MECHWARRIOR 5: MERCENARIES

MECHWARRIOR 5: MERCENARIES
Piranha Games is taking MechWarrior back to its roots

A kilometre from the harbour in Vancouver, on the second floor of a small shopping centre is the last bastion of the MechWarrior franchise. For six years, Piranha Games’ president Russ Bullock has kept the series alive with MechWarrior Online. But with MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, he’s ushering in the dawning of a new era of mech warfare.

“There’s a huge contingent of fans that have been wanting a singleplayer MechWarrior 5 for years,” Bullock tells me as we walk through the Piranha Games office. “Of course we wanted to make one, but being a smaller developer we had say, ‘Okay first things first, we need to succeed with MechWarrior Online and that will allow us to make a singleplayer game.’ And it took a while – a lot longer than we thought – but we’re doing it.”

As we pass by the main hub that connects Piranha Games’ various workspaces, I spy a map of the Inner Sphere, the cluster of some 3,000 star systems that make up MechWarrior’s universe. Each one has a name and a history etched into the stone tablets of BattleTech lore. And for those who have grown up living in that universe, it’s these little details that matter. Fortunately, Russ Bullock is all about the little details.

When I first saw MechWarrior 5 announced at MechCon 2016, the trailer sent the fans roaring. But when a dropship descended from the sky they lost their damn minds. At the time, I was a little confused. Then Bullock explained how so much of MechWarrior was caged inside the imaginations of players. They freaked out because that was the first time they had seen a dropship landing in-game and not just in their imagination. Bullock is hoping to make MechWarrior 5 the catalyst that sets those two decades of MechWarrior fantasy free.

Mercenary culture
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries isn’t just a sequel to MechWarrior 4. It’s a chance to reestablish the series and give its hordes of hardcore fans something that they’ve always wanted. “A significant part of our design philosophy is asking, ‘What have players always wanted to do in a MechWarrior game?’” Bullock tells me.

That’s why Piranha Games is starting with Mercenaries first rather than a straight numbered sequel. “Traditionally, you’d make MechWarrior and then you’d make the Mercenaries offshoot,” he explains. “The first one is a linear, story-heavy campaign and then Mercenaries is more like a sandbox. But players want to live out the BattleTech lore, and the best way to do that is to own your own mercenary unit, so we’re going with Mercenaries first.”

Instead of a series of linear missions, MechWarrior 5 puts you in command of a mercenary unit and gives you the freedom to either rise to mythic status or crash and burn along the way. Around 300 planets of the Inner Sphere will be open for business, letting you travel between the Great Houses while taking increasingly demanding contracts and building reputation with each faction as you also manage your lances of warriors and supporting technicians.

It’s one part MechWarrior and one part Football Manager, Russ tells me. Every bullet you fire and every mech you lose will have a cost, and it’ll be up to you to make sure you’re bringing in enough dough to keep your mercs on the payroll and their mechs in fighting condition. As you progress in prestige, the timeline also moves forward. Great Houses rise and fall according to the lore, new technologies are invented and sold, and eventually the ominous Clans come rampaging through the Inner Sphere like Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde.

Leveraging an ambitious dynamic free market economy, stunning destructibility, and the kind of freedom and scale that hasn’t been seen since the first MechWarrior in 1989, Bullock is working to make MechWarrior 5 the ultimate realisation of BattleTech lore.

the invisible hand
When you begin a new campaign, your mercenary company is in a sorry state. With only a weak mech at your disposal, you’ll be scraping by and taking low-level missions from the periphery states of the Great Houses to keep money coming in. Little by little your business will grow, but it will be up to you to decide how. “The free market is probably one of the biggest components of MechWarrior 5,”

Bullock tells me. Mechs, pilots, technicians, weapon systems – everything you need to form a mercenary unit will have to be purchased from MechWarrior 5’s market. “The market is totally dynamic based on what year it is. In the year 3015, for example, they didn’t have any pulse lasers or Ferro-Fibrous armour as all of that technology comes in later. And it’s also going to depend where you are in the Inner Sphere. If you are in one Great House’s space, you’ll see mechs common among that house. That’s going to provide a whole level of flavour to your play experience each time you start a new campaign.”

Unlike MechWarrior Online, where players can customise their mech chassis in a variety of ways, MechWarrior 5 will stick to the lore and force players to choose between strictly defined roles.

“It’s great for a PVP game because the level of customisation is huge,” Bullock tells me. “But if we allowed that in MechWarrior 5, you essentially negate the free market. There’s no need to keep your eyes peeled for that Jenner JR7-F that has Ferro-Fibrous armour if you take your JR7-D and just put Ferro-Fibrous armour on it.”

To that end, MechWarrior 5 will feature an unprecedented number of mechs to choose from. “Most Mechwarrior games have had maybe 12 to 15 different mech chassis,” Bullock explains. “We’re looking at having upwards of 60 chassis with 300 to 400 variants. You could probably play the game multiple times within just one Great House’s space and see different combinations on the free market.”

But mechs are only as good as the warriors piloting them. Players will also need to be mindful of their mercs and technicians, who each have their own skills and specialties. Likewise, different manufacturers will make variations of weapon systems, giving players granular control over every aspect of their mechs. Profits made from mercenary contracts will be quickly eaten away by repairs, resupply, and the ever-present cost of replacing slain comrades. It’s a huge amount of freedom but also an equally large responsibility if you’re reckless on the field of battle.

Mech on Mech
During my visit, I played an early build of MechWarrior 5. None of the overarching strategy of managing a mercenary outfit was available, but my demo did make it easy to see how the various systems will complement each other. Equally as important, I also got an intimate look at the technology Piranha Games is using to generate the hundreds of battlefields players will fight on.

From the very first blast of my torso-mounted lasers, it was clear that MechWarrior 5 benefits from Piranha Games’ extensive work on MechWarrior Online. I could immediately feel the heft as my 30-odd ton mech stomped through a forest, knocking trees down left and right like some mechanical Godzilla. Everything from the rhythmic thud of PPC cannons to the highly-specific location-based damage modelling feels fantastically heavy. But this isn’t just singleplayer MechWarrior Online, either. With the Unreal 4 engine under the hood, MechWarrior 5 has plenty more horsepower to put to work.

One thing MechWarrior fans will love is that damage modelling has been taken to a whole new level over MechWarrior Online. Each component now has multiple stages of disrepair, making brawls even more visceral as armour peels back after barrages to reveal the delicate mechanical skeletons underneath.

“Mechs aren’t just these paper tigers,” Bullock says. “You don’t just one-shot things. It’s all about a battle of attrition, of using the hills, rocks, and trees for cover and making sure that when you get your chance to shoot, you make it count. You manage your heat, your ammo, and your positioning and you win that battle.”

Enemy mechs won’t be the only thing melting under your alpha-strikes either. MechWarrior 5’s battles will feature combined arms of infantry, artillery, and both land and air vehicles. During my demo, flyers swarmed above me, whittling away my armour while I focused down the more dangerous mechs. Meanwhile stationary turrets tracked me as I trudged through a copse of trees, their shots quickly obliterating my cover with each salvo. When you consider that your own lance of mechs will accompany you into battle, I’m excited to see how MechWarrior 5’s missions will turn into frenetic firefights as both sides whittle away the other.

land grab
Any veteran MechWarrior player knows that it isn’t just about how well you’re able to shoot, but also how you use the terrain to your advantage. And with 300 planets, each needing their own battlefield that feels distinct, Bullock says finding a way to generate fun but unique terrain was easily one of Piranha Games’ biggest challenges. “We needed to create a level generator system that wouldn’t be overly complex,” Bullock explains, adding that since MW5’s announcement the team has dedicated much of its time to solving this one complex riddle.

What they devised is an elegant system that takes ingredients, like different military bases, and places them together with various groupings of terrain. It’s like playing an instrument: you have several notes to work with, but how you arrange them can create vastly different songs. After my demo, Piranha Games’ senior game designer David Forsey give me an opportunity to peek behind the curtain at the development back end of MechWarrior 5 to toy around with making different kinds of maps.

Similar to creating a new map in Civilization, MechWarrior 5’s map tool lets you dictate the density of foliage, terrain patterns, weather, time of day and more. Now, all of these might not sound like they matter, but in the brutally strategic world of MechWarrior, they absolutely do. Wind storms on a Mars-like planet might blind you, forcing you to rely purely on thermal vision to see enemy mechs through the tempest. Likewise, dense forests can now cover the battlefield since Piranha Games doesn’t have to account for all the challenges of syncing up 24 different players over the internet like in MechWarrior Online.

Another big feature that Bullock can’t wait for players to experience is the destructible environment. “Of course, plenty of games have had destructible environments,” he says. “But this is the first time it’ll be in a MechWarrior game, and that’s going to be awesome.” Players can stomp full speed into buildings and tear them down with all the force of a 35-ton walking tank. During my demo, it was so satisfying to cleave through walls and airplane hangars like they were butter.

“We really wanted players to walk anywhere they want,” Bullock elaborates, adding that destructible environments will also present new strategic options. “You can imagine plenty of scenarios where an enemy mech is hiding behind a building and you just take it down to get rid of their cover.”

back to the beginning
With such an emphasis on freedom, MechWarrior 5 is harkening back to the first MechWarrior, before the series became entrenched in the linear stories of Great Houses and their political games. But 15 years is a long time, and MechWarrior 5 will undoubtedly be many players’ first robot rodeo. “It’s important for us to try and be as mindful as we can about a new generation of PC gamers,” Bullock says. “But we understand who our community is and who we’re making the game for.”

Bullock says his hope is that by digging deeper into the series roots than ever before, newcomers will begin to understand why so many care so deeply for this universe – why the names of those 300 planets of the Inner Sphere matter. “This isn’t going to be some watered-down MechAssault made partially for consoles,” Bullock says. “It’s going to be the same kind of action simulator that people have been wanting for 15 years.”

That’s not just because Bullock thinks it’s what MechWarrior fans want, but because it’s what they deserve. “We’re dedicated to the core MechWarrior fanbase. They’re the ones that supported us with MechWarrior Online and now we’re making a game for them.”

Steven Messner 5 CREEPIEST URBAN LEGENDS
5. The Man Who Spoke With God
Picture this scene: The year is 1983. A group of religious scientists have come up with an interesting new theory that any human brain untroubled by stimuli would be able to sense the presence of God. Finding a willing volunteer, an old man with a terminal illness, they painstakingly seal off his nerve endings. Then they sit back and wait. What happened next is like H.P Lovecraft's worst nightmare. For a couple of days, the old man whispered about his deteriorating state of mind. On the fourth day, he claimed to hear distant voices. On the sixth, his dead wife began speaking to him.

Then things really went downhill. As the days passed, the voices of the dead began to grow louder, more hostile. They became angry, mocking, and started to tell the man things nobody should ever have to hear. According to the legend, the man began to scream and tear at his unseeing eyes, shrieking no heaven, no forgiveness, over and over and over. Finally he began to hysterically bite at his own flesh, saying he'd met God and he has abandoned us. Luckily, the tale is nothing more than a particularly spine-chilling example of an urban legend. But it's creepy enough to have utterly freaked some people out, and now seems to periodically resurface whenever the Internet is in need of some gut-wrenching terror.

4. Farmer John's Suicide
The story goes that the owner of a meat-packing plant woke up one day to find his kids missing. With the help of his brother, the two scoured the farm but could find no trace of the missing kids. After a few hours they called in the police, who made a horrifying discovery. The stuff coming out the meat grinder that day was human flesh, pulped and ground down to goo. Realizing this could only be his missing kids, the owner retreated to the plant's boiler room and quietly hanged himself.

Twenty years after the kids were murdered, workers at the plant stumbled across a terrifying scene. The brother of the former owner had been strung up in the boiler room, the words I did it carved across his chest. At the same time, visitors to the town cemetery reported that the soil above the owner's grave had been disturbed sometime in the night. Fast forward to the present, and it's said that you can see the ghosts of the two children falling into the grinder every October, while on Halloween the two hanged men make their way back to the boiler room.

3. The Staring Video
It's a video of a man looking into a camera without expression for roughly two minutes. It's been up on YouTube without comment and seen by hundreds of people. Known as the "Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv" video, the legend goes that it was pulled by YouTube in the early days after they realized its effects. According to the story, those who watched through to the end would see the expressionless man smile an evil smile.

After that they'd lose it. People were said to have clawed their own eyes out after seeing the whole video. Others were said to have taken knives and hacked their own arms up. Yet others were supposed to have killed themselves. It is said that nobody can get even 45 seconds in without screaming, and to go any further is to sacrifice the last shreds of your sanity. At least, that's the story. In reality, the video is of a guy called Bryan Cortez and you can see him today looking suitably non-demonic and friendly.

2. The Suicide Portrait
A few years back, an internet rumor surfaced about the suicide of a young Japanese girl. Shortly before killing herself, the teen had drawn a self-portrait, which she then posted online. Curious to see this slice of suicide memorabilia, a number of Korean forums picked up the image and began re-posting it. That's where things got weird. Users had a hard time looking away from this melancholy picture. Some began re-posting it time and time again, saying that its eyes were drawing them in.

Others noticed that if you stared at the picture for any length of time, it began to alter subtly, the faintest trace of a smile surfacing around the dead girl's mouth. Yet others reported feelings of intense sadness after seeing it. It is said that one or two even killed themselves. It is now thought that anyone who spends too long looking at the image runs the risk of falling into this same deadly obsession. At least it would be, if the original artist hadn't found out about this rumor and posted a fed-up message on his website, debunking the whole thing.

1. Mickey Mouse In Hell
The creepy "lost episod" is a whole sub genre of modern urban legend. But none has ever been quite so twisted as the legend that started them all: the story of the lost Mickey Mouse cartoon. According to the legend, this cartoon is nothing special. It features a black and white Mickey walking past a repeating background, white noise playing on the soundtrack. At two minutes in it cuts to black and that's it. Wait until the sixth minute, and the cartoon is meant to reappear. Only now the white noise has been replaced by the distant murmur of voices. The background Mickey was walking against has begun to distort in ways painful for the human eye to see, and Mickey himself is smirking unpleasantly.

From then on, the cartoon supposedly becomes a nightmare. A scream starts to rise up on the soundtrack as Mickey himself seems to decay, his eyeballs falling out and his grin getting ever wider. Impossible colors begin flickering across the screen, burning rubble rises in the background, and then it is said that nobody knows what happens next. The only Disney employee to ever watch to the end committed suicide shortly after. All he left was a note describing the final frame: a piece of Russian text that translates as "the sights of hell bring its viewers back in." And now, it is somewhere out there on the Internet, waiting for you to find it.

5 MOST EVIL PEOPLE IN HISTORY
5. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was and Iranian religious leader for a decade beginning in 1979. He had led the Iranian Revolution during which up to sixty thousand people were killed. The doctrine of the Shia Islamic Law was incredible strict, enforcing specific dress codes and eliminating equal rights. Brutal punishments were administered for breaking the rules. People were sent to prison and tortured just for listening to music. Anyone caught sharing a kiss in public was given one hundred lashes.

Those who chose not to believe in Allah were tortured and murdered by shooting, hanging, gassing, stabbing, stoning or burning. Anyone caught stealing would have a hand amputated, people were blinded and women's faces were slashed or damaged with acid. During the Iranian Massacres of 1988, everyone who was serving time in prison was killed. Over five months more than thirty thousand people lost their lives, including children who were hung from cranes. Khomeini kept fifty two American nationals hostage. Some were imprisoned for more than four hundred days, some spent six years in captivity. The hostages were blindfolded for their entire imprisonment.

Khomeini wasn't content with just ruling Iran, he had ambitions to conquer the Middle East. Saddam Hussein decided to attack first and between one and two million people were killed during the Iran Iraq war. Children were sent to fight by Khomeini. Saddam Hussein attempted peace talks but to no avail. The economy of Iran crashed and up to a million Iranian people died during this time. Khomeini's aggression towards the US is thought to have been the beginning of terrorist thinking, inspiring groups such as Al Qaeda. He is also thought to have inspired the Islamic Holy War during which over two million people died. In 1989 Khomeini lost his own fight, with cancer.

4. Delphine LaLaurie
When Delphine LaLaurie's New Orleans house caught fire in 1834, the emergency services who attended the scene made some very disturbing discoveries.Two people who were clearly being kept as slaves were found inside the house, chained up to the stove in the kitchen. Both were found to have had terrible injuries afflicted upon them during their life. But this was just the start. Upstairs in the attic more than twelve bodies were found, all of them chained to the floor or the walls.

They bore the disfigurement of serious abuse, having suffered a range of medical experiments conducted upon them by LaLaurie. She had trialled sex change surgery, had broken limbs and reset them in odd positions, performed amputations and taken flesh samples. Some of her victims had had their mouths sewn up, resulting in them dying of starvation. There were some victims who had had their hands attached to other parts of their bodies. LaLaurie never paid for her crimes as she escaped and went into hiding.

3. Beverly Allitt Nurse
Beverley Gail Allitt is said to be amongst the top ten most evil women of all time. Dubbed the Angel of Death, she killed four children and tried to kill another three. And that's not all, she also caused grievous bodily harm to another six. These terrible deeds were committed in 1991 whilst Allit was working in a children's hospital ward in Lincolnshire. It was found that two of the children had been given massive overdoses of insulin whilst another child was found to have a big air bubble inside their body. How the other children were killed and injured remains uncertain. Allitt was sentenced to life in prison, thirteen times over, when she was put on trial in 1993. The judge emphasised that Allitt posed a serious threat to society and would probably reamin in jail for the rest of her life.

2. Adolf Hitler
The German Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, was the leader of Germany between 1933 and 1945. As a young man he had aspirations of becoming an artist but these were not realised when he failed to gain admittance to art school. He enlisted as a solider in the German army during the First World War. He was furious when Germany surrendered. After returning to Germany at the end of the war, Hitler began considering the role of the Jews in terms of the problems Germany was facing.

He blamed the Jews for everything and his bitterness developed into a belief that Jews were not human beings at all. He began to plan for the elimination of all of Europe's Jews. Part of this plan included the fulfilment of his ambition to control the entire world. Hitler believed that the power of persuasion could achieve anything and propaganda was a fundamental strategy in his plans. Hitler took to killing anyone who stood against him. He would experiment on hospital inpatients for new methods of killing people; one thing he trialled in this way was the use of carbon dioxide gas.

More than three hundred thousand people were killed due to Hitler's experiments. Hitler rounded up all of the Jews living in Germany and put them into concentration camps. Jews living in other countries were not safe from this threat and over ninety percent of Polish Jews died during this time. Those incarcerated in these prison camps were put to work. Some died from overwork whilst others were killed in the gas chambers. This wasn't the only way that Hitler killed the people in the camps. He also used a firing squad, death marches, the lethal injection, starvation, poisoning and medical experimentation.

Many people died from disease, starvation and exposure too. The Jewish people were forced to watch their friends and family die. The lives of millions of children were lost because of Hitler's breeding programme. Children were judged against the Nazi scale of perfection and those found to be lacking were executed. He wasn't loyal to friends and allies and would betray them without a second thought. Over eleven million people were killed as a direct result of Hitler's power.

This figure includes six million Jewish people, three million Polish people and another three million Russian people, seven hundred and fifty thousand Slavs, half a million gypsies, one hundred thousand people suffering from mental illness, another hundred thousand Freemasons, five thousand Jehovah's Witnesses and fifteen thousand homosexual people. In all, more than fifty million people died due to Hitler's actions. He died in 1945 when he commit suicide after taking cyanide poisoning then shooting himself.

1. Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was the dictator at the helm of the Soviet Union for thirty-one years, between 1922 and 1953. Prior to his appointment to government, he had been an assassin, a bank robber and an agitator. It took him many years to progress to his place in power and he turned into a ruthless, aggressive, vengeful dictator who was ruled by his paranoia, bringing terror, violence and murder to his country. Those who crossed him were put to death so woe betide anyone who attempted to spy on him or anger him in any way. Anyone who voted against him suffered the same fate.

His ambition was to promote the Soviet Union to an industrial superpower but in working towards this goal many, many people were killed. Soviet citizens were forced into slave labour, many literally being worked to death. Enormous industrial schemes were established and became a source of perhaps millions of people's misery. Stalin's name appears on tens of thousands of death warrants. The only way to escape Stalin's brutality was to adhere to his word entirely. Anyone who spoke against him, who displayed independence or intelligence, was subjected to torture, imprisonment or murdered.

Family made no difference to Stalin and he was as likely to murder his supporters families as he was his enemies; in fact, he murdered the parents of a girl he had made a favourite of. She believed that he extended his love for her to her family, but she was wrong. He is even said to have had wives of his friends killed. Stalin's family didn't escape his ruthlessness either. He sent his daughter's boyfriend into exile and his wife commit suicide in order to escape his horrific treatment.

When his son was captured and put into a Nazi concentration camp, Stalin would not make a trade for his release; his son died in the camp. The means of murder were varied and brutal: it's said that Stalin even had people killed with ice picks. It wasn't only by brute force that people lost their lives. During Stalin's time in power, around ten million people starved to death. He is known to have said that an individual death can be regarded as a tragedy but in high numbers deaths are merely a statistic.

Stalin showed no respect for those who were fighting for his country during the Second World War, even having Soviet soldiers killed. Prisoners were released in order to join the army; when they returned from war, even if they were injured, they were thrown back in prison. He was just as brutal to people from other countries with hundreds of thousands of foreigners raped, tortured and murdered; one and a half million women from Germany were raped by Stalin's men. Stalin regularly used mustard gas explosives to kill large numbers of people. His aim was for his country to become as strong as America, with the ultimate goal being to take on the United States. He was responsible for the deaths of up to sixty million people. He lived until 1953 when he died after having a stroke.

5 UNSOLVED MYSTERIES WITH STRANGE WRITTEB CLUES
5. John Hill
Ottumwa is a small city in southern Iowa and it is home to a disturbing unsolved mystery. Early on the morning of November of 22, 1976, two men walked into the Ottumwa Launderette and in a small room they found the dead body of the 51 year old owner of the launderette John Hill. He had been stabbed multiple times and shot. The police were called to the scene and they found a .25 caliber handgun on the floor near Hill's body.

Near the entrance of the launderette the police found five bullet holes. The police concluded that Hill died as a result of a robbery gone wrong. Hill fired his gun five times at the robber and missed with each shot. The robber attacked Hill stabbing and shooting him. The police said that it was a long drawn-out struggle. Then the killer did something really unusual.

Despite having multiple gunshots go off, which would have drawn a lot of attention, the killer took the time to write something in the victim's blood at the crime scene. It either said black or lack and then the second word was older. The police are unsure what the words refer to or their significance. There were two suspects in the case who are a couple, but neither were charged because they had strong alibis. Unfortunately the case has never been solved and Hill's family is still looking for answers as to who is responsible for his brutal and senseless murder.

4. Tracey Neilson
After a day of classes at Medical School on January 5, 1981, Jeff Neilson returned home to the apartment that he shared with his wife of five months, Tracy Nielsen, in Moore Oklahoma It was Tracey's birthday, she had turned 21. When Jeff got to the apartment he found the door unlocked. Inside the apartment, he found Tracy on the bed. She was lying face up. Her throat had been slit and she had been stabbed multiple times in the chest. During the police investigation they were quickly able to rule Jeff out as a suspect. What the police learned is that on the morning of her birthday, Tracy ran around and did some errands.

Then a neighbor saw Tracy finishing up her chores around the apartment at about noon. During the afternoon her friends and family have been calling to wish her a happy birthday but no one answered the phone. The medical examiner placed her time of death at some time around noon. She had not been sexually assaulted. There was no evidence of a break-in and there was no signs of a struggle inside the apartment. Robbery doesn't appear to be a motive because there was only one item missing from the apartment. It was a one inch by four inch keychain that Tracy used, which had her name on it.

The police think that the killer took it with him as a souvenir. The killer left several clues in the apartment, notably a single fingerprint but unfortunately no match to it has ever been found. The second clue is a cable ticket book from Southwestern Bell for cable repair, which may explain how the killer got into the apartment without breaking in or forcing his way in because Tracy may have let him in since he was a repairman.

The last ticket in the book lists Tracy's address as the service address Whoever filled out the ticket said that the work was completed and then they signed or initialed it at the bottom. The ticket said that the work was finished at 11:51 a.m. on the day of the murder. The police and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation are hoping that someone will recognize the signature or the handwriting Since the murder the police have followed up on 1500 leads, but after 35 years they are no closer to figuring out who killed Tracy Nielsen on her 21st birthday.

3. Gary Grant Jr.
January 12 1984, was a Thursday, but 7-year-old Gary Grant Jr. of Atlantic City, New Jersey, had the day off of school because there was a teacher conference. Gary left his house at about 2:30 in the afternoon and he told his mother that he had an appointment. His mother never thought to ask what he meant by appointment. Gary was supposed to return home by four o'clock and when he didn't, his mother called the police His neighborhood was searched and two days after he went missing his body was found two blocks from his house in the vacant lot.

The 7-year-old had been bludgeoned to death with a metal pipe. The last person seen with gary was his 12-year old friend Carl Mason, whose nickname was "Boo." The police interviewed Carl, who has developmental disability and was smaller than Gary, without a guardian or a lawyer present and he confessed to the murder. He was arrested and sent to juvenile detention. Once he was incarcerated Carl said that he was innocent.

He was given two polygraph tests; one was inconclusive and the other showed that he was telling the truth about being innocent. The judge eventually threw out the confession and Carl was released. Not long afterwards, the investigation into Gary's murder frosted over. This was especially tough on Gary Grant Sr., who was a police officer with the Atlantic City Police Department.

On January 4, 1986, a message was found scrawled on the side of an Atlantic City police car. It read: "Gary Grant's dead. I am living. Another will die on January 12th if all goes right." January 12th was the second anniversary of Gary's murder. Luckily, January 12th, came and went and no one was murdered in Atlantic City on that day. A few weeks later, a second message was found. This time it was scratched onto a sidewalk. It said: "Gary Grant Jr. lives. I still killed him. Son of the pig officer. Payback is a M.F."

The last message led to speculation that grant may have been killed and his payback against his father because he arrested somebody. However, that theory has never been proven. In fact, to this day the police are uncertain if the killer actually wrote the messages or if they were just a horrible prank. The case has sat cold ever since. The new clue emerged in 2006. Gary Grant senior was converting some audio tapes to mp3 files when he came across one that was labeled phone calls.

On the audiotape, he heard the following call that was made to the 911 dispatch on March 8, 1986, weeks after the messages were found. This wasn't the only mysterious phone call on the audiotape A few weeks after the bizarre confession, the 911 dispatch received a second strange phone call regarding the murder of Gary Grant. The caller didn't identify themselves but they accused the man of killing Gary because his father was a cop. The man's name was never made public because he was never charged.

Gary Grant Sr. knows the man, but says that he never had a problem with him. We should also point out that the accused man was arrested in 2011 for sexual contact with a child under the age of five and child endangerment. He ended up pleading guilty to child endangerment in 2013. Again, it is unclear at the calls are genuine or just a disturbing prank. Tragically, despite his father conducting his own investigation the murder of Gary Grant Jr. remains unsolved.

2. The Freeway Phantom
The evening of April 25th, 1971, was a warm one in Prince George's County, Maryland, and it was just an ordinary Sunday for 13-year-old Carol Spinks and her family. Around dinnertime Carol's older sister asked her to walk to the 7-Eleven, which was about a half a mile away from the family's home to pick up some TV dinners, bread and soft drinks Carol made it to the store and purchased her items but then she disappeared on her way home. Her body was found six days later on a grassy embankment next to a highway.

A few months later on the morning of July 8, 16-year-old Darleina Johnson, who lived a few blocks away from Carol, left her home to go to her summer job at a local recreation center. Sadly, she never made it to work. Her body was found 11 days after she went missing. She had been dumped about 15 feet away from where Carroll's body was found. 19 days after Darlenia disappeared 10-year-old Brenda Crockett was sent to the store by her mother.

When she didn't return home her family searched the neighborhood for her. Three hours after Brenda left for the store, her, 7-year-old sister was at home and the phone rang. She answered it and it was Brenda. She was crying. She said that a white man picked her up and she was heading home in the cab. She also said that she thought she was in Virginia. she then hung up the phone quickly. Minutes later the phone rang again.

Brenda's mother's boyfriend answered it this time. Again it was Brenda calling. She repeated what she told her sister and then she added that she was alone in the house with a man. The boyfriend told Brenda to put the man on the phone to tell him where she was and he'd come get her. Brenda then asked, "Did my mother see me?" The boyfriend responded, "How could she see you when you're in Virginia? Tell the man to come to the phone."

The boyfriend then heard the sound of heavy footsteps and Brenda said "I'll see you..." And then the line went dead. Hours later Brenda's body was found along the highway in Prince George's County. Her body wasn't hidden like the first two victims. She had been raped and strangled to death. A scarf was tied around her neck. The police think that the killer made Brenda call her home to give them false information to throw investigators off his track.

On October 8, 12 year old Nenomoshia Yates went missing while walking home from the store in Prince George's County Her corpse was found dumped along the side of the road just hours after she went missing She had been raped and strangled Then around 10:25 on November 15, 18 year-old Brenda Woodward was seen getting off the bus to transfer to another one Her body was found near an access ramp early the next morning. She had been strangled and stabbed.

Her coat was then laid gently over her body in her coat pocket there was a note that said: A handwriting analysis was performed on the note and the handwriting expert said that the note was written by Brenda herself; meaning the Phantom dictated the note to her. At this point the FBI was called in and they got thousands of tips, but none of the tips led anywhere. Around the same time that the FBI got involved the killer took a hiatus. But then on September 5, 1972, he popped back up again On that day, witnesses saw 17-year-old Diane William heading home on the bus after visiting her boyfriend, but she never made it home she was found strangled to death off the side of the road hours after she was seen exiting the bus After the murder of Diane Williams the Freeway Phantom killings came to it end.

Over the course of two years he claimed at least six lives. All the girls were between the ages of 10 and 18 and all of them were african-american. The FBI continued to work on the case but then in 1974 they reassigned the agents that were working on the case because manpower was needed to investigate the Watergate scandal and the freeway phantom killings went cold. In the ensuing years cold-case investigators have continued to look into the string of murders.

One conclusion they drew, which is based on the areas where the girls were kidnapped and the locations where their bodies were dumped, that the Phantom's anchor spot is Congress Heights, which is a neighborhood in Washington DC, suggesting that he lived or worked in the area during the time of the murders. There have been several attempts to pull testable DNA from evidence left on the victims, but so far they have not been able to. They also found fibers from a green synthetic carpet on five of the six girls, however they have not been able to find the carpet that it belongs to.

Finally, something that may just be a total coincidence, but three of the six victims had the middle name Denise Over the years the police have had over 100 potential suspects. The strongest suspect is a man named Robert Askins. Before the freeway phantom murders he had been charged with murder three different times and he was convicted of one of them in 1938 proposing a prostitute with cyanide He was released 20 years later because of a legal technicality.

In 1977, Askins was arrested for raping a 24 year old woman in his house after the arrest the police searched his house. In his desk, they found his appellate court opinion and in one of the footnotes was the word "tantamount" However, there's no physical evidence tying Askins to the Freeway Phantom murders and he was never charged Askins ended up being found guilty of raping and kidnapping the 24 year old woman and he was sentenced to life in prison in the late 1970s He died in prison in 2010, at the age of 91, without ever confessing to the Freeway Phantom murders. The police are hoping that in the future some new technology will help them crack the case

1. Jeanne French, Elizabeth Short, Mimi Boomhower and Jean Spangler
February 10, 1947, was a Monday, and a construction worker on his way to work happened upon a woman's body in a field off of an isolated road in West Los Angeles. The body was identified as 45-year-old Jeanne French. When she was in her 30s, Jean was a pioneering female aviator, but in 1947, her glory days were long gone.

She was estranged from her fourth husband, Frank French who possibly suffered from PTSD, and was supposedly abusive. Jeanne herself was an alcoholic who liked to go out and party. On the night before her body was found, Jeanne was having dinner and drinks at a diner with two men During the meal she got up from the table and made a phone call. From the way she talked on the phone a waitress at the diner could tell that Jeanne was drunk on the phone Jeanne said, "don't bring a bottle the landlord doesn't allow it."

She then yelled over to the two men that she was dining with not to put any liquor in the car and not to take any liquor. About two hours later Jeanne was alone and she stopped in at a drive-in diner where she had coffee with the owner. She talked about her troubles and complained about her estranged husband Frank.

At 10:30, Jeanne was seen at a bar where she told the other patrons that she was going to commit her husband to the neuropsychiatric ward at the Veterans Hospital the following day Jeanne then made her way over to her estranged husband's rooming house. She asked him to come out with her and he turned her down. She hit him in the head with her purse and left. Next, Jeanne was seen at another drive-in diner with a man who had a dark complexion and was small to medium in size People remembered them because the man bragged about leaving a large tip.

After the diner, Jeanne and her friend were seen at a bar They were there from 1:30 until 2:00 when the bar closed as it closed. The bartender Jeanne arguing with her friend. When the bartender stepped out of the bar, he saw Jeanne and her friend get into an old beat-up sedan and they drove off into the night. Then, just hours later, James body was found in the field by the construction worker.

Jeanne had been viciously beaten and stomped. She had massive internal bleeding, her heart was punctured, her neck was broken. On her torso someone had written "F--- you B.D.and under it were the letters "T-E-X" The message was written in Jeanne's lipstick. The police and the media immediately knew what BD stood for. It stood for Black Dahlia.

Just four weeks before Jeanne French was beaten to death, 22-year-old Elizabeth Short's body was found in los angeles Short had been cut in half and her intestines had been removed. Her body was drained of blood, her skin was scrubbed, and her lips were slashed from ear to ear, making it look like she had a horrifying smile.

Like Jeanne French, Short had been dumped in the field. Supposedly Short also had something written on her body in lipstick. It was too small swear words. Eight days after Short's body was found, the story dropped from the front page and an editor at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner got a call from someone claiming to be the Black Dahlia Avenger The caller told the editor that it seemed like they were running out of material on the Black Dahlia murder, so he would send them some of Short's personal belongings, like her birth certificate and her address book.

Sure enough, a package arrived at the newspaper two days later which containing several personal items that belong to Short. A note was also included with the belongings indicating that a letter would follow Four letters were sent in all. They were all signed off as the Black Dahlia Avenger, but the police are unsure at the letters were from the killer or from someone who knew Short well enough, or who had access to her apartment, like a landlord.

The police were hesitant to say that the killings of Short and Jeanne branch were connected The victims did share similar physical features, but the methods of the murders were very different from one another Newspapers, on the other hand, thought that one person was responsible for both murders. Instead of focusing on the serial killer theory when investigating Jean French's murder, the police immediately looked at the most likely culprit in any murder - the romantic partner of the victim.

After all, Frank did seem like a plausible suspect. The couple did have a volatile relationship and Frank did see her on a night that she died. Frank's swore that he had nothing to do with the murder and he took a lie detector test to prove it. He ultimately passed the polygraph test. The police interviewed Jeanne's son and he said that Frank had tolerated a lot from his mother and that she was more than capable of getting herself into trouble.

After that, Frank was dropped as a suspect. However, without Frank the police were out of suspects. Nothing happened with the case for two years. But then two years later, there was another odd case that happened in Los Angeles that may or may not be related to the murders of Jean French and Elizabeth Short.

On August 18, 1949, a friend talked to 48 year old Mimi Boomhower over the phone sometime between seven o'clock and eight o'clock p.m. The call was upbeat and the women talked about an upcoming social event. However that day was the sixth anniversary of Boomhower's husband's death. Later that night, the police were summoned to her upscale house. The front door was open her lights were on and her car was in her garage.

Inside the house there was a salad on the table that Boomhower didn't eat, there was fresh food in the kitchen, and a dress that had recently been worn was lying on the bed. The house showed no signs of a struggle and nothing was out of place. However, the 48 year old widow was nowhere to be found. The immediate conclusion was that Boomhower who was having financial problems committed suicide.

In fact, on the night that she disappeared she was supposed to meet an unidentified man at her house. She was hoping that the man would be interested in purchasing the house. Boomhower's friends and family said that she seemed happy with her life, and was looking forward to upcoming social events so they thought it was unlikely that she would have killed herself Five days after she went missing her purse was found in a telephone booth in a supermarket in Los Angeles.

Nothing appeared to be missing from her purse but written on its side big letters was: "Police Department found this on the beach on Thursday." Thursday was the night that Boomhower disappeared. The purse didn't show any traces of seawater or sands weeks. After Boomhauer disappeared from her house, another woman in Los Angeles disappeared.

26 year old Jean Spangler was an actress that had bit parts in movies and she had recently acquired a powerful agents. On October 7, 1949 she walked out of her front door to go to the farmers market and she never returned home. Two days later, her purse was found at the entrance to a nearby park. One strap had been ripped and inside the purse was a note that read: The police looked into her disappearance and discovered that Spangler was three months pregnant leading to speculation that Dr. Scott was an abortionist.

However, they were never able to find out the true identity of Dr. Scott. Rhe police were also unsure who Kirk was and then they received a rather unusual phone call from movie star Kirk Douglas. He was on vacation and called specifically to tell the police that he wasn't the Kirk in the letter. The police thought that this was suspicious because they never considered him to be the Kirk in the letter. Because of the bizarre call, the police considered Douglas a suspect, and then they discover that Spangler had recently acted in a movie that had yet to be a release, which starred Kirk Douglas, However, Kirk Douglas was eventually cleared in the disappearance.

The bodies of Mimi Boomhower and Jean Spangler have never been found. Newspapers at the time thought that the murders and the disappearances were all connected, but the LAPD weren't convinced. Unfortunately, the LAPD never brought anyone to justice for any of the crimes. However, there is at least one former LAPD homicide detective who thinks that the crimes are all connected, but he didn't join the force until decades after the murders and disappearances Steve Hodel, who is now retired from the LAPD, believes that his father who was an unusual and sadistic doctor named George Hill Hodel is responsible for the four crimes plus five other murders.

George Hodel was on the police's radar and he was a suspect in the Elizabeth Short murder because of an incident that happened in 1945. His secretary died of a drug overdose, but the police thought that Dr. Hodel had killed her to cover up some financial fraud. The police weren't able to prove anything conclusively and Dr. Hodel was never charged.

After his father died in 1999, he wrote several books on the Black Dahlia murder arguing that his father is the real killer. For his investigation, he had the handwriting on Boomhower's purse compared to his father's handwriting, and the examiner said that was highly probable that it was the same handwriting. The theory of George Hodel being the murder of Short and the other women is still controversial. It is even unclear if one person is responsible for all the murders and the disappearances. Unfortunately, there's a good chance that these cases may never be solved.

10 CREEPY URBAN LEGENDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
1. Meat Is Murder (Germany)
The legend goes that in post-war Berlin a woman who was walking through a crowd one day saw a blind man struggling. She offered to help him. He told her he was trying to deliver a letter - would she take it for him? It was on the way she was heading, so she said 'sure'. She set off with the letter, but remembered to check and see if the blind man was doing okay. She caught sight of him without his glasses and cane, hurrying down an alley. Feeling suspicious, she went to the police. When they went to the address on the letter she'd been given, they found bags of human flesh. The letter itself read: "This is today's serving". 1947 was known as the "Year of Hunger' in Germany, a country recently decimated by World War Two. People avoided starvation by eating what they could find: dogs, cats, rats, frogs, snails, as this rumor attests to, people.

2. The Well To Hell (Russia)
In 1984 a team of Russian scientists drilled deeper than ever before into the Earth's crust. It was on a remote peninsula in Northern Russia that hell was purportedly discovered, 12 kilometers below the surface. Supposeedly they through a point that reached 2000 degrees when the drill started sspinning strangely. They lowered their microphones in to take measurements and listened. It was then that they heard thousands of human voices, all screaming in agony. Were they souls trapped in hell? An explosion followed and a winged devil burst from the hole in the ground, killing 13 of the workers.
The story was reported around the world, but originated with a Christian group in Finland that heard of the experimental drilling. As might be expected, this is an exaggeration that has compounded over the years.

3. The Crying Boy (UK)
In 1985 The Sun newspaper in Britain printed a story title 'Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy'. The Crying Boy in question was a painting by Giovanni Bragolin that was found in perfect condtion after a house had been burned inside out. What's more, a firefighter at the scene said he knew of numerous other fires where the 'Crying Boy' painting had been. An investigation was carried out, but not before panicked members of the public began throwing their paintings onto bonfires. Over 50,000 versions of the cursed painting had been sold at this point. The investigators found that the paintings were varnished with flame retardant and so survived the fires. Although this didn't explain why no other varnished paintings were turning up.

4. The Lucifer Statue (Philippines)
Satan standing triumphant over Angel Michael makes for an odd sight in the Catholic Philippines. This is the grave of Don Simeon Bernardo, who ordered the statue be placed there on his death in 1934. Bernardo was tortured and, as a result, didn't have particularly rosy view of the world.

The evil on display shocked residents, but it's just a statue - or is it?

Locals say the statue was initially much smaller than it currently is and has been growing over the years. Others say that the demon files off at night so the wrought iron cage has been places around the statue to keep it from escaping. The surprising truth is that the statue has grown, but in a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. Phone to vandalism due to its irreligious nature the damaged statue was replaced by a slightly larger version in the 1970s and protected from abuse by a large cage.


5. Kaala Bandar (India)
Fifteen years ago mass hysteria swept the city of Delhi in India. During a 5-day period, the terrifying Kala Bandar roamed the streets. It pounced on people in the middle of the night, gouging their arms and necks. Described as 4 feet tall, with the horrifying face of a chimp and bearing iron claws, it was given the nickname the 'Monkey-Man of Delhi'. One man even fell to his death when he thought he saw the Monkey-Man. Another eyewitness described the terrifying situation: "The creature had its hands on my tights when I woke up. When my mother picked up a broomstick, it jumped out of the balcony". No monkey, man or monkey-man was ever caught, but the legend of Kala Bandar lives on, frightening children.

6. Under The Bed (USA)
This is a classic from the USA, a teenage girl is home alone and starts to receive strange messages on to her phone. She keeps ignoring the messages and carries on watching TV, putting them out of her mind. When the messages become more threatening, she phone the police, who trace the messages and tell her that they are coming from within the house! Just a story, right? Well in 2014 one 16-year-old girl started receiving some pretty scary texts. But she thought it was all a joke. She went to bed and just before she fell asleep she received the text: "I'm in your house!" The man had broken in and was hiding underneath her bed. Thankfully though, the police caught him in time.

7. Sacamantecas (Spain)
In Spanish, Sacamantecas means 'fat extractor' and is a kind of disguised monster or drifter that steals the fat from children to feed on. The myth is thought to have begun with Spain's first recorded serial killer, Manuel Blanco Romasanta. In the late 19th Century, Romasanta was convicted of killing 13 people. He rendered their fat in order to make high quality soap, which he then sold - along with the victims'clothes. Romasanta was only one of several people caught for selling human fat in this era and so the myth of the Sacamantecas was born and used to frighten children into behaving.

8. The Black Volga (Poland)
The Black Volga was a classic Russian car and signified wealth and status in the Soviet States during the Cold War. If one was ever seen stalking the Warsaw cith streets, people would flee because it was said that the people inside kidnapped children. No one ever saw who was driving them. One story suggested that the Soviet leader Brezhnev was mortally ill and requested the blood of children to keep his hold on the empire. The Volgas, which were associated with Soviet officials, went out to abduct children and drain them of their young blood. Other versions of the story described the blood being sold to wealthy Arabs to cure leukemia or spoke of vicars, nuns, Satanists, and even the devil driving the car and making children disappear.

9. El Chupacabra (Puerto Rico)
The goat-sucking, spiny and reptile-like Chupacabra was first seen in 1995 in Puerto Rico. This modern legendary beast is thought to drain the blood, vampire-like, from the livestock of Central and South American farmers. The uproar around the first sighting, in which 150 animals were killed, led to a year of weekly chupacabra hunts around Puerto Rico. To unearth the origin of this monster, Benjamin Radford of the Skeptical Inquirer tracked down Madelyne Tolentino, the woman who first reported seeing the creature. He had a hunch: there was a sci-fi B-Movie called 'Species' that featured a creature in the final act that was remarkably similar to her description.nWhat's more, Species was set in Puerto Rico, it came out in the weeks before the first Chupacabra sighting, and Madelyne Tolentino had watched it.

10. Kuchisake Onna (Japan)
Japan never fails to disappoint with creepy myths and ghosts. Kuchisake-Onna is the malicious spirit of a woman who wears a surgical mask. She appears and asks you: "Am I Pretty?" If you say no. she kills you on the spot. If you say yes, she removes her surgical mask to reveal the her mouth has been slit at the corners like The Joker, and then asks:"How about now?" If you say no, she cuts you in half. But if you say yes, she slits your mouth to look like hers. This tale caused widespread panic the the late 1970s. Schools arranged for students to walk home in groups because of their fear of being attracked by the ghost. There is even a rumor that a coroner's report from 1979 showed a woman who'd been hit by a car - in pursuit of a child who had her cheeks slit.

Sources: The Guardian, Live Science, Time, Snopes, 'Folklore and Journalism' (Dr.David Clarke), ABS-CBN News, The Chester Chronicle

10 DEADLIEST ASSASSINS OF ALL TIME
When you think of assassins, you probably think of agile, methodic, secretive characters that hide in the shadows, but as it turns out, some of the deadliest assassins of all time were not only not that secretive, but they had some of the craziest methods for carrying out their work that you will not believe. Here are the 10 deadliest assassins of all time.

10. Axe-Wielding Bear
17th century Swiss political leader Jorg Jenatsch's murder might be the most bearish assassination in history, pun intended. Jenatsch was a vicious Protestant leader with contempt for Spanish Catholics. He even pinned his political rival, Pompeius von Planta, to the floor and murdered him. Well flash forward 18 years to Carnival in the town of Chur. Jorg is drinking with his entourage, all in costume, so no one thinks twice about inviting a man in a bear costume, who's wielding an axe, to the revelry. Jorg tried to shake the bear's hand, but it was Rudolph von Planta, son of Pompeius in disguise, who shot his father's murderer in the stomach, and yet, Jenatsch still grabbed a giant candlestick and was able to fight back before eventually just dying. You know, I get it, the guy was in a bear costume, all snugly snugly, oh how cute, but the guy was holding an axe. Yep, nobody would have saw that coming, big sharp axe in your face.

9. Exotic Dancer Spy
World War I in Europe was an incredibly dangerous place to be, and in the rationale of the time, no place for a woman. But don't tell that to Margaretha MacLeod. This German intelligence officer is considered to be the greatest woman spy of the 20th century, but what's most interesting is that she went by the name Mata Hari, an exotic dancer who performed the dance of seven veils across Europe for English and French soldiers. MacLeod had a Dutch passport, so she could freely travel around wartime Europe, taking many high-ranking officers as lovers, many of whom she murdered before stealing military secrets. Hari ended up passing along her stolen intel to the Germans, that led to the deaths of almost 50,000 French soldiers. Even after she was caught as a spy and executed, she was a flirt, blowing a kiss at the firing squad before they shot her in 1917.

8. She-Tiger
Just like Hari, this person used her femininity and sexual prowess to fight for Basque independence from Spain in the 1980s. Known as La Tigresa, meaning The She-Tiger, she was a dedicated commando in the ETA, which stands for Basque Homeland in Liberty. She was responsible for 23 deaths. Specifically in 1986 at the age of just 20, La Tigresa set a car bomb in Madrid that killed 12 civil guards, another car bomb that killed five civilians, and seduced a police officer in order to gain access to police stations, before shooting him and another five police officers. In 2003, she was sentenced to 2,000 years in jail, but in 2011, apologized, and unbelievably was released early in June of 2017.

7. The Iceman
Richard Leonard Kuklinksi is considered America's most prolific contract killer, nicknamed The Iceman, because he froze his victims to hide the time of their death. He was only ever convicted for two murders, but claims to have killed up to 250 people over 30 years. That means one murder every six weeks. Kuklinski was the go-to killer for the Gambino mafia crime family, and unlike many other serial killers, he had no routine. Specifically, he would use guns, knives, bats, lumber, tire irons, ice picks, fire, cyanide, and even his bare fists, that he claimed he did for the exercise. Oh yes, getting a good one in today. The strangest thing is that when he wasn't murdering people for money, he was a family man living a quiet life in New Jersey. He was even an usher in his church, but his luck ran out in 1988 when he was sentenced to two life sentences, but freely spoke about his crimes up until his death in 2006.

6. The Superkiller
Agent 47 from the video game Hitman was actually inspired by Alexander Solonik, known as The Superkiller to the Russian criminal underworld. As a Soviet special forces member in East Berlin, he was tasked as an assassin of NATO diplomats. Believe it or not, what landed him in jail was not murders, but a rape conviction, and he ended up breaking out of the Siberian gulag and became a hit man for hire. He immediately started taking out high-ranking Russian mafia bosses, protected by armies of bodyguards, and he'd either do this as a sniper from great distances, or show up at nightclubs and kill his target and crew with dual pistols blaring. Police eventually caught up with him in 1995, but he ended up taking out five cops with a hidden machine gun before eventually returning to jail, escaping again, and created his own 50-strong assassin squad in Greece. Eventually he was found strangled in Athens in 1997. How appropriate, an assassin was assassinated, that's just irony.

5. Caesarea
In 1989, Palestinian political organization Hamas's chief weapons maker, Mahmoud al Habu, shot an Israeli soldier in cold blood. However, Israel had the last laugh in 2010, after Habu's body was discovered in the luxury Al Bustan Rotana in Dubai. His cause of death was a brain hemorrhage, which seemed improbable, so Dubai investigators looked into it. What they discovered was that 27 people from Massad's Caesarea unit flew in under different passports and left soon after. A German immigration attorney ended up discovering that multiple people in the Caesarea forged identities and documents to acquire German passports used to enter Dubai without notice. Seriously, these people must be really good at what they do, because I can't even bring a dang bottle of water through the airport, it's like I'm a criminal.

4. The Cartel Hit Man
Martin Corona's book Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man, released in July of 2017, details his violent life as an enforcer for the Arellano-Felix organization. It was this organization that inspired the movie Traffic, with their sadistic methods like Mexican stew, where they stuffed men into 55 gallon drums of hot lye. Corona was recruited to David Popeye Barin's death squad in 1993 after he saved Ramon Arellano's life fighting off 40 gunmen sent by the El Chapo Guzman, with a single AK-47. This guy's like an assassin Rambo. He tried to retaliate against El Chapo inside the Guadalajara Airport, but missed, but he still continued on to a long and lucrative murder for hire spree on both sides of the US-Mexico border. He would often wear disguises to trick his victims, like nerdy glasses, but in 2000, he turned on his bosses, working with the California Justice Department to dismantle the AFO.

3. The Camel
Jesus Ernesto Chavez Castillo's street gang, Barrio Azteca, were the Juarez drug cartel's go-to hit men until 2014. That was, until Castillo testified against his former boss, Arturo Gallegos Castrellon. Chavez confessed to 800 murders, but says that he lost count, and claims to have had a daily murder quota to instill fear in cops, politicians, and the people of Cuidad Juarez, the murder capital of the world. His confessions came after Mexican police allegedly tortured him with electric shocks to the testicles. But killing wasn't enough to please his boss, Castrellon, so he would often dismember and behead his victims, leaving their bodies in public places to make sure he made headlines. Unbelievably, since his imprisonment at the end of the drug cartel war, the Juarez murder rate dropped by two thirds.

2. The Political Assassin
Photographer Burhan Ozbilici's stark image of Mevlut Mert Altintas with a gun and his finger in the air while Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov lies dead beside him, was declared 2016's photo of the year. The Ankara Modern Arts Center was hosting an exhibition created by the Russian embassy on December 19th, 2016. Ambassador Karlov was a few minutes into his speech about improving strained Turkish-Russian relations when a man in a suit shot him nine times in the back, shouting "revenge for Syria and Aleppo." The gunman, who engaged in a 15-minute shootout with police before ultimately being killed, was Altintas. He was an off-duty member of the Ankara police riot squad and a member of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. Man, even police are assassins, you can't trust anybody.

1. The Lady Killers
Kim Jong Nam was a playboy living in exile when he was suddenly poisoned in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia on Valentine's Day 2016. His assassins were Indonesians Siti Aisyah and Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, who sprayed the poison in his face, claiming it was a prank. The reason that they were so unsuspecting was because Miss Huong was wearing really casual clothing, specifically a sweater that said "LOL" on it. Well, getting sprayed in the face with a V.X. nerve agent isn't exactly LOL. It's more like OMG.

10 DEADLIEST FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS
From the femme fatale’s with countless victims to the bohemian body counts that rival any Ted Bundy, we count down the top 10 deadliest female serial killers.

10. Delphine LaLaurie

Perhaps the real inspiration for American Horror Story season three, Delphine LaLaurie inspired her slaves to commit suicide. The reason? They were trying to get away from her lucid torture schemes. LaLaurie would keep droves of slaves on the brink of death and starvation, seemingly for her own enjoyment. Sadly, LaLaurie was never arrested, and although rumors of her atrocities run rampant throughout New Orleans, she never suffered the same way she treated those around her.

9. Belle Sorensen Gunness

No, it’s probably not because gun is in her name, or the fact that her children look terrified in every family photo. In what can only be described as ‘gold digging pioneering’, Belle would murder family members for money. After murdering her husband and two of her very own children and cashing in on their life insurance, she moved to Indiana. There, she dropped a meat grinder on her next husband’s head—and then advertised in the paper that she was looking for yet another husband. In gold digging irony, suitors rushed to the ever increasingly wealthy Belle, who murdered them all. Eventually, her whole estate burned to the ground, killing her children and revealing dozens of corpses for police to find. The weird part was, her teeth were found in the ashes—but her body wasn’t.

8. Amy Archer’s Murder House

Amy Archer-Gilligan murdered the elderly for fun. It’s horrible to hear out loud, but listen to this: in the early 1900’s Archer’s Connecticut home for the Elderly and Infirm saw 60 deaths, not including the deaths of several husbands. Eventually, family and friends of the deceased elderly caught on that Archer was feeding poison to her patients and was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder. She died in 1962 in an insane asylum. Asylum sounds too nice for someone like that.

7. Lavinia Fisher

Notoriously famed as the first American serial killer, and perhaps the inspiration for American Horror Story season five, Lavinia Fisher and her husband ran a hotel that—can you guess?—made fun out of murdering guests. What started as murder and robbery turned into an all-out killing spree. It took local police years to nail Lavinia and her husband for their crimes, and the two were eventually sentenced to death in 1820.

6. Jane Toppan

The further we get down this list, the more we see several things. First, women seem to have bored of serial killing as time has gone on, and second, if a woman is a nurse or part of a medical environment, buyer beware! Jane Toppan was no exception. She is famous for casually experiment on her own patients for her own enjoyment. Now, take that sentence seriously, because this next statement might gross you out. She later told authorities that she felt sexual pleasure in watching her victims die. After killing close friends, her landlord, and her sister, time finally caught up with Toppan and she was sent to Taunton Insane Hospital, where she likely Taunted the world for being foolish enough to send her to a place that would give her another 30 years of life.

5. Bertha Gifford

The ‘Textbook’ Case - Falling in line with the majority of serial killers both male and female—Gifford fits the typical profile of, ‘Oh, she was nice and gentle’. Her murderous rampage is a complete surprise’. Gifford was a quiet and unassuming person who apparently was feeding arsenic to patients. No wonder American folklore is drenched in the blood of terrifying hospitals, insane asylums and medical wards. It seems like one in three had a vicious murderer traipsing around in it. Gifford’s body count made it to almost 20 before she was caught.

4. Dorothea Puente

And the modern era of female serial killers. If you’re in the shipping industry, it’s usually a bit taboo to open packages. Well, in 1985, a handyman failed to open a box given to him by Dorothea Puente to dump—and it was a good thing he didn’t open it, as it contained a decomposing human body. Luckily, fisherman found the body days later and reported it to police. After searches began to plague her premises, Puente suffered a devastating blow when police found seven dead bodies buried under her boarding house—where she had been doing most of her killing. She died in 2011.

3. Nannie Doss

Wait a minute. There’s a female serial killer with eleven bodies to her name and her first name is the word we use to describe a profession that takes care of children? Wow. Who okay’d that one? Nannie Doss married at sixteen, and then murdered two of that marriages four children. Unlike virtually every other husband on this list, that guy ran, but the Doss wasn’t done. Doss used this marriage to murder her grandchildren for insurance money. As if she were pissed about the first one getting away, husbands two, three, four, and five were all murdered. Husband five seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, because the police finally nabbed her. Could you imagine husband number one—living his life in fear hearing about all these other guys dying. Who was husband five, by the way? What insane kind of deathwish did he have?

2. Dynamic Duo of Death

Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood, two serial killers with 80’s skin-flick names, murdered elderly patients for sexual pleasure in the 1980’s. You can’t make that up if you want to. Others thought they were however, when Gwen and Cathy bragged about how awesome they were at killing and no one believed them. In 1989, after Cathy’s ex-husband demanded that the police follow up on them, Cathy threw Gwen under the bus and struck a plea deal, resulting in Gwen serving five life sentences while Cathy only got slapped with 20-40 years. The scariest part—she may be released some day.

1. Aileen Wuornos

Some People Just Want to Watch The World Burn. Aileen Wuornos lands at number one. Unlike most of the women on this list, she didn’t use poison. Unlike most of the women on this list, she wasn’t after money. No—Aileen Wuornos wore her heart on her sleeve and her trigger finger itched. What’s insane about Aileen is that her motive, although completely different thab most of the people on this list, is almost all the more insane. For all seven of her victims that she shot in cold blood, she claimed self-defense—because, as she put it—they were trying to rape her. Wuornos claimed self-defense in the face of rape for years—all while she openly plead guilty to the actual murders. With seven counts under her belt, she was sentenced to death in 2002 by lethal injection.

10 HORROR ANIMALS MOVIE
Number 10: The mosquitoes from "Mosquito"
Kicking off our list is a film that's so bad, it's good. This movie answers a timeless question: What happens when ordinary mosquitoes feed on alien carcasses? The answer involves a campy, good time filled with horrible dialogue, bad acting, terrible effects and buckets full of gore. If you thought you hated these pests before imagine meeting one this big, without a can of bug spray.

Number 9: The crocodile from "Lake Placid"
This film is a similarly funny, yet scary tale of animal cruelty on man. A 30 foot crocodile has begun snapping at victims in Maine. This water dwelling amphibian is a vicious killing machine that not only devours people but also loves munching on cows.

Number 8: The sheep from "Black Sheep"
In this off-beat horror, the dangers of genetic engineering are explored when experiments turn harmless sheep into bloodthirsty killers. As a result, these modified animals go on a rampage of a New Zealand farm, bringing new meaning to the term "Baaad".

Number 7: The snake from "Anaconda"
A National Geographic film crew is taken on a trip to hunt the world's largest giant anaconda in the Amazon rainforest. Unfortunately for them, this snake is so massive, it is capable of consuming a live person.

Number 6: The ants from "Them"
Now we're getting serious and delving into the real questions of radioactivity. Here, atomic testing in New Mexico causes regular sized ants to mutate into massive man-eating monsters that are hell-bent on devouring human civilization.

Number 5: The piranhas from "Piranha"
In this 70s horror flick, military scientists have genetically modified piranhas for use in the Vietnam war However, these man-eaters are accidentally released into the river and find their way to a day camp, where they begin to multiply and feed on the guests.

Number 4: The spiders from "Arachnophobia"
A Venezuelan spider stows away on a boat to America It mates with a local spider and their offspring eat their way through the inhabitants of a small town in California. This is easily the scariest flick to ever star 8-legged freaks with large fangs.

Number 3: The St Bernard from "Cujo"
In this Stephen King tale, a rabid bat bites a friendly St Bernard named Cujo. As a result, the dog becomes incredibly violent and goes on a killing spree through a small town in America.

Number 2: The birds from "The Birds"
Terror from the sky reigns in this iconic horror film by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. The anticipation of a feathery attack never lets up and is especially nerve-wracking when the winged killers decide to converge on a child's party.

Number 1: The shark from "Jaws"
Rounding out our top 10 list is the great white that made us afraid to go to the beach. The film combines an excellent score by John Williams with suspense and pools of blood. Jaws will grip you and never let go.

10 MOST BIZARRE CURSES IN THE WORLD
From a cursed painting, to a cursed movie character, we have 10 most bizarre curses in the world.

10. The Iceman
An ice man was discovered in the Alps in 1991 and it was estimated to be over 5,000 years old. But, after his discovery, seven of the people who found him died over the course of thirteen years and not by natural causes. For instance, one person died in a car accident, another was killed in an avalanche, another died from accidentally falling off a cliff and another from a blood disorder. The Iceman curse is currently one of the most famous curses of modern times.

9. The Crying Boy Painting
This painting of a young boy was set on the walls of multiple homes throughout Europe. But, many of the homes the painting was placed in became the victims of fires and explosions. Even though the homes would be burned down to the ground, The Crying Boy painting was always found to be completely intact in the aftermath. But, what's really bizarre about this "supposed curse" is the fact that the painter of the painting from Madrid said that he had made the painting of a wondering orphan whose parents have died in a house fire.

Even a priest had warned the painter that the each home the boy was led into was destroyed due to a fire at one time or another, the painter did not believe him and took the boy into his studio to paint him. But sure enough, his studio caught on fire as well,  and burned down. Causing the painter to banish the orphan from his presence.

8. Hope Diamond
This is one of the most famous diamonds in the entire world. But, there is a curse associated with it. The diamond was stolen from the head of of an idol in the 1600 and it is said that the priest of the temple of the idol was cursed in the stone. Sure enough, each and every owner of the diamond met a horrible demise including the Princess of France who was murdered by a mob in Paris. Even the jewelers who kept the diamond in their shop died mysterious deaths as well. The diamond is currently on display in the United States.

7. Koh-i-nor
The curse surrounding this diamond is very similar to the curse of the Hope Diamond. But what is unique about this diamond is that every female owner of it was brought great fortune and luck in their lives. But every male who has owned the diamond has been met with a terrible deaths. Diamonds are truly a girl's best friend. Number 6, the Superman curse. Most of the actors who have portrayed superman in either films or television shows have died of ways other than natural causes, ranging from suicide to complications from being paralyzed.

This curse began because the original comic book creators of Superman cursed their own superhero after they were denied the rights and money to the character. The Superman curse remains one of the most infamous curses of modern times. So, it's only a matter of time until we see what happens to the Superman actors from the more recent years.

5. The Bambino curse
The Bambino curse is one of the most famous sports curse in the world. The Boston Red Sox team had a string of bad luck after Babe Ruth was traded to the New York Yankees in the 1920s, but up until then, the Yankees were the ones with the bad luck. Following Ruth's trade, the Yankees won World Series after World Series while the Red Sox lost again and again. But, that changed in 2004 when the Red Sox finally won a World Series, during a total lunar eclipse. What was even more bizarre about this curse is that they won against the Yankees.

4. The 27 club
The 27 club refers to the rockers and musicians who all died at the age of 27 under controversial circumstances. Musicians included here are Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, all of who were very famous rock stars at their time. What is even more bizarre about this curse is that all of them became famous at the age of 25, and then died two years later.

3. 0888-888-888
There is really no cursed phone number in the world unless you are thinking about count spam or trash messages. But the notable exception here is the phone number 0888-888-888. This curses phone number has been the number of many people throughout the 2000's up until now. But every single person who had the number has died. Some owners died of cancer while others were shot to death or died in a gun shot accident. So, who knows what's going to happen to the current person who has this phone number.

2. Blarney Stone
The Blarney Stone in Ireland is notable throughout the world not because it is a curse, but on the contrary because it is a piece of good luck. Kissing the stone means that good luck will come to your life. But, it does not apply if any part of the stone is removed or stolen. In fact, if that becomes the case, bad luck with ensure. People who have stolen a small piece of the stone have reported suffering from depression and bad financial conditions among other things. So bad was the curse that multiple people who stole a piece of the stone sent it back to Ireland.

1. Tecumseh's curse
This curse was bestowed upon every american president in the White House. Elected every 20 years from William Henry Harrison up until John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The curse originated when William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory in 1811 broke a treaty with chief Tecumseh. This led to a war between the US and the Shawnee in which many of Tecumseh's men were killed and Harrison's reputation continued to grow. Finally, Tecumseh cursed Harrison to death when he was elected to the White House, in addition to every president elected after Harrison every 20 years.

Sure enough, every president elected each twenty years died while in office. Harrison in 1840, Lincoln in 1860, Garfield in 1880, McKinley in 1900, Harding in 1920, Roosevelt in 1940, and JFK in 1960. President Reagan who was elected in 1980 was the victim of an assassination attempt, but survived. Supposedly breaking the curse as George W Bush, who was elected in 2000 and survived as well.