Death Recalls Macabre Tale. Zephyr Hills, Florida. (Associated Press) Karl Tanzler von Cosel, who so loved a woman that he kept her body for eight years and serenaded her nightly with organ music, is dead. The circumstances of his own passing were as dismal as his life with the corpse of beautiful Elena Mesa. His decomposing body was found in his house. Deputy Sheriff Gene Ron! said he had been dead three weeks. Coroner L. L. Johns said death resulted from natural causes for the eccentric x-ray technician who had often said he would never die because he had died before. Von Cosel received publicity in 1940, when the body of Miss Mesa found in the tumbledown shack where he lived in Key West. Victim of T. B. While he was working in a hospital he had met and fallen in love with the 19-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis. He obtained permission from her family to build a vault for her in the city cemetery. Eight years later, a sister at the dead girl told officers she had felt for some time that Miss Mesa's body was not in the vault. She went to Von Cosel's shack and found the body in a canopied bed. It was dressed in a filmy negligee and adorned with jewels and there were fresh flowers in her hair. Von Cosel had a closet full of bridal finery in which he dressed his lost love. He was charged with disturbing a grave and vandalism but the charges later were dismissed. Von Cosel told officers he had taken the girl's body from the tomb and kept it in an airplane fuselage for two years before moving it to his home. He claimed she sometimes came to life and talked with him. He built an organ to serenade her and said he preserved her with chemicals he mixed in a vat. Examination at a funeral home where the body was taken proved that the remain were just bones covered with wax and plaster of Paris, but Von Cosel had kept the face molded in a death mask so that the dead girl still looked strangely alive.

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