The Harvard Medical College Murder
(November 23, 1849)
The murder of Dr. George Parkman by Professor John White Webster of Harvard Medical College was Boston’s greatest scandal of the nineteenth century, and America’s first classic murder case.
Early on the afternoon of November 23, 1849, Professor Webster, goaded to a fury by the sneers of the unlikable Dr. Parkman, picked up a heavy chunk of kindling wood from the side of his stove and hit Parkman with all his strength. He then looked down at the prostrate body of his infuriating colleague. He had killed a man. What was he to do with the body?
Professor John White Webster
Bloody Remains
A contemporary print offered its version of murder in the laboratory, showing Webster lashing out in anger at the greedy moneylending doctor.
The solution was near at hand—the assay (testing) furnace he used to analyze mineral samples. He dragged Parkman’s skinny body into the adjoining washroom, heaved it into the sink, and proceeded to dismember it with a stout kitchen knife. Then he put the head into the furnace, which was now roaring, and stuffed the rest of the parts into a tea chest lined with tanbark.
A Classroom Bore
Professor Webster’s reputation as an amiable man may have saved him from being as complete a disaster as a teacher as he was as a money manager. When reporting the case, the Boston Daily Bee described Webster as “tolerated rather than respected, and has only retained his position on account of its comparative insignificance. As a lecturer he was dull and common-place and while the students took tickets to his lectures, they did not generally attend them.”
Unlikely Murderer
The disappearance of the detested Dr. Parkman caused a sensation in Boston, and many must have hoped he had come to a bad end. Parkman had abandoned the medical profession to become a moneylender and was known to treat with contempt those who had fallen behind in their payments. Professor Webster was his opposite. Round and plump, with a cherubic face, he looked like a member of Dickens’ Pickwick Club.
On November 25 an uneasy Professor Webster called on the Reverend Francis Parkman—George Parkman’s brother—and told him that Dr. Parkman had called on him on the 23rd to collect the repayment of a loan. He had left Webster’s carrying $483.64, which lent conviction to the notion that a thief must have waylaid the missing man and murdered him for the cash.
Bones in the Walls
Ephraim Littlefield, the janitor who broke the case, had also been a prime suspect in the Parkman murder. After Professor Webster’s conviction, however, Littlefield collected the $3,000 reward that the Parkman family had offered for any information that led to finding the doctor. Littlefield used that money to retire from his janitorial post.
The janitor at the college, Ephraim Littlefield, had other ideas. He and his wife lived in the basement of the medical college building, right next to Webster’s laboratory. A sour man, jealous of his social betters, Littlefield did not like Webster. And the fact that the professor had given him a turkey for Thanksgiving was enough to arouse his suspicions. Webster had never before given the Littlefields a gift. Littlefield also noted that the furnace burned day and night, and wondered . . .
It so happened that the furnace was on the other side of a wall in a corridor. So with hammer and chisel (and with his wife keeping guard), Littlefield broke through to the furnace. “I held my light forward . . . the first thing I saw was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg. I knew it was no place for these things.” He went to the police.
When Webster found out what Littlefield had done, he was heard to say: “That villain! I am a ruined man!” When taken into custody for the murder of Dr. Parkman, he attempted to swallow strychnine, but it only made him vomit. He passionately declared his innocence, however, insisting that he knew nothing about the remains. Investigators had found fragments of false teeth in the furnace, identified as those belonging to Dr. Parkman, but the professor continued to disclaim all knowledge of the murder.
Sensational Murder Trial
Webster’s laboratory was in the basement of the Harvard’s old medical college building, shown above. It seems Parkman went there to see Webster that November afternoon on the latter’s invitation, raising the suspicion that he had planned to kill Parkman. Most writers on the case (including this one) have been sympathetic to Webster because Parkman was a bad-tempered miser. If Webster planned the murder, this view may be over-credulous.
Webster was tried before Chief Justice Shaw. So much of Boston wished to see the trial that a shift system of seating in the public gallery was arranged, thus permitting a change of spectators every 10 minutes or so—it was estimated that 60,000 people witnessed parts of the trial, which lasted 11 days.
Found guilty, Professor Webster initially maintained his innocence. Some time later he admitted to the crime; there had been a violent quarrel concerning Dr Parkman’s loan and Professor Webster’s continued inability to repay. He confessed: “I felt nothing but the sting of his words . . . in my fury I seized whatever thing was handiest—it was a stick of wood—and dealt him a blow. . . . He did not move . . . he was absolutely dead. I took off the clothes and began putting them into the fire. . . . My next move was to get the body into the sink . . . there it was entirely dismembered. The only instrument was the knife . . . which I kept for cutting corks.”
Despite the claim that the killing blow had been struck in momentary anger, so appealing for a new verdict of manslaughter, Webster was hanged in August 1850.
(1874)
In the early 1870s the Free Territory of Colorado was a very daunting place. Made up of featureless plains leading up to the brutal eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the area was, to white settlers, largely uninhabited and unexplored. Wild animals, resentful Indians, brutal weather, and exhausting terrain took their toll on the new interlopers. The perceived reward outweighed any risk, however; most settlers believed that there was gold in those hills.
Alfred G. Packer was a prospector who claimed to know Colorado as well as any man living. He also claimed to know the location of many big gold deposits. Both these claims later proved to be completely untrue . . . and his pretense cost five men their lives.
Alfred G. Packer
An Unreliable Wilderness Guide
Chief Ouray of the Uncompahgre band and his wife, Chipeta. Ouray knew the land far better than Packer did and advised the prospecting group to abandon their dangerous journey. None of them listened.
In autumn 1873 Packer, then in his mid-20s, led a team of 19 prospectors from Salt Lake City, Utah, to the San Juan County area in Colorado, loaded down with supplies and equipment. The weeks passed and the weary men saw nothing but barren country and eventually arrived close to the snow-capped peaks.
On the point of starvation, they stumbled across the camp of members of the Uncompahgre band of the Ute tribe. The tribe’s leader, Chief Ouray, learned of their hazardous proposed expedition and succeeded in persuading 10 members of the party to abandon the futile quest. The nine remaining prospectors promised to pay Packer handsomely to continue as their guide. They remained at the Uncompahgre camp until they recovered and were still determined to hunt for gold. All Chief Ouray could do was to supply them with provisions and advise them to follow the banks of the Gunnison River as best they could.
Alfred Packer was now the undisputed leader of the expedition. Confident in his knowledge of the area, he claimed to be able to guide the party to the goldfield by a much shorter route than the one suggested by Chief Ouray. Four of the nine men, however, insisted on following the Gunnison River—without the aid of Packer’s “expert knowledge.”
Packer led the remaining five, Israel Swan, Frank Miller, George Noon, Shannon Bell, and James Humphrey, to their demise.
Dead Giveaway
The most striking physical evidence against Packer was that he had seemed too fit when he made it to the Los Pinos Agency—the Uncompahgre chief Ouray, who saw him soon after, commented: “You’re too damn fat!”
The Sole Survivor?
General Charles Adams, shown above, standing at right behind Chief Ouray and Chipeta, took care of the surviving prospectors when they reached the Los Pinos Indian Agency. When Packer reached the agency it was clear that something had gone very wrong.
Of the four men who followed the Gunnison River, two died of starvation before reaching the Los Pinos Indian Agency on Cochetopa Creek in February 1874. General Charles Adams, the U.S. agent at Los Pinos, saw to it that the two survivors were nursed back to full health before beginning their trek to civilization.
In March 1874 a wild-looking man appeared at Los Pinos, begging for food. His face was hideously bloated, but he was in surprisingly good physical condition, everything considered. He gave his name as Packer and explained that his five companions had deserted him while he was ill, leaving him with only a rifle to shoot wild game to survive.
After a 10-day stay at the agency, Packer left. In his travels, he stopped at many saloons, drank heavily, and flaunted a considerable quantity of money. The conflicting stories he told in those bars about the fate of his companions led to speculation that he had, in fact, murdered them. General Adams decided to have Packer tracked down. His team located Packer and escorted him back to the agency, where Adams placed him in solitary confinement.
Packer’s Statement: The First Killing
On April 2, 1874, two Ute men arrived at the agency, holding what they claimed were strips of “white man’s meat.” They had found it just outside the agency, where the snow had kept it well preserved. It was human flesh. Packer must have been carrying it, then dumped the grisly evidence when he saw that he had reached safety.
When he was shown the flesh, he gave a loud groan of despair and fell to the ground. When he had recovered enough, he made the following statement:
When I and five others left Ouray’s camp, we estimated that we had sufficient provisions for the long and arduous journey before us, but our food rapidly disappeared and we were soon on the verge of starvation. . . . One day I went out to gather wood for the fire and when I returned I found that Mr Swan, the oldest man in the party, had been struck on the head and killed, and the remainder of the party were in the act of cutting up the body preparatory to eating it.
Packer’s Statement: More Meat
A sign points out the site of the massacre. It uses the spelling of Packer’s first name that he often used himself: “Alferd,” rather than “Alfred.”
Alfred Packer’s “confession” concluded:
This food only lasted a few days and I suggested that Miller be the next victim, because of the large amount of flesh he carried. His skull was split open with a hatchet as he was in the act of picking up a piece of wood. Humphrey and Noon were the next victims. Bell and I then entered into a solemn compact that as we were the only ones left, we would stand by each other whatever befell, and rather than harm each other we would die of starvation.
One day Bell said: “I can stand it no longer!” and he rushed at me like a famished tiger, at the same time attempting to strike me with his gun. I parried the blow and killed him with a hatchet. I then cut his flesh into strips which I carried with me as I pursued my journey. When I espied the agency from the top of the hill, I threw away the strips I had left, and I confess I did so reluctantly as I had grown fond of human flesh, especially that portion around the breast.
The Discovery of the Bodies
The New York City Daily Graphic sent pen-and-ink artist John A. Reynolds out to Colorado to capture the local color. Reynolds got more color than he expected when he came across five decomposing bodies. He proved his measure as a journalist when he sat down and sketched the gruesome sight. The sketches appeared in Harper’s Weekly.
In June 1874 a newspaper artist named John A. Reynolds was out sketching in the wilderness when he came across the bodies of five men. Four of them were lying in a row, and the fifth, minus its head, was lying a short distance away. It was the remains of the missing prospectors, Israel Swan, Frank Miller, George Noon, Shannon Bell, and James Humphrey. The bodies of Bell, Swan, Humphrey, and Noon had rifle bullet wounds in the back of the skull, and when Miller’s head was found, it had been crushed by a blow from a rifle butt.
The find made complete nonsense of Packer’s statement. A path led from the bodies to a nearby hut, where blankets and possessions belonging to the murdered men were found, and it was apparent that Packer had lived in that cabin for many days, making frequent trips to the bodies for his supply of meat. Each body had its breast cut away to the ribs.
A Change of Statement
Standing before a painting of Packer defending himself against a hatchet-wielding Bell, David Bailey, curator of the Western Museum in Grand Junction, Colorado, holds the pistol that he believes Packer used to shoot Bell. Bailey and others support Packer’s self-defense plea.
A warrant was issued, charging Packer with five murders, but in the meantime the prisoner had escaped. The authorities hunted for him, but, showing that he had more wilderness skill than might have been guessed from his previous expedition, Packer vanished completely.
Nine years later, on March 12, 1883, Sheriff Sharpless of Laramie County recognized and arrested Packer and brought him to Lake City, Colorado. Packer’s trial began on April 3, 1883, when he was charged with the murder of Israel Swan in Hinsdale County on March 1, 1874.
Packer, in his statement to the court, now claimed that he had only killed Shannon Bell—and that was in self-defense. He told a story of his companions fighting among themselves and of Bell firing at him. This completely contradicted what he had said in his original statement, and the jury did not believe his new account. On April 13 the jury found Packer guilty of murder, and voted for the death penalty. Packer appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court and was granted a stay of execution.
A Republican Cannibal
The Gunnison River flows through the rough country of Hinsdale County, Colorado.
In October 1885 the Colorado Supreme Court granted him a new trial, and the prosecution decided this time to try him on five charges of manslaughter. Packer was found guilty of each charge and was sentenced to serve 8 years for each offence, making a total of 40 years. Sentencing Packer, Judge Melville Gerry gave vent to his feelings along unexpectedly political lines: “There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you depraved Republican son-of-a-bitch!”
Packer served 17 years at hard labor before being released. He proclaimed his innocence throughout all those years. He died on a ranch near Denver on April 24, 1907, aged 65, having been pardoned on January 1, 1901.
Serial Killer or Survivor?
Was Alfred Packer, as some have suggested, a serial killer? In both the legal and psychological sense the answer is no. He does not seem to have killed his victims over a prolonged period, as serial killers do, but in a single, frenzied attack. More important, he does not appear to have become addicted to murder—the true sign of a serial killer. In the nine years that he was an outlaw on the run, Packer almost certainly had opportunities to murder people, but there is no evidence that he ever killed (or ate) anyone after the ill-fated expedition.
The truth is that Packer, in a life-or-death situation, acted as a selfish and utterly ruthless survivor.
(December 24, 1891)
Little is known of Frederick Bailey Deeming’s early life. Born in Leicestershire, England, Deeming himself claimed that both his mother and father had been in and out of mental homes and that as a child his own abnormality earned him the nickname Mad Fred.
In 1883, at about 30 years of age, he married and went to Australia to seek his fortune. He tried to make this by swindling jewelers and was arrested for fraud. Released on bail he fled with his wife, Marie, and their children to Port Adelaide and then left for South Africa. On the voyage he succeeded in defrauding two brothers out of £60.
Frederick Bailey Deeming
Selling Gold Mines
The family moved to Cape Town, but Deeming was soon on the move again, supporting himself with jewelry frauds. He was wanted by jewelers in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg for swindles amounting to £1,000. To avoid capture he obtained a post as manager of a gold-mining company at Klerksdorp and offered to sell gold mines to rich financiers. He soon gained a reputation as a cheat, especially after he faked his own death to renege on a deal.
Eventually Deeming sent Marie and the children (there were now four: Mary, Bertha, Sydney, and Leala) to England, and he traveled there alone.
At Hull in Yorkshire he posed as a millionaire and a relative of Sir Wilfred Lawson. There he swindled a jeweler out of £285 (paying with bouncing checks) and hastily embarked for South America. On this trip fellow passengers knew him as the manager of a diamond mine in South Africa. They were startled when detectives at Montevideo, Uruguay, arrested him for fraud.
The Vanishing Family
Frederick Deeming, with his first wife, Marie. Marie died at her husband’s hand, along with their four young children.
Back in Hull in October 1890, Deeming was sentenced to nine months in jail. On his release he went to the Commercial Hotel, Liverpool, where he posed as an inspector of regiments in South Africa, who had come to England to take a house for a Colonel Brooks. He found a cottage, Dinham Villa, at Rainhill, and specified that he was going to concrete the kitchen hearth and floor. In July 1891 Marie and the children moved into Dinham Villa and then simply disappeared—under the concrete. Deeming, at that time calling himself “Albert Williams,” then married Emily Mathers, a tobacconist’s daughter with family money. He took her to see Dinham Villa and danced a little jig on the kitchen floor.
A Murder on Andrew Street
Newspaper illustration of Emily Mathers’s body as it was found under the floor in the bedroom she shared with her husband
With his new wife, Deeming sailed once more for Australia. Emily appears to have at first been extremely happy with her lively husband. Yet by the time they reached Melbourne, 10 days before Christmas, she must have had her doubts. A neighbor said her eyes were red from weeping. The couple, known to neighbors as the Williamses, took a house on Andrew Street in Windsor, Victoria, a Melbourne suburb. But Australia didn’t provide Emily Mathers with a new life—or any life at all. Soon after she moved to Andrew Street, Deeming cemented her lifeless body under the floorboards near their bedroom hearth.
The One Who Got Away
Kate Rounsefell
In January 1892 Deeming hastily left Melbourne and sailed for Sydney. On the boat he met his next prospective victim, a Miss Katie Rounsefell. Believing her new acquaintance to be “Baron Swanston,” she quickly agreed to marry him. He traveled to Sydney with Katie, then left her and obtained a job with Fraser’s gold mine in Southern Cross, Western Australia. She was actually on her way to join him when chance—in the form of the discovery of Emily’s body—saved her. Eight weeks after Deeming had moved out of Andrew Street, the agent went to look over the place, having heard of an offensive odor in the bedroom. The newly cemented fireplace was crumbling—the heat of an Australian summer had dried it too quickly. The policeman who came to check out the odor kicked away a few lumps of soft concrete and found himself looking at the face of a dead girl.
Deeming had left many clues, including a card with the Rainhill address on it. This soon led to the discovery of the bodies in Dinham Villa. Victoria Police traced Deeming to Southern Cross, arrested him, and took him back to Melbourne. At one point he narrowly escaped lynching.
He wrote to Miss Rounsefell, declaring his innocence and asking her to believe in him; he also asked for money (Miss Rounsefell was an heiress.).
His defense tried an insanity plea, and Deeming declared that the apparition of his dead mother frequently appeared to him and had once urged him to kill all his women friends. He also made a speech declaring that Emily Mathers was still alive and that the people in court were the ugliest he had ever seen in his life. The jury found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. Deeming was hanged in the old Melbourne Jail.
Advice
In late 1892 Edward Thunderbolt organized the reburial of his friend Emily Mathers in Melbourne Cemetery. A tall, urn-topped memorial bears the name “Emily Lydia Mathers” and the details of her murder. Attached to the base is a plaque with the words of a poem “Advice,” written by Thunderbolt for his friend:
To those who hereafter come reflecting
Upon this text of her sad ending:
To warn her sex of their intending,
For marrying in haste, is depending
On such a fate, too late for amending
By her friend,
E. Thunderbolt.
Fred the Ripper?
Deeming confessed to being Jack the Ripper—impossibly, because Deeming was in jail at the time of the murders.
(1900–1908)
America’s “Lady Bluebeard” was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth near Trondheim, Norway, in 1859, and followed her sister Nellie to Chicago at age 24. Belle, as she liked to be called, married compatriot Mads Sorenson, a department store detective, about 1884. In an effort to escape the poverty imposed by her husband’s $15 weekly salary, she took in lodgers and ran a candy store. In 1896 this burned down, and she collected the insurance money.
Belle Gunness
The Queen of Hearts
Belle Gunness’s jealous hired hand, Ray Lamphere
Suddenly Belle realized that there were other ways of making money. Her daughter Caroline died the same year and her son Axel two years later, both with symptoms of acute colitis. Both were insured. So was the Sorenson home in the Chicago suburb of Austin, which burned down in 1898. Her husband died in 1900, and the young doctor who saw the body thought its contortions indicated strychnine poisoning. An older colleague said it was due to “an enlarged heart,” and when a postmortem revealed an enlarged heart, the matter was dropped.
Black Widow of the Prairie
Mads Sorenson had died with perfect timing, on the day two insurance policies on his life overlapped. With $8,500 of settlement money, Belle was able at last to buy a comfortable farmhouse near La Porte, Indiana, where she moved with her children, including a 10-year-old adopted daughter, Jennie. In April 1902 she married a young widower, Peter Gunness. He had a baby, and when the child died soon after the marriage, the local doctor suspected smothering, but he kept his suspicions to himself. Eight months later, in December 1902, Peter Gunness died in an odd accident—according to Belle, a heavy meat grinder fell off its shelf and smashed his skull. Jennie appeared at the inquest and supported Belle’s story, and Belle escaped any repercussions.
Over the next few years, Belle hired a series of handymen. Most of them seem to have been her lovers. Belle had never been pretty, although her blue eyes were striking, and a wide, down-turned mouth carried the promise of sensuality. The few men who slept with her and survived recorded that she had a natural talent for sex that made her addictive. Many of these hired men left unexpectedly—so unexpectedly that Belle was left to finish the plowing. Their relatives later identified some of them in Belle’s homemade cemetery.
In June 1907 Belle approached a young odd-job man named Ray Lamphere and told him she wanted a man about the house. He had a droopy moustache and eyes like an anxious koala bear; he gladly accepted. On the first night, Belle joined him in bed.
Just before Christmas 1907, a new man arrived at the farm. Belle explained to Ray that they were engaged. For the next week Ray was in a frenzy of jealousy; then, to his relief, the man disappeared. Not long after, in early January, another man came, Andrew Helgelian. When it became clear Belle had taken him as her new lover, jealousy again tormented Ray. He and Belle quarreled. Ray soon learned that Belle was not to be crossed.
Fire!
Workers and police comb over the rubble and ruins of the burned-out basement of Belle Gunness’s house.
On the afternoon of April 27, 1908, Belle went to make her will and told her lawyer that she believed Lamphere intended to burn down the house. That night the new hired man woke up smelling smoke and raised the alarm. He tried to awaken Belle, but her bedroom door was locked and she did not respond. By the time the firefighters arrived, the house was a smoldering ruin.
When it cooled enough to search, the remains of a woman and three children were found in the basement, into which they had fallen as floors collapsed. It was clear that the children had been battered about the head. Oddly enough, the woman’s head was missing, and the body seemed too small to be Belle, even though false teeth found in the ashes were identified as Belle’s.
Lamphere was arrested and accused of murder and arson. The jury found him innocent of murder but guilty of arson, and he received two years.
When Asle Hegelian came looking for his brother Andrew, searchers began to dig in the hog pen. They found there the remains of 20 men, with skull injuries suggesting blows from a hatchet, as well as a skeleton identified as Jennie.
Was Belle dead, or had she arranged her own funeral pyre and escaped? That mystery has never been solved.
The front page of the Los Angeles Times of May 6, 1908, which featured a story on the “gruesome mystery.” In the shaded area are the details of the “Indiana Woman Believed to Be Guilty of Wholesale Murder,” whose “Victims Strangely Drop from Sight.”
Inspired Lyrics
The story of Belle Gunness inspired a folk song that included the lines:
She placed in the papers a lonely hearts ad.
Men came to Belle Gunness to share food and bed,
Not knowing that soon they’d be knocked in the head.
But while they were sleeping, she’d lift the door latch.
She’d kill them and plant them in her tater patch.
(March 27, 1905)
The first murder to be solved in Great Britain using fingerprint evidence occurred in Deptford, southeast London, in 1905.
At 7:15 AM, March 27, 1905, a small girl playing on the pavement outside a shop in Deptford saw the door open slowly and a man with a bloody face peer out. Then he closed the door again. At half past eight, the shop assistant arrived and was surprised to find the door still locked. He found the shopkeeper, Thomas Farrow, lying dead in the back parlor. Ann Farrow, his wife, was lying in a bloodstained bed, still alive but unconscious.
Henry Faulds
Enter the Fingerprint Experts
By half past nine, Scotland Yard men were at the scene. A milkman said he had seen two men leaving the shop at a quarter past seven.
Medical evidence showed that the Farrows had been violently attacked around seven that morning; the two intruders had been wearing black stocking masks, which they left behind. The door had not been forced, and Farrow was partly dressed, suggesting that he had come downstairs to answer a knock on the door, expecting an early customer. The men had attacked him with a jimmy (a type of crowbar), then gone upstairs and attacked his wife. Then they forced open the cashbox, which was found under the bed.
Local rumor had it that the Farrows kept a large sum of money in the house. They were mistaken; the shop takings—less than £10 a week—were banked regularly.
One of the killers had left a vital clue—his bloody thumbprint on the lid of the cashbox. The box was sent straight to the Yard’s fingerprint department. Then they took the fingerprints of Mr. and Mrs. Farrow. A check in the fingerprint records—now amounting to 80,000 or so—failed to identify the bloody thumbprint.
Unsavory Characters
A newspaper illustration of the Deptford area of London in 1905, showing the locations of key elements of the Mask Murders, which were also know in the press as the Deptford Murders and the Farrow Murders
Straightforward detective work made further progress. Two brothers, Alfred and Albert Stratton, were known to the local police as thugs, but had not yet acquired criminal records. They had abandoned their usual haunts. The younger brother, Alfred, had a mistress, and when the police located her, she showed signs of a recent beating. She informed the police that he had left via the window in the early hours of Monday morning—the day of the murder—and returned by the same route after dawn. The landlady of the elder Stratton told police that she had once come upon black stocking masks hidden under his mattress.
Double Murder
Fingerprint evidence from the Deptford Mask Murders case, from Henry Faulds’s Guide to Finger-print Identification, 1905. Although Faulds was one of the developers of the forensics fingerprinting system, he chose to side with the defense in the case against the Stratton brothers. He believed that a match established from a single print provided insufficient evidence for a murder conviction. The Scotland Yard’s fingerprint expert convinced the jury otherwise, and they found the Strattons guilty of murdering the Farrows.
Assistant Commissioner Melville MacNaghten gave orders for the arrest of both brothers. When they were taken into custody a week later, Ann Farrow had died at the hospital, turning it into a double murder inquiry.
At the Tower Bridge police court, both brothers were noisy and abusive, and the magistrate felt that there was almost no case against them. Then the brothers were fingerprinted. That afternoon the fingerprint expert came into his chief’s office, saying: “Good God, sir, I’ve found that the print on the cashbox corresponds exactly with the right thumb of Alfred Stratton.”
On May 5, 1905, the brothers appeared at the Old Bailey, the Central Court in London, charged with murder. The fingerprint expert for the defense was Henry Faulds, the Scot who had discovered fingerprinting in Tokyo, and beside him was Dr. J. G. Garson, who had developed his own system for classifying fingerprints. Both experts felt that they were not given the recognition they were due and were intent on taking revenge on Scotland Yard by testifying for the defense.
The defense contended that Alfred Stratton’s thumbprint and the bloody thumbprint on the cashbox were not identical—there were various small differences. That, replied Detective Sergeant Collins, was natural. He proved his point beyond any doubt by taking the prints of the jurymen several times over, showing that small discrepancies occurred.
Dr. Garson was called to the stand. The prosecutor, Muir, was ready for him. He held out a letter. Had Dr. Garson written him this letter, offering to testify on behalf of the prosecution? Dr. Garson reddened, and admitted that he had. “But I am an independent witness . . .” The icy voice of the judge interrupted him. “I would say a completely untrustworthy one. Kindly leave the witness box.”
With no expert witnesses to refute the power of the fingerprint evidence, both Stratton brothers were condemned to death. And the evidence of the bloodstained fingerprint became front-page news throughout the British Isles.
Fingering the Crook
In 1909 a patrolling constable in Clerkenwell noticed a finger, caught by its ring, on one of the spikes at the top of a warehouse gate. Its owner had slipped when trying to climb the gate, and the spike had gone between the ring and his finger; his struggles had torn off the finger. The fingerprint files identified the digit as that of a burglar, who was duly arrested and charged with an attempt at breaking and entering.
The Golden Age of American Gangsters
(1920s–1930s)
It is arguable that the cowboy outlaw bandits of the late nineteenth century were the direct forbears of twentieth century mobsters like Baby Face Nelson and Al Capone; and that the early twentieth century was merely the transition period from the age of the six-shooter to the age of the tommy gun. Certainly American gang violence and organized crime were not a twentieth-century development.
Al Capone
Roots in the Old West
Old West “good guys” were as ruthless as the bad ones, such as in the Dodge City peace commission of 1882, which include the West’s most fearless gunslingers. Back row, from left: W. H. Harris, Luke Short, and Bat Masterson. Front row, from left: Charles Bassett, Wyatt Earp, F. McClain, and Neil Brown.
The infamous 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral was not, as Hollywood would have us believe, just a battle between the “good guy” Earps and the “bad guy” Clantons. Certainly the Clanton gang were cattle rustlers and barroom hell-raisers, but the Earps were little better. The Earp brothers came to the Arizona town of Tombstone—with the card-sharping gunslinger and dentist, Doc Holiday—primarily to make money, not to uphold the law. In fact it seems likely that the Earps were simply using their deputized positions to gain control of Tombstone for their own ends. The killing of three men in the OK Corral gunfight, and the many killings in the months that followed, was more like a gangster turf war than a genuine attempt to end crime in Tombstone.
How to Create a Breeding Ground for Crime
Detroit police raid a bootlegger’s brewery. Prohibition did far more to encourage the growth of organized crime than it did to discourage alcohol consumption.
The prohibition of alcohol in the United States began with the Volstead Act in 1919. The act was pushed through Congress by a political hegemony of religious fundamentalists, moral crusaders, and those people who disliked the increasing urbanization of America (cities were generally believed to encourage drinking). But the result was the exact reverse of what the prohibitionists had wanted the ban to achieve. Secret, illegal alcoholism rocketed. Violent bootleggers (alcohol smugglers) virtually ran many big cities, such as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, and U.S. society in general became more, not less libertine.
By 1924, only five years after the imposition of Prohibition, the speakeasy trade was one of the biggest money spinners in America. These were illegal, secret alcohol bars: the term speakeasy comes from the fact that customers were habitually warned to keep their voices down for fear of police detection. The effect of making a common pastime illegal was to make many ordinary people feel outside the law, with a resulting loss of respect for authority in general.
Fed by bootleg alcohol profits, “mobs” of organized criminals grew vastly in size and power—eventually touching almost every aspect of American life. Then the Wall Street crash of 1929 rocked the financial base of the country, creating the Great Depression. Suddenly in such a bleak economic climate, the risks of being an outlaw bandit seemed worth taking.
Bonnie and Clyde
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker
Clyde Barrow had just finished a 20-month jail sentence for armed robbery when he first met Bonnie Parker in 1930. She was an out-of-work waitress and doubtless found the life of crime that Barrow offered her irresistibly attractive. The two became lovers and set themselves up as roaming armed robbers.
But Bonnie and Clyde, as the papers dubbed them, were small-time crooks by the standards of the time, cautiously robbing only gas stations, restaurants, and small-town, poorly defended banks. They were certainly not in the league of more daring bank robbers like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. Still, during the course of this rather petty criminal career, their gang killed at least nine people.
Yet the romantic appeal of the pair as “gangster lovers” quickly gained them national fame and a largely undeserved legendary status. And this may have been a key factor in the authorities’ ruthless determination to apprehend them, dead or alive.
They were betrayed by a friend and ambushed by police near Bienville, Louisiana, on May 23, 1934. Without giving a warning for the pair to surrender, officers riddled their car with machine-gun bullets, killing both within seconds.
The First “Public Enemy Number One”
America’s number-one gangster and its top lawman: John Dillinger, left, and J. Edgar Hoover, right. Hoover made catching Dillinger the immediate goal of his newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Born in 1903 there is little clue in John Herbert Dillinger’s quiet, rural upbringing to hint at why he later became such a master criminal. From all accounts he was an easygoing, good-natured boy.
At the age of 20 Dillinger joined the U.S. Navy but found life onboard the USS Utah so boring that he deserted after only a few months. Being a deserter in peacetime was not a major crime, but life on the run seems to have set the young Dillinger on the path of petty larceny. He was caught trying to rob a grocery store in 1924 and spent the next three years in prison. It was there that he apparently decided to become a real criminal and set about learning everything he could about bank robbery from his more experienced fellow inmates.
On his release Dillinger soon became a legendary, even mythical figure in the public’s eyes. A brilliant bank robber (who timed heists with military precision), it was also said that no prison could hold him. Indeed Dillinger once escaped a maximum-security jail wielding a “gun” he had carved out of soap and blackened with boot polish.
J. Edgar Hoover’s newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation riskily placed its reputation on catching Dillinger—who, in a fit of publicity seeking, Hoover titled “Public Enemy Number One.” Indeed it is possible that the then unpopular interstate police bureau might have been disbanded if Dillinger had gone unapprehended for much longer than he did.
Dillinger Dead?
A Dubuque, Iowa, newspaper headline of April 23, 1934, proclaims the latest crime spree of Dillinger. In front are items confiscated from the criminal who was by then one of the most feared men in America.
Dillinger—or a man who looked just like him—was lured into an FBI trap outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934. The authorities said that he was shot dead while resisting arrest, but several witnesses claimed that he was shot down without warning. The killing wound, fired at close range into the base of his skull while he was lying prone on his belly, is what is called an “execution shot” in the military.
A rumor that the man killed outside the Biograph Theater apparently had distinguishing marks different from John Dillinger (a correct missing tooth—but on the wrong side of his mouth—and brown rather than gray eyes, for example) led some to believe that the FBI killed a double. They believed that the real Dillinger used the death to change his identity and surgically change his face in order to escape forever.
Whatever the truth to this belief, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ever afterward kept a death mask of the man killed outside the Biograph Theater on his desk as a grisly memento.
Pretty Boy
Lawmen surround the body of Pretty Boy Floyd on its mortuary slab after federal agents shot and killed him during a gun battle on an Ohio farm.
A farmer, driven to bank robbing by the agricultural disaster of the Great Dust Bowl, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd won a genuine Robin Hood reputation by also taking and destroying bank debt papers, thus saving many farmers from financial ruin.
Floyd won the sarcastic newspaper nickname Pretty Boy because a farmer, to whom he’d given money, described him to the press as “kind faced and kind hearted.”
Following the death of John Dillinger, the FBI promoted Floyd to Public Enemy Number One. He did not hold the title for long, however. On October 22, 1934, the FBI gunned down Floyd while he was attempting to escape across farmland near East Liverpool, Ohio.
Baby Face
Like many of his ilk, Baby Face Nelson died in a hail of bullets. Belying his benign nickname, Nelson was a ruthless killer, who unnecessarily provoked the final gun battle that cost him his life.
Lester Gillis, better remembered as Baby Face Nelson, was a member of John Dillinger’s bank-robbing gang and was named as the new FBI Public Enemy Number One after the death of Pretty Boy Floyd. Dillinger used violence only rarely, but Baby Face took a sick pleasure in shooting bystanders during heists. And he especially liked killing policemen—he gunned down at least a dozen that we know of.
Baby Face died on November 27, 1934, near Barrington, Illinois, when he deliberately started a gunfight with two unsuspecting FBI agents, who just happened to be driving past in the other direction. He killed both of them before bleeding to death himself. Agents later found his lifeless body in a ditch. Ironically one of the agents was Herman Hollis—the man who had fired the killing shot into Pretty Boy Floyd a month earlier.
Scarface
Al Capone
Alphonse “Scarface” Capone was undoubtedly the most infamous American mob boss of the twentieth century.
Born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, of Neapolitan immigrant parents, Capone joined a local criminal mob at the age of 11. In 1919 Capone moved to Chicago to work as a pimp and gunman in the profitable prostitution trade. It was at this time that he probably contracted the syphilis that would eventually kill him.
By 1925 Capone had worked his way up to being the crime boss of Chicago’s Southside; running prostitution, illegal gambling, and bootlegging rackets and ruthlessly killing any rivals. His wealth in 1927 was estimated at close to a $100 million.
On February 14, 1929, six members of George Clarence “Bugs” Moran’s North Sider Gang (plus an innocent dentist who happened to be playing cards with them) were machine-gunned to death in a Chicago garage on Capone’s orders. A not untypical act of gang warfare in 1920s’ Chicago, the fact that the killing took place on St. Valentine’s Day won enormous media coverage and made Al Capone a national villain. The police, however, could not link Capone to the massacre.
Al Capone was finally arrested in 1930 for income tax evasion. After a decade of avoiding arrest on major charges, it had apparently never occurred to Capone to worry about the fact that he was evidently making millions but never paying a dime in taxes.
In 1931 Capone was found guilty and given 11 years. He was released on medical grounds in 1939. His mind already rotten with syphilis, he had no chance of rebuilding his crime empire. He died in 1947.
No Mob?
Incredible as it may seem, for decades many government officials—especially FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover—flatly denied the existence of organized crime associations in the United States, despite the copious evidence to the contrary. It was not until Hoover’s death, in 1972, that the FBI admitted that “the Mob” actually did exist.
Lucky
Crime boss Lucky Luciano
Charles “Lucky” Luciano, is a less commonly recognized Mafia figure than Al Capone, but Lucky Luciano was, in fact, a much more powerful boss than Capone ever was.
Starting in petty crime in New York from the age of 10, Luciano soon earned the nickname Lucky by escaping arrest and winning dice games. By 1925 he was a second-in-command to a large mob, run by Joe Masseria. In 1929 he re-earned his nickname when he survived a mob hit. Thugs repeatedly stabbed him with an ice pick and partially slit open his throat.
But unlike most of his contemporary gang bosses, Luciano disliked the violence of the ever-present mob wars, largely because it was scaring away business. In 1931 Luciano had Masseria murdered and took over the dead man’s gang. By diplomatically cultivating the younger generation of Mafiosi, Luciano became a capo di tutti capi (“boss of bosses”) and by 1934 had managed to organize a national “crime cartel”—a loose union of Mafia families.
Out of Luck
Thomas E. Dewey finally made a case to send Luciano to prison.
In 1935 New York special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey targeted Lucky Luciano and gained evidence of his use of forced prostitution: some of the call girls in Luciano’s prostitution empire were forced into “white slavery” by gangster-pimps. Dewey found enough of these “sex slaves” willing to give evidence, and the jury convicted Lucky. A judge sent Luciano down for a 30-to-50-year sentence in 1936.
Despite his imprisonment Lucky Luciano continued to run his crime empire from behind bars. In 1942 he helped the U.S. war effort by utilizing his mob and union connections to stop sabotage on the New York docks. He was released from jail in 1946 (20 to 40 years early) in thanks for this help. Luciano was, however, immediately deported to his native Italy.
He died of a heart attack at a Naples airport in 1962, while waiting to meet a movie director who wanted to make a documentary about his life. It may be worth noting that the mob bosses in the United States had expressly forbidden Luciano from speaking to such people, for fear of the mob secrets he could reveal.
Lucky Luciano’s legacy was the greater cooperation between organized crime families in America, which in turn created the modern, semi-corporate Mafia of the modern day.
(1910s–1932)
Albert Fish, a seemingly innocuous, mild-mannered man, earned many nicknames, including the Brooklyn Vampire, the Gray Man, the Bogeyman, and the Werewolf of Wisteria, before he was executed for the murder of Grace Budd on January 16, 1936. Grace, unfortunately, was not the only victim of this sadomasochistic pedophilic cannibal.
Albert Fish
Evil Charm
A woman who lived in the same lodgings as Fish, testified that he loved playing with children and was extremely popular with them.
Little Grace
Grace Budd. Little Grace thought that she was going to a birthday party, but Fish had other plans for the bright 10-year-old.
In May 1928 Edward Budd placed a classified ad in the New York World, looking for country work away from his Manhattan home. It was 58-year-old Fish who answered the ad, visiting the Budd home under the name Frank Howard, a “Long Island farmer.” On his second visit to the Budds, after promising Edward a job, Fish offered to take Edward’s 10-year-old sister, Grace, to a birthday party for Fish’s “niece.” Reluctantly her parents allowed the child to go with the seemingly kind man.
Fish, carrying a bundle containing a cleaver, saw, and butcher knife, boarded a train with Grace in tow, traveling north to Westchester County. So excited by his plans for the unsuspecting child, Fish nearly left his “tools” behind—Grace reminded him to retrieve his bundle. He then took her to an empty house known as Wisteria Cottage, where he stripped himself in an upstairs room and then called Grace in. When she screamed, he strangled her. Then he chopped off her head and cut the body in two.
He took parts of her body home with him, cooked them with carrots and onions, and ate them over a period of nine days. During this time he later confessed that he experienced great sexual excitement.
The Hunt
Six years after Grace’s death a letter from Fish arrived at the Budds in an envelope that could be traced. In the letter Fish admitted to Grace’s murder, gruesomely describing how he feasted on her flesh but declaring that he had not raped her.
A month later, New York City police arrested Fish. Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham was given the task of probing his mental state.
Fish was born in 1870, to a family with a history of mental abnormality. At 5 he was placed in an orphanage; at 15 he left school and changed his first name from Hamilton to Albert. In 1898 he married a girl nine years his junior, and they had six children. Twenty years later his wife eloped with a lodger. Fish, who once said, “I was always fond of children,” continued to look after the children and married three more times.
“Unparalleled Perversity”
Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham worked with the New York City’s police department to determine Fish’s mental condition. Wertham concluded that Fish predilection for extreme sadomasochistic behaviors started when Fish was a child.
“Fish’s sexual life was of unparalleled perversity,” Frederic Wertham says. At 5 he developed a penchant for being spanked because of a teacher. Sadism and masochism were the chief elements in his sexual development. “Experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind were practiced by him. . . . He took bits of cotton, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them in his rectum and set fire to them. He also did that to his child victims.” Most disturbing, he developed a craving for cannibalism.
Fish admitted to a lifetime of preying on children, seducing at least 100. His job as a house painter, often working in basements or empty houses, provided opportunities for finding victims. In some cases, he castrated the boys. He developed a habit of sticking needles into himself below the scrotum; an X-ray showed 27 of these needles inside him, some of them eroded into small pieces. He also tried forcing needles under his fingernails, but found this too painful to continue.
Visions of Hell
The electric chair at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Ossining, New York. Fish was electrocuted in 1936 and buried in the prison’s cemetery.
Fish suffered from “religious insanity.” He had visions of Christ, as well as of Hell, and believed himself to be a particularly holy man. According to Wertham, Fish “felt that he was ordered by God to castrate little boys.” Fish said, “I had to offer a child for sacrifice, to purge myself of iniquities.” It is clear that Fish was insane, and that the jury’s death sentence expressed its indignation rather than a considered verdict of his total responsibility.
Fish had been arrested many times on criminal charges, including grand larceny. He had also spent 90 days in jail for sending obscene letters and received two suspended sentences for passing fake checks. He was sent to a mental hospital for observation in 1930, more than two years after the Budd murder. The report stated, “at times he showed signs of mental disturbance.” Although diagnosed as a sadist (a cat-o’-nine-tails was found in his room), no further investigation was made, and he was released.
Fish was implicated in 15 child murders, but the number may be closer to 100. He may have gotten away with them for so long because, as Wertham noted: “He looked like a meek and innocuous little old man . . . If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose.”
(December 17, 1927)
The kidnap-murder of 12-year-old Marion Parker was one of the most horrific crimes of 1927.
On December 15, 1927, a young man went to the registrar, Mary Holt, at the Mount Vernon School in Los Angeles, and explained that the chief cashier at a local bank, Perry Parker, had been seriously injured in an automobile accident and wanted to see his daughter Marion. The man gave his name as George Cooper and said he worked under Mr. Parker at the bank. His manner was so plausible and sincere that the registrar overcame her hesitation and let Marion go with him. Then she found herself wondering why Mr. Parker should ask for just Marion and not for her twin sister Marjorie too, so she rang the Parker’s house. Perry Parker was, in fact, at home, and said he had not sent for Marion.
Edward Hickman
Marion Parker and the Fox
Marion Parker lived long enough to write a heartbreaking ransom plea to her father.
The police were immediately notified. Later that afternoon a telegram arrived for Parker, saying that he would be receiving a special delivery letter and he was to do nothing until he got it. The telegram was signed “Marion Parker and the Fox.”
The next day the letter arrived, demanding a ransom of $1,500 for Marion’s return. The kidnapper wrote that he would call with arrangements that afternoon, and accordingly when the distraught Parker waited at the chosen rendezvous, police were concealed nearby. It was a futile vigil, and the next morning another letter came from “The Fox.” He wrote, “You gave me your word of honor . . . not to tip the police . . . you lied . . . you are insane to ignore my terms.” A note in the child’s writing was enclosed: “Please, Daddy, I want to come home this morning. This is your last chance . . . come by yourself or you won’t see me again.” A further meeting at Manhattan Place Car Park, Los Angeles, was arranged for that evening. The money was handed over to a soft-spoken young man in an open car, who said he would leave Marion (dimly seen at his side bundled to her neck in a blanket) “just down the street.”
The man drove off, and when he reached the end of the street, shoved Marion from the car. Parker found his daughter dead. The killer had hacked off her hands and legs, sadistically slashed her body, and wired her eyes open. The missing limbs were found in Elysian Park. The coroner later determined that she’d been disemboweled and stuffed with rags. Marion had probably been still alive when the man began to dismember her.
Foxhunt
A laundry mark on a towel wrapped around the remains led detectives to an apartment house, where they met, during their inquiries, a helpful, pleasant young lodger named Evans. Only after their departure did they realize that the shirt wrapped around the torso of Marion Parker bore the same initials as the one Evans wore when interviewed. Evans was really Edward Hickman, who had recently been imprisoned for forgery while working in the same bank as Marion’s father. He was known to blame Mr. Parker for his prosecution.
Hickman fled in a stolen sedan, driving across California, Oregon, and Washington before his capture near Portland. He admitted to abducting Marion but denied the killing, blaming accomplices who were found to have no connection with the crime. (Strange methods were employed to make Hickman talk: once a guard burst into his cell shouting, “I’ve got a message for you from Marion!”) Finally Hickman confessed, stating: “I always wanted to cut up a body, I used a pocket-knife, then drained each piece and washed them in the bathtub . . . then I went out to a cinema . . . I didn’t like the pictures, they were too sad and made me cry.”
Route followed by Edward Hickman as he tried to elude capture. He left Los Angeles on Sunday, December 19, and was captured by two motorcycle cops in Echo, Oregon, on Thursday, December 22.
Just Too Sensitive to Kill
As a teenager, Edward Hickman worked at two jobs to support his studies. From 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM every day, he worked in a chicken-packaging plant. The idea of killing chickens revolted him, so the manager excused him from that part of the job.
Madness and Hanging
Hickman’s young defense lawyer, Richard Cantillon, found himself in an odd position. With the whole country baying for Hickman’s blood, he was quickly convinced that Hickman was guilty—but insane. Hickman’s grandmother had died insane, and his mother was periodically confined in a mental home. A brilliant student at his school in Kansas City, he had plunged into schizophrenia after leaving. Deeply religious, he was about to begin studies at a theological college but was obsessed by his belief that he needed $1,500 to complete his studies—hence the kidnap of Marion Parker.
As Cantillon expected, Hickman was found guilty and hanged in San Quentin in October 1928. An incompetent hangman made the rope too short to break his neck, and he strangled to death.
(March 1, 1932)
March 1, 1932, was a rainy and windy day in Hopewell, New Jersey, and the family of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh were all suffering from colds—which is why they had decided to delay their departure to the home of their in-laws by 24 hours. At 10 o’clock that evening, the nursemaid, Betty Gow, asked Ann Lindbergh if she had taken the baby, Charles Jr., from his cot. She said no, and they went to ask her husband if he had the baby. Then all three rushed up to the room where 19-month-old Charles should have been asleep. On the windowsill was a note demanding $50,000 for the child’s return.
Bruno Hauptmann
The Ransom
Anne Lindbergh with her infant son, Charles Jr.
Under the window the police found some smudged footprints; nearby there was a ladder in three sections and a chisel. The ladder, a crude homemade one, was broken where the top section joined the middle one. And there were no fingerprints in the child’s room.
The kidnapping caused a nationwide sensation, and soon Hopewell was swarming with journalists. But the kidnappers themselves remained strangely silent.
The kidnap note offered few clues. It had various spelling mistakes, like “anyding” for “anything,” and a handwriting expert said that it had probably been written by a German with low educational qualifications. It was signed by two interlocking circles, one red, one blue.
A week after the kidnapping, a well-wisher named Dr. John F. Condon sent a letter to his local newspaper in the Bronx, New York, offering $1,000 of his own money for the return of the child. The result was a letter addressed to Condon signed with two circles—a detail that had not been released to the public. It asked him to act as a go-between, and to place an advertisement reading “Mony is Redy” when he was ready to hand it over.
Lindbergh was convinced by the evidence of the two circles; he instructed Condon to go ahead and place the advertisement. That evening, a man’s deep voice spoke to Condon on the telephone. Condon could hear someone else speaking Italian in the background as the deep voice told him that the gang would soon be in touch.
“Would I Burn?”
A rendezvous was made with Condon at a cemetery. At the gates a young man with a handkerchief over his face asked if Condon had brought the money; Condon said it was not yet ready. The man took fright and ran away. Condon caught up with him and assured him he could trust him.
The man identified himself as “John,” and suddenly asked a strange question: “Would I burn if the baby is dead?” Appalled, Condon asked, “Is the baby dead?” The man assured him that the baby was alive and said that he was now on a “boad” (boat). As a token of good faith, he would send Condon the baby’s sleeping suit. In fact it arrived the following day, and the Lindberghs identified it as that of their son.
Shortly thereafter Lindbergh and Condon delivered the ransom money to the kidnappers. Fearful for his son’s life, Lindbergh did not inform the police until after the ransom was paid.
On May 12 the decomposing body of baby Charles was found in a shallow grave in the woods near the Lindbergh home; he had been killed by a blow on the head, apparently on the night of the kidnapping.
Good and Bad Leads
All efforts were made to locate the missing baby, including posters and newspaper ads.
The police investigation made slow headway. The police strongly suspected nursemaid Betty Gow of being an accomplice, but the Lindberghs had no doubt of her innocence. Suspicion transferred to another maid, Violet Sharpe, when she committed suicide with poison, but again there was no evidence against her.
But the ransom bills—which included “gold certificates” that could be exchanged for gold—had all been marked by the police. Now banks were asked to look out for any of the bills, and in 1933 they began to turn up, mostly in New York, although some as far away as Chicago. This seemed to indicate that the kidnappers lived in New York or thereabouts. In early September 1934, $10 gold certificates began to appear in northern New York and the Bronx. In May of that year, Roosevelt had abandoned the gold standard and called in all gold certificates, but they continued to be accepted by banks and shops.
Red Handed
Charles and Anne Lindbergh
On September 15, 1934, a dark-blue Dodge sedan drove into a garage in upper Manhattan, and the driver, who spoke with a German accent, paid for his fuel with a $10 gold certificate. Because these had ceased to be legal tender, the pump attendant noted the car’s number on the back of the certificate. Four days later a bank teller noticed that the certificate was part of the Lindbergh ransom money, and saw that it had a registration number on the back: 4U-13-41-NY.
The police were informed. They quickly discovered that the vehicle was a dark-blue Dodge sedan belonging to Richard Bruno Hauptmann, a carpenter of 1279 East 222nd Street in the Bronx. It proved to be a small frame house, and that night, police surrounded it. The next morning, when a man stepped out of the door and drove off, police followed him and forced his car over to the curb. Hauptmann, a lean, good-looking German in his mid-30s, made no resistance and was found to be unarmed. In his wallet, police found a $20 bill, which proved to be from the ransom money. Concealed in his garage, they found a further hoard of Lindbergh money. Later a further $860 of ransom money and a gun were found concealed in a plank in the garage.
Quick Fact
Charles Lindbergh became world famous for, in 1927, being the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris. Later he rather blotted his name by speaking out against American involvement in the war against Nazi Germany.
Hauptmann’s Story
Richard Hauptmann had come to the United States as a lowly stowaway in 1924. But in America he prospered. He and his wife worked hard, and by 1926 he was in a position to lend others money and even to buy a luncheonette. The day after the Wall Street crash he withdrew $2,800 from his account and began buying stocks and shares at rock bottom prices. Hauptmann had no need to kidnap the Lindbergh baby; even by modern standards he was very comfortable.
Hauptmann protested his innocence. The money, he explained, had been left in his care by a friend, Isidor Fisch, who had returned to Germany in December 1933, owing Hauptmann more than $7,000, on a joint business deal. Fisch had died of tuberculosis in March 1934.
In August 1934, said Hauptmann, he had noticed a shoebox that Fisch had given him for safekeeping before he left. It had been soaked by a leak, but proved to contain $14,600 in money and gold certificates. Feeling that at least half of it was his by right, Hauptmann dried it out and proceeded to spend it. That was Hauptmann’s story.
But when Hauptmann’s trial opened in Flemington, New Jersey, on January 2, 1935, it was clear that no one believed it.
Conclusive Proof
The most important piece of evidence was the ladder. Not only was there a clear possibility that some of its timber had been purchased at the Bronx yard where Hauptmann bought his timber, but one of the rungs had been traced to Hauptmann’s own attic: Detective Bornmann had noticed a missing board, and found what remained of it, with the “rung” sawed out of it. The evidence could hardly have been more conclusive. Moreover, Condon’s telephone number had been found pencilled on the back of a closet door in Hauptmann’s house.
It was true that there was nothing conclusive to connect Hauptmann with the kidnapping itself. The footprints found outside the child’s bedroom window were not Hauptmann’s size, and Hauptmann’s fingerprints were not found on the ladder. But a man called Millard Whited, who lived near Lindbergh, identified Hauptmann as a man he had seen hanging around the Lindbergh home on two occasions. And Lindbergh himself declared in court that Hauptmann was the “John” whose voice he had heard when delivering the ransom.
The jury was in no doubt whatsoever that Hauptmann was the kidnapper, and on February 13, 1935, he was sentenced to death. By October the Court of Appeals had denied his appeal. On April 3, 1936, Richard Hauptmann was electrocuted, protesting his innocence to the very end.
Framed?
Lindbergh testifies at Hauptmann’s trial.
Is it conceivable that Hauptmann was innocent? According to one investigator, BBC journalist Ludovic Kennedy, it is almost a certainty. Kennedy’s investigations revealed that Hauptmann’s story about his friend Isidor Fisch was true. And Fisch was indeed a swindler; he and Hauptmann were in the fur business together, and Fisch did owe Hauptmann over $7,000.
Then how did Hauptmann, or Fisch, come to be in possession of so much ransom money? The probable answer, Kennedy discovered, is that the Lindbergh ransom money was selling at a discount in New York’s underworld; one convict described buying some at 40 cents on the dollar. Nothing is more likely than Fisch, with his underworld connections, bought a large quantity, and left it with Hauptmann when he sailed for Germany. Forensic examination of the money showed that it had been soaked and dried out, confirming Hauptmann’s story that Fisch had left it on a damp top shelf in a closet.
The truth was that Hauptmann could easily have been “framed.” Soon after her husband’s arrest, Anna Hauptmann had made the supreme mistake of moving out of the house, leaving it empty for police and reporters to wander through unobserved. It was only after Anna left, for example that Detective Bornmann “discovered” the missing board in the attic.
Write it Down Exactly
Ludovic Kennedy’s major discovery was that much of the evidence against Hauptmann was indeed fabricated. When arrested, he was asked to write out various sentences; the court was later told that Hauptmann’s misspelling of various words had been exactly as in the ransom note. This was untrue; he had spelled correctly the first time, then been told to misspell various words—“singature” for signature, “were” for where, “gut” for good. The court was also assured that handwriting experts had identified Hauptmann’s writing as that of the ransom notes; Kennedy submitted the samples to two modern experts, who both said they were not written by the same man.
Kennedy’s investigation also revealed that Millard Whited, the farmhand who identified Hauptmann as a man he had seen hanging around the Lindbergh property, had originally flatly denied seeing anyone suspicious; he was later offered generous “expenses,” and changed his story.
As to Lindbergh himself, he had been invited to sit quietly in a corner of the room, in disguise, when Hauptmann was brought in for questioning; he therefore knew him well when he identified him in court as “John.”
The Second Murder
Investigators at the Lindbergh’s house in Hopewell, after the baby was discovered missing. The ladder left leaning near the bedroom window was a key factor in Hauptmann’s conviction.
The most serious piece of evidence against Hauptmann was, of course, the ladder. Hauptmann rightly pointed out in court that he was a skilled carpenter, and that the ladder was made by an amateur. If the jury registered this point, they may have felt that he had deliberately botched it to mislead investigators—for, after all, was there not the conclusive evidence of the sixteenth rung, whose wood was found in Hauptmann’s attic?
But, as Ludovic Kennedy points out, this plank was only “found” when Mrs. Hauptmann had abandoned the house to the investigators. Was it likely that Hauptmann would go to the trouble of tearing up his attic floor, sawing out a piece of wood from the plank, then planing it down to size, when it would have been simpler to just get another piece of wood from his workshop? He was, after all, a professional carpenter. Kennedy quite clearly believed that the rung was concocted by Detective Bornmann or one of the other investigators.
Given the horror of the case, this faking of evidence may even seem understandable: the police really did firmly believe that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty—so they merely “strengthened” their case a little . . .
Unfortunately it seems that in doing so, they judicially murdered an innocent man and let the guilty go free.
(September 14, 1935)
On a cool autumn day, September 29, 1935, a young woman walking the hills two miles north of the town of Moffat in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, looked down from a bridge over Gardenholme Linn, a stream running into the Annan River. She noticed a bundle jammed against a boulder in the ravine. Then she noticed that a human arm was sticking out of it.
After the police arrived and began scouring the bank, they soon made a gruesome discovery: two mutilated human heads, as well as four more grisly bundles. Each package proved to contain human remains—thighbones, lower legs, lumps of flesh, and an armless torso. One sheet of newspaper wrapped around two upper arms proved to be the Sunday Graphic for September 15, 1935.
Isabella Ruxton, 1935
The Human Jigsaw Puzzle
John Glaister Jr. (left) and two other men at Moffat during the search and recovery of the remains of Isabella Ruxton and Mary Rogerson.
The following day forensic pathologist John Glaister Jr. from the University of Glasgow and Dr. Gilbert Millar of the University of Edinburgh arrived to help the investigation. Professor Glaister quickly realized that this killing was not the work of some terrified amateur—the murderer had taken care to cover his tracks. He or she had not only skillfully dismembered the bodies but also removed the skin from the heads to make the faces unrecognizable, cut off the fingertips to make fingerprint identification impossible, and had pulled out the teeth to prevent dental identification.
Excitable Doctor
Dr. Buck Ruxton, born Bukhtyar Rustomji in Bombay, India, moved to the United Kingdom five years before the murders. His patients in Lancaster, England, found him to be a caring, competent professional.
Meanwhile, the police were working on their own clues. The Sunday Graphic wrapping the bodies was a special local edition, printed only for the Morecambe and Lancaster, England, area. And the clothes in which some of the remains had been wrapped were also distinctive: the head of the younger woman had been wrapped in a blouse with a patch under the arm.
In Lancaster, Dr. Buck Ruxton, a diligent Indian-born GP, had already attracted the suspicions of the local police. Ten days after the remains were found in the Gardenholme Linn, Ruxton—a small, rather good-looking man with a wildly excitable manner—had called on the police to complain that people were saying that he had murdered his wife. The police must help him find her and prove that she was still alive . . .
Forensics Pioneers
The remains were taken to the anatomy department at the University of Edinburgh for extensive postmortem evaluation by a team of experts in the nascent science of forensic pathology. Professor Glaister sorted through the dismembered remains. When he was finally done, he found that he had one almost complete body, the taller one, and one body minus a trunk. The discovery that the assorted pieces of flesh included three breasts also made it clear that both bodies were those of women.
As to the cause of death, this was fairly clear. The taller woman suffered five stab wounds in the chest, several broken bones, and many bruises. The hyoid bone in the neck was broken, indicating strangulation before the other injuries had been inflicted. The swollen and bruised tongue confirmed this. Glaister reasoned that a murderer who strangled and beat his victim before stabbing her would probably be in the grip of jealous rage. As to the other body, the signs were that she had simply been battered to death with a blunt instrument.
Strange Stains
Mary Rogerson, shortly before her death
Despite the doctor’s apparent panic over the disappearance of his wife, Buck Ruxton was soon the investigation’s chief suspect. The Scottish police had already visited the mother of the Ruxtons’ nursemaid, Mary Rogerson, after she had reported her daughter missing. When Mrs. Rogerson saw the patched blouse used to wrap the severed head, she knew that her daughter was dead; Mary had bought it secondhand at a jumble sale and patched it under the arm.
The police also interviewed the Ruxtons’ charlady, Mrs. Oxley. She told them that on the day Isabella Ruxton and Mary Rogerson had disappeared, Sunday, September, 15, 1935, the doctor had arrived early at her house and explained that it was unnecessary for her to come to work that day—he was taking the children to Morecambe, and his wife had gone to Edinburgh. The following morning, she found the Ruxtons’ house—at 2 Dalton Square—in a state of chaos, with carpets removed and the bath full of reddish yellow stains.
On October 12 the police questioned Ruxton all night, and at 7:20 the next morning they charged him with the murder of Mary Rogerson and his wife, Isabella.
Cutting-Edge Evidence
The outlines of the two found skulls superimposed over the outlines of Isabella Ruxton’s head and face. In the first, shown left, it is clear that the smaller skull, marked Skull No. 1, is not a match. The outlines of the larger one, marked Skull No. 2, super-imposed on same outlines, show that this skull likely came from Isabella Ruxton.
Despite the killer’s careful efforts to obscure the identity of the mutilated bodies found in Scotland, the forensics experts—Professor John Glaister Jr. and Dr. Gilbert Millar, along with Professor Sydney Smith, Dr. Arthur Hutchinson, and Professor J. C. Brash of the University of Edinburgh—made sense of the jumble of bones and body parts.
The forensics teams turned to innovative new techniques of photographic comparisons and reconstructions to assemble an impressive array of evidence that proved identity beyond a reasonable doubt.
For the photographic reconstructions and comparisons to work, the forensics team had to first find the scale. In the example at left, the team found the precise scale of a portrait of Isabella Ruxton wearing a dress and tiara, by staging a measured shot of the dress and tiara and then superimposing it on the portrait.
Insane Jealousy
The truth about the murders soon became plain. Ruxton was pathologically jealous, although there was no evidence that his wife—theirs was in fact a common-law marriage—had ever been unfaithful to him.
Isabella Ruxton had gone to spend the afternoon of Saturday, September 14, with two of her sisters in Blackpool. But convinced that she was actually in a hotel room with a man, Ruxton worked himself into a jealous frenzy. When she arrived back far later than expected from the trip, he began to beat her. He then throttled her unconscious and stabbed her to death. Mary Rogerson had probably heard the screams and come in to see what was happening; Ruxton beat her to death.
Crazed with the fear of discovery, Ruxton spent the next day dismembering the bodies and packing them in straw; that night, he made his trip north to dispose of them . . .
Red Stains on the Carpet
There was children’s playground song of the time of the Ruxton trial. It went (to the tune of “Red Sails in the Sunset”):
Red stains on the carpet,
Red stains on the knife,
Oh, Dr. Buck Ruxton,
You’ve cut up your wife.
The nursemaid, she saw you,
And threatened to tell,
So, Dr. Buck Ruxton,
You killed her as well.
The Trial
The forensics team presented evidence at the trial, including a photo of one of the found skulls superimposed over a photo of Isabella Ruxton.
Dr. Ruxton’s counsel, Norman Birkett, must have feared that his client did not stand a ghost of a chance. His only line of defense was that the bodies found in the Gardenholme Linn were not those of Isabella Ruxton and Mary Rogerson but of some other persons. But when the medical experts gave their evidence, it was obvious that the identity of the bodies had been established beyond all possible doubt. One particularly persuasive photograph presented in evidence superimposed the larger of the two skulls on a side-view photograph of Isabella Ruxton. She had a rather long, horsey face, and it was obvious that the two fitted together with gruesome exactitude.
And Dr. Ruxton’s evidence was self-evidently a web of lies and evasions. The prosecution, however, presented convincing testimony against Ruxton, such as that of a cyclist in a town midway between Lancaster and Dumfriesshire. This man, though unhurt by the speeding car that knocked him from his bike, was fast-thinking enough to memorize the license plate number of the car that just sped on after the collision. The preponderance of incriminating evidence led to the jury declaring a unanimous verdict of guilty, arrived at in only one hour. The jealous doctor was hanged at Strangeways jail, Manchester, May 12, 1936.
(1948–1949)
Raymond Fernandez was a con man and a swindler of women. He was a Hawaiian-born Spanish American with gold teeth, and at the age of 31 he wore a wig to conceal his increasing baldness. He took advantage of the postwar man shortage in the United States (where, in 1947, there were one and a quarter million more women than men) to seduce lonely middle-aged women, making contact with them through “Lonely Hearts” clubs—clubs that, for a fee, would organize a meeting between lonely men and women.
Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck
Accidental Sex Maniac
Fernandez was a “sex maniac” but not by birth. The personality change came about in 1945, when the hatch of an oil tanker fell on his head while he was a seaman. The hatch knocked him unconscious, creating an indentation in his skull. After that he became sexually insatiable, happy to seduce any female between 17 and 70. He soon found that he could combine making love with making a living, by persuading the lady to hand over her savings.
Between 1945 and 1947 Raymond Fernandez seduced dozens of women, many of who gave him money voluntarily in return for the pleasure he gave them.
Enter Martha
In 1947 Fernandez met Martha Beck, an obese nurse who had been married three times and had been deprived of the custody of her children because she had been found unfit to take care of them. Fernandez’s original intention was to separate her from her nest egg and flee, but when she fell fanatically in love with him, he found her frantic passion impossible to resist. Besides, like him, she was sexually insatiable.
Martha was only 26. As soon as Fernandez divulged the secret of how he made a living, she decided to join him in his self-chosen profession; she would pose as his sister and help him fleece middle-aged women—if necessary by “marrying” them.
The First Murder
Film reenactment of Martha killing Janet Fay with a hammer
In 1949 Martha added a refinement of her own—murder. When her lover was in bed with his latest conquest, 66-year-old Janet Fay, Martha was seized by frenzied jealousy and bashed Fay on the head with a hammer. Raymond finished the job by strangling her. They then dug a grave in the basement and covered the body in concrete.
On the day of Fay’s murder, Raymond received a reply to one of his advertisements. It was from a widow named Delphine Dowling, 28, who lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with her 2-year-old daughter, Rainelle. In January 1949 the “brother and sister” moved in.
A Fitting Job
Martha had studied nursing but found that no one would hire her because of her weight, so she once took a job as an undertaker’s assistant.
Debacle
Five weeks later, on February 28, neighbors, who had not seen Rainelle and her mother in days, decided to call the police. Fernandez and Beck were at the cinema when they arrived and denied knowing where Mrs. Dowling had gone. They unwisely invited the police to search the house. In the cellar the police investigators noticed a spot of damp cement and soon unearthed the bodies of Mrs. Dowling and Rainelle.
Once arrested, Fernandez and Beck talked freely. They admitted to murdering Mrs. Dowling by shooting her as she slept and then drowning the little girl two days later when she would not stop crying. Martha added that, in 1948, she had been so jealous of a widow, Myrtle Young, who had accompanied them to Chicago, that she had insisted on spoiling Raymond’s fun by sharing a bed with her. They then poisoned Myrtle Young with barbiturates.
Trial
Beck, second from left, and Fernandez, right, exchange smiles past the department of correction officer assigned to escort Fernandez as they wait in the court building of the Bronx Supreme Court in New York. During the trial the pair reached out to each other whenever possible.
Because there was no death penalty in Michigan, the police decided to transfer the trial to New York. The killers naturally objected, but after a legal battle, the trial opened in New York on June 28, 1949. Fernandez and Beck were charged with the murder of Janet Fay. The details that emerged of Fernadez and Beck’s sexual relationship were so indecent that they were never published. On August 22, 1949, the pair was sentenced to death.
In Sing Sing prison they still caused some commotion; they continued to declare their love for one another and to wave when they had a chance to catch a casual glimpse of one another across the exercise yard. Fernandez’s boastfulness about his sex life with Beck led other prisoners to start a story that she was having an affair with someone in the women’s wing, and Fernandez almost went insane with jealousy. Yet they were still declaring their undying love for one another when they were executed on March 7, 1951.
No full account of their murders has been published, since only the three murders to which they confessed were investigated. As many as 14 more were being considered.
London’s East End Celebrity Mobsters
(1950s–1960s)
Ronald and Reginald Kray, identical twins, were born in 1933 in the East End of London, in what was then the slum district of Hoxton. Sons of a scrap gold dealer, Ronnie and Reggie were brought up rather better off than other East End boys, but they maintained their front as working-class criminal heroes throughout their gangster careers.
Reggie Kray, left, and Ronnie Kray
From Boxers to Brutes
Ironically, it was national service that pushed the Kray twins into careers as English Mafiosi. In their teens they had shown great promise as amateur boxers—neither of them ever lost a fight—and they were both preparing to go professional when, in 1952, they were called up. The twins joined the army, but they had no intention of serving out their full stint. They deserted together several times but were always recaptured. The third time, after assaulting the arresting officer, they were sent to await court-martial in the Tower of London (the Kray twins were among the last inmates of that historic prison).
While awaiting trial the pair discovered that they could bully the authorities. They threw tantrums, burned their beds, and emptied the toilet bucket over a guard. The army, seeing that at least one of them (Ronnie, as it turned out) was borderline insane, simply released them with dishonorable discharges.
But those discharges killed any chance for legitimate boxing careers, so the twins bought a snooker club in Bethnal Green. There they put their violent tendencies to work for them, setting up in the protection racket. By the late 1950s the Krays were the most feared gangsters in the city.
Pop Culture Heroes
The twins captured the imagination of writers, filmmakers, musicians, and even video game designers. They’ve been mentioned in many songs, including ones by Morissey and Ray Davies; inspired a Monty Python sketch; and were the key characters in the film The Krays. The hit British soap The East Enders even features a crime syndicate called the Firm.
Gentlemen Thugs
Even today there are those who believe that the Krays’ mob, “the Firm,” benefited the East End’s poor. It is true that, as their empire of mob-funded nightclubs expanded across the city, they made a point of publicly handing out largess and favors. But their protection rackets supplied most of the cash for such generosity. The loss of the money extorted from local businessmen helped keep the East End poor and crime-ridden, while the rest of London and Britain grew steadily more affluent. The Krays, for all their pretensions, were parasites first and foremost.
Their success was mostly due to a willingness to indulge in extreme violence. Although they murdered less often than their American mobster counterparts, they were always willing to use beatings and torture to cement their power base. Ronnie especially—a certified paranoid psychotic—could explode into violence on any pretext. He once slashed a friend’s face so fiercely that he needed 70 stitches, all because the friend had made a playful remark about Ronnie putting on weight.
As well as the protection racket, the Firm committed arson for the insurance payouts, oversaw armed robberies, and hijacked lorries. The Krays also employed a little person to sneak up on enemies and slash their buttocks with a razor—a very painful and slow-healing wound that prevented the humiliated victims from sitting down for weeks.
Friends of the Stars
Celebrities of the 1960s, such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Diana Dors (at left with actor Joe Robinson) were frequent—and pampered—guests at the Krays’ nightclubs.
Ronnie and Reggie carefully maintained a public image as nice, well-dressed, legitimate businessmen. Celebrities flocked to their nightclubs and reveled in the generous hospitality of the Krays. The twins wined and dined famous actors like George Raft, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Diana Dors, and Barbara Windsor. They were photographed by top ’60s photo-grapher David Bailey. And many politicians also found the Kray charm irresistible, possibly including high-ranking Conservative peer Lord Boothby, who was rumored to have had a homosexual affair with Ronnie. When the Sunday Mirror alluded to the rumor, Boothby threatened to sue. The paper backed down and paid a staggering £40,000 to him in an out-of-court settlement. Whether the allegation was true or not, the British media got the message that the Krays were “friends of the Establishment” and backed off investigating their gangland activities.
But despite their (generally) acceptable public image, the Krays began to overreach themselves. In 1966 Ronnie openly shot rival gangster George Cornell dead in the Blind Beggar pub. Yet no witnesses came forward; the Krays’ reign of fear was too strong, coupled with the traditional East End reluctance to “grass” (inform) to the police. Charges were dropped.
The Blind Beggar, the Whitechapel pub where Ronnie killed a man in cold blood as pub patrons looked on.
The Wall of Silence
The Krays believed they were immune to the law, because nobody would dare give evidence against them. After an exhaustive investigation, Detective Superintendent “Nipper” Read of the Scotland Yard Murder Squad realized that nobody would snitch if the Firm was on the streets to enforce silence. So, risking his career, Read arrested the Krays and 16 of their gang, even though he had insufficient evidence to convict them on any major charge. But with the Firm off the streets, people felt safe to come forward. The Kray twins were tried and convicted on three counts of murder: Ronnie had killed Cornell; Reggie killed Firm member Jack “the Hat” McVitie, when McVitie failed to kill a gang enemy; and Ronnie broke Frank “Mad Axeman” Mitchell out of Dartmoor Prison only to kill him when he proved too insane to be kept safely in hiding.
The brothers were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969. Ronnie was sub-sequently deemed criminally insane and died in the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital in 1995. Reggie was granted compassionate leave in August 2000, when he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died 35 days later.
Together in death: the shared grave of the Kray twins
(1962–1979)
Jacques Mesrine was born in Clichy, Paris, in 1937. He was a poor student at school, but his charm made a strong impression on his contemporaries. At the age of 18 he married a beautiful girl from Martinique, but he soon found marriage boring. At 19 he was glad to be conscripted into the army and was sent to Algeria, where the French were trying to put down a Muslim revolt. Mesrine thoroughly enjoyed being in action and received the Military Cross for valor. On his return to civilian life he soon committed his first burglary. With two other men he broke into the flat of a wealthy financier and escaped with 25 million francs.
Jacques Mesrine
First Arrest
In spring 1962 Mesrine was arrested for burglary and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released on parole one year later. For a while he decided to “go straight.” He married a second time, had a young daughter, and became an architect. But when, in late 1964, he was made redundant, he went back to crime.
In 1967 another attempt to go straight (this time as an innkeeper) failed—he found respectability too unexciting.
With a lover named Jeanne Schneider, Mesrine carried out a daring robbery at a hotel in Switzerland. In 1968, as one of the most wanted robbers in France, he decided to move to Canada.
He and Jeanne went to work for a Montreal millionaire, Otorges Deslauriers, as chauffeur and housekeeper, but when Deslauriers dismissed them, Mesrine responded by kidnapping him and holding him for a $200,000 ransom. Deslauriers managed to escape before this was paid.
Arrested by a border patrol when they crossed into the United States, Mesrine was given 10 years for the kidnapping of Deslauriers; Schneider received 5.
Escape
The prison walls of Saint Vincent de Paul in Laval, Quebec, proved no match for Jacques Mesrine.
A year later Mesrine led a number of other prisoners in a spectacular escape from the “escape-proof” prison of Saint Vincent de Paul at Laval. Soon after, Mesrine and two accomplices were in the forests near Montreal where they were stopped by two forest rangers. One of the rangers recognized Mesrine and made the mistake of showing it. Both rangers were shot down, their bodies dumped in a nearby ditch and covered with branches.
There were more bank robberies. Then Mesrine met a beautiful 19-year-old, Jocelyne Deraiche, who became his mistress. With two accomplices Mesrine and Deraiche went south to Venezuela, where they were able to live quite comfortably on the profits of their bank robberies. When a police official told them that Interpol was on their trail, the couple flew quickly to Madrid.
Achieving Fame
The venerable walls of La Santé Prison, above inset, also failed to contain Mesrine. Above, the lifeless body of France’s Public Enemy No. 1 slumps in the BMW that failed to provide him with a fast getaway.
Mesrine now decided to become the best-known criminal in the world. In the remaining seven years of his life, he achieved that ambition.
Back in France, in 1973 Mesrine committed a dozen armed robberies, getting millions of francs. When police finally caught up with him on March 8, Mesrine staged a spectacular escape from the Palais de Justice in Compiegne, getting hold of a gun that an accomplice had left in a lavatory, then holding up the court and escaping with the judge as a human shield.
Not long after this a bank robbery went wrong, and Mesrine’s accomplice was arrested. As a result, the police tracked down Mesrine to his flat and placed him under arrest.
Mesrine was sentenced to 20 years at La Santé, in Paris, another “escape-proof” prison. After a year there, he staged one of his most spectacular escapes. Using a cache of weapons a corrupt guard had smuggled into them, Mesrine and two other convicts held up their guards, stole their uniforms, and locked them in a cell. The convicts then found a group of workmen fitting new bars on the prison’s windows and ordered them to move their ladder to an outside wall of the prison. Using a rope and grappling iron—also smuggled in for them—Mesrine and his fellows climbed to the top of the wall and then down the ladder. They flagged down a passing car and were gone.
He went to London and planned another astonishing crime—to kidnap the judge who had sentenced him to 20 years. He went to the judge’s flat in Paris and held up his wife, daughter, and son-in-law. But the police were tipped off. When Mesrine saw the arrival of the police cars, he ran down the stairs and as he came face to face with several policemen, he pointed behind himself. “Quick, Mesrine’s up there.” And they went rushing past.
When the police finally located his hideout, in a flat in the Rue Belliard, they decided to take no chances. Mesrine had sworn never to be taken alive. On November 2, 1979, Mesrine came out of the building with his girlfriend, Sylvie Jeanjacquot, and walked toward his BMW, parked nearby. At a road junction, a blue truck signaled that he wanted to cut across Mesrine’s vehicle and turn right. Mesrine waved him on. The truck stopped in front of the car, and another truck drew up behind. Four policemen climbed out and within seconds, 21 bullets had shattered the windshield. Mesrine was killed immediately.
The Most Successful Drug in the World
(1980s–1993)
It is now not uncommon to hear of self-made multibillionaires, like Bill Gates and Ingvar Kamprad. But it is sobering to think that one of the first such billionaires was the ruthless criminal Pablo Escobar of Colombia.
Rising from humble beginnings—stealing and reselling gravestones as a schoolboy—Escobar became the world’s most visible drug lord, indirectly taking on numerous Western governments in their “War on Drugs.”
Pablo Escobar
The People’s Drug Dealer
Born in the poor Colombian town of Medellin in 1949, Pablo Escobar clawed his way up the spine of the criminal underworld: from stealing gravestones he moved on to fencing cars, then he got into the drug trade and ruthlessly killed his way to the top.
By the late 1970s Escobar was indisputably the most powerful cocaine dealer in the world. The drug was grown in Peru and Bolivia, processed in Columbia, and smuggled to North America, Europe, and as far away as East Asia.
His power also stretched to the public arena: in 1982 Escobar was even elected to the Colombian Chamber of Representatives. He did not fix this election; the people of Medellin—especially the poor—loved him because he built them churches, housing projects, and sports facilities out of his own pocket.
Escobar could easily afford such generosity. In 1989 Forbes Magazine published its list of the richest people in the world: Pablo Escobar was listed as number seven, with an estimated fortune of $25 billion.
The Price of Success
Pablo Escobar’s power and wealth came at some cost . . . to others. It is believed that he ordered the murder of 30 judges and 457 policemen during the course of his career. His attitude to authority figures was summed up by his policy of “plata o plomo” (translation: “money or lead”).
As to the number of competitors and employees he had killed, nobody can accurately guess. At one point he was killing around 20 people a day for a period of two months. Police once tapped a telephone conversation in which Escobar apologized to the caller for all the noise; his men were torturing someone to death in the same room. He is thought to have been directly responsible for the deaths of at least 4,000 people.
Some law enforcement officials were beyond the reach of both Escobar’s bribes and bullets: he evidently lived in fear of being extradited to a foreign country, like the United States. In 1985 the Colombian Supreme Court was considering an extradition treaty with the United States. These considerations were terminated when left-wing guerrillas of the M-19 movement, under the instruction of Escobar, stormed the Supreme Court, and murdered half of the judges.
Influencing the Election
Luis Carlos Galán lost not only his bid for the Colombian presidency but also his life to the ruthless tactics of Escobar.
Resistance to the seemingly untouchable power of the drug lords in Colombia came to a head during the run-up to the 1990 general election. Several of the candidates for the presidency ran on an anticorruption ticket and seemed serious enough to disturb men like Escobar. He reacted more savagely than anyone could have guessed.
On August 18 the leading contender in the presidential race, former political journalist Luis Carlos Galán, was shot to death. A leading issue of his campaign had been to approve the extradition treaty with the United States.
On November 27 Avianca Airlines Flight 203 was blown to smithereens by a bomb while in flight. All 107 people on the plane died. Escobar’s Medellin Cartel openly admitted that they had planted the bomb—mistakenly believing that presidential contender César Augusto Gaviria Trujillo would be on the aircraft. Trujillo was another candidate who backed the breaking of the cocaine cartels.
Admitting to the Flight 203 bombing was an act of stunning arrogance by Escobar: he was effectively saying that he was willing to hold the whole of Columbia under the gun. He underlined this message by bombing the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) headquarters on December 6, 1989, killing 52 people and injuring more than 1,000 more.
A Nice, Comfortable Cell
The government expropriated the Hacienda Napoles ranch, once Escobar’s estate, in La Dorada, Colombia. It served as housing for low-income families before it was converted into a theme park.
Then Pablo Escobar did a genuinely surprising thing: he gave himself up and went to jail. But his idea of prison—dutifully provided by the Colombian authorities—was something like a private luxury hotel in which he could effortlessly continue his “business.” He even had two brothers, accused of stealing from his cartel, brought into the prison and shot dead by his henchmen.
When news of this double killing surfaced, the embarrassed government threatened to allow his extradition to the United States. So he escaped his “prison” and went on the run in July 1992.
A man with as many enemies as Escobar should have realized that they would be after him at the first sign of weakness. A group calling themselves Los Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) formed and hunted down and killed more than 300 members of the Medellin Cartel.
Escobar himself was trapped by Colombian police on December 2, 1993, and he was killed in the resulting gunfight.
(2002–2003)
The classic 1971 cop movie Dirty Harry was largely based on the real-life “Zodiac” murders that took place in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s. The scriptwriters made one significant change to the modus operandi of their fictional serial killer: he used a sniper rifle to kill from a distance.
Fortunately criminal history has shown this to be a flight of fantasy, not something that a real serial killer would do. Serial killers are typically hands-on sadists, men who like to get close to their victims to more intensely enjoy the sense of power they get from ending innocent lives. No serial killer has been known to use a sniper rifle as his main method of killing . . . until the turn of the twenty-first century, that is.
John Allen Muhammad
A Bullet Out of the Blue
On October 2, 2002, James D. Spring, a program analyst at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was crossing a car park in the Wheaton district of Washington, D.C. A gunshot cracked, and Spring dropped to the ground; he was dead, shot by a single, high-velocity rifle bullet.
It was immediately plain to investigators that this was no ordinary murder—even in crime-riddled D.C., police don’t see murders by sniper fire. The high-velocity rifle is a specialist’s weapon demanding specialist skills; it’s not the sort of gun used in street gang drive-by shootings. Moreover, whoever had killed James Spring had done so expertly with a single shot, suggesting either military or paramilitary training. Given the events of September 11, just over a year before, some officers feared that the murder had been a terrorist incident.
Map plotting the locations of the Beltway Sniper attacks
Code Words
In an attempt to pacify the sniper, investigators complied with a bizarre demand that he had made. A police spokesman read the statement “we’ve caught the sniper like a duck in a noose” on national television. This was a cryptic reference to a folktale in which an overconfident rabbit tried to catch a duck, but ended up noosing itself.
Busy Day
Over the next 24 hours—between October 3 and 4—long-range sniper shots killed five more D.C. area residents. James Buchanan, 39, was cutting the grass at a car dealership in the White Flint area when a bullet hit him. Another bullet found Prenkumar Walekar, a 54-year-old taxi driver, as he filled up at a gas station in Aspen Hill. Sarah Ramos, a 34-year-old mother, was reading a magazine on a bench outside a post office in the Silver Spring district. Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, 25, was vacuuming her van at a gas station in Kensington district.
The last fatality that grim day was a retired 72-year-old carpenter, Pascal Charlot, who was killed while standing at a bus stop in the inner city. But he was not the last victim. A 43-year-old woman was also shot while crossing a parking lot in Fredericksburg—a town 40 miles south of Washington—but she survived.
The murderer clearly liked to move about and had wasted no time. One police officer grimly commented that his annual county homicide rate “just went up 25 percent today.”
This concentration of murders in such a short period suggested either a terrorist operation or a so-called spree killer. At this stage few police officers thought it likely that they had a serial killer on their hands.
Spree Killer or Serial Murderer?
A reflection pool and a stone memorial, shown above, were built at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland, to pay respect to the lives lost during the Beltway Sniper killing spree.
The difference between a spree killer and a serial murderer is not just one of time but of motive. Serial killers are cold and ruthless hunters, taking a lone victim at a time—cautiously—usually over a period of weeks, months, years, and even decades. Spree killers, on the other hand, murder lots of people at once. After a few hours they generally turn the gun on themselves.
What evidence we have (because such murderers are almost never taken alive to give confessions) is that spree killers egotistically decide to sacrifice others before they kill themselves as a bloody and final act of defiance to the world that they are rejecting. Serial killers are essentially homicidal sadists (disinclined to risk their liberty, let alone physically endanger themselves), while spree killers are usually social misfits who become homicidally violent after suffering a massive mental breakdown. Leaving aside the actual killing, the difference in motivation between a serial killer and a spree killer is as wide as the difference between that of a rapist and a suicide bomber.
“I Am God”
Citizen crime control groups like the Guardian Angels tried to allay the fears of area residents.
Panic spread across Washington, D.C., as soon as the story hit the news: a sniper was stalking the capital and nobody was safe. Some people refused to leave their homes, and many didn’t dare use self-service gas stations because these seemed one of the killer’s favorite hunting areas.
After a few days’ pause, the killing began again. A 13-year-old boy was shot in the stomach as he got off his school bus in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Surgeons struggled to save his life, but he died of massive internal injuries. The following day the killer returned to the scene of the boy’s murder and left a tarot card with the words “Dear Mr. Policeman. I am God” written on it.
On October 9 the sniper once again moved away from the Washington suburbs, killing civil engineer Dean Harold Meyers, 53, at a gas station in the Virginia town of Manassas. Two days later Kenneth H. Bridges, also 53, was shot dead at a gas station near the town of Fredericksburg. On October 14 the sniper killed Linda Franklin, 47, while she and her husband loaded their car outside a shop at the Seven Corners Shopping Center on one of northern Virginia’s busiest intersections. Coincidentally Linda Franklin was an FBI analyst.
God Wants Money
A deputy from Hanover County, left, and an Ashland city police officer stand guard at the crime scene at a Ponderosa restaurant after a man was shot and wounded.
On October 19 a 37-year-old man was shot once in the stomach as he left a restaurant in the town of Ashland, 70 miles south of Washington. He suffered severe damage to his internal organs, but survived. He was to be the sniper’s last victim.
The bizarre tarot card note had partly alleviated suspicion that the sniper might be an Islamic terrorist; no radical Muslim would claim to be God—not even in jest. More evidence to this effect came in the form of a letter found at the Ashland crime scene. The writer again referred to himself as God and accused the police of incompetence—adding that it was their fault that five people had had to die. Presumably this indicated that he had expected to be caught after the first two days of his killing spree. The letter demanded $10 million dollars to stop the killings and added chillingly, “Your children are not safe anywhere or at anytime.” So the sniper was apparently a murderous extortionist—like the 1960s Zodiac serial killer—not an Islamic terrorist.
The Ducks Are Noosed
Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose holds two composite images of the type of van that was seen at the Spotsylvania County, Virginia, shooting.
Then, on October 24, the police caught him . . . or rather, them. There turned out to be two perpetrators working together: John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, the older African American, the younger African Jamaican.
A member of the public had noticed a car parked for a long time in a road stop on Virginia Interstate Route 70 and had become suspicious. The police were informed and investigated as a matter of routine—with no notion that they were about to catch the Washington Sniper. Muhammad and Malvo were found fast asleep in the car, but fortunately the officers did not simply move them on. Closer inspection of the vehicle showed that it had been modified to allow a man to lie inside it and aim a rifle while remaining unseen.
Muhammad, who seems to have done the actual killing, turned out to have been an ex-U.S. Army soldier who had served in the 1992 Gulf War and had subsequently converted to Islam. Lee Malvo was a Jamaican who lived with Muhammad and evidently regarded the older man as a father figure. Both were convicted of murder, extortion, and terrorism charges in 2003. Muhammad was sentenced to death and Malvo to life imprisonment without chance of parole.
Social Activist or Serial Killer?
Sniper shooting suspect John Lee Malvo is escorted from court after his preliminary hearing in Fairfax, Virginia. Only 17 at the time of the shootings, Malvo was not eligible for the death penalty in Maryland.
Malvo originally claimed to have been the sole killer—called the “triggerman” in Virginia state law—but later retracted this confession, admitting that he had only made it to move the potential death sentence onto his own shoulders. This was rather less heroic than it at first sounds because, being a minor at the time of the killings, he was much less likely to be actually executed.
Malvo also claimed that Muhammad was a convert to the Nation of Islam—an Islamic black separatist movement—and had told Malvo that the killings were solely to extort money from the white-dominated U.S. government. This money, he went on, would be used to fund a separate nation that could be populated solely by young black people.
The fact that such a goal was patently impossible—given international law, the certain tracing of the extortion money, and numerous laws that protect young people of all races—suggests that Muhammad was spinning a tale to his young friend to justify his urge to kill.
It seems certain that Muhammad was simply a serial killer—a man addicted to murder. Support for this explanation came when it was suggested that the Washington, D.C., killings had not been his first. Investigating police believed that Muhammad was responsible for several unsolved murders.