Otty Sanchez Says the Devil Made Her Do It

July 30, 2009

When San Antonio, Texas police officers were called to the modest single-story home in the 300 block of Wayside Drive shortly before 5 a.m. on Sunday, July 26, 2009, where Otty Sanchez, 33, lived with her sister and her sister's two young children, her mother—who lived in another building on the property—and her own newborn son, Scott "Scotty" Wesley Buchholz-Sanchez, not yet four weeks old, none of them were prepared for what they soon discovered—no police officer could ever be prepared for such an atrocity as that which was found early that morning.  In fact, the crime scene was described as being so gruesome that police officers scarcely spoke to one another as they examined it.

"At this particular scene you could have heard a pin drop," San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said.  "No one was speaking.  It was about as somber as it could have been."

When police officers walked into the unassuming home, they found Otty Sanchez sitting on the sofa.  She was bloody, and had what appeared to be a number of self-inflicted stab wounds to her chest and abdomen, and it looked like her throat had been slashed somewhat.

"I killed my baby!  I killed my baby! I want to die," she screamed repeatedly as she sat there.  She eventually told officers that the devil had made her do it.

When officers found the infant, he was lying in a pool of blood on a bed next to a steak knife.  The shock and revulsion those officers experienced to describe their reaction to what they had found would be an understatement—despite their silence that morning.  Baby Scotty had been stabbed to death, apparently with the steak knife.  They also found a machete and a sword that they at first believed may have been used in the attack, but quickly ruled them out.  The baby boy had also been decapitated, and he had been skinned and gutted, and his face had been torn away, according to the police.  Police believed that the steak knife had been used to not only repeatedly stab the baby, but to also cut off his head and further mutilate him.  The cops also believed that Otty had used the steak knife to inflict her own wounds after the child had been killed.

Although McManus had described the crime scene as "too heinous" to fully discuss, he did say that Otty had eaten part of the baby's brain, and had bitten off three of his toes.  According to Joe Rios, a San Antonio police spokesperson, Otty had told officers what she had done, and that she had been "hearing voices" before the devil told her to kill Scotty, who she had given birth to on June 30, 2009.

"She mentioned that someone or something told her to do it—she was hearing voices," Rios said. 

"So that leads us to believe that she was experiencing some type of mental crisis.  The baby had obviously been decapitated."

Otty Sanchez, according to police information released to news media outlets, had been having relationship problems between herself and the baby's father, Scott W. Buchholz, and the couple had separated on Monday, July 20, 2009.  The couple reportedly had been making progress toward getting back together prior to the tragedy. Otty had apparently shown up to see Buchholz at the home of his relatives, where he had been staying since their separation, on Saturday, July 25, 2009, the day before the child was slain, but had become upset when Buchholz had asked her for a copy of Scotty's birth certificate and Social Security card.

Click here to continue reading this story >

The Butcher, the Florist, and the Schoolgirl

February 09, 2009

Thank the heavens that the crime you are about to read about does not happen often!  According to reports from various news agencies around the world, a 16-year-old St. Petersburg, Russia girl disappeared, at first without a trace, on January 19, 2009 while on her way to school.  However, it did not take long for the girl's body parts to begin turning up in plastic bags at various St. Petersburg locations.  The girl's head, when found, was also wrapped inside a plastic bag.  The father of the girl to whom the body parts likely belonged, and as believed by the police, could not make a formal identification of the flesh and blood remnants that he had once known as his daughter.  Police are continuing to withhold the name of the girl because she has not yet been officially identified, according to city prosecutor Sergei Kapitonov.
 
As the body parts turned up and the evidence was analyzed, in addition to much questioning of people who had known the missing girl, police investigators arrested two men on Saturday, January 31, 2009, twelve days after the girl disappeared, and held them in jail on suspicion of murder.  Butcher Maxim Golovatsckhikh, who worked at a street market, and florist Yuri Mozhnov, both 19, had known their victim. Golovatsckhikh, according to police, is a former mental patient.

Following interviews with their two suspects, police announced that they had determined that the girl in question had voluntarily gone with Golovatsckhikh and Mozhnov to an apartment of an acquaintance on the day of her disappearance.  An argument of as-yet undetermined significance began between the girl and the butcher.  Whatever they had argued about, the two men decided to kill the nearly helpless girl—and did so by drowning her in the bathtub.

After purportedly killing the girl, Golovatsckhikh and Mozhnov allegedly butchered her by cutting her body into pieces.  Afterward, police said, they cooked some of her internal organs with vegetables on a stove by baking them.  After they were cooked to the killers' satisfaction, they ate them.

Christopher Lee McCuin Cooked Parts of His Girlfriend, Jana Shearer

April 29, 2008

Another bizarre crime involving body parts and the potential for cannibalism occurred earlier this year in Tyler, Texas.  Instead of finding a down-home outdoor Texas barbecue when sheriff's deputies responded to a 911 call at a home in this East Texas municipality on Saturday, January 5, 2008, they made a gruesome gastronomic discovery that was cooking on the stovetop inside.  According to the police, Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, killed his girlfriend, Jana Shearer, 21, cooked parts of her body on the stove inside his mother's home, and called 911 to inform them of what he had done.  Deputies were aghast when they found human ears boiling in a pot, and a piece of flesh stuck to the end of a fork in a plate on the kitchen table.  They also found the rest of the woman's body in another part of the home.  Based on the information that McCuin provided to the authorities during the 911 call, investigators had reason to believe that he may have eaten—or at least attempted to eat—portions of Shearer's body.  However, whether he had actually consumed parts of her body was not clear at the time, according to the authorities.

"We cannot prove that he did," said Smith County Sheriff J.B. Smith.  "He was either going to, had been, or led us to think that he was doing it."

McCuin, of course, was arrested on the spot.  Although he had at first gone willingly with the arresting deputies, he had to be placed in additional restraints because he allegedly...

Continue Reading About Christopher Lee McCuin