"Murder House" Claims Another Victim

Los Angeles, CA — Residents of this quiet neighborhood near South Avenue 60 have long known about the horrific events surrounding the house at number 605, and often talk of the property being cursed.  The curse took another victim this week, as 72-year-old resident Wendy Jablonski was found dead in her backyard, apparently electrocuted in her own hot tub.

“She was such a nice lady, she had lots of cats,” said Mark McMiggins, a neighbor from down the street.  ”When she first moved in, some of us warned her about the history of the place, the murders that took place there, but we were really just joking around.  None of us thought something like this would happen.”

Jablonski’s cats — sometimes numbering in the dozens — may in fact have played a role in her death, as the wiring to her hot tub was found to have been chewed through.

The house was the site of the notorious “Shotgun Max” murders in the 1960s, in which then-owner Max Margleberg held his family of five, plus six neighbors, hostage at gunpoint for three days without food or water, before dismembering all of them with a meat cleaver and feeding the remains to the feral dogs that he kept chained up in his backyard.  Some local residents say that on some nights, you can still hear the sound of dogs howling as if hungry for their next meal.

It took more than just the horrific events of those murders to establish the legend of the house’s curse, though.  Following the slayings and Max’s suicide by hanging in the garage of the house, the property was left vacant for another ten years before it was purchased from the bank by Sally Smelterschmidt, a local artist who intended to use the home as her studio.  Just two short weeks later, Sally’s mutilated corpse was found on her backyard deck.  That murder was never solved, and residents started talking about a curse, and saying that Shotgun Max had taken another victim, from beyond the grave.

The property changed hands several more times, apparently without incident, until it was purchased by Mrs. Jablonski in 2002.  The current fate of the property is undetermined, as Jablonski was a widow with no close relatives, but given the red-hot state of the Los Angeles housing market, the house likely won’t remain empty for long and will soon have a new owner — and new potential victim of its curse.