Creepy History: 3 Horrifying Couples Who Will Make You Glad You’re Single

Love is a lot of things – creepy shouldn’t necessarily be one of them, but hey, nobody’s perfect and no love story is the same.

Whether they’re working together to commit horrible crimes like rape and murder or storing the other’s corpse so they’ll never be parted, the following creepy love stories never fail to make me feel OK about being single.

Dr. Carl Tanzler and Maria Elena de Hoyos

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Tanzler met the young Maria Elena when she came to see him for an appointment. He immediately fell in love with her, claiming to have seen her before in visions of the future. Maria Elena was suffering from tuberculosis, and during her treatment Tanzler treated her like a queen, giving her gifts and professing his love. No one knows for sure if Maria Elena ever felt the same way, because she died in 1931.

Tanzler paid for Maria Elena’s funeral and subsequent burial in an above-ground mausoleum. He visited his love every night until one day she went missing – and so did Tanzler. He claimed she was asking him to take her away.

To preserve her body, Tanzler held her bones together with wire hangers, made her a wig made of her own hair which he’d been keeping to remember her by, and gave her some new glass eyes, too. When her skin began to rot, he covered it with a mix of silk and plaster of Paris, then sprayed her with perfume to mask the smell. Tanzler slept with the body nightly. Maria Elena’s sister discovered what was going on, and the body was removed from Tanzler’s home. Doctors still aren’t certain if there was necrophilia involved, though it seems to be the consensus that there was.

Tanzler died in 1952 – with a life-size wax dummy of Maria Elena near him.

Fred and Rosemary West

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This killer couple killed at least ten women, including Fred’s own stepdaughter. Fred made his wife work as a prostitute, and she agreed, having several children – one possibly by her own father. The two sexually assaulted and tortured many women and buried them in their yard. They may have committed more murders, but 11 bodies were found on their property alone.

The Wests weren’t discovered until 1992, when Fred’s daughter told her friends her father had been raping her. There was video proof. Both went to prison, where Fred committed suicide by hanging himself with his bed sheets. Rosemary maintains her innocence.

Myra Hindley and Ian Brady

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Myra Hindley was so infatuated with bad boy Ian Brady that she bleached her hair to look more Aryan (Brady was into Nazi culture) and even helped him commit a horrific murder. After they met, Hindley began dressing sexier and the two secluded themselves from their friends, spending hours at the library reading about torture and crime. Hindley was completely under Brady’s sadistic spell.

They began enticing children and young people (from ages 10 to 17) and sexually assaulting and murdering them. Brady and Hindley were sent to prison, where they continued their relationship via mail until the ‘70s. Hindley later claimed that she was under the “spell” of Brady and that he made her participate in the killings by blackmailing her with explicit photos she’d taken. She later fell in love with a female security guard and died behind bars in 2002. Brady is currently in a high-security hospital for the criminally insane and wishes never to be released.

Ah, love. Ain’t it grand?