Ultimate Serial Killers

Part 1

Ultimate Serial Killers is part of a series that outlines the most famous
killers that have been reported on in recent times. The stories in this book
go into very explicit detail of how each of the murders were committed
and how the police and forensic scientists solve such crimes. I have
taken as much care as possible to write the stories in a way that is
factually correct and that does not disrespect the victims contained in
these pages. The crimes in this book are a part of our history whether we
like it to be or not and everyone deserves to have the chance to learn
about our history.
If you like this book I would be grateful if you could find the time to
leave it a review.
Please keep an eye out for the next release in this series.
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promotions.
Contents:
The Bamber Family Murders
Horrific Scene
High Living
Jeremy’s Dark Secret
Shooting Spree
Bogus Call
The First Doubts
Arrested and Tried
The caravan breakin
For the love of Jeremy
Jeremy’s festering bitterness
Extended trip
Violent fantasies
The Black Panther
The story breaks
Suspicious stranger
Gun attack
New Demands
Suspicious car
Lost time
The kidnapper’s plan revealed
Sinister lair
Tragic find
Pure chance
The trial
The mind of the Panther
Loner
Resentment against society
Rigid self-control
Peter Sutcliffe: The Yorkshire Ripper
MURDER 1 – Wilma McCann, 30 October 1975
Frenzied attack
MURDER 2 – Emily Jackson, 20 January 1976
Attacks stop
MURDER 3 – Irene Richardson, 6 February 1977
The ripper moves on
MURDER 4 – Tina Atkinson, 23 April 1977
MURDER 5 – Jayne MacDonald, 25 June 1977
Fatal descriptions
MURDER 6 – Jean Jordan, 1 October 1977
Hideous mutilation
MURDER 7 – Yvonne Pearson, 21 January 1978
MURDER 8 – Helen Rytka, 31 January 1978
Breaking the rule
Another brutal murder
MURDER 9 – Vera Millward, 16 May 1978
MURDER 10 – Josephine Whitaker, 4 April 1979
Double hoax
Student killing
The last murder
MURDER 11 – Barbara Leach, 1 September 1979
 MURDER 12 – Marguerite Walls, 18 August 1980
MURDER 13 – Jacqueline Hill, 17 November 1980
Chance interception
The Ripper’s confession
Hatred of prostitutes
Timetable of Terror
“I’m Jack” Investigation
Detection – The Ripper Exposed
Biography – Peter Sutcliffe: Born to kill
Shotgun Suicide?
“Jack’s been shot!”
Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker
Random killers
A long tail of terror
Lucky escape
Description of the Stalker
Back in town
The chase
Night Stalker arrested
Night Stalker Murder Victims
In the service of Satan
Church of Satan
Charles Manson Family
Making of the Devil
Troublemaker
Brush with the law
On parole
Drug addiction
Henry McKenny: Big Harry
Contract killing
Armed robbery
Murder 1: ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve
Gruesome killing
Cutting up the corpse
Disposing of the remains
Murder 2: Robert Brown
‘Teddy Bear’ Eve
Murders 3 & 4: George & Terry Brett
Lured to his death
Unbelievable killing
A weekend’s work
Murder 5: Freddie Sherwood
Murder investigation
Weapons haul
McKenny’s alibi
Murder 6: Ronald Andrews – A Watery Grave
Reconstruction
Violent deaths
The hunt for McKenny
Convicted of murder
Henry Lee Lucas – Blood, Sex and Death
One of many
Mother murdered
 Released from jail
Drinking and robbing
Another killing
On the road
Killing spree
Plain evil
Forging cheques
Stabbed to death
Coverup story
Lucas arrested
Convicted of 11 murders
Did he really kill 157?
‘Green River’ murders
Which murder did he commit?
Ted Bundy: Serial Killer
‘Organised’ serial killer
Murder in Oregon
Two women abducted
Helping hand
Possible suspects
High school kidnap
Only her shoes were found
Reported by his girlfriend
Excuse for everything
Charged with murder
Over confident
Attempted abduction
False identification
Appointment with ‘Old Sparky’
Secret Psycho
Cultured Killer
Jekyll and Hyde character
The man they couldn’t hold
Leap for freedom
Bad Driving
Massacre in Florida
Intruder inside
Work of a madman
Violent pounding
Bite marks that trapped the killer
Wounds photographed
Court order
Kidnap vehicles yield vital clues
Special Agent Neill
Vacuumed samples
Polyester fibres
Courtroom Survivor
Playing for time
How many lives cut short?
Confessed to more murders
Brutal sites
Burn Bundy Burn!
Head shaved
John Haigh: The acid bath murderer
 Missed appointment
Fingernail scheme
Loaded gun
Destroyed with acid
Dressed to kill
Five other murders
Victim’s belongings
Chambers of Horrors
Massacre in the New Forest
Set on fire
Previous convictions
Last night of freedom
The trial
Intact scene
Bursting in
Wanted for murder
Removing the evidence
Recorded interview
Blaming each other
“Man with no conscience”
Indescribable brutality
Guilty of mass murder
Robbery in Poole
Dennis Nilsen: Sleeping with the Dead
Rotting flesh
Police were waiting
Reported missing
Uninvited guest
Scottish victims
Lucky escape
A new venue
Bonfire of bodies
Removing the bodies
DIY ‘autopsies’
Disguising the smell
Destroying the evidence
Attack in the park
John ‘the Guardsman’
The final victim
Blocked drains
Killing for company or killing for sex?
Sexual motive
Extreme violence
Was he mad?
Nilsen’s gay secret
John Christie: The whispering strangler
Secret cupboard
Decomposing corpse
Body under the floor
Body in the alcove
Christie’s first victim
Skeletons in the garden
Two skeletons found
 Old case reopened
Did Christie send an innocent man to the gallows?
Illegal abortion
Cases re-examined
Who killed Geraldine?
Suicide pact
Ghoulish fascination
Roy Fontaine: The Killer Butler
Comfortable lifestyle
His death warrant
Robbery plans
Smothered to death
Drugged employer
His last journey
Accomplice killed
Suspicious guests
Linking the clues
Searching for Dorothy’s body
Guilty plea
The brilliant con-man
In disguise
High living
Jewel haul
On the run
Escaped again
Killer Couple’s Murder Rampage
Worried relatives
Farmhouse search
Panicstricken area
Police chase
Damaging statement
Starkweather’s story
His first victim
Death threats
‘Guilty’ verdict
Damning testimonies
The Railway Murderer
Inside Knowledge
Top 10 Of Rape Suspects
Solo Attacks
Unusual Aspects
Staring Laser Eyes
Vicious Killing
New Horror
Second Murder
Dreadful Similarities
Distinctive Yarn
1,000-to-one Chance
The Disappearance of Anne Lock
Identical Method
Incriminating Evidence
Convicted of Two Murders
Duffy - Why did he do it?
 Low Self-Esteem
‘Macho’ Image
Self Preservation
Wimp
Duffy’s 1st Murder Victim
Duffy’s 2nd Murder Victim
Duffy’s 3rd Murder Victim
The woman who married him
The Bamber Family Murders
It seemed an open-and-shut case. This middle-class family had been
killed in a fit of derangement by their beautiful adopted daughter,
who then killed herself. Only the handsome son was left. At least,
that was what everyone was supposed to think.
At 3.36 a.m. on the morning of 7 August 1985, a telephone call buzzed
on the switchboard at the police station at Chelmsford, Essex.
A frightened young man, farmer’s son Jeremy Bamber, pleaded for help.
“My father’s just called. My sister has gone off her head and she’s got a
gun.” He told the duty officer.
At first, the officer thought it was a hoax call from a local drunk: if it
was a real emergency, a normal person would surely dial 999 rather than
ring the more complicated number of a police station. Nevertheless, he
radioed for the nearest patrol car to go to the small, pretty village of
Tolleshunt d’Arcy.
Horrific Scene
There the first officer on the scene met 25-year old Jeremy Bamber at the
gates of his parents 18th-century farmhouse, White House Farm. He said,
“My sister is a nutter. I think something terrible has happened. There are
guns inside.” Detectives were summoned and tried ringing the farm. The
phone was off the hook. The police hesitated to enter the farmhouse for
fear that the girl was armed and might shoot them, but after four hours
the decision was taken to go in.
They were confronted by a scene of sheer horror. Five people, including
two little boys, lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets. In the kitchen
lay 61-year old farmer and ex-RAF pilot Nevill Bamber, with eight
bullet wounds in his head and body.
In the doorway of their daughter’s bedroom, his wife June, also 61, lay
on the floor. She had been sprayed with nine bullets, one directly
between her eyes. On the bed was the body of Jeremy’s sister, 27-year
old former model Sheila Caffell. Across her lay a German-made
Anschutz semi-automatic .22 rifle, its barrel pointing at the two bullet
wounds in her throat. One shot had severed her jugular vein; the other
had powered up into her skull, causing massive brain damage.
But, most heartbreaking of all, Sheila’s six-year-old twin sons lay
murdered in their beds. They had been shot as they slept – Daniel five
times in the back of his head, and Nicholas dispatched with three rounds.
Veteran detectives wept at the sight. And It may have been their tears
that blinded them to the real facts about the massacre at White House
Farm.
Within hours, they had concluded that Sheila Caffell had gone off her
head, wiped out her entire family, and then turned the gun on herself. She
had a history of mental problems and drug abuse and was known to be
depressed. With Jeremy supplying the details of his sister’s history of
mental illness while bravely staving off his grief for his slaughtered
family, it seemed a classic murder/suicide tragedy.
The police had found no sign that anyone else had been at the house on
that terrible night. All the windows and doors had been locked from the
inside, and the police had to force their way in.
The coroner’s verdict was that of murder and suicide, and the bodies
were released for burial; Jeremy, racked with grief, was photographed by
newspapers at his parent’s funeral.
But this time, relatives and friends of the Bamber family were sure that
there was a far more sinister explanation, although their suspicions were
dismissed by police. Most of all, Bamber’s girlfriend Julie Mugford, then
a 22-year old trainee teacher, was filled with unease.
She knew that Bamber had harbored a barely hidden hatred for his whole
family. He had talked endlessly about getting his hands on the family
fortune of almost £500,000. Once they were dead, he had whooped it up
on champagne, drugs and parties. And, within days of the killings, he
had actually boasted, “It was all down to me. I paid a hitman two grand
to do it. Now everything will pass to me.”
High Living
His behavior did not ring true for a man whose whole family has just
been wiped out. While other relatives mourned, he took Julie on a high-
spending holiday to Amsterdam, smuggled cannabis home in toothpaste
tubes, drank champagne and bought suits at £500 a time. He took over
his sister’s London flat and then tried to sell an album of her modelling
photographs, including some soft porn material, to Sunday newspapers,
demanding a four-figure sum. The papers turned him down.
Julie became more and more frightened by her boyfriend’s bizarre
behavior and made the agonising decision to talk to the police. What she
had to tell them eventually ran to 140 pages. Meanwhile, other clues had
come to light, and the CID was forced to look at the case afresh.
Jeremy’s Dark Secret
In the small hours of 7 August when the family was asleep, Bamber went
to his patent’s home. He travelled by bike so that no-one would see his
car. He slipped on gloves and silently entered the house, using a hacksaw
blade to force a lavatory window after the family had gone to bed.
Like many farmers, Nevill Bamber kept a locked gun cabinet. His son
knew where to find the key. The cabinet contained several shotguns, but
there was also a 10-shot, .22 automatic rifle with a silencer.
Bamber had used the gun many times. His father had bought it to control
the rabbits that infested the farm; the silencer has been added later so that
he could shoot rabbits without frightening the others back into their
warrens.
Detectives believe that Bamber had just loaded a 10-round magazine into
the gun and screwed on the silencer when he was confronted by his
father. Nevill Bamber was six feet four inches in height, fit, and
powerfully built. Bamber shot him in cold blood. As he slumped to his
knees, wounded, Bamber mercilessly battered him with the gun,
swinging it like a club. He hit his father so hard that the rifle stock broke.
Then, as he slumped onto the floor, Bamber pumped four more shots into
his head.
Shooting Spree
With icy indifference Bamber collected two more ammunition clips from
the cupboard, reloaded, and went upstairs. He walked into his parents’
bedroom and sprayed bullets at his mother as she attempted to get out of
bed. She was hit in the knee, arm, twice in the chest, at the base of her
neck and at the side of her head.
Bamber then made his way down the corridor to his sister’s room, where
she slept undisturbed by the silenced shots. This one had to look like a
suicide. Bamber placed the gun muzzle under her chin and pulled the
trigger. Sheila dies instantly.
At this point police believed that Mrs. Bamber, in her death throes, had
crawled from her room to the doorway of her daughter’s bedroom.
Bamber put the barrel to her forehead and finished her off with a point-
blank shot between the eyes. Again he reloaded and went into the room
where his nephews slept. He shot them too.
Finally, Bamber stepped over the body of his mother to re-enter his
sister’s room. Police think he had already removed the silencer from the
gun at the end of his shooting spree but then decided to make sure that
his sister was dead by shooting her again. He then pressed her hand
against the gun after wiping off his own fingerprints. But he was not as
through as he thought, one of his his prints remained on the trigger,
another vital clue that was missed at first.
Bogus Call
Before leaving the scene, Bamber lay the gun across Sheila’s body with
the barrel pointing towards to bullet holes in her neck, to reinforce the
impression that her death was a suicide.
He drove to his home, a farm cottage three miles away in the village of
Goldhanger, and after a couple of hours made his bogus call to the
police.
More than 40 detectives, photographers and forensic specialists came to
the farm the next day. If anyone had suspected then that it was not such a
clear-cut matter, no-one voiced it, even tough one detective noticed how
strange it was that Jeremy Baber could calmly cook himself breakfast of
toast and fried bacon while the bodies of his entire family were being
examined only five miles away.
The police thought that this was an open-and-shut case; they read the
situation exactly as Jeremy Bamber had intended them to. It seemed
clear that Sheila Caffell had killed the family and then turned the gun on
herself.
The First Doubts
But two days after the killings, Nevill and June Bamber’s nephew David
Boutflour, also, a farmer, went to the farm. He looked in his uncle’s gun
cupboard and noticed silencer, which he recognized as being for a .22
rifle, the gun used in the murders. Handling it with great care, he saw
congealed blood inside and realized that it must have come from one of
the victims. Also, there were red paint marks on the outside, implying
that it must have scraped against something, and sticking to it was a
single hair.
The police had taken the rifle – why had they not taken the silencer?
Eventually, after Bamber’s girlfriend had gone to the police and more
forensic evidence gradually came to light, Jeremy Bamber became a
suspect and was arrested six weeks after the shootings. In the early
stages, however, all these major points had been missed:
• The police overtook Jeremy Bamber on the road to White House
Farm. They had travelled 15 miles from Chelmsford; Jeremy’s
journey from his home would have taken five minutes at most.
Why had he not hurried off immediately after phoning the police?
• The silencer was still in the gun cupboard. When the police
finally collected it, two days later, they lost the hair that was
sticking to it.

• The red paint on the silencer matched scrape marks on a

• Powder marks around the wounds showed that one shot had been
fired with a silencer and the other without. How could Sheila have
shot herself once then removed the silencer before the second shot
– and now, in any case, could she have shot herself twice, when the
first shot would have been fatal?
• Sheila was supposed to have walked around the house murdering
her family. There was a lot of blood – but Sheila’s feet were
spotlessly clean.
 • Sheila knew nothing about guns. Jeremy on the other hand was a
crack shot.
• The murder weapon was well oiled, but there was no gun oil or
grease on Sheila’s hands or nightgown. Nor were there any signs of
powder burns.

• The release catch for the rifle magazine was so stiff that a police
ballistics expert broke a fingernail trying to release it. Sheila’s
beautifully manicured nails showed no sign of damage.
• Nevill Bamber was a powerful man, nearly six feet four inches in
height. How could Sheila, at five feet seven and weighing only
eight stone, have battered him into submission with enough force
to break the rifle stock?
• The murder weapon was moved during the photography of the
murder scenes, and officers did not wear gloves while handling it.
• One the cartridge cases were not found until two days later, under
a wardrobe.
• Jeremy Bamber had supposedly been at his own home when he
rang the police when he reported that his father had telephoned to
say that Sheila was running amok. But at the farmhouse phone was
off the hook. This meant that Jeremy’s phone would still have been
connected to the farmhouse, and he would not have been able to
make a call. If he wasn’t home when he rang the police, where was
he?
• A lavatory window bore marks where Bamber had forced it open
to get into the farmhouse. No-one noticed them at the time.
• Bamber had used a hacksaw to prise open the window. He
dropped it onto the ground outside but was not found for another
two months.
• Because the family was allowed access to the farmhouse only two
days after the murders, Jeremy was able to take away bloodstained
carpets and bedding and burn them. These could have contained
vital forensic evidence.
• Bamber was not even fingerprinted until six weeks after the
killings. One of his prints was found on the gun trigger.
David Boutflour said after the trial: “We felt there was a difference of
opinion among the detectives themselves about the case. Some of them
thought there was more to it, but some of the senior officers thought it
was a ‘domestic’.
“Sheila was a lovely girl. When we went back to the farm we got this
feeling that they were all still alive and telling us some how to look for
something else. We just felt that the whole thing did not add up .
Arrested and Tried
One officer on the inquiry admitted later: “It was highly embarrassing.
But the truth is people were forced to take notice of what they found that
we missed. Together with one or two other things, they made the
difference between Bamber getting away with it and inheriting the
family fortune, and Bamber getting 25 years.
Bamber was arrested in London and questioned at Chelmsford police
station for 18 hours. He denied the murders but admitted that he had
been responsible for an earlier burglary at the family’s caravan park,
where £980 had been stolen. He was charged with this offence and
released on bail, and promptly went off on holiday to St Tropez.
The police carried on their investigation and continued to turn up the
forensic and circumstantial evidence that pointed to Jeremy Bamber. Six
weeks after the massacre, he was arrested at Dover as he arrived back
from holiday.
He went on trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in October 1986, pleading
‘not guilty’ to five charges of murder. But after a 19-day trial he was
convicted, and is now serving five life sentences with a recommendation
that he serves at least 25 years.
The caravan breakin
After Julie Mugford went to the police with her story, six weeks after the
murders, the Essex police decided to question Jeremy Bamber. He was
arrested at his flat in Maida Vale, the flat had been his sister’s. Taken to
Chelmsford for questioning, he denied that he had anything to do with
the killings. However, he admitted to a burglary at the family caravan
park at Maldon in March, five months before the carnage at White House
Farm, when nearly £1,000 had been stolen. As a diversionary measure
his confession seemed to work, since he was released on bail. He
immediately headed south for a jet-set holiday in the French Riviera.
For the love of Jeremy
Bamber’s girlfriend Julie Mugford once told a friend that the mass
murderer she once loved was “the devil incarnate”. He quickly revealed
his all-consuming hatred for his family to her. She later told police that
her lover came up with “plot after plot after plot” for doing away with
them. She said: “He thought his parents were old fools standing in the
path of his inheritance.
“He resented his sister for having a £20,000 a year allowance to have a
flat in west London. He hated her twin sons, saying they would be
further problems in the way of him getting his hands on the family
money.
“He had it all worked out; he knew to the pound how much they were
worth. He talked openly about shooting them and then burning down the
house to conceal the crime. When talking about it once he changed his
mind and said that was a bad plan, because there were valuables in the
house he could sell after they were all dead and he would lose those if
there was a fire.
“Thoughts of getting rid of his family dominated his life.”
At first, deeply in love with Bamber, Julie dismissed all this as fantasy.
Then, the night before he went on his killing spree, Bamber rang Julie at
their flat in Lewisham and said, “Tonight’s the night.” After the murders
he told her that he planned the killings and had paid a hitman to carry
them out. She still did not dream that he meant it. But his continuing
bizarre and callous behavior, immediately after the death of his closest
family, all became too much for her, and she went to the police.
Jeremy’s festering bitterness
Jeremy Bamber was born in 1960, at the illegitimate son of a nurse and a
married city stockbroker. He was adopted by the Bamber’s, a devoutly
Christian couple; his mother had told friends she hoped her son would
grow up to be a clergyman. But he and his sister Sheila rebelled against
this strict religious background, and Jeremy grew up broody and
resentful. He was sent to boarding school and was reported to his father
for being a violent bully.
Extended trip
After he left school, his father tried to involve him in running the farm.
But Jeremy hated the work. In an effort to let his son sort out his own
future, Nevill Bamber paid for him to go on an extended trip to Austria
and the Far East. Jeremy repaid him by getting involved in drug
smuggling. On coming home, he refused the chance to go back to the
farm, sneering at the “pittance” he was offered. Instead, he preferred to
take jobs as a barman or waiter in Colchester.
Violent fantasies
He nursed a festering hatred for his adoptive parents. From his teens, he
had fantasised about killing them and his sister to get his hands on the
family money. He made no secret of his resentment, or of his plans to
wipe them out; he openly told friends of his schemes to burn the house
down with them in or to pay a London gangster to act as a hitman. When
his sister Sheila had twin sons, he was further enraged. The boys were
two more obstructions in his path to the family fortune.
By 1985, the idea of ‘rubbing out’ his family had become an obsession.
It was time to act. He decided to enter the house while everyone was
asleep and kill them all, in a manner which suggested that his unstable
sister Sheila had gone berserk.
End
The Black Panther
In the early 1970s, the North and Midlands were plagued by a series
of murderous Post Office raids. Then, in 1975, this reign or terror
took on a new dimension with the kidnap of Lesley Whittle.
It was about 7.30 on the morning of Tuesday, 14 January 1975 when
widow Dorothy Whittle first noticed that her teenage daughter Lesley
was missing from her bed. Mrs. Whittle had intended to get her daughter
up to get ready to go to college in Wolverhampton, where she was
studying for ‘A’ level exams.
A search of the house, Beech Croft, in the Severn Valley village of
Highley, Shropshire, revealed nothing. Mrs. Whittle was worried. Her
daughter’s clothes for the morning were still neatly folded at the foot of
her bed.
Mrs. Whittle tried to phone her son Ronald and his wife Gaynor, who
lived nearby. The telephone was dead so she drove to their home, but
they hadn’t seen Lesley. Gaynor, trying to calm her mother-in-law, went
to Beech Croft with her.
There she made an alarming discovery. The phone was dead because the
wires had been deliberately cut.
Then she saw something that made her heart pound with fear. In the
lounge, a large vase that usually stood in the fireplace had been moved to
the centre of the carpet. Perched on the top was a box of Turkish Delight.
Mingled with the sweet wrappers were strips of Dymo tape bearing a
sinister kidnap message. It read:
NO POLICE £50000 RANSOM BE READY TO DELIVER FIRST
EVENING WAIT FOR TELEPHONE CALL AT SWAN SHOPPING
CENTRE TELEPHONE BOX 64711 64611 63111 6PM TO 1AM IF NO
CALL RETURN FOLLOWING EVENING WHEN YOU ANSWER
CALL GIVE YOUR NAME ONLY AND LISTEN YOU MUST
FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS WITHOUT ARGUMENT FROM THE
TIME YOU ANSWER THE TELEPHONE YOU ARE ON A TIME
LIMIT IF POLICE OR TRICKS DEATH.
A second strip read: £50000 ALL IN USED NOTES £25000 £1 £25000
£5 THERE WILL BE NO EXCHANGE ONLY AFTER £50000 HAS
BEEN CLEARED WILL VICTIM TO RELEASED.
Why should this have happened to them? Was this some sick hoax?
Questions raced through the Whittle’s minds. They were a well-known
family in the area. For many years, they had run a large and successful
pleasure coach and bus company. In 1972, a story about them appeared
in some national newspaper when they became involved in a dispute
about a will left by Lesley’s father, George Whittle, the man who formed
the bus company before World War II. The court hearings talked of the
family being worth more than £250,000, but in fact, the Whittles were
not rich in the cash sense and now faced a huge ransom demand. They
decided, despite the grim warnings they had been given, to call the
police.
Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Booth, head of the West Mercia
CID, hurriedly organized an emergency meeting with his senior
colleagues and the family. Plans were made for Ronald Whittle to go to
the Kidderminster phone box that evening and a suitcase packed with
cash was made ready for a handover. Plain-clothes officers discreetly
kept watch at the Swan Centre.
What no one knew was that the kidnapper, Donald Neilson, had been
planning the abduction for over two years. Several times before,
choosing moonless nights, he had slipped ghost-like into the Whittle’s
home to reconnoiter. He had originally planned to make the snatch a year
earlier but threats of fuel rationing (because of the oil crisis of the time)
and other factors caused him to postpone the attempt. His original targets
had been Ronald Whittle or his mother. But something had gone wrong,
and he’d had to take the teenage daughter, Lesley.
The story breaks
Then there was a real setback. At that time, British police, inexperienced
in kidnap cases, were not in the habit of asking the media to agree to a
voluntary blackout on all reporting until the victim was safely released.
A freelance journalist in Kidderminster was tipped off about the story,
and as police feverishly made plans to catch the kidnapper the story
broke on the BBC news. Booth, certain that the kidnapper would
abandon plans to make contact, withdrew Ronald Whittle and the police
surveillance team from Kidderminster. This was a mistake that was to
affect the whole course of the operation.
Although the phone box lines were being tapped they had been left
unmanned. At midnight, the phones jangled into life. The kidnapper was
trying to make contact, but no-one was there to answer. The only clue the
police telephone tracers could glean was that the calls had been made
from Dudley in the West Midlands, about 30 miles away. The next day,
the media discovered the location of the call boxes, revealing where they
were and ruining any chance that the kidnapper would call again.
While all this was going on in Kidderminster, a violent drama as being
played out elsewhere. Although it was over a week before the
significance was realized, it was to prove a vital link in the chain.
Suspicious stranger
Gerald Smith was a 44-year old overseer working at the British Rail
freightliner depot alongside Dudley zoo. The depot cranes worked 24
hours a day shifting containers between railway flat wagons to lorries.
On the evening of 15 January 1975, Smith came on night duty at 10 p.m.
At about 10.15 he was looking up the approach road to the depot when
he saw a man lurking under a lamppost near two parked lorries.
Gun attack
Suddenly the stranger stepped out from the shadows and asked the
overseer for a lift to a warehouse. There was something suspicious and
furtive about the man’s behavior. Smith was sure he was up to no good
and decided to call the police. But as he turned to walk away, the
stranger pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot him. The first bullet hit
him in the buttocks. He turned, and the gunman shot him five more times
in quick succession.
As Smith went down the gunman stepped in for the kill. Smith looked up
and saw the gun barrel pointing straight into his face. The gunman pulled
the trigger and there was a click. He was out of ammunition.
And the gunman fled into the dark, Smith managed to stagger to his
office to raise the alarm. His life was saved by surgeons who discovered
bullets had shattered a kidney, seriously damaging his liver and
perforated his bowel.
The bullets were examined by ballistics experts and compared with
existing records. To the amazement of the police, they matched the
bullets used in Post Office raids in which three men had been murdered.
The gunman who had shot Gerald smith and three postmasters was one
and the same, the stealthy, dark clad killer who had become knows as the
Black Panther.
New Demands
The following night, Lesley’s kidnapper tried anew to start a ransom
exchange procedure. At the Whittle home, one of the employees of the
coach company answered the call, heard pay phone pips and then the
unmistakable voice of Lesley. He tried to speak to her, then realized it
was not the girl herself but just a tape recording of her voice. Three times
the message repeated: “Mum, you are to go to Kidsgrove post office
telephone box. The instructions are inside, behind the backboard. I’m ok
but there’s to be no police and no tricks OK?” The call was traced to the
Stoke-on-Trent area.
With maximum speed, Chief Superintendent Booth’s men equipped
Ronald Whittle with a transmitter and throat microphone and sent him on
his way to Kidsgrove in his Scimitar sports coupe. An armed detective
lay out of sight on the floor in the rear. Whittle found the phone box, but
could find no message. Close to panic, he whispered into his hidden
microphone: “I can’t find it, there’s nothing here.” Trying to calm him,
Assistant Chief Constable Fred Hodges told him: “Keep searching.”
Nearly an hour after entering the box, Whittle finally found the message,
a piece of orange Dymo tape, pushed so far behind the backboard that his
fingers could hardly reach it. It read: GO TO THE END OF THE ROAD
AND TURN INTO BOAT HORSE LANE. GO TO THE TOP OF THE
LANE AND TURN INTO NO ENTRY GO TO THE WALL AND
FLASHLIGHTS FOR TORCH RUN TO TORCH FURTHER
INSTRUCTIONS ON TORCH THEN GO HOME AND WAIT FOR
TELEPHONE.
The instructions took him to Bathpool Park, an area of former mine
workings and spoil heaps, with soccer pitches, an artificial ski slope and
small clumps of trees. At one end a large dam holds back the lake known
as Bath Pool. The area is borders on one side by the busy London-to-
Crew railway. Whittle, his heart pounding, drove slowly round the park,
but missed the low wall where he was supposed to stop and flash his
lights. Eventually, in desperation, he got out and shouted: “This is Ron
Whittle, is anybody there?” There was a silence.
Suspicious car
Detectives listened to his transmissions for a mobile control center
parked on the high ground a few miles away. Whittle did not find the
torch, there was no contact with the kidnapper, and the police regrouped
at Bridgnorth to consider their next move. No order to search the park
was made. Booth decided that if the police moved in and the kidnapper
was watching, he would know Whittle had broken the orders not to
contact the police. With hindsight, it turned out to be a tragic error.
On the 23rd, eight days after the attempt on Gerald Smith, a member of
the public walked into Dudley police station and told officers to check a
suspicious car he said had been parked for at least a week near the bus
terminal in Dudley, only 250 yards from the scene of the shooting. It was
a green Morris 1300 with false registration plates ‘TTV 454H’ and had a
stolen and crudely altered tax disk in the windscreen. It had been stolen
in West Bromwich the previous October. Somehow the police sweep
following the Smith shooting had failed to spot it.
Then detectives opened it they were both delighted and dismayed. Inside
was an extraordinary collection of items: a tape recorder and cassettes,
plastic sheeting, 90 feet of lorry lashing rope, a makeshift foam rubber
mattress, a new torch, a new pair of cord trousers with a 29-inch inside
leg measurement, a bottle of Lucozade, barley sugar, and four buff
envelopes containing messages punched in Dymo tape.
The first one read: A454 TO WOLVERHAMPTON INSTRUCTIONS
IN TELEPHONE BOX CORONATION AVENUE.
The second one read: M6 SOUTH M5 ONTO A4123 DUDLEY
WOLVERHAMPTON INSTRUCTIONS TELEPHONE BOX 52449.
The third one read: A461 DUDLEY TELEPHONE BOX 52499 OR
55719.
And the final one read: TURN RIGHT AT SECOND TRAFFIC
LIGHTS TO FREIGHTLINER LIMITED DUDLEY TERMINAL
INSTRUCTIONS TAPES TO STREET LIGHT.
Now it all tell into place. The kidnapper had been leaving his trail of
clues when Gerald Smith interrupted him at the last stage. It was the
Black Panther who had shot him and had snatched Lesley Whittle.
With trepidation, the detectives slotted the cassette into a player. The
tape sounded hollow, like in an echo chamber. A girl’s voice said: “Go
on the M6 north to Junction 10 and then on the A454 towards Walsall.
Instruction is taped under the shelf in the phone box. Please, Mum…
There’s no need to worry, Mum. I’m OK. I got a bit wet but I’m quite
dry now. I’m being treated very well, OK?” The tape ran for one minute
and 29 seconds.
The detectives realized it had been intended to begin a paper chase of
instructions laid by the kidnapper. The voice on the tape was Lesley’s
The police traced all the phone boxes that were mentioned in the
messages but were bedeviled by mistakes. They decided not to
fingerprint or search any of the boxes; instead, they kept the booths
under observation in the hope that the kidnapper would regain his
confidence and return to leave his messages.
What the CID didn’t realize was that Neilson had already put the
messages in place. The ones found in the car were duplicates.
Lost time
This mistake was exposed when a 17-year old boy, making a call from
the box at the Dudley bus depot near the stolen Morris, found a Dymo
tape message hidden behind the backboard. It was an exact copy of
message found in the car.
Alarmed, the police searched all the phone boxes the kidnapper had
mentioned. Sure enough, there were the originals, all in place. There was
serious consternation. Valuable time had been lost.
A second search of the Freightliner approach road was rewarded when a
message was found taped to a lamppost. Fifty police had somehow
missed it before. A fresh search was ordered for the whole area. Another
taped message was found trodden into the mud. It simply said: ‘GO TO
GATE 8’.
Eventually the police worked out that this meant gate 8 of the nearby
zoo. There they found another hidden message on Dymo tape. It said:
INSTRUCTIONS AT END OF ROPE.
The kidnapper’s plan revealed
Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place. Three days after the shooting
police had gone to the zoo car park to investigate a suspect car: they had
found a 250-foot coil of rope.
Booth and his colleagues could now see the whole picture. Although
they surmised that one tape message was still missing, it seemed the
kidnapper’s original plan has been to get the money brought to Dudley
and attached to the end of the rope, which then would have been yanked
over the zoo wall, enabling him to get clean away in the darkness with
the money. The Smith incident had thrown all the Panther’s plans out of
line and confused everyone, especially the police.
But they were still no closer to finding Lesley.
Three weeks after Ronald Whittle’s abortive rate to Bathpool Park, Chief
Superintendent Booth decided to go back to the area. There had been a
long ominous silence from the kidnapper, and he was very worried. But
if the police flooded the area and the kidnapper was watching, he would
know the Whittles had disobeyed the order to keep the law out of it, and
that could put Lesley at risk.
Booth got around the problem with a subtle deception. Hearing that the
BBC wanted to talk to Whittle for a TV news special, Booth persuaded
him to ‘reveal’ to the reporter that the kidnapper had summoned him to
Bathpool Park. When later in the programme the reporter put this point
to Booth himself the detective feigned anger and disbelief. But it gave
him the excuse he needed to order a huge search of the area.
More than 100 police then started house-to-house enquiries near the
park. The resulting publicity bore fruit in the next day. An 11-year old
schoolboy came forward with another major clue, a piece of Dymo tape
bearing the message: DROP SUITCASE INTO HOLE. The boy had
found it caught in some twigs in the park two days after the kidnapping
and had shown it to his teacher. But it seemed unimportant and the boy
had taken it home and put it in a drawer. Now, with news of the kidnap
on every bulletin, he brought it to the detectives.
The next day more schoolboys produced a small hand lantern-style torch
which they had found in the park between the bars protecting the
entrance to a concrete flood water overspill tunnel, known to local
children as the Glory Hole. One of the boys remembered that a piece of
Dymo tape had been sticking to the torch. He had not seen any message,
and the tape had been lost.
The police remembered the message found by Ronald Whittle in the
Kidsgrove call box that ended: FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS ON
TORCH. The ‘DROP SUITCASE INTO HOLE’ tape must have been on
the torch when it was placed at the head of the Glory Hole.
Sinister lair
The Glory Hole was part of a complex flood drainage scheme designed
to carry overflow water from Bath Pool to the disused Brindley Canal. It
had been built in 1965 and consisted of three vertical concrete shafts,
each deeper than the last, connecting to a long culvert. Could this be the
kidnapper’s lair?
With trepidation, they decided to search the Glory Hole and its adjoining
shafts. On Thursday 6 March, Detective Constable Phil Maskery, in
warm protective clothing and with a powerful torch, used a ladder to
climb down the first concrete shaft. Forty feet down, the shaft joined the
culvert, a five-foot diameter concrete pipe. It was dark, dank and eerie,
but the air was sweet and clean.
Maskery played his torch over the debris caught at the foot of the shaft.
He saw the usual junk thrown in by kids, then spotted something not so
usual: a Dymo tape machine.
Maskery carried this find to his colleagues on the surface. They then set
off to a large manhole leading to the second shaft. Maskery climbed
down the fixed steel ladder set into the shaft wall. He reached the
bottom, but there was nothing.
Tragic find
Back at the top, the CID team trudged to the entrance of the third deepest
shaft. This was built in three sections, the first 22 feet deep, the second
23 feet and the last, short section only nine feet deep. Each section was
separated by a small metal platform. Because of the danger of methane
gas, it was decided to call in a specialist from the water authority. The
next day, the water inspector lowered a gas gauge down the shaft and got
a positive danger reading. Donning breathing apparatus, Maskery
descended to the first landing and found nothing of interest. But it was a
different story at the second landing. Inside the mouth of a smaller drier-
up culvert was a tape recorder.
A second check showed the gas alert had been caused by a faulty meter.
DC Maskery now made the final journey down to level three. It was
pitch dark on the third landing, seven feet above the floor of the main
culvert.
Maskery’s torch caught a flash of blue caught on an iron stanchion, it
was Lesley’s dressing gown. He shone the light in the other direction and
gasped. Lesley naked, lifeless body hung suspended by the neck from a
steel wire cable.
The detective choked back his horror and emotion. This Godforsaken
place had been her prison. Now it was her tomb.
There were more clues in the hellish subterranean dungeon. A yellow
foam rubber mattress, similar to the one found in the Morris car at
Dudley, lay on the platform. A maroon sleeping bag lay folded as a
pillow. There was a new survival blanket still in its wrapper.
A Woolworths writing pad found in the same side tunnel as the tape
recorder bore a clear imprint of a handwritten message that read: ‘Tell
them to come to Kidsgrove Post Office Telephone Box. Instructions
inside behind backboard tell them you are OK, tell them no police or
tricks.’ This was clearly a ‘script’ written by the Panther for his victim to
record to be sent to her family.
Police divers searched the thick silt where the culvert flowed into the
canal. There was a treasure trove of evidence, a pair of size seven
training shoes, a pair of blue cord trousers, inside leg 29 inches, a blue
polo neck sweater, a roll of Dymo tape, a pair of new socks, a cassette
tape and half a bottle of brandy.
A brown and yellow sleeping bag was still floating, and there were
pieces of sticky plaster. One piece had hairs attached from Lesley’s
eyebrows and was probably used to blindfold her. Another had some of
her head hair sticking to it. Detectives deduced it was part of a gag. Then
came another pathetic find: Lesley’s blue slippers.

Most pieces of the Panther’s kidnap kit were found as police searched
the acres of undergrowth in the park itself, a pair of Zeiss binoculars, an
anorak, a hammer and tartan holdall. There was elation when news came
from the laboratory. Forensic specialists had found a fingerprint on the
front cover of the notebook.
The case was now deemed so important that Commander John Morrison,
head of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, had been sent to coordinate the
hunt for the kidnapper, which now spanned half a dozen police
territories. The fingerprint check was ordered to be a top priority. For
months, the print was compared with millions of others, virtually every
known criminal in the UK. If the kidnapper had been in trouble before,
which seemed likely, his prints would be on file. But the excitement
turned to crushing disappointment. Whoever the kidnapper was, he was
not on police files. They were still no closer to catching the most
dangerous man in Britain, but events were soon to take a dramatic turn.
Pure chance
On 11, December 1975, PC Tony White and Stuart Mackenzie were on
duty near Mansfield, Notts. At about 10.30 p.m. they stopped and
questioned a short, wiry man who had been acting suspiciously.
The next moment, they found themselves looking down the barrels of a
sawn-off shotgun. Taken hostage, they were being made to drive through
Rainworth when Mackenzie swerved and White jumped the gunman. All
three tumbled out of the car. Members of the public queuing at a nearby
chip shop helped as the hijacker, struggling madly, was overcome.
At Mansfield police station, they knew that this was no ordinary prowler.
Could he be the Black Panther? He looked the part, but gave nothing
away, not even his name. It was not until the next evening that he began
to crack. “My name is Donald Neilson,” he said, “and I live in
Bradford.” He eventually broke down in tears, saying, “The girl need not
have died if the money had been paid.” He admitted to the murder of the
three postmasters, but he claimed Lesley’s death had been as the
accident.
When the police searched Neilson’s house, they discovered a mass of
evidence. There was an ‘operations’ book detailing post offices and
wealthy homes that were clearly being considered as targets for robbery,
and boots and shoes that were taken for matching to footprints. In a
locked room Neilson’s wife said the killer’s sanctuary, the police found
an arsenal of weapons and survival gear. But most ironically of all, a
detective opening a drawer in a room already searched, found something
hard wrapped in a shirt. The policeman thought it was a gun but he was
wrong. Instead the wrapping contained a six-inch long ceramic model, of
a black panther.
The trial
Neilson went on trial in Oxford on 14 June 1976. It was felt that no court
in the Midlands could give him a fair hearing. On 1 July he was found
guilty of the kidnap and murder of Lesley Whittle. Three weeks later he
was found guilty of three more murders and three attempted murders. He
received five sentences of life imprisonment.
The mind of the Panther
In the guise of the ‘Panther’, Donald Neilson terrorised all who
crossed his path and became Britain’s most wanted man. But what
lay behind his black mask of death?
Donald Neilson was born on 1 August 1936, as Donald Nappey, as a
slightly built schoolboy he was called ‘nappy’ and bullied. It made him
broody and introverted. Even in adult life he hated his name and in 1965
he changed it legally to Neilson.
Loner
He found it hard to make friends. When he was just 17 he met Irene first
ever girlfriend, and they married shortly before he was called up for his
Army national service in June 1955. They later had a daughter, Kathryn.
It was in the Army that Neilson really enjoyed himself for the first time
in his life. As a member of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, he
learned about guns and ammo and the tactics for successful ambush and
silent killing. He became skilled in jungle and guerrilla warfare, escape
and evasion, camouflage and survival.
Neilson served in Kenya on anti-Maui Maui operations, and then in
Cyprus, where he fought EOKA terrorists. He became fascinated by the
SAS and hung around with their troops in the NAAFI in Cyprus
whenever he could. He was demoted as a lance corporal in 1957, but his
obsession with the Army and guerrilla warfare never ceased. He read
everything he could and collected army surplus kit. He even persuaded
his wife and daughter to take part in bizarre war games on the Yorkshire
moors. All three would dress up in combat fatigues and head off in the
family ‘car’, an Army surplus Austin Champ jeep. Neilson even made
dummy guns, grenades and a bazooka out of a length of drainpipe.
When police raided his home they found a bizarre collection of pictures
he had taken. One featured a picture of Kathryn in camouflage dress
popping up from a ditch to lob a dummy grenade at her mother as she
drove by in the jeep. In another, Irene pretending to be dead was lying
half out of a wrecked jeep that looked as if it had been blown up by a
mine.
After Neilson’s arrest, psychiatrist Dr Hugo Milne said he found the
‘Panther’ was a man who deeply resented what he saw as underserving
people taking advantage of others. He hated ‘dole scroungers’, especially
immigrants, and held extreme right-wing views. He even justified
picking on the Whittle family as a case of people having money they did
not deserve.
Resentment against society
He turned to crime because he thought society’s scales had been tipped
against him and justified his attacks on post offices because he was
taking ‘government money’.
Dr. Milne found that Neilson derived a great deal of pleasure out on
beating the police.
“He had a system of moving across police boundaries whenever
possible. His theory was that the police were petty, insular and reluctant
to share information among themselves so he felt he was helping himself
to a lot by constantly moving across police boundaries. He used his
knowledge to anticipate their next move. That way he was able to evade
his pursuers for many years.
Rigid self-control
“Neilson was a loner who never boasted of his exploits. Unlike many
criminals, he had rigid self-control, which helped him get away with it
for so long.”
Dr Milne believes that Neilson probably did not intend to kill Lesley. He
said: “The sleeping bags, the survival blankets, the brandy, all indicate he
intended to keep her alive. Although he had killed without mercy, this
was a different crime. I am convinced he had no sexual interest in her at
all. Getting the money was the most important thing.”
End
Peter Sutcliffe: The Yorkshire Ripper
A lone and savage killer stalked the deserted streets of England’s
northern towns. As police struggled to catch the maniac, 13 women
died before the case reached a dramatic climax.
Part-time prostitute Wilma McCann was tottering slightly on her high
heels as she made her way home after a night out in the pub. It was a
bitterly cold October night in Leeds and she was glad to be within sight
of her house in Scott Hall Avenue when the bearded stranger
approached.
Wilma, 28, and the mother of four young children, probably never knew
what happened next. A hammer crashed down on the back of her head,
once and then again, shattering her skull. Swiftly her attacker dragged
her body away from the street to the darkness of the deserted Prince
Philip playing fields. Wilma was already dead as her killer feverishly
pulled down her white flared trousers and tore open her jacket and
blouse. Then, in what was to become a ritual trademark, he stabbed her
14 times in her chest and stomach.
Wilma McCann had been slaughtered by Peter Sutcliffe. She was the
first murder victim of a man soon to be known worldwide as the
Yorkshire Ripper. It was 30 October 1975.
At first local police treated it as an isolated case. It was a savage killing,
probably by a stranger and thus the hardest type to solve. Why had
Wilma been killed? She had not been raped. Yet the killing showed clear
signs that the murderer was a deeply disturbed sexual deviant. On the
other hand, her purse had been stolen. Sex crime or robbery?
Any thoughts among seasoned CID men that the case was a bizarre one-
off were rudely dispelled less than three months later, on 20 January
1976.
MURDER 1 – Wilma McCann, 30 October 1975
Wilma McCann probably never knew what hit her on that night in
1975. The Ripper had struck with the savagery that was to become
his hallmark.
Wilma McCann was the first of the Ripper’s victims to die. The
police could see several plausible motives for her death. They
suspected her to a part –time prostitute who perhaps had come
across a violent client; or, alternatively, as her purse had been stolen
it could have been a robbery that went wrong. But there were no
clear leads, and the mother of four’s murder was to remain unsolved
for more than five years.
Frenzied attack
A man on his way to work in the early morning darkness almost tripped
over the body of Emily Jackson, a 42-year old prostitute, as she lay
where she had been dumped in a side alley in the Chapeltown area of
Leeds, centre of the city’s red light district. Her top clothing and bra had
been torn off. Then her frenzied killer had stabbed her 50 times in the
neck, chest, stomach and back. But, as with Wilma McCann, these
wounds had been inflicted after death. Emily’s life had also been
instantly taken out by two massive blows to the back of the head. The
head wounds on both women had the same characteristics, as if each
victim had been struck by a small, heave ball. And some of the stab
wounds were very odd, not like normal knife injuries, but more like
punctures.
Within several hours’ murder squad officers had decided on the likely
weapons: a ball-head hammer and a sharpened Phillips screwdriver.
They were to become the Ripper’s signature. On other small clue was
duly logged. On one thigh was a boot print. Size seven: small for a man.
So far the detectives had failed to make an important connection. Two
other women, neither of whom where prostitutes, had been attacked in
West Yorkshire in 1975: Anna Rogulskyj, aged 34, had been savagely
attacked with a hammer in Keighley on 5 July, and Olive Smelt, 46 years
old, had been bludgeoned and slashed across the buttocks in Halifax on
15 August. Both women pulled through after brain surgery, but it was
nearly three years before police realized they were apart of the same
pattern. And it was over four years before police realized the attacks and
murders were all linked.
On 9 May 1976 Marcella Claxton was attacked by a man with a dark
beard as she crossed Roundhay Park, Leeds, after dark. Marcella, an
educationally backward 20-year old, screamed and her attacker ran off.
Detectives were sure it was an abortive attack by the ripper.
MURDER 2 – Emily Jackson, 20 January 1976
Hammer blows followed by frenzied slashing with a knife were
common factors in the early killings.
A complex personal life and what her husband described as an
insatiable sexual appetite drew part-time prostitute Emily Jackson
to her fatal encounter with the Ripper. Following the death of her
14-year old son, the Jacksons sought comfort in the pubs along
Roundhay Road, Leeds. That was where Emily picked up her
clients, so her husband was not worried when she failed to appear at
closing time; he simply took a taxi home and went to bed. The next
morning, Emily’s body was found between two derelict buildings by
a workman taking a short cut. It was so horribly mutilated that case-
hardened investigating officers were distraught with shock.
Attacks stop
For a year there were no more attacks and detectives wondered if the
killer they sought had committed suicide or been jailed for some other
crime elsewhere. But if any doubts remained in police minds that a serial
killer was on the loose, they vanished on the morning of 6 February 1977
when the body of a part-time prostitute, Irene Richardson, was found by
a jogger on open land known as Soldiers Field, part of Roundhay Park.
The 28-year old mother of two had been felled by three massive blows to
the head with a ball-head hammer.
The scene was all too familiar. Some of her clothing, including,
strangely, her boots, had been pulled off. Then she had been mutilated
with 20 or more stab wounds from a knife and a Phillips screwdriver
Irene had set out the night before to go to a disco. But somewhere en
route she had been waylaid by Sutcliffe, who had driven her to
Roundhay before killing her.
Parallels were now being drawn with that other series of horrifying and
unsolved crimes of a century before, the murders of Jack the Ripper. In
that most famous of all multiple murders in Victorian London, a killer
had preyed on prostitutes, stabbing them, ritually disemboweling them or
cutting out organs with a scalpel-type blade. Was the Leeds murderer
inspired by these killings? The press was soon to make the connection,
dubbing the Leeds fiend as the new Ripper, within days adapted to ‘The
Yorkshire Ripper’.
Detectives struggled to find a motive. None of the victims had been
raped. So why was the killer apparently picking out prostitutes?
After the murder of Irene Richardson there was near panic in the red
light district. Many of the ‘toms’, as they were known to local police,
moved out to London, Manchester or Birmingham. Many more set up
business just a few miles away in Bradford.
MURDER 3 – Irene Richardson, 6 February 1977
Forced into prostitution in order to earn money to keep her young
children, Irene Richardson went out on a winter’s night in 1977
looking for trade. Her savaged body was found by a jogger the next
morning on a local park.
The Ripper did not strike again for a year. Irene Richardson was
killed in Leeds, close to where Wilma McCann had been found. Her
head was smashed with a hammer, and she had been almost
disemboweled by frenzied slashes with a Stanley Knife.
The ripper moves on
Like a wolf following a flock of sheep, the Ripper moved on, too. On 23
April 1977 he selected his next victim, attractive divorcee Patricia ‘Tina’
Atkinson. Tina was a 32-year old local woman who had turned to
prostitution to feed her three young daughters. She lived in Oak Lane,
right on the edge of the Bradford red light zone. On the night of her
death she had spent the evening drinking in a pub. Sometime after
leaving she had met the Yorkshire Ripper, and a violent death. Tina had
taken him home to her own flat: her mutilated body was found the next
day on her blood soaked bed.
Four hammer blows had shattered her skull. Then her killer had stabbed
her seven times in the stomach and slashed her sides. There was one
small but important clue, a boot print on the bedclothes, size seven;
identical to the one found on Emily Jackson.
It was another two months before the Ripper struck again. The victim
was to be his youngest.
Sixteen-year-old Jayne MacDonald had just left school and had a job in a
shop in Leeds. On the night of 25 June 1977 she went to the
Hofbrauhaus night spot in the city centre to go dancing with friends. She
left about 2 a.m. On her way home she was stalked and waylaid by the
Ripper.
Her body was found by children about 9.30 a.m. lying against a wall in
Reginald Terrace. She had been hit three times with a ball-hammer then
stabbed a dozen times.
Why had this young girl suddenly become a victim? Sadly, despairing
detectives concluded that Jayne’s death was probably a ‘mistake’. She
just happened to live in the area where prostitutes walked the street.
Ironically Jayne’s home was just six doors away from the home of the
first victim, Wilma McCann.
A month later, Maureen Long met the Ripper and survived. On the night
of 27 July 1977, 30-year old Maureen was walking through the centre of
Bradford after a night out when she was offered a lift by the Ripper,
cruising in his car. On a nearby patch of open ground Maureen was
struck by a savage blow from behind with a hammer. But something
saved her life. For a reason still unknown, her attacker fled, leaving her
for dead. She was found and rushed to hospital, where she underwent
brain surgery.
MURDER 4 – Tina Atkinson, 23 April 1977
Tina Atkinson was killed at her flat in Bradford. The savagery of the
attack bore all the hallmarks of the Ripper crime. However,
detectives found a clue they had also picked up at an earlier murder,
a print from a size seven boot.
Tina Atkinson was a divorced mother of three who entertained
clients at her flat on the edge of Bradford’s red light district. It was
there that she took the Ripper one warm Saturday evening, and her
mutilated body was found the next day.
MURDER 5 – Jayne MacDonald, 25 June 1977
The death of a teenager Jayne MacDonald caused more public
outrage than did the previous killings of prostitutes.
Jayne MacDonald was just 16 years old when she was ‘picked’ by
the Ripper as she walked home late after a night out. Her body was
found by children the following morning.
Fatal descriptions
She later described her assailant as having blonde hair, and a witness
described a white Ford Cortina leaving the area; two unfortunate
inaccuracies that were to further confuse the Ripper Squad. Her attacker
had dark hair and drove a different model of car, a white Ford Corsair.
On 1 October 1977 the Ripper changed his tactics, causing police more
problems. He crossed the Pennines to Manchester and killed again. The
victim this time as Scots-born prostitute Jean Jordan. Some time after
midnight, the 20-year old mother of two was picked up by the Ripper,
who was now driving a newly bought red Ford Corsair. He drove her
from Moss Side to the Southern Cemetery and killed her with savage
ferocity. Eleven hammer blows rained on her head. But as he dragged her
into dense bushed to complete his grotesque ritual, something again put
him to flight.
Sutcliffe drove back to Yorkshire, but he realized he had made a
potentially disastrous mistake. He had given Jean Jordan a new £5 note
from his wage packet. The police might trace it back to him. For eight
anxious days he scanned newspapers and listened to the news on radio
and TV, but there was nothing about his latest outrage. Jean Jordan’s
body had still not been found.
Driven on by his worry over the bank note, Sutcliffe motored back to the
cemetery. Her body was where he had left it. Frantically he searched her
handbag, but could not find the money. It was hidden in a secret pocket.
MURDER 6 – Jean Jordan, 1 October 1977
Jean Jordan often visited relatives at short notice. She was not
reported missing when she failed to return home after a night out.
The attack on Jean Jordan was the Ripper’s first murder in
Manchester. However, he left a vital clue. Jean had been paid in
advance with a brand new £5 note, which she had put into a secret
pocket of her handbag. On leaving the scene he had forgotten to
retrieve the note, which he knew could be traced by the police to the
payrolls of two or three companies in Bradford. This so disturbed
Sutcliffe that he returned to the body a week after the murder, but
he could not find the money. In a fury the Ripper further mutilated
the remains with a piece of glass.
Hideous mutilation
Now the strange urges flooding his twisted mind told him to finish the
job he had started. He removed her clothes, but he had not left home
equipped to mutilate. Sutcliffe was forced to search a nearby allotment
until he found a broken shard of glass from a greenhouse. He then
carried out a hideous mutilation on the body. Her corpse was found the
next day.
Police then found the £5 note and realized it could be an important lead.
It had been issued by a bank at Shipley, near Leeds, four days before the
Jean Jordan murder, and had been sent out in payrolls for factories in the
area where Sutcliffe worked as a truck driver. Officers interviewed over
5,000 people who could have received the note in their was packet. One
was Sutcliffe: twice in eight days he was interviewed. But after politely
answering the police questions he gave no reason for them to be
suspicious, and there was no follow-up action.
It was the first of several amazing close calls Sutcliffe was to have with
the police before he was caught.
On 14 December he struck again, battering Marilyn Moore. She was
attacked with a hammer in Leeds, but Sutcliffe fled before he could
complete his gory routine. Marilyn’s life was saved in hospital.
The New Year was only three weeks old when the Ripper murdered for
the seventh time on 21 January 1978. His victim was 22-year old
prostitute Yvonne Pearson. Her body lay undiscovered for two months,
by which time Sutcliffe had killed again.
Victim number eight was vivacious Helens Rytka, an 18-year old
streetwalker. She worked with her identical twin sister from the Railway
Arches red light zone along Great Northern Street in the mill town of
Huddersfield.
The sisters had a well-rehearsed routine they thought would help keep
them safe. Each would go with a ‘punter’ in turn, the first waiting for the
second to get back to their street corner ‘base’ before starting the routine
again. The sisters even took the numbers of the cars of each other’s
clients as a safeguard. But on the night of 31 January their double act
went fatally wrong.
MURDER 7 – Yvonne Pearson, 21 January 1978
In a tragic prophecy, Yvonne Pearson once said it would be just her
luck to meet the Ripper. She did, fatally, on 21 January 1978.
Yvonne Pearson’s body lay concealed for two months after her
death. It was also the site of a minor Ripper mystery that has never
been solved, how did a neatly folded copy of the Daily Mirror dated
a month after her death come to be tucked under her arm? After his
arrest, Sutcliffe denied ever revisiting the body.
MURDER 8 – Helen Rytka, 31 January 1978
Helen Rytka was the Yorkshire Ripper’s eighth victim. She was
killed by the horribly familiar series of savage hammer blows.
Working with her twin sister, Helen Rytka’s system for evading
trouble involved each of them taking it in turns to go with clients
while the other waited for her sister’s safe return. On the night she
met the Ripper, though, Helen broke her own rules and met a
horricically violent end in a timber yard.
Breaking the rule
Sutcliffe, fearful that police activity was making Bradford too risky, set
off for Huddersfield in his red Corsair. He spotted Helen waiting for her
sister to return fro a spell with a client. Perhaps it was the promise of
some quick extra money that persuaded Helen to break her golden rule
and get in the car without waiting for her sister to come back. She was
never seen alive again. Two days later her naked body was found
battered and stabbed and hidden behind some corrugated iron in a timber
yard. This time the Ripper had broken with tradition and had sex with his
victim, probably after she had been battered senseless.
Two months later the body of the Ripper’s earlier victim Yvonne Pearson
was found hidden under an abandoned sofa on a Bradford dump. She had
been hit so hard her skull had broken into 21 pieces. Instead of a ball-
hammer, a heavy club or coal hammer had been used. Her clothing had
been partly removed and horse hair stuffing from the sofa had been
pushed down her throat to stifle her screams. There had been no
stabbing, but there was no doubt that this was a Ripper killing.
There was also a most bizarre twist. As in the case of Jean Jordan, the
killer had seemingly returned to the body. Under one arm detectives
found a neatly folded copy of the Daily Mirror, dated exactly one month
after she had been killed.
Over 200 CID officers were now assigned to the case full-time. There
was huge coverage in newspapers and on TV, but still police were no
closer to finding her killer.
Another brutal murder
With chilling predictability, Sutcliffe ruthlessly ended the life of another
woman in May 1978. He again crossed the Pennines to Manchester.
There, on 16 May, he met Vera Millward, a 41-year old Spanish-born
prostitute who had seven children. Vera had been waiting at home for a
regular client, but when he failed to turn up she went looking for trade.
At about 1.30 a.m. a patient at Manchester’s Royal Infirmary awoke to
hear a woman’s screams and a cry for help, then silence. When daylight
broke it revealed Vera’s body lying in a flowerbed. Her head had been
caved in with a club hammer and her torso had been slashed and stabbed.
Then, without explanation, the killing stopped. For 11 months there was
a break in the terror. But in April 1979 the nightmare began once more,
with a new and even more terrifying variation. Sutcliffe stopped stalking
red light districts and started picking on lone women at random.
On the night of 4 April, 19-year old Josephine Whitaker, a clerk with the
Halifax Building Society, had been to visit her grandparents. She left
their house late to walk to the home which she shared with her parents
less than a mile away. As she crossed Savile Park she was stalked by
Sutcliffe. He fractured her skull with one blow from a heavy hammer.
After dragging her into the undergrowth he pulled off her clothing and
stabbed her several times in the stomach with a specially sharpened
Philips screwdriver.
MURDER 9 – Vera Millward, 16 May 1978
Four months after he murder of Helen Rytka, the Ripper returned
to Manchester. Vera Millward, mother of seven, died in a frenzied
attack which took place in the well-lit grounds of the Manchester
Royal Infirmary.
In May 1978 the Ripper again crossed the Pennines to kill in
Manchester. The body of 41-year old prostitute Vera Millward was
found with the characteristic Ripper injuries including a stomach
wound so severe that her intestines had spilled out.
MURDER 10 – Josephine Whitaker, 4 April 1979
Four years after his vicious on the office cleaner Olive Smelt, the
Ripper was back in Halifax. This time he chose a building society
clerk. Josephine Whitaker as his victim, taking her life in Savile
Park, close to her home.
When Josephine Whitaker was attacked after a gap of almost a year,
she was just a few minutes walk from her home in Halifax. She had
been on one of her regular evening visits to her grandparents. Police
received thousands of calls after the murder because Josephine was
another teenage victim, a clerk with the Halifax Building Society.
Double hoax
In April and June 1979 the police were cruelly thrown off course in their
investigation by a double hoax. First, letters purporting to be from the
Ripper were sent to the squad. They were given to newspapers to
publish, hoping the handwriting would be recognized. The letters were
phoney. But worse was to come when a lengthy cassette tape by a man
calling himself ‘Jack’ was sent to the police. The speaker had a strong
Geordie accent. Dialect experts narrowed the area still further to
Sunderland.
For months, the police were convinced it was the voice of the real killer
taunting them about his plans to kill again and how easily he had got
away with things. They switched much of their effort to the Tyne and
Wear area of north-east England. One theory was that the killer had lived
in Sunderland but had a job that brought him regularly to Leeds and
Manchester.
Meanwhile the Ripper continued his brutal attacks.
Student killing
The next to die was Barbara Leach, a second-year social science student
at Bradford University. On 1 September 1979, she had spent the evening
drinking with friends in the Manville Arms pub. At about 1 a.m. she left
to walk home to her digs in Grove Terrace. In Ash Grove, Sutcliffe
attacked her. Her body was found the next day, covered with discarded
carpet held down by bricks. She had been stabbed repeatedly with the
same screwdriver used to kill Josephine Whitaker.
Another long breaks in the attacks then followed, leading to renewed
speculation that the Ripper was dead or in jail or some other offence. But
in the summer of 1980 the nightmare began yet again. On 18 August
civil servant Marguerite Walls, 47, worked late in her office at the
Department of Education and Science in Farsley, between Bradford and
Leeds. She had stayed on to clear up some correspondence because she
was going on holiday the next dat. At about 10.30 p.m. she left to walk
the mile to her home. Somewhere she fell prey to the Ripper. Her body
was found two days later, covered with grass cuttings and leaves, in the
garden of a large house. She had been killed with blows from a hammer
and then strangled, but there were no knife wounds, a fact that caused
several detectives to doubt if this was a ‘genuine’ Ripper murder.
In October and November there were more attacks, but both victims
survived. The first was Dr Upadhya Bandara, a visitor from Singapore
who had been on a course at Nuffield Centre in Leeds. Sutcliffe threw a
noose around her neck from behind and hit her on the head, but then
changed his mind and fled, leaving his terrified victim bloody and dazed.
On Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, he attempted to attack 16-year old
Theresa in Huddersfield, but her boyfriend heard her screams and ran to
help. Sutcliffe fled into the night.
The last murder
Twelve days later he committed his final killing. Language student
Jacqueline Hill, studying at Leeds University, got off a bus in Otley
Road, Leeds, to walk a few yards to her room in Lupton Flats, a hall of
residents. She had been to a special meeting for voluntary probation
officers.
Sutcliffe had been in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant opposite the
bus stop where she got off. He beat her to the ground with a hammer,
then dragged her unconscious body to bushes, stripped her and stabbed
her repeatedly, one wound piercing her eye. Her body was found the next
day.
The elusive Ripper had again vanished without a trace, but after five
years on the loose his time was running out. On 2 January 1981, the urge
to kill welled up from the dark recesses of his mind once more. Tucking
his hammer and sharpened his car coat, he set off in his car (this time a
Rover 3500) and headed for Sheffield. On Melbourne Avenue he spotted
Olive Reivers. She got into the front seat next to him and he offered her
£10 for sex. Sutcliffe asked her to get into the back, but she refused, an
answer which may have saved her life.
MURDER 11 – Barbara Leach, 1 September 1979
After an evening spent in a local pub, Barbara Leach went out to
clear her head in the night air. She was to become the Ripper’s 11th
victim. Barbara was found partly concealed in a black alley, yards
from where a friend had last seen her.
Just before the start of a new term, Bradford social sciences student
Barbara Leach and some friends went for a night out at the
Mannville Arms pub. At the end of the evening Barbara decided to
get a breath of fresh air by walking home. She asked a flatmate to
wait up for her and set off in the rain, but she had barely gone 200
yards before being violently assaulted by the Ripper. When she did
not arrive home her flatmates thought she might have met another
friend or stayed elsewhere. By late the next day, however, they were
worried and reported her missing. Her body was found by a police
officer the next day. She had been left in a back alley, under an old
carpet which was weighed down with stones.
MURDER 12 – Marguerite Walls, 18 August 1980
Due to go on annual leave the next day, 47-year old Marguerite
Walls was killed while walking home after staying late at work to
clear her desk. Her body was found the next morning by two
gardeners.
After another pause of nearly a year, the Ripper struck again.
Marguerite ‘Margot’ Walls was a 47-year old civil servant who had
been walking home after working late. She was bludgeoned and
strangled as she passed through a respectable suburb of Leeds. Her
body was dumped in a garden, just yards from the local police
house.
MURDER 13 – Jacqueline Hill, 17 November 1980
Jacqueline Hill was attacked by the Ripper during the walk from a
bus stop to her student flat.
After killing Marguerite Walls in October Peter Sutcliffe had
carried out two savage but non fatal attacks, on a 34-year old girl in
Huddersfield. His fourth attack in a month was on Leeds student
Jacqueline Hill. The Ripper stalked his victim as she got off the bus
near the university hall of residents where she lived. He struck as she
was within 100 yards of safety, dragging her to some waste ground
where he carried out his by now ritual mutilations. Jacqueline’s bag
was found later that evening and reported to the police, but her body
was not discovered until the next day. She was to be the last victim of
Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous attacks.
Chance interception
A few minutes later, as Sutcliffe planned his next move, a police car
gently pulled up in front of them. Sergeant Bob Ring and PC Robert
Hydes thought something looked odd about the registration of the Rover.
While Ring used his radio to ask for a computer check on the number,
Hyde’s spoke to the beard man in the driver’s seat, who gave his name as
Peter Williams. The driver then asked if he could get out to relieve
himself and Hyde gave permission, keeping an eye on the driver as he
stepped over to some bushes surrounding a fuel tank.
What Hyde could not see in the darkness was the driver deftly dumping a
hammer and a sharpened screwdriver in the undergrowth.
By the time Sutcliffe got back to the car the computer check had been
done. The plates were stolen and Sutcliffe was under arrest.
At Hammerton Road police station he was charged. Again he asked to go
to the lavatory. Once out of sight of the officers, he got rid of a knife by
hiding it in the cistern. But he retained a length of clothes line in his
pocket, and that seemed very odd. West Yorkshire police had asked
every force in the country to tell them if they arrested any men who were
with prostitutes. So, after a night in the cells at Sheffield, Sutcliffe, who
had now given the police his correct name, was driven to Dewsbury for
further questions. Ripper Squad Detective Inspector John Boyle
interviewed him and began to get a cautious but definite feeling that this
just might be the elusive Ripper. He told him he would be held in
custody for another night for further inquiries to be made.
Meanwhile, in Sheffield, officers Ring and Hydes picked up the ‘buzz’
that over in Dewsbury they were still holding their prisoner from the
night before, who was now being quizzed by the Ripper Squad.
The penny dropped for both officers at the same time. Hydes and Ring
raced to Melbourne Avenue. It took seconds of searching in the bushes
by the fuel tank to find what they knew instinctively would be there, a
ball-headed hammer and a sharpened screwdriver. And back at the police
station in Hammerton Road, a quick glance in the lavatory cistern came
up trumps again; a knife.
The Ripper’s confession
At Dewsbury, Boyle and Detective Sergeant Peter Smith, who had been
on the Ripper trail from day one, almost jumped for joy. Returning to
Sutcliffe’s cell, Boyle told him: “I think you are in serious trouble.”
After a minute or so, Sutcliffe said: “I think you are leading up to the
Yorkshire Ripper.”
Smith and Boyle were now trembling with excitement. Composing
himself Boyle said: “Well, what about the Yorkshire Ripper.”
“Well,” said Sutcliffe, “that’s me.”
After admitting to police that he was the killer, Sutcliffe confessed to all
his crimes. He readily agreed that he had killed 11 times, though the
police were investigating 13 murders.
He later told detectives: “You are probably right. I can’t remember all the
details of everything I have done.” Senior officers believed he had
genuinely lost count of all his attacks.
It took 17 hours to write down his full statement. He was eventually
charged with 13 murders and seven attempted murders.
Detectives were surprised to find out that Sutcliffe’s rampage had gone
back as far as 1969, when he had stalked a prostitute in Leeds and
coshed her with a sock full of shingle. But they were shocked when he
told them that the same year he had gone out armed with a hammer,
planning to kill, and had actually been arrested. He had been taken to
court and was fined £25 for “going equipped for burglary”. Had Murder
Squad police only known this after the murder of Wilma McCann, he
could have been stopped there and then.
Hatred of prostitutes
Sutcliffe claimed that his hatred of prostitutes stemmed from an incident
when he was ‘ripped off’ for £5 by one. He told the detectives he had
picked up the woman, who agreed to sex for £5. Sutcliffe could not raise
an erection and gave up, but agreed to pay the woman. He gave her a £10
note and she said she would come back with his change, but she failed to
return. He told police: “I felt outraged and humiliated and embarrassed. I
felt a hatred for the prostitute and her kind.” He also admitted clubbing
another prostitute unconscious in 1971 in Bradford.
Sutcliffe went on trial in the would famous Court One at the Old Bailey
on 5 May 1981, 16 weeks after he was arrested.
The trial almost never went ahead. The Director of Public Prosecutions,
Sir Anthony Havers, had agreed that Sutcliffe should be deemed
mentally unfit to face trial. But the judge, Mr Justice Boreham, insisted
that a jury should have the right to decide if he was guilty of murder or
not.
Sutcliffe pleaded guilty to manslaughter. But on 22 May the jury
returned a verdict of guilty on 13 counts of murder and seven of
attempted murder. He was jailed for life, with a recommendation that he
should serve at least 30 years.
Timetable of Terror
1969
Sutcliffe stalked a prostitute in Leeds, and coshed her with a sock full of
shingle. The same year he had also gone out armed with a hammer,
intending to kill, and had been arrested, but was only fined £25 for being
“equipped for burglary”.
5 July 1975
Anna Rogulskyj, aged 34, was attacked with a hammer by an unknown
man in Keighley.
15 August 1975
Another attack took place, on 46-year old office cleaner Olive Smelt.
30 October 1975
Sutcliffe killed his first victim, Wilma McCann, a 28-year old prostitute
in Leeds, near her home in Scott Hall Avenue.
20 January 1976
The second victim, 42-year old Emily Jackson was found dead in the
Chapeltown area of Leeds. Police realized that they had a potential serial
killer on their hands.
9 May 1976
Twenty-year-old Marcella Claxton was attacked by a dark-bearded man
in Roundhay Park. Leeds, but he ran off when she screamed.
6 February 1977
A part-time prostitute, 28-year old Irene Richardson, was found dead on
open ground, at Soldiers Field, part of Roundhay Park. Newspaper
reports began to dub the killer ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’.
23 April 1977
Leeds prostitutes were terrified and many of them moved. The Ripper
moved to, he killed 32-year old Tina Atkinson in Bradford.
25 June 1977
The next murder victim was 16-year old Jayne MacDonald, who worked
in a shop in Leeds. The Ripper stalked her as she walked home from a
night out.
27 July 1977
The next victim survived. Maureen Long was propositioned and struck
with a hammer, but the Ripper ran off. Her recollection of a blonde-
haired attacker confused police efforts for some time, one of a series of
conflicting descriptions.
1 October 1977
The Ripper crossed the Pennines to Manchester, and killed 20-year old
prostitute Jean Jordan. He left her body in a cemetery but realized that he
had given her a new £5 note, which could potentially be traced to him.
He returned to the body but could not find it.
14 December 1977
Marilyn Moore was attacked with a hammer in Leeds but her assailant
fled, and she survived.
21 January 1978
The Ripper killer 22-year old Yvonne Pearson. Her body was not found
for two months.
31 January 1978
Only 10 days later the eighth victim, Helen Rytka, was murdered in
Huddersfield. She was an 18-year old prostitute.
In March 1978 the body of Yvonne Pearson was found. A newspaper
that was dated a month after she had been killed was found under her
arm.
16 May 1978
In Manchester once more, the Ripper killed Vera Millward, a 41-year old
Spanish-born prostitute. This murder was followed by an 11-month
pause in the killings.
4 April 1979
The next victim was 19-year old Josephine Whitaker, a building society
clerk.
In April and June of the same year, police were sidetracked by hoax
letters and a cassette tape, which caused them to divert their investigation
to Sunderland.
1 September 1979
Barbara Leach, a student at Bradford University, was murdered on the
way home from an evening with friends. Another long break in the
killings followed.
18 August 1980
Another murder took place in Farsley, between Bradford and Leeds. The
victim was 47-year old civil servant Marguerite Walls.
Two more women were attacked, Dr Upadhya Bandara in October, and
16-year old Theresa Sykes in November, but both survived.
17 November 1980
The Ripper’s last murder. Student Jacqueline Hill was killed in Otley
Road, Leeds.
2 January 1981
The Ripper picked up Olive Reivers in Sheffield, but passing police
officers were suspicious about his car and he was arrested, but not before
he had dumped his weapons.
He was taken to Dewsbury police station as part of a round-up in which
the West Yorkshire police had asked to be informed of men arrested
while consorting with prostitutes. The arresting officers, realizing that
their suspect was now part of the Ripper enquiry, returned to the scene
and found the weapons. Also, a knife was found in a lavatory cistern at
Hammerton Road police station, where Sutcliffe had hidden it. Faced
with the evidence, Sutcliffe confessed.
22 May 1981
After his trial at the Old Bailey, in which he pleased guilty to
manslaughter but not guilty to murder, Sutcliffe was convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment.
“I’m Jack” Investigation
The “I’m Jack” hoax letters and tape caused a great deal of confusion
and time-wasting on the investigation. The tape that taunted and haunted
the Ripper squad arrived in the post at the West Yorkshire police HQ on
18 June 1979. It was immediately linked with three letters that had come
in during the previous 15 months. Assistant Chief Constable George
Oldfield and his boss Ronald Gregory weighed the evidence, and
decided it was genuine. The tape and letters gave them what they thought
was a host of clues: voice, handwriting, even a blood group from the
saliva used to seal the envelopes. They hoped that by broadcasting the
tape it would be only days before the Ripper was pinpointed. Linguistic
experts said the voice on the tape was a Sunderland accent, and Oldfield
sent a team to the Wearside town to stand by. But as soon as the tape was
played on TV and radio they were swamped with thousands of calls
claiming to know whose voice it was. All had to be checked out.
Officially the senior officers kept a firm front, sticking to the story that
they believed the message were real. In private they were having doubts,
especially when Detective Chief Inspector David Zackrisson of
Northumbria police gave them a report which showed that 10 phrases in
the letters were very similar to phrases used in letters sent to police in
London by Jack the Ripper in 1888. Zackrisson warned that the whole
affair could be an elaborate hoax. The Geordie voice could simply be
someone who had studied the original Ripper case from the 1880s.
Detection – The Ripper Exposed
Was Peter Sutcliffe a cold-blooded killer or a helpless psychotic,
unstable to control his vicious urges? Sutcliffe told the Old Bailey jury
that he killed prostitutes because he had been receiving “messages from
God” since he was a 20-year old grave digger, saying that he should go
out and “clean up the streets” by killing vice girls. Three eminent
psychiatrists had interviewed Sutcliffe and each formed the view that he
was a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered delusions he was on “a
mission from God”.
But his defence could not explain why in 17 hours of interviews with the
police after he admitted to being the Ripper, he never once mentioned the
messages from God. And at his trial, a prison officer who had been
guarding Sutcliffe whole he was on remand claimed that he had heard
him telling his wife that he planned to con the court into believing only a
short time in psychiatric hospital.
The prosecution argued that Sutcliffe was a sex killer who carefully
planned his attacks and had a little remorse afterwards. Six of his
murders showed clear signs of sexual sadism. Although Sutcliffe did not
rape, he got his thrills by knifing and mutilating his victims, in effect,
rape with a knife.
Although he had ‘excused’ his early crimes to himself by only killing
prostitutes, his sadistic urges to kill and mutilate became so strong that in
the end any female victim would do. After his conviction, Sutcliffe was
sent to the maximum security wing of Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of
White. He as a marked man, reviled by most other prisoners for his
crimes against innocent women. In 1983 he was attacked by another
inmate, who slashed his face with a broken coffee jar. It needed 84
stitches to repair the damage.
In 1984 he got his wish to serve time in a ‘loony bin’. After prison staff
noticed his mental condition was deteriorating he was moved to the
maximum security mental hospital at Broadmoor, where he is still
detained, with little prospect of ever being released back into society.
Biography – Peter Sutcliffe: Born to kill
Peter Sutcliffe was born on 2 June 1946, the eldest of five children, in
Bingley, Yorkshire. He was a quiet and introverted boy who clung to his
mother. At school he was unhappy. Frequently bullied because of his
slight build, he often played truant. He left school at 15 with no
qualifications and little drive or ambition, and took a series of dead-end
jobs. Unlike most Yorkshire lads of his own age, he showed no interest
in cricket, soccer or rugby. And, although good-looking, he showed little
interest in going out with girls.
When he was 16 he tried to change his image. He bought a Bullworker
exercise and started working out with weights, a trend commonly noted
by psychiatrists in rapists and sex killers. But he did not have a girlfriend
until he was 21. Then he met his future wife, Sonia Szurma, in a local
pub. She was only 16 but they started going out regularly together.
The couple broke up several times in the seven years before they
married. It was during one of these partings that Sutcliffe claims to have
suffered a humiliating incident with the prostitute that had allegedly
caused him to hate them all with a murderous loathing. He told
detectives he only picked up the prostitute to “get back” at Sonia, who
had been dating another man.
In 1972, Sonia went to teacher training college in London. In 1974, the
couple married, but they often had furious rows, and it was within a year
of his wedding that Sutcliffe started his reign of terror.
Shotgun Suicide?
At first glance it was an open and shut case. The body was on the
bed, a huge hole blown through its face. On the floor lay a shotgun.
It looked like suicide, but was it?
The body lay on its back on the bed. Blood shone obscenely in the light,
from a hole which had been punched through the head: a fist sized hole,
right between the eyes. It was not a pretty sight. Still, the uniformed
police who were first on the scene were used to such sights. After all,
this was Miami, and Miami could be a rough city.
Monday 8 September 1986 had just begun. The long Miami weekend
was drawing to a close, and the operators manning the lines of Miami’s
‘911’ emergency telephone service had had a typically busy time, but the
rush was now over.
“Jack’s been shot!”
The call came just before one in the morning. It was a tragically routine
affair in the crime ridden Florida metropolis. A distraught female voice
had cried “Jack’s been shot!”
Police were sent to Number 80, North West 69th Avenue. The house was
in a poor to middle-class area of Miami, a part of the city where violent
crime was not unusual.
First on the scene were the uniformed officers, dispatched on receipt of
the 911 call, who arrived at the house within minutes. They were soon
joined by detectives from the Miami City Police’s homicide department
and the duty Medical Examiner from Metro-Dade County, who is called
in on any occasion of violent death.
The house was a low, one storey building. On entering, the first thing the
investigators noticed was the unusual décor. There were fur rugs
everywhere, and on the walls there was a collection of native spears. The
bedroom, on the south side of the house, was dominated by a large, fur-
covered water-bed. A lamp with a Harley-Davidson share lit the scene.
Lying on its back across the bed, partly covered by a quilt and Indian-
style blanket, was a man’s body. The body was black-haired and heavily
bearded. One blue eye gleamed in the light; the other eye had been
obliterated and most of the left side of the face was covered in blood.
End
Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker
Los Angeles in 1985 was a city in fear, as a deadly killer struck at
random. Young or old, male or female, all were prey to the Night
Stalker.
The date was 17 March 1985. Just before midnight, Maria Hernandez
drove her car into the garage of the apartment in the suburb of
Rosemead, Los Angeles, she shared with Dayle Okazaki. As she left the
garage she heard a sound behind her and, turning saw a man dressed in
black pointing a gun at her. “Don’t shoot,” she begged him, raising her
hand; he fired, but the bullet was deflected by the car keys that she was
holding. As she was thrown backwards to the ground by the impact, her
attacker kicked her savagely and stepped over her body into the
apartment’s rear entrance.
Shocked and shaking, Maria dragged herself to her feet and staggered
towards the front of the building. There was the sound of a second shot,
and she found herself confronted again by the gunman as he ran from the
apartment. “Please don’t shoot me again,” she begged, and he vanished
into the night. In the kitchen of the apartment, Dayle Okazaki lay dead, a
bullet through her head.
Maria was able to give the police a description of the killer; he was thin,
with dark curly hair, staring eyes and a mouthful of rotten teeth. And on
the floor of the garage, detectives found a dark blue baseball cap with the
logo of the well-known heave metal band AC/DC.
At the time, the attack on Dayle and Maria was thought to have been a
burglary which had gone wrong, but as similar attacks began to occur
with greater frequency, police realised that there was a serial killer on the
loose.
Random killers
There is nothing more terrifying than mindless murder, for it comes
without warning, it is almost impossible to take adequate precautions. In
1984 no less than five random killers had been at large in Los Angeles,
and the reaction of most people was to ignore their existence and to
console themselves with the thought that, among the city’s millions, they
were unlikely to be picked for slaughter. Yet every few days another
name was added to the list of unsuspecting victims.
In the summer of 1985 the LA police believed that they were to close to
identifying one of the serial killers, thought to be responsible for 14
deaths, as well as rape, child abuse, brutal assault and robbery. They had
evidence to link many of these previous crimes, and hoped to keep their
investigation under wraps; but then the prowler struck twice within three
days they were forced to make a public announcement. The newspapers
were quick to dib the killer the ‘Night Stalker’ and, as terrified citizens
locked their doors and dozed uneasily in their beds, the hunt was on.
For several weeks, the police had been cautious about announcing a
manhunt. But after an attack on Christopher and Virginia Peterson on 6
August 1985, they began to have second thoughts. The events of the
night 8 August, and the resulting press and public outcry, forced their
hand. On that night, the Night Stalker shot Elya Abowath, a 35-year old
Asian, in his San Gabriel Valley home, savagely beat and raped his wife
Sakina, and tied up the elder of the two children, three-year-old Armez.
A long tail of terror
Privately, the police had been seeking the Night Stalker for two months.
In June Detective Sergeant Frank Salerno of the LA County Sheriff’s
Department had come to the conclusion that at least six killings during
the previous three months were the work of the same man. There were
matching descriptions from two survivors’, matching bullets recovered
in the cases where the victims had been shot, and significant similarities
between traces of fingerprints found at different sites. Salerno persuaded
his superiors to put him in charge of a task force to track down the killer,
and at the same time the LA Police Department appointed a squad to
work closely with the County Sheriff’s Department.
The first killing in the series was thought to have been that of Dayle
Okazaki earlier that year. Police had not at that time connected the attack
with an earlier one in June 1984, when elderly Jennie Vincow was raped
and murdered.
On the same night as the Okazaki killing, in nearby Monterey Park, the
prowler killed law student Tsai Lian Yu, dragging her from her car and
shooting her several times. Bullets showed that the same small calibre
gun had been used in both incidents. Three days later, he abducted a
young girl from her Eagle Rock home, sexually abused her, and then,
surprisingly, let her go.
However, only a week passed before pizza-parlour owner Vincent
Zazzara was shot in his home close to the San Gabriel freeway, and his
wife Maxine was also shit and then repeatedly stabbed.
For six weeks there were no more related murders in the Los Angeles
suburbs, subsequent evidence suggests that this coincided with one of the
killer’s trips north to the home of an unsuspecting friend, Donna Myers,
in San Pablo, near San Francisco, which he was in the habit of doing
once a month to get his stained clothes laundered.
Then, on 14 May, William Doi was shot in the head in his home in
Monterey Park. While the Night Stalker savagely beat his wife Lillie and
demanded to know where the valuables were kept, Doi managed to
stagger to the telephone and dial an emergency number before he
expired. Lillie survived.
Two weeks later, on 30 May, Carol Kyle was woken from a deep
slumber in her Burbank home by a torch shining into her eyes. She
opened them to see a gun pointing at her, and hear a man’s voice
ordering her out of the bed. She was forced into the adjoining bedroom,
where her terrified 12-year old son was handcuffed and shut in a
cupboard.
Lucky escape
Carol offered the intruder her diamond and gold necklace, which he took
before raping her. Courageously she told him, “You must have had a
very unhappy life to have done this to me”, and, amazingly, this saved
her life. The Night Stalker told her: “I don’t know why I’m letting you
live. I’ve killed people before. You don’t believe me, but I have.” Carol
was later able to give police a detailed description, which tallied with
those already recorded.
It was not that the city and county authorities, persuaded by Sergeant
Salerno, first put together an investigating team that by August would be
more than 200 strong, and began to build up a profile of the killer. A
month later, the killer went on a fortnight’s rampage. On 27 June, Patty
Elaine Higgins was found with her throat slashed in her home in
Arcadia. On 2 July, elderly Mary Louise Cannon was killed in the same
manner, also in Arcadia. In the same suburb, three days later, 16-year old
Whitney Bennett was beaten to death in her home in Monterey Park.
That same night 63-year old nurse Sophie Dickman was raped and
robbed in her home, also in Monterey Park.
Terror reigned in the Los Angeles suburbs. Fearful citizens began to buy
guns, form vigilante groups and bolt their doors and windows at night.
But some were unlucky. On 20 July, the Night Stalker shot Max
Kneiding and his wife Lela in Glendale. Then he went on to Sun Valley,
where he shot Chainarong Khovananth in his bed, before beating and
raping his wife Somkid, forcing her to swear by Satan that she would not
cry out. Then he beat and violated their eight-year old son before
escaping with $30,000 in cash and jewellery.
Description of the Stalker
Then on the night of 5/6 August came the attack on the Petersons. Both
were seriously injured, but survived to give good descriptions of their
assailant. It was this attack, plus the murder of Elyas Abowath three days
later, which was to blow the case wide open. The next day the sketches
of the killer’s face and his description were on the television and in all
the newspapers.
About this time Ramirez made one of his regular trips north to San
Francisco and called on Donna Myers. She was looking at one of the
sketches of the Night Stalker. “Do you think that could be me?” he asked
her. She said, no, she didn’t think he had the guts. He laughed and said
nothing.
On the night of 17 August he broke into the Lake Merced home of Peter
Pan and his wife Barbara, and shot them both through the head. Police
found small calibre bullets that matched those found at two murder sites
in Los Angeles.
A week later, back in Los Angeles, the Night Stalker broke into the home
of William Carns in Mission Viejo, 50 miles south of the city. He shot
him three times through the head (Carns survived, but suffered
permanent brain damage) and raped his fiancée Inez Erikson twice,
saying: “You know who I am, don’t you? I’m the one they’re writing
about in the newspapers and on TV.” Giggling, he ordered her to say: “I
love Satan.” Then he left, but she was able to see through her tears that
he drove away in a battered orange Toyota.
The Toyota had also been spotted in Mission Viejo earlier in the day. A
keen eyed teenager, James Romero III, had noticed it driving past his
home three times. He noted the number and informed the County
Sheriff’s department. Two days later, police found the car abandoned in a
parking lot in the LA suburb of Rampart. It was immediately taken away
for examination.
Using a new technique, laser scanning, detectives found a satisfactory
fingerprint, and a photo was at once sent to the State computer in
Sacramento. Only a few days before, the new computer had been
updated with all the prints on file of persons who had been born after 1
January 1960.
Within minutes it had identified the print: it belonged to a petty thief and
known drug user from El Paso, Richard Ramirez, born 28 February
1960, twice convicted in Los Angeles for car theft. Within hours’ police
photographs and a description of him were on the front pages of every
newspaper in California. Immediately, two central LA policemen
realised, too late, that they had stopped and cautioned the Night Stalker
for a minor traffic violation only hours before the Toyota was found.
Back in town
At 8.15 am on 31 August, Ramirez descended from a Greyhound bus at
the Los Angeles depot. He had been to Phoenix, Arizona, to buy cocaine.
He was dressed, as usual, in all black: black trousers and a Jack Daniels
T-shirt. In the two days he had been out of California he had seen none
of the local newspapers, and he strolled casually out of the bus station,
past unwitting security guards, and took a local bus to east Los Angeles.
At 8.30 he entered Tito’s Liquor Store on Towne Avenue to buy a can of
Pepsi and a packet of doughnuts. As he walked to the till, he looked
down at the front page of a local Spanish language paper, La Opinion,
and saw his own picture staring up at him. He raced out of the store as
customers began to shout, and kept running for nearly two miles. As he
paused, fighting for breath, he heard more shouts, and the siren wail of
an approaching police car.
On Perry Street he beat a house door, crying “Ayudame!” (Help me), but
the occupier, Bonnie Navarro, slammed the door in his face. On Indiana
Avenue he tried to pull a woman from her car; as passers-by ran to her
aid, he jumped over a fence, and came face to face with Luis Munoz
cooking at his barbecue. Munoz struck him with the barbecue tongs, and
Ramirez fled over the fence to another backyard.
The chase
There he found Faustino Pinon working on the transmission of his
Mustang. As he tried to climb into the car’s driving seat, Pinon seized
him in a headlock, and the car lurched backwards and forwards as the
two men struggled. Ramirez broke free and ran off down the driveway
on to Hubbard Street, followed by Pinon.
Angelina de la Torres was just getting into her gold Granada when she
saw a tall, skinny man lurching towards her, screaming, “Te voy a
matar!” (I’m going to kill you!). Crying out, she hit at him with the car
door, and her husband Manuel, hearing her screams, picked up a steel
rod and ran to her aid. From the other side of the street, Jose Burgoin and
his two sons, Jamie and Julio, came running and, pursued by five men,
Ramirez fled again. Within a few yards Manuel de la Torres caught up
with him and struck him two or three times with the steel rod. Ramirez
fell to the ground, the Burgoins jumped on top of him and a police patrol
car screeched to a halt beside them.
Night Stalker arrested
“Save me, please! Thank God you came! Save me before they kill me!”
gasped Ramirez, and the reign of the Night Stalker had come to an end.
When the Night Stalker was arrested, the police feared that the Hispanic
community of east Los Angeles wold lynch him. While he was held in a
cell at Hollenbeck police station, a crowd of more than 600 gathered
outside, shouting, “Hang him!”, and the streets were packed as a police
motorcade took him to the county jail. There he boasted to Deputy
Sheriff Jim Ellis: “I love to kill people. I love watching them die. I would
shoot them in the head and they would wriggle and squirm all over the
place, and then stop. Or I would cut them with a bread knife and watch
their faces turn real white. I love all that blood. I told one lady one time
to give me all her money. She said no. So I cut her and pulled her eyes
out.”
It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but it took two years to bring it to
the preliminary hearing, and another two years before Ramirez was
found guilty. The State was determined to secure a conviction and
prepared its case with care, but Ramirez denied his earlier confession and
took six months to enter a plea of ‘not guilty’. (Nevertheless he sported a
satanic symbol on the palm of his left hand during one preliminary
hearing, shouted “Hail Satan!”, and, back in his cell, told a fellow
prisoner, “I’ve killed 20 people, man. I love all that blood.”) Then he
constantly changed his mind about whom he wanted to represent him;
and when two attorneys were eventually appointed, they had no
cooperation from their client. They had so little time to prepare their case
that the prosecution was concerned that any conviction might get
reversed on appeal.
Eventually, in January 1989, after more than 1,500 prospective jurors
had been interviewed, the trial opened. After three and a half years in
prison, Ramirez was a very different figure from the Night Stalker so
vividly described by his victims: his hair was groomed, his teeth had
been capped, and he wore a smart, grey pinstripe suit. He refused to
testify in his own defence and his attorneys worked hard to convince the
jury that this was a case of SODDI, “Some other dude did it.”
Twice the jury had to be reconvened: once, after 13 days of deliberation,
when one of their number was found to be asleep and two days later
when another was found murdered in her apartment. But finally, on 20
September 1989, Ramirez was found guilty of 13 murders and 30 other
felonies. In a plea of mitigation, his attorney argued that he was a man
possessed by the devil and a helpless victim of his own sexuality, and
should not be sentenced to death. “Life imprisonment without parole
means he will never see Disneyland again.” he said.
But Judge Tynan imposed the death penalty. Then he asked if Ramirez
had anything to say. “I have a lot to say.” Replied the Night Stalker, “but
now is not the time or place. I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath.
But what the hell? … I don’t believe in the hypocritical moralistic
dogmas of this so-called civilised society. You maggots make me sick.
Hypocrites one and all! … You don’t understand me. You are not
expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am
beyond good and evil.”
Led from the court in chains, he made the sign of the devil’s horns with
the fingers of his left hand, and told reporters: “Big deal. Death always
went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland.” To date, he
languished on death row in San Quentin jail.
Night Stalker Murder Victims
Dayle Okazaki, 17 March 1985
Dayle Okazaki, a 35-year old Hawaiian-born traffic manager, was for a
long time thought by police to have been the first of the Night Stalker’s
slayings. She shared a house in Rosemead, Los Angeles, with Maria
Hernandez. Dayle was killed by a single shot though the head. What the
police did not know was that Richard Ramirez had been active for at
least nine months before this attack. His first killing had been in June
1984, with the brutal rape and murder of 79-year old Jennie Vincow.
Vincent and Maxine Zazzara, 27 March 1985
The horrific killing of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara, whose bodies were
found by their son Peter, alerted police to the fact that they had a vicious
serial killer on their hands. Vincent, a 64-year old retired businessman
and owner of a pizza restaurant, was shot in his study, while Maxine, a
successful lawyer who had just celebrated her 44th birthday, was killed in
the bedroom. Her body had been stripped and repeatedly slashed with a
knife, and the killer had gouged out her eyes. After his arrest Richard
Ramirez boasted to a Deputy: “I love all that blood. I told one lady one
time to give me all her money. She said no, so I cut her and pulled her
eyes out.”
William Doi, 14 May 1985
William Doi and his wife Lillie were woken in their Monterey Park
home by an intruder. William was shot in the head, while 63-year old
Lillie was handcuffed to the bed, beaten and raped. Police discovered an
Avia shoe print in the flowerbed outside the house, which matched a
print found at the Zazzara attack. A witness also reported seeing a tall,
thin, dark-haired man in the area at the time of the crime.
Joyce Nelson, 7 July 1985
Joyce Lucille Nelson, a youthful looking 61-year old grandmother, lived
in the Night Stalker’s favourite killing ground of Monterey Park. On the
night of 7 July 1985 an intruder broke into her home, battered her about
the head with a blunt instrument and strangled her. Witnesses reported
seeing a man matching the description of the Night Stalker in the area,
and police again discovered an Avia shoe print, matching those found
after some of the previous attacks.
Max and Lela Kneiding, 20 July 1985
Maxson ‘Max’ Kneiding and his wife Lela were killed in their beds.
Max, a gentle man with a heart condition who owned three gas stations
in Glendale, was killed instantly by a .22-calibre bullet. Police were later
to match this with bullets used in many of the previous attacks. Lela was
also shot, and she was subjected to a frenzied knife attack: stabbed
repeatedly and her throat was slashed so deeply that her head was almost
severed. Obviously not satisfied with his night’s work, the Night Stalker
then went and burgled another house in nearby Sun Valley. There he
killed 35-year old Chainarong Khovananth, raped his wife Somkid and
sexually assaulted their eight-year-old son.
Elyas Abowath, 8 August 1985
Elyas Abowath was shot and killed on the night of 8 August 1985. His
28-year old wife Sakina was beaten and raped. As happened with
Somkid Khovananth in the second attack on 20 July, Sakina was forced
to swear by Satan that she would not scream. Her description of the
attacker matched those given by previous Night Stalker victims, and
forensic examinations of the bullets established that they were fired by
the same .22 pistol that had been used in the earlier killings.
In the service of Satan
The first signs of a new devil-worshipping movement in California were
noted in 1966. Taking advantage of the liberal state laws on religion, a
former carnival performer, Szandor Anton LaVey, publicly established
his First Church of Satan in San Francisco. LaVey had been accused by
many of being simply an opportunist publicity-seeker, cynically
exploiting the growing interest on occult matters and taking advantage of
those in search of prurient sensations, but his activities were to have
many tragic consequences.
In 1969 he published The Satanic Bible, a plausible mixture of rituals
taken from a variety of sources. In his black-painted home close to
Golden Gate Park he held black masses and invited the press to witness
them. The symbol of the cult was an inverted pentagram, on which the
head of a horned goat was superimposed.
Church of Satan
LaVey was a consummate showman, cheerfully willing to admit in
private conversation that his Church of Satan did little more than offer
his followers the opportunity to release their sexual hang-ups, but
unhappily there were others who lacked this ironic detachment. Within
only a few years the cult of Satanism had been taken up by psychopathic
movements who were used to it as justification for perversion and
murder.
Charles Manson Family
Perhaps the most infamous example is the Charles Manson Family, but
there were others: The Circe Order of Dog Blood, the Four Pi
Movement, and, most sinister of all, the Process Church of Final
Judgement. Serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole claimed to
have been hired by a satanic cult to kidnap children and deliver them for
ritual sacrifice, and a book The Ultimate Evil, Maury Terry, 1987
accused the Process Church of being the influence behind a vast number
of serial killings.
Whether Ramirez had any affiliation with a satanic cult, or was no more
than a self deceiving lonely psychopath, it is interesting to compare the
dates of his killings with the ‘satanic ceremonies’ described in Profiling
Violent Crimes by Ronald M. Holmes 1989:
The Night Beast: a three-week ceremony beginning at the third full
moon of the year (mid March). “The male is always sacrificed first …
the eyes are also removed … the procedure is repeated for the chosen
woman, and again for the closing night’s ceremony.”
The May Day Rite: “There is both human and animal sacrifices, a high
priest and a woman.”
The Passover: occurs every six months, in February and August. “There
will be two human sacrifices, a high priest and his wife or ‘Bride of
Lucifer’.”
Making of the Devil
Born in El Paso, on the border between Texas and Mexico, on 28
February 1960, Richard Ramirez was the youngest of seven children.
They were a typical poor Mexican immigrant family, living in a small,
white stucco house under the shadow of an expressway. Richard was
brought up strictly in the Catholic faith, but by the age of nine he was
already a loner, a haunter of video arcades and a glue sniffer.
Troublemaker
From glue he soon graduated to marijuana, hanging out with a few kids
who regularly stole to pay for their dope, breaking into houses in the
richer parts of El Paso. He was a truant for most of his time at Jefferson
High School, finally dropping out at the age of 17. As one of his teachers
said: “He didn’t give a damn about anything. He hit the dope pretty hard
and was heavily into rock ‘n’ roll.
Brush with the law
Richard Ramirez’s first brush with the law came on 7 December 1977
when he was arrested on suspicion of possessing marijuana; but,
although he was also carrying a ski mask and a toy pistol, no charges
were made. He was arrested on three further occasions, but it was only
on the third, in 1982, that he was convicted, earning a 50-day suspended
sentence and a $115 fine.
On parole
He was put on three year’s parole and shortly afterwards left town to
follow a woman friend, Mrs Donna Myers, 18-years older than himself,
north to San Francisco. For a short time, he remained in the Golden Gate
City, sometimes staying in Mrs Myers’ house, sometimes sleeping rough.
He lived, said Mrs Myers, on hamburgers, Pepsi and cupcakes, and never
brushed his teeth; and he stole cars, usually Toyota’s or Datsun’s,
whenever he needed one.
Drug addiction
Early in 1983 Ramirez moved south to Log Angeles, where he began to
inject cocaine and express an interest in Satanism. He boasted of stealing
video recorders, microwave ovens and jewellery to pay for his growing
drug addiction. Within a short time, he was arrested for stealing a car and
jailed for five months. Later he was convicted again on a car theft charge
and spent 36 days in jail. Very soon after his release, he committed the
first of his murders.
End
Henry McKenny: Big Harry
It was one of Scotland Yard’s most shocking cases. Six brutal
murders, which only came to light during a robbery investigation.
George Brett was a hard man. A well-known East End haulage
contractor, he was fond of a fight. On Saturday 4 January 1975, he
walked into a church hall in Goodmayes in Essex, accompanied by his
10-year old son Terry Neither was to come out alive.
The old church hall had long been converted for light industrial use. One
half was a soft toy business, while an engineering company specialising
in underwater equipment occupied the other.
Brett had been lured to the side by a man he knew as Mr Jennings. There
was the possibility of some business for his haulage firm, and his son had
come along for the ride. The floor of the hall was completely covered in
children’s teddy bears, and racks around the wall contained diving
equipment. The only other occupant of the building was a very big man,
bent over a work bench.
‘Jennings’ sat Brett down on the only chair and gave the boy a teddy
bear to hold. Before any more could be said, the man at the bench raised
a silenced Sten sub-machine gun and shot Brett through the head. Brett
fell, and the big man came closer to make certain of his kill with a
second shot to the head.
Then he turned to the 10-year old, who was still clutching the teddy bear.
‘Jennings’ grabbed the boy and held him tight, while the gunman moved
round and coldly fired one more shot, into the side of Terry’s head. He
died instantly.
Contract killing
George Brett and his son had fallen foul of a pair of hitmen, who had
been paid £1,800 to commit murder. To most people, the term ‘hitman’
conjures up images of American gangster movies; they are considered a
very un-British kind of criminal. But in the 1970s, ‘Harry the Bandit’
McKenny and his partner John Childs set themselves up as contract
killers.
Childs had posed as ‘Mr Jennings’ in order to lure George Brett to his
death. Harry McKenny went about their work with cold savagery, and
disposed of the bodies of their victims with callous ingenuity.
Henry Jeremiah McKenny, also known as ‘Big Harry’ or ‘Big H’, was a
big man indeed. Six feet five inches in height and an athletic 17 stone, he
was a feared and respected by his fellow villains. Respected for his ice-
cool nerve on armed robberies, and feared because with his
sledgehammer fists and easy attitude to violence, he was a man not to be
crossed.
McKenny was not just a dumb thug. A qualified pilot, he had also
trained and worked as a salvage driver. He had invented and patented a
revolutionary new air pump, a design now used by professional frogman
worldwide. But Big Harry could make better money from crime.
Besides, he liked the life.
Through the 1960w and 1970s he had been involved in scored of
robberies, lorry hijacks and warehouse breakins. He was well known to
Scotland Yard as a hard and dangerous villain, and had served several
jail terms.
How the police finally brought Big Harry to justice is a fascinating
example of how the cracking of a seemingly unrelated case can suddenly
lead detectives on the trail of even more serious crime.
Armed robbery
In June1979, a team of gunmen pounced as a security van was collecting
money from a bank in the centre of the market town of Hartford. One
robber grabbed grabbed a guard and he walked to his armoured Transit
van. Pressing a gun to his back, he forced the other guard to let the
villains on board. Then they coolly told the security men to continue on
their collection rounds in Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield, threatening
them with death if they raised the alarm or tried to escape.
Eventually, with more than half a million pounds on board, the robbers
told the guards to stop. They were tied up, gagged and bundled into a
cubicle of a public lavatory while the crooks sped off with sacks full of
money.
But the robbers had made one small vital mistake. They had left the
boiler suits they had worn for the robbery in the same lavatory. In one of
the pockets, detectives found the numbered key to a BMW 320 car.
Contacting BMW in Germany via Interpol, the Hertfordshire police were
told that the car which that particular key fitted had been supplied to a
garage in Essex. Further enquiries revealed that the BMW had been
bought by Phillip Cohen, a wealthy East London greengrocer.
Murder 1: ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve
McKenny’s first killing was for his own direct gain. He was meticulous
in planning how the killing would be done and had already prepared a
‘slaughterhouse’ in an East End flat, where the body could be taken to be
dismembered without leaving a trace. To help in this grisly task
McKenny had bought an electric meat mincer that had been advertised
for £25 in Exchange and Mart.
The victim was to be toymaker ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve. In 1974 McKenny and
Terry Pinfold had been running a small business manufacturing diving
equipment in a converted church hall in Haydon Road, Goodmayes, a
district of Ilford. Renting a small unit in the same building was Eve.
McKenny had noticed that Eve was making plenty of money out of
manufacturing soft toys. He decided that if Eve were to die it would be
simplicity itself to take over the enterprise.
Gruesome killing
One evening in August McKenny and a friend called John Childs stayed
late in the workshop knowing Eve was set to return after everyone else
had left. When Eve got back from the factory after making a delivery to
a customer he had no idea he was about to die. He had cheerily
expressed his surprise at seeing the two working so late when McKenny
hit him over the head with a hammer. The two men rained blows on his
head. To make sure he was dead, McKenny then strangled him with a
piece of rope.
The two men then spent all night carefully removing all traces of the
horror they had committed, even using sulphuric acid to dissolve the
bloodstains. Then they loaded Eve’s corpse into the boot of a car and
drove the few miles to Childs’ rented council flat in Dolphin House,
Popular High Street.
Cutting up the corpse
When, after his arrest, Childs described what happened next, it left
experienced detective Frank Cater feeling physically sick. Dumping the
body in the room, which had been lined with plastic sheeting, McKenny
had then sawn off one of the victim’s legs. He then decided to shift the
body to the bath to finish the job. Calling Childs to watch, Big Harry
took a razor-sharp butcher’s knife and, with only three swift cuts,
severed the head from the body. McKenny then sweated for several
hours cutting up the rest of the corpse, stopping now and then for a cup
of tea.
Then the ghoulish pair hot a major snag. When they tried to put the bits
through the mincer, it jammed. McKenny, the engineer, diagnosed the
problem, realising that the domestic electricity supply was not enough to
dive the motor. They would have to try something else. Childs took the
mincer to bits, then went out and threw the parts in a canal.
Disposing of the remains
Meanwhile McKenny toiled trying to flush bits of body down the
lavatory. Eventually, they decided to burn the remains in the fire grate in
the living room. After nearly two days all that was left was charred bone.
This was ground up, mixed with the ashes and scattered from a car while
driving along the A13.
They had learned from their mistakes, and soon they would be doing it
again, this time as hired killers.
Informer
Cohen was arrested by the Hertfordshire CID and interrogated. He
admitted his involvement in the robbery and, looking for a lenient
sentence, informed on the rest of the gang. Three of the other four
members of the gang were rounded up in a series of dawn raids. Among
them was a small-time petty crook called John Childs. The only man
they missed was Henry McKenny.
Since most of the gang members were London-based villains, the
Metropolitan Police were called in. Flying Squad Chief Inspector Tony
Lundy, already the scourge of London’s armed robbers, sent a team of
senior detectives up to Hertford. They interviewed all of the prisoners,
hoping that one at least would ‘roll over’ and help clear up more
unsolved robberies.
The detective’s got more than they bargained for. Philip Cohen was
desperate to avoid a 20-year sentence. He told them: “I can go better then
armed robberies. Big Harry, Johnny Childs and Terry Pinfold have been
doing the murders for years.”
Terry Pinfold, in prison at the time of the Security Express robbery, had
been McKenny’s partner in a company making diving equipment. They
had been based at an old church hall in East London. Childs had been in
prison with Pinfold in the early 1970s, and had got to know McKenny
after his release.
Cohen claimed that they had killed at least four people, and other
members of the gang added to the tale with two more possible killings.
The only names the investigating officer was familiar with were those of
haulage contractor George Brett and his son Terry. Their disappearance
in 1975 had been a major mystery. Brett had gone out to a business
meeting and had taken Terry with him. His Jaguar had been found
abandoned, but there was no trace of Brett or his boy.
Detectives had always believed that they had been murdered. The
underworld had buzzed with rumours; every copper had his own theory
about who had done it. Now Lundy and his men were being told that the
Bretts had been lured to a warehouse and killed with a sub-machine gun.
Was this all humbug? Was McKenny really a ruthless killer? But what
had seemed fantasy took an ominous turn towards fact when the Yard
began to check out the list of supposed victims.
Murder 2: Robert Brown
Robert Brown was an old friend of Eve and had been employed at the
toy factory. McKenny and Childs found out that Brown had accidentally
stumbled in on the mopping-up operation after Eve had been killed.
Brown had kept his mouth shut, but McKenny decided he knew too
much and would have to be eliminated.
Before they could get to him, Brown was jailed for burglary. But he
escaped from Chelmsford jail and, on the run, went to Pinfold for help.
Pinfold sent him to child’s flat in Poplar, telling Brown he would be able
to hide from the law.
When he turned up his ‘friends’ welcomed him inside. As the front door
closed, McKenny shot him three times in the face and head with a
silenced gun.
But Brown, who had once been a wrestler, did not die easily. There
followed another horrific scene. Brown struggled for his life like a
wounded bear. McKenny sunk a fireman’s axe into his skull and Childs
plunged a diver’s knife into his chest again and again. Still Brown
refused to die. Eventually Childs administered the coup de grace,
impaling him to the floor with a sword stuck through his heart. There
then followed the familiar ritual of dismembering and burning the body.
‘Teddy Bear’ Eve
Terry Eve, known as ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve because of his soft-toy business,
had not been seen since October 1974. He had been ruthlessly rubbed out
because McKenny had wanted to take over his money-spinning company
which had shared the former church hall in Essex.
Robert Brown, a former professional wrestler, was on the run from
Chelmsford Prison. He had been working for Pinfold and McKenny, but
had disappeared in January 1975. Apparently he had come upon the
killers cleaning up after the murder of Eve. Although Brown had kept his
silence for three months, he had been murdered to ensure that he could
not spill the beans in the future.
Freddie Sherwood, a 48-year old Bermondsey man, had disappeared in
July 1978 from the Herne Bay nursing home he ran. He had set off to sell
his Rover car, and had never been seen again. Childs and McKenny had
reputedly been paid £4,000 to kill Sherwood, and had lured him to his
death at McKenny’s bungalow next to the church hall in Goodmayes.
Ronald Andrews, a 38-year old roofing contractor, had been a friend of
McKenny. He had disappeared in October 1978, although by chance his
big American car had been found submerged in a river near Wisbech in
Cambridgeshire. The Lincoln Continental had apparently skidded off the
road, gone over a low bank into 12 feet of water. There story here was
that Big Harry had been having an affair with Andrew’s wife, and had
decided to get rid of his rival.
Murders 3 & 4: George & Terry Brett
According to Childs, it was George Brett’s liking for a fight that brought
about his death. In October 1973 Brett was involved in a bloody brawl
with another man. Armed with an iron bar, Brett came out on top,
inflicting serious injuries on his axe-wielding opponent, who ended up in
hospital. Childs claimed that McKenny had been paid £1,800 by the
injured man to kill Brett.
Lured to his death
Brett was lured to the same factory at Goodmayes where Eve had met his
end, on the pretence that it was a business meeting. Brett, perhaps
suspecting he was being set up for a revenge attack and believing that the
underworld code of honour would prevent anything happening with a
child present, took his 10-year old son, Terry, with him. If he did think it
would thwart any attempt to do him harm, he had sadly underestimated
the homicidal single-mindedness of Big Harry.
McKenny was inside the little factory with Childs and Terry Pinfold.
Brett was being shown the pile of toys and diving gear that was to be his
load when McKenny produced a Sten gun and shot him through the
head. McKenny then told Childs to hold the boy still, and shot Terry in
the head while he clutched a small teddy bear that had been given to him
moments before. Before leaving the premises McKenny grabbed Pinfold
and smeared his face with blood to drive home the message: “You’re
involved, and there’s no going back.”
Unbelievable killing
Childs to Chief Superintendent Cater: “If I had a gun in my hand at that
moment, I swear I would have shot Harry to pieces. I could not believe
he had gone ahead with it and murdered the boy as well.”
A weekend’s work
The bodies were transported to the flat in Dolphin House and the long,
gruesome talk of cutting and burning them began. It took an entire
weekend to finish the job, the ashes again being dumped from a car on
the A13.
Murder 5: Freddie Sherwood
Freddie Sharewood’s killing provided another pay day, with an obscene
twist. There was to be murder on hire purchase. According to Childs,
McKenny had been offered $4,000 to kill him by another London
gangster. The deal involved a £1,500 deposit, followed by five monthly
instalments of £500 when the job was done.
The plan was straightforward. Sherwood, a small-time hood, was
proprietor of the Old Vicarage nursing home in Herne Bay. Ay the time
Childs and McKenny tool the contract for his murder, Sherwood was
trying to sell his Rover car. Childs went to look at the car and agreed to
but it. He asked Sherwood to drive it to McKenny’s bungalow, where he
would be paid in cash. Instead he was paid in bullets: as Sherwood sat at
a table counting out the cash, McKenny stepped into the room and shot
him in the head. Childs then clubbed him with a hammer.
The unfortunate Sherwood then made the familiar last journey in the
boot of his own car to Poplar, where his body was cut up and burned.
Murder investigation
When Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Powis, then head of the
Yard’s detective division, was told about the case, he was convinced that
there could be some truth to the tale. He ordered Detective Chief
Superintendent Frank Cater, one of his most experienced murder
investigators to take over.
McKenny was still missing: with Philip Cohen he had set up an elaborate
alibi for the Hertford robbery, and it was believed that he was in France.
However, John Childs, who had also been implicated in the supposed
killings, was in custody.
When Carter sat down with Childs, the detective was not disappointed.
The robber was not a hard man, and the killings he had committed were
weighing on his mind. He explained how McKenny had told him he was
fed up with being over six feet tall, the Yard always came and took him
in for questioning. According to Childs, McKenny had suggested: “It
would be a lot easier to do people in for money.”
Weapons haul
Acting on information given by Childs, detectives went to the house of
one of his friends. Just after the Hertford robbery he had hidden some
‘luggage’ in her loft. They found two metal boxes and a canvas bag,
which contained a small arsenal. Six hand guns included a Walther
automatic pistol, a rare Rhoner 8mm automatic, an Enfield .38 pistol
with its barrel threaded to take a silencer, and three Webley .455 pistols.
There were also four pump-action shotguns, a Belgian .22 rifle and a
Mannlicher sporting rifle with telescopic sight. Most interesting of all
was the Mark .22 Sten sub-machine gun, with a home-made silencer and
pistol grip.
In two weeks of carefully recorded questioning, John Childs gave the
murder squad men chapter and verse on the full, gruesome details of a
series of killings unsurpassed in cold-bloodedness.
The most unsettling part of the confession was his description of how
they disposed of the bodies. They were all transported to Childs council
flat in Poplar. They had tried to use an industrial mincing machine to
dispose of the body of Terrence Eve, but it required three-phase
electricity for operation and would not work from a domestic supply.
Instead, they roughly butchered the body and burned in the flat’s
fireplace. According to Childs, this was how they had disposed of all of
the bodies. The whole process took many hours, but once complete, the
bones left over could be ground up, and with the ashes scattered over a
wide area.
The wealth of detail that Childs provided convinced Frank Cater that he
was telling the truth, but he though that the grisly method of disposal was
physically impossible.
McKenny’s alibi
To reduce the risk of being identified for the Hertford robbery, Harry
McKenny and Philip Cohen concocted what they thought was a
foolproof alibi.
1. 13 June: Harry McKenny, his mistress Gwen Andrews and
her two children fly from London to Marseilles for a holiday.
There, they check into a small hotel. McKenny makes a point
of being seen in bars frequented by British tourists.
2. 17 June: Harry, Gwen and the children leave the hotel very
early in the morning. They say that they are going on a
camping tour of the region, and will be back in a few days. He
catches the morning flight from Marseilles to Paris. She takes
the children to a remote camping site.
3. 17 June: McKenny catches a taxi across Pairs to the Gare du
Nord railway station. At about 9 o’clock he phones fellow
robber Philip Cohen, who is waiting with a powerboat in
Brighton. Once he had received the call, Cohen sets off across
the Channel to make a 2.00 p.m. rendezvous with McKenny at
Boulogne.
4. 17 June: With a couple of hours to spare, McKenny goes
window shopping, and misses his train. The only way to make
the rendezvous is by car, and he hires a taxi, paying double
fare in advance, to cover the 200 kilometres to Boulogne.
5. 17 June: McKenny and Cohen meet, and set off for England.
Cohen smuggles McKenny ashore. They drive from Brighton
to Cohen’s home in Upminster, where the final robbery plans
were completed.
6. 20 June: McKenny and Cohen lead the gang which steals over
half a million pounds from a Security Express van. After the
robbery, McKenny goes into hiding at Cohen’s house.
7. 23 June: After lying low for three days, McKenny goes to
Victoria Station. He catches the Saturday night boat train for
Paris, travelling via Newhaven and Dieppe.
8. 24 June: Early the next morning, the train arrives at the Gare
du Nord. McKenny takes a taxi across Paris to Orly and
catches the morning flight to Marseilles. He collects Gwen
and the children from their camp site and returns to the hotel
they had stayed in before. There he continues his task of
making himself known. With any luck, none of his new
friends will know that he’s been away.
Murder 6: Ronald Andrews – A Watery Grave
Ronald Andrews murder was a personal matter for McKenny. For many
years the two men had been great friends. But then McKenny had taken a
fancy to Andrews wife. An affair was not enough: McKenny wanted to
marry Mrs Andrews.
To a man like McKenny the solution was easy. He had no qualms about
killing his best friend than he did about killing a stranger. As usual,
Childs, who Andrews had never met, was a willing helper. For a mere
£400, and a new silencer for one of his guns, he helped Big Harry to do
the job.
Childs posed as a private detective and offered to help Andrews, who
suspected his wife was having an affair, to find out who her lover was.
Andrews went to Childs home to discuss the case. Once inside,
McKenny stepped forward with a .38 pistol and calmly executed his old
buddy. His body was disposed of in the tired and trusted manner.
McKenny then took Andrews Lincoln Continental to the River Nene
near Wisbech and, under cover of night, rolled it into the water, having
first left an empty vodka bottle inside to make it look like a drunken
accident. It was found, soon afterwards, by fishermen. Andrews had not
even been reported missing.
Reconstruction
Cater asked Professor James Cameron of the London Hospital Medical
College if he thought that Childs claims could be true. Cameron, one of
the country’s top forensic pathologists, said that he had no idea, but there
was one way of finding out: to stage a reconstruction.
Of course, a human body could not be used, so the forensic team
acquired the next best thing: an 11-stone pig. It took many hours, but the
professor proved that given enough time it could be done.
Careful forensic work also yielded important evidence. Although
McKenny and Co, had taken great care in eliminating evidence of their
dreadful activities, so much blood had been spilled in so many places,
that there was still plenty to find, even if only in microscopic traces.
At McKenny’s bungalow, there was blood in two layers of linoleum,
blood traces in the carpet and on the skirting boards, on a chair seat and
on a curtain. A bullet hole had been found just as Childs had described,
filled with wax and covered over.
At Child’s flat it was the same story: there was blood on the curtains, on
the plastic sheeting used to protect the carpet, on a knife used to butcher
the bodies, and on a dustbin used to store the remains.
Violent deaths
With no bodies, it was impossible for the police to say whose blood it
was, except that it was from at least two different people. But the sheer
number of places where bloodstains had been found pointed to only one
conclusion, at least two people had died violently and their bodies had
subsequently been butchered.
Although not conclusive evidence in itself, small particles of lead were
found in the grate of Childs fireplace. Metropolitan Police Forensic
Laboratory scientists confirmed that they were almost certainly bullet
fragments remaining in the bodies that had melted when the killers had
gone about their grisly work.
The hunt for McKenny
The major problem now facing Frank Cater was to find and arrest Henry
McKenny. He did not want Harry the Bandit to know he was being
investigated for murder, since this might have made an already very
dangerous man more wary and at the same time more likely to shoot his
way out of trouble. This reasoning went out of the window when the
press became interested.
Very early in the investigation, a Fleet Street crime reporter had got wind
of the case, but had been persuaded to hold off on reporting the story.
Just over a month after the Security Express robbery, however, the Daily
Mirror carried a report that the robbery had been tied into the murder
investigation. Before long, most of the national newspapers were
covering the story in detail. Although they could not by law name Harry
McKenny, their nickname of ‘Big H’ and the linking of missing persons
George and Terry Brett, Terrence Eve and Ronald Andrews to the case
cold leave little doubt whom they were writing.
Cater decided to make a virtue of a necessity, and on 27 July he released
photos and full descriptions of McKenny. This brought in a flood of
telephone calls for members of the public. Most came to nothing, but one
report, that McKenny had seen driving a Volkswagen in Ilford, seemed
more promising. The Yard set a trap, into which the wanted man
obligingly drove. However, after jumping two red traffic lights, leaving
chasing police cars caught in traffic, he abandoned his car and escaped
on foot.
McKenny remained on the run until 20 September, until another tip-off
sent armed officers to a house in a quiet close in Plaistow, East London.
Phoning the occupants of the house at one in the morning, a detective
stated that it was surrounded and ordered McKenny out into the street.
He came out peacefully, was handcuffed and taken to Plaistow police
station. The three-month manhunt was over.
In spite of the lack of any bodies, the police knew that they had a case.
Childs confession, allied to the forensic evidence, was enough. He
pleased guilty, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Convicted of murder
In October 1980, Henry McKenny was tried for the same crimes. Big
Harry denied all the charges. Childs was the chief prosecution witness.
After a trial of 40 days, McKenny was convicted of killing George Brett,
Terry Brett, Frederick Sherwood and Ronald Andrews. He was
sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should
serve at least 25 years. At the minimum, Harry McKenny will be behind
bars until past his 70th birthday.
End
Henry Lee Lucas – Blood, Sex and Death
Henry Lee Lucas might be the most evil killer ever. But it is equally
possible that most of his victims are products of his own highly
active imagination.
Cindy was 16 or 17 years old, a runaway from somewhere up north,
hitch-hiking through the southern United States to nowhere in particular.
She was heavily made-up, “very sext and well built, large bust,”
according to the scruffy, one-eyed man driving south on the interstate,
and that was enough to make him pull over and offer the girl a ride. In
the car, she was glad to take his offer of a beer.
“We kept talking,” he wrote later, in his half-literate but strangely vivid
style, “and I ask her to slide over beside me and she did. I become to feel
of her tittys and she ask me if I like that and I said yes. She was only
playing me I could tell so I said I wanted to **** her and she said
maybe. I said I was going to stop and get some and she said not yet we’ll
have plenty of time and I said no we don’t.”
Cindy shifted away from the driver, towards the passenger door.
Possibly, she was going to risk jumping from the car. But just moving
away made the driver mad. He reached out his right hand and pulled her
back towards him, and put his arm around her neck. Cindy lashed out,
hitting at the driver as she struggled to pull free of his grasp.
As the driver fought to control the angry, frightened teenager the car
nearly went off the road. Cindy figured a wreck might not be such a bad
thing. She made a grab for the steering wheel. That was too much for the
driver.
“I rammed the butcher knife into her. She said something but I could not
make it out. She fell between the seat and dash next to the door. She
stayed like that until I pulled her out of the car and while I was pulling
her she began to moan or something.”
He dragged the girl into a field, then chocked the last remnants of life out
of her. He made a sketch of the girl as he remembered her, to illustrate
his gruesome account.
One of many
Cindy’s killing was just one of the dozens of murders to which Henry
Lee Lucas confessed, in writing or in interviews, to Texas Ranger Phil
Ryan in June 1983 at the County Jail in Montague, 100 miles northwest
of Dallas, in north-east Texas.
One-eyed drifter, car mechanic, ex-con, and self confessed cannibal,
born-again Christian and matricide, Henry Lee Lucas was to confess, in
due course, to some thing over 1,000 such killings. Of some, there is no
police record, and many seem to be the product of his own imagination.
Lucas had been sentenced to death in Texas, having been convicted of 11
murders. Not the hundreds of victims he had claimed, but still enough to
make his a very evil man.
Lucas, by his own account, killed his first woman when he was 14 or 15
years old. The victim was 17, waiting at a bus stop when Lucas cornered
her. He beat her senseless, tried to rape her and, when she came round
and began to struggle, he throttled her to death.
He wasn’t caught. But Lucas did spend a year in the Beaumont Training
School for Boys, in Virginia, from September 1952 for breaking and
entering and , nine months after his release, went down for four years at
the Virginia State Penitentiary for burglary. In May 1956 he broke out,
stole a car, was captured in Michigan, and served time for the theft in the
federal prison in Chillithicoe, Ohio. Then he returned to Virginia to
complete his original sentence, and was finally paroled in September
1959.
Mother murdered
Four months later, he killed his mother. To most people, to kill a parent is
the hardest crime of all even to imagine, let alone commit. But to Lucas,
Viola was not a mother. She was a monster. And he hated her.
During Lucas’ time on the run in 1956 in Monroe, Michigan, he had met
and fallen in love with a girl named Stella Curtis. After his release from
the Virginia state pen in 1959, he met up with her again in Tecumseh,
Michigan, where he was staying with his half-sister. They decided to
marry. When Viola showed up to visit her daughter, she objected
violently to the planned marriage. She wanted Henry back home in
Virginia. Caught in the crossfire which erupted in a Tecumseh bar, Stella
fled. Henry went back to his half-sister’s apartment, and Viola followed
to abuse him further. In the end she reverted to her old ways and hit him
with a broom handle. Henry, reduced to a child again, but now with the
strength of a man, hit her back. This time he had a knife in his hand.
Lucas was tried in March 1960 and was sentenced to spend 20 to 40
years in the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson. In August
1961, after several suicide attempts, he was admitted to the Ionia State
Mental Hospital, where his already damaged brain was further subjected
to massive ‘treatments’ with electric shocks (without anaesthetic), brutal
behaviour therapy, and heave doses of tranquillisers and anti-depressants.
He spent four years in the mental hospital before returning to Jackson.
Released from jail
Henry Lee Lucas was released from Jackson on 3 June 1970, having
served a little over a quarter of his maximum sentence. Overcrowding in
the penitentiary had brought on a spate of early releases for long-serving
prisoners, Lucas among them. He was now free to put his plan for a
unique way of life, which happened to mean a unique line in other
people’s deaths, into action.
How far he got at this stage is up for question. He claimed to have killed
two women immediately on his release, “almost within sight of the
prison walls”, although state authorities cannot confirm the deaths. But
Lucas certainly tried. He was sentenced in December 1971 to a four to
five-year term for attempting to abduct a 15-year old schoolgirl at
gunpoint. He went back to Jackson, and stayed there until 29th August
1975, six days after his 39th birthday.
Precisely when Henry Lee Lucas began killing after his release from
Jackson in August 1975 is not clear. He first went to Perryville,
Maryland, then to Chatham, Pennsylvania, staying briefly with relatives.
In November he was living in Port Deposit, Michigan; on 5 December he
married Berry Crawford, a widow 10 years his junior, and they rented a
mobile home in the town. For the next 18 months Lucas worked for his
brother-in-law Wade Kiser, a salvager and wrecker, gutting or fixing
cars. But from time to time he would disappear out of town for a few
days, apparently on drinking sprees.
They were probably more than that. According to some sources, during
his short stay in Pennsylvania in 1975, Lucas had met 28-year old petty
thief, and it seems that the pair had enough in common to meet up again
later that year after Tool returned to his mother’s home in Jacksonville,
Florida. One thing they did have in common, apart from having been
habitually dressed as girls when they were children, was an unhealthy
interest in rape and death, although not necessarily in that order.
Drinking and robbing
What started as drinking and cruising turned into robberies of
convenience stores and gas stations in western Pennsylvania. From there
they began to travel further afield, into Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois
and Wisconsin, even as far as northern Georgia. And the further they
went the madder they became. The slightest resistance would be greeted
with shots from Toole’s favourite weapon, a .22 revolver or semi-
automatic.
When it came to sheer pleasure, their favourite targets were hitch-hikers
or lone women stranded with a broken-down car. According to Toole, on
the night of Sunday 5 November 1978, they had travelled as far as
Round Rock, about 11 miles north of Austin, Texas, on Interstate 35, and
picked up a teenage couple whose 1974 Ford Torino had run out of
petrol. No sooner were they in the can than Toole pulled out his .22
semi-auto and pointed it at the boy.
The teenager responded by offering to hand over his wallet. Lucas, at the
wheel, took the car off the Interstate and soon pulled up. Toole got out,
opened the rear door, pulled out the boy, and shot him once. The boy
tried to run a few steps. Toole smiling, emptied the pistol into him. Then
he got back into the car, this time taking the wheel. He drove back to I-
35, and headed north for Waco.
Another killing
At some point Lucas clambered into the back with the girl while Toole
drove on. Finally he ground to a halt on a service road just south of
Waco, ordered the girl out of the car, and pumped six shots into her.
Lucas left Port Deposit in February 1979 and headed for Florida, because
his half-sister Almeda had threatened to report him for sexually abusing
her grand-daughter. For transport, he stole his nephew Randy Kiser’s
pick-up truck. Once in Jacksonville he made contact with Toole, and
stayed in the apartment that Toole shared with his wife Novella. In the
adjoining house lived Toole’s mother Sarah Hartley and her husband
Bob, and Toole’s drug-addicted sister Drusilla Powell, with her two
children, 12-year old Frieda Lorraine, knows as Becky, and 10-year old
Frank. Given Drusilla’s problems, the two children were mostly looked
after by their grandmother.
On the road
Toole for Lucas a job with the roofing company he worked for. Soon,
Henry Lee was helping Sarah take care of the two children. At first, he’d
drive them around town on his various errands. Then he and Ottis started
taking off with the two children for weeks at a time, heading north into
Georgia and beyond on I-95, or west on I-10 towards Mississippi,
Louisiana and Texas.
In early October 1979, the odd foursome was on I-35 in Austin, Texas, in
a 1971 Chevrolet Malibu, when they saw a woman by the roadside, bent
over the engine of a black Dodge Diplomat sedan. On 8 October the
nude body of 34-year old Sandra Mae Dubbs was found in some field
miles away down the interstate in Travis County. She had been stabbed
37 times.
One of the more prolific of these sprees took place in the spring of 1980,
when Lucas and Toole took off for a couple of weeks in Georgia with
Ottis’ niece and nephew. Once in Georgia on I-95, the two ‘adults’
kidnapped a 16-year old girl and killed her. What else they did, Lucas
refrained from saying. They dumped her body in an artificial lake. In
Brunswick the next Sunday, they tried to buy beer, but were turned away.
Ottis Toole left the store in a rage, then returned and killed the cashier
out of spite. In Savannah, they picked up ‘a young blondish girl” at a
truck stop. Somewhere in some woods south of the city they killed her.
Afterwards, Toole mutilated the body.
Killing spree
In the YMCA parking lot at Heinzville, Lucas stabbed “short of a
middle-aged white woman” to death. Near Dublin, in the course of
robbing a store, Toole shot an unarmed bystander. Just over the state line
in Alabama, Lucas killed “a resident, a white female”. Back in Georgia,
in Donalsonville, Toole took Becky into a convenience store. She
returned to the car, and Lucas drove down the road while Toole tool the
cashier into the bathroom at the store and killed her.
In Douglasville, west of Atlanta, the pair picked up a young man and
drove him into the country. When he refused to have sex with Toole
because he was “too dirty”, Toole went crazy and beat the man to death.
They were heading back home now, by way of Albany. Here, they broke
into a store, found a woman inside, and Lucas stabbed her to death. Just
before they crossed the line into Florida, much the same thing happened
again. This time, the victim of Lucas’ angry blade was male.
Just how many people Henry Lee Lucas killed, with or without the
willing assistance of Ottis Toole, will probably never be known. While
Lucas confessed to over 1,000 murders, he had been linked with
reasonable certainty to considerably fewer.
But the United States is a huge country, with endless, wide-open space,
and thousands of communities large and small. In a nation where it is not
difficult to disappear from one place and reappear in another with a new
identity without anyone knowing or caring, it is just as easy to disappear
and die, with the same effects. As one commentator remarked, many of
those who might have been witnesses against Lucas are probably dead,
for often the only people who knew of his crimes were the victims
themselves.
What is certain is that his pattern of working at buying and selling junk,
wrecked cars and auto parts for periods between jaunts on to the
interstate highways continued through 1980 and 1981. In May 1980, the
two men and two children headed west, reaching Tucson, Arizona,
before Frank and Becky got homesick, the car broke down, and they
began to make their way back to Jacksonville by riding freight cars and
hitching rides on the highway. In July they were Delaware and Virginia.
Plain evil
For food, they wold go to missions and soup kitchens; for cash, they sold
their blood. For drink, they’d rob and kill/ they would rape and kill
anyway, for fun our out of a profound hatred for humanity, from being
“plain evil”, as Lucas once called it, or just because Lucas, at least,
preferred his women dead before he had sex with them.
This bizarre, blood-soaked existence continued sporadically until 16
December 1981, when Becky’s mother Drusilla committed suicide. At
this point the Florida authorities stepped in, and put Becky and Frank
into a juvenile home in Bartow. Lucas hated to be parted from Becky
and, early in January 1982, he and Toole broke into the home and sprang
her. Then they headed west. By 20 January they were in Huston, Texas.
Six days later they raped, killed and decapitated another victim on I-20
between Abilene and Colorado City, then drove into Arizona. Here, near
Scottsdale, they dumped the woman’s head in the desert. After this, Ottis
Toole went back to Florida under his own steam. He was never to see his
niece again.
Lucas and Becky carried on west into California to Beaumont. Lucas
was later to claim that he had a contract killing to carry out there.
Whether that is true or not, it was on a county road, near Beaumont’s
junction of I-10 and State Route 79, that antique dealer Jack Smart, from
nearby Hemet, stopped one rainy night in late January 1982 to give the
unlikely pair a ride.
He did more: he gave Lucas and Becky, who was now presenting herself
as Henry Lee’s wife, a small apartment in which to live, in return for
doing repair jobs around his shop and his home. And when it turned out
that Mrs Smart’s 80-year old and almost blind mother, ‘Granny’ Kate
Rich, needed someone to look after her, Lucas and Becky had so
impressed the Smart’s with their hard work that they offered the job to
them. Lucas and Becky caught the Greyhound bus to Ringgold, in
Montague County, Texas, where Granny Rich lived, early in May 1982.
Forging cheques
Before the end of the month, they were summarily thrown out of Granny
Rich’s house by two of her daughters. They had been summoned from
Wichita Falls by the clerk at the Ringgold general store, who was sure
Lucas was forging cheques on Mrs Rich’s bank account. They found the
place filthy and unkempt, and gave the pair money for a bus fare to get
out of town.
Lucas pocketed the money and decided they should hitch-hike back to
California. But the pair were soon picked up by a local preacher, the
Reverend Ruban Moore, who ran a small religious community called the
House of Prayer just outside nearby Stoneburg. Moore offered them a
place to stay, one of the community’s shacks, in return for Lucas’ help as
a roofer and general repairman. Lucas could not have known it, but
accepting Moore’s generous offer was the beginning of the end, for
Becky, and for him.
Becky’s sin, in Lucas’ eyes, was not so much getting religion, as what
she meant to do as a result, and what that would mean to him. By the
beginning of August Becky had become so enmeshed n the religious
atmosphere that pervaded the House of Prayer that she felt she needed to
confess her sins and repent. That entailed going back to Florida, giving
herself up, taking whatever punishment might be coming, and rejoining
Henry Lee as soon as she was free again.
At first, Lucas resisted, but finally gave in. On his birthday, 23 August
1982, they packed up. Everything they owned fitted into three suitcases.
The Reverend Moore gave them a lift to the truck stop at Alvord. From
here, they would start the long hitch back to Jacksonville.
Stabbed to death
They never made it. They got two rides that took them to Denton, 37
miles north of Dallas, Texas, on I-35. They waited on the access road to
the interstate until 2 a.m., but no-one stopped. Finally they made their
way into a field off the road and undid their bedrolls, got undressed, and
wold have settled down to sleep. Lucas, however, decided to persuade
Becky that the sensible thing to do was return to Stoneburg and the
House of Prayer. He was terrified that Becky’s intention to confess her
sins include confessing his sins too, and those of her uncle Ottis. Before
long, they were arguing furiously.
“We kept on arguin’, cussin’ each other,” Lucas said later. “Finally I just
told her we were going back the next morning regardless. She hollered
out and hit me at the side of the head, and that was it. Well, I stabbed her
with the knife. I just picked it up offa the blanket and brought it around
and hit her right in the chest with it.
“She just sort of sat there for a little bit, and then dropped over, y’know.
Well, after that, I cut her up in little teeny pieces and stuffed it in three
pillows that we had. I dumped the snuff out of the pillows and stuffed all
of her in there except her legs and, I’d guess you’d say, her thighs.”
Coverup story
Over the next two days, Lucas made his way back to Ruben Moore’s
House of Prayer. There, he tearfully told Moore how Becky had taken off
with a truck driver, heading east. Moore believed him, and offered Lucas
time and space to recover. He saw Lucas as a penitent sinner.
Since May, word had got round the sparsely populated community that
Lucas and Becky were at the House of Prayer, and Kate Rich had
maintained contact with Becky by telephone. When she heard the child-
wife of Henry Lee Lucas had apparently run off, she called him. Lucas
agreed to drive her to church one Sunday. On 16 September, Lucas took
Moore’s car and drove to Ringgold to pick her up.
During the drive to church, Granny Rich questioned Lucas about
Becky’s departure. Then, she openly doubted his story. She persisted in
questioning everything Lucas had to say about Becky’s vanishing trick,
and eventually he got mad. He told her he was taking her back home,
then swung off the highway on to a dirt road just outside Ringgold and
pulled up on a piece of waste ground. Then he picked up the butcher’s
knife he always had to hand and plunged it into her heart.
Lucas pulled Kate Rich’s body from the car and mutilated it. After that,
he stuffed her body into a drain running under the road. Lucas had
broken his own rules twice within three weeks. He had killed two people,
now, with whom his connections were well-known. Perhaps, in his own
perverse way, he was finally asking to get caught.
Lucas arrested
Careful detective work by Montague County Sheriff’s ‘Hound Dog’
Conway and Texas Ranger Phil Ryan brought Henry Lee Lucas in for
questioning over Mrs Rich’s disappearance, the body had not been
found, in October 1982, but he stuck to his stories and was released. One
of the first things Lucas did after that was to retrieve Granny Rich’s
decomposing remains from her hiding place and take them back to the
House of Prayer, where he burned them in an incinerator. Then he took
off for New Mexico.
In June 1983 came the lucky break: the two Texas officers discovered
Lucas had been in illegal possession of a deadly weapon. He returned to
Stoneburg from New Mexico on 10 June, and was arrested on 11 June.
Four days later, in his cell in the Montague County Jail, he began the ling
chronicle of his astounding appalling confessions.
In the months and years that followed, Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have
committed over 1,000 murders. Law officers from Canada and 40 of the
United States stood in line to question him on over 3,000 unsolved
killings on their books. As a result, police forces from more than 20
states are satisfied that they have confirmed his involvement in 157
homicides and have closed the files on them.
Convicted of 11 murders
At the end of 1991, Lucas had been convicted of eight murders besides
those of his mother, Becky Powell and Granny Rich. His victims and
sentences in those cases were:
the unidentified female known as ‘Orange Socks’, whose
body he dropped into a culvert on I-35 in Williamson
County, Texas, in October 1979 (death penalty)
26-year old teacher Linda Phillips, stabbed in Kauffman
County, Texas, in August 1970 (life)
Police officer Clemmie E. Curtiss, shot in Cabell County,
West Virginia, in August 1976 (life)
18-year old Lillie Darty, raped and shot in Harrison County,
Texas, in November 1977 (66 years)
Diana Bryant, strangled in Brownfield, Texas (75 years)
66-year old Glenna Biggers, stabbed with a 14-inch knife
and a three pronged fork in Hale County, Texas, in
December 1982 (life)
An unidentified female raped and strangled in Montgomery
County, Texas, sometime before 17 March 1983 (life)
16-year old Laura Jean Domez, beaten and strangled in the
same County on 13 April 1983 (life)
In addition, Lucas had been charged or indicated with 20 other killings,
and faces trial in Florida on four more counts of murder.
Did he really kill 157?
Like several other serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas enjoyed, or suffered
from, a condition called hypermnesia, the ability to recall events in
astonishingly fine detail. It was often his ability to describe tiny details,
which could be known only to the killer, that time and again convinced
police officers that his confessions were genuine. In many cases, without
prompting, Lucas led investigators directly to the scene of the crime.
Lucas’ strange gift was also used as evidence that some police forces had
been over-eager to clear unsolved cases from their books by asking him
leading questions. Lucas, the accusation went, would pick up enough
information in this way to resemble it, with some clever guesswork of
his own, into a highly plausible confession.
‘Green River’ murders
There seems little doubt that he did this more than once. Not all of
Lucas’ 1,000-plus confessions hold water. For example, he maintained
that he was responsible for the spate of killings known as the ‘Green
River’ murders in Washington State. But when the first ‘Green River’
bodies were found, in July 1982, he was at Ruben Moore’s House of
Prayer in Texas. In this instance he had read in the newspapers.
But two of his confessions, both of which were utterly convincing, seem
unlikely both to be true. One or the other is, but not both. The problem
is: which one?
The first concerned the rape, sodomy, stabbing to death, mutilation and
attempted decapitation, on 4 November 1978, of Lisa M. Martinez, an
attractive, dark-haired 19-year old who lived in an apartment in
Kennewick, Washington State. Lucas was able to provide a wealth of
detail about the young woman, about her apartment and its location, the
weather at the time of the killing, and more intimate items (later
confirmed) that were not publically known. It seemed clear that he was
telling the truth, and that he was the perpetrator.
The second was the double shooting actually by Ottis Toole, although
Lucas was admittedly an accomplice, of teenagers Kevin Key and Rita
Salazar near interstate 35, 11 miles from Austin, Texas. Once again,
Lucas offered a wealth of detail about the killings, much of it unreleased
to the public. The innocent couple died on 5 November 1978, one day
after Lisa Martinez died in Kennewick, but roughly 2,000 miles away by
road. To travel from one place to the other in 24 hours calls for an
average speed of a little over 83 MPH, fast, even for Lucas’ reckless
style, in a country that then had a blanket speed limit of 55 MPH.
Which murder did he commit?
If Lucas knew so much about both crimes, but committed only one, the
logical conclusion is that he knew who did the other. But which did
Lucas commit? And who was the other killer? Ottis Toole, his occasional
homosexual lover? Or someone else entirely, whose private confession,
or boast, stuck in Lucas’ hyperactive memory like a crazed wasp in a pot
of honey.
END
Ted Bundy: Serial Killer
Ted Bundy seemed to be a friendly young law student. But behind his
pleasant façade lurked a demonic psychopath who preyed on young
girls.
At 7.18 a.m. on the morning of 24 January 1989, an executioner hired
by the state of Florida flipped a switch and sent a 2,000-volt surge of
electricity coursing through the body of Ted Bundy. For 60 seconds
the mass killer arched and twisted against the straps that held him, as if
fighting death. Then, as the power was switched off, he sank back, his
life extinguished. ‘Old Sparky’, the oldest electric chair in America,
had done its duty once again.
It was nice years and 277 days since the death sentence had been
passed. Across the USA, in a nation used to outbreaks of bizarre and
horrific crime, work stopped as people stood around TV sets, popping
champagne corks and cheering at the news. After 15 years, America’s
most loathed mass killer had finally been dealt with. On the eve of his
death, Bundy, the handsome young lawyer, by now 42, finally broke
down and confessed to the murder of 23 young women. Detectives
believe the true figure was 36, with several more lives ruined after
surviving his appalling attacks.
‘Organised’ serial killer
Ted Bundy was a classic ‘organised’ serial killer. His crimes were not
spur-of-the-moment decisions: they were carefully planned and
executed. He was intelligent and articulate and had a degree in
psychology to his credit. Handsome and clean-cut, his outward
appearance gave no clues to as the monster inside. To his friends, to the
courts and, above all, to his victims, he came across as a well-spoken and
charming man. It was impossible to believe that Ted Bundy was actually
a brutal sadist.
Bundy’s first hideous attack is believed to have occurred on 4 January
1974 at the Washington State University in Seattle. An 18-year-old
student, Sharon Clarke, had settled down for the night in a modern
residential block when Bundy crept in. She was battered with animal
ferocity with a heavy blunt object that fractured her skull, then raped and
violated with an iron rod.
The poor victim was found the next day in a coma by classmates who
had gone to her room thinking she had overslept. For weeks she hovered
on the edge of death before pulling through. But it was nearly three
months before she could talk to detectives, by which time Bundy had
wreaked more horror and havoc.
Four weeks after the first attack, Lynda Ann Healy, a student at the
same university, was murdered in her bed. A friend checked her room
and made a grisly discovery. Lynda was missing and her bed was
soaked with blood. On 12 March on the campus at the Evergreen State
College in Olympia, one hour’s drive from Seattle, 19-year old Donna
Manson left her room to go to a nearby jazz evening. On 17 April, 18-
year old Susan Rancourt, a student at the Central Washington State
College at Ellensburg, 90 miles from Seattle, filled up a washing
machine at the campus launderette, and left saying she would be back
for her laundry later. Neither girl was ever seen again. One university
student almost murdered, three missing – police agreed it looked
ominous.
It would be six months before the terrible fate of Bundy’s victims
became clear. Ted Bundy drove a bronze-coloured VW Beetle car,
which had the passenger seat removed when he was ‘hunting’.
Wearing a mask and equipped with handcuffs, he beat each girl about
the head with a tyre iron or similar weapon. The semi-conscious
victim was then dragged into the car and driven to his chosen murder
site: Taylor Mountain. Pulling off a lonely mountain road 20 miles
from Seattle, he knew he would be undisturbed while he raped and
killed.
With the body buried, Bundy drove back to Seattle, and resumed his
respectable life. However gruesome his crimes, there was nothing
‘insane’ about Ted Bundy. He knew exactly what he was doing. But he
began to believe he could always outwit the police.
Murder in Oregon
The pattern was repeated in May, but this time nearly 230 miles away
at a university campus at Corvallis, Oregon. Roberta Parks, aged 20,
left her room just before 11 p.m. to walk 100 yards to the student’s
union building. She vanished from the face of the earth.
Homicide detectives from five forces were now pooling their
information. They were sure the disappearances were linked to the
first attack but they had nothing, not even the sighting of a suspect, to
work on. While they looked for a lead another girl went missing, this
time back in Seattle.
Vivacious Brenda Ball had gone out dancing to a nightclub on the
evening of 1 June 1974. It was a Saturday and none of her friends
thought it was a matter of concern when she didn’t come back for the
rest of the weekend. When the alarm was raised, there was little the
police could find out except that she had left the nightclub with a good
looking man who had his arm in a sling. Homicide officers didn’t
know it then, but they were going to hear more in the years to come
about a man with an injured arm.
Within 12 days’, tension brewing around the university at Seattle
reached near hysteria when yet another young woman suddenly
vanished. At 11 p.m. 18-year old student Georgeanne Hawkins left a
party to walk back to her quarters, only 50 feet away. It was as if the
ground had opened up and swallowed her: the next day there was no
trace of her.
The police were filled with foreboding and frustration. Captain Joseph
Mackie was sure he had a serial killer on his hands, but how could he
be certain when there were no bodies and virtually no evidence?
On 14, July the pressure on Mackie and his team became almost
unbearable. Not one, but two, young women vanished on the same day
at the same place.
Two women abducted
Janice Ott, a striking 23-year old blonde, and 18-year old Denise
Naslund vanished while on a day out to Lake Sammamish, a national
park and popular beauty spot 10 miles outside Seattle. Both had been
their independently.
TV and newspaper appeals soon brought forward the first piece if hard
information. Janice had definitely been seen leaving the park with a
good looking young man. A witness had heard the man ask Janice if
she would help him get a boat on to the roof of his car.
Bundy was pleased with himself. It was one thing to bludgeon a
sleeping woman unconscious and drive her away in the middle of the
night. Now he had abducted two women together, in broad daylight.
He had always felt superior to everyone around him. Now he knew he
was right.
Bundy had an aura of authority and he carried several items of police
gear, including fake ID. But it was not just a trick to lure girls into his
car. Bundy craved that feeling of control. It was like a drug and one
that he would be increasingly dependent on. The feeling lasted even
after he had killed his victims; he kept ‘souvenirs’ to help him relive
the moment.
He hid the bodies in remote locations and revisited several of them to
experience again the thrill of total control. He had sex with the
corpses.
Bundy’s crimes were so utterly gross that they seemed far removed
from the nice looking young law student. The police were looking for
a savage beast in human form. But no-one imagined that its disguise
could be so convincing.
Detectives Keppel and his partner Roger Dunn, both experienced
homicide cops, were sure they now knew Ted’s new modus operandi;
his MO.
Helping hand
The attacks at night in halls of residence were probably too risky to
continue. Instead, seek out well-educated, well brought-up young
women, college students for instance. Ask them politely for help. An
arm in a sling would help to convince them that he needed assistance,
and what harm could a nice-looking man with only one arm free do?
What happened to them next only remained a secret until 7 September
when the bodies of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were found hidden
in a ditch just four miles from Lake Sammamish.
Now, suddenly, the chilling disappearances stopped. But the murder
team picked up another vital piece if information. A student at the
same university as Susan Rancourt, missing since April, came forward
to day she had been approached by a man fitting the description of
‘Ted’, and with his arm in a sling, on the same day Susan had
disappeared.
More reports came in from other women who had been approached by
a stranger wearing a cast on his arm, sometimes his leg. Help with a
boat was sometimes mentioned. A girl told of the night a man “with a
broken leg” had asked her to help his carry some books. It was the
same place and the same night that Georgeanne Hawkins had
disappeared.
The detectives knew the calls were genuine. Now they were sure they
were up against a cunning and rapacious serial killer.
Possible suspects
They were sifting through thousands of names of possible suspects.
One name that came out was that of Theodore Robert Bundy. An
extremely bright graduate in psychology, he had been studying law at
the University in Tacoma, 25 miles from Seattle, and he lived close to
the campuses where several of the missing girls had been snatched.
Bundy had been prominent in political campaigns in the 1972
presidential elections and spent spare time working with emotionally
disturbed youngsters. He was in a permanent relationship with an
attractive young woman and had a sparkling career almost guaranteed
in law or politics.
What the police did not know was that Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy had
moved from the state of Washington in September 1974 to Salt Lake
City in Utah, 3,000 miles away, to study law at university.
Coincidentally, girls stopped vanishing in Washington State. But in
Utah, police noticed there was something distinctly worrying going
on.
On 18 October, Melissa smith, teenage daughter of local police chief
Louis Smith, vanished from a restaurant car park. She was found
raped, battered and strangled nine days later in woods near the Summit
Park mountain resort.
On 31 October, Halloween night, another teenager, Laura Ann Aime,
mysteriously vanished from a party at the American Fork park in Salt
Lake. Hikers found her body nearly a month later hidden un
underbrush on a hillside. Like Melissa, she had been raped, battered
and strangled.
Little over a week later two women had terrifying close encounters
with Bundy. One lived to tell the tale. The other vanished without
trace, presumed murdered.
The woman who survived was 18-year old Carol DaRonch, who was
in a Salt Lake City shopping arcade when she was approached by a
man claiming to be a police officer. He tricked her into his car, and
when she became suspicious he tried to handcuff her, but she fought
back, screaming and yelling. Eventually she fell out of the car. Bundy
followed her but, illuminated by the headlights of an approaching car,
he leapt back into his vehicle and sped away.
High school kidnap
That seemed to end the night’s drama. But even as the lawmen were
reassuring lucky Carol that she was safe, another chain of events with
more tragic consequences was being played out just 15 miles away at
the Viewpoint High School.
A play was in progress in the school theatre when a young teacher was
approached by a man claiming to be a police officer and asking her to
identify a car in the car park. The teacher’s refusal probably saved her
life.
Seventeen-year-old Debbie Kent was not so fortunate. She had gone to
the play with her family, leaving a younger brother at a nearby roller
rink. At 10 p.m. she volunteered to take the family car and collect him.
Witnesses later told police they heard screams from the school car
park and saw a bronze-coloured VW Beetle drive away. Debbie was
never seen again. Police found one clue: a handcuff key.
As quickly as they started, the killings in Utah stopped. But the killer
hadn’t stopped killing. He’d just moved on. By January he was in the
ski resort of Aspen, Colorado.
Caryn Campbell, a 23-year old nurse, had gone to Aspen from her
home in Michigan with her boyfriend, a doctor, to attend a medical
conference. They were booked into the Wildwood Inn on 12 January
1975. The first night they were in the lobby with friends when Caryn
said she wanted to go back to her room to find a magazine.
She never returned. Police mounted a huge search, but there was no
trace.
A month later, the worst fears of the local police force were realised
when Caryn’s naked body was found buried in a snow bank on a
mountain road between Aspen and the neighbouring resort of
Snowmass.
Things were happening fast. On 1 March 1975 two forestry workers
were checking timber growth on Taylor Mountain in the Cascade
Range when they saw a white, shiny sphere half buried in moss. It was
the skull of Brenda Ball.
Detectives Keppel and Dunn were quickly joined at the site by a full
team of police scene-of-crime scientists and searchers.
Within 24 hours they had made three more startling finds. Here lay the
remains of Lynda Ann Healy, Susan Rancourt and Roberta Parks, four
girls who had been seized from places miles apart. In the case of
Roberta, from Corvallis, Oregon, over 200 miles away. Yet all had
been brought to this lonely mountain as a final resting place.
A fortnight later, on 15 March, the killer struck again. In Vail, another
wealthy ski centre 100 miles from Aspen, 26-year old ski instructor
Julie Cunningham was feeling down after a broken romance. To lift
her spirits, she agreed to meet a girlfriend in a bar. She left home but
never made the rendezvous. Like so many before, she simply vanished.
Only her shoes were found
On Sunday 6 April it happened again. Denise Oliverson lived in Grand
Junction, Colorado, a small town on the interstate highway between
Salt Lake City and Aspen. After an argument with her husband, Denise
mounted her bicycle and rode off to visit her parents who lived in the
same area. Her bike and shoes were later found in a ditch under a
railway bridge.
On 15 April Melanie Cooley vanished in Nederland, Colorado. Her
body was found two weeks later 15 miles away. She had been battered
to death and raped.
Ten weeks later on 1 July, Shelley Robertson disappeared from another
Colorado town, this time the resort of Golden. Her naked and battered
body was found hidden in a disused mineshaft in late August.
On Independence Day, 4 July, a petrol station attendant, 19-year old
Nancy Baird, disappeared from the forecourt where she worked at
Bountiful, Colorado. The Seattle murder squad, Colorado homicide
and FBI specialists on serial killers had no doubt that the ‘Campus
Killer’ had struck again.
Eighteen young women dead or missing, but scarcely a clue, just a
vague description, a penchant for slings or plaster casts, a
commonplace car. For the harassed Colorado police, it didn’t add up
too much. Thousands of possible lines of enquiry were followed
through and checked.
Again, the name of law student Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy came up. Some
months earlier his steady girlfriend, Megan Roberts, had approached
detectives in Seattle, Washington.
Reported by his girlfriend
She was worried about aspects of her boyfriend’s behaviour. She had
found a bag of women’s underwear hidden in his flat. He kept medical
supplies, bandages, plaster of Paris, surgical gloves, even a crutch, in a
cupboard without explanation. He had a knife in the glove
compartment of his car.
There was more. She said Bundy liked to tie her up with her stockings.
Experiments with bondage and anal sex were followed by mock
strangulation that left her frightened for her life. But the detectives
were confronted by a list of over 3,000 suspects. While her revelations
raised some eyebrows, they did not catapult Ted Bundy to the top of
the pack. There were weirder suspects to be dealt with first.
Since his college days Bundy had had little difficulty attracting
women. It seemed unbelievable that a man with a steady girlfriend
could be vanishing from time to time in order to perpetrate such
dreadful crimes. But, although Bundy could start a normal sexual
relationship, he could never maintain one. One former girlfriend
described him as an unexciting lover. For Ted Bundy normality was
not enough. And it made him angry.
He was angry with everyone, his girlfriends, his family and people in
general. Whether Ted Bundy was abused as a child remains unclear,
but his formative years were certainly unhappy. For whatever reason,
his inner rage led him to regard women as disposable items. Kidnap,
murder and necrophilia offered him something that ‘mere’ sex could
not.
Bundy’s murderous career received its first check on 16 August 1975.
In the early hours of the morning he was driving his VW Beetle
through Granger, a small town near Salt Lake City. He was looking for
a victim, but he attracted the attention of a Highway Patrolman parked
at a quiet junction. Sergeant Bob Hayward flashed the VW to stop but
Bundy turned off his lights and sped away.
Hayward gave chase and another Highway Patrol car, vectored by
radio, joined the pursuit. The VW ran through two stop signs before
finally pulling over in a lay-by.
Hayward questioned the driver, a tall, slim man in his 20s, who told
the lawman: “I’m lost.” The Highway Patrolman, a seasoned officer
with over 20 years’ service, knew the driver was hiding something. He
asked to see his driving licence. The name on the Licence was
Theodore Bundy.
Hayward, now joined by two colleagues in the back-up car, decided to
search the VW. He found a strange collection of property. A crowbar,
an ice pick, torn strips of bed sheet, a pair of handcuffs and a peculiar
mask with eye holes, made from a pair of ladies’ tights with the legs
knotted at the top.
Excuse for everything
Bundy had a plausible explanation for everything: the mask, for
example, was a home-made ski hood. But Hayward wasn’t taken in.
Bundy was arrested as a suspect burglar. He was taken to jail, then
bailed pending further enquiries. The enquiries were taken up by
detective Captain Pete Hayward, brother of the patrol officer who had
flagged Bundy down.
Hayward had interviewed Megan Roberts personally when she had
nervously walked in to police and named her boyfriend, Ted Bundy, as
a murder suspect.
Three days after he had been stopped, Bundy was rearrested and
charged with going equipped to commit burglary. Hayward and
detective Jerry Thompson were quietly excited. Bundy looked like a
good suspect for the attempted snatch of Carol DaRonch. The car,
crowbar and handcuffs all fitted. Could this be the mass killer sought
in four states?
Thompson searched Bundy’s flat and found a map of Colorado. Bundy
denied ever having been there. But in Aspen, detectives alerted about
the arrest of Bundy requisitioned his credit card records. He had lied
about Colorado. Bundy had filled up with petrol in that state three
times. The dates coincided with the days Caryn Campbell, Julie
Cunningham and Denise Oliverson had vanished.
Bundy was charged with kidnapping Carol DaRonch and was held in
custody. Detectives from Seattle, Salt Lake City and Aspen held an
emergency summit conference.
On 20 November Bundy was given $100,000 bail. He went to Seattle
to stay with friends, shadowed round the clock by undercover police.
In February 1976 he went back to Utah to face trial on the kidnap
charge. Bundy put up a strong defence, denying he had been anywhere
near the shopping mall where Carol DaRonch had been snatched two
years before.
When questioned about why he tried to escape when the Highway
Patrol tried to stop his car, Bundy calmly told the jury he had been
smoking drugs. He panicked when he saw the police car and sped off
throwing several cannabis “joints” out of the window.
But Carol DaRonch proved a resolute witness, positively identifying
Bundy as her abductor. He was convicted and sentenced to one to
fifteen years in jail.
The police had won a battle, but the war between the law and the
young lawyer was by no means over. While detectives renewed their
efforts to link Bundy to the murdered girl, the ‘Campus Killer’ was
making plans to escape.
Charged with murder
By January 1977 the authorities in Aspen had enough evidence to
charge Bundy with the murder of Caryn Campbell. Bundy announced
that he would defend himself, and requested access to the prison law
library in Glenwood springs close to Aspen. On 7 June he asked to
visit the Court House library for some last-minute cramming just
before his appearance. He was left alone and promptly escaped by
leaping from a second floor window.
Bundy was recaptured a week later, pulled over by a Sheriff’s car
while driving a stolen Cadillac. The murder trial was rescheduled for
January 1978. But Bundy had no intention of showing.
Feigning illness throughout December, Bundy refused food and
slimmed down enough to climb through a loose ceiling panel on the
night of the New Year’s Eve celebrations in 1977. He crawled through
the ceiling space, smashed into an adjacent room and vanished into the
night.
Lawman greeted the news with stunned disbelief. In Aspen Bundy’s
latest escape turned him into a ghoulish folk hero, with T-shirts and
even a folk song celebrating his unscheduled departure.
Eight days after escaping, Bundy, now calling himself Chris Hagen,
got off the bus at the town of Tallahassee, home of the University if
Florida and 1,500 miles from Aspen. He booked into a respectable
guest house, paying a $100 advance in cash.
Over confident
How long could Bundy have eluded capture is open to question. He
was an accomplished thief who wined and dined several girls, paying
his bills with stolen credit cards. He had devoted his considerable
intelligence to staying free he might still be at liberty. But the months
in confinement only served to increase Bundy’s appetite.
And his confidence knew no bounds. He had proved to himself that he
could abduct, rape and kill and will. It had only been a bit of bad luck
with the Highway Patrol that landed him in prison. Like several other
serial killers, Bundy was now convinced he could outwit the police
whatever he did. No mortal man could catch Ted Bundy.
Only two weeks after his escape Bundy killed again. But it was not to
be a single murder. On the night of 15 January 1978 he launched
himself in a frenzied attack on five girls living on the university
campus.
Bundy broke all his own rules that night. Having broken into a girls’
residential block, home to 40 students, he moved from room to room
attacking at leisure. Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner suffered severe
head injuries that disfigured them for life. Bundy used the same oak
branch in the rooms of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, but he had
gone further, sexually assaulting both girls as they lay dying. At 3.15
a.m. Nita Neary returned to the building from a night out. Perhaps
disturbed by the approaching footsteps, Bundy fled down the stairs,
actually passing the terrified girls as he raced into the street.
But Bundy was not finished yet. He attacked again only four blocks
away.
Three girls rented a house on Dunwoody Street. Nancy Young and
Debbie Cicarelli woke to hear a violent struggle inside the house and
they called the police. Officers, already on the scene because of the
earlier mayhem, arrived within minutes. They found Cheryl Thomas, a
ballet student, lying in a pool of blood with massive head injuries.
Among the gore lay a stocking mask. Bundy had not even bothered to
keep it on.
While Tallahassee reeled with shock at the vile events, the man knows
as Chris Hagen maintained a bold front. He kept late hours and seemed
to drink more than was good for him, but he paid his way. Once again
Bundy was living off stolen credit cards and stealing vehicles to keep
mobile.
Attempted abduction
On 8 February Bundy tried to abduct a schoolgirl in Jacksonville. He
posed as a fire officer, but fled when the girl’s brother appeared
unexpectedly. The children of a detective, they noted down the number
of the van Bundy was driving and reported what had happened.
On 9 February Bundy kidnapped a 12-year old schoolgirl from outside
the Junior High in Lake City. Kimberley Leach was no runaway and
she vanished days before she was to be the school’s Valentines Day
Princess. Police feared for the worst.
The van was found on 13 February and forensic analysis had barely
begun before police found Bundy himself. He had stolen an orange
VW Beetle and was parked in a Pensacola side street at 1.30 a.m.
when Patrolman Dave Lee approached. Bundy took fright and once
again made the mistake of racing a patrol car in a VW Beetle. Forced
on to the kerb, he was arrested at gunpoint.
False identification
At first he blustered, saying his name was Kenneth Minster, but the ID
he showed police was stolen. He had a wallet-full of stolen credit cards
and some of them turned out to have been used in Lake City the day
Kimberly Leach disappeared. Eventually he admitted his true identity,
but he would not confess to the killings in Tallahassee or to the
abduction of Kimberly Leach. Her body was found two months later,
hidden in a derelict pig sty. From examination of the van and her
remains, it appeared that she had been raped in the vehicle and then
suffocated in the mud while he assaulted her again. He had mutilated
her body with a knife.
Appointment with ‘Old Sparky’
Bundy was tried in June 1979 for the murders of Margaret Bowman
and Lisa Levy. The jury was unanimous in finding him guilty and the
legal panel ordered the death penalty, in Florida the electric chair. The
following year Bundy received another death sentence for murdering
Kimberly Leach. Although Bundy exploited every legal avenue to save
his skin, the state of Florida was determined to see justice done. It took
nearly 10 years and several million dollars to defeat every challenge,
but he was made to keep his appointment with ‘Old Sparky’.
Secret Psycho
What made Ted Bundy a gentle charmer one day and a homicidal sex
killer the next remains a mystery. In most ways his personality was the
exact opposite of the majority of serial killers or rapists.
Psychiatrists have discovered that most sex murderers are inadequate
personalities, who suffer from poor self image. They are frequently of
low intelligence, often physically small, and their attacks on women
usually stem from a feeling of rejection by the opposite sex at an early
age.
Cultured Killer
Bundy showed none of these traits. He was intelligent, cultured, good
looking, witty, and a bit hit with women. When he was first arrested in
Colorado, friends from the colleges where he studied could not believe
the police were holding the right man. They all described his as kind,
sensitive and self-assured.
Bundy seemed to have everything. He was tall, slim, and handsome.
He had a brilliant future ahead of him as a lawyer, he had campaigned
for the Republican Party at election times, studied and spoke Chinese,
was friendly and sociable and enjoyed sports.
Jekyll and Hyde character
Police captain Joseph Mackie, one of the Seattle detectives who helped
bring Bundy to justice, said: “He was a true Jekyll and Hyde character,
He was very attractive to women, good looking, charming, successful,
a fun guy to be with most of the time.
“But inside him lurked a terrible twisted power that drove him to
commit some of the worst sex crimes ever seen in the USA.”
After his final arrest, Bundy told psychiatrists that he had fantasies
about being a vampire which often took over his life. But he said that
he always felt bad about these phases after they had passed.
While refusing to admit to any of his crimes until the very eve of his
execution, he did admit to being heavily influenced by magazines
featuring violent pornography that he often bought from sleazy stores
in Seattle.
Psychiatrists and detectives also noted that while denying involvement
in any crimes, Bundy would freely speculate about who the killer
might be and what his mental situation was.
Detective Mackie said: “We know he was talking to us about himself,
but he always acted like he was using his very considerable
intelligence to try to help us build up a picture of what the real killer
might be like. He enjoyed playing mind games.”
Dr James Dobson, a psychologist who examined Bundy, said: “Only
after his first killing did he feel any remorse. But then the sex frenzy
overcame him and he killed again and again, becoming more and more
desensitised. He no longer experienced normal human feelings and he
blamed pornography for feeding his sick obsessions.”
The man they couldn’t hold
Bundy’s bizarre folk-hero image stemmed largely from his ability to
escape. Everyone loves an escape artist. As early as September 1976
prison officers found forged ID and social security papers hidden in his
cell, plus airline timetables.
In January 1977 he was driven from Utah to Colorado to be tried for
the murder of Caryn Campbell. As a former law student, Bundy’s
decision to defend himself in court was taken at face value. He was
granted access to the prison law library, where he laboured away in
peace. No suspicions were aroused when at the courthouse on 7 June
Bundy requested a quick last-minute cramming session in the law
library there. But when the time came for him to face the judge, he was
nowhere to be found. Bundy had jumped from the second-floor
window and ran for it.
Leap for freedom
In his leap for freedom he sprained his ankle, but he made it to the
thickly wooded mountains before helicopters were overhead. He heard
police dogs on his trial but threw them off the scent by swimming the
swirling Roaring Fork river. He found a hunter’s cabin and broke in,
finding food, warm clothing and a gun.
Bundy pressed on, trying to get as far from Aspen as he could. But,
unfamiliar with the area, he actually travelled in a circle. Six days after
his dramatic escape he was back on the outskirts of the city. Weak,
exhausted and in serious pain from his injured ankle, he thought his
prayers were answered when he found a Cadillac with the keys in the
ignition.
Bad Driving
Bundy stole the car, but he was so tired that his erratic driving attracted
the attention of a Sheriff’s car. He was chased and arrested.
The Caryn Campbell murder trial was set for 6 January 1978. But
Bundy had other plans. In the weeks leading up to his court appearance
he pretended to be ill, refusing food and sleeping late. But there was
nothing wrong with him: he was deliberately losing weight. Bundy had
discovered a loose ceiling panel around a light socket in his cell. From
there he could wriggle through a tiny crawl space and break into the
jailer’s lounge.
On New Year’s Eve Bundy knew all the jailers would be at a big party
in their social club.
On New Year’s Day bleary-eyed wardens were not surprised to see
what they thought was Bundy still asleep under his blankets. In fact,
they had fallen for the oldest trick of all. The lump under the covers
was just a pile of Bundy’s law books. He had done it again, and had a
17-hour start on his captors.
Massacre in Florida
Forty female students and a supervisor lived in the Chi Omega
residential block. The building was protected by a combination entry
lock but it had been malfunctioning for several days. Tragically, no-
one had bothered to fix it.
On a Saturday night many of the girls were out on dates or seeing
friends. Margaret Bowman, who was 21, had gone out with a new
boyfriend. Lisa Levy had been out to a disco. Karen Chandler, a local
girl, had been home to have a meal with her parents. Kathy Kleiner,
her room mate, had been to a wedding.
It was Nita Neary, coming home at 3.15 a.m. after a hectic night, who
first noticed something suspicious. As she entered the building foyer
she heard the sound of feet running on the landing above. A man
wearing a dark ski cap bounded down the stairs and dashed away
towards the rear of the building. He was carrying what looked like a
lump of a tree branch.
Intruder inside
Scared, Nita woke her room mate Nancy Dowdie. The two friends
ventured back into the corridor looking for the intruder. Finding
nothing, they were discussing what to do next when they saw Karen
Chandler stagger out of her room with blood streaming from her head.
In Karen’s room her friend Kathy Kleiner was on her bed, her face a
mask of blood. Both girls had been the victims of a frenzied attack
with a heavy club. They were alive but critically injured.
Within minutes of the alarm, police and ambulance crews were
sweeping into the car park. Frightened students in their dressing gowns
were wandering the corridors in confusion.
Police ordered a room-by-room search. In Lisa Levy’s room patrolman
Ray Crewe was greeted with a sight he would never forget. The young
student lay on her blood-soaked bed dead from massive head wounds.
She had been subjected to a cruel and violent sex attack.
Now every room had been searched except number nine. Margaret
Bowman had been chatting to one of her friends until 2.45 a.m. There
was no reply to the knocks on her door.
An officer forced his way in to be greeted by another scene of sheer
horror. Margaret lay on her bed with the covers pulled up to her chin.
But the room was awash with blood. Her skull had been cracked open
by a series of massive blows. A nylon stocking had been used to
throttle her. It had been pulled so tight that her neck was broken. She
was beyond help.
Work of a madman
A madman had been at work, moving from room to room, bludgeoning
his victims with a heavy oak tree branch. There were pieces of bark
stuck in pools of coagulating blood.
The attacks must have stretched over nearly 30 minutes yet,
amazingly, no-one had heard a scream, a cry for help, or the sounds of
violence.
The streets around the dormitory block were clogged with police cars
and ambulances. Sirens wailed and blue and red lights lit up the night.
Unbelievably, only four blocks away from the Chi Omega house a
fresh horror was unfolding.
Three students, Cheryl Thomas, Nancy Young and Debbie Cicarelli,
shared a rented house on Dunwoody Street. On this terrible night they
had all been out on the town together. When they had got home they
were in good spirits, laughing and joking before going to bed in their
separate rooms.
Cheryl, a ballet dancer, was later to say that the last thing she
remembers as she was dozing off was hearing what she thought was
her cat knocking a pot plant off a window sill.
Violent pounding
A few minutes later Debbie and Nancy were terrified to hear the
sounds of violent pounding coming from elsewhere in the darkened
house. They called the police.
Officers already at the scene of the campus carnage raced to
Dunwoody Street. They forced their way into Cheryl’s room to find
her semi-conscious in a sea of her own blood. She had been battered to
the very edge of death.
As an ambulance rushed her to hospital, where her life was saved,
detectives began an immediate examinations of the crime scene. In the
blood they made a vital find. It was a mask made from a pair of ladies’
tights with eye holes cut out and the legs knotted on top.
Bite marks that trapped the killer
The breakthrough came after the murder of Lisa Levy at Tallahassee.
During the frenzied sex attacks he had bitten her breast and buttocks,
leaving deep teeth marks.
Police called in dentist Dr Richard Souviron. He was also a forensic
odontologist and had helped police identify hundreds of bodies from
dental records. Now detectives wanted to know if the bite marks could
help trap the killer.
Wounds photographed
At the mortuary Souviron had the bite wounds carefully photographed.
When Bundy was arrested police were able to obtain a copy of his
dental records and x-rays from the jail in Utah where he had been held
before his escape.
Souviron noted remarkable similarities between Bundy’s teeth and the
bite marks on Lisa Levy. For instance, Bundy’s lower incisors were
sharply angled out of line with the rest of his teeth. This pattern could
clearly be seen in the victim’s flesh.
Court order
Later police got a court order to take a wax impression of Bundy’s
teeth. Souviron was then able to prove conclusively that the injuries
could only have been made by Bundy.
Kidnap vehicles yield vital clues
Forensic science made a great contribution to getting Ted Bundy
convicted as a multiple murderer. The first was when Bundy’s
Volkswagen was seized after his arrest in Colorado. Detectives hoped
that a microscopic check of its interior might yield valuable evidence.
The inside of the car was vacuumed. About 1 lb of dust, gravel and
other debris was carefully packaged and sent to the FBI crime labs in
Quantico, Virginia.
Special Agent Neill
Special Agent Bob Neill emptied the bag in to a glass-topped table and
used an illuminated magnifying glass to search for human hairs.
Several were found and picked out with tweezers. Magnified 400
times, human hair displays a patters as individual as a fingerprint.
Agent Neill was supplied with samples of hair from all of the murder
victims found up to that point. He then used a special device called a
comparison microscope, which can magnify two sides at once merging
the image into one.
If two hairs from the same person were laid end to end they would
become a continuation of one another. One of the hairs taken from
Aspen victim Caryn Campbell was a perfect match. Neill subsequently
made more Caryn Campbell hair matches.
Vacuumed samples
He then compared a pubic hair from police chief’s daughter Melissa
Smith with a hair recovered from the vacuumed samples. Once more, a
perfect match, proof that both women had been carried in Bundy’s car.
A further forensic lead came when the police found the body of
Kimberley Leach. Unlike the previous Bundy killings were clothes and
jewellery were never found, her clothes were still on her body.
Polyester fibres
Sticking to some of them were blue polyester and wool fibres that
proved a prefect match to the carpet in the rear of the stolen van Bundy
had been spotted driving in Florida.
Splashes of blood, a perfect match with Kimberley’s, were also found
in the van carpet material, and identical fibres to those sticking to her
clothes were later discovered in lab tests adhering to one of Bundy’s
jackets.
Courtroom Survivor
On 31 July 1979 Ted Bundy was sentenced to death for the murders of
Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. He became convict 669063 in
Railford Penitentiary, Florida. Hundreds of men were there on Death
Row. All awaited a one-way trip to ‘Old Sparky’, America’s oldest
electric chair.
The US legal system allows for a seemingly endless series of appeals
and stays of execution. Ted Bundy was a law student with a degree in
psychology and he was determined to make the system work for him.
However, he was back in court the following year, once again on trial
for his life.
In January 1980 he was tried for the rape and murder of 12-year old
Kimberley Leach. He was convicted in February, the jury
recommending the death sentence. The judge agreed and duly passed
sentence. However, although the state of Florida was determined to
execute Bundy, it took more than nine years and legal expenses
estimated at between five and ten million dollars to get him to the
electric chair.
Playing for time
When every single legal avenue had been closed, Bundy played for
time. In the last days of his life he confessed to more murders, hoping
to delay his death still further. Closeted with detectives from Utah and
Colorado, he admitted to several more murders. The night before his
death he confessed to a whole series of them. But his final appeals
were rejected, and on 24 January he was led to the ‘Chair’.
How many lives cut short?
How many people did Bundy kill? No one will ever know for sure. As
he lingered on Death Row he made various claims to journalists,
psychologists and law officials, raging from 40 to 400.
Confessed to more murders
Although convicted of three murders in Florida, crimes he steadfastly
denied, it was only on the eve of his execution that he called together
detectives from five different states and confessed to another 22
murders.
Brutal sites
Police search teams later visited a number of woodland sites where
Bundy claimed to hidden bodies, but no remains were found.
One FBI detective said: “Many of the areas had been dug up in open
cast mining operations or changed completely by timber felling or road
building. All we can say is that he certainly killing at least a dozen
women, probably three times that number, and possibly a lot more.”
Among the girls he finally confessed to killing where Roberta Parks,
Susan Rancourt, Georgeanne Hawkins, Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman,
Brenda Ball and Donna Manson.
Burn Bundy Burn!
Bundy went to the electric chair at the Florida State Penitentiary in the
town of Starke on 24 January 1989, nine years and 277 days after
being sentenced to death. He was 42.
He had spent the previous two days making further belated confessions
to detectives and praying in the company of a Methodist priest. For the
last week of his life he had been confined to a tiny death cell, only nine
feet by eleven feet.
Head shaved
On the morning he died Bundy refused a last meal of steak and eggs.
His head was then shaved and he was walked the 30 feet to the
execution chamber.
He was strapped into the macabrely named “Old Sparky”. Built in
1923, it was the oldest electric chair in America. It had already put to
death 215 killers.
At exact noon, a hooded and anonymous executioner, paid $85 for the
job, flipped a switch that sent 2,000 volts through Bundy’s shuddering
body.
The execution was watched by 43 witnesses, state and prison officials,
plus 12 representatives of the media, and a dozen Florida citizens
picked from more than a thousand who applied by letter for the
“privilege” of seeing Bundy die from behind a glass panel.
Witnesses said that Bundy had to be supported by two prison officers
as he entered the death cell. He was described as having a look of
controlled anger on his face as the signal to switch the current was
given.
Outside the jail, Sheriff’s deputies struggled to keep order as a huge
crowd set off fireworks and cheered in a lynch-mob atmosphere.
A local radio DJ even urged listeners to turn off their toasters and
coffee makers “to give them more juice down there at the jail”.
After an autopsy, Bundy was buried in a tiny cemetery reserved for
execution victims inside the prison grounds. His grave is marked only
by a small concrete tablet bearing his name.
End
John Haigh: The acid bath murderer
John Haigh was known to the other residents of Kensington’s
Onslow Court Hotel as a successful businessman. He wore smart
suits and drove a sports car, but his money did not come from his
business. It came from murder.
When residents of the Onslow Court Hotel came down for breakfast on
the morning of 19 February 1949, they immediately noticed that one of
their number was missing. Mrs Olive Durand-Deacon, a wealthy 69-year
old widow, had been a permanent resident at the hotel for some years and
was noted for her punctiliousness. It was unlike her to be late for a meal.
Mrs Constance Lane, another resident and a close friend of Mrs Durand-
Deacon, was particularly concerned and decided to make a few discreet
enquiries. Her concern deepened when the hotel’s chamber maid told her
that Mrs Durand-Deacon’s bed had not been slept in.
Later that morning Mrs Lane was approached by another of the Onslow
Court’s residents, Mr John George Haigh. Haigh was something of an
odd man out at this genteel South Kensington establishment, a private
hotel which was almost exclusively the preserve of elderly, well heeled,
upper-class ladies. It was not that his presence was resented by the other
residents. On the contrary, most of the Onslow Court ladies found the
dapper 19-year old engineer handsome, charming and meticulously well
mannered. Mrs Durand-Deacon was a particular fan of his and the two of
them had taken to spending long hours huddled together in the lounge,
‘talking business’.
Haigh asked Mrs Lane if she knew Mrs Durand-Deacon’s whereabouts,
saying that they had had an appointment the previous day and that Mrs
Durand-Deacon had failed to show up. He did so hope she was all right.
Missed appointment
Mrs Lane already knew about the appointment. She had seen Mrs
Durand-Deacon just as she was about to leave the hotel, and she’d said
she was on her way to Haigh’s factory in Crawley to discuss a business
project. Mrs Lane could not understand how she could have “failed to
show up”.
Mrs Lane had never liked Haigh. He was too oily for her taste, and his
involvement with Mrs Durand-Deacon had always made her uneasy. She
instinctively mistrusted him, and now she had a creeping feeling that
something was seriously amiss.
Mrs Lane toyed with the idea of going to the police but realized that
there might be some perfectly innocent reason for Mrs Durand-Deacon’s
absence. So, anxious not to embarrass her friend or make a fool of
herself, she decided to wait.
The following morning, 20 February there was still no sign of Mrs
Durand-Deacon. Mrs Lane was at breakfast, pondering her next move,
when she was again approached by Haigh, expressing concern. Mrs Lane
was suddenly galvanized into action. She told Haigh that she was going
down to the police station to fill out a missing persons report, and that
she would like him to go with her. Haigh had little choice but to agree,
and he offered to drive them both down to Chelsea police station.
Fingernail scheme
The report Haigh made to the police was plausible enough. According to
him, Mrs Durand-Deacon had approached him for some technical
advice. She was thinking of starting a business, designing and
manufacturing artificial fingernails. She had already made prototypes but
she knew absolutely nothing about the technical side of things. Being an
engineer, perhaps he, Haigh, could give her a few pointers?
In reality, Haigh said, Mrs Durand-Deacon’s idea was a commercial non-
starter in ration-bound post-war England, but he had not wanted to hurt
her feelings and said he would be delighted to help. They had planned to
drive down to his workshop in Crawley to look at some materials from
which the nails could be made. He had arranged to meet Mrs Durand-
Deacon on the afternoon of 18 February at 2.30 p.m. outside the Army
and Navy Stores in Victoria Street. He had waited there until 3.30 p.m.,
but she had not arrived and he had driven down to Sussex alone. He was,
of course, extremely concerned about Mrs Durand-Deacon’s welfare, and
would do anything he could to help the police to locate her. The police
thanked Haigh for his cooperation and said that they would be in touch if
they thought of anything else.
Haigh drove Mrs Lane back to the Onslow Court Hotel, hoping that he
would hear no more of the matter. Four days later, however, on Thursday
24 February, Woman Police Sergeant Alexandra Lambourne went back
to the hotel to gather additional background information on Mrs Durand-
Deacon. She interviewed Haigh at some length and, like Mrs Lane, was
immediately repelled by his superficial charm and unctuous concern for
the well0being of the missing window. She was an experienced police
officer and was convinced that Haigh was lying.
WPS Lambourne had nothing to back up this gut feeling, but she felt
strongly enough about it to mention it in her report to her Divisional
Detective Inspector Shelley Symes. “Apart from the fact I do not like the
man Haigh and his mannerisms,” she wrote, “I have a sense that he is
‘wrong’, and there may be a case behind the whole business.”
Symes had enough respect for Sergeant Lambourne’s judgment to ask
the Criminal Record Division at Scotland Yard to run a check on Haigh.
Within a matter of hours, they came back to him with a file which
showed that John George Haigh had been jailed three times, twice for
obtaining money by fraud and once for theft. Further enquiries in
London and Sussex showed that he owed substantial sums of money, and
that he was in arrears with his bill at the Onslow Court Hotel.
On Saturday 26 February, Sergeant Pat Heslin and Police Sergeant
Appleton of the Sussex Constabulary went to see Mr Edward Jones,
owner of Hurstlea Products, a small engineering company located in
Giles Yard off Leopold Road in Crawley. Jones told the police that he
had known John Haigh for some years and over the past few months he
had let him have the use of a storehouse at the back of the factory for a
peppercorn rent. Haigh had been using the premises for some sort of
‘experimental work’, but had never said precisely what this entailed.
The police were anxious to look around the shed, but Jones told them
that Haigh had the only set of keys. So Heslin prised the padlock off the
door of the small brick built shed. At first glance the whitewashed
interior looked ordinary enough. There was the usual clutter, plant pots,
old bits of wood, a couple of work benches, carboys of chemicals,
protective clothing but then something caught the sergeant’s eye. On one
of the workbenches there was a small hat box and an expensive leather
briefcase. They simply didn’t belong.
Loaded gun
Heslin looked through the case and found a variety of papers and
documents, including ration books and clothing coupons. The contents of
the hat box included several passports, driving licenses and diaries, a
cheque book and a marriage certificate, none of which bore the name of
Haigh. At the bottom of the box was the most alarming find of all, a .38
Enfield revolver and a small white envelope containing eight bullets.
The following evening, 27 February John Haigh was invited back to
Chelsea police station to answer further questions. Haigh appeared to be
totally unconcerned as he was installed in the Divisional Detective’s
office with a cup of tea. He had actually dozed off by the time Detective
Inspector Symes, Inspector Albert Webb and Superintendent Barratt
arrived to interview him at 7.30 p.m.
They came at him well armed with evidence. Not only did they have the
obviously stolen documents from the Crawley workshop, they had also
traced Mrs Durand-Deacon’s jewellery to a dealer in Horsham, Sussex.
The dealer’s description of the seller matched John Haigh precisely, as
did that of a dry-cleaner to whom he had apparently taken Mrs Durand-
Deacon’s Persian lamb coat.
Confronted with this evidence, Haigh puffed on a cigarette, and said
calmly: “I can see you know what you’re talking about. I admit the coat
belonged to Mrs Durand-Deacon and that I sold her jewellery.”
“How did you come by the property.” Asked Symes, “and where is Mrs
Durand-Deacon?”
Haigh thought for a while before replying. “It’s a long story,” he
confided. “It’s one of blackmail and I shall have to implicate many
others.”
Just then, the telephone rang and Symes and Barratt were summoned
from the room. Left alone with Inspector Webb, the most junior of his
interrogators, Haigh switched tack. “Tell me frankly,” he asked, “what
are the chances of anyone being released from Broadmoor?”
Destroyed with acid
Webb’s immediate reaction to Haigh’s extraordinary question was to
caution him and advise him of his rights. Haigh dismissed the warning
with a wave of the hand. “If I told the truth,” he continued, “you would
not believe it. It is too fantastic for belief. I will tell you all about it. Mrs
Durand-Deacon no longer exists. She has disappeared completely and no
trace of her can ever be found. I have destroyed her with acid. You will
find the sludge that remains at Leopold Road. Every trace had gone.
“How can you prove a murder if there is no body?” Haigh added,
obviously pleased with himself.
Webb’s first reaction to Haigh’s confession was to disbelieve it. It was
simply too fantastic, too grotesque. Haigh was obviously setting himself
up for an insanity plea. After all, he had already mentioned Broadmoor.
When Symes and Barratt returned to the interview room, Webb asked
Haigh to repeat what he had said. Haigh did so. Symes cautioned him
again, but there was no stopping Haigh now. He talked for two and a half
hours, as Inspector Symes wrote.
He described the events of Friday 18 February in meticulous detail. He
told how he had picked up Mrs Durand-Deacon in his Alvis and driven
her down to Crawley. He described how she had bent over her handbag
to extract her fingernail designs and how, as she turned away from him,
he had pulled a .38 Enfield revolver from his jacket pocket and shot her
through the nape of the neck, killing her instantly. Haigh went on to
describe how he had then knelt by his victim’s body, made an incision in
her neck, gathered a few inches of her still coursing blood in a glass, and
drunk it.
Having slaked his thirst, Haigh claimed he had gathered together Mrs
Durand-Deacon’s valuables, the Persian lamb coat, rings, a necklace,
earrings and a gold crucifix, and stowed them in his car.
He had then proceeded to get rid of the body. The clutter which the
police found in the workshop was in fact the paraphernalia of Mrs
Durand-Deacon’s material destruction, carboys of sulphuric acid, a
specially lined metal drum, rubber gloves and apron, a gas mask and a
stirrup pump. Haigh had needed all these things in order to dissolve the
body. He had known precisely what to do. He had done it before.
Dressed to kill
He had laid the 45-gallon drum on its side and pushed Mrs Durand-
Deacon’s head and shoulders inside, and then righted the drum so that
the whole body slumped down to the bottom. He had then gone to the
“Ye Olde Ancient Priors’ restaurant in Crawley and ordered a poached
egg on toast and a cup of tea. On his return he had donned his rubber
apron, gloves, wellington boots and gas mask, and poured concentrated
sulphuric acid into the drum. “The question of getting the right amount
was only learned by experience,” he boasted.
Haigh said he adjusted the acid level to cover the entire body by using a
stirrup pump. Once satisfied, all he had to do was wait for the flesh and
bone to dissolve. He knew this would take at least two days, and so he
then went for dinner at The George Hotel’s restaurant, before driving
back to the Onslow Court Hotel.
Haigh went on to describe how, on the following Monday, he had
disposed of his victim’s jewellery for £110, and then returned to Crawley
and emptied the sludge, Mrs Durand-Deacon’s decomposed body, out of
the drum with a bucket, and poured it on to some waste ground at the
back of the shed.
Five other murders
The police said nothing as Haigh told his terrible story of murder and
theft, vampirism and genteel cups of tea. When he had finished with his
version of the demise of Mrs Durand-Deacon, Haigh moved back in time
and, by the early hours of 1 March, he had also confessed to five other
murders.
The first, he claimed, had been committed on 9 September 1944. The
victim had been an old acquaintance, William McSwan. He had killed
him in a basement flat in Gloucester Road. A year later, he had lured
William’s parents, Donald and Amy McSwan, to the same flat, and had
beaten them to death. He had forged Donald’s signature to gain power of
attorney over their estate.
While selling one of their properties some time in February 1948, he had
met Dr Archibald Henderson and his wife Rosalie. He had killed them in
the storeroom in Giles Yard.
In each case, he had acquired money or other property belonging to his
victims by skilful forgery and deception. Years after he had disposed of
their remains, he had written forged personal and business letters,
“successfully staving off enquiries from relatives, friends and
associates”.
Haigh added that he had destroyed all the bodies by means of his acid
bath method after drinking a glass of their blood.
The arrest of John Haigh caused an immediate public sensation. Stories
of acid baths, vampirism and murder are the stuff of which the tabloid
newspapers are made. Haigh’s remand at Horsham magistrates’ court
drew huge crowds, predominantly composed of jeering women.
On 4 March, after being transferred from the Chelsea police cells to
Lewes Prison, Haigh sprang more surprises. He asked to see Inspector
Webb, with whom he clearly felt some sort of affinity. He confided in the
young detective that he had committed three murders which he hadn’t
mentioned in his earlier statement, a woman and a youth in west London,
and a girl in Eastbourne. This brought his total to nine.
The police, however, were having their time cut out establishing a case
against Haigh for the murder of Mrs Durand-Deacon. Even though he
had admitted to the crime, to be certain of a conviction the prosecution
needed proof that she was in fact dead, and that Haigh had indeed killed
her.
The Home Office pathologist Dr Keith Simpson first carried out routine
blood tests at the workshop in Crawley and established that they were of
the same group as Mrs Durand-Deacon. Then he turned his attention to
the wasteland where Haigh claimed to have deposited the ‘sludge’ from
his acid bath. Soon he found a stone ‘the size of a cherry’. It was a
gallstone. Simpson handed it to Detective Sergeant Heslin, saying:
“There you are, Sergeant, that’s the first trace of a human body.” Heslin
congratulated the doctor on his good luck.
“It wasn’t luck,” Simpson snapped, “I was looking for it. Women of Mrs
Durand-Deacon’s age and habits, 69 and fairly plump, are prone to
gallstones.”
Simpson soon found more human remains, fragments of a left foot which
he managed to reconstruct and cast in plaster. The cast fitted one of Mrs
Durand-Deacon’s shoes perfectly. Then he found fragments of pelvic
bones and two discs from a lower spinal column.
Victim’s belongings
He discovered other non-human remains, the handle of a handbag, a
lipstick container, a hairpin and a notebook, all of which could be traced
back to the victim. His most sensational find, however, and the clincher
in the case, was a set of dentures which were categorically identified as
having belonging to Mrs Durand-Deacon.
In Lewes Prison Haigh was well aware of the forensic evidence being
amassed against him, but he remained optimistic. He was certain that he
could escape the gallows by convincing a jury that he was insane, and on
being told that Sir Maxwell Fyfe, the eminent barrister, was to represent
him, Haigh was delighted. He wrote: “I’m very glad to see we have got
old Maxy. He’s no fool.”
The trial of John Haigh for the murder of Mrs Durand-Deacon, that was
the only charge ever brought against him, opened at Lewes Assizes on
18 July 1949, and lasted less than two days.
There were no real questions as to whether Haigh had killed Mrs
Durand-Deacon. The case rested on whether or not he was sane. The
defence called Dr Henry Yellowlees, a consultant psychiatrist at St
Thomas’s Hospital, as an expert witness.
Doctor Yellowlees was no doubt an able man in his field, but he was a
rotten witness. “In the case of pure paranoia,” Yellowlees explained, “it
really amounts, as it develops and gets a greater hold, to practically self-
worship, and that is commonly expressed by the conviction in the mind
of the patient that he is in some mystic way under the control of a
guiding spirit which means infinitely more to him and is of infinitely
greater authority than any human laws or rules of society.”
Dr Yellowlees rambled on in this vein for some considerable time. He
was frequently interrupted by both Sir Travers Humphreys, the judge,
and Sir Hartley Shawcross, counsel for the prosecution, neither of whom
had the faintest idea what he was taking about. As for the jury, he had
lost them after the first few sentences and it took them only 13 minutes
to return a verdict of ‘guilty’ on John George Haigh. Sir Travers
Humphreys was equally speedy as he summoned the Black Cap and
condemned him to death.
Haigh was taken to Wandsworth to await execution.
Chambers of Horrors
As the day of his execution approached, Haigh’s apparently limitless
poise began to crumble. He started to suffer from depression and
complained of recurrent nightmares about blood. But despite this he
maintained his sense of theatre. He bequeathed his favorite suit and tie to
Madame Tussauds, ensuring himself his rightful place in the chamber of
Horrors, and he requested that the model of himself should show at least
one inch of shirt cuff.
Then Haigh became concerned about the hanging itself. He contacted the
prison governor, Major A.C.N. Benke, and requested to rehearse his own
execution. “My weight is deceptive,” Haigh insisted, “I have a light
springy step and I would not like there to be a hitch.”
The governor turned down his request, assuring him that the executioner
was highly experienced and that there would be no problems.
At 9 a.m. on the morning of 10 August, John Haigh was executed. His
depression had left him and he was his old self, all swank and swagger,
as he faced the gallows. That same day he was buried, as it the custom in
cases of execution, inside the prison walls.
End
Massacre in the New Forest
It started as a robbery of the house of a wealthy elderly couple. It
was to end in the death of five people, as the robbers indulged in a
horrifying orgy of rape and murder.
On a September evening in 1986 retired publisher, Joseph Cleaver and
his wife Hilda were at home in their mansion in the heart of Hampshire’s
New Forest, entertaining their son and his wife to dinner. The main
course had been cleared away and dessert had just been served by the
elderly nurse and housekeeper Margaret Murphy. Suddenly three masked
men wielding pick handles and a shotgun burst in.
A harsh voice from under one of the masks ordered the women to take
off their jewellery, and the men put their wallets and cash on the table.
Then all five were marched upstairs, tied and gagged, and placed on beds
or on the floor. Hilda Cleaver was tied to her wheelchair.
For over an hour the bandits ransacked the Cleavers’ home, the beautiful
Burgate House, which stood near the banks of the River Avon near
Brockenhurst. After collecting together, a pile of weapons from Joseph
Cleaver’s gun cabinet, a TV and video and a few other items, they went
looking for a wall safe they thought may contain several thousand
pounds.
Frustrated at their failure to find it, the intruders stormed upstairs. Then
they took turns to brutally rape 46-year old mother of two Wendy
Cleaver as she lay alone in one of the bedrooms. Then one of the men
rolled the weeping woman on to her front, took a length of black cloth
they had found in the house, looped it round her neck and strangled her.
Set on fire
But the savagery did not stop there. The robbery that had become a
murder was now to become a massacre. With chilling deliberation, the
gang sprinkled two gallons of petrol across the carpets, curtains, beds
and their victim’s lying helplessly trussed in the master bedroom.
In a final act of barbarity, one of the gang lit a firelighter and, as he ran
down the stairs, tossed it up over the landing and into the fuel-soaked
bedroom, with erupted into a ball of flames.
Joseph and Hilda Cleaver, son Tom, and nurse Margaret, who had
worked for the family for nearly 50 years, died in tortured agony, burned
alive.
Because Burgate House lay at the end of a winding drive in 14 acres of
its own ground, no-one spotted the blaze. But the vine-clad building did
not burn to the ground as the killers had planned.
The 19th-century house had been heavily rebuilt during the early 1940s.
Because timber was so scarce in the Second World War the builders had
replaced wooden beams and joists with concrete sections. It meant that
although furniture and fabric upstairs burned fiercely for several hours,
the house stayed intact with little outward sign of the conflagration
within.
The horrific events of the night before were not discovered until about
10.30 on the morning of 2 September when cleaner Nellie Taylor and
gardener Edgar Stubbings arrived for work and saw smoke still billowing
from upstairs windows.
They found clear signs that the downstairs rooms of the house had been
ransacked. The remains of the unfinished meal were still on the dining-
room table.
The Cleavers’ pet poodle was staggering and whimpering, its face
bloody where someone had hit it. The dog was so badly injured it later
had to be put to sleep.
From upstairs they heard whimpering from Wendy Cleaver’s two pet
long-haired dachshunds. They ventured upstairs and found the dogs
pawing at the door to a spare room. On the bed inside was the half
naked, bloodstained body of Wendy Cleaver.
The master bedroom was still a glowing mass of embers, too hot to enter.
Mr Stubbings tried to phone for the police, but found the telephone lines
had been cut. The couple hurriedly drove to the local police station to
report their horrific find.
Scene of crime officers Detective Constable Malcolm Slaughter was the
first CID officer into the building. He found evidence that petrol had
been doused over the carpets and furniture. Pieces of unburnt firelighter
were scattered randomly throughout the house.
Downstairs he noted that a gun cabinet had been cleared out and that
there had been a hunt for a wall safe, all but one picture in the entire
house having been left hanging to one side.
A bottle of milk, half empty, stood incongruously on the carpet amid the
antiques in a downstairs sitting-room and was carefully preserved for
fingerprints. A cocktail cabinet had been emptied of bottles of spirits.
Detective Chief Superintendent Alan Wheeler and Detective Chief
Inspector Dennis Luty of Hampshire CID both visited the scene. They
had little doubt that this was the work of at least two, maybe three, men.
But if this was just a robbery, why had the victims been so brutally
murdered? Could it be that the victims had recognized the intruders, thus
sealing their fate?
Prime suspect
Within a few hours, the experienced senior men thought they knew the
answer to that question and probably the identity of one of the killers.
Joseph Cleaver’s correspondence contained a letter from a Bournemouth
family. It was a reference to a couple called George and Fiona
Stephenson, who had applied for jobs as a live-in cook and handyman at
Burgate House.
Joseph Cleaver had placed an advert in the Bournemouth Evening Echo
in July, two months earlier. The Stephenson’s had replied and had got the
job. They had moved to a small cottage in the grounds the same month
but by the middle of August they had gone.
Mrs Stephenson had run away to stop the drunken beatings handed out
by her husband. On the night before she left she had fled to Burgate
House and had been given shelter by Mrs Murphy, after Stephenson had
hit her again in another drunken rage.
Shortly after, Joseph Cleaver, appalled at his employees’ behavior, had
sacked Stephenson. In themselves these facts could be said to mean
nothing. But after a check with the police national crime index, Wheeler
and Luty were 99 per cent certain they knew who was behind the
Fording bridge mass murder.
Previous convictions
Stephenson had been in jail several times. He had previous convictions
for burglary, fraud, theft, dishonest handling, drugs, assault and firearms
offences. While attempting to resist arrest in one incident he had squirted
a policeman in the face with tear gas spray.
The detectives went to Bournemouth, to the address on the letter found
Joseph Cleaver’s bureau. There they interviewed a married couple,
friends of Stephenson. In the front room was a TV and video recorder,
stolen from Burgate House.
The couple explained they had last seen Stephenson on the morning of
the murders. He had asked them if they wanted a TV to replace the one
they owned, which had gone wrong. The next morning, they had woken
to find the TV and video on their doorstep.
By that night, every police station in the country had been asked to join
the hunt for George Stephenson. By the next day, his picture was on TV
and in every national newspaper.
The message flashed to police throughout the UK described George
Stephenson as “armed and dangerous”. Detectives knew that he and his
accomplices had escaped from Burgate House with two double-barreled,
12-bore shotguns, a single barrel .410 shotgun, a .22 rifle and a dozen
boxes of ammunition.
Within hours of the TV and press appeals, the search had been switched
from the south of England to the Midlands and Coventry, where
Tyneside-born Stephenson had grown up as a teenager.
A car-hire company in Coventry contacted the police to say that
Stephenson had hired a red Rover 213 in the days before the killing. His
driving document details were on the hire form, but the deposit had been
paid by another man, 25-year old George Daly, who lived in Deedsmore
Road, Coventry.
Stephenson was shocked when he saw his picture on the TV news. He
telephoned police in Hampshire and said he was going to give himself
up.
Last night of freedom
He travelled south by train to Brockenhurst, where he spent his last night
of freedom on a crawl round four of the town’s pubs. Under his arm, he
carried a copy of the previous day’s Coventry Evening Telegraph, which
featured his picture on the front page.
In the Forester Arms Stephenson chatted up two girls who were staying
at a nearby campsite. After sharing several drinks with them, he accepted
an invitation to go back to their tent to carry on drinking after the pub
had closed.
They shared a bottle of red wine and smoked cannabis until about 2 a.m.
when he left them. He walked to the nearest public telephone box and
called the murder incident room, asking detectives to come to collect
him.
In the meantime, detectives in Coventry had raided the house in
Deedsmore Road and arrested George Daly and his 21-year old brother
John, who were handcuffed and driven south to Hampshire.
The trial
The trial of Stephenson and the two Daly brothers began at Winchester
Crown Court on 6 October 1987. All three men pleaded not guilty to five
counts of murder, Stephenson and George Daly pleaded not guilty to
rape, but John Daly pleaded guilty to rape and robbery.
Prosecuting QC David Elfer opened with a dramatic account of the
events at Burgate House on the night of the murders and immediately
after. He told the jury that Stephenson had planned to raid the house and
kill Mr and Mrs Cleaver because he wanted revenge for being given the
sack from his job as the handyman and because he was jealous of the
family’s wealth and elegant lifestyle.
Stephenson and the Daly brothers had prepared for the murders by
buying two-gallon cans of petrol and firelighters beforehand and taking
them to the house.
Mr Elfer said: “They were there for the money, guns, ammunition,
jewellery, a TV and video and any other valuables they could find.
“But the plan went further. No-one was going to be allowed to live to tell
the tale, and the house was then to be burned to the ground, covering all
clues to what happened that night. Nobody was going to be allowed to
come out alive”.
Mr Elfer said that Stephenson was the man who had thought up the plan.
“Precisely for that reason, it had to end in murder. If not, Stephenson
risked identification from his voice, his shape, possibly even recognition
through his sticking mask.
“But Burgate House didn’t die. It refused to collapse or go up in flames
as had been expected.
“They were not to realize that Burgate House is made entirely of
concrete, and instead of the fire catching the floor and wooden joists and
galloping though, it contained itself in one room.
Intact scene
“Thus, the following morning when the police and fire brigade came
they were able to see and have left to them all these grisly clues as to
what had taken place, right the way down to the dinner table and the
interrupted meal.”
Mr Elfer told the jury of eight men and four women that they would see
in evidence horrific pictures of burned bodies. He told them: “I must
warn you that the facts of this case are gruesome in the extreme.”
The court heard that having worked for the Cleavers for a few weeks,
Stephenson was familiar with the family’s routine. Dinner was always at
8 p.m. sharp and everyone was expected to dress for it. Stephenson also
knew that the Cleavers always left a front door key in the porch until 9
p.m. every night.
Bursting in
On the night of the murders, the three intruders had arrived quietly at
about 8.30 p.m. and let themselves in with the key from the porch. They
had brought their own weapons with them, pickaxe handles and stocking
masks, and Stephenson had also taken a shotgun from the gun cabinet in
the hall and loaded it before bursting in on the dinner party.
Stephenson had not expected to find five people in the house; he didn’t
realize Thomas and Wendy Cleaver would be there. Ironically, they were
only staying to help the elderly couple out while they looked for new
staff to replace the sacked Stephenson and his runaway wife.
Mr Elfer told the court how in the middle of the raid, Tom and Wendy’s
22-year old son Jason had telephoned from their home at Oxshott in
Surrey. He was suspicious when a strange man answered the phone and
refused to let him speak to any of his relatives.
When Jason rang for the third time the killers had united Thomas
Cleaver and forced him to the phone at gunpoint, where he was forced to
tell his son that his mother was in bed with the flu and everything was all
right.
Mr Elfer told the court that Wendy Cleaver had been beaten, and then
assaulted by all three men after her clothing had been ripped from her
body. In a tape-recorded interview with the police, John Daly told how,
after he had raped Mrs Cleaver, Stephenson had walked into the room
with a knife and piece of cloth and put them on the bed.
He told detectives: “He didn’t say anything, he just put them on the bed.
But I knew what they were for, to kill her with.
“I turned her on to her face, slipped the cloth round her neck and pulled
tight. Her face went blue and she died.”
When detectives asked Daly how long he had strangled Mrs Cleaver for,
he replied: “About five minutes.”
His elder brother George told detectives that while he was loading booty
from the house into the hired Rover, Stephenson told him: “They are
already dead and I have poured petrol on them.”
John told the police that it was his brother who lit the deadly firelighter
and tossed it into the petrol-soaked bedroom.
Wanted for murder
Stephenson, the jury were informed, had told police he was shocked
when he saw his picture on TV and had given himself up in order to
clear his name. But Mr Elfer said that after phoning the police
Stephenson had waited almost a day before giving himself up in order to
concoct an alibi and to give the Daly brothers time to hide the guns and
to dump jewellery and other stolen items in a canal.
When he did talk to detectives he told them that he had driven to
Bournemouth from Coventry on the day of the murders and had given a
lift to two Hell’s Angels he saw hitch-hiking.
He told the detectives: “I was telling them about the house. It must have
been them that went there and killed them.”
Some of the most damning evidence against all three men were given by
Ruth Smith, who lived in Coventry with George Daly. She told the jury
that Stephenson and the Daly brothers had arrived at the house in Elgar
Road at about 3 a.m. on the morning of 2 September, about six hours
after the murders had been committed.
The three men had a collection of bottles with them including wine, gin,
vodka and whisky, and immediately sat down and had a rowdy drinking
session until dawn.
She also told how the men had brought five guns in leather cases and
boxes of ammunition into the house from the hired car. She was later to
identify four of the guns to the police.
Removing the evidence
Ruth also spoke of the ‘panic’ to get the guns out of the house when
George Stephenson’s face appeared on television and said she had seen
them carried out in a plastic bin liner. Detectives later got the guns back,
after John Daly told them where they were hidden.
Ruth said: “George said his picture had been on TV. He said that five
people had been murdered and that the police thought it was him., but he
was innocent. He then went and shaved off his beard and moustache and
said he was going back to Hampshire to clear his name.”
Some of the most dramatic evidence came in the form of tape-recorded
interviews which was played to the court. George Daly sat in the dock
with his head in his hands crying as a recording of an interview with
detectives was played. In it he described the moment he threw the lit
firelighter over the landing banister.
Recorded interview
On the tape, he said: “After putting some stuff in the car I went back into
the house and it stank of petrol. Stephenson came down the stairs and
said they were all dead.
“I thought they were just going to be left tied up. He said we would have
to burn the house, so I lit a firelighter and threw it over the rail as I was
on the stairs. There was no bang. It just went up in a big flash.”
John Daly also wept as he heard his own voice describing to detectives
how he had raped and murdered Wendy Cleaver.
He said: “I thought it was just going to be a robbery. I thought we would
get thousands. I never thought I would have to do anything.”
Daly had then demonstrated to the detectives how he had throttled Mrs
Cleaver, motioning with his hands to show how he had crossed them
over and then pulled the ribbon tight until she was dead.
Blaming each other
As the trial wore on, the defendants used ‘cut throat’ defence techniques,
each blaming the other for what had taken place. When it came to
George Stephenson’s turn to testify, he changed his story from the one he
had told the police, claiming he had made up the story about picking up
the two Hell’s Angels hitch-hikers. He said he had been to Burgate
House on the day of the murders, but had acted only as a getaway driver
and had stayed outside in his car while the Daly brothers went in to steal
the guns.
He said: “I would not have harmed them. They were lovely people; they
had been good to me.”
“Man with no conscience”
His defence earned him a stiff rebuke from George Daly’s counsel, Mr.
Anthony Palmer QC, who told him: “The only way out for you now is to
blame the Daly brothers to try and save your own wretched skin. You are
a man with no conscience.”
George Daly later testified that he had walked into the bedroom at
Burgate House and seen Stephenson attack Wendy Cleaver while still
holding a shotgun in one hand.
Daly told the court: “I am telling the truth. I have nothing to lose because
I am going to be found guilty and sent to jail for life anyway. I am not
daft enough to think I am going to get off this.”
But, unlike his younger brother, George Daly denied vehemently that he
had raped Wendy Cleaver.
In his closing speech David Elfer, prosecuting QC told the jury that all
three men had plotted the “holocaust” together and were all equally
guilty.
He told them: “Is there one of them that is not guilty of robbery? Is there
one who is not guilty of rape? And is there one of them who was not a
party to the mayhem, carnage and murders that took place at Burgate
House?”
On the 17th day of the trial, the jury returned after five-and-a-half hours
to announce guilty verdicts on the rape charges against both Stephenson
and George Daly. John Daly had already pleaded guilty to the rape
charge.
But it was not until the next day, 28 October 1987, that they were able to
make up their minds and convict Stephenson of murder. He was given
six life sentences with a recommendation that he should not be released
for 25 years.
Indescribable brutality
Passing sentence, Mr Justice Hobhouse told him: “These murders were
committed in circumstances of indescribable brutality and cruelty. You
showed no mercy and deserve none.”
John Daly, the youngest gang member, was given seven life terms for
rape, robbery and five murders. His brother George, the man who set off
the murderous inferno, was cleared of murder but convicted of
manslaughter. The judge said he was not satisfied that he had intended to
kill anyone but told him: “You showed a reckless disregard for human
life.” He was jailed for 22 years.
As the sentences were announced Stephenson, who had tried to pin the
blame on his two co-defendants, sneered at George Daly standing
alongside him. Daly tried to attack him and the two men were separated
and pinioned by prison officers. When order was restored Stephenson
smiled at the jury, then swaggered down the steps from the dock to the
cells below.
Stephenson’s wife Fiona was not in court to see her husband jailed. They
had married just nine months before the murders after a whirlwind, two-
week romance. The beating had started almost immediately. Unbeknown
to Stephenson, Fiona had called the police after reading about the
murders and put her husband’s name forward as a prime suspect.
Guilty of mass murder
Before he had arrived in the Bournemouth area Stephenson made a small
fortune as a drug smuggler. He set up his own shipping organization
moving loads of cannabis from Morocco. He drove them overland
himself, hidden in specifically prepared compartments in camper vans
and cars, and fooled Customs by posing as an innocent tourist.
His brother Bill said after the trial: “Even in the 1970s he was making
over £40,000 a year bringing drugs into Britain.”
Stephenson also dealt in cocaine, amphetamines and LSD. He was a
target for surveillance by West Midlands drug squad and Customs, but
his only conviction was for possession of a small amount of cannabis.
Bribed officials
He narrowly escaped a long sentence in a Turkish jail when two of his
partners were caught with a load of cannabis. Stephenson baster boasted
to his friends that it had cost him a small fortune to bribe officials to get
his cohorts released. He was an enthusiastic drug user himself and police
believed that on the night of the murders he had taken several tablets of
amphetamine and possibly heroin to get him in the right frame of mind
to commit his heinous crimes.
Stephenson had wanted to steal guns from Burgate House because he
wanted to use them in an armed robbery. Together with the Daly
brothers, the ruthless Stephenson had already carried out a
reconnaissance of the wages office of a factory in Nuneaton,
Warwickshire, with a view to stealing the payroll. But he discovered that
the cash was heavily guarded and decided they needed untraceable guns
for a successful attack.
Stephenson knew there was a small arsenal at Burgate House and a raid
would also enable him to get revenge on the family who had sacked him.
During his trial, it was alleged that Stephenson had already carried out a
similar robbery in 1986. George Daly testified that Stephenson had taken
him to look at a house in Poole, Dorset, where he claimed he and two
accomplices had done a successful ‘tie up’ robbery.
Robbery in Poole
They managing director of the B&Q DIY chain, James Hodkinson,
testified in court that he and his wife had been tied up and robbed when
three men armed with a sawn-off shotgun and knife had burst into their
home. They had escaped with cash and jewellery worth over £40,000.
But the gang had been wearing masks and Mr Hodkinson could not
identify Stephenson as one of the robbers. A detective said afterwards:
“We think Stephenson may well have been involved in the Poole
robbery. It was his style and he was certainly living in the area at the
time, but he had not admitted it and we have no way of knowing for
sure.”
End
Dennis Nilsen: Sleeping with the Dead
Dennis Nilsen was a quiet, ordinary man. His dreadful crimes went
undetected until a cold February day when the drains became
blocked.
To the tenants living in the flats at 23 Cranley Gardens in the middle-
class London suburb of Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen had been the
perfect neighbor. Quiet, polite and considerate, the shy, bespectacled
bachelor lived alone in the top flat with only a small dog and a car for
company.
The other four residents had not had the faintest idea that the softly
spoken civil servant had spent spare moments over the last five years
butchering a series of young men. For Dennis Nilsen, a 37-year old
former police officer and soldier was about to be exposed as the worst
mass murderer in British history.
His neighbours had no idea that above their heads Nilsen had throttled
three men to death, then chopped up their bodies and flushed their flesh
down the lavatory. Neither could they have the faintest clue that at his
previous flat in north London the Job Centre clerk who liked listening to
classical music had done to death a further 12 young men, sometimes
sleeping with their decomposing bodies, hiding their remains under his
floorboards and finally destroyed all traces of them on a bonfire.
The first hint of the horrors came during the first weekend in February
1983, when lavatories in the house, which had been converted to flats,
refused to flush properly. The problem became so bad that one tenant
called in the specialist drain clearance firm Dyno-Rod.
Rotting flesh
An engineer descended into an inspection pit at the side of the house and
found it inches deep in what looked, and smelled, like rotting flesh. He
was so concerned that he decided to get his boss to take a look, but that
couldn’t happen until the next day.
During the night, a woman in one of the downstairs flats heard the sound
of footsteps repeatedly padding down the stairs from the attic flat and
going outside. They came and went a dozen times or more. When he
returned the next day, the drain engineer noticed that the cover plate on
the inspection shaft had been moved. And when he went back into the
shaft he saw that the mass of flesh had mysteriously vanished. But
whoever had been at work had not been quite thorough enough. In the
mouth of the pipe leading into the chamber were lodged some small
bones and a piece of what looked like cooked chicken. The engineer was
convinced there had been a murder and called the police.
Detectives from the local police station at Hornsey came and removed
the suspicious-looking fragments. Within hours it was confirmed by their
laboratories, they were human finger bones, and the ‘chicken’ was
human flesh.
Police were waiting
It was 9 February. That evening, when Nilsen came home from his office
in nearby Kentish Town, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay and his
colleague Inspector Steve McCusker were waiting for him in the
hallway.
Chief Inspector Jay greeted him with the line later immortalized by Fleet
Street newspapers. “Good evening Mr Nilsen. I’ve come to talk to you
about your drains.” Nilsen replied that he was surprised the police should
be interested in blocked drains, and asked if Detective Inspector
McCusker was some sort of health official. “I am interested in your
drains, Mr Nilsen,” replied Jay, “because they are clogged with human
remains.”
It was on 30 December 1978 that Nilsen had turned killer for the first
time. After a Christmas spent alone he went drinking in the Crinklewood
Arms, a pub frequented by many of the local Irish population.
Towards the end of an evening of heavy drinking, he fell in company
with an Irish youth about 18. When the pub closed, Nilsen invited his
new friend back to his flat. The couple went to bed together bit fell
asleep without having sex.
Later, Nilsen awoke and was overcome with the urge to murder his
companion. He grabbed a tie from the end of the bed and looped it
around his sleeping victim’s neck. There was a furious struggle, but after
a minute or so the young Irishman’s body went limp.
To make doubly sure he was dead, Nilsen fetched a bucket of water from
the kitchen and held his victim’s head in it until all signs of life were
gone. The Nilsen began one of the bizarre rituals which he was to
conduct time and time again.
He filled the bath with warm water and gently lowered his victim in,
carefully washing his body and hair with soap. He then dried the body
and put it in his bed. He removed the corpse before he went to bed
himself and laid it on the floor. The next day he placed it under the
floorboards of his room. But a week later he took up the carpet again,
removed the body and lovingly gave it another warm bath.
He put the body back under the floorboards, where it remained for nearly
eight months, until August 1979, when Nilsen wrapped it in plastic bin
liners and destroyed it on a big bonfire of old fence posts and furniture at
the bottom of the garden.
Two months later, he came close to killing again. He met a young student
from Hong Kong in the West End and took him back to Melrose Avenue.
There he made a half-hearted effort to strangle him with a tie. The
student fought him off, ran away and called the police. Nilsen was
questioned, but there was no further action when the student said he did
not want to prosecute.
As well as the murders, Nilsen was later to admit to attempting to kill
nine other men by strangling them.
His second killing was not until almost a year after the first. On 3,
December 1979 Nilsen had a day off work for Christmas shopping. At
lunchtime in the famous Princess Louise pub in Holborn, he got into a
conversation with 19-year old Kenneth Ockendon, a Canadian visitor.
Despite being due to fly home for Christmas with his family the next
day, Ockendon went back to Melrose Avenue for a meal and a heavy
drinking session.
Ockendon was listening to music through headphones when Nilsen
strangled him with the flex. After he was dead, Nilsen stripped him and
gave him the ritual hot bath, then slept with the corpse next to him on the
top of the double bunk bed he had constructed for himself. The next day,
he wrapped the stiffening body in warm clothing and placed it under the
floorboards. During the next fortnight Nilsen retrieved Ockendon’s
corpse three or four times from his hiding place and sat it in an armchair
so that they could watch TV together.
Reported missing
Kenneth Ockendon was one of the few victims that were reported
missing. The alarm was raised when he failed to return to the hotel room
he had been renting in central London. Police knew something must be
wrong because his passport and most of his belongings were still there
and his return air ticket to Canada was never used. His parents even flew
to London and searched the streets and bars trying to find him. But after
several weeks without further news, there was nothing police could do
except consign his file to the missing person’s bureau at Scotland Yard.
Victim number three was Martyn Duffey, aged 16, from Birkenhead,
who had come to London looking for work. The pair met in May 1980 in
the West End and Duffey went back to Melrose Avenue, where he was
strangled as he slept in Nilsen’s bed. Nilsen told detectives that he
realized his victim was unconscious but still alive. He carried him to the
kitchen, where he filled the sink with water and held the body’s head
under for several minutes.
Afterwards, there was a slight variation on the bath routine. After filling
the tub, Nilsen got in with his new dead friend and carefully washed him.
He then dried him off and placed him in a cupboard.
After two days Nilsen was distressed to find that the body was starting to
show signs of decomposition, and immediately consigned him to the
usual resting place under the floor, where the temperature was much
cooler.
Victim number four, 27-year old Billy Sutherland, a fellow Scot, met
Nilsen in a West End pub just a few days after the Martyn Duffey
murder. Sutherland, originally from Edinburgh, was well known in the
West End as a gay prostitute. The two spent the evening drinking in pubs
near Piccadilly. At closing time Nilsen left to go home on the
underground.
Uninvited guest
He later told police that he originally had no intention of taking
Sutherland home with him, but when he got to the tube station he found
Sutherland had followed him. At Melrose Avenue, the uninvited guest
fell into a drunken sleep. His host strangled him with his bare hands, and
after the usual washing ceremony placed him under the floorboards to
join the others.
The fifth victim is known only to be a young man from the Far East, the
Philippines or Thailand. Nilsen met him in a West End pub, took him
home and strangled him to death with a tie, placing his remains once
more into the increasingly crowded space under the floor.
Nilsen’s recollection of how his next three victims met their deaths was
even more vague. All of them had been killed after heavy drinking
sprees of whisky and Bacardi rum. All Nilsen could tell detectives was
that the first was a young Irish labourer, another was a starving ‘hippy
type’ he found sleeping in a doorway on London’s Charing Cross Road,
and the third he could hardly remember at all. He could not even recall
any of their first names.
Scottish victims
Victims nine and ten were both young Scots, one picked up in the
Golden Lion pub in Soho’s Dean Street and the next from another pub
nearby.
The 11th victim was a tough-looking skinhead who was picked up near
the infamous ‘meat rack’ area of Piccadilly where young gays
congregated. The skinhead, who had tattoos on his arms and body,
including one round his throat that said ‘cut here’, had boasted to Nilsen
how much he liked fighting and how tough he was. But when he fell
asleep after a dozen cans of beer and several whiskies he was no match
for his companion, who crept up behind him and throttled his with a
ligature. He was then hung naked for 24 hours from Nilsen’s bunk while
the killer examined his torso. He was then bathed and hidden in the usual
place.
Lucky escape
Another potential victim had a lucky escape in late 1980.
On 10, November, Nilsen met 26-year old Douglas Stewart in the West
End. After a heavy drinking session, Stewart agreed to go back to
Melrose Avenue with Nilsen. Stewart fell asleep in an armchair and
woke to find Nilsen had tied his ankles together and was trying to
throttle him with a tie. Stewart fought back, and when he got the upper
hand Nilsen gave up.
But the would-be victim had noticed that at the beginning of the attack
Nilsen had been armed with a large kitchen knife, which had been
dropped in the ensuing struggle.
Stewart finally ran from the house and called the police from a phone
box. Tow officers accompanied him back to Melrose Avenue where they
confronted Nilsen. But the officers decided that the matter was no more
than a ‘domestic’ argument between homosexuals, and they left without
taking further action.
Malcolm Barlow, a drifter aged 24, originally from the Sheffield area,
was the last to die at Melrose Avenue, in September 1981. He was
another streetwise petty crook, already known to police as a male
prostitute, pickpocket and sneak thief. He suffered wild extremes of
behavior, was educationally subnormal and suffered from epilepsy.
On 17, September, Nilsen discovered Barlow slumped against a wall in a
state of collapse only yards from his own front door as he was on his
way to work. Nilsen took pity on the man, and when Barlow said he was
ill from the effects of drugs he was taking for epilepsy Nilsen took him
home and called an ambulance.
That would have been the end of the matter. But after being released
from hospital Barlow went back to Melrose Avenue and sat on the
doorstep of number 195 until Nilsen came home. He was invited in for a
meal and few drinks.
Later that evening, Barlow met his inevitable end, being manually
throttled by the ‘good Samaritan’ who had come to his aid not 24 hours
earlier. In a hurry the next morning, because he was late for work, Nilsen
pushed Barlow’s lifeless body into the cupboard under the kitchen sink,
where he stayed until his killer had more time to consign him to the usual
spot under the floor.
Detectives copying Nilsen’s Melrose Avenue confessions noted that they
ranged from being minutely detailed to vague in the extreme. In many
cases, he had been very drunk and claimed he could only remember
waking up in the morning next to a body.
A new venue
Nilsen moved to Cranley Gardens in October 1981. There, Three more
men were to die and other were to have narrow escapes.
Seven weeks after he moved there, Nilsen went back to one of his old
haunts, The Golden Lion pub in Soho, and chatted up a 25-year old
student, Paul Nobbs. The men had round after round of drinks. Later,
Nobbs accepted his new friend’s invitation to go home with him to carry
on partying. At some point, Nobbs passed out. In the morning, he awoke
with a bad hangover, and a sore and bruised throat. Later he went to the
hospital, where a doctor told him it appeared someone had tried to
strangle him.
Nobbs decided against going to the police. The story only emerged when
Nilsen himself was telling all. He said: “I tried to strangle him with a tie.
He struggled and I suddenly snapped out of it and stopped trying to kill
him.”
Another guest who had a close call with death was a drag artist, Carol
Stottor, who used the stage name Khara le Fox. They met in a pub in
Camden and went back to the Muswell Hill flat where, Nilsen lent
Stottor a sleeping bag, warning him the zip was dangerous. Stottor later
awoke with Nilsen pulling the zip so tight that he passed out. He came to
in a bath of cold water, with his host trying to push his head under.
Bonfire of bodies
Although having stiff and rotting corpses under his floors didn’t worry
Nilsen, he knew that such anti-social habits inevitably carried health
risks and increased his chance of being found out.
Throughout the marathon questioning sessions after his arrest, he often
spoke of how he expected a knock on his door from the police
investigating the disappearance of several people. He told Chief
Inspector Jay: “I just couldn’t understand why no-one was coming for
me. All these murders, yet no-one seemed to know.”
Nilsen went on to give the detectives a spine-chilling account of how he
got rid of the remains hidden in his home.
Having burned the corpses of his first victim, by the summer of 1979
Nilsen was faced with getting rid of the bodies of Kenneth Ockendon
and another unidentified man he had strangled.
Removing the bodies
After lifting the floorboards and taking out the bodies, one of which was
smelling through advanced decomposition, Nilsen carefully cut off the
heads, removed all the main organs, and cut the torso into pieces. He
then stuffed the remains into some old suitcases and took them to a shed
he had built near the end of the garden. He covered the cases with piles
of newspapers weighed down with a stack of bricks and rubble. The
remains were to stay in the shed for another six months.
Having cleared out the space under his floor, the area was soon
reoccupied with new ‘guests’, three men he murdered in September,
October and November of 1980. By the end of the year, the total had
risen to four and Nilsen was facing a severe shortage of space once
again.
Nilsen removed the corpses and, using only a sharp kitchen knife and his
knowledge of butchery, set about dissecting his unfortunate victims.
DIY ‘autopsies’
He described in graphic detail to the police how he would start by
removing the hands and feet, which were then washed, dried, and packed
into plastic rubbish bags. Nilsen then skilfully removed the heart, lungs,
kidney, liver and other major organs and packed them into more bags. He
then described how he cut the arms and legs into sections before severing
the torso into two halves, all of which were given the bin-bag treatment.
Remarkably Nilsen took no measure to safeguard his own health, usually
working stripped to his underpants and using only a battery of deodorant
sticks to combat the nauseating odours.
After completing his DIY ‘autopsies,’ he repacked all the grisly parcels,
except the ones containing the organs, under the floor again. Under the
cover of darkness, he tipped the bags containing the heart, lungs etc. into
a gap between a fence and wall, noting with satisfaction that within a
couple of days there was no trace of them. The local foxes, rats and cats
had done their work.
In December 1980, he built an enormous bonfire, five feet high, on the
waste ground that lay just beneath the fence at the end of his garden. He
used long sections from an old tree that had been felled, plus old
furniture and any other combustible junk he could find. In the centre of
the pile, he left a large hole.
The next morning, before it got light, Nilsen took the bundles of human
remains from under his floor, tied them up in rolls of old carpet, and
dragged them into the garden and through a gap in the fence to the
bonfire site, where he placed them at the centre of the main timbers.
Next, he went to the shed and started to remove the cases packed full of
more human flesh and bone, which had been there since mid-summer.
The cases on the bottom had burst open because of the weight of those
on top, and even though it was the depth of winter the place was alive
with maggots and bluebottles.
As he dragged the cases to the bonfire, several fell apart, scattering their
putrid contents on the ground. Nilsen had to scramble about in the dark
to find all the pieces and get them onto the funeral pyre he had
constructed.
Disguising the smell
Before using lighter fuel to ignite the stack of wood and bodies he threw
several old car tyres on top, hoping that the smell of burning rubber
would disguise the smell of cooking flesh. The fire blazed furiously for
several hours, only attracting the attention of a few children who came to
watch until Nilsen told them it was dangerous to get too close.
When the flames finally died down Nilsen surveyed the glowing embers
for telltale signs and spotted a skull intact at the centre. He smashed it
with a garden rake, then stirred up the embers to look for signs of any
other clearly recognisable human bones.
His task done, Nilsen bathed, shaved and dressed, and went for a drink in
the West End. In a pub in St Martin’s Lane he met a young man and took
him home to Melrose Avenue. In the morning, the pair had tea and toast,
and the visitor left unharmed.
But by mid-1981, the space under his living room floor had four new
occupants, all nicely cut up and packaged in plastic.
In October of that year the landlord, who had been trying to get the
house back and wanted his tenants to leave, offered Nilsen £1000, plus
the added inducement of a pleasant rented flat in Cranley Gardens,
Muswell Hill. Nilsen, eager for several reasons to leave Melrose Avenue,
agreed to the proposal and was to be out by October. Two days before he
was due to leave, he constructed another huge bonfire.
More sleepers, old doors and broken furniture were carefully constructed
into another home-made crematorium. From under the boards, he took
his vile bags of human remains and put them on the fire. From under the
kitchen sink, a torso was dragged across the back lawn and through the
gap in the fence.
Nilsen topped off the pile with more old tyres, and the bunk bed which
he had built himself and in which several of his victims had met their
deaths.
Destroying the evidence
It was another huge inferno. After the flames died down he examined the
cooling ashes and noticed it was littered with bone fragments. When the
last glow from the embers died out he rolled the site several times with
the garden roller, hoping to crush any pieces into powder.
Before leaving, he remembered he had hidden Malcolm Barlow’s arms
in a hole in the garden. He dug them up and broke the bones up with a
spade, casually slinging what was left into the waste ground near the
bonfire.
The next day he left for Cranley Gardens.
Attack in the park
When Stottor struggled Nilsen apologized and said he had placed him in
the water to try and revive him. Stottor later claimed that the next day,
while walking in a park, Nilsen attacked him again, knocking him to the
ground with a blow from behind. Stottor only went to the police a year
later, after reading of Nilsen’s arrest.
The first murder victim at Cranley Gardens was John Howlett, a former
member of the Grenadier Guards who was well known around the West
End simply as John ‘the Guardsman’. He had met Nilsen several times
before the night in December 1981 when they ran into each other in the
Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane.
The two men went to an off-licence for whisky and beer and then took
the underground to Highgate and Nilsen’s flat. Thereafter more heavy
boozing, Howlett announced he was going to bed, went to Nilsen’s
bedroom and climbed between the sheets. Nilsen didn’t want him there
and offered to call a taxi to take him home. But Howlett refused to get
out of bed and went back to sleep. It was a decision that cost him his life.
Nilsen fetched a piece of loose upholstery strap from an armchair, wound
it around Howlett’s neck and started to strangle him, saying: “It is time
you went.”
Howlett did not die easily. He put up a tremendous struggle until Nilsen
bashed his head against a wall. Nilsen made two further attempts to
choke the life out of Howlett, but his intended victim then got his hands
on Nilsen’s throat and tried to throttle him. Eventually Nilsen got the
better of him, and Howlett passed out. But the ex-soldier’s heart kept
beating strongly. Nilsen dragged him into a bath full of water, but as he
pushed his head under Howlett revived and fought back with renewed
strength. It was another five minutes before he finally drowned.
John ‘the Guardsman’
Nilsen later told detectives that Howlett had almost killed him in the
struggle.
He told them: “I had bruises on my throat for days after, where he tried
to throttle me.”
Now a new set of problems faced Nilsen. Unlike in his previous flat, he
had no access to a garden. Nor were there floorboards at Cranley
Gardens. Nilsen stashed Howlett in a wardrobe for several days while he
tried to think of a plan. The only answer was to cut the body up and get
rid of it piece by piece.
He put the body in the bath. Using only a sharp kitchen knife, he opened
the stomach area and removed the liver, kidneys and spleen, later going
higher into the chest cavity to get at the heart and lungs. These were all
cut up into pieces about two inches square on a chopping board and
flushed down the lavatory in batches weighing between eight and twelve
ounces.
To speed the process along, Nilsen tried to render down larger portions
by boiling them. The head, hands, feet and ribs, cut from the torso one by
one, where thus boiled on the kitchen stove in a large jam making pan,
using two burners to create enough heat. Nilsen then threw the shoulder
blades onto a bramble bed on a vacant plot at the rear of his home but
decided it was too risky to get rid of other large bones in the same way.
He put some of the smaller ones out with his usual household rubbish.
The skull, thigh and arm bones and the pelvis were given a heavy coating
of salt, put into plastic supermarket bags and packed into a tea chest in
his living room. There they remained undisturbed for nearly a year until
the police came knocking.
The next victim, Graham Allen, was another drunken drifter that Nilsen
picked up in Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End. He was taken
back to Cranley Gardens and strangled as he ate an omelette Nilsen had
ready for him. The unfortunate Allen was dumped straight in the bath
and left for three days while Nilsen prepared for his next act of butchery.
Once again the larger portions were boiled on the kitchen stove, and hair,
blood, flesh and smaller bones were either flushed down the lavatory or
were put out in black sacks for the dustman. The skull and remaining
large bones went in the tea chest.
The final victim
The final victim was Steve Sinclair, a 20-year old drug addict, originally
from Perth, who was suffering the early stages of the AIDS virus.
On 26 January, Sinclair, who lived in squats or Salvation Army hostels
and stole to live, met Nilsen in Goslett Yard, London. He scrounged a
hamburger off Nilsen at a McDonald’s in Oxford Street, then agreed to
go home with him. On the way, they stocked up with booze at an off-
licence.
At the flat Sinclair drank beer and injected himself with heroin, then
settled down in a drug and drink induced stupor in an armchair in front
of the TV. It was there that Nilsen strangled him, using a necktie once
more.
Nilsen was now only eight days from arrest.
After keeping Sinclair’s body intact for several days, and bizarrely
dressing the corpse in his own clothes, Nilsen started the process of
dissecting, boiling and flushing the remains. It was parts of the body of
Stephen Sinclair that eventually blocked the drains.
Blocked drains
At first, Nilsen pretended to be shocked when Jay told him what was
blocking the drains. In fact, he had been expecting arrest for four days,
ever since the trouble with the lavatories had affected the whole house.
His denials were destroyed in less than 60 seconds. Jay was blunt and to
the point. “Don’t mess me about, Dennis; where is the rest of the body?”
With a sign of resignation, Nilsen replied: “It’s in plastic bags in the
wardrobe in the next room.”
The detectives didn’t need to unlock the cupboard. The smell alone told
them what they needed to know.
Nilsen was arrested. Sitting outside in the back of a CID car, McCusker
offered Nilsen a cigarette and asked him: “What are we talking about
here, Dennis; one body, or two?” The matter of fact reply stunned the
experienced detectives.
“Fifteen or sixteen since 1978. Three here, and about a dozen where I
used to live.”
At the police station, Nilsen was obviously keen to unburden himself of
the dreadful secret he had kept for five years. Within the first few
minutes, he told the incredulous detectives that there were, in fact, bits of
three men in plastic bin liners in a tea chest and in cupboards at Cranley
Gardens.
Over the next 30 hours, Nilsen told how the rest of his victims had all
been murdered at his previous home on Melrose Avenue.
The trial of Dennis Nilsen commenced at the Old Bailey before a packed
court on Monday 24 October 1983.
He was charged with the murder of six of the seven men police had been
able to identify: Sinclair, Ockendon, Sutherland, Barlow, Duffey and
Howlett, and with the attempted murder of Douglas Stewart and Paul
Nobbs. To each count, he pleaded not guilty.
After hearing a welter of evidence from psychiatrists who had examined
Nilsen, and Nilsen’s extraordinary confessions to the police, the jury of
eight men and four women listened to the closing speeches.
Sir Allan Green QC for the prosecution stated that Nilsen, although sick
of mind, was still in control of himself and was aware of what he was
doing throughout his appalling acts. Put simply, he was a man who
enjoyed killing and derived satisfaction from the act itself. If they were
satisfied this was the case, then the jury must find him guilty of murder,
he told them.
The defence, conducted by another of Britain’s finest legal minds, Ivan
Lawrence QC, was that Nilsen committed all his acts through mental
illness. During his summing up he told the jury: “In common terms, one
would have to say that anyone capable of committing such crimes must
be out of his mind.”
In his closing address, the judge, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson, reminded
the jury: “There are evil people who do evil things, and committing
murder is one of them. A mind can be evil, without being abnormal.”
After five years of horror and millions of words written and spoken, it
was a matter of deciding whether Dennis Nilsen was mad, or just bad.
The jury retired to consider their verdict on Thursday 3 November. It
took them 24 hours to find Nilsen guilty by a ten to two majority
decision on all the murders.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation from the
judge that he serve a minimum of 25 years.
Killing for company or killing for sex?
Why Dennis Nilsen became a mass murderer remains a mystery. Many
psychiatrists studied his case; all formed different conclusions.
Nilsen himself told detectives that he had no idea what drove him to such
terrible acts. When first arrested, he seemed to show no remorse for what
he had done, though he did sometimes speak of his own amazement that
he could have carried out such unspeakable acts. It was only later while
awaiting trial, that he spoke of his sorrow, and then only in the case of
Kenneth Ockendon, whom he had taken from a family who loved and
missed him.
One popular theory is that he killed because he was lonely. In the first
case of the young Irishman, Nilsen had met him in a pub, took him
home, and knew he would probably never see the youth again after he
left the next morning.
Kenneth Ockendon, his second victim, was due to fly home to Canada
the day after they first met. Did Nilsen kill him so that he would not be
alone?
More weight had been added to this theory by his own accounts of the
outlandish rituals that later took place, with some victims being washed,
hidden, then ‘exhumed’ from under the floor to be dressed and treated
like old friends.
Sexual motive
May experts believe that the killings were sex crimes, but according to
Nilsen’s own accounts only about half of the murders involved sexual
contact, either before or, in some cases, after death.
All his attacks were on men and, although a self-confessed homosexual,
another confusing element of his personality is that he also spoke of
having enjoyed sex with women in the past, and of being ‘turned on’ by
heterosexual pornography.
He also had a strange obsession with death and told psychiatrists how he
sometimes enjoyed posing naked in front of a mirror, having first
covered himself in while make-up powder so as to resemble a corpse.
Extreme violence
Another theory is that, although Nilsen was shy and introverted, he had a
strongly dominant alter ego that could only be expressed by sudden acts
of extreme violence towards lonely and inadequate strangers.
At Nilsen’s trial psychologists and lawyers argued bitterly over his state
of mind. His evil crimes beggared belief. Here was a man who openly
confessed to killing a dozen young men at Melrose Avenue and stuffing
them under the floorboards. He took them out to have sex with the
corpses and eventually burned a heap of decomposing remains in his
garden.
If Nilsen had appeared in court rambling about ‘hearing voices in his
head’ or ‘Aliens turning his blood to powder’ (explanations given by two
mentally disturbed killers convicted in the USA), he would have been
regarded as ‘mad’. A defence of ‘diminished responsibility’ might have
been accepted by the jury.
Was he mad?
But Nilsen was no jabbering idiot. He was intelligent, articulate and
displayed no symptoms of any recognized mental disease. His defence
would claim he suffered from temporary abnormalities of mind. But to
the jury he was not mad. He knew what he was doing and liked it enough
to kill and kill again. Most people like someone to home to, and so did
Dennis Nilsen. He just preferred them to be dead.
Nilsen’s gay secret
Dennis Nilsen was born on 23 November 1945 in the busy Scottish
fishing port of Fraserburgh, north of Aberdeen. His mother was a local
woman, his father a Norwegian army officer who had escaped from his
country with the remnants of his regiment as the Nazis swept in during
World War II.
In 1961, he decided to join the army as a boy soldier and did his training
at Aldershot. He later joined the Royal Fusiliers, serving with them in
Germany and Norway. The young Nilsen did not chase girls, but liked to
drink with the rest of the soldiers in his unit, and was a quick as the rest
to deride and abuse homosexuals.
Nilsen enjoyed his army career. He saw action in Aden in the mid-1960s
and was later posted to Sharjah in the Persian Gulf, where he started to
take a real interest in catering and where he first learned the butcher’s
art. It was also there that his homosexual tendencies first surfaced, in an
affair with a young Arab boy.
When his regiment was posted home to Scotland he served as chef in
charge of the NCO kitchen for the Royal Guard at Ballater near
Balmoral. When the Argyles were disbanded, Corporal Nilsen, as he
then was, was transferred to the Royal Signals base in the Shetlands.
There he developed a deep crush on another soldier. When his advances
were not reciprocated, Nilsen fell into a deep depression. In 1972, after
11 years in the army, he left, aged 27.
End
John Christie: The whispering strangler
John Christie left his flat suddenly, owing several weeks rent. The
front room reeked of disinfectant, and it was not long before the
gruesome secrets of 10 Rillington Place were uncovered.
Rillington Place was a sleazy dead-end road in Notting Hill, London.
The three-storey terraced houses had once been the homes of well-to-do
Victorian families. By the early 1950s they were divided into flats, low-
rent housing being taken over by London’s growing immigrant
community.
Number 10 was at the far end. Dirty curtains kept inquisitive eyes fro
peering through the ground floor window. At the back was a weed-
choked yard enclosed by a crumbling wall. From the street it appeared
no different from the others, but what was found inside one March
morning in 1953 made it one of the most infamous addresses in England.
10 Rillington Place became the title of a book and later a film, but you
will not find it on any map of London; it no longer exists. The name of
the street was changed, and number 10 was pulled down.
Secret cupboard
On 24 March 1953 a newly-arrived Jamaican man, Beresford Brown,
was examining the walls of the gloomy kitchen at the back of the house.
He lived in one of the flats upstairs, but the landlord had said he could
also use the kitchen of the ground floor flat. The tenant had skipped,
owing several months’ rent.
While inspecting the kitchen he tapped on a section of the wall. It
sounded hollow, and turned out to be a door, papered over. He thought
the cramped kitchen could do with some more storage space, so he
tugged the door open. But the cupboard was full. Brown found himself
looking at the bare back of a dead woman, and there were two more
behind her.
The grisly discoveries at 10 Rillington Place triggered a nationwide hunt
for John Reginald Halliday Christie. A balding 55-year old office
worker, he had lived in the ground-floor flat for the previous 14 years.
Known in the seedy local pubs and cafes as “Reg”.
Some thought him affable, while others, mainly women, found him
repulsive. He had a strange whispering voice and liked to creep about the
house wearing plimsolls.
Christie had vanished into thin air, having sub-let his flat to an Irish
couple, Mr and Mrs Reilly, and had charged them a $7 deposit. But he
had no authority to let it, and the unfortunate couple were thrown out by
the landlord the next day. Christie’s wife Ethel had already gone;
according to neighbours she had travelled to Sheffield for surgical
treatment. She had not been seen since Christmas.
Likenesses of Christie were published in the papers and the manhunt
began. Meanwhile police began a painstaking search of 10 Rillington
Place.
The corpse in the cupboard had been placed in a sitting position with her
back towards the room. She appeared to have been dead for only a few
weeks. The body was leaning, and would have fallen had it not been
secured to a fastening attached to the back of her bra. Her wrists were
tied with a handkerchief. Behind this corpse lay two more, both wrapped
in blankets and both quite well preserved.
Decomposing corpse
The bodies were taken away to the mortuary in Kensington for post-
mortem examination. Meanwhile police began to strip the interior of the
house in case there were any more bodies. Later that night they
uncovered a fourth corpse that had been decomposing for several
months. It had been hidden under the floorboards of the front room, John
Christie’s bedroom.
Dr Francis Camps, veteran of some of the most notorious murder cases
of the previous two decades, worked throughout the night as he carried
out autopsies on the first three bodies, and took delivery of the fourth
body the following morning.
Christie was still on the run when the inquest opened on 30 March. Many
men who had the misfortune to look like him had been picked up for
questioning, but there were no early leads. The three victims in the
kitchen alcove were identified as 26-year old Hectorina Maclennan, 26-
year old Kathleen Maloney and Rita Nelson, aged 25. All three were
prostitutes known to the police and all had been treated for venereal
disease. The fourth body, under the floorboards, was that of Ethel
Christie.
At Rillington Place the search was now extended to the garden, and it
was not long before a large number of bones were unearthed. Most of
them were human. Dr Camps began the grisly process of completing a
human jigsaw puzzle that would eventually result in the assembly of two
almost complete skeletons. They were both female, but one skull was
missing.
There was another bizarre and chilling find inside the house: a tobacco
tin containing four locks of pubic hair. Trophies from the victims, or
evidence of other killings? Before scientific analysis could be completed,
police were at last able to interview the man at the centre of the case.
Christie had not gone far. While the search was conducted across the
nation, he had simply booked into a local doss house. He used his own
name and made no serious attempt to hide from justice. The day after the
inquest started he had made his way from his lodging in Rowton House
to Putney Bridge. He was gazing into the waters below when his
thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the words: “You look like John
Reginald Christie.” Christie straightened up, to be confronted by PC
Thomas Ledger.
“You are quite right, officer; I am Christie.” He was no longer the well-
groomed, almost obsessively clean man who had lived at Rillington
Place. He was penniless, dirty and desperately tired. He offered no
resistance and accompanied the policeman to Putney police station.
Later that day Christie was faced by Chief Inspector Albert Griffin and
Inspector Kelly. Informed that the body of his wife had been uncovered
from the front room floor of 10 Rillington Place, Christie began to weep,
sating: “She woke me up; she was choking; I couldn’t stand it any longer
…” The prisoner was then cautioned and made the first of several
statements embodying his recollections of the murders.
“I’ll tell you as much as I can remember. I have not been well for a long
while, about 18 months. I have been suffering from fibrositis and
enteritis. I had a breakdown at the hospital. I got better by September
1952, but kept having attacks after.
“My wife had been suffering a great deal from persecution and assaults
from the black people in the house 10 Rillington Place and had to
undergo treatment at the doctors for her nerves. In December she was
becoming very frightened from these blacks and was afraid to go about
the house when they were about and she got very depressed.
“On 14 December I was awakened by my wife moving about in bed. I
sat up and sat that she appeared to be convulsive, her face was blue and
she was choking. I did what I could to try to restore breathing but it was
hopeless.
“It appeared too late to call for assistance. That’s when I couldn’t bare to
see her, so I got a stocking and tied it around her neck to put her to sleep.
Then I got out of bed and saw a small bottle and a cup half full of water
on a small table near the bed. I noticed that the bottle contained two
Phenol Barbitone tablets and it originally contained 25. Then I knew she
must have taken the remainder.
“I got them from the hospital because I couldn’t sleep. I left her in bed
for two or three days and didn’t know what to do. Then I remembered
some loose floorboards in the front room. I had to move a table and some
chairs to roll back the lino about half way. Those boards had previously
been up because of the drainage system; there were several of these
depressions under the floorboards.
“Then I believe I went back and put her in a blanket or a sheet or
something and tried to carry her, but she was too heavy so I had to sort of
half carry and half drag her and put her in that depression and cover her
up with earth. I thought that was the best way to lay her to rest…”
Body under the floor
As a final, bizarre footnote, presumably invented in order to solicit
sympathy, Christie explained that he had put Ethel under the floorboards
(as distinct from under a bush in the garden) so that she would remain
near him; “I think that in my mind I did not want to lose her.”
Be that as it may, John Christie had already begun to tell the lies that
would punctuate the whole of his subsequent account of his crimes; Mrs
Christie’s body disclosed no trace of Barbiturate drugs.
Christie said that for some months he had been suffering from one of his
frequent bouts of psychosomatic illness and had been unable to work; in
fact, he had become so impoverished that shortly after Christmas (about
a month after killing Mrs Christie) he sold most of his furniture.
“I made a bed on some bedding on the floor in the back room. I had
about four blankets there. I kept my kitchen table, two chairs, some
crockery and cutlery. These were just enough for my immediate needs
because I was going away. I wasn’t working and had a meagre
existence.”
Christie turned out to have an extensive criminal record. Despite this,
and to the embarrassment of the Force, Christie had been taken on as a
Special Constable in the War Reserve Police, having volunteered on the
outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
Christie’s record included several spells in prison. He had been sacked
from his job as a postman in 1921 and jailed for the theft of postal
orders. Two years later, he was bound over and put on a year’s probation
for obtaining money by false pretences. He received two short prison
sentences in 1924 for more petty theft. In 1929 he had split up with his
wife and was living with a prostitute in Battersea. He served six months’
hard labour for assaulting her with a cricket bat. His criminal career
ended with a three-month sentence in 1933 for stealing the car of a
Roman Catholic priest who had befriended him.
Christie wrote to his wife from prison and persuaded her to rejoin him.
She made the ultimately fatal mistake of agreeing. After his release they
rented rooms in Notting Hill, moving to the ground floor flat at 10
Rillington Place in 1938. Christie had no further trouble with the Law
until his arrest for mass murder 15 years later.
Christie never denied his guilt, and seemed happy to recount the story of
how three bodies had come to be hidden in the kitchen cupboard. His
first encounter had been with Rita Nelson on 2 January 1953. Her body
was at the back of the kitchen alcove.
“One evening I went up Ladbroke Grove to get some fish and chips for
the animals. I had a dog and cat. On the way back, a drunken woman
stood in front of me and demanded a pound for me to take her round the
corner.” Christie said he replied that he was not like that. “I haven’t had
intercourse with any woman for over two years, my doctor will tell you
that.” This curious reply to a drunken prostitute had no effect and his
story continued with her following him home and into the house.
“I tried to get her out and she picked up a frying pan to hit me … I don’t
remember what happened but I must have gone haywire. The next thing I
remember she was lying still in the chair with rope around her neck.”
Christie said he had left her body in the kitchen overnight whole he slept
in the bedroom. Asked how she had ended up in the alcove, he replied: “I
must have put her there. I don’t remember doing it.”
She was found wearing nothing but her stockings. Christie’s explanation:
“I slung her clothes in the bedroom; she had started to undress before she
picked up the frying pan.”
Christie’s confession was full of gaps and he claimed his memory was
failing him. It was certainly highly selective. Dr Camps’ study of the
body showed that Rita Nelson had semen in her vagina. Not only had she
been strangled, but her blood showed a 34 per cent saturation of carbon
monoxide. She had been gassed.
Rita Nelson’s body had been in Christie’s house for about eight weeks.
All three of the women’s bodies were uncannily well preserved. It had
been a cold winter, and tests showed that the average temperature in that
tiny alcove was no more than 5 degrees F even in April. It was cold, dry
and well ventilated. Dr Camps said the bodies cold not have been in
better condition had they been refrigerated.
Body in the alcove
Christie also confessed to the killing of Kathleen Maloney, whose body
was the second to go into the alcove. He said he had met her in a café,
where she had cadget a cigarette and started chatting to him. She was
looking for somewhere to live and Christie told her that he might be
leaving his flat soon. She came to Rillington Place that evening where,
just Rita Nelson, she attacked him: “She was in a violent temper. I
remember she started fighting … I know there was something, it’s in the
back of my mind. She was on the floor. I must have put her in the alcove
straight away.”
Temper or not, Kathleen Maloney had certainly been drunk when she
died. The autopsy revealed a blood alcohol level of 0.24 per cent, the
equivalent of eight double gins. Like Rita Nelson she had been gassed
and strangled, and had had sex at or about the time of her death.
Hectorina Maclennan was the third and last victim to be stuffed into the
alcove. Christie said he met her and her boyfriend in Hammersmith,
where he was signing on at the Labour Exchange. She was looking for
accommodation as they were about to be thrown out of their current
lodgings. Christie claimed he offered to let them stay at Rillington Place
if their search was unsuccessful.
The night Hectorina Maclennan arrived at Christie’s flat alone. She
asked if her boyfriend had called. “I said ‘No’, but I was expecting him,”
Christie told the police. “She said she would wait, but I told her she
couldn’t and … pushed her out of the kitchen. She started struggling like
anything … she then sort of fell limp as I had hold of her.
For a third time Christie had apparently been attacked by a woman and
once again there had been a fight, the details of which escaped him. She
had died and her body finished up in the alcove. “I must have put her in
there,” said Christie, as if struggling valiantly to remember. The
vagueness of this brutal murderer was beginning to look highly contrived
and his defence of ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ came as no surprise
to the police.
Hectorina Maclennan had been dead for about four weeks when her body
was found. She had been strangled with a cord or smooth electric flex
after inhaling enough coal gas to render her unconscious. There was no
evidence of any struggle. She was found with her white cotton jacket and
black wool jumper pulled up over her shoulders. She still wore her bra
and stockings, but no skirt and no knickers. The scratches on her back
were consistent with the body being dragged across the floor.
Christie’s accounts of the three deaths contradicted sharply with the
pathologist’s reports. They were enough to make police very cautious
about accepting anything Christie said at face value. However, they had
recovered 11 boxes of human bones from the garden and were anxious to
hear Christie’s version of events.
The bodies were identified as those of Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian refugee
who disappeared in 1943, and Muriel Eady, a 30-year old woman
reported missing in 1944.
Christie’s first victim
Ruth Fuerst was 21 when she died. She had been working in England as
a student nurse when the war began, and she stayed in this country rather
than return home. She gave up nursing and took up a job in a munitions
factory. Renting a room at 41 Oxford Gardens, she lived only a few
minutes walk from Rillington Place. She did not make a lot of money in
her daytime job and may have tried to earn a little more by part-time
prostitution. In 1943 she had the misfortune to meet John Christie while
he had Rillington Place to himself, when Ethel was on holiday with her
relations in Sheffield.
Ruth Fuerst was Christie’s first victim. He told police that she was with
him in the flat and “wanted me to have intercourse with her”. While she
was there he received a telegram from Ethel saying that she would be
returning shortly. So Christie went to bed with Ruth Fuerst, and strangled
her during sex. To his disgust, her bladder and bowels emptied as she
died, a typical consequence of strangulation. It seems to have taught
Christie a lesson: the three bodies found in the alcove all had white
cotton vests wedged between their legs like a diaper.
Ethel Christie returned home before her husband had time to dispose of
the body. He his Ruth Fuerst’s corpse under the floorboards, wrapped in
her leopard skin coat with the rest of her clothes slung on top. Christie
waited until the next afternoon when Ethel was out before he dug a
shallow trench in the back yard. During the night he lifted the
floorboards again and dragged her corpse through the house to its secret
grave.
A few months after killing Ruth Fuerst, Christie asked to leave the police
force. His request was granted, and he found a job with the Ultra Radio
Works at Park Royal, London. Lunching in the canteen each day he got
to know 31-year old Muriel Eady. She had a steady boyfriend and
Christie invited the pair of them back to Rillington Place for tea with him
and Ethel. Another time all four went to the cinema.
The murder of Muriel Eady was the most carefully planned of Christie’s
dreadful crimes. He waited until October 1944, when Ethel again went to
visit her brother in Sheffield, before putting his scheme into action.
Muriel Eady suffered from chronic catarrh and Christie spent months
dropping hints, talking about his ‘medical knowledge’ and his time in the
police force. He told her that he had an inhalation device which could
clear catarrh very successfully; perhaps she would like to try it out?
Muriel Eady visited Rillington Place to try Christie’s cure. According to
Christie, he persuaded her to inhale from a glass jar containing Friar’s
Balsam. With a scarf over her head, Eady breathed in the powerful
smelling-salts aroma. She could neither smell nor see the deadly coal gas
that Christie was piping into the jar.
Muriel Eady’s aunt, with whom she lived, raised the alarm when Muriel
failed to return home. But, that autumn, London was under attack by the
German flying bombs, and whole building were being obliterated by a
single hit. Hundreds of people were vanishing without a trace, hapless
victims of the German attack on the capital. Police knew no-one with a
motive for killing Muriel Eady, and Christie was never suspected.
Skeletons in the garden
Following the discovery of bodies inside 10 Rillington Place, police
found 11 boxes of assorted bones in the scrubby back garden.
First of all, they found some charred material, the remains of a bonfire lit
in a dustbin lid. Later examination proved them to be the shattered
fragments of a skull, including a lower jawbone complete with teeth.
Then somebody noticed an arm bone which had been pushed into the
ground to help support some trellis work. Eventually, the whole garden
was divided into small plots and methodically excavated to a depth of
around 18 inches. The soil was painstakingly sieved and searched back at
the laboratory and provided not only a huge collection of bones but also
teeth and hair, fragments of cloth and a page from the Evening News
dated 19 July 1943.
Two skeletons found
This detritus was finally collected together at the London Hospital
Medical School where, under the direction of Professor Richard
Harrison, Dr Camps and his team set about sifting the grisly evidence.
The bones were sorted into those which were identifiably human and
whose which were not, and the final result was the almost complete
skeletons of two women, though one of them lacked a skull.
Old case reopened
Christie’s confessions were horrifying; he openly admitted to the murder
of the six women whose remains were found at Rillington Place. Then he
confessed to a seventh killing that had taken place there in 1949, the
victim being a 20-year old woman called Beryl Evans.
The trouble was, her husband Timothy had already confessed to her
killing. He had changed his story during his trial but was hanged, still
protesting his innocence.
Beryl Evan’ corpse had been found by the police in the ground-floor
wash-house. The body of her 14-month old baby daughter had been
hidden besides her. This brutal double murder shocked the nation. If
Evans had claimed provocation he might have escaped with a
manslaughter conviction for the killing of his wife, so it was decided to
prosecute him with the murder of his daughter. There could be no
mitigating circumstances for strangling a little baby, and a conviction
would mean the death penalty.
After he reacted his confession, Evans claimed that Christie had killed
Beryl while attempting to perform an illegal abortion. He also alleged
that Christie killed baby Geraldine.
The true story of what really occurred inside Rillington Place in 1949
cannot be established with absolute certainty. Neither men admitted to
the murder of baby Geraldine, but both said they killed Beryl.
According to Christie, Beryl Evans was suicidal. She had frequent rows
with her husband and was dismayed at becoming pregnant again.
Christie told police that he found Beryl Evans trying to gas herself one
afternoon. He opened the window, turned off the gas and, despite
developing a bad headache himself, managed to revive her. His detailed
account of how he saved her life was described by the pathologist as
“highly improbable, if not impossible”.
Did Christie send an innocent man to the gallows?
At the time of the revelations of 1953, 10 Rillington Place and John
Christie had already enjoyed a brief period of notoriety. In the spring of
1948 24-year old Timothy Evans, an illiterate van driver, his 19-year old
wife Beryl and baby daughter Geraldine arrived to take up residence in
the two-room flat on the top floor of No. 10. It was a stormy relationship,
and there were frequent quarrels, often about money.
On 14 November 1949 Evans went to visit an aunt in his home town of
Merthyr Tydfil, in South Wales. On 30 November he walked into the
Merthyr police station and made a voluntary statement saying that on 8
November he had returned home to Rillington Place after a day’s work to
find his wife dead. He had, he said, hidden her body down a drain.
On 2 December officers of the Metropolitan Police visited the house and
found the bodies of Beryl and baby Geraldine dumped in the outside
wash-house to the rear of the building. The bodies were removed and
examined by Dr Donald Teare, a close friend and colleague of Dr Francis
Camps who later examined the human remains in the Christie case. Both
Mrs Evans and her child had been strangled.
Illegal abortion
Timothy Evans, still in custody in Wales now made a second statement,
this time accusing John Christie of killing Beryl while performing an
illegal abortion: Dr Teare, however, found no evidence of an abortion.
Evans was transferred back to London where he made another statement
in which he confessed to killing his wife and daughter.
“She was incurring one debt after another and I cold not stand it any
longer, so I strangled her with a piece of rope and tool her down to the
flat below the same night whilst the old man (Mr Kitchener) was in
hospital. I waited till the Christies downstairs had gone to bed, then I
took her to the wash-house after midnight. This was on Tuesday 8
November. On Thursday evening after I came home from work I
strangled my baby in our bedroom with my tie and later that night I took
her down to the wash-room after the Christies had gone to bed.”
Evans’ next public appearance was before a jury at the Old Bailey on 11
January 1950, before Mr Justice Lewis. By now Evans had retracted his
confessions and was blaming Christie for both murders. In the event, the
unhappy Timothy was charged only with Geraldine’s murder.
Chief witness for the prosecution, needless to say, was John Christie, and
to nobody’s surprise Evans was found guilty of murder after the jury had
been out for only 40 minutes. The prisoner was sentenced to death;
Christie sat in court openly sobbing. Evans’ appeal was turned down on
20 February, and he walked to the scaffold on 5 March.
Cases re-examined
When 10 Rillington Place again became a backdrop to murder three
years later and Christie confessed to the murder of Beryl Evans, there
was a great disquiet that an innocent man might have been hanged. The
then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, announced in the
Commons on 6 July 1953 that he had appointed Mr John Scott
Henderson to re-examine the evidence in the Evans and Christie cases.
Christie had by now been convicted and was awaiting execution for the
murder of his wife; had was clearly one of Scott Henderson’s most
important witnesses. Not that Christie was very helpful. Asked again if
he had killed Mrs Evans or the child, he replied: “Well, I am not sure. If
somebody came up to me and told me that there was definite proof that I
had something to do with one of them, or both of them, I should accept it
as being right, that I must have done it; but I want to know the truth
about it as much as you.”
In the end, Mr Scott Henderson found against a miscarriage of justice,
summarising his views thus:
The case for the prosecution against Evans, as presented to
the jury, was an overwhelming one.
Having considered all the material available relating to the
deaths of Mrs Evans and Geraldine Evans, I am satisfied
that Evans was responsible for both.
Christie’s statements that he was responsible for the death of
Mrs Evans were not only unreliable but untrue.
However, the doubts remained, and over the years many notable
campaigners contributed to the expressions of doubt. The first attempt to
smash the case against Evans was Michael Eddowes’ The Man on Your
Conscience, published in 1955 in the wake of Christie’s execution.
Another veteran champion of justice. Ludovic Kennedy, also assembled
a vast amount of convincing fact and argument in his book Ten
Rillington Place (1961), in which he also successfully demolished the
case of Evans’ guilt. During the following five years the Evans case
became pivotal in the growing campaign against capital punishment and
in 1965, under a newly elected Labour government, the death penalty
was abolished for an experimental five-year period. In the following
year, on 18 October 1966, Timothy John Evans was granted a
posthumous free pardon.
What really went on at 10 Rillington Place in November 1949 we will
never know. The controversy rages still, with no shortage of supporters
for both the Evans and the Christie theories. Although the case for
Timothy Evans’ innocence had earned wide popular and media support,
it is only fair to add that there are a number of uncomfortable factors
against Christie’s guilt.
A ‘confessor’
At the time of the Scott Henderson inquiry the chaplain of Pentonville
prison was interviewed and remarked that he had the impression that
Christie was a “confessor”, that he had some need to admit to crimes.
The Ravenhead Morgan was particularly struck by one strange statement
of Christie’s when asked about his confession to the Beryl Evans murder:
“The more the merrier,” he said.
But if this were so, why did Christie adamantly deny killing little
Geraldine Evans? Ludovic Kennedy advances the proposition that the
arrogant Christie was desperately conscious of what other people thought
of him, “that he was, deep down, a puritan and a moralist of the most
hypocritical sort”. Much as he might be able to claim provocation in the
killing of his other victims he could never explain away the murder of a
child.
It should also be added that Dr Francis Camps, pathologist in the Christie
case, entertained no doubts about Evans’ guilt. In her splendid account of
the medical aspects of the Christie case Molly Lefebure, at the time
Camps’ personal assistant, offers the explanation that after killing Beryl
during one of their frequent violent arguments, the noise aroused Christie
and, when he came to investigate, he found Evans cradling a dead body.
A man not entirely unfamiliar with the disposal of corpses (he already
had two under the back yard), Christie volunteered to get rid of Beryl’s
remains.
The motive for this ‘generosity’ is plain, if the murder was discovered
the police would be swarming all over 10 Rillington Place, and might
make some gruesome discoveries in the garden.
Who killed Geraldine?
Baby Geraldine, according to the pathologist, had probably been killed
either shortly after her mother’s death or the following day. Once Beryl
was dead, Miss Lefebure suggests the infant would have been a serious
liability and it would not have been long before somebody (Mrs Christie,
for example) wondered why her mother had gone off and left her. It is
unclear who actually killed Geraldine, and convincing scenarios can be
painted with either Christie or Evans playing the leading role. Only one
thing is certain, the controversy had many years to run.
Suicide pact
Having allegedly rescued Beryl Evans, Christie said he went to visit her
the next day. She was still suicidal and, Christie claimed, she made him a
bizarre offer: if he can assist in her suicide, she would let him have sex
with her.
Christie was happy to oblige, and gassed in her top-floor flat until she
was unconscious. He then strangled her with a stocking after a failed
attempt at sex, “I found I was not physically capable of having
intercourse with her owing to the fact that I had fibrositis in my back… I
couldn’t bend over.”
The body of Beryl Evans was exhumed as police investigated Christie’s
most controversial confession. However, not for the first time the
autopsy was of one of his alleged victims contradicted his statement. The
post-mortem examination of Beryl Evans showed no sign of coal gas
poisoning, and she had been strangled with rope, not a stocking as
Christie had claimed.
Ghoulish fascination
Unlike any of Christie’s known victims, she had been punched about the
face before being killed. She had a black eye and a swollen lip and there
were further bruises on her legs. The investigating detectives suspected
Christie was making the whole story up, trying to increase his tally if
victims in the hope of appearing insane.
Christie was charged with the murder of his wife, and found himself in
the same court where he had given evidence at the trial of Timothy
Evans. The trial was a sensation. Christie was the greatest mass murderer
in recent British history. The crimes of this whispering strangler exerted
a ghoulish fascination. How had he really lured the three prostitutes to
their deaths? What persuaded them to sit in that fatal chair while the
deadly gas seeped into their lungs? Where had Christie’s collection of
female pubic hairs come from? Why did John Christie become a fiendish
killer?
Christie pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He stood in the same
dock as Timothy Evans to hear the same verdict and the same sentence
of death. After a four-day trial it took the jury less than an hour and a
half to convict him. The statutory enquiry into his mental state agreed
with their verdict, and he did not appeal. John Christie went to the
gallows on 15 July 1953, taking the secrets of 10 Rillington Place with
him forever.
End
Roy Fontaine: The Killer Butler
He could have stepped out of a cruel comedy, but Roy Fontaine, the
killer butler, was no joke.
Roy Fontaine, elegant, cultured, well-spoken and with perfect manners,
was straight from the pages of Jeeves and Wooster.
Few would have guessed that under that façade of breeding lurked a
cunning and devious crook who had spent half his life in jail. Fewer still
would have believed that in the later summer of 1977 Fontaine, the
phoney aristocrat, would turn killer, eventually murdering five people
and burying their bodies in the Scottish countryside.
Most of Fontaine’s life had been a sham. Despite the cut-glass accent,
Fontaine lad been born Archibald Hall, son of a post office worker, in a
grimy tenement on Glasgow’s South Side in 1924.
By his teens, he was already well into an apprenticeship of petty crime
and had been locked up four times by his 20th birthday for housebreaking
and handling stolen goods. But he had an overwhelming desire to dress
in fine clothes and dine on gourmet food, and decided that the upper
classes could provide him with that lifestyle.
He changed his name to Roy Fontaine and headed to London with plans
to find work as a valet. But his ambitions were soon off the rails, and by
1947 he had been sent down at the Old Bailey for offences of burglary
and cheque fraud.
Fontaine, however, was not easily discouraged. He studied books on
etiquette and elocution in the prison library and read everything he could
about antique furniture, porcelain and crystal.
After his release, and for the next 25 years, he moved around the country,
conning his way into jobs as a butler for the aristocracy. Between his
legitimate jobs, he carried out cleverly planned jewel and antique
robberies. But things continued to go wrong, and he often found himself
back in jail.
By 1977, after more than a quarter of a century of crime, arrest, trial and
jail, Fontaine was looking for a quieter life.
Comfortable lifestyle
In May of that year he was hired by a Lady Peggy Hudson, the window
of a former Conservative junior cabinet minister, as her butler at her
18th-century manor house in Kirkleton, Dumfriesshire. She was
impressed with her new manservant, and Fontaine was given
comfortable quarters and the use of a car.
All was well until a piece of Fontaine's past caught up with him. During
his last spell behind bars at Long Lartin jail near Worcester, Fontaine had
met and had a homosexual affair with David Wright, a 26-year old
burglar from Birmingham. Wright telephoned him at Kirkleton, wanting
to see his prison lover.
Fontaine invited Wright to Lady Hudson’s house and before long the
youthful newcomer had charmed Lady Hudson so much that she offered
him a job. At first, things went well. But after a few weeks Wright
started to urge Fontaine to rob Lady Hudson of her valuables. Fontaine
was reluctant; his last conviction had earned him 10 years. He certainly
planned to rob her eventually, but he wanted to pass the work to a pair of
London accomplices so that he could arrange a perfect alibi.
But Wright threatened to extort Fontaine by revealing his crooked past to
Lady Hudson unless the robbery plan went ahead. Then Fontaine
discovered that his friend had stolen an antique ring from Lady Hudson
and had given it to a local girl. Fontaine visited the girl and got the ring
back. But at the house that night, the two men had a furious argument,
and Wright stormed out.
It was nearly 4 a.m. when Fontaine was suddenly awakened by a huge
bang. Wright was standing drunkenly at the foot of the bed, holding a
smoking .22 rifle. A bullet had just slammed into the headboard of
Fontaine’s bed, missing his by barely an inch. In fear for his life,
Fontaine told Wright that he would help him rob from Lady Hudson.
His death warrant
Wright, who had drunk four bottles of champagne from her Ladyship’s
wine cellar, was in no mood to be soft-soaped and suddenly jabbed
Fontaine in the face with the butt of the rifle badly gashing his eye. Then
filled with remorse at what he had done, he broke down in tears and put
down the gun. But he had signed his own death warrant.
Fontaine decided that Wright’s impetuous behavior and drunkenness
threatened his own plans. He would have to die. A few days later
Fontaine suggested some rabbit hunting on the estate. Wright thought he
had been forgiven for the drunken bedroom scene. The two men went to
Lady Hudson’s gun room. Wright selected a 12-bore shotgun and
pocketed six cartridges. Fontaine chose the rifle that had been fired at
him a few nights before. Across the deserted fields were some ruins, and
there they stopped while Write fired both barrels of his gun at some
fleeing rabbits.
He reloaded and fired twice more. As he broke open the gun to load with
his last two shells, he asked Fontaine why he hadn’t fired yet. The butler
replied that he hadn’t seen and rabbits big enough to be worth a shot.
Wright fired twice more. Now all of his ammunition was spent. He sat
down on a grassy mound and took out his cigarettes. But he never had
that last smoke.
Fontaine, standing just behind him, raised his rifle and shot him dead
with four bullets in the head and back. He then dragged the corpse to a
clump of trees, where he buried it in some marshy ground near a stream,
heaping heavy boulders and logs onto the grave to make sure the body
stayed hidden. Fontaine knew that he had just crossed the divide from
cunning com-man to cold-blooded killer. There was no going back.
That night he had to drive to Carlisle station to pick up Lady Hudson,
who had been away on holiday. He still had a nasty eye wound from the
rifle butt but told his employer that he had hit his face on the edge of the
swimming pool. At the house, Lady Hudson asked where Wright was,
and Fontaine told her he had left a few days earlier for a better job,
without giving notice. But Lady Hudson was worried and suspicious.
She decided to contact the local police. But before she had done so she
received a strange phone call from a man claiming to be a London CID
officer, informing her that her butler was a crook. The local police had
received a similar call.
Detectives visited the house. Lady Hudson paid off Fontaine and the
police escorted his from her home but had no grounds to arrest him. The
following day, 8 September 1977, Fontaine left for London and the next
stage of his bizarre career. Now he knew he needed to take stock. He had
a few thousand pounds and some stolen goods he could sell still stashed
away, and he was in no hurry to go back to the hurly-burly of life as an
active criminal. Fontaine liked the border country, and within a few
weeks, he had returned north and rented a small cottage, Middle Farm, in
the village of Newton Arlosh, a few miles from Carlisle.
But he kept an eye open for any opportunity and regularly thumbed the
‘situations vacant’ columns of Tatler, The Lady and Country Life. It was
there that he spotted the advertisement placed by retired MP Walter
Scott-Elliot and his wife, who required a butler to live in at their
magnificent home just off Sloane Square in London’s fashionable
Knightsbridge. Fontaine got an interview and, using his old trick of
forged references, was offered the job.
The Scott-Elliot were rich indeed. As well as their home in Chelsea, they
had two houses abroad, in France and Italy, and formerly owned a
country home in Scotland. Their London home was a veritable treasure
trove of fine art, antique furniture, china, ivory and jade. Fontaine
estimated that Mrs Scott-Elliot’s jewellery alone could be worth more
than £100,000.
Robbery plans
From the day, Fontaine met them his mind was buzzing with plans about
the best way to rob the couple. This was to be the big one, the one he
would retire on.
Fontaine had formulated a careful plan to milk the couple’s bank
account. But he needed an accomplice. He contacted Mary Coggle, an
old girlfriend he had known on and off for years, who existed on the
fringes of London’s underworld.
Coggle thought she knew a man who would help Fontaine. He was
Michael Kitto, a 39-year old London-born, small time villain. Fontaine
thought Kitto would make an ideal ‘apprentice’; such small fish would
be easy to fob off with a tiny percentage of what he was sure the last take
would be. The two men sealed their partnership with a toast to the
fabulous haul they were about to get away with. They could have no idea
that the pledge would come true in the most macabre way.
Three weeks after their first meeting on 8, December 1977, they went on
a drinking spree. When the pubs turned out Fontaine invited Kitto back
to the Scott-Elliot residence to show him the treasure trove. He knew it
would be safe. Mrs Scott-Elliot was under treatment for a few days in a
clinic, and her husband would be safely tucked up asleep in bed by that
hour.
Fontaine took his new partner on a guided tour of the house. There was
no hitch until the pair gently opened the door of Mrs Scott-Elliot’s
bedroom. Unbeknown to Fontaine, she had returned from the clinic and
was sitting up in bed reading. The startled woman let out a gasp of shock
which rapidly turned to anger. In a second Fontaine saw all his plans
crashing in ruins. This would surely mean the sack, and no chance of
getting the loot.
Smothered to death
His mind fuddled with drink, Fontaine was slow to think but diabolically
quick to act. As Mrs Scott-Elliot shrilly demanded what he was doing
with a stranger in her room, Fontaine grabbed a pillow and held it over
her face to muffle her shrieks. Kitto joined in, pressing the pillow harder
still over her nose and mouth, and pinning the struggling woman to the
bed.
Suddenly she stopped struggling. In horror, Fontaine and Kitto removed
the pillow. There was blood coming from the victim’s nose and mouth.
She was dead.
Then they realized that Walter Scott-Elliot, wakened by the noise from
his wife’s room, was shuffling down the corridor to see what was going
on. Fontaine told Scott-Elliot that his wife had a nightmare, but
everything was OK.
Leaving poor Mrs Scott-Elliot tucked up in bed as if sleeping soundly,
the two killers set off early the next day to see Mary Coggle. When they
told her what had happened, she hardly batted and eyelid. And she
readily agreed to move into the house and impersonate the dead woman
until they could get the fraud plot under way. It was vital that Walter
Scott-Elliot be kept in the dark about his wife’s death as long as possible.
Fontaine knew he was taking medication that kept him fairly drowsy and
confused. If they could confuse him further they might get away with it
still.
Back at the house, Fontaine told his befuddled employer; “Your wife got
up early and went shopping.” During the day the three conspirators hired
a Ford Cortina, using a stolen driving licence obtained by Coggle. While
Mr Scott-Elliot took lunch at the Reform Club, Fontaine and Kitto
wrapped his wife’s corpse in a sheet and put it in the boot of the hired
car. Fontaine had decided to bury the corpse in the remote Scottish
countryside.
But the dead woman’s husband still presented a problem. There was only
one thing for it. Mrs Scott-Elliot would have to come with them on the
ghoulish ride north of the border.
Drugged employer
Early that evening, Fontaine slipped his employer a double measure of
sleeping tablets. Then, with the old man almost asleep on his feet, he was
led outside and bundled into the car. In the back seat, he found himself
sitting next to Coggle, dressed in a £4,000 mink coat she had taken from
his dead wife’s wardrobe. In his state of drugged confusion, he placidly
accepted Fontaine’s explanation that this was his wife and that they were
all off for a country holiday.
On the long drive north, stops were made at intervals to give Scott-Elliot
another dose of stupefying drugs. The first port of call was the cottage at
Newton Arlosh that Fontaine was still renting. The next morning, they
headed further north into Scotland. At Lanark, they stopped at an
ironmonger’s, where Fontaine bought a new spade and garden fork.
In the wilds of Perthshire, on the road between the villages of Comrie
and Dalchonzie, Fontaine chose the spot to bury Mrs Scott-Elliot. Kitto
and Fontaine tipped her body over a wall, where they dug a shallow
grave in the bank of a ditch. While they toiled in the cold evening air, Mr
Scott-Elliot sat drugged in the back seat of the car holding the hand of
his ‘wife’. After completing their ghoulish work, the motley funeral
party drove back to the cottage near Carlisle. There they put the heavily
sedated Walter Scott-Elliot to bed, then sat down to a hearty steak dinner
to decide what to do next.
They argued deep into the night, fuelled by champagne and brandy. But
there was no getting away from it. The accidental fatal encounter in Mrs
Scott-Elliot’s bedroom had thrown a big spanner in the works. Walter
Scott-Elliot was now a major liability: they could not keep him in the
dark forever. They reluctantly agreed there was only one solution. The
next morning, with the unfortunate old man once more subdued with
sleeping pills, they set off again for Scotland. At the end of the first day
they booked into a hotel at Blair Atholl, Perthshire, too tired to kill the
old man that night.
His last journey
In the morning, with the old man again drugged into confusion and still
believing that Coggle was his wife, all four sat down together for a
civilized breakfast in the hotel dining room. Shortly after 9.30 a.m. they
again climbed into the hired Cortina and drove around looking for a
suitable site to kill and bury their unfortunate passenger. By lunchtime
they still hadn’t found the right spot, so Fontaine ordered a halt at a
country pub for a lunch of beer and sandwiches.
Then they set off again, and on a lonely road in Glen Affric Scott-Elliot
asked to stop to relieve himself. When he stepped off the road onto a
small plantation, Fontaine and Kitto made their move. Dragging him out
of sight of the road, they tried to strangle him, but he fought like a lion.
Kitto then tried to throttle him with a scarf, but still the old man
struggled valiantly. Finally, with Scott-Elliot down and gasping for
breath, Fontaine went back to the car and returned with a spade they had
used to dig his wife’s grave. He gave it to Kitto and ordered: “Finish him
off.” A sharp blow shattered Scott-Elliot’s skull.
The two men hastily covered his body with branches, leaves and ferns,
not bothering to bury it in their haste to get away from the dreadful
scene. They cleaned the blood off the spade and returned to the cottage
in Cumbria, stopping only once, for another night of cigars and
champagne in a hotel at Aviemore. Black thoughts now clouded
Fontaine’s crystal-clear mind. From being an almost ‘respectable’ thief
he was not a triple murderer, and it had got him nowhere. He was also
growing increasingly irritated by Irish-born Mary. He was sickened by
the way she paraded herself in Mrs Scott-Elliot’s clothes and jewellery.
He began to see Mary Coggle as the biggest thread to his survival.
Fontaine was also worried about the number of drunken phone calls
Coggle was making to her friends in London. Some of the people she
was talking to were bound to be police informers. The next morning
Fontaine decided to head back to London. He wanted to salvage some
part of his plan, and was keen to return to the Scott-Elliot home to see
what else could be removed and sold.
As they parked, a furious row broke out about what should be done about
the mink and diamonds. Fontaine suddenly snatched a heavier poker
from the fire hearth and rained blows on Mary. Kitto pinioned her arms
while Fontaine struck her. She slumped across the sofa, bleeding
profusely from head wounds and begging for mercy.
Accomplice killed
As she lapsed into unconsciousness, they tied her hands behind her back
and Fontaine placed a plastic bag over her head and tied it tightly at the
neck. Mary Coggle was soon dead.
They drove northwards with Mary’s corpse in the boot of the Cortina
and, in a lonely lane at Middlebie, near Lockerbie, pitched her over a
bridge into the stream. This time they made no attempt to conceal the
remains. The only attempt they made to throw investigators off the scent
was to dress her in men’s clothing before dumping her.
After spending a jolly Christmas with Fontaine’s sister and other
relatives near Stoke on Trent, the two men travelled to see Fontaine’s
stepfather in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire. There they met up with
Fontaine’s youngest brother Donald. Seventeen years younger than his
murderous brother, Donald had also fallen into a life of crime. He had
been released from prison the day before, on 13 January, after serving
three years for burglary.
Fontaine and Kitto were heading back to Middle Farm cottage and
suggested to Donald that he join them. This was strange, as Fontaine had
always said how much he hated his brother. The killers were now in a
different car, having dumped the Cortina in Edinburgh. They had a hired
red Ford Granada, but Fontaine was unhappy about the registration
plates YGE 999R, fearing the ‘999’ might draw unwelcome attention. He
ordered a new set of plates from a garage. It was a small matter, but it
was to be his single biggest mistake.
At Newton Arlosh the threesome did some heavy drinking. Soon they
were discussing pulling off another big crime, a country house robbery in
Dumfriesshire, where the victims would be tied up. Donald, eager to be
in on the plan, boasted he could tie up anyone so that they could not
escape, with only six inches of string. He produced a short length of
pyjama cord and urged his elder brother to tie his thumbs together behind
his back. He then told Kitto to lay him face down and loop his legs
through his arms. Sure enough, he had made his point; he was
completely helpless. But meanwhile, Fontaine had been thinking he had
talked too much about the proposed robbery to his brother. Donald was a
weakling who would crack too easily under pressure. Now he lay at
Fontaine’s feet, trussed like a chicken.
He fetched a cotton wool pad soaked in chloroform and pressed it over
his brother’s nose and mouth. In seconds he was unconscious. Then
Fontaine and Kitto filled the bath with water and held Donald under for
ten minutes. Soon Donald was being given the usual tour of the border
counties, locked in the boot of the car. It was the night of 16, January
1978, when the two men parked the Granada on the forecourt of the
Blenheim Arms hotel at North Berwick and booked in for the night.
Suspicious guests
Manager Norman Wight could not say exactly why, but he was uneasy
about his new guests. He made an informal call to one of his local police
contacts. Two plain clothed constables made a discreet visit. The first
thing that they noticed was that the registration plates didn’t match the
details on the tax disk on the red Granada. And computer checks
revealed that the plates should be on a completely different car,
belonging to a London clothing firm.
Fontaine and Kitto were drinking fiver star French brandy in the hotel
restaurant when they were arrested and taken to the local police station
for further questioning. One of the officers went back to the hotel and
drove the Granada to North Berwick police station, unaware that there
was a body in the boot. The unsuspecting officers, believing they had
probably captured a couple of minor cheque fraud merchants, hadn’t
looked in it.
It was not until nearly 24 hours later, by which time Fontaine had
escaped through a lavatory window, that detectives opened the back of
the car and came face to face with the lifeless body of Donald Hall.
Fontaine was recaptured at a police roadblock at Musselburgh on the A1
trying to get a taxi to flee the area.
When the police searched the two suspects they found a number of items
that were later linked to the Scott-Elliot home, plus ten of the sleeping
tablets that the pair had used to drug Walter Scott-Elliot. But at this stage
police were still totally unaware of the trail of bodies Fontaine and Kitto
had left behind them. Apart from the body of Hall in the boot, only one
of their victims had surfaced so far. Mary Coggle had been found by a
shepherd in the stream near Lockerbie on Christmas morning, but police
had not yet identified her.
Meanwhile, Fontaine was determined to cheat the law one way or
another. His escape bid had failed. But he had a suicide kit, a supply of
barbiturate tablets hidden in his rectum. After distracting his guard with a
request for a glass of water, Fontaine extracted the secret cache and took
a near fatal overdose. After collapsing in his cell he was rushed to
hospital in Edinburgh where his life was saved. Two days later he
collapsed again from barbiturate poisoning. He had had a second suicide
kit, hidden in the same place.
Now things were beginning to move fast. While Fontaine was in
hospital, police in Berwick send an allstation message reporting the
arrest of the two men. The message was of great interest to Detective
Superintendent Ray Adams of Chelsea CID in London. He had been
wanting to trace Fontaine to speak to him about the strange
disappearance of the Scott-Elliot’s.
Linking the clues
There was no evidence that anything sinister had happened to them. But
when Adams noted that the butler had also vanished, and then looked at
Fontaine’s long record as a master crook, his detective instinct told him
that something was amiss. Also, his office had been told by detectives in
the Stoke on Trent area that antique silver bearing the Scott-Elliot family
crest had been sold recently in their area.
Meanwhile at North Berwick, Kitto was beginning to crack. Within
hours he had told detectives the whole saga. A special team hurried south
and forced their way into the cottage at Newton Arlosh, there they found
a wealth of evidence, including blood stains from Mary Coggle, the
bottle of chloroform used in the killing of Donald Hall, linen with the
Scott-Elliot family crest, guns and firearms certified in the name of
Walter Scott-Elliot. And fingerprints found at the cottage proved to
match with the unidentified woman in the stream at Lockerbie.
Following Kitto’s directions, the police later found the poker used to
batter Mary Coggle in the hedge where it had been hidden. He also sent
them to a wood near the village of Tomich in Glenn Affric on 17,
January. Using powerful torches, they began to search. On a mosey
mound was a smooth white shape. It was the shattered skull of Walter
Scott-Elliot.
Faced with the inevitable, Fontaine confessed and offered to show police
the exact places where he had hidden Mrs Scott-Elliot and David Wright.
There was little trouble finding Wright’s remains. On 21, January,
Fontaine, still shaking from his suicide bids and wrapped up against the
bitter weather, led detectives across the moors on Lady Hudson’s land to
the bog where he had hidden the body.
Heavy rains had washed away much of the earth. The bones of a human
foot could clearly be seen sticking out from a pile of logs and rocks.
Searching for Dorothy’s body
Finding Mrs Scott-Elliot was harder. The search was hampered by
blizzards that had suddenly swept Scotland. Digging was almost
impossible in the iron-hard frozen ground and Kitto had trouble recalling
the exact spot. Specially trained sniffer dogs that had been used to find
bodies after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war were borrowed from Greater
Manchester police to help the search.
With daylight fading the butler guided his captors along the Braco-
Comrie road. As they passed over a small burn Fontaine ordered the
driver to halt. There in an icy ditch, half covered by rotted reeds and
snow, were the remains of Dorothy Scott-Elliot.
Guilty plea
On 2, May 1978 Fontaine, appearing under his real name of Archibald
Hall, pleaded guilty to the murders of Walter Scott-Elliot and David
Wright. Kitto pleased guilty to the involvement in the Scott-Elliot case.
The judge, Lord Wylie, ordered that Fontaine be jailed for a minimum if
15 years, and put no time limit on the length of Kitto’s detention. Both
men were to stand trial in England for the other three murders.
At the Old Bailey the following November Fontaine admitted murdering
Mary Coggle and his younger brother. Kitto admitted murdering Coggle,
and pleased guilty to the manslaughter of Donald Hall. Fontaine denied
the murder of Mrs Scott-Elliot, but Kitto pleased guilty to manslaughter.
Judge James Miskin sent Fontaine down for life, adding the
recommendation that he should never be released. Kitto got 15 years.
The brilliant con-man
Archibald Hall was a brilliant actor. His criminal tendencies landed him
in jail while he was still a teenager, but he was determined to shrug off
his early life in the slums of Glasgow and managed to convince fellow
inmates and prison staff that he was a Sandhurst-trained army officer or
an Old Etonian rogue. His skills in deception stood him in good stead
later on.
He was sent to prison again in 1947, and during his incarceration he
immersed himself in books on etiquette and culture that would help him
achieve the lifestyle he aspired to. When he was released he used false
references to get a job as a butler with shipping executive William
Warren-Connel on his 1,000-acre Park Hall estate in Stirlingshire. It was
there that Fontaine realized he could use his gift for acting to help him
get away with almost anything.
In disguise
While his employer was abroad on holiday an invitation arrived inviting
the Warren-Connels to a Royal garden party at Holyrood House, the
Queens official home in Edinburgh. It was an irresistible opportunity.
Fontaine hired a dress suit, complete with tails and top hat, then helped
himself to his master’s Rolls Royce and drove to Edinburgh, posing as
Mr Warren-Connel.
He was ushered through he gates to hob-knob with the aristocracy and
later told friends he found it hard to resist stealing items of silver cutlery
as he strolled through the marquees. His trip was not just for pleasure.
After leaving the party Fontaine used his props and phoney persona to
visit several of Edinburgh’s swankiest antique shops, ‘casing’ them for
future robberies. The Warren-Connels came home two days later, totally
unaware that they had been on the Royal guest list.
High living
Fontaine’s job ended just weeks later when police investigating county
house burglaries in Scotland discovered him working at Park Hall and
tipped off his employers. He left with three months’ salary in his pocket.
Typically, instead of looking for work he booked into a five-star hotel
near Gleneagles and lived on champagne and smoked salmon until he
had blown his entire pay-off. His career continued with legitimate jobs
interspersed with criminal activity. One brilliant executed con involved
Fontaine hiring the garb of an Arab prince. He booked into a suite at a
top London hotel and asked the manager to contact several of Mayfair’s
most exclusive jewelers to send representative to see him with some of
their finest diamond rings.
When the reps were ushered to the suite they found the ‘sheik’ was
taking a bath. A Middle Eastern voice calling from the tub asked them to
pass the rings through the bathroom door, which had been left ajar.
The reps, knowing how notoriously temperamental fabulously wealthy
oil Sheiks could be, did not want to risk losing a fat commission. Eager
to obey, they pushed each tray through the narrow gap into the swirling
clouds of steam.
Jewel haul
After half an hour of silence the reps grew uneasy and one cautiously
poked his head into the bathroom. He saw a hot tap gushing scalding
water into an empty bath, a discarded Arab robe and sandals, and an
open window leading to the roof tops. Fontaine had escaped with gems
worth a fortune.
Another of Fontain’s talents, a photographic memory, was often put to
use in a ‘switch’ con. Fontaine would visit a jeweller and view a valuable
ring or diamond brooch. Memorising the design, he would dash to a
crooked friend in Hatton Garden who would use Fontain’s amazingly
detailed memory to make a replica substituting glass for the real
diamonds. Fontaine would then return to the jeweller a day or two later
for a second viewing, and swap the genuine piece for the worthless fake.
On the run
In 1964 Fontaine was caught and sentenced to 10 years for a string of
burglaries. But within months he led an amazing break-out with two
other convicts from the top security prison at Blunderston in Suffolk.
They were the first people ever to escape from the prison service’s
showpiece jail. For over two years Fontaine stayed on the run, pulling off
a series of clever robberies. He had several close shaves with the police.
After robbing a jeweller in Falmouth, Cornwall, he was chased by police
and hid undiscovered under a guest-house bed while detectives searched
the room.
Escaped again
In London he was hurt and taken to hospital when the car he was driving
turned over after a bad crash in the West End. When police came to
question him in hospital, he jumped out of a window and escaped. In
Perth he was again forced to jump out of a rear window of a house he
was robbing whole police, alerted by a silent alarm linked to their HQ,
burst in at the front. Eventually he was caught in Weston super-Mare in
1966 and returned to jail.
End
Killer Couple’s Murder Rampage
A senseless killing spree by two teenagers in 1958 shocked the
conservative citizens of the prairie state of Nebraska.
On Saturday 25 January 1958 a teenager, Bob von Busch, walked into a
police station in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a strange tale to tell. He, his
wife and their new baby had been turned away when they went for a visit
to his mother-in-law’s house. His 14-year old sister-in-law, Caril Fugate,
had shouted from the doorway that the whole family had the flu. And
when they had continued up the path Caril had screamed at them: “Go
away! If you know what’s best, you’ll go away so mother won’t get
hurt!”
A patrol car was sent to the shabby house at 924 Belmont Avenue, deep
in the poorer quarter of Lincoln. Caril Fugate met the officers at the door
and told them that the doctor had quarantined the rest of the family, her
stepfather Marion Bartlett, her mother Velda, and her toddler sister Betty
Jean, but there was nothing to worry about. The family hadn’t really
approved of her sister’s choice of husband, Caril explained, and it would
be just like Bob von Busch to make up malicious stories about them.
Satisfied with her answers, the police left.
Worried relatives
Two days later another person called at the police station to complain
about what was going on at 924 Belmont Avenue. This time it was
Velda’s mother, Pansy Street. Worried about her daughter, she had
disregarded the note Caril had left on the floor, “Stay a way Every Body
is sick with The Flue”, and had shouted and banged on the door until
Caril had appeared. The girl had not let her in, and had again said that
Velda’s life was in danger.
While Mrs Street was telling her story, the police received a call from
another Belmont resident, Guy Starkweather. His daughter, Laveta’s had
gone to 924 Belmont Avenue the previous day to see Caril. Caril had told
her she could not come in because Laveta’s brother Charlie, whom Caril
had been dating for about 18 months, was in the house planning a bank
robbery.
The police took Pansy Street back to the house. When no-one came to
the door, the old woman persuaded on the officers to break in.
Everything in the house was neat and tidy, the beds had all been made,
but there was no sign of the sick family, or of Caril or Charlie
Starkweather for that matter. The police took Mrs Street home and left it
at that.
Later that evening, Bob van Busch and Rodney Starkweather, one of
Charlie’s six brothers, went to take a look around the house themselves.
In an outhouse in the back yard they found the body of Velda Bartlett,
wrapped in a quilt and bundled up with clothes line. Beside her on the
toilet seat, in a cardboard box, was the doubled-over body of her toddler
daughter, Betty Jean, who had a knife wound in her throat and a
fractured skull.
The youths called the police, who found Marion Bartlett’s body in a
broken-down chicken coop. He too had been wrapped in bedclothes and
trussed up with rope. He had been shot in the head and stabbed in the
throat. All three had been dead for about a week.
At 5.43 p.m. the police put out an alert for Caril Fugate and her 19-year
old boyfriend, together with a description of Starkweather’s car, a
souped-up, black 1949 Ford that he sometimes raced at a nearby track.
The car was found the following day, stuck in the mud on a farm track
outside the small town of Bennet, 16 miles south-east of Lincoln. The
track led to a farm belonging to August Meyer, a 70-year old single man
who was a family friend of the Starkweathers. Charlie and his brothers
often went hunting on his land.
The news of the find spread quickly. Bennet was already in a ferment;
two local teenagers had fled to come home from their date the previous
evening, and many of the town’s residents were out searching from them.
About 30 well-armed farmers joined the 25 men from the county, state
and city police forces who surrounded Meyer’s white-painted, weather-
boarded farmhouse.
Farmhouse search
The police were convinced Starkweather was inside. When a supply of
tear gas grenades arrived from Lincoln, County Sheriff Merle Karnopp
called for Starkweather to surrender. There was no reply, and the
farmhouse was swamped with tear-gas. When the gas cleared, the police
moved in. They found the body of August Meyer in one of the
outbuildings. The back of his head had been blown away with a sawn-off
shotgun. The house had been ransacked, but there was no-one there.
A few minutes later Karnopp got some more bad news. A local farmer,
acting on a hunch, had gone to investigate a tornado shelter, a cellar
closed over with a heavy trapdoor, in the grounds of a demolished school
a mile or two away. The bodies of the two missing Bennet teenagers, 17-
year old Robert Jensen and 16-year old Carol King, were found at the
bottom of the Shelter’s concrete steps.
Jensen had been shot six times in the back of his head; his girlfriend had
been killed with a single bullet. She was naked from the waist down and
had been stabbed several times in her lower abdomen with a thin,
double-edged knife. Scratches on Carol King’s back and buttocks
showed that she had been killed a short distance from the tornado shelter,
and then dragged across to the trapdoor and bundled down the steps.
The killer had obviously made his getaway in Jensen’s car, a customized
blue Ford with whitewall tyres. The police initiated a state-wide search
for it.
Panicstricken area
Panic seized the Lincoln area and most of eastern Nebraska. Gun dealers
ran out of stock, and posses of armed men wandered the streets and
provided escorts for children coming home from school. An unfortunate
student at the University of Nebraska, who bore more than a passing
resemblance to Starkweather, had to go into hiding in case he was shot
on site.
Privately, the police thought the murderous teenager was long gone, but
they were wrong. The following morning another three bodies were
found at 2843 24th Street, a mansion in the wealthy area of Lincoln.
C. Lauer Ward, a millionaire industrialist, lay just inside the front door.
He had been shot at close range and stabbed with a hunting knife. His
wife, Clara, and their maid, Lillian Fencl, were found upstairs in separate
bedrooms. Both had been stabbed many times in the chest and neck with
the same thin-bladed knife that had been used by Carol King. Perfume
had been splashed around the bedrooms to mask the smell of blood. Bob
Jensen’s car was discovered at the back of the house, parked next to the
garage, and Clara Ward’s 1956 Packard Patrician was found to be
missing.
The city of Lincoln was sealed off and a block by block search began.
Two hundred members of the National Guard cruised the streets in jeeps
mounted with machine guns.
While this was happening, a 29-year old geologist, Joe Sprinkle, was
driving east towards Douglas Wyoming, 500 miles west of Lincoln. He
saw two cars, a Packard and a Buick, parked just off the road. Thinking
there had been an accident, he stopped to see if he could help. As he got
out of his car a stocky, bow-legged youth in a black leather jacket, his
red hair streaked black with boot polish, stepped out of the Buick,
holding a pump-action rifle at waist level. He ordered Sprinkle to release
the handbrake of the Buick. The bullet-riddled body of a middle-aged
man was wedged on top of it.
Sprinkle pretended he was about to reach into the car, but grabbed the
gun barrel instead. The struggle for the weapon spilled out into the road.
At the moment, a policeman, Deputy Sheriff William Romer, drove by.
He jammed on the brakes and in the rear-view mirror saw a girl, dressed
in a suede jacket and wearing a headscarf, get out of the back of the
Buick and run towards him. “Take me to the police,” she yelled. “He just
killed a man.” “Who is he?” asked Romer. “Charles Starkwalker,” she
replied.
Starkweather suddenly let’s go of the gun, causing Sprinkle to topple
backwards into a pit beside the road and ran towards the Packard. He
jumped in, gunned the engine, and roared off back towards Douglas.
Romer set off in pursuit, and radioed ahead for a roadblock. The Douglas
Chief of Police, Robert Ainslie, was out on patrol with the County
Sheriff, Earl Heflin, as the call came over the radio. Suddenly they saw
the Packard hurtle by in the opposite direction at round 100 mph.
Police chase
They turned and gave chase, catching up with him as he got snarled up in
the traffic in Douglas. Heflin tried to shoot out the Packard’s tyres with
his pistol, and pedestrians scattered as Starkweather rode up over the
pavement to overtake slow-moving cars. At one point the Packard and
the police car were bumper to bumper, but the powerful Packard roared
off, jumped a red light and headed out beyond the city limits at 120 mph.
Heflin leaned out of the window and took pot-shots at the car with his
.30 carbine. One of the bullets punched through the Packard’s rear
window and, soon after, the police officers saw the brake lights come on
and the car rolled to a halt.
Ainslie pulled up 100 yards behind it. They did not know that
Starkweather had left his weapons behind in the Buick. Starkweather got
out of the car, bleeding from his ear, which had been cut by flying glass.
Heflin shot at the ground in front of him and shouted for him to lie face
down on the road.
Starkweather reached behind him. Thinking he was going for a weapon,
Heflin fired again but missed. Starkweather had been tucking in his shirt.
When it was arranged to his satisfaction, he lay on the ground. The
officers approached him cautiously and handcuffed him. The manhunt
was over.
Starkweather did not have much to say in the police car on the journey
back to Douglas. When he was asked why he had given up his flight, he
said that it was partly because he thought he had been shot and partly
because “I would’ve hit head on with somebody, anyhow.” The only
other thing he said was “Don’t be rough on the girl. She didn’t have
anything to do with it.”
Caril was saying much the same thing to Deputy Sheriff Romer. She
repeated the whole story she had told Laveta Starkweather, that Charlie
had been planning a bank robbery with some young hoodlums and that
he had told her the gang were holding her family hostage to make sure
she kept quiet.
Damaging statement
Then, according to Romer, she volunteered a really damaging statement,
blurting out that she had seen all nine of the murders in Nebraska. If this
was true, she had seen her family killed, and the hostage story was false.
After this Caril started mumbling unintelligibly, and she had almost
completely broken down by the time they got to Converse County jail.
She was filthy and tear-stained, but resisted all efforts to clean her up.
She was put under sedation and almost immediately fell asleep in her
cell.
Starkweather was taken to the same jail. He had nothing to say to the
reporters and the Wyoming law officers except: “You wouldn’t have
caught me if I hadn’t stopped. If I’d had a gun, I would have shot you.”
He was given a pencil and paper and wrote a brief letter to his parents,
asking them to forget about him and saying they were in no way to
blame, as “you and mom did all you could to rise me up right and you all
ways help me when I got in bad with something.” Otherwise he was
unrepentant: “I’m not really sorry for what I did cause for the first time
me and Caril have more fun, she helps me a lot, but is she comes back
don’t hate her she had not a thing to do with the killing all we wanted to
do is get out of town.”
Starkweather’s story
Lieutenant Robert Henninger of the Lincoln city police arrived to
interview Starkweather later that evening. At first, Heflin was reluctant
to allow him access to his prisoner, but Henninger pointed out they had
no way of knowing whether Starkweather had left other victims lying
wounded on his travels, and Heflin relented. Relieved to see someone
from home, Starkweather started talking.
He signed a written confession, saying he had killed the Bartletts on
Tuesday 21 January before Caril got home from school, and had kept
Caril captive by saying they were being held, hostage. He admitted the
Bennet murders and shooting the man in the Buick, who had been
identified as Merle Collison, a travelling salesman from Montana. He
had shot Lauer Ward during a fight, he said, but when he left, “There was
only one dead person in that house.”
The next day Starkweather was charged with the murder of Collison. The
governor of Wyoming was opposed to capital punishment but announced
he would not block extradition to Nebraska, whose governor had no such
scruples.
Sheriff Karnopp and several others flew to Douglas. Charlie agreed not
to fight extradition, provided they returned to Lincoln by road, rather
than air. Karnopp knew his captive was not afraid of flying. “He was a
daredevil. He wanted to put off being put in prison for as long as
possible so he’d have more time and opportunity to escape.”
Starkweather wore handcuffs, leg-irons and a chained leather belt all the
way home. A caravan of cars took two days to make the return trip to
Lincoln. Caril and Charlie travelled separately; they were never to speak
again.
His first victim
On the way Starkweather told Karnopp he had killed a man named
Robert Colvert in a gas station hold-up in December. In his cell at the
overnight stop at Gering he scribbled a note, high up on the wall. “By the
time anybody will read this I will be dead for all the killings.”
Underneath he wrote that he had killed nine times and Caril twice. This
was the first time he had suggested Caril had taken a hand in the crimes.
Caril travelled with Gertrude Karnopp, the sheriff’s wife. She didn’t say
much but asked if her family were dead and who had killed them. She
claimed not to know anything about it though she was carrying pictures
of them that had been clipped from the Wards’ copy of the Lincoln
newspaper. The murders had filled the front page.
Back in Nebraska, both were charged with the first-degree murder of
Robert Jensen in the course of an armed robbery. Charlie had told how
they had both held a gun on the youngster, and Caril, probably unaware
of the legal implications of her statement, agreed she had emptied
Jensen’s wallet and given the cash to Charlie.
Starkweather’s trial came first, on 5 May. His court-appointed defenders
wanted to plead insanity, but Starkweather and his family would have
none of it. He was happy enough to die, but not to accept the shame of
insanity. Nevertheless, psychiatric tests suggested there were mental
problems, and his lawyers declared that would be the defence “whether
Charlie is for it or not”.
From this point, backed by his family, refused to co-operate with his
court-appointed lawyers. Though there was a suggestion he may have
suffered brain damage, he refused an electroencephalograph test.
Starkweather wanted to plead self defence. On the face of it, it was a
ridiculous plea. Clara Ward and Lillian Fencl had been tied up, Merle
Collison had been sitting in a parked car, and two-year-old Betty Jean
Bartlett was hardly a threat to anyone. Several of the other victims,
including teenager Robert Jensen, had been shot from behind. Still,
Charlie insisted that they kept “coming at him”.
As the date of his trial approached, Charlie continually changed his story.
He made at least seven confessions, all different. But he continued to
implicate Caril in the killings. She had been present when he killed her
family, he said, and had finished off her mother with a knife and her
baby sister with a rifle butt. She had shot and stabbed Carol King inn a
fit of sexual jealousy, had killed both the women at the Ward house,
probably for the same reason, and had finished off Collison after
Charlie’s gun jammed.
Death threats
The trial was carried out under high security; there had been dozens of
threats to Starkweather’s life. There was an enormous amount of media
attention, and the young killer milked it for all he was worth, through his
rebel image had been softened by prison. His sideburns had been shaved
off, his hair neatly trimmed, and his leather jacket, black denim trousers
and cowboy boots had been exchanged for a light tan suit and black
shoes.
The prosecution’s case was simply put: Starkweather had confessed, his
fingerprints were in Jensen’s car and the murder weapon, a pump-action
rifle that had belonged to August Meyer, had been found on the back seat
of Merle Collison’s Buick.
Clement Gaughan, who was presenting the defence, began with a parade
of character witnesses, and then put Starkweather on the stand. Charlie
agreed that he was a suspicious person who trusted no-one but himself
and, for the first time in public, he accused Caril of one of the killings,
that of Carol King. When he was asked if he had any remorse, he refused
to answer.
Gaughan then introduced three psychiatric witnesses, who painted a
picture of an emotional cripple, unable to feel much beyond fear of
anger, liable to panic under any sort of stress and with no real
understanding of the value of human life. However, each of them was
forced to admit by the prosecutor, Elmer Scheele, that their conclusions
did not put Charlie with the narrow definition of insanity required by
Nebraska law.
‘Guilty’ verdict
Scheele’s psychiatric witnesses all agreed that is Starkweather was found
insane and committed to a mental institution, he would have soon be out
on the streets again. Mindful of this dire warning, it took the jury 24
hours to find Charlie Starkweather guilty and fix his penalty at death.
“The Lord giveth,” said Guy Starkweather as the verdict came in on 23
May, “and the Lord taketh away.” Starkweather was to make one more
public appearance, at Caril’s trial which started on 27 October. Nebraska
law permits minors to be tried as adults if the crime is serious enough.
Caril remains the youngest woman to be tried for first degree murder in
American history.
Much of the prosecution evidence was a repeat of that at Starkweather’s
trial. The main differences were that Caril was pleading innocence, not
insanity, and that Charlie was the star witness for the prosecution.
Starkweather had been widely quoted as saying that if he went to the
electric chair, Caril should be sitting in his lap. Asked by Caril’s attorney,
John McArthur, if he still felt that way, he demurred. “Now I don’t care
if she lives or dies.”
His testimony was damning though. Caril had been present when he shot
Velda Bartlett and threw a knife at Betty Jean. She had watched TV
while he cleaned up the blood and took the bodies outside. The hostage
story was “a bunch of hogwash”, something they had cooked up between
them. He had left the Bartlett home several times in the six days they had
spent there, and he had not tied up or restrained her in any way. Once
they were on the run, she had had several chances to escape; she had
gone to buy hamburgers and Pepsi, for instance, and had been left
several times by him in one of the cars with all of their weapons.
Damning testimonies
Other prosecution witnesses testified to having seen Caril and Charlie on
their wanderings and testified how easy it would have been for her to get
away. And Gertrude Karnopp and William Romer repeated the damaging
admissions she had made.
Caril stuck to her story. She had broken up with Starkweather on Sunday
19 January and had come home from school two days later to have a gun
thrust in her face. She had always thought her family’s life, and her own
depended on her cooperating with Charlie.
Although she was only just 15, Caril failed to take advantage of her
youth at the trial. She dressed older than her years, and her hair, in a
girlish pony-tail at the time of the killings, was tightly permed. She
answered questions in a slipped, brittle voice, which was often hostile,
and claimed not to remember whenever Elmer Scheele’s questions got a
little tricky. In no way did she impress the jury as a vulnerable and
victimized little girl.
As with Charlie, the jury was out for 24 hours. They found Caril guilty,
and sentenced her to life imprisonment.
End
The Railway Murderer
On the surface, he didn't look much of a threat. Small, ginger-
haired, and pockmarked, John Duffy was the kind of man you might
pass in the street. Until, that is, you saw the eyes. The eyes of the
rapist. The eyes of a killer.
At first glance, John Francis Duffy would not fit many people's image of
how they would expect a psychotic sex murderer to look.
Frail, pale, spotty and feeble-looking, at five feet four and around nine
stone, he hardly looked like a man who could terrorise women in London
for four years. Yet specialists in sex crimes say that, both physically and
mentally, Duffy represented a very common profile for a serial sex
criminal. Between 1982, and his capture in 1986, Duffy is thought to
have raped over 30 victims and killed three more.
Squads of detectives who had been struggling with a huge rape
investigation for three years now faced the frantic task of finding their
man before he killed again.
The only clues they had were in his method of killing. All the victims
had been strangled in a similar way, and all his crimes, both rapes and
murders, had occurred near railway stations. But the scenes of his attacks
were spread all over London and Home Counties, and there was no way
of telling where he would strike next.
The only other chilling clue to his identity was a description, by almost
every victim, of a man with cold blue eyes that looked like twin lasers.
His reign of terror began in June 1982 when a woman was snatched from
near a railway station at Hempstead, northwest London, on her way
home from work. This was just weeks after Duffy had been fired from
his job as a carpenter with British Rail for bad timekeeping.
Intriguingly, in several of his early attacks Duffy had an accomplice. The
first victim reported two men dressed in track suits seized her and
dragged her into some nearby waste ground. This incident was the
followed by five attacks within weeks by the same two men. In each case
the incidents involved women coming from railway stations, usually
after dark.
Inside Knowledge
What the police did not know was that the rapist was a former railway
employee whose job as a carpenter had taken him all over the London
rail network. Duffy had detailed knowledge of literally thousands of
miles of suburban commuter lines in London and the hundreds of
stations that served it. He knew every alley and pathway that run nearby,
the short cuts, the unstaffed halts and the lonely, unlit car parks that often
adjoined them. He had carefully worked out which places offered the
best chances and conditions to pounce on an unsuspecting female victim.
Top 10 Of Rape Suspects
There are other things that police would have love to have known about
Duffy. He was married, but unhappily because there had been no
children. He had a sexual fetish about rape fantasies, and he liked
bondage, insisting that his wife was tied with her hands in front of her
before he could have successful sex. All these details would have
rocketed Duffy into the “top 10” of rape suspects. But the Irish-born
woodworker had never been in trouble with the police before; there was
no chance of him even entering the frame as a suspect.
As things got worse on the home front the couple split up, but attempted
to reconciliation in 1983. It was during this period that the police charts
of the rapist’s activities show that the attacks increased. The couple
parted again, however, after an endless series of rows. Duffy was
desperate to have children and blamed his wife when she did not
conceive. In fact it was Duffy that was the problem. Tests were later to
prove he had a low sperm count, seriously reducing his chances of
fatherhood.
Solo Attacks
After the second break up Duffy started once more to stalk the late-night
commuter train lines. Now he had dumped his partner, and was working
alone. His first solo attack was when he raped a woman at knifepoint on
Barnes Common in west London in 1984. The attacks then came at
regular intervals. In July 2985 Duffy attacked three women in one night.
Detectives had by now started to link nearly 30 terrifying attacks. The
operation, launched under Detective Superintendent Ian Harley, was
codenamed HART, an acronym for Harley’s Area Rape Team. Later in
July, Duffy burst into his estranged wife’s home in north London and
attacked her. When her boyfriend found out and challenged Duffy, he
beat him up with a series of karate blows. Mrs Duffy, appalled by her
husband’s violence, went to the police and he was arrested in August.
But what should have been the end of Duffy was nearly the beginning.
He was back on the streets, and stalking women with renewed cunning
and determination.
The HART detectives had already spent time drawing up a list of 4,874
possible suspects for the rapes. They had asked Scotland Yard and Home
Counties forces for the files on every known person with a history of sex
crimes. They were already well into their task. By eliminating suspects
who were already in jail, had died or for various reasons were thought
unlikely, they had reduced the tally to 1,593 when they were routinely
notified about Duffy because his wife’s allegations. He was duly entered
on the list of ‘possibles’ as number 1,594.
Unusual Aspects
Officers on the HART squad had no inkling that Duffy was their man.
But the rape squad officers had already noted a number of very unusual
aspects of many of the crimes. In almost every case the attack had started
with the rapist ‘chatting up’ his intended victim - an unusual preliminary
in most sex attacks. The victims were then threatened with a knife and
forced into a quiet spot away from other people. They were then tied up
with their hands behind them in a ‘praying’ position, the attacker using a
coarse type of string to bind them. Then, most unusually of all, the
attacker used paper tissues to wipe away semen from the victims private
parts. In a bizarre final act, he produced a small plastic comb to comb
through each victims pubic hair. Detectives realised that whoever they
were hunting was a cunning and devious individual who, after each
attack, was doing his best to get rid of any forensic evidence that could
link him with the crime.
Staring Laser Eyes
As has so often happened in major cases before, the perpetrator gets
some lucky breaks. Appearing at Acton Crown court in August 1985, in
connection with the attack on his wife and her boyfriend, Duffy was
granted bail, despite strong police objections. Three months later, in
October, a woman was brutally raped in Copthall Park, in Middlesex.
Again Duffy was able to ride his luck. The HART team detective had
already developed a nagging hunch that Duffy might be the man they
sought. He had already noted that several victims had described a
slightly built man with staring laser-like eyes, and thought the
description fitted Duffy. He was pulled in for questioning and put on an
identity parade. His luck held out. The 20-year old victim, still in shock,
could not pick him out and the police were forced to release him.
Duffy was now out of control and hurtling towards the even which
would chance the whole face of the investigation. Four days after
Christmas 1985, he added a new dimension to his bestial behaviour.
Secretary Alison Day left her home in Hornchurch, Essex, late on the
afternoon of 29 December to travel to Hackney in East London to meet
her boyfriend, who worked at a local factory. Duffy, out prowling for a
victim, spotted the attractive 19-year old as she changed from a main-
line service at the busy junction station at Stratford and boarded a three-
coach North London Line train to travel the one stop to Hackney Wick.
She had planned to walk the short distance to the factory where her
boyfriend worked. But she never made it.
Vicious Killing
Duffy, who always carried a knife, forced her to some dingy lock-up
garages, tied her hands behind her with coarse string, and forced her to
have sex. After heating her unconscious with a brick, he tore a strip from
her tartan shirt and looped it around her neck. Then he used a small piece
of wood, inserted through a turn in the material, to gradually twist it
tighter and tighter, throttling the life out of her. After making sure she
was dead, Duffy carried her body to the nearby River Lee. Placing large
stones in her pockets, to make sure she would sink, he threw her into the
icy water.
The strange circumstances of her disappearance soon sparked a headline-
making murder hunt. The worst fears of her frantic family were finally
realised 17 days later when police divers found her body on the bed of
the murky waterway in nine feet of water. Her sheepskin jacket with the
stones in the pockets, was found 200 yards downstream. Detective
Superintendent Charlie Farquhar, who had never failed to solve any of
the 20 murders he investigated in his career, was determined that
Alison’s killer would not get away.
New Horror
Although vital evidence had been lost because the body had been in the
water for so long, Farquhar, a tough ex-Flying Squad boss, was
encouraged by news from the labs. A number of ‘foreign’ fibres, almost
certainly from the killer’s clothes, had been found still sticking to the
coat. More were found on Alison’s jeans and shirt, which were on her
body, even though her bra and knickers were missing. Farquhar knew
that if they could just lay their hands on the right suspect, a check on the
clothes in his wardrobe could provide them with the vital breakthrough
he needed. He told his squad: :Matching fibres will be as good as a
fingerprint.: Farquhar’s team liaised with the HART detectives. The fact
that Alison had set out by train and been found a short distance from a
station was interesting. But there was nothing else to tie her killing to
Duffy or any other suspect.
Second Murder
Then in April 1986 came a new horror, when Duffy killed for the second
time. His victim was a 15-year old school girl, Maartje Tamboezer, who
lived in the village of East Horsley, near Guildford, Surrey. Maartje was
Dutch. Her family had been living in England for several years, where
her father worked as an oil company executive. On 17 April she set out
to cycle about half a mile from her home to a sweet shop in the village.
Her route took her along a path close to East Horsley station. When she
failed to come home from her shopping trip the alarm went up. An
urgent search of the area soon revealed the ghastly tragedy. First her bike
was found in the wood near the path. Then her body. She had been tied
up, raped, bludgeoned and strangled. Like Alison, Maartje had her hands
tied behind her back. Chillingly, like Alison, she had the life choked out
of her with a ligature placed around her throat, the noose slowly
tightened using a piece of wood. One of her socks has been pushed down
her throat. Her killer had also tried to destroy forensic evidence. Tissues
had been pushed into Maartje’s body and set alight.
Dreadful Similarities
On the footpath close by, searchers found a length of heavy duty nylon
fishing line stretched between bushes at chest height. The killer had
clearly used this device to bring down or divert his victim into his grasp.
It only took a few hours for Detective Superintendent John Hurst of
Surrey CID to reach a conclusion that, even tough separated by 50 miles,
Maartje and Alison had fallen victim to the same bestial killer.
Distinctive Yarn
Evidence that would eventually convict Duffy was now starting to pile
up. The string used to bind Maartje and Alison was a rare brand trade
named Somyarn. Detectives traced it back to a factory in Preston. They
had stopped making it in 1982, but a major customer had been British
Rail. Duffy had worked for British Rail as a carpenter. The same type of
string, it was to turn out, had been used to bind many of the rape victims.
A check on Maartje’s clothes at the Home Office laboratories at
Aldermaston found the semen stains. Duffy had tried to cover his tracks
by burning some evidence, but he had not been thorough enough. From
the semen, scientists were able to determine that the killers blood fell
into the ‘A’ secretor category, in itself not very helpful. But further
advanced testing, measuring the blood enzymes PGM, meant that the
specimen would enable them to narrow the odds much further. PGM
testing breaks people down into 10 distinct groups. And the tests
narrowed the field to an average of only one suspect in five.
1,000-to-one Chance
Superintendent Hurst, Farquhar and Ken Worker, now in charge of the
HART inquiry, had a conference and quickly concluded they were all
hunting the same suspect. The separate inquires now became one,
coordinated by the head of Surrey CID, Detective Chief Superintendent
Vincent McFadden. Duffy was a prime suspect, but the combined team
still had no evidence.
Three weeks after Maartje was murdered detectives had a bizarre
encounter with Duffy. By a 1,000-to-one chance two officers from
HART team were driving though the village of North Weald in Essex
when they saw Duffy. North Weald, close to Epping Forest, is one of the
furthest-flung outposts of the Central Line tube network. The officers
knew Duffy was a prime suspect in their enquiry. What was he doing
here, 25 miles from home, walking near a lonely branch line? The
detectives were suspicious that he was checking out the area for an
attack. They stopped and searched him. In his pocket was a butterfly
knife like the one described by some of his victims - and a wad of paper
tissues. Duffy was taken into Epping police station, but to the detectives
frustration there was still not enough direct evidence to charge him with
anything.
The Disappearance of Anne Lock
Less than a week later there was another murder. On Sunday 18 May
1986 Anne Lock, a 29-year old secretary with London Weekend TV, left
her office on London’s South Bank and caught the train to take her home
to Bookman’s Park, near Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. Married
a month before, she had just returned from the Seychelles.
Anne had ridden to the station on her bicycle. When she failed to get
home on time, her husband Lawrence went looking for her. After several
hours of anxious waiting he called the police. A search team found her
bicycle near a footpath, but it was two months before her badly
decomposed body was found deep among the brambles over an
overgrown railway embankment.
Identical Method
Once again, it took police only hours to conclude that the killer of Alison
and Maartje had killed again. Anne too had been strangled with an
identical ligature after being tied with her hands behind her and raped.
One of her socks had been pushed down her windpipe. As with Maartje,
the murderer had tried to cover his tracks by setting fire to clothing and
parts of the body. Duffy, who was now firmly fixed as a suspect, was
brought in for questioning. Again the detectives bit back their frustration
when they realised there were still short of the damning evidence they
needed.
Duffy’s name also came out at the top of a suspects list when a
psychologist at Surrey University, Professor David Canter, produced a
psychological profile - a technique first pioneered by the FBI - to build
up a ‘character sketch’ of the suspect. This made 17 observations about
the likely character of the man who had now become ‘Britain’s most
wanted’. He deduced that the killer lived in the Kilburn/ Crinklewood are
of London, had a ricky marriage and no children, worked at a semi-
skilled job and probably has very few friends. In all, 13 of Professor
Canter’s predictions about Duffy’s character turned out to be accurate.
Meanwhile, Duffy himself sensed the police were starting to get close.
When he was questioned again and asked to supply a blood sample for
analysis, he refused. The following day he persuaded a friend to slash
him across the chest with a knife, and punch him in the face. He then
staggered into West Hampstead police station claiming that he had been
victim of a vicious mugging and had lost his memory as a result. He put
up such a convincing act that arrangements were made for him to be
taken to a psychiatric hospital at Barnet for treatment. Murder squad
detectives were incredulous. They had Duffy under observation, and no-
one saw him get mugged. Now he was a voluntary mental patient. But
Duffy gave the police the run around once more. While detectives
though he was a full-time patient, Duffy was in fact only part-time. On
21 October 1986 he slipped away to Watford, where he blindfolded and
raped a 14-year old girl. Although she was subjected to a terrifying
ordeal, for unknown reasons Duffy decided not to kill her.
When the detectives realised he was roaming free instead of being a
hospital in-patient he was put under tight, round the clock surveillance.
Within days he was tailed heading back to Copthall Park, apparently
planning another ambush.
Incriminating Evidence
Detective Chief Superintendent McFadden ordered that Duffy was
arrested again. This time it was felt that there were enough grounds for a
search of his home in Barlow Road, Kilburn. At his home police found a
number of knives, but still nothing to link him directly to any specific
crime. But when they searched his mothers home a few streets away,
they finally got the break they had prayed for.
Under the stairs was a large ball of the unique string that Duffy used to
tie up his victims. Back at his home police seized the entire contents of
his wardrobes and sent the lot for lab analysis.
When the detectives re-interviewed Duffy he remained impassive,
refusing to answer even when the incriminating ball of twine was placed
in front of him. Duffy was charged with all the rapes and murders, but
refused to admit to anything.
Just weeks before his trial was due to start at the Old Bailey,
Superintendent Farquhar got the news he had been waiting for. Thirteen
‘foreign’ fibres that Scotland Yard scientists had found attached to
Allison Day’s clothes when they were dragged from the river were a
perfect match for those from a sweater owned by Duffy.
Convicted of Two Murders
When the news of his arrest got out, the friend who had performed the
‘mugging’ on Duffy came forward to confess it was a sham. At his trial
several of the witnesses in the rape cases did not want to give evidence,
and he was tired on only five counts of rape and the three murders. He
pleaded not guilty to all counts, but was convicted of two murders and
four rapes. The prosecution agreed that there was insufficient evidence to
prove that he had killed Anne Lock and he was acquitted of that killing.
Duffy showed no emotion when he was sent down for 30 years.
Detective Superintendent Charles Farquhar said after the case: “There is
no doubt in my mind, or any of the minds of all the detectives in this
case, that Duffy did kill Anne Lock.”
“There was one other extraordinary thing. If there was one thing his
victims remembered about the man who attacked them, it was the
description of his eyes. The first time i saw him, i knew he had to be the
one. He really did have the most cold, penetrating, ‘laser’ stare i have
ever seen. He was without doubt one of the most evil characters in this
history of British justice.”
Duffy - Why did he do it?
One question that has never been answered is exactly why John Duffy
ever embarked upon his monstrous catalogue of crime.
Detective Chief Superintendent Vincent McFadden, who coordinated the
huge investigation, said: “Duffy never cracked. He never admitted
anything. Despite hundreds of hours of interviews his answer to almost
every question was ‘I can’t remember.’”
Low Self-Esteem
Experienced detectives and psychologists who studied his background
believe his problems stemmed from his own self image. Duffy hated the
fact he was physically small and suffered with acne. His wife told police
that he felt himself inadequate because a low sperm count meant he had
failed to father any children.
‘Macho’ Image
He tried to bolster his own ‘macho’ image with martial arts and
bodybuilding, and by collecting knives and other weapons. Police
psychologists think that his feelings of inadequacy developed into a
hatred of women in general, leading to the first rape attacks. Most of
Duffy’s victims were tied up in a style identical to the one he used on his
wife.
Self Preservation
Detectives think that his sudden switch from rapist to murderer was one
of self-preservation. He had been picked ip and questioned about the
rapes; the police were getting close. Detective Superintendent Charles
Farquhar, a veteran murder investigator, said: “He knew the time was
coming closer when he was bound to get caught. I am convinced he
decided that he could no longer risk being identified by a victim. From
the beginning of 1986, they had to die.”
Wimp
“All the officers who worked on the case agree,” Farquhar continues.
“Duffy saw himself as a wimp, a failure with women. We know, from
interviews with his wife and friends, that he often talked about rape and
on occasions described it as ‘a natural male instinct’. He was into karate
and knives. This was all to build up his self image. His lack of self-
esteem warped his mind and turned him into one of the most dangerous
criminals we have ever seen in this country.
Duffy’s 1st Murder Victim
Alison Day: Murdered 29 December 1985
Situation: Alison Day was murdered while going to meet her boyfriend
from work. The murder took place close to Hackney Wick railway
station, by the side of a canal. It was a Sunday evening, between
Christmas and New Year; there were few people about, and the station
was deserted. Although close to a railway station, there was no evidence,
as yet, that the Railway Rapist had turned to murder.
Method: The victim’s hands had been tied behind her back, initially with
string, but when that broke the killer used a strip of cloth torn from her
shirt. She had been strangled, again with a strip of cloth torn from her
shirt. The ligature had been tightened around her neck with a stick, using
a technique know as a Spanish Windlass.
Pathology: As the body had been weighed down with stones and
dumped in a nearby canal and was not discovered for 17 days,
pathological evidence was hard to come by. However, the fact that there
had been an attempt to dispose of the body was significant. The ligature
marks around the neck were clear, as was the fact that the hands had
been tied behind her back in a ‘praying’ position and the thumbs were
tied together.
Forensic Evidence: Again, thanx to the immersion of the body in the
water, there was little evidence to be found. However, a number of textile
fibres were found on the victim’s sheepskin coat, some or all of which
might have come from the murderer’s clothing.
Conclusion: Investigating officers considered the possibility that the
murderer was connected with the ‘Railway Rapist’, but other than the
fact that the crime took place near a railway station there was little to
connect the cases.
Duffy’s 2nd Murder Victim
Maartje Tamboezer: Murdered 17 April 1986
Situation: Maartje Tamboezer was attacked and murdered as she rode
her bicycle to a sweetshop in East Horsley, Surrey. She had been riding
by the side of the railway line from Horsley to London. Nobody
witnessed the attack, but this time, however, a number of people on the
station recalled seeing a smallish man rushing onto the platform and just
catching the 6:07 p.m train to London.
Method: The victim had been knocked off her bike by a rope stretched
across the path. She had then been dragged into a nearby copse, bound,
severely beaten, raped, and strangled. Her hands had been tied behind
her back with the thumbs together, and she had been strangled with her
own scarf.
Pathology: Marks on the neck indicated that the murderer had tightened
the ligature with a Spanish Windlass. A neck bone had been broken by a
karate blow. The hands were behind the victims back, in the praying
position with the thumbs together. An attempt had been made to dispose
of the body by burning. However, samples of the killers semen were
obtained from the dead girls clothing, and showed that he was of blood
group A, and of a special type known as a ‘secretor’
Forensic Evidence: The victims hands had been tied with a string
known as Somyarn. Made from paper, the string could be identified as
belonging to a batch made before 1982. British Rail is the main user of
the material. A search of the scene of crime also turned up a footprint
indicating that the killer had very small feet.
Conclusion: The Spanish Windlass indicated some kind of tradesman, as
a similar technique is used in carpentry. The Somyarn pointed to a
British Rail connection. Circumstantial evidence indicated that the killer
was probably a smallish man.
Duffy’s 3rd Murder Victim
Anne Lock: Murdered 18 May 1986
Situation: Anne Lock, a newly married secretary working for London
Weekend Television, had just for off the train at Bookman’s Park in
Hertfordshire. It was 10 p.m and she was attacked as she went to collect
her bike from where it had been padlocked. It is assumed that she was
forced at knifepoint down a lonely path alongside the railway line.
Method: The victim’s hands were tied behind her back. She is almost
certain to have been beaten and raped, although the delay in finding the
body after the crime meant that this was difficult to establish. One of the
victim’s socks was stuffed into her mouth, while the other was used as a
blindfold.
Pathology: In spite of an intensive search, the victims body was not
found for nice weeks, by which time it had been partially skeletised.
However, it was clear that the murderer had attempted to burn the body.
Pathological evidence was hard to come by because of the time lapse,
but the cause of death was probably suffocation.
Forensic Evidence: Apart from the burning of the body, there was little
forensic evidence remaining. However, some of the victim’s belongings
were found a short distance away, indicating that the killer had not taken
a direct route back to the station.
Conclusion: Circumstantial evidence pointed to the fact that Anne
Lock’s killer had also been the killer of Alison Day and Maartje
Tamboezer. However, hard evidence was lacking owing to the nice
week’s delay between the murder and the discovery of the body.
The woman who married him
John Duffy married Margaret Byrne at Camden Registry Office in June
1980. Her parents did not approve, but she saw the best in the former
altar boy. However, the couple’s inability to produce a child hit at the
very roots of Duffy’s self-esteem, and he began to turn violent. The
marriage was soon under strain, and Duffy’s fantasies of sexual violence
and bondage began to become more open. The couple separated in 1982,
and it was at this time that Duffy began his series of vicious and
ultimately deadly attacks. The trial reconciliations were unsuccessful,
and the marriage split irrevocably in June 1985. According to Margaret,
“The nice man i married became a madman with scary, scary eyes.”
Margaret divorced John Duffy in June 1986, and has since begun a
new life with her son Christopher.
End

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