5 Creepy AF Deaths That Popped Up In The News

Within a week of Homero's body turning up, so did the body of a second Butterfly Preserve employee. This one was Raul Hernandez Romero, a tour guide. He'd been missing for the past weekend, and his body wound up not down a well but up a mountain, at the very highest part of the Preserve. He too had been beaten, and the cause of death in his case had something to do with his being stabbed in the head.

Both murders are unsolved so far, officially, but people who aren't the police are pretty confident about what's going on here. The Butterfly Preserve has enemies in the criminal fields of logging and avocado farming. That's not a joke -- Mexican cartels are in a war over who controls the avocados, and farmers and loggers have been responsible for majorly reducing the butterflies' habitat. Homero had been a logger himself years ago then became an anti-logging mayor, and as Defender of the Monarch, his activism mainly consisted of fighting illegal agriculture. If you get in their way, loggers will straight-up murder you, apparently. Captain Planet and all those movies about land developers bulldozing the kids' camp were right.

As survivors later explained, the sect (or cult ... let's go ahead and call it a cult) had been holding perfectly normal prayer meetings for a while. But then one member received a vision and realized God had chosen them to kill all unbelievers. So one day, all members received new instructions: they had to come to the evening's meeting whether they liked it or not. This all might remind you of how the Jonestown Massacre went down -- Panama seems vaguely in the same neck of the woods as Guyana, where Jamestown was -- but this little massacre happened just a couple weeks ago instead of in the '70s.

The cult leaders told the members to close their eyes and accept their beatings. As one escapee, Dina Blanco, describes it, "When I came to, they kept telling me not to open my eyes. I heard drums, an accordion, screams, crying. I was tied up." This may or may not have been even more scary than having to walk naked across hot coals, which is what some of the cult members had to go through, but it was after Blanco and the others escaped and police raided the compound that we found the really horrifying bit: seven bodies in a mass pit, having been beaten to death with Bibles. Bibles, and machetes.

The murder had been an exorcism gone wrong -- or possibly gone exactly as intended; we don't know. Elsewhere in the compound, authorities found a naked woman and a slaughtered goat, and also open discarded Bibles and musical instruments, all of which sounds like an amazing party but only under totally different circumstances. The cult leaders may have thought the victims were possessed by demons, but locals now say the murders themselves were the work of the devil, and they've wised up now and decided to be hostile to any religion that tries poking its way into the region.

Detectives were open to that idea but also had to do their usual thing, looking at Adrienne's boyfriend as a person of interest and combing the area for any signs of the missing woman's body. Two months went by without any signs turning up, though they did find her boots and her phone, both somehow on the cabin's roof. And then the family found her, just a short walk from the cabin. Search teams, drones, and teams of dogs had already searched, but this area was too flooded to look at properly until the family drained it. The coroner's totally unsatisfying initial assessment just said "no foul play."

A couple months after that, and the medical examiner released the toxicology report. Adrienne had died of drugs, he said, a combination of meth and anti-anxiety meds. Exactly how this ties into everything else is a mystery that authorities are no longer pursuing. Did she fake the shoot-out and her disappearance, like her family had thought, but then succumbed to drugs and hypothermia? Was this suicide? Were there multiple shooters after all, as the initial ballistics evidence suggested? Or had the meth and some spectacularly ineffective anti-anxiety drugs genuinely convinced Adrienne that imaginary figures were shooting at her?

Whatever the answer, the lesson here is clear: When you do meth, always bring a buddy, for safety.

Authorities identified the two as Richard and Elizabeth Alexander, aged 74 and 79. Their car had broken down a mile away. They'd abandoned it in the blizzard and lit out in search of help, and the closest sign of life they were able to see was Mike and Diane's porch light. The managed to traverse that mile on foot, but then they stopped and they died just a hundred yards from their warm destination, just like in the old song. Their bodies had been in the front yard under a thin layer of snow, and they'd been there while the Haas family were inside celebrating Thanksgiving.

It doesn't look like the old couple suddenly collapsed in exhaustion. Richard seemed to have positioned himself purposely on top of his wife to keep her warm. In truth, lying down in a blizzard is a distinctly terrible way to get warm when there's an indoor alternative only one minute away, but hey, that's snow madness for you. You might even say that dying in the arms of your longtime spouse is a pretty decent way to go. But then Mike had to ruin it for us, pointing out to a reporter how exposed Richard must have died first, leaving Elizabeth for some time pinned down by her husband's freezing corpse.

With this story too, there's a clear lesson: When you're stranded with a buddy, always bring some meth. Wait, that's not it. Always keep moving? Yeah, that's better. Or, better still: When you're caught in a blizzard, stay in your car. Try walking through a howling snow, and you'll quickly get disoriented. If you do make it even as far as Elizabeth and Richard, that would make you one of the lucky ones.