Secret of Elena's Tomb | The Black Wedding

1/25/2018

On a moonless night in 1940, several figures crept through the solitary grounds of Key West Cemetery. The only sound was the rustle of palm fronds overhead. They came to a freshly dug grave, and dropped a coffin inside. With hurried movements they covered it with dirt and grass, erasing all sign of where it was. No memorial was ever raised to identify who had been buried in secret.

Elena Hoyos Mesa and the man who defiled her corpse Karl Tanzer

Key West Cemetery established in 1847, had welcomed saints and sinners through the years, but one would think this skulduggery was reserved for perhaps a criminal or an undesirable, but the truth was far from that.

In the casket were the remains of an ill-fated young woman who had known neither happiness in life, nor peace in death. What followed was one of the most disturbing cases that made headlines around the world as to what a sick mind will do, all in the name of love.

By the 1970s all the people who had witnessed the mysterious burial were dead, taking the secret to their graves of where Elena Hoyos Mesa was interred. This is the story of what brought them to that night.

Elena Milagro Hoyos Mesa tomb c.1940

Elena was the daughter of local cigar maker Francisco "Pancho" Hoyos (1883–1934) and Aurora Milagro (1881–1940). She married Luis Mesa on February 18, 1926, when she was very young. Her only pregnancy ended in miscarriage. After this she grew wan and thin, and many attributed it to the loss of the baby.

In 1930, her mother took her to the doctor, who in turn sent her to the Marine Hospital for an x-ray.

Elena went to the hospital accompanied by her husband Luis. The examination confirmed she had the most dangerous form of TB known as "hasty consumption" because of how rapidly it advanced.

Not long after the diagnosis, her husband Luis abandoned her for another woman and left Key West for Tampa, and then Miami. Once there he worked as a waiter in a Cuban restaurant. He denied fleeing because of Elena's sickness, but he knew if he stayed he would probably contract the disease.

The x-ray technician at the hospital was an old man named Carl Tanzler. He was an eccentric character known by the community on the island of Key West. He was probably the first to realize that she suffered from an advanced case of tuberculosis. Unknown to everyone, he became obsessed with Elena from the moment he laid eyes on her.

Tanzler who claimed to have medical knowledge, attempted to treat and cure Hoyos with a variety of medicines, as well as x-ray and electrical equipment that he brought to her home. He also romanced the dying young woman with gifts and jewelry. Eventually he proposed marriage, despite being more than 30 years older than her, and both of them were married to other persons.

Once this became known, Pancho Hoyos chased him off. Elena died soon after on October 25, 1931 at the age of 22.

Knowing that Elena's father would not accept his offer, Tanzler went to her sister Florinda Medina, and offered to pay for an expensive crypt. She was Elena's older sister, and known by the nickname of Nana by the family. She agreed since they were in poor circumstances, and he built it himself. In return all he asked was that she be held inside an airtight casket, with an incubator tank full of formaldehyde. He also directed the funeral home on how to prepare her body, making sure she was not embalmed.

After Elena's death, Tanzler rented a room in the Hoyos' household. They were so desperate for money, they agreed.

Fuselage that Tanzler dubbed Elena's Airship c.1940

Tanzler bought an old airplane chassis, which he parked next to the Marine Hospital where he worked. Little did anyone know he called it Elena's Airship, and that he planned to fly back to Germany with his bride, where they could live happily ever after. The only thing that stood in the way was his inability to bring the young woman back to life.

On the day before Easter in April 1933, eighteen months after Elena died, Tanzler crept through the cemetery, removed the inner coffin from the outer one, and loaded it onto a toy wagon he covered with blankets. He placed a crucifix on top, and left through some loose planks on the edge of the cemetery. Tanzler planned to leave the coffin temporarily inside an abandoned house. As he passed the coffin over the cemetery fence it fell on him when the ground gave way. He lost consciousness and when he came to, he found he was pinned by the coffin which was dripping a bad smelling ooze over him. He was able to get out, and take the coffin to the house.

That night after daubing his clothes with whiskey to mask the stench he returned to his room inside Elena's parent's house.

Shortly thereafter Tanzler stashed the corpse in the old airplane fuselage.

At the first opportunity he cleaned the corpse, filled the coffin with water and carbolic acid to kill the maggots and dispel the odor. In order to stop the stench he made a small cut on Elena's side and removed her intestines, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, bladder, liver and lungs. He followed this procedure based on how ancient Egyptians prepared mummies for preservation. He filled her abdominal cavity with sterile cotton and absorbent linen packets. He also filled in the holes made by the larvae that had once crawled inside the corpse. Her fingers and toes were bandaged and held together by wires.

Tanzler working at Marine Hospital

He used splints for the nose, and he attached a cord to her wrist, and with a pulley on the ceiling he straightened out her arms which had been folded over the body in the coffin.

Afterward he made a wig from Elena's hair that had been collected by her mother and given to him not long after her burial. He dressed her in a wedding gown, placed a tiara on her head and gave her a wedding ring along with other jewelry. He put glass eyes in the sockets of the skull.

He eventually covered her body with fine silk to keep the bugs away.

Tanzler kept the body in the fuselage for two years until 1934. He was fired from the hospital, and told he had to move the plane. He moved out of the room he rented with the Hoyos, and went to a shack on Rest Beach that had once been part of the old butcher pens, where cattle were slaughtered so the blood would run directly into the sea. At one time it had also been a real estate office built in the 1920s during Florida’s land boom. The owner had jumped from a building after the market crash in 1929.

Tanzler paid a taxi driver to tow the wingless plane back to the shack.

Mario Medina, Elena's brother-in-law helped him repair the structure which was dilapidated. Eventually an Italian fisherman named Frank built his own shack up against the wall of Tanzler's house.

There are two versions as to why he was fired. In one it was due to cutbacks in costs and supervision of a new naval commander, in another the firing was due because someone discovered what he kept in the plane fuselage. It could have been both, and economics were used as an "excuse" to get him and the plane off the property.

There is a story that a group of people, including Elena's family, paraded behind the fuselage of the plane as it was taken to its new site. Unbeknownst to them Elena Hoyos Mesa was the unseen queen of the parade, sliding about in liquid inside her coffin.

After he lost his job at the hospital, Tanzler kept to himself even more. He was seen when he visited the post office to pick up his monthly check. Some speculated it was a pension for his service in the German military during WWI, something he was anxious to keep secret. This could explain how he ended up in the internment camp in Australia, something that came to light after he wrote his memoirs many years later.

In June, 1934 Tanzler's wife, Doris wrote him a letter about their daughter's death from diphtheria, and that she needed emotional and financial support. She asked him to attend the funeral but he ignored her pleas. All his attention was consumed with caring for a dead body, and his living family received nothing.

For the next 7 years Tanzler experimented with different ways to bring Elena Hoyos back to life. He also slept next to his Frankenstein bride. He believed that in order to resurrect her with electricity, he had to keep her hydrated and fed, so he would spit broth into her mouth. Her coffin was filled with plasma solution.

In 1935, six years after the onset of the Great Depression, eighty percent of the population in Key West was unemployed, and the city was on the verge of bankruptcy. The cigar factories had left to Tampa, and the sponge industry was wiped out by disease. This was the same year a powerful hurricane struck Florida, killing hundreds of people and damaging the keys closer to Miami. It destroyed the Overseas Railroad, and cut off Key West from the other islands north of it. It wasn't until 1937, that a roadway was laid down to replace the railroad. With a population that was out of work and a government that barely operated, including law enforcement, adults started to throw rocks and debris at the plane. One of the windows was broken, and Tanzler moved inside the plane to make sure no one broke in and found Elena. Frank the fisherman continued to live next to him.

Cabanas on Rest Beach, Key West c.1930s

As the corpse's skin decomposed Tanzler replaced it with silk cloth soaked in beeswax, and plaster of Paris. He kept refilling the chest and abdominal cavities with rags to keep the original form. The mannequin-like face was colored with cosmetics. and he continued trying to feed a dead woman.

In 1936 a great concrete pier close to where Tanzler lived was blown up. He learned they would soon use dynamite on the house where he lived. He approached a lawyer who told him nothing could be done about it since the property belonged to the city. Without protection from the sea he decided to move. A policeman told him about a beachfront property that belonged to the city, where he could take the plane. Situated on Flagler Avenue, it was about two miles from Old Town. The wooden structure gave him what he desired the most, which was seclusion.

In another version of this story, the lawyer owned the property, and offered to let him stay at the shack if he kept squatters out. The place had also once been known as Meacham's Garage.

Carl and Frank, with the plane in tow moved to the building. It was then that he was able to take Elena from the coffin and lay her in the bed all the time. This is when he committed the most of his necrophilic acts. It was only a matter of time before Frank saw what Tanzler kept in the bed. Somehow Tanzler convinced him that he was trying to resurrect Elena.

Marine Hospital, Key West where Tanzler worked c.1871

Strangely after this move, both men started to argue frequently. Did Frank harbor a suspicion that Carl was indeed deranged, and not a genius like he claimed?

In February, 1940, Elena's mother died from tuberculosis. Eight months later, almost 9 years to the date of Elena's death, the caretaker at the cemetery realized the glass panel in the door to the crypt was missing.

The family sent Carl a message that someone was trying to break into Elena's mausoleum. They wanted the tomb opened to make sure she was ok. He refused them.

It seemed Tanzler's frequent visits to the mausoleum in those early months after Elena's death did not go unnoticed. Unexplained was when he suddenly stopped visiting the cemetery, and was reported to occasionally buy women's clothes and cologne, "but for whom?" observers asked themselves. Another story that circulated was that a local boy saw him dancing with a large doll-like figure through a window.

The family didn't take no for an answer, and a confrontation ensued, where Elena's sister Florinda hit Carl. She then threatened to call the police.

Unbeknownst to Carl, the cemetery caretaker had already told Florinda the coffin was no longer inside the mausoleum. She wanted to make sure the stories were true before she went to the police.

Tanzler told the family to come to his house first so they could talk. He took Florinda to the shack where he lived, and what she saw chilled her blood. She could not believe that what appeared to be a doll laying on a bed covered with mosquito netting was her sister. The effigy wore a veil and a wedding band. It was then Elena's family realized Tanzler's generous offer to pay for her mausoleum, had been a disguise for his dark desires.

Florinda gave Tanzler one week to return the corpse back into the crypt. He refused.

The remains of Elena Hoyos c.1940

Florinda went to the police, who came with a search warrant to the house. The deputies found exactly what Florinda Medina had described, and he was taken to jail and charged with grave robbery among other things.

The effigy was sent to a funeral home.

Then another story surfaced about something that happened several years before. The policeman who told Tanzler where he could relocate the plane to, after being fired from the hospital had tried telling Elena's family about his suspicions that he was keeping Elena's corpse inside the fuselage. They didn't believe him, and said Tanzler was just playing around with masks. Seeing that the Hoyos family were not concerned with the information, he left the old man alone.

When Doris Tanzler learned of her husband's arrest she sent a letter to police that read: "Dear Sir,
I note in the papers that Carl Tanzler is in custody. He is my husband and we have been separated for eleven years. His mind is troubled on account of many ways. It was impossible for us to live together. If my testimony as to his sanity is desirable, I will gladly tell all I know. Sincerely yours, Mrs. Doris Tanzler."

Carl asked the judge to return Elena's corpse, and was refused. He said: "It is the end of everything for me. I protest against the inhuman decision. You cannot do this. It means her utter ruin and a break of faith to my Elena. If I cannot have her back, I will abide by your decision, but I will carry on my fight to the highest court of the land to annul this decision."

Elena's remains stripped of all clothing c.1940

Tanzler was always seen as eccentric by the people in Key West, but after the discovery of Elena's body they felt sorry for him, and offered to raise money so he could pay bail.

After Tanzler’s arrest the ugly truth of what transpired to Elena became known. Most of this information came from testimony Tanzler himself gave to doctors and lawyers while he was being held in jail. In the days following the burial, he would visit the crypt frequently since he had kept the key. He would remove the top from the casket to look through the glass at Elena’s face. He said her spirit would come to him when he would sit by the grave, serenading her corpse with a Spanish song titled La Boda Negra (The Black Wedding). She would also beg for him to take her from the grave, that she did not want to be in the coffin any longer. He installed a phone in the shack and would carry on conversations with her when the weather was stormy, and he was unable to go to the cemetery.

Tanzler had sufficient medical knowledge to know that soon her body would decompose, since she had not been embalmed. He needed to buy time to bring her back to life, and he believed that in her gratitude she would agree to marry him.

Psychiatrists determine Tanzler was sane. He was released under bond, and he was not prosecuted due to the statute of limitation having expired. After his release he wanted Elena’s body back and even went to court to regain it from her sister. His request was denied.

Tanzler with Elena's death mask

On October 7, 1940, a young woman who had lived and died in obscurity, had her mummified remains exhibited where more than 6,800 people lined up to see it inside Dean Lopez Funeral Home at the cost of .10 cents per person. Two men stood near her body with fly swatters and would swat people's hands if they tried to touch Elena or take anything off her.

This was the only way to raise money to reinter her since the family had no money, and Tanzler was sitting in a jail cell.

Her name and likeness was part of a bizarre story that was seen all around the world, and it put Key West on the map.

Sickeningly the French portrayed Carl as a great lover, Germans celebrated him for being a scientist, and others said that Carl and Elena were star-crossed lovers.

Dr. DePoo and Dr. Foraker who attended the 1940 autopsy of Hoyos's remains, recalled in later years that Tanzler had sex with Elena's corpse. Dr. DePoo said, "The breasts really felt real. In the vaginal area, I found a tube wide enough to permit sexual intercourse. At the bottom of the tube was cotton, and an examination of the cotton, I found there was sperm. Then I knew we were dealing with a sexual pervert." This examination proved that Tanzler was a necrophiliac, but since he was never brought to trial this fact never became known. Do doubt it would have changed the way Tanzler was seen by the community.

In a kindness to the Hoyos family, the doctor who discovered what Tanzler had been doing to the dead girl, waited until 1972 to disclose his findings. By then all the family was dead.

Dr. Foraker wrote a medical treatise titled The Romantic Necrophiliac of Key West for Tropic in 1972. He explained that he had searched through forty to fifty years of literature pertaining to sex crimes, and found no case similar to Tanzler's. Other cases of necrophilia involved bodies that were recently deceased.

Two months after the discovery of Elena's corpse, it was reinterred inside the original mausoleum, however with a well-founded fear of Tanzler's obsession, it was decided to move her to an anonymous grave. Benjamin Sawyer the undertaker, Otto Bethel the cemetery sexton, and Assistant Chief of Police Bienvenido Perez agreed to complete this work under cover of night. They knew that given the opportunity Tanzler would steal the body. It's believed they buried the remains in a child's coffin next to where Elena's baby was laid to rest, but this has never been confirmed. What was never disclosed was that Elena's sister Florinda and her husband Mario Medina accompanied the group to assure themselves she was being properly buried.

Tanzler became a minor celebrity, and visitors from out of town continuously approached him to hear his story. He enjoyed the attention, but he worried as well. He knew that if the truth of how intimate he had become with a dead corpse became known, the sentiment by the Key Westers would turn against him.

Cigar makers' homes, Key West c.1936

The authorities in Key West might not have been able to prosecute Tanzler, but they settled for kicking him out of the shack on Flagler Street where he had been squatting. The structure was razed. This also ended his money-making venture where he was charging .25 for curious onlookers to tour the place where he had kept Elena.

By April, 1941 without money or a job he was forced to leave Key West, and went off to Zephyrhills, Florida. He packed up three trucks with his belongings, including the wingless airplane. Within hours of his departure from Key West, the mausoleum he had built for Elena exploded. This made it obvious that Tanzler was not an eccentric, harmless old man, but was a person who was quite devious and vengeful.

In his memoirs, Tanzler recounted how he dressed in the black suit he would wear when visiting Elena in the mausoleum. He walked in the night to the cemetery, and used the key to get inside the crypt. He wedged sticks of dynamite above the doorjamb and set the timer for 24 hours.

Upon arrival in Zephyrhills he moved in with his sister, never having told her he was bringing three trucks full of belongings, including a plane. He wanted solitude in order to write his memoirs, but the activity inside her house coupled with her occasional epileptic seizures forced him to move into the plane.

It was about this time that WWII was heating up in Europe, and despite being an older man, as a German national he was watched by the government. Eventually he was told to take the wheels off the fuselage.

It wasn't until 1944, that he moved to a little shanty where he lived by himself. He also placed Elena's casket, which he had taken with him from Key West, on a table.

Lopez's funeral home where Elena's body was displayed after it was taken from Tanzler's shack

Elena’s family was dogged by misfortune as most of them died of tuberculosis. In April, 1934 her younger sister Celia Hoyos Roque, age 21 died, and their father followed two weeks later at the age of 52. Her mother Aurora died at the beginning of 1940, which spared her the knowledge of what had been done to her dead daughter's body.

In the first days of February, 1944, Florinda's husband Mario died in a freak accident. The 31-year-old worked as a crane operator for the public works department. The crane was being used in the shifting of large spools of cable along the waterfront at the naval base. Another man, Lino Garcia was in the act of attaching the crane's hook to one of the spools, when the cable leading from the boom to the hook came in contact with overhead high tension wires. An electric current shot through Garcia's body and he let out a cry.

Medina jumped from his seat in the cabin and rushed to help Garcia. He was knocked away by the electricity as he caught hold of Garcia. Roy Boone, 32, a third man who was also a member of the crane's crew, attempted to pull Garcia from the hook and fell dead.

When the current struck Garcia, his muscles contracted and he was raised several inches from the ground, which probably saved his life.

Elena Hoyos with her new husband Luis Mesa on their wedding day c.1926

Two years later, Florinda joined her husband.

It’s possible the disease struck so much of the family because they were living in cramped quarters. In the 1930 census Elena was living with her parents, and her two sisters in the house of her in-laws the Mesas in Grinnell Street. The Mesas lived there with 7 of their sons, one of them was Luis who was married to Elena, and the grandfather named George. They all worked in the tobacco industry.

In the 1930s tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Key West, since cigar factory workers sat so close together as they rolled tobaccos. This facilitated passing the germs between them.

In 1952, after the story of Elena Hoyos resurfaced due to Tanzler's death, Florinda Sifontes Alvarez, Elena's cousin through her mother, wrote a short editorial concerning what the family considered a tragedy. She denied accusations made by Raul Vazquez, a local Tampa man, who had declared that the family received hush money to keep the secret from leaking out, and once the payment stopped, the public found out what Tanzler had done with Elena Hoyos' remains. She called out Vazquez to prove his statement. She had taken two of the children left of the family to live with her.

She said that when the news broke in Key West, northern businessmen came to Florinda Medina's home, and offered her a good sum of money to take Elena's body and exhibit it in museums up north. She declined the offer.

Was Tanzler an obsession-driven, modern Dr. Frankenstein?

WHO WAS KARL TANZLER

He was born as Karl Tänzler or Georg Karl Tänzler on February 8, 1877 in Dresden, Germany, the son of Karl Tanzler and Pauline Schulz.

He traveled from an early age to India, Italy and Australia. At the outbreak of WWI or the Great War as it was known, he was held in an internment camp due to his German ethnicity. At one point he was kept at Trial Bay, a castle-like prison on the cliffs. He built a small sailboat with intentions of escaping, but he failed. He was released when the war ended, and sent to a prisoner exchange in Holland. He returned to Germany, and spent three years there living with his mother. It was a defeated and impoverished nation, and his mother suggested he join his sister who was living in the United States.

By then he had married Doris Anna Shafer (1889–1977) and he was listed as "Georg Karl Tänzler" on the marriage certificate. Together they had two children: Ayesha Tanzler (1922–1998), and Crystal (Clarista) Tanzler (1924–1934), who died of either diphtheria or tuberculosis.

Very little is known about Tanzler between the time he left Australia in 1920, and immigrated to the United States six years later. Only his wife and two children provided a clue to his life. He omitted mention of his activity in his memoirs.

He sailed from Rotterdam on February 6, 1926 to Havana, Cuba, eventually settling in Zephyrhills, Florida, where his sister lived. He was later joined by his wife and two daughters. In 1927, he abandoned his family and took a job as an x-ray technologist in Key West, using the name of Carl von Cosel. For good measure he made himself a count.

In an autobiography he wrote after leaving Key West he recounted that at the age of 12, he started having visions of a noble ancestress named Countess Anna Constantia von Brockdorr (1680-1765), also known as the Countess of Cozel. She supposedly showed him a vision of a dark-haired woman who would one day be his wife.

After leaving Key West, he returned to Pasco County and moved in with his sister. This was not too far from his wife Doris, who helped to support him in his later years. She did this even though he had abandoned his family, and dragged them through the mud because of his notoriety. He wrote his autobiography and his story was published in 1947 in the pulp magazine Fantastic Adventures.

The death mask Tanzler had made for Elena's corpse was put on display in a local museum when the case became local folklore. It was stolen some time later and turned up in 1952, on the floor of Tanzler's home lying next to his dead body. His decomposed remains were found just inside the locked, front door of the small house he lived in. It was estimated he'd been dead about three weeks. The 75-year old died in obscurity and loneliness, since it was only after a neighbor reported that mail was stacking up outside the door that someone went to find out what happened to him. His wife Doris outlived him by 25 years, and his daughter Ayesha passed in 1998.

Black Wedding (Lyrics translated from Spanish)

Listen to the story I was once told
by the old gravedigger of the region.
It was about a lover who by ungodly luck
had his sweet beloved taken by Death.

Every night he went to the cemetery
to visit the tomb of his sweet beloved.
The townspeople secretly whispered
that he was a dead man who escaped the pit.

On a horrendous night he shattered to pieces
the abandoned marble tomb;
he dug the earth and carried in his arms
the rigid skeleton of his beloved.

And there in the sad and gloomy room,
he mourned under a feeble flame;
He sat beside her cold and rigid bones
and celebrated his wedding with his dead beloved.

He tied her bare bones with ribbons;
her rigid skull he crowned with flowers,
he covered her decaying mouth with kisses,
and proclaimed his love to her with a smile.

He took his bride to their soft wedding bed,
lying next to her, in love;
and he remained asleep forever
while embracing her rigid skeleton.

And he remained asleep forever
while embracing her rigid skeleton.