THE 'MARK OF THE VAMPIRE' MURDER

One cool December morning in 1938, a man and his mother-in-law ventured out into a lonely, wooded area just north of the City of Oakland, CA to pick mushrooms. What they found instead was the stone cold dead body of young Leona Vlught lying in a ravine. The autopsy revealed three red puncture wounds on her throat. It wasn't long before the term "vampire" was being used to characterize the killer.

Railroad office stenographer Rodney Greig was eventually identified as a suspect by a tip provided to the police, and was thereafter apprehended red-handed with the murder weapon (a knife), as well as a locket that belonged to Miss Vlught. His reason? "Honest, I don't know why I did it," was his answer on the stand.

The story appeared in the August 1939 issue of INSIDE DETECTIVE, just a few years after Bela Lugosi played Count Mora in MGM's MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. The photo in the article used to suggest that the killer was indeed, a vampire is a vignette of Lugosi as Mora. The caption insists that Greig has an "astonishing" resemblance to Lugosi. I'll let you be the judge.

Knowing that the topic would be good copy to sell to readers, there are suggestions that connect the crime to vampirism, including the triangular punctures that further advanced the possibility that the neck wounds were made by fangs (a tri-cuspid?). Setting the scene is a quote "From An Old Carpathian Almanac" regarding vampires that precedes the story. 

Greig turned out to be nothing more than a garden variety human monster, a typical sadistic lust killer that murdered on impulse. Leona Vlught herself is characterized as a bit of a floozy, and she might have unknowingly contributed to at least some of the consequences of her ill-fated date with Greig as she was known as a girl that got passed around by multiple boyfriends. This is an interesting piece of true crime reporting that kept me reading until the end. I suspect it will you, too.