The Creepiest Family Cult Ever

Incest, homicide…Ugh! Don’t blame me if you can’t sleep tonight

The month of December 1970. Santa Cruz, Spain: Walter Trankler, a well-known doctor in local circles, had just heard a knock at his door. His housemaid Sabine was busy doing her chores in the kitchen.

Mr Trankler opened the door and found two men, who introduced themselves as Harald Alexander and Frank, the father and brother of Sabine. The doctor brought the 15-year-old Sabine from the kitchen and allowed the family to have a private conversation near the front door.

Mr Trankler wouldn’t have wanted to overhear their chat, but the appearance of the two men had struck him. Both of them were covered in mud, certainly no way to dress up to meet their family. So, the doctor’s instincts told him to eavesdrop on the conversation, and what he heard would send a shudder of cold down his spine.

The father and the brother had just murdered three of their family members- the 42-year old mother Dagmar and Sabine’s two sisters; the 15-year-old Petra and the 17-year-old Marina.

The doctor stood motionless, unable to process the enormity of the situation. He wondered if Sabine was going to faint or scream anytime now.

But to his surprise, Sabine just took her father’s hand, pressed it to her cheek affectionately, approving the horrific act. She said: “I’m sure you have done what you think is necessary.” The family then embraced each other.

The doctor realized he was with a dangerous set of people who had lost the sense of right and wrong. He rushed to his room, bolted himself in, fortified the door with makeshift barricades, and called the police.

Every minute before the police showed up felt like an entire year for the doctor. He didn’t know if the culprits would flee or come for him.

While the cops arrived in a few minutes, the Alexander family was still there, chatting casually, and what the doctor construed as the mud was dripping off Harald’s hands.

It wasn’t mud. It was blood.

The horrible crime scene

As the officers rushed into the doctor’s house, the three family members didn’t look anything like they had just killed a few of their own. The cops wondered if they had received the right tip, as they asked Harald, “what’s going on ?”.

Without even the slightest hint of compunction, Harald would retrace the incident he had told his daughter. There was no hesitation whatsoever; they would even tell the address of his apartment, where the crime took place.

The cops were truly bewildered by the candidness, not knowing if this was a prank.

A few officers were soon dispatched to the crime scene to determine the veracity of Harald’s admission. There the cops saw the most horrible spectacle they had ever seen in their life.

Three bodies, horribly mutilated, were lying in the apartment; one in the bedroom and two in the living room. It was an absolute bloodbath.

If that wasn’t enough, the deceased’s breasts, heart, and vagina were cut off from the body and nailed to the wall!

What madness could have driven them to something like this?

The backstory

The Lorber society was a religious cult formed in the early 1800s in Dresden, Germany. Harald Alexander had taken over the leadership of this cult after the previous leader George Riehle passed away.

The Lorber cult was a relatively small group of about 100 people, and their beliefs were centered around one theory:

Everything outside the Lorber society was pure evil, influenced by satan.

After assuming the leadership of the group, Harald would give them one more dogma to abide by- that his second son, the newborn Frank, was the messiah of God. The followers duly accepted the new diktat of their leader.

So Frank the boy, lived like a God, was revered like a God, where even his silly demands were met without question. He had absolute autonomy over the cult and family, as the followers lined up to hear ‘the word of God’ from him.

As the teenage Frank discovered sexual pleasures, he also figured out that sex with someone outside the cult- the impure and satan servants- would amount to blasphemy.

Frank, therefore, suggested incest- forming a sexual relationship with his mother and sisters. Every one approved of this madness without any hesitation; for them, this was the word of the prophet, the will of God.

This was the late 1960s, and the word about the family and its strange custom had just begun to spread. The Harald Alexander family understood that they were a subject of active investigation, and they packed and shifted to the Canary Islands in Spain.

But a change of place didn’t mean a change of beliefs.

The hour of killing

Nurtured and bolstered by a rare brand of fanaticism, Frank’s mind was beyond control now. On 22nd December 1970, after ten months of moving into Spain, Frank declared that the ‘hour of killing’ had arrived.

For Frank and the family members, the killing hour was a means to ensure women’s entry into Heaven. They believed that women were inherently evil and that admission to Heaven would be denied to them without this killing process.

We don’t know if this was a concept out of the Lorber cult, or entirely a figment of the imagination of Frank.

The family’s womenfolk were told to wait for the hour of killing any day, as Frank deemed it fit. And when Frank figured out the right time, the women were supposed to submit and subjugate themselves to his attack.

One day, when Frank was sitting at the edge of a bed where his mother was lying, he didn’t like the look his mother gave him. He felt that she wasn’t permitted to look at him that way. And he knew instinctively that it was time for the hour of killing.

The Harald family was hopelessly subservient to their dogmas, so much so that they wouldn’t even question the decision to kill themselves. So, when Frank bashes his mother’s head with a wooden cloth hanger, she adjusts her posture and makes it easy for Frank to kill her!

Frank continued to beat his mother, who was lying upside down, and Harald, meanwhile, started playing his Harmonium! (A musical instrument like the Piano).

The two sisters-Petra and Marina, soon showed up, and the scene of their mother being butchered made no effect on them.

Harald, while playing the ritualistic notes, told them that the hour of killing had arrived.

The girls knew the rules. They stood there, patiently waiting for their turn. Frank came, having finished the business with mom, and began to beat both his sisters frantically. In a matter of a few minutes, both of them were lying flat on the floor, in a pool of blood.

The cruel ritual

One of the neighbors had later recounted that they might have heard some muffled moans from Harald’s apartment. Still, everything was drowned in the loud music Harald played.

As Frank finished the act of killing, he fetched a knife and pruners to cut the ‘impure’ organs of the dead.

It is possible that more than one among the three women was not dead at this moment. Frank wasn’t a professional killer who knew the human body’s weak points, but an unruly, eccentric killer who beat wherever he found fit. He couldn’t have possibly pulled off a clean execution.

So, Frank would complete the killing by hacking the dead ladies with the kitchen knife. And then he tries to cut their breasts, nipples, and vagina to nail them on the wall. But this wasn’t easy, so Frank and Harald would take turns to complete this part of the horrible ritual.

When one person severed the organs, the other person played the organ.

The ritual was completed after retrieving Dagmar’s heart, wrapping it in a cord, and nailing it to the wall, along with the other body parts. Harald and Frank rejoiced after completing the ritual, running around and singing, having completed the ceremony and liberated the women!

The father and son slept in another property they owned, ever so peacefully and proudly.

What happened to Frank, Harald, and Sebina?

It was the next day after the gruesome ritual that the doctor Walter Trankler intercepted the family’s private conversation and brought the police in.

Neither Frank nor Harald had to stand trial as the authorities found them mentally unfit. Both of them were sent to a psychiatric hospital. Sabine pleaded to let her go along with them, but she was instead sent to a convent. Nobody heard from her after that.

Frank and Harald Alexander remained in the mental asylum for many years. But in 1991, 20 years since their admission into the psychiatric hospital, they managed to escape from the hospital.

To this date, their whereabouts are unknown. The father and the son, sharing a dangerous delusion, vanished into thin air.

Where could Frank and Harald have possibly gone? Could the 20 years in hospital have impacted their mental state? I guess nobody will ever know…

Do you wish to read the story of another family which committed suicide for a strange reason? Check out the following link:

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