When I began to assemble an anthology of famous murder cases of the 1950s, I noticed that I had approximately twice as many to choose from as in the earlier volumes on the 1930s and 1940s. One reason, I knew, was partly that the murder rate began to climb steadily after the war, as it does after most wars. But a glance down the list revealed something more disturbing: that an increasing number of people began to experience the compulsion to kill—from Christie, who turned his house into a kind of private morgue, and Werner Boost, who liked to murder courting couples, to Heinrich Pommerencke, who admitted that he became a wild animal when he killed. All these were, of course, sex crimes, and in retrospect they can be seen as a prelude to the epidemic of ‘serial murder’ that becomes apparent in the 1970s.
Another interesting change can be seen if we compare killers like Christie and Glatman with killers like Manuel, Boost and Rees. Christie and Glatman seem to belong to an ‘older’ type of killer, the conventional little man with a violent sexual appetite that drives him to rape in much the same furtive spirit as a poacher stealing game. In Manuel, Boost and Rees we encounter a type of criminal who will become increasingly familiar in the following decades: the rebel against society who seems to feel that he has a right to kill. It is significant that the ‘Moors murderer’ Ian Brady cited Nietzsche, Sade and Dostoevsky among his intellectual mentors. Christie had no intellectual mentors—although a number of witnesses described his desire to be known as a doctor and a man of learning. It is also possible to infer from the trial evidence that he possessed at least one characteristic of the successful doctor—a soothing bedside manner that lulled his victims into a state of trust.
The climax of what has been called ‘the greatest murder mystery of all time’ developed on the afternoon of 24 March 1953 at a tiny, shabby house in London’s Notting Hill area. A Jamaican tenant named Beresford Brown was preparing to redecorate the ground-floor kitchen, and was looking for a place where he could put up a shelf. When he tapped the wall in the corner it sounded hollow, and he realized that he was looking at a cupboard that had been covered over with wallpaper. He peeled back a strip of wallpaper from the corner and discovered a hole in the door; he switched on a torch and peeped through. And what he saw was unmistakably the back of a naked woman, who seemed to be bending forward with her head between her knees, as if being sick. It explained the offensive smell in the kitchen, not unlike that of a dead rat.
The police were there within minutes; so was the pathologist Dr Francis Camps. The cupboard door was opened, and the seated body was seen to be supported by a piece of blanket which was knotted to her brassiere. The other end of the blanket was part of the covering of a tall object leaning against the wall. A closer look revealed this was another body. And beyond it, against the back of the cupboard—which had obviously been a coal cellar—there was yet another object that looked ominously like an upright body.
The first corpse proved to be that of a rather pretty young woman, with a mark around her throat indicating that she had been strangled to death; a ‘stalactite’ of mould was growing out of her nose. Medical examination showed she had been dead about a month. Bubbling from her vagina was a large quantity of sperm—about 5 cc—suggesting that her killer had either had a tremendous orgasm, or had raped her more than once. The second body also proved to be of a young woman, wearing only a cardigan and vest; she too had been raped and strangled. The body had been placed in the cupboard upside down. Medical examination showed that she had been in the cupboard about two months. Body three was again of a young woman, upside down and wrapped in a blanket. And, as in the case of body two, a piece of cloth had been placed between the legs in the form of a diaper. She was wearing only a pink silk slip and bra, with two vests. She was six months pregnant, and had been in the cupboard from two to three months.
These were not the only remains found at No. 10 Rillington Place. Beneath the floor boards in the front room there was another naked body wrapped in a blanket. This proved to be a middle-aged woman, who had been dead for between three and four months. Between her legs there was also a piece of silk in the position of a diaper. A search of the garden revealed that a bone propping up a fence was a human femur. Digging revealed bones belonging to two more female bodies.
There was no problem about identifying the killer. He was John Reginald Halliday Christie, who had lived in the ground-floor flat for the past fifteen years, and had had the exclusive use of the garden. Christie was described as a tall, thin, bespectacled man with a bald head. The corpse under the floorboards was that of his 54-year-old wife Ethel. Christie had left the flat four days earlier, sub-letting it to a couple named Reilly (from whom he took rent of £8). That same evening the Jamaican landlord, Charles Brown, had arrived and found the Reillys in occupation; he had ordered them to leave the following morning—since Christie had no right to sub-let the flat.
Now the hunt was on for Christie; police naturally feared he might commit more sex murders. One week later, on 31 March 1953, a police constable near Putney Bridge thought he recognized a man staring gloomily into the water and asked him if he was Christie; the man admitted it quietly, and accompanied PC Ledger to the station. He seemed relieved it was over.
The finding of the bodies brought to mind another tragedy that had occurred in the same house five years earlier. On 2 December 1949, the police had found the bodies of 20-year-old Beryl Evans and her one-year-old daughter Geraldine in the wash-house outside the back door. The husband, an illiterate labourer named Timothy Evans, had been charged with both murders and hanged. Now everyone was asking the question: was Christie the killer of Beryl and Geraldine Evans? Christie himself answered part of this question a few weeks later when he confessed to strangling Beryl Evans with a stocking; he claimed she had asked him to help her commit suicide. But Christie strongly denied murdering the baby Geraldine.
Reg Christie (as he was known) was born in Yorkshire in April 1898, the son of a carpet designer who bullied and ill-treated his family. He was a weak child who was regarded as a ‘cissy’ by his schoolfellows. He was often ill, and frequently in trouble with the police for minor offences—he was the unlucky type who always seemed to get caught. At the age of 15 he became a clerk to the Halifax police, but was sacked for pilfering. And when he lost a job in his father’s carpet factory for petty theft, his father threw him out of the house. He served in the First World War and, according to his own statement, was gassed. In 1920 he got a job as a clerk in a wool mill, and began courting a neighbour, Ethel Waddington, a plain, homely girl of a passive disposition; they married in 1920.
But Christie continued to be a petty criminal. In 1921 he was a postman, and people complained that letters and postal-orders failed to arrive. Investigation revealed that Christie had been stealing them, and he was sentenced to three months in jail. In 1923 he was put on probation for obtaining money by false pretences. In 1924 he was sentenced to nine months for theft. This was too much for Ethel, and she left him. He moved to London and settled down with another woman whom he met on a coach going to Margate. But Christie’s dislike of work led to quarrels, and after one of these he hit her with a cricket bat, almost shattering her skull. For this he was sentenced to six months for malicious wounding. And in 1933 he received another three months for stealing the car of a priest who had befriended him. He wrote to Ethel in Sheffield, asking her to come and visit him in prison. When he came out, they again moved in together. Their new home was the small, shabby house at the end of a cul-de-sac called Rillington Place. The rent was twelve shillings and nine pence a week.
In September 1939 Christie became a war reserve policeman, and he became unpopular in the area for his bullying and officious behaviour—he loved to run in people for minor blackout infringements. During this period, Ethel often went to visit her family in Sheffield, and in 1943 Christie began to have an affair with a young woman from the Harrow Road police station. Her husband, a soldier, heard about it and went and caught them together at Rillington Place. He beat Christie up, and later divorced his wife, citing Christie as co-respondent.
It may have been this humiliation that led to Christie’s first murder. Some time soon after the divorce scandal, Christie picked up a young Austrian prostitute named Ruth Fuerst—she had been stranded in England by the war—and took her back to Rillington Place. Ethel was in Sheffield. As they had sex, he strangled her with a piece of rope. The fact that he used rope suggests that the murder was premeditated; he probably decided to kill her while she undressed. But why? The answer was supplied to me by Dr Francis Camps, the pathologist on the case, when I met him in 1959. Camps told me that one of the odd things about the case that never came out in court was that he found dried sperm in the seams of Christie’s shoes. For Camps, this showed clearly that Christie had masturbated as he stood over a corpse. And this, in turn, indicates that Christie had to see the corpse to achieve maximum stimulation. In short, he was a necrophile. In fact, he admitted later that the most overwhelming emotional experience of his life was to see the corpse of his grandfather when he was 8 years old.
Christie was almost certainly lying when he said he had normal intercourse with Ruth Fuerst. In his teens, Christie was the laughing stock of the local youths because he was reputed to be impotent; after a humiliating experience with a local girl, he became known as ‘Reggie No-Dick’ and ‘Can’t do-it Christie’. With shy, passive women (like Ethel) he could achieve intercourse, although he claims that they had been married for two years before they had sex. The same is probably true of the soldier’s wife with whom he had an affair. But with most women he was impotent unless they were unconscious or dead. So when Ruth Fuerst came back to his flat, he probably prepared a piece of ‘strangling rope’ (with a knot at either end) and placed it under the pillow, intending to kill her and make sexual use of the corpse until Ethel came back. In fact, he was interrupted. A telegram arrived shortly after the murder, announcing her return. He had to conceal the body hastily under the floor boards, and bury it in the garden at the first opportunity. Now he had killed a woman, the aching sense of inferiority—brought to a head by the beating from the angry soldier—was assuaged.
In December 1943 temptation came his way again. Now no longer a policeman, he worked for a firm called Ultra Radio, and met a plump, attractive little woman called Muriel Eady. She told him she suffered from catarrh, and Christie had an idea. He told her he had a cure for catarrh, and invited her back to Rillington Place while Ethel was away. The cure, he said, was to lean over a bowl of steaming Friar’s Balsam, with a cloth over the head to keep in the steam. Christie ran a rubber pipe from the gas tap, and inserted it under the cloth. Muriel Eady passed out peacefully. Trembling with excitement, Christie moved her on to the bed, removed her clothes, and raped her. Looking at the body, he later described how he experienced a sense of exquisite peace. ‘I had no regrets.’ Muriel Eady also found her way into the garden.
Six years passed before he killed again, and it is possible the murder was unpremeditated. Timothy and Beryl Evans had moved into the upstairs flat, but they quarrelled a great deal; one of the quarrels was about a blonde girl who had moved in with them; the girl had to leave. In one of his confessions, Christie claimed that he strangled Mrs Evans at her own request, because she wanted to die. There may be an element of truth in this. But what Christie failed to mention is that Beryl Evans had again discovered herself to be pregnant, and wanted an abortion. Christie, who loved to swagger, had told Timothy Evans that he had once studied to be a doctor. And Evans asked Christie if he could perform an abortion.
What happened next is a matter for conjecture; but the view of Ludovic Kennedy, in his book Ten Rillington Place, is well argued. Christie went into the room, where Beryl Evans was waiting for him; she removed her knickers and lay down with her legs apart. Christie inserted a finger, or perhaps a spoon, then was overcome with sexual desire, and tried to climb on her. Beryl struggled; Christie strangled her, and then raped her. When Timothy Evans came home, Christie told him that his wife had died as a result of the abortion, and that he, Evans, would almost certainly be blamed.
Evans, a man of subnormal intelligence, panicked. He allowed Christie to do his thinking for him. And what Christie apparently advised was that the baby should be looked after by some people in Acton, and Evans should vanish. Evans did vanish—to Merthyr Vale, in Wales, and spent ten days with an aunt and uncle; then he decided to go back to London, to give himself up to the police. They came and found the bodies in the wash-house, and Evans was charged with murder.
And here we encounter the first mystery of the case. Evans then made a full confession to murdering his wife and baby by strangulation. This was, admittedly, his second confession—in the first he had stated that Beryl had died as a result of an abortion performed by Christie. But he repeated his confession to murdering his wife and child the following day. So although he withdrew this second confession a fortnight later, the police had no reason to believe his assertion that the real killer was Christie. At the trial, Christie appeared as a witness for the prosecution, and Evans was hanged on 9 March 1950.
Ethel Christie had a strong suspicion, amounting to a certainty, that her husband was somehow involved in the murders—she had noticed his extreme nervousness at the time. She confided her belief to a neighbour, and when Christie came in and caught them discussing the case, he flew into a rage. This could explain why, on 14 December 1952, he strangled her in bed. It could also have been that he experienced a compulsion to commit more sex crimes, and Ethel stood in the way. Christie told her family in Sheffield that she was unable to write because she had rheumatism in her fingers.
In mid-January 1953 Christie picked up a prostitute called Kathleen Maloney in a pub in Paddington, and invited her back to his flat. As she sat in a deck-chair in the kitchen, he placed the gas pipe under the chair; she was too drunk to notice. When she was unconscious, he raped her and put her in the cupboard.
The next victim, Rita Nelson, was six months pregnant; Christie may have lured her back with the offer of an abortion. She also ended in the cupboard—the second body.
About a month later, Christie met a girl called Hectorina Maclennan, who told him she was looking for a flat. She and her boyfriend actually spent three nights in Christie’s flat, now devoid of furniture (Christie had sold it). On 5 March Hectorina made the mistake of going back to the flat alone. She grew nervous when she saw Christie toying with a gas-pipe and tried to leave; Christie killed her and raped her. When her boyfriend came to inquire about her, she was in the cupboard, and Christie claimed not to have seen her. As Christie gave him tea, the boyfriend noticed ‘a very nasty smell’, but had no suspicion he was sitting within feet of Hectorina’s corpse.
This was Christie’s last murder. Two weeks later, he left Rillington Place, and wandered around aimlessly, sleeping in cheap lodgings and spending the days in cafés until he was arrested. He confessed to all the murders of women, usually insisting that it was they who made the advances. He was executed on 15 July 1953.
The major mystery remains—was Timothy Evans innocent? Long after his death, he was officially absolved of all responsibility and guilt; yet that leaves some major questions unanswered. For example, why did he confess to the murders?
Ludovic Kennedy, in Ten Rillington Place, takes the view that Evans was innocent of both murders. He confessed, says Kennedy, out of misery and confusion. But this is almost impossible. Evans had had ten days in Wales to think things over. There is no earthly reason why he should have confessed to strangling Beryl (after a quarrel) and then Geraldine. (Kennedy argues that he was too fond of both).
In The Two Stranglers of Rillington Place, Rupert Furneaux takes the opposite view. He points out that Beryl and Timothy Evans often quarrelled violently, and that nothing was more likely than that Evans would kill Beryl in a rage. He argues closely and convincingly, and is, on the whole, more plausible than Kennedy. And he believes that it was Christie who murdered the baby.
But this still leaves a major mystery: why, in that case, did Evans also confess to murdering Geraldine?
The answer is surely supplied by a curious piece of evidence from another murderer, Donald Hume, who was in prison at the same time as Evans, on a charge of murdering a man named Stanley Setty and throwing pieces of his body out of an aeroplane. Evans asked Hume’s advice, and when Hume asked ‘Did you kill your wife?’ Evans replied: ‘No, Christie murdered her.’ Here he could well have been lying, for by now his defence was that Christie had killed her in the course of an abortion. But when Hume asked if he killed the baby, Evans made the surprising statement that Christie had strangled Geraldine while he, Evans, watched. He said that the baby’s crying had got on his nerves.
This rings true. Evans was in a frantic state, and he could well have stood by while Christie killed Geraldine. In doing so, he had become, in effect, her killer, so his confession to murdering her was not far short of the truth. Guilt probably increased his sense of being her murderer. And this, I would argue, is almost certainly the answer to the riddle. There were two stranglers of Rillington Place. And baby Geraldine was, in a sense, killed by both of them.
The question of whether Peter Manuel should be classed as a serial killer is a difficult one. John Bingham’s book The Hunting Down of Peter Manuel (1973) begins: ‘Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel was found guilty of murdering seven people. He certainly killed nine. In addition to the murders, he raped one woman, assaulted others, and was a housebreaker of some renown, being in all a versatile criminal.’ And a few pages later: ‘Manuel did kill for pleasure. He liked killing. The act of killing thrilled him.’ This certainly sounds like a precise definition of a serial killer.
Manuel seems to have been one of those habitual crooks who find it impossible to stay out of trouble. Unfortunately, little is known of his childhood, and the circumstances that turned him into a criminal. Born in Manhattan in 1927, he returned to England with his British parents at the age of 5. His parents were good Catholics. The family lived in Motherwell, Scotland, then moved to Coventry. There, at the age of 12, Manuel made his first appearance in court for burgling the shop of a cycle dealer, and received twelve months’ probation. When he appeared before the same court five weeks later for housebreaking he was sent to an approved school. He escaped eleven times, and was usually returned after being caught housebreaking—on one occasion he attacked the householder with a hammer. In 1942 he robbed and indecently assaulted the wife of a school employee, and was eventually caught hiding in the school chapel. This time he was sent to Borstal. After being released two years later, he rejoined his family, who had returned to Scotland. His father worked as a foreman in the local gasworks, and was on the District Council. Soon afterwards Manuel was acquitted on yet another charge of housebreaking.
Manuel’s problem was that, as a criminal, he was not particularly competent. Worse still, he was unlucky. Soon after midnight on 16 February 1946, he broke into a bungalow in Sandyhills, near Glasgow. A local constable called Muncie was called to the scene, and spent most of the night searching the house, in case the burglar was still concealed there. He was not, so Muncie went home for breakfast. Soon, he was called back to an empty bungalow very close to the one he had already investigated—a neighbour had reported seeing an intruder. In fact, Peter Manuel was hiding in the loft, but Muncie failed to find him, and left after a search. Later that morning, Muncie remembered that he had left behind a teacup with fingerprints on it, and drove back to the bungalow with a colleague. While the colleague was collecting the keys from a neighbour, a well-dressed youth—Manuel was 19—walked towards Muncie’s car from the direction of the bungalow; Muncie stopped him and asked his identity. The youth said he was Peter Manuel, then admitted that he had come from the garden of the bungalow, where he had been ‘watching’. At the police station, he was found to have in his possession a gold watch that Muncie had last seen in the bungalow. Manuel was placed under arrest and charged with burglary.
Unfortunately, he was allowed out on bail. And within two weeks, he had committed three sexual attacks. The first two were unsuccessful; a woman with a 3-year-old child fought and screamed so hard that he ran away, and a nurse was saved by the appearance of a motorcyclist. Muncie had already recognized the description of the attacker as that of the burglar, but Manuel was nowhere to be found. The third victim, a married woman, was attacked from behind on a lonely road after dark. She had only just been released from hospital, and was in no condition to resist. Manuel dragged to a railway embankment, beat her into submission, then raped her.
The next day Muncie caught up with him. In an identity parade, the first two victims immediately identified Manuel as the attacker. The third victim had not seen his face; but fragments of red sandstone—from the railway embankment—in Manuel’s clothes left no doubt that he was the rapist. He received an eight-year sentence.
Back in Glasgow in 1953, he worked for the Gas Board and British Rail, and even became engaged for eleven months to a bus conductress. There was a curious episode during the engagement that throws light on Manuel’s complex psychology. The girl received a letter alleging that Manuel’s real father had been electrocuted in America, and that Manuel himself had been in the Secret Service. Manuel shrugged it off as a calumny; in fact, he had written it himself. It was typical of his desire to ‘be’ someone, to appear as more interesting and exciting than he actually was. In fact, the girl cancelled the marriage because Manuel refused to go to confession. (Both were Catholics.)
During this period, Manuel tried hard to make trouble for Muncie by alleging perjury in the rape case; he also offered information about two murders, claiming to know the identity of the killer. The police dismissed the claims. In December 1954, Manuel also tried to gain American citizenship, and tried to support the claim by offering information about various crimes he claimed to know about, and information about national security. The Americans decided he was a liar and fantasizer, and sent him away. Muncie, who interviewed him again about these claims, decided that he had an overpowering craving for attention.
On 30 July 1955—the day he was supposed to have been married—Manuel made another bungled attempt at rape. The girl, Mary McLaughlin, was forced into a field at knifepoint, but her screams were heard, and people began searching nearby fields with torches. Manuel forced her to the ground and placed a knife at her throat, threatening to kill her and cut off her head. He also put his hand inside her underwear. When the searchers had gone away, the girl tried talking him out of rape, asking if he was in trouble, and Manuel told her that he had been due to get married that day, but that the girl, a bus conductress, had broken it off the previous evening. Then, after smoking cigarettes and talking for more than an hour, they made their way back across the fields. Manuel had thrown away the knife with which he threatened her. When he asked her if she meant to report him to the police, she told him that she intended to forget the whole thing.
In fact, after telling her mother and sister what had happened, she went to the police. Muncie recognized the description as being similar to Manuel, and soon Manuel was under arrest. At first he alleged an alibi, which was quickly disproved. But in court, he elected to defend himself, and soon revealed that he was a highly articulate young man. He told the jury that he and Mary McLaughlin had been courting, but had quarrelled. They had met by accident on the day of the alleged assault, and she had gone with him voluntarily…
He told the story so plausibly that the jury—who knew nothing of his criminal record—decided that he deserved the benefit of the doubt, and brought in a Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’. Subsequently, Manuel’s father saw Mary McLaughlin at a bus stop and spat at her.
Manuel’s next attack on a woman proved fatal. Ten weeks later, on 4 January 1956, a man taking a walk in a copse near the East Kilbride golf course saw a girl lying face down, her head battered in. She proved to be 19-year-old Anne Knielands, who had set out the previous evening to meet a boyfriend. But her young man was celebrating Hogmanay, and had forgotten about their date.
She had been attacked from behind, and had run away across a field, losing both shoes and scrambling over barbed wire that had lacerated her. Finally, she had been overtaken, and struck on the back of the head with a piece of angle iron so violently that the skull was shattered into fifteen pieces. Yet although her knickers—and one stocking—were missing, she had not been raped.
Not far from the site of die murder, men from the Gas Board were working at a building site, and among the workers was Peter Manuel. The man who had found the girl’s body learned that Manuel had a criminal record that included sex attacks, and informed the police. Manuel was questioned, and explained that the scratches on his face had been acquired in a brawl. He had been at home on the evening when Anne Knielands had been killed. His father supported his alibi, although he knew some of his son’s statements were false. The police had to accept his word.
In March, police received a tip that Manuel and another man intended to rob a colliery at Blantyre, near Manuel’s home. They pounced as the men were breaking in; one was arrested, but the other—Manuel—ran away. However, he left behind a fragment of clothing on a barbed wire fence, and was finally charged with the attempted break-in. His trial date was set for 2 October, seven months away. Meanwhile, he was released on bail.
Six months later, in September 1956, there were three burglaries in Lanarkshire. The first, on 12 September, was in an empty house in Bothwell. The burglar had scattered soup on the floor, walked on the bedcover in dirty boots, and slashed the mattress and quilt. He had drunk the juice from a tin of pears and left the pears on the carpet. A stopwatch, an electric razor and some tools were missing, but other valuable items were untouched.
The second burglary took place in High Burnside, not far from East Kilbride, on 15 September. Again, soup was scattered on the carpet, as well as spaghetti; there were dirty footmarks on the bed. But all that had been stolen were four pairs of nylon stockings and two gold rings.
Two days later, the daily help arrived at 5 Fennsbank Avenue, High Burnside, the home of baker William Watt, and found a glass panel broken in the front door. In the house, three women lay dead, shot in the head at close range: Mrs Marion Watt, her sister Margaret Brown and her 16-year-old daughter Vivienne. All were wearing nightclothes, although Margaret Brown’s pyjama bottoms had been torn, and Vivienne’s had been removed. A brassiere, apparently torn from her body, lay on the floor of Vivienne’s bedroom. The girl had a bruise on her chin where she had obviously been struck but there was no sign of rape or sexual assault. A cigarette had been stubbed out on the carpet.
William Watt had been away on a fishing trip when the women were murdered, but ten days later he was arrested and charged with the murders—the policeman who had arrested him had felt that he did not behave like a man whose family has just been slaughtered, and a check of his alibi convinced the police that he could have returned home during the night and committed the crimes.
Yet the police also had reason to suspect Manuel. Further along Fennsbank Avenue, at number 18, another burglary was discovered. The burglar had again poured tomato soup on the carpet and stubbed out a cigarette. A pair of nylon stockings was found on a chair in the lounge.
They had another reason. An informant told the police that Manuel had boasted that he intended to ‘do a Jew’s house’ on the evening of the murders, and to use a revolver. He told the informant that he had tested the revolver by shooting a cow up the nostril.
By chance, Muncie—now a chief inspector—had noticed a dead cow in a field, and learned from the vet that it had blood in its nostril. Unfortunately, it already lay in a vat at the knacker’s yard. In an attempt to find the bullet, Muncie and a squad of policemen spent four days searching through piles of stinking offal; unfortunately, they were unable to find anything.
Manuel was questioned—his father blustered that he was going to complain about police harassment to his local MP—and Manuel simply refused to account for his movements on the evening of the murders. Soon after, he was sentenced to eighteen months for the colliery burglary. He was placed in Barlinnie Jail, alongside William Watt…
Now Manuel behaved in the strangely irrational manner that seems typical of a certain type of serial killer—unless, that is, he was suddenly struck by remorse, or a flash of human decency. He sent for Watt’s lawyer and told him that he, Manuel, knew that Watt was innocent, and that he knew the name of the man who had actually committed the murders. To prove this, he described the position of certain articles of furniture in the Watts’ house, claiming that the murderer hold told him—and that he had also asked him to dispose of the gun. The lawyer checked the furniture and found that Manuel’s statement was accurate. But there was still no proof that Manuel was the murderer. Finally, after sixty-seven days in jail, Watt was released.
Almost a year later, in November 1957, Manuel was also released. His first action was to arrange a meeting with William Watt, and tell him that the murders had been committed by a man called Tallis. His description of the inside of the house was so accurate that Watt accused him of having been inside it. Manuel denied this. There was nothing Watt could do about his suspicion that he had spoken to the killer of his wife, daughter and sister-in-law.
On 8 December, a few days after this talk with William Watt, Manuel went to Newcastle upon Tyne, and hired the taxi of driver named Sidney Dunn. Near Edmundbyers, he shot Dunn in the back of the head, then cut his throat; then he smashed the windows and headlamps of the taxi, and dragged the body on to the moorland grass. He left the driver’s wallet untouched. The precise motive—apart from the pleasure of killing—remains a mystery.
Twenty days after the Newcastle murder, Manuel killed another girl. On the evening of 28 December 1957, Isabelle Cooke set out from her home in Mount Vernon to go to a dance. She failed to reach the dance or return home. A woman who lived nearby heard a woman cry out.
The police were still searching for the body on New Year’s Eve when Manuel massacred another family. Peter Smart, a successful civil engineer of 45, lived with his wife and 10-year-old son in a house he had built himself at Sheepburn Road, Uddingston. His relatives had been expecting him to drop in for Hogmanay celebrations, but when he failed to arrive, simply assumed that he had found something else to do. When he failed to arrive at work on 6 January, and the police reported finding his car abandoned in a Gorbals street, two of his colleagues went to the house in Sheepburn Road; when there was no reply to their knocks, they called the police. The three Smarts were found dead in their bed; all had been shot at close range in the head.
Two local residents named McMunn shivered when they heard the news. On 4 January, a burglar had peered round their bedroom door, but had fled when Mr McMunn asked his wife: ‘Where’s the gun?’ and she replied ‘Here it is.’ The burglar had gained admittance by breaking a window.
Peter Manuel was an immediate and obvious suspect. And suspicion of his involvement increased when Joe Brennan, a friend of Manuel’s who was now in the police force, reported that Manuel had been broke on New Year’s Eve and spending freely on New Year’s Day. And now, at last, the police had the break they had been hoping for. Peter Smart had been to the local bank on New Year’s Day and had drawn out £35. The money, as it happened, was in new notes, in consecutive numerical order. The customer who had drawn out cash immediately after Peter Smart was interviewed, and still had some of his notes, also numbered consecutively. From this, the police could deduce the numbers of the notes drawn out by Peter Smart. They then went around hotels and pubs where Manuel had spent money on New Year’s Day, and were able to trace notes he had spent; they were from the lot drawn out by Peter Smart.
Early on 13 January 1958, the police swooped on the house of Manuel’s father. He was as aggressive and unhelpful as ever, threatening again to complain to his MP. Peter Manuel was roused from sleep, and became angry. ‘You haven’t found anything yet—you can’t take me.’ The word ‘yet’ convinced the police that they were on the right track.
In the house they found a camera and a pair of gloves lined with lambswool. On Christmas Day, there had been a burglary at the home of the Revd. Alexander Houston, in Mount Vernon, in which a camera and gloves lined with lambswool had been stolen. When the minister identified them as his property, the police at last had something with which they could charge Peter Manuel. For good measure, his father was also charged.
Peter Manuel’s reaction was as unexpected and irrational as ever. He asked to see the police superintendent, and told him that the money had been given him by a man called Samuel McKay, in payment for showing McKay around the Sheepburn Road area, with a view to spying out suitable houses for burglary.
When told of this accusation, McKay—who was not normally the kind of man who would help the police—became indignant, and offered them a useful piece of information: that just before Christmas, Manuel had been in possession of a Biretta pistol.
And now, two days after his arrest, the totally unexpected happened, and Manuel decided to confess. He asked to see the inspector in charge of the murder team, and told him that he could help him clear up some unsolved crimes. Then, in front of members of the team, he wrote a statement declaring that he would give information about the murders of Anne Knielands, Isabelle Cooke, the Watt family and the Smarts, if they would release his father. Then he confessed—verbally—to breaking into the Smarts’ house and killing all three. His parents were sent for, and Manuel repeated his confession to them. After that, Manuel took the police to the spot where he had buried Isabelle Cooke. In the grave—in a field not far from where she had last been seen—the girl’s almost naked body was uncovered.
Later, Manuel was able to lead the police to the place beside the River Clyde where he had thrown the Beretta; this was recovered by a diver. The pistol was wrapped in a pair of Mrs Smart’s gloves.
The trial, which opened on 12 May 1958, should have been an anticlimax, since Manuel had confessed, and the police had overwhelming evidence against him. But Manuel still had a few surprises. He dismissed his defence counsel and undertook his own defence—no doubt recalling the previous occasion when this tactic had succeeded in producing a verdict of ‘not proven’. His basic assertion was that his ‘confessions’ had been forced from him, in that his father was also in custody, charged with burglary. He also charged that William Watt had murdered his own family, and had confessed this to him. But when he examined his own mother, she admitted that when she and her husband had been called to the police station, her son had said ‘I don’t know what makes me do these things.’ Manuel tried hard to get her to retract this, without success. The jury, understandably, felt that if Manuel’s own mother was willing to acknowledge that he had confessed, then there could be little doubt of it.
They took two hours and twenty-one minutes to find Manuel guilty on all counts except the Anne Knielands murder, on which the judge had instructed them that the evidence was insufficient. Manuel was sentenced to death.
In Barlinnie Jail, Manuel had to be kept apart from other prisoners—rapists and child killers are always unpopular. Precautions were even taken to make sure he could not be poisoned. When his appeal was rejected, Manuel suddenly stopped speaking, and gave up smoking; for three weeks he was silent. Two days before his execution, when he heard that the Home Secretary had rejected an appeal for clemency, he suddenly became his old self again, talking in the odd, compulsive way that had already caused him so many problems. On 11 July 1958, he made his confession to a priest, ate breakfast with a large tot of whisky, then went quietly to meet the hangman.
From the point of view of this book, the main interest of the Manuel case lies in the fact that Manuel was one of the earliest ‘self-esteem killers’. Fellow prisoners knew him as a braggart who wanted to be respected as a master criminal. His most urgent desire was to be ‘known’, to be famous or notorious. Yet unlike other boastful killers—for example, Richard Speck, the murderer of the eight Chicago nurses (whom we shall encounter in the next chapter)—he was a man of considerable intelligence, and psychiatrists noted that he could be articulate and well-mannered. But he continued to refuse to acknowledge the murders, claiming that the police had ‘framed’ him. He explained his burglaries by saying with disarming candour that he was a dishonest person who happened to have been born that way.
But how do we explain the fact that, except in one case, his female victims were never raped? John Bingham has suggested that the reason is that Manuel would reach orgasm before he arrived at this point. After the Mary McLaughlan assault, semen stains were found in his trousers, and this could explain why, after groping around inside her underwear, he suddenly calmed down and smoked a cigarette. Vincent Verzeni and Peter Kürten often achieved orgasm in the act of throttling victims; when this was over, they became harmless.
Manuel may also have been an underwear fetishist. Anne Knieland’s knickers, and her missing stocking, were never found. In one of his burglaries, Manuel left a pair of nylon stockings on a chair; he may have used them to cover his hands and prevent fingerprints, but also because they sexually excited him. The torn pyjama trousers in the case of Margaret Brown, the removal of Vivienne Watt’s pyjama trousers, and the fact that most of Isabelle Cooke’s clothes had been removed, point unmistakably to a sexual motive. Yet the bus conductress to whom Manuel was engaged said that he never made sexual advances. This seems to suggest that Manuel was interested in sex only when it was associated with the ‘forbidden’. What excited him was tearing off a girl’s underwear or pyjamas; while doing this the excitement may have been so great that he achieved a climax.
Another curious detail is that neighbours of the Smarts noticed that the curtains were sometimes drawn and sometimes undrawn in the days following New Year’s Day. This suggests that Manuel returned to the house day after day. John Bingham’s theory is that his murders sprang out of an association of violence with sexuality, and even that this may have had something to do with the phases of the moon. Whether or not this is true, it seems clear that Manuel was one of those for whom criminality itself is somehow sexual. But he lacked insight into his own condition; he was undoubtedly speaking the truth when he told his parents: ‘I don’t know what makes me do these things.’
One thing seems very clear—and explains the amount of space devoted to this curiously untypical case. In spite of his intelligence, Manuel was driven by a totally irrational resentment. Like Panzram, he wanted to ‘get his own back’ on society. This could well have been the result of his period in Borstals—we have already seen that this was one of the major factors that led ‘Brides in the Bath’ Smith to become a criminal, and in the next chapter we shall see that this is also the key to the ‘Moors murders’. Manuel followed the search for Isabelle Cooke with gloating satisfaction, and even dropped hints to his policeman friend Joe Brannan that he knew something about it. It didn’t worry him that he knew Brannan was a policeman, and that he had probably been told to report on him. It made the game more interesting. As he and Brannan sat on top of a bus, looking at police searching a high railway viaduct, Manuel said: ‘Wouldn’t it be a fine sight to see one of those bastards hanging by the neck from the viaduct? Preferably one with stripes on his arm…’ He was obviously glad to have a policeman there as an audience; at last he was being allowed to give them ‘a piece of his mind’, just as if he was standing on stage under a spotlight with an audience of coppers…A comment like this enables us to understand Manuel’s mentality in a single flash. He was saying: ‘If I can’t be a part of society—with the pre-eminence I deserve—then I’m going to do my best to screw things up, until the bastards feel sorry they didn’t pay me more attention…’
This is an attitude we shall see again and again in later serial killers. Lacenaire was perhaps the first notable criminal to embody this irrational resentment, and he would have regarded Manuel as a worthy—if somewhat unimaginative—successor, lacking the foresight and cunning that make a truly great criminal.
Lacenaire might well have entertained a higher opinion of the criminal who might be regarded as the German counterpart of Peter Manuel: Werner Boost, who was arguably Germany’s most dangerous serial killer since Peter Kürten. And, unlike Manuel, he certainly could not be accused of lack of planning: he spent hours in libraries reading the lives of notorious criminals, studying their methods and making notes on how to avoid their mistakes.
For the Düsseldorf police, the story began on the cold, snowy night of 7 January 1953. Shortly before midnight, a fair-haired young man who was bleeding from a head wound staggered into the police station and said that his friend had just been murdered. The ‘friend’, it seemed, was a distinguished lawyer named Dr Lothar Servé. The officer on duty immediately telephoned Kriminal Hauptkommissar Mattias Eynck, chief of the North Rhineland murder squad, who hurried down to the station. The young man had identified himself as Adolf Hullecremer, a 19-year-old student, and explained that he and Dr Servé had been sitting in the car ‘discussing business’, and looking at the lights on the river, when both doors of the car had been jerked open by two men in handkerchief masks. One of the men began to swear, then shot Servé in the head. As Hullecremer begged for his life, the second man whispered that if he wished to stay alive, he should ‘sham dead’. He then hit Hullecremer on the head with a pistol. As he lost consciousness, Hullecremer heard him say: ‘He won’t wake again.’ When the men had gone, he made off as fast as he could…
After Hullecremer’s head had been bandaged, he said he felt well enough to take the police and the doctor back to the car. It was parked in a grove of trees on the edge of the river, its engine still running. Across the rear seat lay the body of a man of about 50, bleeding from a wound in the temple. The doctor pronounced him dead.
The motive was clearly robbery—the dead man’s wallet was missing. Eynck concluded that the robbers were ‘stick-up men’ who had chosen this spot because it was known as a ‘lovers’ lane’. The fact that the two had been in the rear seat when attacked suggested a homosexual relationship.
Forensic examination revealed no fingerprints on the car, and falling snow had obliterated any footprints or other tyre tracks. The murder enquiry had reached an impasse when, a few weeks later, a tramp found a .32 calibre pistol—of Belgian make—in the woods, and forensic tests showed it to be the murder weapon. Photographs of its bullets were sent to all police stations, and the Magdeburg police—in East Germany—contacted Eynck to say that the same gun had been used in a murder a few years earlier in a small town called Hadersleben. Two East Germans attempting to flee to the West had been shot with the same weapon. This seemed to suggest that the murderer was himself an East German refugee who had moved to Düsseldorf. But there the trail went cold—thousands of East Germans had fled the communist regime to the large cities of West Germany since the war.
Almost three years later, in October 1955, Eynck found himself wondering whether the double killers had struck again. A young couple had vanished after an evening date. The man was 26-year-old Friedhelm Behre, a baker, and his fiancée was 23-year-old Thea Kurmann. They had spent the evening of 31 October in a ‘bohemian’ restaurant called the Cafe Czikos, in the old quarter of Düsseldorf, and had driven off soon after midnight in Behre’s blue Ford. The next day, worried relatives reported them missing. But there was no sign of the couple or of the blue car. Four weeks later, a contractor standing by a half-dredged gravel pit near Düsseldorf was throwing stones at a metal object when he realized that it was the top of a blue car. He called some of his men, and they heaved it ashore. In the back seat lay two decomposing corpses. They proved to be those of the missing couple, the girl still dressed in her red satin evening dress, which had been torn and pulled up.
The medical report revealed that Friedhelm Behre had been shot through the head at close range. The girl had been garrotted, possibly by a man’s tie, after being raped. It looked as if the killer had wrenched open the rear door as the couple were petting, shot the man, then dragged the girl out. After rape, her body was thrown into the back seat, and the car driven to the gravel pit, where it was pushed into the water.
To Eynck, this sounded ominously like the Servé murder. Again, there were no fingerprints—suggesting that the killer had worn gloves. The bullet had disappeared. It had gone right through the victim’s skull, but it should have been somewhere in the car. Its absence suggested that the murderer had removed it to prevent the identification of the gun.
The murder caused panic among Düsseldorf’s young lovers, and over the Christmas period the usual lay-bys were deserted. Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Botte, in charge of the investigation, quickly found that he had run out of clues.
Three months later, on the morning of 8 February 1956, a businessman named Julius Dreyfuss reported that his Mercedes car was missing—together with its chauffeur, a young man named Peter Falkenberg. The chauffeur had failed to arrive to pick up his employer. It seemed possible that Falkenberg had driven away to sell the expensive car. But an hour or so later, a woman reported that a black car was parked in front of her house with its headlights on. It proved to be the missing Mercedes. And there was a great deal of blood inside—in both the front and the rear seats.
At about the same time, a woman had reported that her daughter, 23-year-old Hildegard Wassing, had failed to return home after a date. A few days before, Hildegard and a friend had met a young man named Peter at a dance; he had told them he was a chauffeur. Hildegard had agreed to go out with him the following Tuesday, 7 February, and her brother had noticed that he was driving a black Mercedes. To Eynck, it sounded as if Peter Falkenberg and Hildegard Wassing had fallen victim to the ‘car murderer’.
The next morning, a gardener was cycling to work near the small village of Lank-Ilvereich, near Düsseldorf, when he saw the remains of a burning haystack some distance from the path. He strolled over to look—and then rushed for the nearest telephone as he saw the remains of two corpses among the burnt hay.
Eynck arrived soon after, and noticed the smell of petrol. Both bodies were badly charred, but rain had prevented the fire from totally incinerating them. Forensic examination revealed that the man—identified from dental charts as Peter Falkenberg—had been shot through the head. Hildegard Wassing had been raped and then strangled—the rope was still sunk in the burnt flesh.
Thousands of Düsseldorf residents were questioned, but once again, there were no obvious leads. The car killer was evidently a man who took great care to leave no clues. Then a detective named Bohm came upon a possible suspect. In the small town of Buderich, not far from the burnt haystack, he was told of a young man named Erich von der Leyen, who had once attacked some children with a manure fork, and was regarded as a ‘loner’ by his neighbours. He was originally from East Germany, and now lived in lodgings in a place called Veert. Von der Leyen worked as a travelling salesman for agricultural machinery, so his log-book should have shown precisely where he was when the couple were murdered. But the entry for 7 February had been made later, and the travelling times for drives seemed implausible. Moreover, there were red spots on the front seat-covers. These were sent for forensic examination, and were reported to be human bloodstains. Erich von der Leyen was placed under arrest. Stains on his trousers also proved to be blood.
Von der Leyen insisted that he had no idea where the stains came from—the only way he could account for them was to recall that his girlfriend’s dachshund had been in his car when it was on heat. That sounded unlikely. The police asked another forensic expert to examine the bloodstains on the trousers, and see if he could determine their age. Under the microscope, he saw epithelial cells—evidence that it was menstrual blood. The stains on the car seat were re-tested, and the laboratory admitted with embarrassment that these were also of menstrual blood—and, moreover, from a dog. The police had to release von der Leyen, and to apologize for the intense interrogations he had endured.
Soon after this, on the evening of 6 June 1956, a forest ranger named Erich Spath was walking through woods near Meererbusch, not far from the burnt haystack site, when he saw a man lurking in the undergrowth, and peering from behind a tree at a car in which a courting couple were petting. The man was so absorbed that he did not hear the ranger. Then Spath saw him draw a revolver from his pocket, and creep towards the car.
Spath placed his rifle to his shoulder and crept up behind the young man. ‘Drop it!’ The man turned round, then threw away his gun and ran. Spath chased him and soon caught up with him, crouching in a hollow.
Half an hour later, the car with the courting couple—and also containing the ranger and his captive—pulled up in front of Düsseldorf’s main police station. The suspect—who was dark and good-looking—had accompanied them without protest and without apparent concern, as if his conscience was clear. And when they stood in the office of Kriminal Hauptkommissar Mattias Eynck, Spath understood why. The young man—who gave his name as Werner Boost—explained that he had merely been doing a little target practice in the woods, and had thought he was being attacked. He obviously felt that no one could disprove his story and that therefore the police would be unable to hold him.
‘Is your gun licensed?’ asked Eynck.
‘Well…no. It’s a war trophy…’
‘In that case, I am charging you with possessing an illegal weapon.’
The gun was found in the undergrowth where Boost had thrown it. Nearby was a motorcycle, which proved to have been stolen. Boost was also charged with its theft. A magistrate promptly sentenced him to six months in jail, which gave Eynck the time he needed to investigate the suspect.
At first the trail seemed to be leading nowhere. The pistol had not been used in any known crime; Boost was, as he said, an electrical engineer who worked in a factory, and who was regarded as a highly intelligent and efficient worker; he had been married for six years, had two children, and was a good husband and provider. His wife, Hanna, told Eynck that he spent most of his evenings at home, working in his own laboratory or reading—he was an obsessive reader. Occasionally, she admitted, he became restless and went out until the early hours of the morning.
She led Eynck down to the basement laboratory. There he discovered various ingredients for explosives, as well as some deadly poisons. He also found a quantity of morphine.
Back in the flat, Eynck noticed a letter postmarked Hadersleben. He recalled that the Belgian pistol, which had been found within a few hundred yards of Boost’s flat, had been used in a double murder in Hadersleben, near Magdeburg. ‘Do you know someone in Hadersleben?’ he asked. Hanna Boost told him that it was her home town, and that she had married her husband there.
‘How did you both escape from East Germany?’
‘Werner knew a safe route through the woods.’
But she insisted that, as far as she knew, her husband had never owned a gun.
Now, at last, the case was beginning to look more promising. Back in his office, Eynck looked through the latest batch of information about Boost. This had come from a town called Helmstedt, which had been taken over by the Russians in 1945. And at about this period, there had been a great many murders—about fifty in all—of people trying to escape from the Russian to the British zone. Werner Boost had been in Helmstedt at the time. Then he had moved to Hadersleben, and the murders had ceased. But the two would-be émigrés had been shot in Hadersleben while trying to escape…
There was another interesting item—a notebook which had been found in the saddle of Boost’s stolen motorcycle. And it contained an entry: ‘Sunday, June 3. Lorbach in need of another shot. Must attend to it.’
Eynck sent for Boost and questioned him about the item. Boost said smoothly:
‘Franz Lorbach is a friend of mine, and we go shooting together. On that day, he just couldn’t hit the bull’s eye, so I made a note to give him another shot.’
Eynck did not believe a word of it. He asked Boost about his days in Helmstedt, and whether he had ever helped refugees to escape. Boost admitted that he had, and said he was proud of it. ‘And did you ever shoot them?’ Boost looked horrified. ‘Of course not!’
Eynck now sent out one of his detectives to try to locate Franz Lorbach. This was not difficult. Lorbach proved to be a man of 23 with dark curly hair, whose good-looking face lacked the strength of Werner Boost’s. He was a locksmith, and insisted that he only had the most casual acquaintance with Boost. Eynck knew that he was lying. He also noticed Lorbach’s dilated pupils, and surmised that he was a drug addict, and that Boost was his supplier. He was certain that, when his craving became strong enough, Lorbach would talk. He held him in custody for questioning.
Meanwhile, Boost and Lorbach were placed in a police lineup, wearing handkerchief masks over the lower half of their faces. Adolf Hullecremer, the student who had been with Dr Servé when he was shot, was able to identify Boost as Servé’s assailant. He said he recognized the eyes. But he failed to identify Lorbach.
After a day or two in custody, Lorbach began to show symptoms of withdrawal from drugs. And one day, as Eynck was questioning Boost again—and getting nowhere—he received a phone call saying that Lorbach wanted to talk to him.
Lorbach was pale, his eyes were watery, and his nose twitched like a rabbit’s.
‘I want to tell you the truth. Werner Boost is a monster. It was he who killed Dr Servé, and I was his accomplice…’
Lorbach admitted that it was a love of poaching that had drawn the two of them together in 1952. They often went shooting in the woods. But Boost seemed to have a maniacal hatred of courting couples. ‘These sex horrors are the curse of Germany.’ So they would often creep up on couples who were making love in cars and rob them. Then, he said, Boost had an idea for rendering them unconscious. He had concocted some mixture which he forced them to drink. Then he and Lorbach would rape the unconscious girls. ‘Some of them were very lovely. I feel ashamed—my wife is going to have a baby. But it was Boost who made me do it. I had to do it. He kept me supplied with morphine, which he obtained from the chemist who sold him chemicals.’
He insisted that he had taken part only in the attack on Servé and Hullecremer. Boost had been indignant to see two men in a car together, and had ordered him to kill the young man. But Lorbach had not the stomach for it. Instead, he had whispered to him to pretend to be dead. Lorbach’s failure to shoot Hullecremer enraged Boost—he made Lorbach kneel in the snow, and said: ‘I ought to kill you too…’
Lorbach led the police to a place at the edge of the forest, where Boost kept his loot concealed. In a buried chest, they found watches, rings and jewellery. There were also bottles of poison, some knives and a roll of cord which proved to be identical to that which had been used to strangle Hildegard Wassing.
Lorbach also disclosed that Boost had ordered Lorbach to kill his wife, Hanna Boost, if he was arrested. There was a phial of cyanide hidden behind a pipe in his flat, and Lorbach was to slip it into her drink, so that she could not incriminate her husband. Eynck found the phial exactly where Lorbach had said it was.
Lorbach also confirmed that he and Boost had been involved in an earlier attempt at crime, a year before the murder of Dr Servé. The two men had placed a heavy plank studded with long nails across the road, to force motorists to stop. But the first car to come along had contained four men—too many for them to tackle—and it had driven on to the verge and around the plank. Two more cars also contained too many passengers. Then a security van came, and a man with a gun removed the plank. After that, police arrived—evidently alerted by one of the cars—and Boost and Lorbach had to flee. In fact, as long ago as 1953, Eynck had suspected that Dr Servé’s murderer was responsible for this earlier attempt.
Lorbach also detailed Boost’s plans to rob a post office by knocking everyone unconscious with poison gas, and to kidnap and murder a child of a rich industrialist for ransom.
Werner Boost had been born on 6 May 1928 in an industrial area of Hadersleben, the son of an unmarried mother who was only 17; he never knew the identity of his father. He had been placed in a government-run home, and been in trouble with the law from an early age. Leaving school in 1942, at the age of 14, he had worked in a series of menial jobs. He was released from a juvenile institution just before the war ended, and conscripted into the army. Taken prisoner by the British, he was set free within two months.
Unable to find work as an electrician, he had engaged in black marketeering and any other illegal activity that would pay. This is the period when, it is believed, he began smuggling would-be escapees across the border into West Germany, murdering them en route and stealing all they had. Since they would be carrying all their wealth with them, it would have been a profitable occupation.
Back in Hadersleben, in 1950, Boost married, and seems to have been an affectionate husband and father (the couple had two daughters). But there is evidence that he murdered the pair who were shot with the Belgian pistol, perhaps to finance an escape to West Germany. There he chose Lorbach as a partner in crime, and embarked or a career of robbery and murder.
On 11 December 1956, Boost was charged with the murders of Dr Servé, Friedhelm Behre, Thea Kurmann, Peter Falkenberg and Hildegard Wassing. But when Lorbach, the main prosecution witness, suffered a nervous breakdown due to drug problems, the trial had to be postponed. Meanwhile, Boost was extradited to Magdeburg for questioning about the murder of the couple at Hadersleben. But he stonewalled his questioners as he had tried to stonewall the Düsseldorf police, and was finally returned to Eynck’s jurisdiction with no additional charges against him.
Boost’s trial began in the courthouse at Düsseldorf on 3 November 1961, before Judge Hans Naecke, two associate magistrates, Dr Warda and Dr Schmidt, and a six-man jury. Boost maintained his total innocence, and his lawyer, Dr Koehler, lost no time in pointing out that the testimony of a drug addict like Franz Lorbach was hardly reliable. Lorbach himself was a poor witness, who mumbled and became confused. But he was able to tell one story that strengthened the case against Boost. Lorbach confessed that Boost had blackmailed him—by threatening withdrawal of his drug supply—into taking part in another attack on a couple. They had held up two lovers in the woods. Boost had tried to kill the man, but the gun had misfired. The girl had run away screaming, and Boost had ordered Lorbach to catch her. Lorbach had done so—but then whispered to her to lie low for a while. When he returned, Boost had knocked the man unconscious—but Lorbach had warned him there was a car coming, and they had roared away on Boost’s motorbike.
Eynck told the court that he had traced this couple, and that they had confirmed the story in every detail. They were not married—at least not to one another—which is why they had failed to report the incident. But Eynck was able to offer their deposition in evidence.
Boost’s lawyer counter-attacked by pointing out that there had recently been a murder of a couple in a car near Cologne, and that Boost was obviously not guilty of this crime.
After a month of listening to this and similar evidence, the six jurors decided that the evidence that Boost had murdered the two couples was insufficient. But they found him guilty of murdering Dr Servé. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Lorbach to three years as his accomplice—much of which he had already served. Boost’s sentence was exactly the same as if he had been found guilty on all charges.
The psychiatric examination had uncovered some of the causes of his criminality. Fatherless, brought up under harsh and loveless conditions, Boost—like Panzram and Manuel—reacted by making a conscious decision to become an ‘enemy of society’. An account of Boost by George Vedder Jones contains the lines: ‘He developed an almost fanatical jealousy towards men who had been rich and successful through opportunities that had been denied him in his youth,’ and ‘His bitter hatred of mankind—originating in his warped childhood and manifested by his fantastic plans for mayhem and violence—seemed to supply motivation for the five Lovers’ Lane murders.’
But it must also be recognized that Boost was primarily a sex criminal—a man of immense sex drive whose ‘hatred of society’ simply provided a rationalization for rape-murder. In this sense, there was an element of self-deception, of unconscious dishonesty, in Boost’s hypocritical attitude about lovers petting in cars—‘These sex horrors are the curse of Germany’—when he himself then went on to rape the women.
It should finally be noted that in spite of his ruthlessness, Boost was a victim of self-pity, convinced he had never been given a chance. Like so many criminals, it would never have entered his head to consider placing some of the blame on himself. Here again we have a basic key to the mind of most serial killers.
Boost’s contemporary Heinrich Pommerencke was an altogether more straightforward killer—an uncomplicated example of a man driven by such an urgent craving for sex that it overrode all other considerations. This emerged clearly in an exchange that took place when the prosecutor Franz Schorp asked Pommerencke if he felt no remorse after his murders. Pommerencke shook his head. ‘All I felt was the physical desire to possess these women.’ ‘Do you know what people call a man who can commit such crimes and feel no remorse?’ Pommerencke answered softly: ‘A monster.’
On the morning of 5 June 1959 a pretty blonde girl was found dead by the railway line south of Freiburg. It was immediately obvious to police commissioner Gut, of the Freiburg murder squad, that this was a sex crime; her red dress was torn down the front, and she lay in the typical rape position, her underwear in the bushes beside her. Her body was covered with scratches and bruises, and there were cinders embedded in her flesh.
As it happened, Gut already knew her identity, because he had been involved in the search for her. She was 21-year-old Dagmar Klimek, a trainee teacher from Heidelberg. Three days earlier, she had boarded the Riviera Express with a group of twenty-nine other young women, en route for a package holiday in the Italian lakes. At about 11.30 at night, she had said goodnight to her friends and made her way to the toilet in the next coach—she had paused to ask the tour director where it was. Then she had vanished. A few minutes later, someone had pulled the communication cord and jumped from the train.
Commissioner Gut could have no doubt what had happened. A man had been waiting on the small open platform at the end of coach 405—this was established by the fact that someone had removed the light bulbs from this particular platform—and had hurled her from the train as she passed him. Then he had pulled the communication cord and run back to find her. The girl had still been alive, but probably unconscious, as the man dragged her into the bushes, and raped her. Then he had stabbed her in the chest, killing her instantly. The body was so well concealed that it was not found until three days later.
Only two witnesses had seen the killer. One was a salesman who had boarded the train at Freiburg, climbing on at the platform of coach 405. He had noticed the tall, slim young man with blond hair because he looked somehow furtive. The man had been wearing a shabby grey suit.
The other witness had been dozing in the same carriage when the train braked to a halt. He had seen a man jump from the train and run out of sight behind bushes; he described him as tall and gaunt, and wearing a loose-fitting grey suit that made him look like a scarecrow.
A check into Dagmar Klimek’s background indicated that she had no male admirer who might have killed her. The killer was clearly a sex maniac who had chosen her at random because she walked past him on her way back from the toilet.
On the supposition that the killer must have been bloodstained, the police checked cleaning establishments from Frankfurt to Freiburg, looking for the grey suit; they met with no success. Careful interrogation of dozens of known sex offenders also produced no result. Every railway ticket clerk south of Frankfurt was asked if he recalled a tall skinny man in the grey suit; no one did.
Could this killer have struck before? When Gut looked through the record of unsolved sex crimes in Baden-Württemberg, he found three that sounded as if they might have been committed by the same man. Towards the end of February 1959, a Karlsruhe waitress named Elke Braun had been walking home when a man had seized her from behind and thrown her on the ground. He was brandishing a knife and ripping at her clothes when a passing taxi driver heard her screams. The man—who was tall and blond—ran off as the taxi driver approached. The girl said her attacker had ‘the face of a baby’, with soft skin. But his expression as he attacked her left her in no doubt that he intended to kill her.
The following morning, the body of a 34-year-old cleaning woman named Hilde Konther was found in bushes near her home. She had been beaten and raped, then strangled. It looked as if the waitress’s attacker had been lying in wait for her as she returned home from work in the early hours of the morning.
The other crime that sounded as if it had been committed by the same man had taken place a month later, on 26 March 1959. In the nearby town of Hornberg, a beautician named Karin Walde had also failed to return home from work. The next morning, her parents found her naked body in bushes close to her home. She had been battered to death with a heavy stone and raped.
One more sex crime had an ominously similar ring. On 30 May an 18-year-old girl had been attacked in her bedroom in Zingen, another small town on the Karlsruhe railway line. Someone had climbed in through the window while she was asleep, beaten her insensible before she could resist, then raped her. It had been a moonlit night, and she had seen him clearly—a tall man with piercing eyes and a ‘baby face’. He had escaped by the way he came in.
Three days after the body of Dagmar Klimek was found, another girl disappeared. Rita Walterspacher was an 18-year-old office worker who travelled by train from her home in Rastatt, south of Karlsruhe, to her job in Baden Baden, a mere ten kilometres to the south. On 8 June 1959, she telephoned her parents to say she would be a little late arriving home; she expected to be back by seven. When she had failed to return by the next morning, her parents enquired at the local railway station—to be told by the Stationmaster that he had seen their daughter alight from the 6.06 train.
Rita’s way home lay south along a wooded road. The police organized a search party, and there was an appeal on local radio for anyone who might have seen her. Soon after this, a woman from a neighbouring town drove to the Rastatt police station. She had been on a slightly later train the evening before, she explained, and at about 6.15, just before they reached Rastatt, she saw a girl running along the road beside the track, pursued by a man. She was screaming, but the woman thought they were simply two lovers having fun. The man—who was tall, with blond hair—grabbed the girl and dragged her into the woods. The woman thought no more about it until she heard the appeal on the radio.
When she added that the man was wearing a grey suit, the detective realized that this was almost certainly the rapist of the Riviera Express. A larger search party was organized, and spread out through the woods near the spot where the woman had seen the incident. The girl’s body was found a few hours later by a farmer’s dog, hidden under a pile of fir branches, not far from the railway line. From her position, it was clear that she had been raped there, then covered over. The cause of death was strangulation.
When Commissioner Gut saw the body he had no doubt that this was the man he was looking for. This was clearly a sex maniac in the most precise meaning of the term. When he was trying to rape a girl, he went into a frenzy, beating her violently and tearing at her clothes until they were in tatters. The fact that he might have been seen from the passing train did not deter him. Until the rape was accomplished, he became a wild animal incapable of any other thought.
Two rape–murders within a week suggested that the killer was reaching a peak in a cycle of violence that is typical of sex criminals, and that he had to be caught quickly. But the area over which he had committed his crimes was enormous, ranging from Karlsruhe in the north to Hornberg, a hundred kilometres south.
On the off-chance that the killer lived in the Rastatt area, the police instituted door-to-door enquiries, looking for anyone who might resemble the Riviera rapist—who had by now acquired himself a press nickname: the Monster of the Black Forest. Many suspects who matched the description were brought in for questioning, but all were able to prove their innocence. Again there was an extensive search for a bloodstained suit at local cleaners, but it was as unsuccessful as before. As the days went by, Gut experienced an increasing frustration, realizing that all he could do was to wait for the next attack to occur, and hope that this time the ‘Monster’ left some clue.
Fortunately, the Riviera rapist was caught before he could kill again.
On the morning of 19 June, a tailor named Johann Kohler opened his shop at eight o’clock. Soon after this, his first customer arrived—a young man named Heinrich Pommerencke, who had worked as a waiter in Hornsberg’s Hotel Baren. Kohler was glad to see him, for the youth had ordered some clothes two months earlier—a sports jacket and trousers—and had paid a deposit. But he had failed to collect them.
Pommerencke had a soft, almost girlish face, with pink, smooth skin. Although tall, he looked much younger than his twenty-two years. He was wearing a baggy grey suit.
Pommerencke apologized for the delay in collecting the clothes, explaining that he now worked in a hotel in Frankfurt, and had been unable to get to Hornberg. He asked the tailor how much he owed, and paid from a wad of notes.
‘Would you mind if I changed my clothes here? I can’t stand this old suit a moment longer.’
Kohler indicated the changing cubicle, and Pommerencke vanished inside, leaving a bulging briefcase on a chair in the shop. He emerged a few minutes later, and surveyed himself with satisfaction in the mirror.
‘Now all I need is a haircut. Could I leave you to wrap up my old suit while I go?’
When Kohler had packed the suit, he moved the heavy briefcase on to the floor. As he did so, the defective catch burst open, and Kohler was startled to find himself looking at a rifle whose barrel and butt had both been shortened with a hacksaw.
At that moment, his wife came into the shop. The tailor showed her the weapon.
‘I can’t understand what such a quiet young man is doing with a gun like this. He doesn’t look as if he’d say boo to a goose.’
Frau Kohler shook her head. ‘A weapon like that could have only one purpose—robbery. You ought to report it to the police.’
Within minutes, an inspector named Posedowski had arrived from the local station on his bicycle. He viewed the sawn-off rifle with distaste, then looked through the briefcase. It contained some soiled clothing, money, pornographic books, a bottle of pink liquid labelled ‘love cocktail’, a box of bullets and a ticket stub from Karlsruhe to Zingen.
The suit itself was unpacked, and Posedowski saw why its owner was anxious to change it. There were many spots where cleaning fluid had been used to remove some dark stain, and these showed as unsightly blotches.
Like every other policeman in Baden-Württemberg, Posedowski knew about the Monster of the Black Forest and his grey suit. And although this pink-cheeked young man hardly sounded like a multiple killer, his reasons for carrying a sawn-off rifle obviously demanded investigation.
Heinrich Pommerencke looked mildly surprised to find a policeman waiting for him, but raised no objection when asked to accompany him to the local police station. He seemed so unconcerned that Posedowski relaxed his vigilance, and was taken by surprise when the young man took to his heels. Posedowski blew his whistle and pursued him on his bicycle. Fortunately, they had almost arrived at the station, and another policeman soon joined the chase. They eventually cornered Pommerencke in the grounds of a carnival on the edge of town. Posedowski snapped handcuffs on him, and the two policemen marched him back to the station.
When Commissioner Heinrich Koch saw the sawn-off rifle, he reacted with satisfaction.
‘I’ve just been notified of a burglary at Durlach station last night. A track worker walked in on the robber, who threatened him with a sawn-off rifle, then ran away.’ The thief had stolen some money from a cashbox.
The rest of the contents of the briefcase also intrigued the commissioner. The ‘love cocktail’—presumably a mild aphrodisiac—and the pornography certainly suggested a man with sex on his mind. The stub of the rail ticket from Karlsruhe to Zangen reminded Koch of the rape of the 18-year-old girl in her bedroom by a man with a ‘baby face’.
The grey suit was sent to Freiburg for forensic analysis; the blood serum test would reveal whether spots that still showed under the cleaning fluid were human blood.
Koch then interviewed the youthful suspect, and accused him without further ado of being the Durlach burglar. He noticed that, far from looking worried, Pommerencke seemed relieved. He admitted that he had purchased the rifle in a pawnshop, and had used it in the burglary the night before. He also admitted to three other recent burglaries—of a textile mill, an ammunition factory and a cafeteria in Rastatt. These admissions gave Koch the grounds he needed to charge his suspect, and Pommerencke was taken to the cells.
The investigation into Pommerencke’s background was continued by the police in Frankfurt. In his room in the hotel they found papers that established that he had lived in various West German cities, including Karlsruhe, and that he had served a prison sentence for burglary. He had apparently worked as a housepainter and handyman, as well as a waiter. Those who worked with him in Hornberg and Frankfurt said that he was a ‘loner’ who spent much of his time at the cinema or in his room. He was known as a good worker who neither smoke nor drank.
Four days after his arrest, Pommerencke was taken to Freiburg, where the two commissioners who had been in charge of the case—Gut and Zismann—were waiting to interview him. They had also prepared a surprise for him. He was given a grey suit, and placed in an identity parade. The girl who had been raped in her bedroom in Zingen instantly identified him as her attacker.
Pommerencke indignantly denied it. ‘I may be a burglar but I’ve never attacked a girl.’
But there were still four witnesses to view the police line-up. They were the two men who had seen the rapist on the Riviera Express, the woman who had seen Rita Walterspacher being attacked near Rastatt, and the waitress who had been saved by the taxi driver in Karlsruhe. All of them picked out Pommerencke.
Zismann told his suspect that they now had powerful circumstantial evidence to link him with Karlsruhe—where Hilde Konther had died—with Hornberg, where Karin Walde had died, and with Rastatt and the Riviera Express. Faced with this evidence, Pommerencke sullenly admitted that he had been the man who had attacked the girl in Zwingen and the waitress in Karlsruhe. But he strongly denied the rape-murders.
When the results of the test on the grey suit came from the forensic lab, Zismann was also able to tell Pommerencke that they now had evidence to link him to Hilde Konther, Dagmar Klimek and Karin Walde—the blood on the suit corresponded to their blood groups. And hairs on the suit had been identified as being from the head of Rita Walterspacher.
It was fortunate that Pommerencke was ignorant of forensic science, or he would have known that—at that time—neither blood nor hairs could be identified as coming from a particular person. Blood could only be ‘grouped’—and in fact, the stains had been too faint for grouping. The lab had only been able to establish that they were of human origin. Moreover, there had been no hairs on the suit.
But Pommerencke was taken in by the bluff. His defiance suddenly collapsed. With averted eyes, he asked for a pencil to write his confession.
What this document made clear was that Pommerencke had been attacking and raping women for years—he had no idea of how many rapes he had committed. He had also committed scores of burglaries.
Heinrich Pommerencke had been born in Bentwisch, near Rostock in East Germany, in 1937. He was the child of a broken marriage, and described himself as an extremely lonely little boy. But he seems to have inherited an extremely powerful sexual urge, which troubled him from an early age. ‘When I was a boy I never had a friend in the world. After a while I got the urge to assault females. I had a girlfriend once but we split up, and I went back to my old ways. Other men always had girlfriends with them. I wanted girlfriends too, but I never succeeded.’
Pommerencke claimed—almost certainly untruthfully—that he had seduced his first girl at the age of 10. At the age of 15 he began to hang around the local dance hall in Bentwisch and made a few clumsy attempts to attack girls. Because of one of these attempts at rape, he fled from Bentwisch in 1953, when he was 16 and went to Switzerland. There he served a prison sentence for burglary, and was deported. He drifted around West Germany, living in Hamburg, Heidelberg, Düsseldorf, Karlsruhe, Hornberg and Frankfurt.
Living alone in rented rooms, reading pornography and indulging in sexual daydreams, Pommerencke’s fantasies had reached an intensity that sooner or later had to be translated into action. He was not of high intelligence, and tended to be inarticulate—which meant that he completely lacked the arts of a seducer. ‘Whatever I did [when with girls] was always wrong. I was never a good dancer, and girls avoided me because of that. When I was alone with them, I didn’t know what to say.’ This social inadequacy, combined with an overpoweringly strong sexual urge, meant that rape was virtually his only way of obtaining the sexual favours he craved. And it was finally in Hamburg, according to his confession, that he gave way to the compulsion and committed seven rapes between 1955 and 1957. It was after this that he was jailed for burglary.
But his first murder had been committed in Karlsruhe soon after he moved there in 1959. There he had been to see Cecil B. de Mille’s film called The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. In the scene with the half-naked women dancing around the Golden Calf, he had suddenly decided that many women are evil, and deserve to die. When he left the cinema he bought a knife, then walked around until he saw the waitress Elke Braun. But as he was attacking her, the taxi driver had interrupted, and he had been forced to flee. But the compulsion was now overpowering, and he had attacked the cleaning woman a few hours later, battering her unconscious when she resisted, then strangling her. But Pommerencke admitted that it was after killing his second victim, beautician Karin Walde, in Hornberg, that this violent method of obtaining satisfaction became a fixed obsession that drove him to seek further victims.
Pommerencke’s trial opened in Freiburg on 3 October 1960, before Judge Friedrich Kaufmann. The defence evidence consisted mainly of character testimony from many people who said that the prisoner was extremely shy, and blushed when he talked to women. His mother came from Switzerland to testify that her son certainly did not hate women; he adored them. Girls who had been out with him testified that he was too nervous even to attempt to kiss them.
His factual account of his various murders chilled the spectators. He described how, after throwing Dagmar Klimek from the train, he had had to walk back for half an hour along the tracks before he found her. He had dragged her into the bushes and torn off her clothes in a frenzy, then, after raping her, had stabbed her to death. Then he had walked to the nearest village, washed in the public fountain, and hitched a lift back to Frankfurt from a passing motorist.
He admitted that he had felt no remorse after the murders, because he had been so overwhelmed by a desire to possess women. But now, he conceded, he saw that ‘everything I did was cruel and bestial. From the bottom of my heart I would like to undo all this.’
After a five-week trial, Heinrich Pommerencke was sentenced to eight terms of life imprisonment, plus a further 156 years, a sentence to be served with hard labour. It meant that he would spend the rest of his life in jail.
On the other side of the Atlantic, at the time when Heinrich Pommerencke was nerving himself to commit his first sex attack, another mild little man was collecting pornographic photographs and fantasizing about rape. But his tastes were less straightforward than Pommerencke’s; being of a timid disposition, Harvey Glatman dreamed only of violating girls who were tied hand and foot.
On the evening of 1 August 1957, Robert Dull, a young pressman on the Los Angeles Times, called at a Hollywood apartment block to see his estranged wife, and was not surprised to hear that she was not at home. Judy was an exceptionally beautiful girl, greatly in demand as a photographic model, and it was this that had led to the break-up of their marriage—Robert Dull objected to her posing in the nude.
Judy’s flatmate, Lynn Lykles, explained that she had gone off with a photographer called Johnny Glynn at about two that afternoon.
‘Do you know where she went?’
‘No, but he left a telephone number.’
‘Would you ask her to call me at work when she comes in?’
But two hours later, there was still no sign of Judy. By that time, two photographers had called in to complain that she had failed to keep appointments. At 9 p.m., a young contractor telephoned to say that Judy had failed to show up for a dinner date, at which she was supposed to meet a lawyer to discuss her marital problems. Lynn gave him Johnny Glynn’s telephone number. A few minutes later, he called back.
‘That number was a machine shop in Pico. They’d never heard of a photographer called Johnny Glynn.’
Now they were both seriously worried. There had been a number of attacks on girls in Hollywood recently, and only two evenings before, Judy had complained that a strange man had followed her home.
The contractor hurried off to look in a number of Sunset Strip cafes that Judy frequented; meanwhile, Lynn rang Robert Dull, who hurried over immediately. They telephoned Judy’s parents, relatives and friends without success, then went to report her disappearance at the West Hollywood police station. And when a routine check of hospitals failed to locate her, the sheriff put out a call to radio cars cruising Sunset Strip, asking them to watch out for a pretty 19-year-old blonde. He asked:
‘Who is this Johnny Glynn?’
Lynn described how, two evenings before, a little rabbit-like man with jug-handle ears had knocked on the door of their apartment, asking to see Lynn. It so happened that the only person at home was Betty Carver, a recent arrival from Florida; like Lynn and Judy, she was a photographic model. And, since Betty had a friend with her, she allowed the little man into the apartment. He identified himself as Johnny Glynn, a magazine photographer, and said he had obtained Lynn’s name from an agency. Would it, he asked, be possible to see her portfolio? But when Betty returned with it, he pointed to the photograph of Judy on the wall. ‘Now she’s the type I’m really looking for. Could I see her portfolio as well?’ As he leafed slowly through it, Betty could see that he was fascinated. When he had finished, he asked for Judy’s personal telephone number.
Two mornings later, the three girls were eating breakfast when Johnny Glynn telephoned. He had a rush assignment, he explained, and wanted Judy to pose for him that afternoon. Judy was reluctant; she had a busy schedule, and Betty’s description of Johnny Glynn aroused her suspicions. But when he mentioned that his own studio was being used, and that he would have to use Judy’s apartment, her doubts evaporated, and she agreed to see him at two that afternoon.
He arrived looking as scruffy and unprepossessing as on his previous visit; moreover, he was without his photographic equipment. This, he explained, was because a friend had agreed to lend him his own studio. When Judy mentioned her hourly fee, he agreed immediately. And a few minutes later, they left the apartment, with the photographer carrying Judy’s case. Lynn Lykles had felt uneasy as she watched them leave.
At mid-morning the following day, a bulletin was issued listing Judy Van Horn Dull as a missing person, possibly kidnapped; she was described as 19 years old, five feet four inches tall, with golden hair and a suntanned complexion. Johnny Glynn was described as about 29 years old, of slim build, five feet nine inches tall, with horn-rimmed glasses, and dressed in a rumpled blue suit.
Sergeant David Ostroff, who was handed the assignment, checked on all the Hollywood photographers and modelling agencies he could find; none of them had heard of Johnny Glynn, or knew anyone who answered his description.
The disappearance of the beautiful model made newspaper headlines, and Ostroff was kept busy for weeks following up tips. It soon became clear that the modelling business was not Hollywood’s safest occupation. Several young models came forward to describe how they had been rash enough to accept jobs from unknown ‘photographers’ who had then forced their attentions on them, sometimes at knife- or gunpoint. A number of men were questioned, but none of them had the distinctive appearance of Johnny Glynn. Ostroff recalled the disappearance of a beautiful young actress named Jean Spangler eight years before, in October 1949, but although they studied her file, it failed to throw any light on Judy’s disappearance.
Even Judy’s husband Robert seemed a possible suspect; he and Judy had not been on the best of terms since he had seized their fourteen-month-old daughter Suzanne while Judy was at work. But a little investigation cleared him of suspicion; he was known to be still in love with his wife, and hoping for a reconciliation. None of Judy’s friends could offer any clue to the mystery. After following up dozens of futile leads, Sergeant Ostroff concluded that Johnny Glynn was a false name, and that the rabbit-like man was probably some kind of sex pervert. It seemed likely that Judy Dull was dead.
Or was it possible that Judy had gone into hiding before the court case that would decide the custody of her daughter? At the hearing—on 9 August 1957—there was an unusual number of reporters and photographers. Judy was known to be deeply attached to her daughter—so attached that she was even considering giving up modelling to devote more time to her. When there was no sign of her in court, her husband told the press that he was certain she had been murdered.
Five months after her disappearance, on 29 December 1957, a ranch worker walking in the desert near US Highway 60, between Indio and Thousand Palms—130 miles east of Los Angeles—wondered what was causing his dog to bark. It was standing above a human skull that lay in a cotton field. He summoned the police, and they discovered a half-buried skeleton not far from the skull. The mouldering brown dress and underwear revealed that it was a woman. Remains of hair sticking to the skull indicated that she was a blonde. It was impossible to determine the cause of death.
Could this be Judy Dull? She had been last seen wearing a brown dress. And the skeleton was the same height as Judy—five feet four. But a forensic expert concluded that the dead woman was in her mid-thirties, and when Judy’s husband failed to identify the pearl ring found on the finger, Ostroff concluded that this was not the woman he was looking for.
As it happened, he was mistaken…
On Sunday 9 March 1958, the Los Angeles police heard about another disappearance. The woman’s name was Shirley Ann Loy Bridgeford, a 24-year-old divorcee with two children. The night before she had gone out with a stranger on a blind date, and had not been seen since.
From Shirley’s mother, the San Fernando Valley police learned that Shirley had been lonely and bored. And since a man she had been hoping to marry had suddenly lost interest in her, she had also been depressed, convinced that she was now ‘on the shelf’. A friend had suggested that Shirley should join a Lonely Hearts Club, and she had seized on the idea with the enthusiasm of the desperate. For a fee of $10, she had become a member of a dating club in Los Angeles. Her first date had arrived early on Saturday evening—an unprepossessing, bespectacled man with jug-handle ears and an appearance that suggested he had no interest in clothes. He had introduced himself as George Williams, a plumber who lived in Pasadena. Shirley had introduced him to the family—her mother, grandmother, brother and sister, and he had looked awkward and embarrassed. A few minutes later they had left—he said he was taking her to a square dance. No one had bothered to look to see what kind of car he was driving.
The obvious lead was the Lonely Hearts Club. Its organizer was able to provide the police with George Williams’s address, but it turned out—as they expected—to be false. Another girl—a Hollywood secretary—who had actually spent an evening with ‘George Williams’ told them that he had been a ‘perfect gentleman’, and that they had spent the evening quietly in her apartment. She was unable to offer any leads.
To Sergeant Ostroff, it sounded as if George Williams and Johnny Glynn might be the same person. But this was no help to the investigation, since it was impossible to find any trace of either. The only thing that was clear was that ‘George Williams’ had almost certainly joined the club with the intention of abducting a girl. The Hollywood secretary had described him as clean shaven, yet Shirley’s family said he wore a moustache. Since he had dated Shirley only two days after the secretary, that meant it had to be a false one. Since only a man with some misdemeanour in mind would go out on a blind date with a false moustache, the likeliest conclusion was that Shirley Bridgeford was now dead. Another was that unless the abductor was caught, he would strike again.
When another model vanished in late July, Lieutenant Marvin Jones of the Los Angeles police suspected that this is exactly what had happened. The landlord of a small apartment block on West Pico Boulevard, in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles, reported that one of his tenants was missing. She was 24-year-old Ruth Rita Mercado, who—using the alias Angela Rojas—worked as a stripper and a nude model. Her landlord had passed her door on the evening of 23 July and heard her inside talking to her collie dog. There was a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door. When, four days later, he observed the mail piling up in her mailbox, he used his pass key to enter the apartment. It was empty, with no sign of a struggle; but the collie pup was in the bathroom, exhausted from lack of food. Her parakeets were in a similar condition—fortunately they had been found in time. It seemed obvious that Ruth had not left them voluntarily. She had cared for her pets as though they were babies.
Oddly enough, the landlord wrote to Ruth’s mother in Plattsburg, New York, instead of going to the Los Angeles police, and Lieutenant Jones learned of the model’s disappearance from the New York police. He sent Sergeant Paul A. Light to investigate. Light felt he had found a promising lead when he learned that Ruth had left her previous apartment on South Kenmore Avenue because she had been receiving obscene phone calls, and had one evening found an obscene note pushed under her door. And when, with some help from the local police, he tracked down the author of the note, he felt that he might have found his man. His hopes collapsed into disappointment. The man had been harassing the girl because he objected to having a model as a neighbour, and he was able to prove that he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
When Lieutenant Jones checked the files of other disappearances, he observed the similarity to the case of Judy Dull. And it was clear that Ruth Mercado’s way of life involved even more risk than Judy’s. As well as being a stripper, she advertised her services as a nude model in newspapers, and even provided photographic equipment for amateurs. And since she lived alone, she had less protection than Judy in her shared apartment. Her boyfriend—a piano player—was at present in Bermuda, so could be eliminated as a suspect. And so, eventually, were several other photographers who had worked with both Judy Dull and Ruth Mercado. And this time there was not even a description of the abductor. As he surveyed the total absence of clues, Lieutenant Jones surmised that he would turn out to have jug-handle ears and a dishevelled appearance.
Three months after Ruth Mercado’s disappearance, late on the evening of Monday 27 October 1958, Officer Thomas F. Mulligan of the California Highway Patrol turned his motorcycle into a dark avenue near the small town of Tustin, 35 miles south-east of Los Angeles, and was startled when his headlight illuminated a couple who were struggling at the side of the road. At that moment, the couple separated, and as he braked to a halt and shouted to ask what was happening, he saw that the woman was holding a gun, which she was pointing at a man. The woman was small and plump, and her clothing was in a state of disarray. The Highway Patrolman raised his revolver and ordered them to stand still and hold up their hands. Both did so immediately. The woman, who was almost hysterical, shouted: ‘He’s a killer. He was going to rape me.’ The man made no attempt to deny this, or to escape as Mulligan radioed Tustin for assistance. A few minutes later, the Tustin police arrived.
Meanwhile, the girl—who identified herself as Lorraine Vigil—told Mulligan what had happened. A model named Diane, who also ran a modelling agency, had telephoned her two hours ago to ask if she wanted to do a modelling job. Lorraine was a secretary who was determined to break into the modelling business, and she accepted immediately. But before the client arrived, Diane rang her back to tell her to be on her guard. Although she knew the man—Frank Johnson—and had done some modelling for him before, she felt uneasy about him. That was why she herself had refused to accept the job unless she was allowed to take a chaperone along. And Johnson had refused…
Frank Johnson arrived at her Wilshire apartment soon afterwards, and Lorraine saw why Diane was uneasy. He was a shifty little man with jug-handle ears and an untidy appearance—he looked as if he slept in his clothes. He didn’t even come to her door, but blew his horn outside. When she went out, she asked for money in advance, and he handed her $15. Then they drove off in the direction of downtown Los Angeles. But instead of heading for Diane’s agency in Sunset Strip, he turned south-east. When Lorraine objected, he explained that he was going to take her to his own studio in Anaheim.
In fact, he drove straight through Anaheim. And in the dark road near Tustin, he pulled up and told her he had a flat tyre. Then he pulled out a small automatic, ordered her to keep quiet, and produced a length of rope. Lorraine pleaded not to be tied up, offering to do whatever he wanted. But as a car came past, she tried to open the door. He grabbed her and pulled her back, then threatened her again, and tried to tie her up. She began to struggle, and he became increasingly angry and abusive. As he pointed the gun at her, she grabbed it and tried to pull it away. It went off, and she felt the bullet burn her thigh. But the man seemed as shocked as she was by the sound of the shot. As he stared at the smoking gun in bewilderment, she leapt across him, forced open his door, and fell out on to the road with the man underneath her. Clinging tightly to his gun, she tried to pull it out of his hand; when he tried to point it at her, she bit him as hard as she could. He gave a cry of pain, and released the gun. Lorraine pointed it at him and tried to pull the trigger. It was at that moment that they were illuminated by the patrolman’s headlight.
Taken to the Santa Ana police station, the man gave his name as Harvey Murray Glatman, aged 30, a TV repairman. He proved to have nearly a thousand dollars on him, which led the police to suspect him of being a holdup man. He made no attempt to deny his attempt to assault Lorraine Vigil, but said it had been a sudden impulse, and he was sorry. He also admitted that he had a police record and had been in prison. He had come to Los Angeles, he said, in the previous year. But when the police asked him what he had been doing since then, he was evasive, and they felt he was concealing something.
A bulletin describing the arrest was sent to police throughout the area, asking if the suspect could be linked to any other crimes. When it landed on the desk of Lieutenant Marvin Jones, he immediately noted that the suspect, as well as his intended victim, lived in his area. Moreover, Glatman lived a few blocks from Ruth Mercado in San Pico Boulevard.
When the police called at the white shingle bungalow at 1011 South Norton Avenue, they noted its run-down appearance, the tar-paper on the roof and the bars on the windows. Inside, they found the walls covered with nude pinups, in some of which the girls were bound and gagged. There were also a number of lengths of rope. It seemed that Harvey Glatman was interested in bondage.
The following day, Glatman was asked if he would take a he detector test, and he agreed. Two sergeants from Wilshire went to Santa Ana to watch. They walked in while Glatman was being questioned—wired up to the lie detector—and when they were introduced as two detectives investigating the disappearance of two girls, the polygraph recorded no sudden alarm. But when he was asked about ‘Angela’—Ruth Mercado—the stylus gave a nervous leap. A few minutes later, Glatman was confessing to killing Ruth. ‘I killed a couple of other girls too.’
And now, at last, the police heard the full story of the disappearance of three women.
Harvey Murray Glatman was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1928; he was a ‘mother’s boy’ who was also an excellent student. (A later test showed that his IQ was 130.) When he was 12 years old, his parents came home one day to observe that he had red marks around his neck. Under pressure, Harvey admitted that he had been in the attic, tied a rope round his neck, and tightened the noose until he experienced sexual satisfaction. (Many masochists accidentally hang themselves when obtaining release in this way.) The family doctor was consulted, but advised them not to worry—Harvey would outgrow it. Meanwhile, the best way to avoid more self-strangulation was exercise…
Girls at school found the scrawny, jug-eared boy unattractive; he made his bid for attention by snatching their purses, running away, then flinging them back at them. Mrs Glatman is quoted as saying tolerantly: ‘It was just his approach.’
When he was 17, Glatman tired of frustration and sexual fantasy; one night in Boulder, Colorado, he pointed a toy gun at a teenage girl and ordered her to undress. She screamed and he lost his nerve and ran. Picked up by the police, he was released on bail—and broke bond to make his way to New York. There he satisfied his aggressive urges against women, robbing them at gunpoint; he became known as the ‘Phantom Bandit’. He also graduated to burglary, but was soon caught, and sentenced to five years in Sing Sing. Once inside, he proved a docile prisoner, seemed to respond to psychiatric treatment, and was released in 1951. He moved back to Colorado, and worked at TV repairs. In 1957, he moved to Los Angeles, where his doting mother, who took a lenient view of his ‘mistakes’, found the money to set him up in a TV repair business.
Glatman’s problem was simple: a powerful inferiority complex made him incapable of the normal courtship procedures. In order to maintain a state of sexual excitement, he had to have the girl completely at his mercy—preferably bound and gagged. The result was that at 28 he was still a virgin, whose sex life was confined to lurid daydreams of bondage.
He may have thought of the idea of becoming a photographer after seeing picture of bound girls on the covers of true detective magazines. He soon learned that even an amateur photographer could pay to photograph unclothed girls in public studios. But his glimpses of female nudity only made his celibacy more agonizing. Which is why, on 29 July 1957, he called at the apartment of Lynn Lykles to try and persuade her to pose for him. But when he saw the photograph of Judy Dull on the wall, he realized that she was the girl he had always wanted. Two days later, his dream was fulfilled; Judy was in his old black Dodge, being driven to his ‘studio’—no doubt he had removed the pinups and bondage photos from the wall for the occasion.
Judy was wearing a dress; Glatman told her to remove it and put on a pleated skirt and cardigan. When he produced a length of rope, Judy reacted with alarm. He soothed her by explaining that he was taking photographs for the cover of a true detective magazine, and she had to be bound and gagged. And when she was seated in an armchair, her knees tied together, he hands behind her, a gag in her mouth, Glatman pushed up her skirt to reveal the white underskirt. Then, having taken some pictures, he unbuttoned the cardigan, pulled down her bra, and unzipped the skirt at the waist. Then, unable to contain himself any longer, he lifted her on to the floor—she was only five feet four inches tall, and very light—and removed everything but her panties. When he began to fondle her, Judy struggled and tried to scream; Glatman felt his excitement evaporating. He rushed out of the room and returned with an automatic pistol. He placed this against her head and told her that if she resisted, she would be killed—he was an ex-convict, and would not hesitate to shoot. When she nodded her acquiescence, he removed the gag.
He found the sight of a bound girl so satisfying that he decided to prolong the pleasure; he left her tied on the floor while he had something to eat. Now anxious to pacify him, Judy promised to do whatever he wanted, and not to report him to the police. She explained that she was due to appear in court in ten days’ time, hoping to obtain the custody of her daughter, and that if she went to the police, it would only confirm her husband’s contention that she was unfit to be a mother.
Glatman responded with apparent concern. When Judy’s nose began to bleed, he stanched the blood with a pillowcase. Then he made her sit on the settee for more bondage photographs. Finally, he did what he had been waiting to do; he removed his own clothes and raped her twice.
After that, he switched on the television, and the two of them sat naked and watched it, while she allowed him to fondle her. Now it was all over, he was not sure what to do next. Could he believe her when she said she would not report him to the police? If he did, and she broke her word, he would be in jail for the rest of his life…
Finally, he explained what he had decided to do. He would take her to some remote spot, then release her. After that, he would leave town. Judy tried to persuade him to let her take a taxi back home, but he refused. She apparently believed his threat to shoot her, for she made no attempt to escape when he forced her to climb into his car. They drove out on the San Bernardino freeway, then into the desert. There he made her pose for more ‘cheesecake’ photographs on a blanket, which he took with a flash. Finally, he made her lie on her stomach, and looped the rope around her neck; then he bent her legs back and tied it around her ankles. At this point, Judy must have realized she was going to die, and began to struggle. It was too late; Glatman pulled on the rope until she lay still.
Glatman was not a violent man; now she was dead he felt sorry. He apologized to her body before dragging it further into the desert, and burying it in a shallow grave. A fetishist to the end, he took her shoes for souvenirs.
For weeks, Glatman lived in fear of being caught. Would Judy’s flatmates provide the police with enough clues to track him down? Would they visit some of the agencies and studios he had used. But as the weeks went by, he began to feel calmer. After Christmas, the craving for another woman became too strong to resist. This time he joined the Lonely Hearts club, and arranged a date. The first girl he visited was the Hollywood secretary. But she was simply not his type—a talker. She offered him tea and biscuits and they conversed. It was impossible for Glatman to feel master of the situation. So he took his leave, and rang the club for another date. They gave him the name of Shirley Ann Bridgeford.
As soon as he saw Shirley Ann, he knew she found him a disappointment; for a moment he was afraid she would find some excuse not to go out. But once they were in the car she seemed to reconcile herself to the evening ahead; she even raised no objection when he explained that he was not fond of square dancing, and suggested they go for a drive instead. This time they drove past Long Beach and down south towards San Diego. But when he stopped the car on a side road in the Anza desert, and put his arm round her, she balked. Wasn’t it about time to go home? Glatman’s anger surged, but he controlled it; they were still too close to a main road to risk force. He pretended to agree, and said they would find a drive-in for a meal.
As he drove with one hand on the wheel, he tried to fondle her, and his resentment was fuelled by her resistance. Finally, on a dark mountain road inland, he stopped the car and produced his automatic. Then he ordered her into the back seat, and told her to undress. When she resisted, he tore off her clothes, then raped her. After that, he drove on into the desert, and stopped where a track came to an end. He removed his photographic gear, spread out the blanket on which he had killed Judy Dull, and ordered Shirley—now once again wearing her dress—to sit on it while he took some photographs. And when he had enough souvenirs, he made her lie on her stomach, looped the rope around her neck, and garrotted her. This time he was too lazy to dig a grave; he covered her body over with brushwood; before leaving, he removed her red panties as a keepsake.
He had allowed almost seven months to elapse between his first and second murders. Now, as with most sex criminals, the urge became more insistent. And when he saw a newspaper advertisement in which the model offered to be photographed nude, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. He called on Angela Rojas on the evening of 22 July 1958, and was not particularly surprised when she shook her head and explained that she felt ill. He was used to rejection. The following evening he went back, and found the apartment in darkness. He whiled away an hour in a bar, then returned; this time, the light was on. When she showed no sign of being willing to admit him, he pulled out the gun and ordered her inside. Like Judy Dull, Ruth Mercado was small, and he liked this. He ordered her into the bedroom, made her undress, then tied her up and raped her. After that he took souvenir photographs. Before they left the apartment he had raped her several times more.
When she mentioned that she was expecting her boyfriend soon—a lie—he told her he wanted to take her for a picnic. He seemed so convincing that she believed him, and even offered to provide two bottles of brandy. They drove off down towards San Diego, beyond Escondido, and in the early hours of the morning they were thirty or so miles from the spot where he had killed Shirley Ann Bridgeford.
This time Glatman had decided to take his time. In this lonely spot they were unlikely to be interrupted. He and Ruth Mercado spent the whole of the following day out in the desert; they slept, ate, drank, took photographs and made love. Ruth had decided that she had nothing to lose by trying to please him, and Glatman found himself increasingly unwilling to kill her. She was the kind of girl he would enjoy living with. Yet he again had to recognize the impossibility of allowing her to stay alive. More than twenty-four hours after kidnapping her, as she lay face downward in nothing but her panties, Glatman garrotted her in the same manner as the other two. He again took the panties as a memento, as well as all her identification. Like Shirley Ann Bridgeford, she was left unburied.
That was the conclusion of Harvey Glatman’s two-hour confession. By the light of the full moon, the detectives drove down to the Anza desert, and with Glatman’s help, located the bones of Shirley Ann Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado. Back in prison, Glatman was questioned about more unsolved sex killings in Los Angeles, but his openness convinced police that he knew nothing about them. Meanwhile, police searching his apartment again found a locked toolbox that contained the bound photographs of his victims, two pairs of panties and one pair of shoes.
In court in San Diego in November, 1958, Harvey Glatman pleaded guilty to the murders of Shirley Ann Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado. His lawyer had proposed a plea of guilty but insane, but Glatman opposed it, saying he would prefer to die rather than spend a life behind bars. Superior Court Judge John A. Hewicker duly obliged, and on 18 September 1959, Harvey Glatman died in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
One of the most sensational cases of the late 1950s was that of the necrophile Ed Gein. Strictly speaking, Gein does not qualify as a serial killer; yet it is impossible to doubt that, in the psychological sense, he belongs in the same gallery as Pommerencke and Glatman.
On the freezing afternoon of 8 December 1954, a customer who dropped into Mary Hogan’s tavern in Plainfield, Wisconsin, found the place deserted, and a large bloodstain on the floor. A spent .32 cartridge lay near it. Bloodstains ran out of the back door and into the parking lot, where they halted beside tyre tracks that looked like those of a pickup truck. It looked as if Mary Hogan had been shot and then taken away.
Police were unable to find any clues to the disappearance. But a few weeks later, when a sawmill owner named Elmo Ueeck spoke of the disappearance to a little handyman called Ed Gein, Gein replied with a simplicity reminiscent of Stan Laurel: ‘She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.’ And Ueeck who, like most of the residents of Plainfield, regarded Gein as little brighter than Stan Laurel, could not even work up the interest to ask him what he meant.
Three years passed. On the evening of 16 November 1957, Frank Worden returned from a day’s hunting to find his mother’s hardware store locked up, although the lights were on. A local garage attendant told him that he had seen Mrs Worden’s delivery truck driving away at about 9.30 that morning. With sudden foreboding, Frank Worden rushed home and collected the spare key to the store. Inside, as he expected, there was no sign of his mother. But the cash register was missing, and there was a patch of blood on the floor.
‘He’s done something to her,’ said Worden.
‘Who?’ asked sheriff Art Schley.
‘Ed Gein. My mother said he’d been hanging around and behaving oddly recently…’
The sheriff lost no time in driving to Gein’s farm, six miles west of Plainfield. It was deserted. But he knew that one of Gein’s few friends was his cousin Bob Hill. As Schley arrived at Hill’s house, he saw Gein’s pickup truck about to drive away; Gein was at the wheel, with Bob Hill and his sister Darlene. The sheriff halted them, and asked Gein to get in the squad car for questioning. Gein’s replies sounded typically inconsequential and inconsistent, but when he remarked that someone was trying to frame him for Mrs Worden’s death, Sheriff Schley decided to take him into custody. No one had mentioned Mrs Worden.
The doors of Ed Gein’s farmhouse were locked, but the door of a woodshed—or ‘summer kitchen’—at the rear opened when Schley pushed it with his foot. Since the farm had no electricity, the sheriff had to use a torch. What it showed him was the naked corpse of a woman hanging upside down from a crossbeam, the legs spread wide apart, and a long slit running from the genitals almost to the throat. But the throat, like the head, was missing. The genitals and the anus were also missing. Bernice Worden had been disembowelled like a deer.
When a portable electric generator had been installed, the investigators were able to explore the farmhouse. It looked as if it had not been tidied or cleaned for years, and there were piles of rubbish everywhere, as well as dozens of horror comics and magazines. More ominously, there were also human skulls, two of which adorned Gein’s bedposts. The seat of a chair proved to be made of human skin. So did a lampshade, a wastepaper basket and even a drum. They also found a shirt made of human skin, and a number of shrunken heads, one of which proved to be Mary Hogan’s. The head of Bernice Worden was in a sack, while her entrails and heart were neatly wrapped nearby.
Who were the other corpses (ten of them)—or rather, whose body parts? Gein cleared this up after confessing to the shooting of Mrs Worden; he had dug them up in the local graveyard. Asked if he had had sexual relations with them, Gein shook his head vigorously. ‘No, they smelt too bad.’
Slowly, his story emerged. His mother, Augusta Gein, had been crankily religious. Every time it rained heavily, she would read him the story of Noah from the Bible and prophesy the end of the world. She was convinced that the modern world was so full of sin that God would destroy it at any minute—women wearing lipstick and short skirts…Ed Gein was the younger of two brothers, and he became a mother’s boy. His father died in 1940, and his brother Henry two years later. Henry had also been a bachelor—their mother’s upbringing had made both men very nervous of women—and he died in 1944, the same year in which Augusta Gein also suffered a stroke. Her son nursed her until she died in the following year. Ed was then 38, a small, thin man with a pleasant smile, well liked by everyone. Admittedly, there was an odd story about him. His nearest neighbours, the Bankses, had invited him to their house in 1942 when a female relative was in the house; she was wearing shorts, and Gein clearly found it hard to keep his eyes off her legs. That night, a man broke into the woman’s house and seized her small son by the throat, asking him where his mother had gone. The man fled before he found out, but the boy thought he recognized Gein. Ever since then, the Bankses had had reservations about their quiet, pleasant neighbour.
What happened seems fairly clear. Gein was a sexually normal man—his mother’s undivided attention had not turned him into a homosexual—but he was frightened of women, and not very attractive to them. He had a woman friend, with whom he went out for twenty years, but she finally decided against marrying him. She said his conversation was all about murder. Alone in the farmhouse, he thought endlessly about sex, until one day he saw a newspaper report of a woman who had been buried that day. In the middle of the night, he set off with his pick-up truck and a spade. He dug up the woman, unscrewed the coffin, and put her into the truck; then replaced the coffin and carefully remade the grave. Then he took the corpse home, feeling happier than ever before. At last he had a woman alone and all to himself. He was probably so enthusiastic that he didn’t know how to start. But he had plenty of time…He explained: ‘It gave me a lot of satisfaction.’
Gein’s graveyard excursions were not very frequent. Over ten years there were only nine. He suffered from remorse, and decided every time never to do it again. The craving was so strong that it went beyond the desire to perform normal acts of love. He ate parts of the bodies, and made waistcoats of the skin, which he wore next to his flesh. His gravedigging expeditions—and murders—were always at the time of the full moon.
Gein understood himself well enough to realize that his mother was the root of all the trouble. Consciously, he loved her, unconsciously, hated her: hence his choice of elderly women as the only two victims he actually murdered.
At Christmas, 1957, it was decided that Gein was insane, and he was committed to Waupan State Hospital for life. No doubt some of the people of Plainfield for whom he acted as a baby-sitter think about their narrow escape; but there is no evidence that Gein was violently inclined towards young women or children. Gein died of cancer on 26 July 1984, at the age of 78.
Another case of the late 1950s deserves to be mentioned at this point, because although it cannot be classified as serial murder, it is among the best known cases of ‘spree killing’ in American criminal history. ‘Spree killing’ describes a murder rampage—a group of murders that occur over a short period of time, in which the killer seems to decide that he may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and goes on killing until he is stopped—usually by arrest or a policeman’s bullet.
Nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather, of Lincoln, Nebraska, was an admirer of film star James Dean. His girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, was five years his junior. In January 1958, Starkweather had an argument with Caril’s mother—who believed her daughter to be pregnant—and shot her dead. He went on to kill her stepfather and two-year-old sister. After two days alone in the house with Caril, he fled when police began to try to gain entrance.
In a brief murder rampage, Starkweather killed seven more people: a farmer named August Meyer, a young couple, Robert Jensen and Carol King (the latter was raped), a businessman, C. Lauer Ward, his wife Clara and their maid, and a shoe salesman, Merle Collison, who was murdered as he napped at the wheel of his car beside the road. Another motorist, ordered to release the handbrake on Collison’s car, grappled with Starkweather, and Starkweather fled in the car, pursued by police who had come upon the struggle. He surrendered when they shot out his rear window. Starkweather was electrocuted in June 1959, declaring that his last wish was to have Caril (who had turned against him) sitting on his knee. Caril Fugate was sentenced to life imprisonment by a jury that declined to believe that she had merely been a terrified captive, but was paroled in 1981.
A film, Badlands (1974), represented Starkweather exactly as he wanted to be remembered—as a courageous ‘rebel without a cause’. In fact, his random killings required no courage, and as he surrendered, Starkweather was close to panic, complaining loudly that he had been cut by flying glass.
The 1950s ended with a case of serial murder that could be regarded as a portent of the future. Melvin Rees was a self-esteem killer, a man who felt he had every right to defy society in the name of his own moral standards.
On 26 June 1957 an army sergeant was driving home for a weekend with a girlfriend, Margaret Harold. They had stopped in a lonely spot near Annapolis, Maryland, when a green Chrysler pulled in front of them. A tall, thin-faced man got out, and identified himself as the caretaker of the property. He asked for a cigarette, then for a lift. Suddenly he pulled out a gun and climbed into the back seat. He demanded money, and wound his fingers into Margaret Harold’s hair, pulling her head back. ‘Don’t give it to him,’ she said angrily. There was a shot, and she slumped forward. The sergeant pushed open the door and ran as hard as he could. A mile along the road he found a farmhouse and asked to use the phone. When the police arrived some time later, Margaret Harold was still across the front seat, without her dress. The killer had violated the corpse.
The police searched the area, and found a cinder-block building nearby, with a broken basement window. Inside, the walls were covered with pornographic photographs, and police morgue shots of women who had been murdered. One photograph stood out from the others as normal—it had been clipped out of a college yearbook. The girl in it was finally identified as a 1955 graduate of Maryland University, Wanda Tipson; but she had no recollection of dating any male who corresponded to the sergeant’s description of the murderer.
On 11 January 1959 Carrol Jackson was out driving with his wife Mildred and their two daughters, Susan, aged 5 and Janet, eighteen months. Carrol Jackson was a non-smoker and teetotaller who had met his wife at a Baptist church; she was president of the women’s missionary society. As he drove along a road near Apple Grove, Eastern Virginia, an old blue Chevrolet began to overtake, flashing his lights. When Jackson pulled over, the Chevrolet pulled in front and stopped. Jackson screeched to a halt, and was about to lose his temper when a man jumped out of the other car and waved a gun in his face. The tall, thin-faced man with long, ape-like arms and a beetling brow forced the Jackson family to get out of their car and into the boot of his Chevrolet. Then he drove off. Later that afternoon, Mildred Jackson’s aunt drove along the same road and recognized her niece’s husband’s car, abandoned.
The search for the Jacksons revealed nothing. Then another couple came forward to say that they had been forced off the road earlier that afternoon by an old blue Chevrolet. A man had walked back towards their car, but they had quickly reversed and driven away.
Two months later, on 4 March, two men whose car had bogged down on a muddy back road near Fredericksburg picked up armfuls of brush to gain traction, and found themselves looking at the body of a man. It proved to be Carrol Jackson, his hands bound in front of him with a necktie. He had been shot in the skull. Underneath him was the body of his eighteen-month-old daughter, who had simply been tossed into the ditch, and died of suffocation under her father’s body. There was no sign of Mildred or Susan Jackson.
On 21 March, boys hunting squirrels close to the spot where Margaret Harold had been murdered noticed freshly dug earth; they brushed some of it aside and saw the blonde hair of a little girl. Police uncovered the bodies of Mildred and Susan Jackson. Mildred had a stocking tied around her neck, but it was loose. Susan had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument. There was evidence that both had been raped. Police theorized that the stocking around Mildred Jackson’s neck had been used as a tourniquet to force her to commit some sexual act that disgusted her.
The grave was within a few hundred yards of the cinder-block structure in which the obscene photographs had been found two years earlier. And a quarter of a mile away, the police found a broken-down shack with relatively fresh tyre-marks nearby. Inside, police found a red button from Mildred Jackson’s dress.
Again, the investigation came to a halt. But two months later, the police received an anonymous letter that accused a jazz musician called Melvin Davis Rees of the murders of Margaret Harold and of the Jackson family. The man, who said he was a salesman, said that he and Rees had been in a town not far from the spot where Margaret Harold had been murdered, and that Rees had been hopped up on Benzedrine. The writer said he had later asked Rees point-blank if he had killed the Jackson family; Rees had not denied it, but only evaded the question. Police searched for Rees—whose job as a jazz musician kept him travelling—without success. Then, early in 1960, the writer of the letter, who identified himself as Glenn L. Moser, went to the police, to say that he had received a letter from Rees, who was working as a piano salesman in a music shop in West Memphis, Arkansas. An FBI agent went into the store and told Rees he was under arrest. Later that day, the sergeant identified Rees in a line-up as the man who had murdered Margaret Harold.
Detectives hastened to the home of Rees’ parents in Hyattsville, armed with a search warrant; in an attic they found a saxophone case containing a .38 revolver, and various notes describing sadistic acts—including the murder of the Jacksons.
‘Caught on a lonely road…Drove to a select area and killed husband and baby. Now the mother and daughter were all mine…’ He went on to describe a perverted sex act, probably forcing fellatio on her. ‘Now I was her master,’ he says with relish. He then described killing her slowly in a way that made it clear that his sexual hang-up was sadism.
Maryland police now discovered links between Rees and four other sex-murders of teenagers: two schoolgirls, Marie Shomette and Ann Ryan, had been intercepted in College Park, near the University of Maryland, and shot and raped; the bodies of Mary Fellers and Shelby Venable had been found in Maryland rivers.
Rees was tried in 1961, and executed for the murder of the Jackson family.
People who had worked with Rees (who played the piano, guitar, saxophone and clarinet) found it hard to believe that he was guilty of the crimes, and described him as mild-mannered and intelligent. The girl whose photograph had been found in the hut had, in fact, known him very well, and had given him up because he was married; it just never struck her that the killer of Margaret Harold could be the jazz musician.
Peter Hurkos, the psychic, was called into the case after the disappearance of the Jackson family, and his description of the killer was remarkably accurate—over six feet tall, left-handed, tattooed on the arm, with a walk like a duck and ape-like arms. At the scene of Margaret Harold’s murder, Hurkos walked to a bush and plucked off the dead woman’s torn skirt which had been there unnoticed since the murder. Hurkos added that the man had committed nine murders. This concurred with the figure the police themselves finally arrived at.
Rees had told Glenn Moser: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill—only individual standards make it right or wrong’—the argument that Sade had advanced but never attempted to put into practice. We may also note Moser’s comment: ‘I asked him point blank if he had killed these people. He evaded the question. He didn’t deny it.’ H. H. Holmes would have cast his eyes up to heaven and said: ‘My dear fellow, what an appalling suggestion.’ Rees’s self-esteem would not permit him to lie about it, even if—as happened—it cost him his life.