Chess Murders in Fiction and the Tabloids

     Fiction has a lot of stories about chess and murders. For example, Moxon's Master is a short story by American writer Ambrose Bierce, which speculates on the nature of life and intelligence. It describes a chess-playing automaton that murders its creator. First published in The San Francisco Examiner on April 16, 1899, it is one of the first descriptions of a robot in English-language literature written much before the word 'robot' came to be used. 

The Defense (1930) - Vladimir Nabokov's novel is built around the protagonist's relationship to chess, and ends with his ambiguous death. 
All the King's Horses - Kurt Vonnegut's 1953 short story, a communist Chinese officer holds a U.S. ambassador, his family, and a number of enlisted men hostage, using them as chess pieces, ordering removed "pieces" to be executed.
The Seventh Seal - In the 1957 film the protagonist plays chess with the personification of Death. 
The Squares of the City - In John Brunner's 1965 science fiction novel, the murderous events which take place are eventually shown to have the structure of a famous 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin.
Deadlier Than the Male - In this 1967 spy film, the chief hero and villain square off on a giant electronically controlled chess board manned by lethal pieces.
Pawn in Frankincense - In Dorothy Dunnett's 1969 novel a character is coerced into a life-size chess match with his son's life at stake. 
The Most Dangerous Match - In Columbo's 1972 TV episode, a chess player murders his opponent before a big match. Lt. Columbo must out-maneuver this crafty killer. Peter Falk article on Chessbase.
The Eight, Katherine Neville's 1988 novel centers around an ancient chess set over which two opposing factions have battled for centuries, taking the roles of actual chess pieces. 
The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, a 1990 novel, features a mysterious serial killer seems to be continuing the game of over 500 years back in time, where the pieces of chess are related to real-life characters from the past and present. 
Knight Moves is a 1992 thriller film in which a serial killer commits a series of murders across the city and a grandmaster helps catch him. 
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, a 1997 novel in which the characters become human chess pieces in a life-sized game of Wizard's Chess, risking their lives. 
Doctor Who had a 2011 episode in which the Doctor plays a game of chess where the pieces are electrified, presumably killing a losing player. 

     Those stories are all more or less believable, but the Weekly World News, a largely fictional news tabloid published in the United States from 1979 to 2007 and renowned for its outlandish stories often based on supernatural or paranormal themes and an approach to news that verged on the satirical, also published a couple of chess stories. 
     The tabloid was launched in 1979 as a means to continue using the black-and-white press that the higher-profile tabloid The National Enquirer had been printed on when it switched to color printing. Like many supermarket weeklies, the Weekly World News was published in Lantana, Florida until it moved to Boca Raton in the late 1990s. Its longtime editor, Eddie Clontz, a 10th-grade dropout from North Carolina and former copy editor at small newspapers, joined the paper in 1981. 
     The tabloid claimed that it always printed the truth, but many stories were obviously made up. But, not always. 

     In February 1989 the tabloid published graphic photos on its front page of the post autopsied body of executed serial killer Ted Bundy; they were real. Surprised Florida officials were outraged and eventually a low-level employee of the Alachua County, Florida, Medical Examiner's office was arrested and charged with taking and selling the photographs.  
     As often happens, a few people were tricked by their stories including the gullible folks at Fox and Friends morning news show who reported on a fake story that the Los Angeles Police Department intended to purchase 10,000 jet packs at a total cost of one billion dollars. And, on two occasions their report that Facebook was going to shut down was believed by some as genuine. 
     The tabloid was relaunched as an online publication only in 2009 and in 2011 it was made available via an online paid subscription emailed to subscribers biweekly. 

     In 1989 they ran the story of Nikolai Gudkov being electrocuted by his opponent after winning against a chess computer in 1989 (page 36).
     In 1994, they ran a story about Nikolai Titov whose head exploded during the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships due to the condition Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis (page 15).