Cases of having intimate relations with corpses have gone back to before biblical times but one of the first and oldest documented cased of necrophilia was during the reign of King Herod.  Herod had to conquer his own kingdom before many would accept him as their leader and he did so, with the help of the Romans in 37 B.C. Herod was notorious for his wild parties and was also known to kill anyone that may have been a threat to him but there was one murder he committed not for personal gain but out of jealousy.

He married a Hasmonean princess and granddaughter of the high priest Hyrcanus II, Mariamne.  In  a fit of jealousy Herod had his wife, Marianne killed however, continued to have sex with her for seven years after she was murdered. 

Another famous case of necrophilia is that of Sir John Price.  After the death of his first wife, he soon remarried.  His deceased wife was embalmed and kept in the same bed as he and his new bride.  After his second wife passed, he also had her embalmed and added her to his dead bed-mate collection, sleeping next to her dead body in addition to the one of his first wife.  This time, his third wife would not tolerate the two other women in their marriage bed, especially decomposing ones.  It is said that he continued this behavior until his own death.

Marquis De Sade, famous for his sadistic, (the term sadistic was created after the Marquis de Sade himself) deplorable, fantasy stories mixing sex, torture, pain and death.  He often referred to necrophilia in his books.  In some of his books, he spoke of carving new orifices in the dead bodies to create a wound in which to penetrate for sexual pleasure.  He also mentioned carving out tongues and teeth to make oral sex, more pleasurable.  Most necrophiliacs do not kill their deceased sexual partners, merely dig them up or take the bodies of their loved ones post-mortem.  More often, there have been cases of men being arrested for raping the dead.  A man named Henri Blot was arrested for raping a number of exhumed corpses.  One man was a gravedigger who explained that he couldn’t get a living woman to be with him sexually so he felt it was not hurting anyone by enjoying himself with the corpses as a substitute. 

Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer both did various sexual things to corpses and/or portions of corpses as well as ingested some of them.  Gein was known to use the skin of women to get a sexual charge and Jeffrey often poisoned or drilled a hole in the heads of his victims in order to have sex with them post-mortem.  There is also a “necro-fetish” in which one of the persons involved in the sexual relationship will pretend to be dead to turn on the other partner.  Some go as far as getting made-up to look partially decomposed in order to fulfill their fantasy. 

This is not as uncommon as one would think.  In the film, Quills, the abbey consummated his love for a maid in the mental institution which housed the Marquis De Sade, after she had been killed by an inmate.  Even certain species of animals partake in copulation after death, the mallard duck and some insects for instance.

One of the most famous cases of necrophilia was actually documented on HBO’s special “Autopsy”.  In 1930s Florida, a doctor by the name of Carl van Cassel was treating a young, beautiful tuberculosis patient.  He fell madly in love with her and fought long and hard to save his love’s life but to no avail.  The young lady was Maria Elena Oyoz, and she was stunningly beautiful.  He first unearthed her body immediately after her death and had a cast made of her face to preserve her beauty forever.  He had her body placed in a mausoleum; hoping being above the ground would slow the inevitable decay.  He would visit the her everyday but people began noticing his frequent trips to the cemetery and rumors began to spread that he had become a bit crazy after enduring the ward and all of the epidemics he worked with.  He transported her body to his home, redressed it in a wedding gown and placed the mask of her own face on her.  He also covered the entire body with strong smelling perfumes and wax to keep the flesh and bones from falling apart as the body aged and decomposed. 

As the years passed, he had to keep her bones together with piano wire and perform the time-consuming task of daily applying new wax and slathering perfumes on what was left of the body.  He also made wigs made of her hair to keep as much of her genuine as he could.  Not wanting to leave his home, he would get huge deliveries of the wax and perfume and neighbors started to become suspicious.  Regardless of the perfumes, the stench of the dead body was still permeating the air and a complaint was made.  It was later found out that, along with daily love letters to Maria Elena, he also consistently had sex with what were basically just bones, no flesh left, just bones covered in wax and perfume.  The way he did this was by inserting a tube where her vagina would have been so that he could continue to have sex with her.  Eventually the family found out that he had Maria Elena’s body and were outraged.  They took him to court and got back her body and laid it to rest in an undisclosed location.  Dr. Van Cassel died shortly thereafter but lying beside him on the floor was a life-size doll on which he had placed the death mask of his darling Maria.  He stayed with his sweetheart and would accept her in any form and loved her until the day he died.  Although this story is obviously not normal or pleasant, Dr. Van Cassel was never a violent man.  There is an underlying sweetness to the level of dedication and intensity of love he had for her that did not die when Maria Elena did.  His love (and lust) continued until his death. 

 This is part two of a special called Autopsy – the ending case shows the story of Dr. Carl Van Cassel, as written above.  Very disturbing and extremely interesting.