Horror House - Richard McLaren

The problems started for Frankie Maegre on the fourteenth of December, 1994. It was a normal night, just before Christmas and all the neighbors were in good spirits. Christmas light adorned most of the houses on the estate, and Christmas songs were being merrily blasted out from many a passing car. Ice was laid thick on the road, and the bright glow of the many streetlights illuminated the whole road like a runway. Not that Frankie could see any of this. He never went outside, especially at Christmas.

A man and his dog walked past his house and garden. If the walker was puzzled by the closed windows and curtains, without any sign of life or seasonal cheer, he made no indication of it. But who would, after all, everyone knew Frankie Maegre, and most tended to stay away. He was a peaceful, yet quite man, and no one minded his quietness, nor did they seem it to be odd. He was just a lonely old man.

At seventy-something years old, Frankie was by far the oldest person on the estate, with the other residents tending to be young couples in their late twenties. As he sat there, watching the television behind his closed curtains, the grey of his fringe hung low over his face, and the wrinkles in his skin, already well defined, were already mapping out his look for the remainder of his life. He signed. Turned off the TV. Stood up, reached for his crutches. He had been in Vietnam, and his left leg had been so badly burned in a napalm attack that it had to be removed. He had used the same pair of crutches since he left Vietnam, all those years ago.

The dog stopped by his lawn ran round the back of his house, following the garden.. It began to dig; it needed to go to the toilet. Its owner yawned followed the dog slowly, and then picked up a pooper scooper from inside his front pocket pocket. A few seconds after he looked up again, he was already reaching in his pocket for his mobile phone, and dialing on the keypad the number nine, nine, nine.

What his beloved spot had dug up was, what appeared to be, the part of a human head. When the police arrived, it was fully exposed and revealed to be a severed head. The rest of the body was never found, but judging by the partially rotting face, it had belonged to a young girl, aged between seventeen and twenty. She had had long brown hair, and had been exceptionally beautiful. She was also from an Asian background, or as it was later identified as, Vietnamese.

Frankie was immediately called upon for questioning, but it appears that he had heard the police sirens and ran. They found tire tracks on the opposite side of the house to the body, which backed onto a piece of farm land. The police were exceptionally worried as the tire tracks were going in the general direction of the city of Manchester, not a place for an old murderer.

Some followed in hot pursuit. He had been gone only twenty minutes, and he was restricted to the speed limits on the very busy roads around the area, leading to Manchester. The police were not.

The rest went inside his house. There was nothing unusual about the inside, but upon further investigation a trapdoor was found, underneath the television set. This led to the houses basement, which seemed to have been built by Maegre himself. Inside was a truly horrific site. Huge steel barrels that contained alcohol and a mixture of at least twenty human torsos were found. On the walls were hung several bodies, hung with hugs like disfigured ornaments. It appeared as if meagre had raped the corpses on many occasions, over several years. All of the corpses were old. They were all well preserved, so we can only deduce that they all spent some time in the alcohol. There was a table, with a corpse on it, which seemed to be in the middle of an operation of some sort. Her skull had been broken into with a hammer, and the table was stained with multiple batches of blood.

There was one particular thing. All of the girls were Vietnamese. When the garden was dug up, they found as many as thirty heads, limbs and other entrails. These were his used up and useless corpses, but it was the internal corpses that were getting his attention.

I have already mentioned that he had been in ‘Nam. What was kept more secret by the soldiers at the time was the brutality and sexual violence that most of them committed against the local Vietnamese women. Maegre took it another stage further. He had killed what had appeared to be over fifty women, and after the war was over, facing the concept of being unable to commit the murders any more, took the bodies that he had stashed in the thick jungle (he was noted to be a gifted navigational aid) and had taken them, via private boat, slowly back to England. And that is where he remained. Nearly fifty years of butchering, both on and off the battlefield, now refined to the confines of his home. Now, years later, his acts had been quite literally, unearthed.

A manhunt was soon launched. It did not take long to find him. There are few options for someone over the age of seventy with one leg, and was found in a Manchester red light district the following night. It is possible that he wanted to kill the girl; she was after all, Asian, although this is merely speculation.

He was arrested for thirty four murders, as there were thirty four identifiably separate bodies. He was taken to court, and was given the sentence of life for each account of murder, totaling to 680 years, with no chance of parole or appeal. This sentence was to be spent in Broadmoor prison for the criminally insane. It is noted that upon hearing the sentence, he swore loudly at the judge, and when the restraining officer attempted to intervene, he bit him in the neck, nearly severing the main artery. There seemed to be little point of adding one account of attempted murder to his list of offenses, but he insisted it was, giving him a new total of 690 years behind bars.

To be very honest, we will never know the true number of the pile of corpses that were victims of Frankie Maegre, although it is certain to be over fifty. As the bodies were never found in Vietnam, they were never traced back to England. He took the real number to his grave.

In late 1996, Maegre was himself killed, by another inmate. He was stabbed with a handmade weapon, a piece of metal roughly resembling a screw driver that had been smuggled in to the prison from outside. Supplier unknown.

Buried in the usual fashion, in an unmarked grave at Broadmoor cemetery. Only his brother, the priest and a few journalists appeared, and the piece was never actually published in any paper. It seemed as if the world had lost its interests in psychopaths. The name Frankie meagre has been erased from history, without a single breath of his name has been uttered.

The entire estate where he lived was razed to the ground, with a new industrial park now sitting on the site were so many horrors took place. Maybe there are more bodies that reside there, waiting to be discovered in a future generation. Pity, they wont be able to find a word about the man who was once known as the ‘butcher of ‘Nam’, or his private little horror house.