A

Abbott, Jack Henry (AKA: Jack Eastman), 1944- , U.S. A man who spent most of his adult life in prison, Abbott committed his first murder in 1966 and, after novelist Norman Mailer worked for his release, killed a second time in 1981. At first, this convict, dedicated wholly to violence, was celebrated by New York’s literati for penning a prison journal successfully published by Random House. Like many another criminal before him, Abbott, upon his 1981 release, was adopted by such literary lights as Norman Mailer, his sponsor, and Jerzy Kosinski. He was invited to smart cocktail parties where the rich and famous fawned over him. He was heralded as a “great writer” and an “insightful philosopher.” But what Jack Henry Abbott really was, always had been, was a man who would kill anyone over the slightest annoyance. This he did, at the height of his brief literary fame, oblivious to his so-called rehabilitation: a cold-blooded, conscious murder that proved how dangerous it really was for amateur criminologists to meddle with crime.

A habitual criminal, Abbott spent all but nine months of his adult life in prison. He was convicted of forgery, bank robbery, and murder. In 1953, at age nine, Abbott proved so incorrigible in foster homes that he was sent to reform school in Utah. Released at age eighteen, Abbott was arrested and convicted of passing bad checks and sent to Utah State Penitentiary where he killed a fellow inmate in 1966. Tried for this murder, Abbott claimed self-defense and said that he had been the victim of a violent homosexual attack. When that ploy did not appear to affect the court, Abbott assumed the role of the lunatic, throwing a pitcher of water at the judge and claiming insanity. A court psychiatrist examined him and reported that Abbott was fit to stand trial. He was found Guilty and sentenced to fourteen years.

In 1971, Abbott escaped from Utah State Penitentiary and was at large for six weeks, during which time he robbed a Denver bank and, upon his recapture, became a federal prisoner. While serving time in a maximum security prison, Abbott read voraciously, consuming scores of books on philosophy, enmeshing himself in the credos of Karl Marx and becoming an avowed Marxist. Abbott read a 1977 newspaper story about Norman Mailer writing a book (The Executioner’s Song) on Gary Gilmore, who was condemned for murder and awaiting execution in Utah State Penitentiary. Mailer, like his New York contemporary, Truman Capote, was suddenly departing mainstream literature to enter the world of criminology.

It was to Mailer, a powerful influence in the media, that Abbott began addressing his letters, which were fifteen-page, hand-written missives to the author. The clever Abbott, obviously realizing that Mailer was a complete novice in perceiving prison life, offered to aid him in that understanding by detailing his own experiences as a long-term, “state-raised” prisoner.

He intrigued the author by spewing forth tales of dark violence, writing in a clinically descriptive style reminiscent of Mailer’s own early works, particularly certain passages from The Naked and the Dead, which had certainly not gone unnoticed in Abbott’s endless rummaging through prison libraries. The prisoner’s literary nightmares described fourteen years of solitary confinement: unbelievable cruelty on the part of prison guards who beat him, tortured him with antipsychotic drugs, sadistically gassed him, starved him so that he was forced to sustain himself by eating cockroaches in his cell, and placed him in strip-and-search cells where he had to stand naked, chained by one arm to his bed.

Abbott’s relentless correspondence fed on hatred and violence, intriguing an author whose own interest in violence had always been intense. Mailer took Abbott’s letters to the editors of the elitist New York Review of Books, and, at his urging in June 1980, an article praising Abbott’s writing style appeared in that publication, along with a sample of the letters. This article was read with great interest by Errol McDonald, an editor at Random House. Within two months, McDonald had placed Abbott under a book contract which called for a $12,000 advance, and began organizing the killer’s book, which was entitled In the Belly of the Beast. Almost immediately, Abbott began to energetically lobby for a parole. The Federal Bureau of Prisons made the first step easier by returning Abbott to Utah State Penitentiary to serve out his remaining time there. Once inside the walls of that institution, an automatic parole was considered. Mailer and others were influential, if not decisive, in their pleas that Abbott be released. Mailer wrote to the parole board that Abbott was really “a powerful and important American writer,” urging a positive decision and offering the killer a job as his research assistant. McDonald, the Random House editor, also wrote to prison authorities, saying that he believed Abbott “could support himself as a professional writer if he were released from prison and that he could very well have a bright future.”

The parole campaign was successful and Abbott was released on June 5, 1981, transferred from prison to a halfway house in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When the killer’s plane arrived in New York, Norman Mailer was on hand to greet him. Almost at the same time, reviews of Abbott’s recently released book gushed torrents of praise upon the killer. Wrote Colgate University Professor Terrence Des Pres in the New York Times Book Section: “…awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenious; its impact is indelible and, as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling.” New York’s literati welcomed the killer with warm embraces, celebrating his published achievement with a number of cocktail parties and smart gatherings at which Abbott was lionized. Great things were predicted for him. He would become a literary giant of the century. His books would be read as credo by anyone needing to know about prison life. Moreover, some even said, Abbott represented the new wave of American literature and was, in fact, its leader. Other than Mailer, many New York literary lions heaped praise on Abbott’s work, and these included the brilliant writer Jerzy Kosinski of Being There fame. (Kosinski would later regret endorsing the lethal Abbott, being one of the few in the clique of the killer’s admirers who later concluded that the Abbott episode was a fraud, likening the literary laurels placed upon Abbott’s head to the literati’s support of the Black Panthers in the 1960s.)

Abbott worked briefly for Mailer by doing some scanty research, but he spent most of his time drifting aimlessly about the city, a misplaced creature who paradoxically spent time with the elite and powerful of New York one hour, and the next walking about the worst area of the city, the Lower East Side, peopled with prostitutes, pimps, drug pushers, and hardened criminals like himself. Besides Mailer and Kosinski, Abbott found himself in the company of such sterling personalities as author Jean Malaquais, literary agent Scott Meredith, and Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books. He impressed them to no end with his knowledge of Sartre and Camus, existentialists like himself, he said. He knew just what names and quotations would lure these Establishment personalities closer to his web, manipulating them with ease, calling loudly for entrees from their own menus, chewing voraciously upon the fat of their own philosophical beliefs, and thanking them for allowing him, Jack Henry Abbott, convicted killer, to dine at their table.

Surrounded by the protecting arms of New York’s literary sachems, Abbott undoubtedly felt that his future was secure. Now he lobbied discreetly for an even loftier position, one which would afford him continuous recognition and financial support, not as a reformed criminal but as a misunderstood literary giant. He expected his new friends to arrange a fellowship for him at the prestigious MacDowell Colony for accomplished artists in picturesque Petersborough, N.H. Here he would preside over the novice writer, the impressionable artist, dictating the thoughts of youthful, adoring followers. None of this, thankfully, was to be.

On the morning of July 18, 1981, Abbott, accompanied by two women, entered a small, all-night eatery, the BoniBon, on Second Avenue and Fifth Street. It was 5 a.m. After Abbott and the women took their seats, 22-year-old Richard Adan, a struggling Cuban-born actor working as a waiter, approached the table to take their order. Adan had recently appeared on public TV in Spain in a series of dramatic roles that had given his career a boost. His newly completed play about the Lower East Side was soon to be produced by an experimental stage group and the youth, known always to be polite and pleasant, was looking eagerly forward to a blossoming career in the theater. Adan had recently married a young choreographer-actress whose father had given him a job as a waiter in his restaurant so the young couple could make ends meet.

Abbott asked Adan where the washroom was located. Adan, according to customers in the restaurant, courteously explained that it was an employee-only washroom and that insurance restrictions prevented customers from using it. Abbott became incensed and began using abusive language. According to witnesses, Adan asked him to go outside with him to try to settle the argument so as not to disturb the other customers. Abbott later claimed that Adan was threatening him, but it was Abbott who did the threatening. Once outside the restaurant, Abbott drew a knife with a medium-length blade and with one powerful thrust, drove the blade into Adan’s heart. Another waiter, just at that moment, looked out of one of the restaurant’s windows to see the young waiter jumping up and down, gushing blood. Abbott then returned to one of the women with him, college student Susan Roxas, and shouted, “Let’s get out of here. I just killed a man!”

With that, Jack Henry Abbott, acclaimed author, vanished. It is revealing to quote Abbott’s own work, where he describes how he knifed a fellow prisoner to death fifteen years earlier, a methodical, cold-blooded act that was duplicated with the same precision in his 1981 murder of Richard Adan: “The enemy is smiling and chatting away about something. He thinks you’re his fool; he trusts you. You see the spot. It’s a target between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down; you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest.”

For two months Abbott eluded police and federal agents who were searching for him nationwide. Using the considerable advances from his book, Abbott managed to get to Mexico and hole up near the Guatemalan border; but after some weeks, not being able to speak Spanish or find work that would cloak his activities, he moved back to the U.S., to Louisiana. He was spotted in the Latin Quarter of New Orleans several times but whenever officers appeared, he had just departed his lodgings, almost as if he had been informed that authorities were closing in on him. Investigators interviewed the prostitutes of the Quarter and one streetwalker identified Abbott’s photo, telling police that the much-wanted killer was looking for work in the Louisiana oil fields. Officers tracked the elusive killer through the oil towns of Algiers, Harvey, and Marrero, searching through the murky bunkhouses where hundreds of nameless itinerant workers lived, but at every turn they missed their man, sometimes only by minutes. Abbott seemed to have a sixth sense about lawmen closing in on him and would, according to fellow workers, suddenly quit whatever he was doing, grab his meager belongings, and depart. In mid-September 1981, New York Police Detective William Majeski, who had arrived at the BoniBon restaurant after the Adan killing to take charge of the investigation and had trailed Abbott with other officers to New Orleans, learned that the fugitive was using a social security card with the alias of Jack Eastman.

Abbott had selected an anonymous world into which he hoped to disappear. The boom town oil fields of Louisiana collected thousands of roughnecks and roustabouts, many with criminal records, men like Abbott, who sought obscurity. Mixing with these tough, taciturn men were illegal aliens from Mexico, refugees from Vietnam, the flotsam and jetsam of the world, as it were, men who worked for $4 an hour, sixteen hours a day, and paid a third of their salary to the company to sleep in filthy bunkhouses and eat from open-air canteens. The rest of their money they would give to the whores who visited these camps in droves.

On Sept. 23, 1981, following a tip from Detective Carl Parsiola of St. Mary’s Parish, James Riley, an intelligence agent of the sheriff’s department, accompanied by Dan Dossett of the Morgan City Police, and other officers, located Abbott working in the fields of the Ramos Oil Company. He was unloading pipe from trucks that clogged the roads. Overhead helicopters buzzed about on company work and the nearby bayous belched smoke from tugs pulling freight. Where years before there had been wilderness, this area was now cluttered with humanity and the officers were concerned that their man would once again escape. Carefully, Riley, Dossett, and the others moved toward Abbott, pretending to be workers. When they saw him raise his arms to comb his hair, the lawmen rushed forward, eight shotguns leveled at him. Abbott was ordered to keep his hands in the air as officers moved forward to handcuff him. He said nothing, remaining motionless, offering no resistance. He wore cheap blue jeans and a T-shirt that were coated with oil; his boots were crusted with caked oil and were falling apart. Returned to New York and held at Riker’s Island, Abbott was tried before Judge Irving Lang of the Manhattan State Supreme Court. He was defended by criminal attorney Ivan Fisher and prosecuted by James Fogel. Early on, Abbott displayed anxiety and nervousness, a pose unlike his earlier aloof attitudes.

In his own words, Abbott characterized the death of Adan as the result of a “tragic misunderstanding,” a literary understatement without parallel. He went on to explain that he acted in self-defense, believing that Adan intended to attack him, the same plea that Abbott had employed when stabbing a fellow prison inmate to death in 1966. To that claim, a spectator in court rose and shouted, “You intended to do it, you scum!” This cry came from Henry Howard, the father-in-law of the dead Adan. Judge Lang ordered Howard removed from court, but he waited outside the courtroom throughout the trial, frustrated by his inability to see justice done.

The prosecution provided several witnesses, but one, Wayne Larsen, a 35-year-old Vietnam veteran, proved damning to Abbott’s self-defense tactic. Larsen was standing at the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street and watched as Abbott attacked Adan. He testified that Adan was walking away from Abbott when Abbott drew his knife and raised it. He recalled that when Abbott struck Adan there was an impacting sound that “still rings in my ears.” Even though Adan was mortally wounded and helpless, Abbott, according to Larsen, acted as if he had merely scratched his victim, cursing Adan and screaming, “Do you still want to continue this?” Adan had made no move toward Abbott and, according to Larsen, was trying to back away from his assailant. Abbott “made a beeline” for the back-pedaling Adan and lunged forward to make sure he killed his man and, in Larsen’s words, Abbott’s knife blow to Adan’s chest was so powerful “that the hair swung back on his (Abbott’s) head.”

Abbott sat trembling in court, clutching a handkerchief. He wore glasses and his hair was combed in a meticulous pompadour. Immediately following Larsen’s testimony, Abbott asked that he be allowed to leave the courtroom. “The testimony was extremely upsetting to him, reliving the event,” lawyer Fisher later stated. Abbott’s request was granted, although the paradox was evident. Abbott had graphically described his murder of another human being without a gnat-sting of remorse in his best-selling book but he was visibly upset by the retelling of his murder of Adan.

The victim, however, was offered up by Abbott to be not Adan, but Abbott. He again recited the litany of his prison sufferings, the endless abuse that was heaped upon him by an unthinking, inhumane prison system, the very rationale that had brought about his much-influenced parole. Abbott wanted it both ways, first to be released from prison for what the prison system had done to him, then excused from another murder outside of prison and shielded from being returned to that system because of what the prison system had done. If nothing else, Abbott was certainly angling for a minimum sentence, after having been found guilty of first degree manslaughter.

Prosecutor Fogel was having none of it, calling for a maximum sentence, a life term. “This is a killer,” Fogel argued before the bench, “a killer by habit, a killer by inclination, a killer by philosophy, and a killer by desire.”

Fisher clung to Abbott’s own lifelong defense, stating that his client had been warped by a lifetime of prison. “He was mistreated for so long and in so horrible a way. If it was, in fact, the poison of prison that brought about these events, how can it be urged that a lot more is the cure?”

Judge Lang had earlier ruled that Abbott’s previous convictions had qualified him as a “persistent violent felon.” When he asked the defendant if he had anything to say before sentence was pronounced, Abbott mumbled, “No.” Judge Lang then stated that the conviction of Abbott was in part “an indictment of a prison system which brutalized instead of rehabilitating…It’s perfectly clear that the defendant could not cope with the reality of a non-prison existence.” Judge Lang then sentenced Abbott to fifteen years to life, a minimum sentence. He would be returned to Utah State Penitentiary to serve out his remaining eight years for earlier convictions before serving the New York sentence of fifteen years.

Norman Mailer went before the court and implored leniency, stating, “Culture is worth a little risk. A major sentence would destroy him.” Even though Abbott did not receive the maximum sentence, Mailer, following the sentencing, was disgruntled, saying that Judge Lang’s sentence was so long as to be “killing.” Complained the 59-year-old author, “At the point he gets out, he’ll be as old as I am now.” Adan’s father-in-law, Henry Howard, heard the news of the sentence and was filled with rage. “In twenty-four years,” he said, “Jack Abbott will be back on the street and he will kill again. Why are his rights better than Richard Adan’s rights?”

This was a question answered obliquely and rather callously by Abbott’s attorney, Ivan Fisher, who was quoted as saying, in responding to questions about Adan’s family being entitled to the profits from Abbott’s book (then estimated to be about $500,000), “If you kill a brain surgeon you’re in much more trouble than if you kill a waiter working nights at the BoniBon Restaurant. That’s not my judgment, that’s the law.”

Before being led back to prison, Abbott, through Fisher, announced plans to sue the State of New York for $10 million for “the mental anguish and threats to his life” while he was a prisoner on Riker’s Island. Meanwhile, Abbott’s book soared to best-seller status, selling more than 40,000 hardbound copies through Random House. At the time, dramatic rights to Abbott’s savage tale had been purchased by a film company headed by comic Alan King in the amount of $250,000. See: Gilmore, Gary.

 

Abdullah, Mohammed (Joseph Howk, Jr.), 1939- , U.S. A voracious reader since early childhood, Howk graduated at the head of his high school class at age fifteen. Though brilliant, he was a much disturbed boy, later claiming racial differences in his family caused him to develop deep mental trauma, his mother being black, his father white. His 140-plus IQ did not balance with the many irrational acts he committed, attempting to hang himself at age nine, trying to burn down his parents’ Long Beach, Calif., home at age sixteen.

At that time Howk was taken to the Camarillo State Hospital and was diagnosed schizoid after extensive examinations. Although therapy was recommended, no psychiatric treatments were undertaken. The boy experimented with various religions, finally becoming a Catholic. He dropped this in favor of embracing the Nazi credo at age fifteen. He argued with his teachers over Aryan supremacy until he quit Long Beach City College since the school philosophy was at odds with his own. By seventeen Howk had discarded his ardent Nazi beliefs and dedicated himself to Mohammedanism. He was now a radical follower of Islam and changed his name to Mohammed Abdullah.

When Abdullah entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1958, he advertised his chosen religion, wearing a fez at all times and spouting Islamic credos, practicing Islamic customs. In one of the many coffee shops that catered to the waning beatnik clans, Abdullah met 34-year-old Martin Horowitz, a social dropout, an eccentric drifter who himself had psychiatric problems. Horowitz shared his offbeat philosophies with Abdullah who tagged along after his mentor until meeting statuesque Sonja Lillian Hoff, another student at Berkeley, majoring in home economics with her eye on future social work. The attractive girl was utterly fascinated with minority groups and Abdullah and his strange ways intrigued her.

The couple eventually fell in love but Abdullah’s jittery possessiveness soon disturbed the relationship. He could not stand to see the girl even talking to other male students. Abdullah told Sonja about his obsessive love for her and she showed considerable understanding, too much for her own good. After seeing the girl in casual conversation with another male student, Abdullah wrote in his diary (on Apr. 6, 1960), “Tonight I tried to kill myself but Sonja put herself between my knife and my throat.” He added, “Next time I suspect her of liking another man, I shall kill her quickly and without warning.”

Abdullah did catch the girl with another man but only threatened to murder her. So alarmed was the girl that this time she contacted police and Abdullah was ordered off campus. The girl began dating an Iranian student and Abdullah again threatened to kill her. She left Berkeley but made the error of returning to work a summer job. Abdullah saw her working in a restaurant as a waitress and implored her to come to his apartment for a reconciliation. (He had secretly planned, as noted in his diary, to lure her to the apartment where he would slit her throat and then commit sucide.) The girl told Abdullah never to contact her again.

Going to his one friend, Horowitz, Abdullah obtained a loaded 38-caliber pistol. Horowitz later stated that he loaned the weapon to his friend to “soothe his tensions,” but later still, Abdullah claimed he purchased the weapon himself. Armed, the incensed Abdullah went to the Berkeley library on July 13, 1960, and typed a letter explaining his pain at being rejected and how he intended to murder Sonja Hoff: “I have stolen a pistol to kill my beloved and myself.” He then approached the girl as she was studying and asked her to step outside. She agreed, an inexplicable move on her part in that she was once again being confronted by a man who had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

On the steps of the library, Abdullah yanked forth his pistol and, without a word to the girl he loved, shot Sonja Hoff in the head. She died instantly. Abdullah stood over her for some minutes while students and passersby stood riveted in shock. He fired another bullet at the prone girl but it missed. Then he calmly put the gun to his own head and fired a bullet into his skull.

The killer, however, survived even though the bullet remained lodged in his brain. He was blinded in one eye but was well enough by Jan. 3, 1961, to stand trial for murder. Abdullah was quickly found Guilty and was sentenced to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber. Horowitz, the willing hand who had provided the murder weapon, was also tried and was convicted of manslaughter. When a ten-year sentence was pronounced, Horowitz went to pieces, sobbing wildly in court.

Mohammed Abdullah was a happy man as he awaited execution, telling his prison guards that he was sure Allah would give him Sonja once they were united in the hereafter. This heavenly reward was, however, denied to the zealot killer when California’s Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown commuted the sentence to life imprisonment without parole. The governor’s reason was that Abdullah had been insane throughout his life.

 

Acevedo, Louis, 1956- , U.S. Acevedo and Shelley Sperling had been a couple throughout their teenage years. But when the 18-year-old honor roll student went away to Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., her life began to change and she decided to end the relationship. Acevedo, however, would not accept the rejection. In September 1974 she agreed to meet him at a waterworks next to the campus, expecting a final talk. Instead, Acevedo struck her with a brick, fracturing her skull and severely injuring the hand she used to protect herself. He was charged with felony assault and released on $10,000 bail. Later, after a grand jury indicted him for attempted murder, he remained free on the same bail.

College authorities told a terrified Sperling to “phone for help” if Acevedo ever confronted her on campus, and security guards at Marist College were alerted to watch out for him. The former boyfriend, who worked as a part-time therapy aide at an institution for the mentally retarded, kept a gun in his locker. That fact, known to several of his acquaintances and friends, went unreported. On Feb. 18, 1975, Acevedo waited for Sperling outside the college cafeteria. When she saw him, she ran to a telephone and was dialing for help when he shot her dead.

 

Acid Bath Murders, See: Haigh, George John.

 

Ackerman, Bradley, 1964- , U.S. Ackerman and Julie Alban of Long Beach, Calif., had grown up in the same affluent neighborhood; their families lived across the street from each other. On June 8, 1988, after they had dated for about ten months, Ackerman asked her to marry him. She refused. Later that evening, as Alban lay sleeping in her parents’ home, Ackerman entered her bedroom and shot her in the back. He then shot himself but later recovered from his wound. Alban was paralyzed for life.

Ackerman, the stepson of Daniel Ridder, chairman of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, was tried for first-degree murder. Defense counsel, Anthony Murray, arguing that his client was severely depressed over both a recent $30,000 gambling debt and failure to fulfill his early promise as a tennis player, reported Ackerman had taken thirty pills in an attempt to kill himself. Kenneth Lamb, the deputy district attorney who tried the case, told jurors that Ackerman’s precision in firing the .38-caliber pistol did not indicate that he was suffering from a Valium blackout, and said the rejected suitor had invented that defense to escape responsibility. Ackerman was found guilty of a willful, premeditated attempt at first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Lamb called the verdict “justified,” pointing out that Ackerman had sentenced Alban to “death and, failing that, he sentenced her to life in a wheelchair.”

 

Adamic, Louis, 1913-51, U.S. A Yugoslavian nationalist who came to America at age fourteen, Adamic became a successful and prominent U.S. writer. At age thirty-eight, he was found dead in his 100-year-old New Jersey farmhouse. Adamic arrived in the U.S. in 1927 and worked as a newsboy, then became a soldier, a sailor, a factory worker, and a restaurant helper. Turning to writing, he based one of his books, Laughing in the Jungle, on his experiences as a hobo, and produced several others about politics and the immigrant’s status in America. The Native’s Return, written after he visited his beloved Yugoslavia on a Guggenheim Fellowship, was his first bestseller. He then moved to an old farmhouse in Riegelsville, N.J., continuing as a supporter of the head of Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito, and campaigning briefly for American Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in the 1948 U.S. election. Adamic’s name came up that same year before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he was accused of membership in left-wing organizations. Neighbors said the Adamics had become reclusive over the last few years; their house appeared to be locked up and deserted. In fact, Adamic and his wife had moved to California, apparently after threats as a result of his work over a three-year period on a book called The Eagle and the Roots, a study promoting Yugoslavia as a bastion of democracy holding out against encroaching Russian Communism. The book was said to be critical of both Russia and the U.S., and was an ardent defense of Tito. Anton Smole, Yugoslav correspondent in San Francisco and a longtime friend, said Adamic had told him of several threats, including one in California when two men stopped him on the street, demanding to see his new book. When the author refused he was beaten unconscious. He moved back to New Jersey shortly thereafter, without his wife, and continued the final work on his book for six weeks.

On Sept. 4, 1951, a paper-mill technician on his way to work at 4 a.m. noticed a glare in the New Jersey hills near Adamic’s farmhouse. When firemen arrived from two miles away, the farmhouse garage and studio had burned to the ground. The firemen put out the fire and went inside, discovering a litter of oily rags in the unswept rooms and an unburned wall of the garage soaked with oil. In a second-floor bedroom they found Adamic’s body, a .22 Mossberg rifle lying in his lap, and a single bullet wound above his right ear. A Hunterdon County medical examiner returned a tentative verdict of suicide.

Police investigated the possibility of murder, based on threats Adamic had told Smoles and other friends about, demanding he quit work on his last book. According to Adamic’s brother-in-law, Harold Sanders, Adamic’s wife thought the death was suicide. Sanders said, “He was working too hard, was upset by world conditions, and was under great stress.” The FBI investigated the case briefly, dropping it when no angles were found to follow up on. On Aug. 7, 1957, a rusty tin box containing $12,350 in disintegrating large-denomination bills was found in the walls of the burned farmhouse. The package, wrapped in brown paper, had “1950” written on it. At the time of Adamic’s death his wife estimated the value of his estate at $5,000. Based on the date and the fact that Adamic had built the wall in which the box was discovered, it is believed that the author had hidden the money.

 

Adams, Louis, prom. 1932, U.S. The crowning of Mark Adams as “King of all the Gypsies in the World” was to be a festive celebration. In December 1931, Adams, a farmer in California’s San Fernando Valley, invited an army of Gypsy fortune tellers, silversmiths, and card readers from across the U.S., to witness his coronation and feast on barbecued steer. The week-long party came to an abrupt end, however, when Mark’s brother Louis Adams murdered his estranged wife from Chicago in front of their nine children. Despondent over their recent separation, Louis decided to take matters into his own hands. He was immediately arrested and jailed.

 

Adams, Millicent, 1942- , U.S. Socialite Millicent Adams, a post-debutante Bryn Mawr student, raised in upper-class comfort in Philadelphia, Pa., met engineering student Axel Schmidt and killed him when he jilted her foranother more socially prominent woman. Schmidt was certainly a dedicated social climber, and his cruel treatment of Adams caused her first to think of suicide, or so she later claimed. But her destructive plan was one that evolved out of practice, not whim, since she bought a St. Bernard, took it to an unused servant’s room in her family home and shot it with a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson which she had recently purchased. This scenario was enacted, it was later reported, to make sure that the weapon would work on its intended victim, herself.

Yet, when Adams went to bed with Schmidt for the last time in October 1962, the scorned woman turned the gun on Schmidt, not herself, shooting and killing him with a single, well-aimed bullet. Attorneys for Adams claimed that she had suffered a fit of temporary insanity. Adams pled guilty to manslaughter, but there was a condition. If the court gave her a ten-year probational sentence, Adams would commit herself to a mental health center. The court surprisingly accepted this arrangement.

Adams gave birth to a child, Lisa, whose father was the man she had slain and she was allowed to visit the girl on weekends. At the end of three years, Adams was released and labelled “rehabilitated.” She relocated to the West Coast where she moved in with wealthy relatives. Millicent Adams did not pay dearly for committing homicide; some might have labelled it a slight inconvenience for having done away with a trifling lover.

 

Adams, William Nelson, 1902- , Brit. The case of 17-year-old William Adams and his murder of 60-year-old George Jones, is more than a curious one. On the evening of June 10, 1919, Adams, who had befriended the older man who had given him lodging in his room and bought him meals and drinks, was drinking with Jones and another man, Charlie Smith, in a Tooting pub. The trio left the pub late that night en route to Sutton when Adams stabbed Jones six times with a shoemaker’s awl, three times in the throat and three times in the chest. Jones was later found half alive, wearing only his trousers and vest, his shirt wrapped awkwardly about his chest and neck as if someone had attempted to stop the flow of blood. Jones lived for three days and told police that he had no idea why Adams would want to hurt him, saying, “I had done nothing to him.”

When Adams was finally arrested, he told another story, one with bizarre implications. He admitted that Jones had taken him in but had requested that Adams perform a special service in gratitude for his kindness–that the youth kill him. “I’ve done you a good turn,” Adams quoted Jones as having said. “Now you do one for me. Will you kill me?” Adams went on to say that Jones was “worried out of his life” because he was facing a tax bill he could not pay. Adams said he would think about it and did, waiting a week until attacking Jones at the victim’s own request in a Sutton park. He described how Jones removed his coat and hat, lying on the grass and handing the awl to Jones, saying, “The best way is to stab me in the left side of the neck.”

Adams more or less hesitated but Jones kept urging him on. Charlie Smith, a man never found by police, watched the whole strange scene without participating. Finally, Adams worked up his nerve, he claimed, and stabbed the victim several times, but then tried to staunch the flow of blood by wrapping Jones’s shirt around his wounds. He then took the victim’s money and left the scene with Smith. Jones died on June 13, 1919, and Adams was charged with committing a homicide he labelled a “murder by request.” The jury, listening to Adams’s odd story at the Guildford Assizes in July 1919, dismissed the cry of the defendant that he was “only trying to oblige the old gentleman” and found him Guilty. Adams was sentenced to death, but Edward Shortt, then Home Secretary, commuted the prisoner’s sentence to life imprisonment.

 

Adamson, John Harvey, 1944- , U.S. When an investigative reporter with information on Arizona land fraud and rampant underworld corruption in that state was killed by a car bomb in Phoenix in 1976, a $100,000 special prosecution fund was established to investigate the slaying. Adamson, a 32-year-old former tow-truck operator and sometime dog breeder, phoned Pulitzer prire-nominated investigative reporter Don Bolles on June 2, 1976, to say he would give Bolles information linking top Arizona Republicans to land fraud schemes. When Bolles rushed over to meet Adamson at the Phoenix Hotel, he found he had apparently been stood up. Returning to his car, the reporter was blown up by a crude dynamite bomb that exploded as he got into the vehicle.

Hanging on for eleven days and through six operations, losing both legs and his right arm, Bolles died on June 13, 1976. His last words were: “Mafia…Emprise …They finally got me..John Adamson, find him.” Two hours later, Adamson was arrested and charged with murder. At a preliminary hearing held under strict security on June 21 at the Maricopa County Superior Court, Adamson pleaded Not Guilty. The prosecution’s two main witnesses were Robert Lettiere, an ex-convict who described driving to a parking lot with Adamson to look for Bolles’s car five days before the fatal bombing, and Gail Owens, a former girlfriend of Adamson’s who had been with him when he bought a remote control device which he described as a gift for friend.

After a series of delays, including mistrials and moving the trial site due to pretrial publicity, Adamson pleaded guilty to planting the bomb. He escaped the death penalty in exchange for testimony against Max Dunlap and James Robison. According to Adamson, Dunlap, a wealthy contractor, and Robison, a plumber, detonated the bomb with a remote control radio transmitter used in model airplanes. Dunlap had also promised to help Adamson escape to Mexico after the killing, and to take care of his wife and child. Millionaire Arizona landowner and businessman Kemper Marley, Sr., angry about an article Bolles had written about Marley’s alleged troubles with the law in 1942, found his name linked with Dunlap in Adamson’s testimony. Dunlap and Robison were convicted of the murder of Bolles and were sentenced to death on Jan. 10, 1977, in Maricopa County Superior Court. Adamson is serving a twenty-year sentence for his part in the crime.

On Feb. 1, 1980, the Arizona Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Dunlap and Robison, on the grounds they were denied their constitutional right to face their accuser, Adamson. The Court further stated that Adamson had refused to answer certain questions and that the trial judge, Howard Thompson, had erred by denying a motion of the defense to strike all of Adamson’s related testimony after Thompson declined to force him to answer.

In November 1980 Adamson was sentenced to die in the gas chamber for Bolles’s murder. During the new proceedings, Adamson said in a shaking voice that he had fulfilled his agreement to testify against people who once were close associates and that was “a personal punishment far greater than any court could impose.” In December 1988 a federal appeals court overturned Adamson’s death sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled that Adamson had been improperly sentenced by the Arizona Supreme Court because the trial judge had initially ruled that a prison term was the appropriate sentence for the murder. Later, the court imposed the death penalty only after Adamson violated a plea agreement requiring him to testify against Robison and Dunlap. The death penalty, the court said, also violated the right to a jury trial by allowing the judge to decide whether murder is a capital crime.

 

Adamson, Joy, See: Ekai, Paul Wakwaro.

 

Agostini, Antonio (The Pajama Girl Murder), prom. 1934, Aus. An Italian immigrant working in Sydney, Agostini was married to an assertive, hard-drinking Englishwoman, Linda Platt, in 1930. The couple lived a meager existence on Agostini’s small salary. He worked at odd jobs, mostly in restaurants as a waiter, and his income, or the lack of it, caused his wife to drink heavily and, according to Agostini’s later statements, become abusive. To improve their lifestyle the couple moved to Melbourne where Linda Platt Agostini was last seen alive in August 1934. After that she vanished. When her friends or relatives inquired about her, Agostini merely shrugged, saying that she had run off with a lover. This raised few eyebrows for Mrs. Agostini, an attractive woman with a voluptuous figure, was known to play the field even after her marriage.

On Sept. 1, 1934, a farmer cleaning a culvert six miles from Albury (located between Melbourne and Sydney) found the body of a young woman. She was badly burned and her head showed vicious head wounds. Her curvacious body was adorned with only pajamas embroidered with a Chinese dragon. When coroner physicians examined the corpse closer they quickly discovered a bullet wound below the right eye. Parts of the skull had been dealt severe blows so that the bone had collapsed. There were burns over the body which conformed with the patches of oil discovered at the burial site. Someone had murdered this woman and then had attempted to destroy the body by soaking it in oil and burning it.

The corpse was first identified by no less than six people as Mrs. Anna Philomena Morgan Coots, the wife of a Sydney writer who had been reported missing. The medical examiners and the police were content to label the body such, and marked the “Coots” murder as solved, yet there was some doubt among the authorities as to the real identity of the dead woman, particularly when Mrs. Coots’s mother, Mrs. Jeanette Routledge, viewed the corpse and stated, “I am certain that this is not my daughter.” Mrs. Coots’s grandmother, her landlady, and several close friends insisted otherwise, that, indeed, the corpse was Anna Coots. Authorities decided not to bury the murder victim under that name. They would wait for developments and other leads. The corpse was placed in a metal coffin which was filled with a special preservative, formalin, an aqueous solution of formaldehyde which will provide indefinite preservation of organic tissues. The body was stored in a basement area of Sydney University’s Pathological Museum and there it waited until the police decided whether or not to bury it. The wait lasted for ten years.

During that time a curious police sergeant named King came to visit the corpse and peer at it as it swam in the formalin. (One report had it that the streetcars rumbling by outside caused the corpse to “bob like an apple” in the preservative fluid.) King reported to his superiors that he believed the woman was none other than a friend of his wife’s, Linda Platt Agostini, someone the Kings had not seen since early 1931. He was sure of his identification, however, because of the unusually shaped ears on the corpse. They were pointed and had no lobes, something King had noticed about Mrs. Agostini when first meeting her. King made his statement in 1938 at a second inquest which was publicized. An amateur sleuth and medical criminologist, Dr. Palmer Benbow, decided to investigate. He convinced authorities to allow him to examine the corpse and the scanty evidence unearthed by the police.

There was not much to examine–the corpse, wrinkling in formalin, a bag which had been soaked with oil, a piece of toweling. When peering at the toweling under his microscope, Benbow noticed something the police had not discovered or, if they had, had ignored. There were laundry marks on the towel. These marks led the doctor to a shack outside of Albury and there he found an old bed with a metal frame which had been painted. Benbow matched flecks of paint from the frame of this bed to those found on the corpse, and matched fibres from a woolen blanket he found to those found in the dead woman’s hair. He began interviewing residents in the area but suddenly Dr. Benbow’s one-man investigation came to an abrupt halt. He later claimed that police had obstructed his work and that witnesses suddenly had nothing more to say to him after being visited by certain authorities. Oddly, Benbow’s half-completed investigation aimed itself at establishing the corpse as that of Anna Morgan Coots, not Linda Agostini.

Edith Flemington, Linda’s mother through an earlier marriage, had been contacted as early as 1935 when her daughter reportedly ran away to blissful oblivion with an unknown lover. For almost ten years Mrs. Flemington had been writing authorties around the world from her home in Littlehampton, Sussex, England, trying to find her daughter or her daughter’s remains. The police in Sydney had sent her a photo of the corpse in the preservative fluid, but she had originally denied the remains as being that of her daughter. (Formalin usually causes the body to shrink and wrinkles to appear on the face, slightly disfiguring features.) But Mrs. Flemington did recognize the photo of the pajamas the dead woman had been wearing, yellow silk pajamas with a green dragon embroidered on the back which, Mrs. Flemington later recalled, had been given to Linda by her sister as a wedding gift.

Mrs. Flemington wrote many letters to the Sydney police describing her daughter and how she had clerked in London stores, been a movie usher and a hairdresser on the Red Star Line which is how she wound up in Australia. She wrote about her son-in-law, Agostini, and how he was not a “reliable type,” a would-be silk merchant and part-time waiter, how, on one occasion, instead of buying her daughter an engagement ring, Agostini bought her a one-passage home which Linda never used. In her last letter to the Sydney police, Mrs. Flemington said that though she had failed to recognize the body in the formalin as her daughter she had had strange dreams as of late, seeing her daughter “afloat” in a dark, small area.

Then, in March 1944, Antonio Agostini, who had been interred in an alien prison camp during the war, came under suspicion once again. W.J. Mackay, the newly-appointed police commissioner for New South Wales, intended to clear up the matter once and for all. He had read Mrs. Flemington’s last letter and examined the yellowing notes of Dr. Benbow. Mackay, leafing through the thick police files, noticed the name of a dentist who had worked on Linda’s teeth, but oddly enough, the dentist had not been asked to compare his charts of Linda Agostini with the teeth of the dead woman. The dentist was called in and the teeth were compared. There was no doubt in the dentist’s mind that the deceased was his former patient. Mackay next ordered physicians to take the corpse from the formalin bath and reconstruct it as best as possible. Then he brought in friends and relatives of both Mrs. Coots and Mrs. Agostini. The identification for Mrs. Agostini was the strongest, and Agostini was brought from his prison camp.

The short, balding, and near-sighted Agostini had been interrogated in 1935 by police who had accepted his story about his wife running off with another man. Mackay disregarded that tale and began to pump the little waiter. He soon changed his story. Yes, the pickled corpse was the late Mrs. Agostini, the little man admitted. He added, as he casually chain-smoked in front of the commissioner, that he had killed his wife but not intentionally. On Aug. 28, 1934 they both went to bed drunk but Linda woke up before dawn, he said. She was raving about another woman coming to see him at the restaurant where he worked. (Agostini insisted that his wife was jealous of him to the point of being neurotic.) Somehow she had gotten hold of a gun and was waving it at Agostini, he said, and he tried to take it away from her. In the struggle the gun went off and she was killed by the fatal shot. He panicked and attempted to carry the body downstairs, but it fell from his grasp and during its fall the terrible wounds to the head were inflicted on the stairs. He then drove out to the culvert and stuffed the body inside.

Much of Agostini’s statements didn’t make sense. If the death was accidental why had he attempted to burn the corpse beyond recognition. Agostini insisted that he had not done so, that, perhaps some other person finding the corpse had tried to burn it so as not to be blamed for a murder. More revealing was the report from the original examining physicians who stated that the head wounds found on the body were made before the bullet had been fired and that the blows to the skull caused the actual death of Linda Agostini. This, of course, pointed to a beating administered by Agostini. He was charged with murdering his wife and placed on trial on June 9, 1944. No matter how much the prosecution pressured Agostini, the little man would not budge. The killing was accidental, he insisted.

The jury undoubtedly believed the quiet little waiter. Agostini was convicted of manslaughter and sent to serve a six-year sentence at hard labor. He was released in 1950 and was promptly deported to his native Italy where he disappeared. By that time, the body of Linda Platt Agostini had finally found rest, having been buried in July 1944, in Melbourne’s Preston Cemetery. There are those today who still insist that the corpse is that of Mrs. Coots who was never found and that there were actually two murders occuring on the same day and in the same area. One of the killers was brought to justice and the other, since only one corpse was unearthed, remained at large and unknown.

 

Ahearn, Danny, prom. 1930-40s, U.S. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side, Danny Ahearn admired gangsters, studied them carefully, and then joined their ranks as a teenager. Although Ahearn had extensive experience as a robber, gambler, and con man, his main profession was killing for hire. Arrested in New York twenty-two times on major charges, Ahearn was released twenty times. Tried twice for murder, he was released both times for lack of evidence. Reportedly after his final arrest, he gave a long, detailed interview in which he described the techniques and etiquettes of his trade. “For a man to commit murder,” he explained, “he’s got to have no heart.” He advised professional assassins to have patience, study their intended victims carefully, keep a cool head, and stay on good terms with the police, reasoning that “They got to make a buck. They’re human, too. Treat ‘em nice. Then, if you get into trouble you may be able to do business with ‘em.” Ahearn recommended several standard murder methods such as placing dynamite in the starter of the victim’s car or blowing up his house. Women were useful to lure the victims to isolated areas, or to get the target in compromising positions in bedrooms where they would be easy prey. He emphasized working with the police and making connections with them to set up favorable conditions for favors and exchanges.

When hired to kill a woman, Ahearn advised romancing her in nightclubs, then taking her to her apartment and gaining her confidence and affection, so one could later invite her on a vacation, perhaps in the mountains. To avoid trouble, the killer should make sure she writes a letter to her family saying she is going away. Every day of the vacation, he advised, dig part of a ditch in the woods. When the grave is finished, take her for a walk in the woods, knock her on the head, and bury her alive, Ahearn suggests. He suggested that a killer always carry around some poison in order to be prepared, and try, when possible, to leave a gun planted on the victim’s body, because, he said, “Police don’t interest themselves too much in the case where gangsters are killed.”

 

Akulonis, Peter, d.1953, U.S. A quiet, reserved man who did chores for his elderly mother and worked hard for his livelihood, Akulonis came unravelled one day and murdered his entire family. As a youth in Lawrence, Maine, Akulonis was a troubled poor boy, partly deaf, with some facial paralysis, who rebelled by committing acts of petty crime. In the 1930s he changed his ways, marrying, fathering two sons, and becoming a hard-working boiler-maker in a tank works. For years Akulonis kept to himself, raising his family. A co-worker talked about the factory: “The noise in here drives you bugs after a while, but he never come off his machine to talk to anybody. He was a bandit for work.” Around the Christmas holiday of 1952, things began to change for Akulonis. He sat alone at lunch, complaining once to a friend with a new car, “How can you afford that when I drive a pile of junk? All I do is work and go home …I’m not getting anything out of life.” He asked another man at the shop if he thought he was “crazy or something,” and soon he began picking fights. Finally he quit and started to drink.

In mid-April Akulonis went to his four-room apartment in the afternoon, picked up a carpenter’s ax, and killed his wife with a single blow, turning then on his 4-year-old son, Michael, whom he brutally murdered and mutilated. Going to his brother Alphonse’s house, the killer herded his mother and two young nephews into a room and hacked them to death. When the brother returned, Akulonis met him in the kitchen and killed him, too. Picking up his 11-year-old son, Peter, Jr., at school, Akulonis drove the boy to some nearby woods, then shot him in the face with a .22 rifle, newly purchased from Sears Roebuck and Co. He returned to his car–a recent loan from his remaining brother Raymond–and drove it to the Cambridge factory where Raymond worked. Raymond got behind the wheel while Akulonis sat in the back. Two other workers along for the ride said they noticed nothing unusual about his behavior. The police, called by Alphonse’s widow, were waiting at Raymond’s house when the car pulled up. As the officers leaped out of their car, Akulonis shot Raymond through the head, then turned the rifle on himself. A note found in his pocket read, “I love Michael more than life. I loved Mom, Paul, Jimmy, Sis, Peter, Ray.”

 

Alarcon, Nestor Mencias, prom. 1970, Mex. Nestor Alarcon, a 26-year-old Mexican peasant, was hired to kill Isabel Garcia by his employer, Senora Martinez Anguilar. Garcia was having an affair with Senora Anguilar’s husband. Senora Anguilar first paid a witchdoctor to put a spell on Isabel Garcia, but when this failed to end the affair she offered Alarcon fifty-five pesos to kill the woman. “That’s a lot of money for a man like me,” he said later. He hacked Garcia to death with a machete, then turned on her 9-year-old daughter.

Police had closed the books on the case when Alarcon drew attention to himself by leaving town. He was picked up for routine questioning and confessed to murdering Garcia. He told police that Senora Anguilar put him up to it, but reneged on her part of the agreement after learning that Alarcon had also killed the girl. Alarcon later said he committed the murder because he felt obligated to carry out the orders of his employer.

 

Albanese, Charles, 1937- , U.S. In the fall of 1980 Fox Lake, a popular vacation spot near Chicago, was shocked by the deaths of two elderly residents, the first of many over the next sixteen months in a bizarre scheme to seize control of the estates of two wealthy families. If the plan succeeded, Charles Albanese, a prominent Chicago-area businessman driven to obtain wealth and power, would inherit the estates. But first he had to poison up to six of his relatives.

In August 1980 he implemented his heinous plan. Mary Lambert, the 87-year-old grandmother of Albanese’s wife Virginia, died of an apparent heart attack on Aug. 6. Twelve days later Virginia’s mother, 69-year-old Marion K. Mueller, died the same way. Described as healthy women, their sudden deaths within two weeks panicked friends and family into believing their local water supply was contaminated. Tests of the water proved negative.

Virginia Albanese inherited $150,000 from the two deceased. An investigation into the deaths uncovered that in May Charles Albanese had persuaded Lambert to leave her estate to her daughter, Mueller, in the event of her death, aware that his wife would receive the inheritance when Mueller died, and that she had previously willed her property to him.

The deaths were reinvestigated in 1981 when, on May 16, Charles’ father, 69-year-old Michael J. Albanese, Sr., died of an unknown illness. His death left the family-owned trophy company and an estate worth $267,373 to his sons, Charles and Michael A. Albanese, Jr., and would revert to Charles at the death of Michael, Jr. In addition, Michael Sr., left his wife Clare a $200,000 life insurance policy paid in full at the time of his death. Should she die, Charles would become her beneficiary.

Authorities reopened the cases of Lambert and Mueller when they learned that all three dead persons were related and that the junior Albanese was ill with symptoms his father had shown before his death. An inquiry into the death of the senior Albanese finally showed signs of arsenic in his system. Doctors examined Michael, Jr., and found arsenic as well. The bodies of Lambert and Mueller, exhumed and autopsied, also showed arsenic in their systems. All of the evidence by now pointed to Charles Albanese, who was in line to inherit more than half a million dollars from both families.

Police took Albanese into custody as he, his wife, and his mother were leaving for a vacation in Jamaica. Police feared the two women would have been murdered there as they were the only remaining barriers to the wealth Albanese sought. A jury convicted Albanese on three counts of murder in the poisoning deaths of Mary Lambert, Marion Mueller, and Michael Albanese, Sr. Sentenced to death, he awaits punishment on death row. Albanese and his lawyers have appealed the sentence and on Sept. 29, 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court denied their appeal and scheduled Albanese to die in the electric chair on Jan. 25, 1989.

 

Alcott, John James, 1925-53, Brit. The murder for which Alcott was executed was much contested by his defense counsel who maintained that the killer was insane or, at least, a hysteric who had no idea that he was taking a human life. Though little is known of Alcott’s early life, he later admitted that as a youth he got along poorly with his father. When his father later went into the army and served overseas during WWII, Alcott would go into the British countryside and wander for days, living off vegetables filched from farms, and sitting by small fires at night, brooding about his father. During Alcott’s trial for murder in 1952, his defense counsel claimed that these early-day wanderings and remorse over an absent father were that of a mentally unbalanced child. The portrait was not unlike one drawn by Viennese psychoanalyst, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, who had years earlier typified such conduct as that of the neurotic whom he labelled “the unconscious criminal.” Stekel claimed that boys resentful of harsh fathers often harbor a secret and deep death wish for such parents. In the case of Alcott, the inference was made, he substituted other victims for his father, killing without conscience, without social sense, without a concept of law and order.

Alcott’s teenage years were uneventful except that he did buy a bicycle he knew was stolen and for this offense was sent to a correctional school where he became a model student. He later stole a bicycle and then decided not to keep it, selling it. The sale brought him to the attention of the police and he was returned to the school for a short period. No other illegal incidents occurred in the young man’s life until he was sent to Germany after enlisting in the British Army. He later claimed he suffered a series of blackouts while in the service, one following a minor traffic accident. Following the accident, he found himself wandering about the German countryside and being joined by a nomadic Czech who was trying to reach France. The pair stopped at a small lodging house where a night watchman offered them coffee then, inexplicably, according to Alcott, whirled about and threw the scalding coffee at the uniformed Alcott, screaming, “You English bastards take a man’s last drink!”

Alcott jumped at the watchman, smashing his face with his fists while, according to Alcott, his Czech friend leapt forward with an empty whiskey bottle in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other and crashed both of these down upon the watchman’s head, sending him unconscious to the floor. The Czech, Alcott stated, hated all Germans after having spent years in a concentration camp during WWII. Both men fled the lodging house, unaware that the watchman was dead. They were picked up a few days later and Alcott was tried before a court-martial, charged with murder. He was found Guilty but, strangely enough, received a pardon and was discharged from the British Army under the term “Services No Longer Required,” a discharge invariably reserved for those with poor military records. The reason why Alcott was pardoned for this murder was never explained, and no amount of prodding from civil authorities could later produce information on the murder from army officials.

After resuming civilian life, Alcott became a fireman and married, living quietly at Hither Green. In early August 1952, Alcott and his wife planned to vacation in France. Alcott told his wife that he would pick up his holiday pay but he traveled to Aldershot where he took a room in a boarding house and spent several days shopping for clothes in the area and visiting the station house at Ash Vale Station. There he introduced himself to the railway clerk, Geoffrey Dean, age twenty-eight, married and with a small child, telling Dean that he was a fellow railway worker. He returned to talk to Dean several times and undoubtedly noticed the considerable sums of money from fares that Dean periodically counted and stored in the station house safe. Shortly before 8 p.m. on Aug. 22, 1952, Dean turned over tickets and a date stamp to a night porter and told him he would be staying a little later in the office to perform some cleanup work. The station door was locked and a sign on the door told customers to purchase tickets from the porter. An army sergeant went to the station door and heard what he later described as possible scuffling noises and the voices of two men talking. He read the sign and went in search of the night porter. About an hour later another porter noticed a light on in the station office and knocked at the door. He got no response and looked into the window to see Dean sprawled on the floor, blood seeping from his body. Police were called, broke in the door, and found the murdered Dean with more than twenty stab wounds, several in the heart, the lungs, and even in his legs. Powerful blows had actually crushed some of the victim’s bones. The safe was standing open and approximately £168 had been stolen.

Police began a thorough search of all the inns and boarding houses in the area, asking about strangers. One boarding house yielded an empty first-floor room where a young man had stayed. Found was a jacket with blood stains and in the pockets a wallet containing two ten-shilling notes which had blood spots and, most revealing, a passport bearing the name of John James Alcott. Police were posted at the house and some hours later they arrested Alcott as soon as he entered his room. He took little time in showing officers a chimney where he had hidden a knife in a leather sheaf. Inside his pockets were documents from the station house safe and £109. Alcott seemed carefree about being charged with Dean’s murder, and all during the time he awaited trial he concerned himself with his wife’s welfare and how she would manage financially without him.

At his trial, held at Surrey Assizes in Kingston on Nov. 18, 1952, Alcott showed a strange indifference to his predicament while his lawyers argued that he was certainly insane. He himself claimed that he had suffered another blackout, like those he had experienced in his military service and that the victim, as far as he could remember, was “a decent fellow.” He didn’t know why he was in Aldershot or why he went to the station house or why he suddenly murdered a man he had been having pleasant conversations with for several days. He explained that he must have blacked out because when he “came to” he was holding the bloody knife and the stolen money and realized that he was in trouble and that is why he hid the murder weapon. Alcott told the court that he “had gone berserk.” Why then, if he had only a blind and inexplicable urge to murder had he taken the money, Alcott was asked. “Perhaps I did it because it had been there staring me in the face,” he replied. “I could have taken two or three pounds at any time I had liked without his knowing it. It would have been easy, looking back at it.”

The prosecution, however, presented a convincing argument that all of Alcott’s blackouts, his loss of memory, and insane acts were feigned, that all of this was a backup plan should he be caught after committing a premeditated robbery and murder. It was shown how Alcott visited the station house a day before the murder and placed a call from there to another station house to inquire about the health of a fellow railway worker who had been accidentally scalded by hot cinders Alcott himself had been shoveling weeks earlier. He told Dean at the time of this call–which was to establish himself as a fellow railway worker to be trusted–that he expected a return call at the station house which would let him know about the injured worker. This was his ruse to excuse a return to the station house the following evening. Moreover, Alcott had purchased an entire new set of clothes–from coat, pants, shirt, to shoes–and these he intended to wear when fleeing the area after the robbery-murder, dumping the “murder clothes.” The bloody pants and shoes Alcott had been wearing were found in bushes near the boarding house, and it was reported that these were the very items Alcott was hiding just before he was arrested on his return to the boarding house to retrieve his bloody jacket in order to hide it elsewhere.

The murder weapon was the knife Alcott had hidden in the chimney, one which he had purchased in Aldershot for the very purpose of killing Dean. He later claimed that he had bought the knife as a gift for a young brother and just happened to have the weapon in his pocket when he suffered his impulse to kill the station clerk. The jury did not accept the posture of insanity, nor did the accused man’s background conform to the McNaghten Rules on insanity. Alcott was convicted of murder and Mr. Justice Finnemore sentenced him to death. Alcott’s relentless attorneys doggedly sought to appeal the case on grounds of insanity. Their request for appeal was denied and Alcott was executed on Jan. 2, 1953.

 

Aldridge, Alfred Scott, prom. 1929-31, U.S. As a result of the 1929 trial in Washington, D.C., of Alfred Aldridge, a black man charged with the murder of a white police officer, lawyers were given the right to dismiss prospective jurors during the selection of the jury based on their racial prejudice.

Represented by court-appointed attorney James Reilly, Aldridge was charged with the murder of police officer Harry J. MacDonald. To ensure that his client received a fair trial, Reilly asked prospective jurors if they were prejudiced toward blacks. The presiding judge maintained that his questions were improper, prohibited him from continuing, and quickly began the trial. In the end, Aldridge was convicted and sentenced to death. Reilly immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Just one week before Aldridge was to be executed, the high court barred his execution and saved him from death. The Supreme Court maintained that lawyers have the right to ask questions regarding a prospective juror’s beliefs on race in order to protect their own client’s inherent right to a fair trial. For the first time, lawyers won the right to reject jurors based on their racial prejudice.

 

Alexander, Frank, 1954- , and Alexander, Harald, 1931- , Canary Is. The Alexanders, a reclusive German family, were religious fanatics who believed that only a select few of their religious cult were free of Satan’s control and that all others were instruments of the Devil to be purged by violence if the “chosen one” of their cult so decreed. This is exactly what happened to the Alexanders in 1970 when 16-year-old Frank Alexander decided that his mother and sisters were possessed of the Devil and had to be murdered. A horrific slaughter followed in which Frank and his equally zealous father Harald destroyed their loved ones in the name of God. Their grisly acts they later excused as part of their religious beliefs.

The Alexanders had originated in Dresden and later moved to Hamburg where Harald Alexander became the ardent disciple of George Riehle, a religious zealot who was, in turn, the self-designated leader of the Lorber Society. Jacob Lorber (1800-64) had founded this religious group in the early part of the nineteenth century, a severe spiritual organization that taught unflinching self-denial and upheld the beliefs that all non-members were basically evil. Riehle became a member of this small sect, which never numbered more than a few hundred members through the decades, and sometime in the 1930s, Riehle came to believe that he was the Prophet of God. Alexander met Riehle in Hamburg when the old man was dying and nursed him through his last days. When Riehle died, Alexander announced to his wife that he had inherited the mantle of the Lorber Society leadership. Dagmar Alexander, equally possessed of her husband’s single-minded beliefs, accepted him in his self-appointed role.

When their son Frank was born, Harald Alexander told his wife that their son was now the Prophet of God and that his every whim had to be observed and obeyed. As the boy grew up he was served by his family members–his older sister Marina, his younger twin sisters Sabine and Petra, and his parents–as if he were a potentate. They responded to his every whim, until Frank Alexander dictated their every movement. The boy, when reaching his teens, decided that he could never “pollute” himself with the bodies of women outside of their small sect. He informed his father that he would have sex with his mother and older sister and such incestuous relations became commonplace within the Alexander household, the father not only agreeing to such practices but encouraging his son to have sex with his wife and daughters at any time, often joining with Frank as they both assaulted Dagmar Alexander or the older sister, Marina. The women accepted their roles as sex objects in the belief that they were serving the Prophet of God, Frank Alexander.

Such bizarre practices soon brought them to the attention of the Hamburg police, especially when the younger sisters began to talk about them to the few friends they had. To avoid police investigation into their activities, the Alexanders moved to a reclusive society, one far apart from the rest of the world–the Canary Islands–relocating to a small apartment at 37 Calle Jesus Nazareno in Santa Cruz, the capital of Tenerife.

Neighbors soon noted that the family remained aloof and its members seldom ventured out of the apartment. Harald Alexander was forever playing a small organ that had been left to him by George Riehle. For ten months the family occupied the small flat without incident, the girls and Frank supporting the family with low-paying jobs–the girls working as domestics and Frank as a shipping clerk, though he kept irregular hours.

Then, on Dec. 22, 1970, Harald and Frank Alexander appeared in the villa occupied by Dr. Walter Trenkler, asking to see 15-year-old Sabine Alexander. Trenkler found the girl in the kitchen preparing a meal for the family and told her that her father and brother were on the patio waiting to see her. She went to them and Trenkler, to his amazement and shock, heard Harald Alexander say to his daughter, “Sabine, dear, we wanted you to know at once that Frank and I have just finished killing your mother and your sisters.”

The girl took her father’s hand and put it to her cheek, saying, “I’m sure you’ve done what you thought necessary.”

Dr. Trenkler stood in shock for a moment, staring at the Alexanders. Harald Alexander caught Trenkler’s stare and said matter-of-factly, “Ah, you’ve overheard. We’ve killed my wife and other daughters. It was the hour of killing.” The horrified physician then looked over the father and son carefully. What he originally thought was mud and dirt on their clothes, the result of laboring he imagined, was not what covered them from head to foot. It was human blood, gore that smeared their clothes and faces and hands, dried and caking in the hot sun of the courtyard where they stood.

Even more frightening was the conduct of the Alexanders. There was nothing secretive or sinister about them. They were calm and reported their gruesome acts as if nothing was amiss, that the killings they had just announced were perfectly acceptable. Trenkler asked the Alexanders to wait. He raced into the villa and called the police.

Officers quickly arrived and took the Alexanders into custody while Detective Inspector Juan Hernandez and Detective Sergeant Manuel Perera went to the Alexander flat, accompanied by a police physician, and forced open the door. They stepped into a place of carnage; all of the dishes, clothing, papers, including passports and family documents, had been torn to pieces. Everything was in shreds. The apartment was coated with blood–ceilings, walls, floors. In the middle of the living room floor were the mutilated bodies of the two daughters, 18-year-old Marina, and 15-year-old Petra. Their breasts and private parts had been hacked away and nailed to one of the walls. The older girl had been disemboweled. In the bedroom was found the remains of 39-year-old Dagmar Alexander, also horribly mutilated, her breasts and privates also hacked away. Her heart had been cut out, bound on a cord and this was nailed to the wall. The place was a grisly slaughterhouse running blood, a sight so overwhelming that even the hardened officers grew sick to their stomachs.

The Alexanders, at the local police station, freely admitted the gruesome murders. Frank Alexander, called “The Prophet” by his father, related how he was in the bedroom when Dagmar entered it. “I saw that Mother was looking at me and I had the feeling that it was not permitted for her to look at me in this manner. I therefore took the clotheshanger and struck her over the head. After I struck her several times she fell over and lost consciousness. Father had gone to the living room to play the organ and I also went there. First I struck Marina on the head with the hanger, and after she lost consciousness, I struck Petra. Father continued to play the organ and praise Jesus, but when I began to remove the offending parts, he came to help me.” Harald Alexander supported every heinous detail of his son’s statements, saying that the sex organs of his wife and daughters were “offending parts,” and had to be removed, adding that the women in the household had expected the “hour of killing” at any time, that the family had discussed this “holy time” and its eventuality and that the women accepted their role as human sacrifice for The Prophet, Frank Alexander. Both Frank and Harald Alexander then stated that they felt no guilt, that this was all part of their religious beliefs, that women were unclean and had to be purified by killing. They claimed that their victims had been released into heaven through their murders and they even celebrated their grisly acts by playing the organ, both taking turns, and singing hymns after slaughtering the females of their household.

Psychiatrists examined the father and son and concluded that they were both unfit to stand trial. Both were committed to an asylum for the criminally insane where they presently reside, neither, at last report, responding to any kind of treatment and both convinced, still, that the slaughter of their family members was a purification act in keeping with their religious beliefs. Both men still believe that they are being persecuted for their beliefs and neither has expressed one thought of guilt. Harald Alexander continues to address his son Frank as “The Prophet.” Sabine Alexander, the surviving female member of the family, begged authorities to send her to the asylum with her brother and father but this was rejected. She was sent to a convent where she still resides, refusing to live in the outside world.

 

Allaway, Edward Charles, 1939- , U.S. Armed with a 22-caliber semiautomatic rifle purchased a week earlier at a K Mart, Edward Allaway entered the library building of California State University at Fullerton one day in July 1976. He searched the basement and ground floor, firing at co-workers whom he accused of “messing around with (his) wife,” Bonnie, twenty-two. Allaway killed seven people and wounded two others before police subdued him.

Allaway who worked as a janitor at the library, was unable to cope with his wife’s decision to end the marriage. He was arraigned on seven counts of murder at the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana.

The prosecutor asked for the death penalty, and in the subsequent trial Allaway was found Guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder, and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. However, the jury could not decide whether Edward Allaway was sane at the time of the shootings. Their deadlock threw the case into the hands of the judge, who declared him Not Guilty by reason of insanity. Allaway was committed to the Atascadero State Hospital, where he awaits further psychiatric review.

 

Allen, Floyd, d.1913, U.S. The Allens of Carroll County, Va., had long been a potent force in local politics, a huge clan whose history stretched back to the American Revolution. Family members owned large tracts of land, and since the American Civil War the Allens were considered to be the leading citizens of the area. They possessed a fierce pride in their history and their place in the community, no more so than Floyd Allen, who became the patriarch of the clan by the turn of the century. A Democrat, Allen boasted that no Republican ever bested him at the ballot box or with fists. He had held a number of public offices and felt that his family prestige and his own self-inflated image put him above the law. Allen reveled in his political clout. On one occasion, in 1904, after he had been sentenced to jail for one hour after striking a lawman, Allen refused to enter a cell, sending a runner to the governor, who immediately issued a pardon. He was forever knocking down deputy sheriffs and other officials who disagreed with his blunt, brutal tactics, a violent habit that blossomed into mass murder in 1912.

It was Allen’s intractable conviction that not only was he above the law but so too were all of his relatives. Two of his nephews, the fatherless Edwards boys, got into a bloody fight at school and, after seriously injuring several other students, fled. A small posse made up of Allen enemies tracked the boys to North Carolina and arrested them, bringing them back into Virginia. They were met by Floyd Allen and several of his more hardened back-county relatives, gun toters all, who ordered the posse members to release the Edwards boys, stating that the lawmen had no right to make arrests across the state line which was, in fact, the truth. The posse members hurled insults at the Allens and a battle ensued where guns were fired and punches were thrown. Although no one was killed, several men on both sides were badly injured. Floyd Allen was indicted for assault and battery and held for trial at the Carroll County Courthouse in Hillsville, Va.

There were three trials, the last ending on Mar. 13, 1912. In the last trial, since Allen’s influence was so broad, jurors from faraway counties were brought in to judge the case. On Mar. 14, 1912, Floyd Allen was to hear the verdict of the jury. He took no chances. Allen summoned the most truculent of his clan members to pack the courtroom the following day and scores of Allens filed into the court, many with pistols hidden inside their coats and pants pockets. Allen himself was not searched since he was thought too important a person to be treated as a common criminal. Inside of Allen’s large sweater were two pistols. He sat grim-faced at the defendant’s table with his attorney, Judge Bolen, a former local magistrate who had battled hard for Allen’s vindication. On the bench was Judge Thornton L. Massie. At the prosecution table sat state’s attorney Commonwealth Foster, an avowed enemy of the Allen clan, as was Sheriff Webb and most of his deputies who ringed the courtroom. The jury foreman, C.L. Howell, was asked for the verdict and Howell passed the written verdict to Judge Massie who read it aloud without emotion, “Guilty as charged in the indictment–one year in the penitentiary.”

Allen stiffened in his chair, gripping the armrests so tightly that his knuckles showed white. His attorney, Judge Bolen, reached over to him and patted him on the shoulder, saying, “Take it easy, Floyd. There are better days ahead.”

“I’m going to take it calm,” Allen replied in a low voice as he stared at clerk Goad who handed the judge’s order to the sheriff. “I just hate it on account of my two boys,” the clan chief added.

“The sheriff will take charge of the prisoner,” Judge Massie ordered. Sheriff Webb and several deputies began to approach Allen, who then stood up and fumbled with the buttons of his sweater.

“Gentlemen,” Floyd Allen solemnly announced, “I don’t aim to go.” He then whipped out two pistols and the rest of the Allen clan produced guns. The firing commenced, filling the entire courtroom with clouds of black smoke. Panic seized the large crowd which bolted en masse for the doorway. The sheriff and his deputies returned fire, blasting away at Floyd Allen, Sidna Allen, and Floyd’s son Claude, who fired their weapons resolutely at the deputies, the jury, and the judge. Allen took special aim at the prosecuting attorney, Commonwealth Foster, who had expected trouble and had armed himself. Foster, holding up a heavy law book in front of his face, traded shots with Floyd Allen as he retreated to a door leading to back rooms.

The crowd was in a frenzy to escape the bloody shootout. People knocked each other down and trampled upon one another. Chairs and benches crashed backward as the spectators scurried, scrambled, clawed their way toward the exits. Several fell, wounded in the murderous crossfire. Little Bettie Ayers, an Allen witness, ran screaming toward an exit, yelling, “Let me out of here!” A bullet slapped into her back, knocking her down. Judge Massie had watched in horror as his courtroom was turned into a bloody slaughter pen. He suddenly slumped forward on the bench, blood spreading out in front of him from a chest wound. Attorney Foster was struck several times by bullets as he emptied his guns in the direction of killer Floyd Allen, as did Deputy Queensberry who fired round after round from his .25-caliber pistol from the jury room doorway. Allen reeled backward, hit in the thigh, so that he crashed through the railing which broke and he fell on top of his lawyer, Judge Bolen. Cried Bolen, “For God’s sake, get off me before they kill me shooting at you!” Allen got to his feet and then raced toward an exit. He turned to fire at clerk Goad who was shooting at him. Sidna and Claude Allen fired at the clerk who was hit by eleven bullets, one going into his open mouth, chipping a tooth and smashing out of the back of his neck. Goad, however, continued to fire back.

“I’m hit bad,” Floyd Allen cried out to Sidna Allen, taking a gun from him since he was out of bullets and firing as he ran from the courtroom and down the steps to his horse which was tied up to a nearby railing. Before he could mount, however, Allen stepped on a rock and broke that part of his leg which had already been splintered by a bullet. The intense pain caused him to beg relatives to help him mount his horse. Once in the saddle, Floyd Allen briefly fainted and then, coming to, told relatives to bring a carriage. He was put into a carriage and taken down the street to Burnett’s stable where he was removed and placed on the ground; his relatives believed Allen was dying. It began to rain. At the courthouse, clerk Goad, bleeding from his many wounds, hid behind one of the towering pillars of the building and traded shots with Sidna Allen who was hiding behind another.

Inside the courtroom, Judge Massie was dying. With his last breath he told juror Daniel Thomas, “Sidna Allen shot me…Give me a drink…Tell my wife…” By the time Judge Bolen reached him Massie was dead. Inside the juror’s room, on a couch where he had collapsed, was Attorney Foster. He had been hit in the head and blood drenched the floor where he was lying. His wife rushed to the room just as he let the automatic in his hand fall to the floor. He was dead. When they lifted his large body to take it to the morgue, dozens of bullets spilled from his pockets. Commonwealth Foster had expected a battle with the Allens and he had gotten it. Sheriff Webb was also dead, his body riddled with bullets; in death he clenched between his teeth a toothpick. Little Bettie Ayers was mortally wounded. She died the next day, as did a juror named Fowler. Five were dead or dying in the courthouse and sixteen others were wounded, many of these just barely clinging to life until medical help was summoned and saved their lives.

The Allen clan fled as the courthouse was surrounded by scores of deputies who had been appointed for just this eventuality. A dozen deputies, guns drawn, then marched down the street to Burnett’s stable where Floyd Allen lay in the rain, blood coating his pants. Staring down at his father was Victor Allen, who had taken no part in the shoot out. “This thing hurts me,” Victor told his father. “I’ve always tried to do right.”

“I made my peace with my God about seven years gone,” Floyd Allen said, looking up at his son, “and methinks I see him now.”

Victor Allen shook his head and replied, “No–it’s the devil that you see.”

The Allens were rounded up and both Floyd Allen and his son Claude were convicted of murder and were executed in 1913, both going to the electric chair–first the father, then the son. Sidna Allen was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years but was pardoned in 1926 by Governor Harry Byrd. Victor Allen was acquitted.

 

Allen, John Edward, (AKA: the Mad Parson), 1912- , Brit. Allen, twice committed to a mental institution by the time he was twenty-five, brutally murdered 17-month-old Kathleen Diana Lucy Woodward on Oct. 21, 1937. While employed as an assistant chef at the Lamb Hotel in Burford, Oxfordshire, he befriended the Woodward family and often played with the child, whom he had taken for a walk on the day she disappeared. When her body was later found lying beside a road, she had been strangled with a clothes-line. Her hand still clutched the two pennies Allen had given her. Two days later, Allen surrendered to authorities and was charged with murder.

On Nov. 6, 1937, Allen was convicted of the murder and remanded to psychiatric care at the Broadmoor Asylum where he joined an entertainment group–The Broadhumoorists–which performed comedy shows for the inmates. Ten years later, Allen escaped from Broadmoor dressed as a cleric–his Broadhumoorists costume. He was recaptured two years later, but while free he became known in the press as the Mad Parson. On Sept. 18, 1951, Allen, at the age of thirty-nine, was released from the asylum.

 

Allen, Kenneth, 1943- , U.S. In December 1978, 24-year-old Allen engaged up to twenty-five Chicago police officers in a gunfight at his South Side apartment which eventually led to his slaying two undercover officers on a Chicago street three months later. Police arrived at Allen’s apartment shortly after his girlfriend, Bianca Smith, reported a quarrel between herself and Allen, who would not allow her to remove property from their shared home. Allen held police at bay for nineteen hours with an arsenal of weapons–high-powered magnum revolvers, semiautomatic pistols, and a hand-held M-16 rifle–until his inevitable arrest that evening.

Three months later, on Mar. 3, 1979, Chicago plainclothes narcotics officers William P. Bosak and Roger Van Schaik were gunned down in daylight after stopping a car suspected of carrying drugs. Heavily armed men in the car opened fire on the officers as Allen arrived and fired on them from the opposite direction. Witnesses claimed that one wounded officer, bleeding on the ground, pleaded for his life as Allen pumped three more shots into his body. Additional officers responded to the shooting and gave chase to Allen’s automobile, which slammed into a Chicago Transit Authority bus and three police cars before coming to a halt. Allen fled and was captured seven blocks away.

Allen was charged with the murder of the officers and held in custody without bond. He later pleaded guilty, explaining in court that the murders were a case of mistaken identity. He was found Guilty and sentenced to death in the Illinois electric chair. In 1980, he filed a plea to the state supreme court requesting that any appeal of his conviction be denied and that he be put to death immediately. No reasons for the plea were given, but the court ruled that every death penalty conviction receives an automatic appeal.

 

Allen, Margaret, 1906-49, Brit. The murder of 68-year-old Nancy Ellen Chadwick by Margaret Allen in 1948 was a motiveless and mindless act which still baffles criminologists to this day. Allen, the product of an immense family–she was the twentieth child of twenty-two off spring–had always denied her own femininity. Everything about her was masculine and she preferred the company of burly male workers in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, England. At an early age, Allen took on jobs that were usually performed by men. She loaded coal, repaired houses, and even became a bus driver. She was fired from this last position for abusing passengers–shoving and cuffing them if they did not take their seats fast enough.

Short and stocky, Allen, in 1935, checked into a hospital and had a “delicate” operation performed, one, she later confided to a friend, which changed her “from a woman to a man.” Allen then made no pretense about her turnabout sexual role, cutting her hair short, donning male clothes, drinking with roustabout workers in bars. She had no female friends, except for Mrs. Annie Cook, and this relationship evaporated when Allen, while on vacation with Mrs. Cook, proposed a sexual bout which was promptly rejected by the offended Mrs. Cook.

Allen next invested her savings in the purchase of a dilapidated building that once served as Rawtenstall’s police headquarters, situated on the town’s main street, Bacup Road. To this house Mrs. Nancy Ellen Chadwick, a drifter, came to knock on the door on Aug. 28, 1948, dragging all her earthly belongings in an old sack. Her body was found inside that sack the next day, her head crushed by what police later determined to be a coal hammer, the face coated with ashes.

Detectives had a relatively easy job tracing the victim to Allen since a bloodstained path led directly to Allen’s home. Moreover, the suspect went out of her way to encourage Scotland Yard inspectors to arrest her. She dogged their footsteps and stood about, hands thrust into her trousers, staring at them as they inspected the area. At one point, she rushed up to a detective and pulled at his sleeve and pointed to the nearby river. “Look, there’s something there!” The object floating in the river was Mrs. Chadwick’s knitting bag which officers found empty of the money the victim was alleged to have carried in it.

But still she was not charged. Margaret Allen then barged into the local pub, swilled down several beers, wiped her chin, and bellowed, “I was the last person to see the old woman!” She, like many an arrogant criminal before her, was openly challenging the police to make a case against her. (A similar case where the killer’s ego insisted he actually lead the police to his door to challenge the police to make a case against him, was that of the haughty Richard Loeb, of the notorious Leopold and Loeb of Chicago, who thought to commit the perfect murder as an intellectual exercise.)

By late August, however, Scotland Yard sleuths had already gathered enough evidence to convict Allen of the Chadwick murder, matching hairs from the head of the victim to Allen’s clothing and discovering in Allen’s house several effects of the victim. It only remained for Allen to confess her crime. This she did after inspectors came to her door on Sept. 1, 1948. When formally charged, Margaret Allen smiled and admitted killing the old woman. “I was in a funny mood,” she said out of the corner of a crooked smile. “She seemed to insist on coming in (to the house). I just happened to look around and saw a hammer in the kitchen. On the spur of the moment I hit her. She gave me a shout and that seemed to start me off more and I hit her a few times, I don’t know how many.” She gave no other explanation. Margaret Allen had killed the elderly woman on a whim.

After a five-hour trial, Allen was found Guilty, despite her counsel’s feeble attempt to prove her insane. She was sentenced to death. Her old friend, Mrs. Cook, got together a petition to ask for a commutation but only 162 people in the town of almost 30,000 signed the document. Margaret Allen didn’t seem to care. She acted, in her last hours at Strangeways Prison, as if the whole matter was nothing more than an inconvenience. She complained about her cell’s lack of creature comforts and when she was brought the last meal she had requested, a plate of scrambled eggs, she kicked it out of the jailer’s hands, splattering the food onto the wall of the cell and sneering, “At least no one else will enjoy that meal!” Without a word, Margaret Allen stomped up the stairs of the scaffold on the morning of Jan. 12, 1949, and was hanged on schedule. See: Leopold, Nathan.

 

Allen, Peter Anthony, 1943-64, and Evans, Gwynne Owen (John Robson Welby), 1940-64, Brit. Both Allen and Evans were milkmen and thugs who committed small robberies in Liverpool and had, since their teens, been in trouble with police. On the night of Apr. 6-7, 1964, John Alan West, a 53-year-old laundry driver, was attacked by Allen and Evans as he interrupted their robbery of his small house. They stabbed West several times and struck him on the head many times, crushing his skull, before running outside and driving away with Allen’s wife in the car. (She had gone along for the ride, not knowing, she later claimed, what the two men were planning.) Police, who had been summoned by a neighbor, found Evans’ raincoat and a girl’s phone number inside one of its pockets, along with other items that led them to pick up Evans forty-eight hours later.

West’s watch was found on Evans, who immediately claimed that Allen had done all the hitting and stabbing and was responsible for West’s death. He merely “took a few things.” Allen put the blame for the murder on Evans, but admitted that the car the killers had used on the murder night had been stolen in another part of Liverpool. Both men were tried at Manchester Crown Court in June 1964 and little defense could be offered. The only question in the court’s mind was who actually did the killing, Allen or Evans. A jury quickly decided that both men were Guilty and they were condemned. The distinction these two thugs held in the annals of crime was not the sordid murder they committed but the fact that they were the last two to hang in England before capital punishment was abolished by a bill originally introduced in Parliament in 1956, one finally passed ten years later when hanging was suspended. Both men were executed on Aug. 13, 1964, but in separate prisons–Allen in Liverpool’s Walton Prison, Evans at Strangeways Prison in Manchester.

 

Almarez, Stella Delores, 1951- , U.S. On June 18, 1980, in despair over her failed marriage, Stella Almarez of Norfolk, Neb., brutally slashed the throats of her two infant daughters and then shot down her older girls, ages seven and ten. Failing in her suicide attempt, Mrs. Almarez was arrested the next day and arraigned on a murder charge. In November 1980 she was found Not Guilty by reason of insanity by a Madison County jury and was committed to the Lincoln Regional Center for hospitalization. The controversial verdict led to sweeping changes in state law. As a result, the burden of proof that a person was insane at the time they committed a murder shifted from the prosecution to the defense. It is now up to the defense counsel to prove that his or her client was insane at the time they murdered.

A second noteworthy change involved the disposition of defendants remanded over to the custody of mental health facilities, like the one in Lincoln. During Mrs. Almarez’ five-year stay at the regional center, she was permitted to work outside the hospital. A revision of the legal codes, however, required that each inmate be reviewed annually to determine their mental fitness before being permitted to wander off the grounds. Also, an inmate could only be released after hospital officials received a written order from the judge.

Released in 1985, Stella Almarez was the first Nebraska patient to be affected by this new ruling. Judge Merritt Warren of the Madison County District Court, declaring Almarez no longer a danger to herself or society, ordered her unconditionally released on Oct. 2, 1985.

 

Almodovar, Anibal (AKA: Terry), 1916-43, U.S. Almodovar was a Puerto Rican sailor living in New York City, a ladies’ man who did as he pleased with his girlfriends and his 23-year-old wife, Louise Petecca Almodovar, a waitress who met the handsome, dashing Almodovar, whom she called Terry, at the Rhumba Palace in Manhattan. After dancing with him, she fell in love and the two were married a short time later. Only a few weeks went by before Louise accused Terry Almodovar of seeing other women. He exploded and then moved out. A short time later, Louise called Terry and asked to meet with him, to see if they could patch up their differences. Almodovar arranged to meet his wife in Central Park. In Central Park, near 110th Street in the tall grass, is where police found Louise Almodovar’s body on Nov. 2, 1942. She had been strangled. The waitress had apparently struggled with her killer; the sleeve of her jacket torn from the shoulder. Chief medical examiner, Dr. Thomas A. Gonzales, determined that the killer had murdered with expertise: “The killer did not throttle her by placing both hands around her neck. He did it with two fingers from each hand, placing them on the windpipe. The larynx was only slightly fractured.”

Until the dead woman was identified, police thought she had been killed by park thugs, but then they received reports on Terry Almodovar’s marriage to the girl, and their breakup over his womanizing and violent streaks of temper. He was arrested on suspicion. Almodovar’s clothing was turned over to Dr. Alexander O. Gettler, chief toxicologist of the medical examiner’s office. Dr. Gottler found seeds of various types of grass in Almodovar’s trouser cuffs and these he passed on to Dr. Joseph J. Copeland, professor of botany and biology at City College. Meanwhile, Terry Almodovar confessed that he had met with his wife in Central Park, and when Louise began to accuse him of seeing other women, he lost control and strangled her to death. He later recanted this confession, saying that he had been coerced by authorities into making the admission. When Almodovar was brought to trial, however, the killer never for an instant thought he would be convicted by some seeds of grass.

Almodovar was placed on trial on Feb. 24, 1943, before Judge George L. Donnellan. The prosecution presented an impressive array of forensic evidence; the botanical evidence provided clearly placed Almodovar at the scene of the murder. Dr. Copeland testified he had examined the seeds of grass found in Almodovar’s trouser cuffs and that he had determined these to be a rare species (Plantago canceolata, Panicum dichotomiflorum, Eleusine indica) which could be found only in the area of Central Park where Louise Almodovar had been strangled to death. No other spot in New York City had this uncommon form of grass, planted at the murder site for experimental reasons. Copeland, at the request of police to head off Almodovar’s expected alibis, also emphatically stated that this type of grass could only be found in two spots in Long Island and three small areas of Westchester County. Copeland went on to add that the grass seeds in Almodovar’s trouser cuffs had matured only within a week or so of the time of the murder, which clearly placed the killer at the murder site. Almodovar was convicted and sentenced to death, going to the electric chair in 1943. The case stands as a hallmark in scientific research dealing with a murder trial.

 

American Bluebeard, The, See: Schmidt, Helmuth.

 

Amerman, Max, 1923- , U.S. Calling itself the “Sweetest Town on Earth,” Medina, Ohio, proved to be anything but that on the night of Oct. 5, 1950, when Harold Mast was murdered on the back porch of his farmhouse. Mast was shot in the back with a bullet from a twelve-gauge shotgun just before entering the home Amerman was leasing to him. As no one saw his assailant, suspicion soon fell on Amerman who was in love with the dead man’s wife, Randi Mast. Amerman had paid for the woman’s parents to come to the United States from Germany, allowed the Masts to lease his luxurious farm very inexpensively, and often attempted to have sexual intercourse with Mrs. Mast.

At the time of the murder, however, Amerman was in New Jersey, giving him a solid alibi which was doubted only after questioning 17-year-old Jerry Killinger. Killinger and Amerman, ten years the teen’s senior, had a very close friendship, so close that Killinger would not divulge what he knew about Mast’s killing. When police confronted Amerman with knowledge of this friendship, he admitted to having arranged for Killinger to shoot Mast so that he could marry Mrs. Mast. Killinger then confessed to pulling the trigger. The day before Killinger turned eighteen, Nov. 16, 1950, the jury found him guilty of murder without recommendation for mercy. He was sentenced to be electrocuted at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, as was Amerman after he pled guilty to first degree murder in January 1951.

 

Anargeros, Sophie (AKA: Sandra Peterson, Sophie Peterson, Mrs. Wally Hamilton), 1931- , U.S. For a girl whose own mother placed her in a juvenile delinquent school, and who was termed by a probation officer as “hell bent,” Sophia Anargeros, by the age of fifteen, was already destined for a life of crime.

On her release from the school, Anargeros left her home town of Somerville, Mass., just outside Boston, changed her first name to Sandra, and headed west to Reno, Nev. She spent the next couple of years working for gambling establishments and similar businesses attracting customers. Anargeros was married briefly in Southern California, just long enough to gain another name, Sandra Peterson.

During the winter of 1950, Anargeros took up a new profession–stealing from Texas motorists whom she induced into offering her a ride. She soon teamed up with a 14-year-old girl, in whose house the hitchhiker-thief had been living. The two would lure a male driver into the car’s back seat and rather than submit to sex, they would rob him at gunpoint, then order him to drive off or simply leave him on the roadside and drive off in his car. However, not all of their crimes were successful. One driver, Lewis Patterson, resisted being robbed, and for his efforts received two bullet wounds, one in his side and one in the chest, that killed him. Anargeros and her accomplice tried in vain to escape pursuit–buying bus tickets headed in the opposite direction from which they were traveling, though returning the tickets later, and even dyeing the color of their hair. The two were arrested in San Angelo, Texas, Anargeros confessing that she had killed the man, but only in self-defense after he had tried to rape her–a claim that the younger girl’s statement repudiated, resulting in a charge of murder against Anargeros. After four days, a jury found her guilty of murder with malice on Jan. 20, 1951, for which she received a sentence of two life terms, serving just over ten years–under the name of Sophie Peterson–before she was pardoned on Dec. 19, 1961.

 

Anderson, Percy Charles, d.1935, Brit. Edith Drew-Bear’s body was discovered floating in a water tank by Brighton police on Nov. 25, 1934, but neither drowning nor the five bullets in her back and head had caused death. She had been strangled with a silk scarf wound tightly under her chin, according to Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who conducted the postmortem two days later.

The attack on the 21-year-old movie theater usher was characterized during the trial of her murderer, Anderson, as maniacal, a point the defense tried to use in proving that Anderson was not guilty by reason of insanity. Spilsbury noted that the bullets were fired from a .22-caliber gun–presumably a Walden Safety Revolver which was never recovered–and thus had not seriously wounded the victim, but had likely induced unconsciousness before she was choked to death and then dumped in the water tank.

When arrested, Anderson was carrying poison, ammonia chloride, and zinc chloride, and possessed in his room bullets identical to those found in Drew-Bear’s body. He admitted quarreling with Drew-Bear but beyond that remembered nothing. In March 1935 he pled insanity to the charge but was nevertheless convicted of murder and executed at Wandsworth.

 

Andrews, Lowell Lee (AKA: The Nicest Boy in Wolcott), c.1940-59, U.S. Referred to as “the nicest boy” in his hometown of Wolcott, Kan., by the local newspaper, Andrews did anything but live up to it when he attempted to fulfill his secret dream of becoming a hired gun in Chicago. Andrews, at the age of eighteen, weighed 300 pounds, wore horn-rimmed glasses, never drank alcohol, never dated, regularly went to church, and was an honor student. But because he needed money for the trip to Chicago to see his dream through, Andrews decided to kill his sister and parents and sell the property owned by his well-off farming family.

While his familywatched television, he entered the parlor carrying an automatic rifle and revolver and shot his sister between the eyes, his mother three times, and his father twice, before reloading, since the first round failed to kill his parents. He confessed the killings to his pastor a few days later. He was found Guilty of murder, despite being diagnosed as schizophrenic, sentenced, and hanged at Leavenworth Prison.

 

de Antiquis Murder, See: Geraghty, Christopher James.

 

Appelgate, Everett, See: Creighton, Mary Frances.

 

Appleton, John, c.1855, Brit. On Mar. 28, 1905, John Appleton, in a drunken stupor, confessed to police that he and Joseph Earnshaw had robbed and killed a man, later identified as William Ledger, near Newcastle in July 1882. Having no other evidence to go on–records showed the crime remained unsolved–the police believed Appleton and arrested him. Earnshaw, apparently, had since died.

Appleton was tried at the Durham Assizes in July 1905, where he recanted his confession, stating he had only read of the murder. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life due to the peculiar circumstances of the case.

 

Appo, Quimby (Lee Ah Bow), 1814-1912, U.S. One of the most bizarre prisoners ever to be jailed in the New York Tombs was its first Chinese inmate, the berserk killer, Lee Ah Bow, known to the police as Quimby Appo. He was not, as some historians have claimed, the first Chinese in New York. The first Chinese settlers were those artisans stranded when their showboat, the junk Ki Ying, caught fire while docked in the East River. The newly-arrived Chinese took lodging on Mott Street between Pell and Chatham, and the area became New York’s Chinatown. Appo, a murderer by temperament, arrived in New York from California as the personal slave of a landed gentleman. This was more than seven years after the Ki Ying group took up residence.

In no time at all, the unbalanced Appo attempted to kill a shopkeeper. He was booked for attempted murder in the summer of 1840. Female missionaries visited Appo in his cell, and he became their prime target for conversion to Christianity. With their help, Appo was released. In the next twenty years, the “Chinese Devilman” or “Devil Appo,” as the press dubbed him, was arrested at least a dozen times for assaults and attempts to commit homicide. On Mar. 9, 1859, Appo attacked three women in his boarding house. One of these females was his mistress, who made the mistake of serving him a cold dinner. He stabbed her. When another woman rushed into the apartment, Appo drove a dirk into her heart.

Racing down a back stairs, Appo’s escape route was blocked by the stout landlady. She turned her back on him and he promptly stabbed her in the buttock. Police arrived and carted the Devilman off to The Tombs, where he was scheduled to hang for murder. The persistent missionaries mounted a campaign to save their religious pet and convinced authorities to reduce his sentence to seven years, which he served in constant anger. He would bite the hands of jailers as they shoved his food through the bars. He screamed for hours on end. He spat at Warden Fallon and tried to claw anyone who recklessly got too close to his cell. Somehow, Appo’s savage behavior only further endeared him to the missionaries.

Upon his release, the Devilman promptly stabbed his landlady, Lizzie Williams. Through a lawyer provided by the missionaries, Appo was again released. There was no end to the liberties Appo took with his fellow creatures. Drunk one day in 1872, the Devilman dug up a large cobblestone from the street and crashed it down upon the head of one John Linkowski. With one blow, the diminutive Chinese had dashed the man’s brains out. Again, he was thrown into the Tombs, and again the religious zealots got him released. Appo was about to take up the cross, they doggedly insisted.

Instead, Appo took up another dirk and drove it into Cork Maggie, a Bowery whore. Since she survived the attack, the missionaries pointed out to police, there was no sense in prosecuting. The Devilman was not even taken into custody. A year later, on Oct. 21, 1876, this fierce little man jumped up from a card game and plunged a dagger several times into the chest of one John Kelly, whom he accused of cheating him. This time, authorities sent Appo to Matteawan, the state prison for the insane, the same prison which later housed the notorious train robber Oliver Curtis Perry and millionaire murderer Harry K. Thaw.

The Devilman never left this prison. He would endlessly stare from his cell window and, upon seeing the searchlight of the Hudson River Nightboat, would scream: “Here comes my diamond!” Officials at the institute reported that Appo “believes that he has grand hotels, palaces, servants and horses outside the asylum; that he is King of the World and Omnipotent, the Second God; commands the wind and the sun; that Tom Sharkey and General Coxey are his military staff and that he must suffer for Ireland.” The Devilman suffered for ninety-eight years before being buried on the grounds at Matteawan on June 23, 1912.

 

Archer-Gilligan, Amelia (AKA: Sister Amy), 1869-1928, U.S. Archer-Gilligan, or Sister Amy, as she was called by the charges of her nursing home in Windsor, Conn., was a marrying murderer who had the dubious distinction of being blessed by the unwitting relatives of her victims. Establishing a nursing home in Windsor in 1901, Archer-Gilligan began taking in old men whom she promptly married after their wills had been signed over to her. Five of these unsuspecting elderly gentlemen perished soon after the nuptials, all of them poisoned, it was later determined, over a period of fourteen years. In addition to these victims, Sister Amy also murdered at least a dozen other persons, elderly women who were entrusted to her nursing home, but only after each had drawn up new wills which made her the sole beneficiary. Relatives incredibly approved of such measures after listening to Sister Amy tell them that it was the only way in which she could be compensated for taking care of the old people since her monthly rates were bargain cheap. Of course, the patients did not live long enough to cause a severe drain on Sister Amy’s coffers. Usually a new patient at Sister Amy’s home lasted but a few short months before Archer-Gilligan helped them into eternity by poisoning their food. A few she suffocated with pillows and chalked up their deaths to heart failure, the death certificates signed by a senile doctor who merely wrote down the causes of death as Sister Amy described them.

This convenient murder factory became suspect when a relative learned that an elderly aunt had died only a few days after she had been placed in Sister Amy’s home and only hours after the woman’s will had been signed over to Sister Amy. The relative did some investigating and then went to officials to prove that the death rate at the Archer-Gilligan home was ten times higher than at other homes for the aged. Police placed an undercover agent in the home who witnessed the scheming Archer-Gilligan administering poison to some of the patients. Sister Amy was arrested by the policewoman and was tried and convicted of murder in 1914, sent to Weathersfield Prison to serve a life term. She began to have nervous fits and, after she tried to poison the warden and several turnkeys, Sister Amy Archer-Gilligan was sent to an insane asylum, kept in a padded, locked cell until 1928 when she died.

 

Armistead, Norma Jean, 1930- , U.S. In October 1974, Nurse Armistead of the Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles quietly sneaked into the medical records section where she scribbled an entry into the ledger, a false pregnancy, her own. It was unusual but not impossible that a childless 44-year-old woman should suddenly become pregnant. There were more than a few sneering comments made by hospital personnel, but soon the matter was forgotten.

On May 15, 1975, Armistead paid a social call on 28-year-old Kathryn Viramontes in her Van Nuys apartment. The younger woman was completing her own term of pregnancy when she was suddenly accosted by knife-wielding Armistead, who was not interested in the family valuables or any cash hidden about the house. She slashed her victim in the throat and then performed a crude but successful caesarean section to extricate the living infant from the womb of the dead woman. Armistead checked herself into the hospital a few hours later and informed the doctors that she had given birth to the boy prematurely at home. It was not long afterward that the true facts of this bizarre murder came to light.

Ajury later convicted Norma Jean of first-degree murder after declaring her to be legally sane when she took the knife to Viramontes.

 

Armstrong, Herbert Rowse, 1870-1922, Brit., Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong was a small, mousey-looking man whose wife Katherine Mary Armstrong henpecked him from morning to night. Armstrong had been a major during WWI and he insisted that he be addressed by the rank with which he retired. The only authority he really possessed was titular and his dominating wife stripped him of even that by ridiculing his military experiences. The couple lived comfortably with their three children in a cottage in Cusop Dingle closed to the border of Wales-England. The quiet and dignified Armstrong worked as a solicitor in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. When Katherine Armstrong wasn’t picking at her husband’s habits, she was complaining about her constantly failing health as do most dedicated hypochondriacs. To neighbors and friends Armstrong appeared to take the constant nagging and scolding with good-natured tolerance but he secretly seethed at the humiliation heaped upon him by his unbearable wife, so much so that he put into action a plan he was sure would allow him to get away with murder.

In the spring of 1920, Armstrong began spending all his extra time killing weeds about his cottage area, purchasing considerable quantities of arsenic to eliminate the unwanted growth. In July of that year, Mrs. Armstrong made out a will in which she left all her earthly possessions to her mild-mannered husband. Some weeks later, Katherine Armstrong was having so many delusions and visions that she was removed to an asylum where she was certified as insane. While his wife languished in the asylum, Armstrong began taking short vacation trips to London and, when at home, made a great show of practicing his hobby of weed-killing. At the turn of the year, Mrs. Armstrong made an amazing recovery which allowed her to return home but she soon grew ill and, on Feb. 22, 1921, she succumbed to illness. The cause of death was attributed to a combination of heart disease and gastritis. Major Armstrong grieved briefly, entering a terse comment in his diary, “K died.”

Armstrong seemed to take his wife’s death with relative calm. In fact, in the months that followed, his normally withdrawn personality seemed to grow more aggressive. He took many vacations to London and suddenly took a great interest in his lackluster business, going after clients with confirmed zeal. His chief rival in the town of Hay was a solicitor named Oswald Norman Martin who received in the mail a box of chocolates from an unknown person. Martin thought this to be a small favor from one of his clients who wished to remain anonymous and he later served the chocolates to a dinner guest who became violently ill only minutes later. The chocolates were turned over to a toxicologist who determined that they had been injected with arsenic. The solicitor was baffled as to who might send him such a lethal gift. Then on Oct. 26, 1921, in response to an invitation, Martin went to Armstrong’s home to take tea. Armstrong chatted casually while the two men sipped their tea, then reached for a buttered scone on a nearby plate but instead of eating this himself, handed it to his guest, saying, “excuse my fingers.” The crude manner of serving was overlooked by Martin who attributed such conduct as typical of an aging bachelor who had just been widowed. He ate the scone and later was taken violently ill.

Dr. Thomas Hincks, who had attended Armstrong’s wife and had had reservations about the manner of her death, was summoned to Martin’s home to treat the ailing solicitor. Hincks was concerned over Martin’s erratic pulse which would not be the normal result of stomach disease. He sent a sample of the solicitor’s urine to a clinic for analysis and received a report that it contained a substantial amount of arsenic. Police, now suspicious of Armstrong after reading reports from Dr. Hincks, encouraged the badly frightened Martin to continue his acquaintence with Armstrong. Martin was sent a barrage of invitations from Armstrong to have another tea with him but he nervously found one excuse after another to postpone the lethal appointment. When the solicitor could stand the game no more, he insisted that the police act. Investigators had been attempting to put a case together against the polite little major but were unsure of their case. They finally gave Martin relief by arresting Armstrong on Dec. 31, 1921, charging him with the attempted murder of Martin. A short time later, detectives obtained permission to exhume Mrs. Armstrong’s body which was carefully examined by Scotland Yard’s forensic bloodhound, Dr. Bernard Spilsbury, who found the remains of Katherine Armstrong filled with arsenic.

Armstrong was now charged with his wife’s murder, in addition to his attempt on Martin’s life, and placed on trial on Apr. 3, 1922, at the Hereford Assizes, appearing before Justice Darling and prosecuted by Attorney General Sir Ernest Pollock. Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, one of the ablest criminal lawyers in England, defended Major Armstrong with the argument that Mrs. Armstrong had committed suicide by taking arsenic, such was her mental condition at the end. This claim was countered by Pollock when he produced a nurse who had been present at Katherine Armstrong’s deathbed and quoted the victim in court as having said, “I have everything to live for–my husband and my children.” This was not the comment of a suicidally bent woman. Further, Armstrong, who conducted himself with impressive ease while in the dock, seemed to incur the emnity of Justice Darling who personally questioned the diminutive major several times. The most damning evidence was a packet of arsenic which had been found on Armstrong by officers who arrested him and from whom he appeared to be hiding the poison. He later claimed that this was but a small packet of poison he had put together, blending poison and other substances, to kill dandelions. Police found twenty packets of arsenic which Armstrong had put together which puzzled Lord Darling and he inquired why Major Armstrong would take the trouble to make separate doses of the poison instead of merely sprinkling the whole supply of arsenic throughout the weed-infested area.

“I really do riot know,” Armstrong replied to Justice Darling. “At the time it seemed the most convenient way of doing it.” His indecisive response further damned the solicitor in the eyes of those who believed him guilty of killing his wife. Moreover, only nineteen dandelions were counted in the weed patch and Armstrong had prepared twenty packets of poison. It was assumed that the extra packet was to be used on Armstrong’s rival, Oswald Martin. Also weighing heavily against the major was the testimony of a physician testifying for the prosecution who insisted that he had examined Armstrong and that the prim-and-proper major was suffering from advanced stages of a sexually-transmitted disease which he had apparently contracted following his wife’s death. This evidence doomed the man in the dock perhaps more than anything else since he had postured himself as a man of high morals and great scruples. Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong was found Guilty of having poisoned to death his wife and sentenced to death. The poisoner was hanged on May 31, 1922.

The Armstrong case reminded the public of another sensational murder trial against another solicitor, Harold Greenwood, also from Wales, who was charged with poisoning his wife with arsenic in 1920, but who had been acquitted. It was speculated during Armstrong’s trial that he had read about the Greenwood acquittal and believed that he could poison his own wife and, if charged, would be released as had Greenwood, convinced that his social position, his military rank, and his occupation as a solicitor would put him above suspicion and beyond conviction. Ironically, Greenwood wrote a series of articles for John Bull magazine duringArmstrong’s trial in which Greenwood described in bemoaning detail what it was like to be tried for murder. If indeed, Major Armstrong had been inspired by reading about the celebrated Greenwood case a year before he murdered his wife, he may have dug deeper into the history of murder and located the case of Cordelia Botkin, who mailed poisoned chocolates to one of her rivals twenty-some years earlier in America. Botkin’s murder ploy may have also inspired Armstrong to dispose of his business rival, the hapless Oswald Martin.

 

Arrington, Marie Dean, 1935- , U.S. In his capacity as the public defender of Leesburg, Fla., Robert Pierce was well acquainted with Arrington. He represented her teen-aged son and daughter when they stood trial for armed robbery and forgery in 1968. The outcome of these two separate trials did not please Arrington–herself an exconvict who was free on bond while awaiting sentencing for the shooting death of her husband in 1964. The anger the black woman felt toward the public defender festered until Apr. 22, 1968, when she put on her best new outfit and took a cab down to Pierce’s private office. To her dismay, the object of her vendetta was not in, just a 37-year-old secretary, Vivian Ritter. Later that afternoon Pierce returned to find Ritter gone. It was not like her to just walk out. Never once during her thirteen-year employment had the pretty brunette done such a thing. The police were immediately notified. Within hours several witnesses volunteered the information that Ritter and an unidentified black woman had been observed leaving the building together, but they were not walking side by side. It was quickly surmised that Ritter had been forcibly taken from the building, perhaps at gunpoint.

Six days later the shotgunned remains of Ritter were found. There was strong evidence that suggested she had been senselessly tortured before her death. Arrington was picked up shortly afterward by Florida police. She was convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of Ritter and sentenced to die in the electric chair. A twenty-year prison sentence for the 1964 murder of her husband was tacked on by the courts.

Before her execution could be carried out, Arrington escaped from the women’s prison in Lowell, Fla., on Mar. 1, 1969. Her name was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted List and she remained a fugitive for nearly three years. There was some talk in Leesburg that a vigilante group located Marie Dean and had taken her into the swamps where Vivian Ritter was avenged. This was not the case, however. The murderer was captured in New Orleans in 1971 by FBI agents.

 

Atlanta Children Murders, See: Williams, Wayne Bertram.

 

Attebery, Ira (Attebury), 1915-79, U.S. For three years, Attebery regularly attended the annual Battle of the Flowers Parade in San Antonio, capping off a week-long fiesta celebration. The 64-year-old retired trucker lived in a small trailer park not far from the parade route, and tended to keep to himself. “I thought it was strange that he went to parades since he had little to do with people,” said Kate Copeland, the manager of the trailer park where Attebery lived until he went berserk on Apr. 27, 1979. “He was a loner,” she added.

The self-styled parade aficionado lined up, by police estimate, six automatic rifles and enough bullet clips to supply a military arsenal. Near the intersection of Broadway and Grayson, Attebery began firing wildly into a crowd of 4,500 parade spectators through a window in his trailer home. “He would expose himself, fire, and then duck. The total gunfire lasted about thirty minutes, and it was another thirty minutes before we found him dead,” said Captain Patrick Nichols of the San Antonio police. To the police officers standing in the middle of the parade route, Attebery yelled “Traitors! Traitors!”

Before he turned the gun on himself, Attebery killed two people and wounded fifty more. Blood samples taken from the dead man’s body revealed the presence of the drug PCP, known in the streets as “angel dust,” a deadly drug recently banned in Texas because of the unpredictable, occasionally suicidal behavior it brought on in addicts.

Attebery went berserk under the delusion that the police were chasing him because of a 1971 trucking accident he was involved in that killed two women. On at least one previous occasion he had contacted the police seeking psychiatric help. “I would have been very happy if police had brought the man here,” said Robert Pugh, director of the county mental health department. “But unless the man was willing to come and was in violation of a law, the police could not have brought him in.”

 

Aulisio, Joseph, 1966- , U.S. Aulisio liked to tinker with automobiles. His friends and schoolmates expected him to become a mechanic, like many other high school boys in the small town of Old Forge, Lackawanna County, Pa. By all accounts, he was a model student, loyal, obedient, and helpful, according to his principal Walter Ermolovich, who also knew the boy’s father Robert, a biology teacher in the school.

Problems started when the Aulisios’ youngest child died in its third month. Relations between family members became strained, ending in the parents’ divorce. Joseph’s school work declined, and he began cutting classes. He grew sullen and withdrawn, to the dismay of his parents, still engaged in the bitter divorce suit. His unhappiness finally culminated in murder on July 26, 1981, when the dark-haired youth abducted 8-year-old Cheryl Ziemba and her brother Christopher Ziemba, four, from their home on the outskirts of Scranton. Two days later their two bodies were found in an abandoned strip mine, shotgunned to death.

Aulisio was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair, which caused protest among opponents of capital punishment. “We’re reading more and more about vicious crimes by younger and younger people,” countered Judge James Walsh of the Lackawanna County Common Pleas Court. “Incidents like that are causing a lot of people to say that if they are guilty of adult criminal activity they should be subject to adult punishment.” In 1982 Aulisio was the youngest offender to sit on death row in a U.S. prison. During the long appeals process he was transferred to the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon where he currently resides.

 

Austin, Alice, and Simmons, Ted, and Scott, Ira, prom. 1930s, U.S. Alice and Earl Austin of Hardin County, Ill., were in the middle of a bitter divorce. Earl Austin was suing Alice for desertion; she had run away with a local swain, Ted Simmons. Alice countersued Earl, charging him with adultery, and named Lacene McDowell as the other woman. The divorce action raged on until Alice Austin decided that waiting for drawn-out divorce proceedings to bring her a proper financial settlement was a waste of time. She and her lover, Ted Simmons, thinking to cash in on a life insurance policy on Earl Austin’s life (still signed over to Alice), planned to murder the estranged husband. They plotted his death in many schemes but finally went to Ira Scott, a farmer with a knack for putting mechanical things together–in this case a bomb–requested by his two eager clients. Scott fashioned an infernal machine and placed this in Earl Austin’s car.

On Mar. 20, 1939, Earl Austin and Lacene McDowell got into Earl’s car to go for a drive along the rural roads of Hardin County. An hour later a terrific explosion rocked the car as it sped along, blowing away the floorboards and sending the car careening off the road and into a ditch. Both Earl Austin and Lacene McDowell were blown skyward at the moment of the blast, flying more than twenty feet into the air. Austin was dead within seconds but Miss McDowell, with one leg blown off, managed to linger for an hour. She remained unconscious and could tell State’s Attorney Clarence E. Soward nothing before she died. Soward, however, was aware of the violent divorce action between Austin and his wife Alice and knew that Alice’s sweetheart, Simmons, had openly threatened Earl Austin. He interviewed both Alice and Ted Simmons. Both expressed their profound regrets at the deaths of Earl Austin and McDowell, adding that they were with a group of people when the car blew up. The matter rested in limbo for some weeks until police received a tip that a local farmer, Ira Scott, had been acting nervously when going into town to buy some grain. Scott had purchased more items than his meager earnings would normally allow which also aroused suspicions.

When Scott was confronted by Soward, he broke down immediately, blurting, “I didn’t mean to (kill them). I didn’t know that there was going to be anybody in the car. Alice and Ted Simmons gave me fifty dollars to bomb it for the insurance. They didn’t tell me that there would be anyone in it.” He went on to say that he thought Alice and Ted wanted to collect insurance on the car, an implausible statement. Further, if no one was to be in the car, Scott failed to adequetly explain why he had set the timing device of the bomb on a delayed mechanism so that it would only go off after the car had been driven for about an hour after it had been started. His statements were downright idiotic in that his defense was built upon the car being driven by itself. By his own admission, Scott had run the fuse from the dynamite back into the exhaust manifold and this would have been impossible to ignite unless someone was indeed driving the auto. Simmons and Austin continued to deny their guilt when all three were later tried. All were found Guilty and each received a fourteen-year sentence.

 

Avril, Robert, 1911- , Fr. Avril, a common laborer with a miserable childhood, habitually attacked and raped women and, eventually, the attacks turned into murder. On Aug. 28, 1955, the body of a young woman was found in some tall grass off the roadway near the small village of Picquigny, between Amiens and Abbeville in northern France. The victim’s clothes were in disarray and a band of white on her suntanned wrist showed police that the woman’s wristwatch had been stolen. An English-made bicycle was found nearby along with some clothing that had been torn out of the bag fixed to the bicycle’s rack. A check of the area disclosed that a 23-year-old school teacher named Janet Marshall from Nottingham, England, had registered in a nearby youth hostel the previous evening. The body was identified as Marshall and a search for her killer ensued. Police discovered that Marshall had stopped at a cafe in Picquigny on the morning of August 26 to have breakfast. Detectives, led by Inspector Henri Van Asche, concluded that the woman had been waylaid by one of the common laborers who worked in the area and they interrogated several men without charging anyone. Local residents described one particular laborer who had a brutal face and had been seen to watch Janet Marshall as she pedalled out of the village of Picquigny. A composite sketch was made of the suspect and this was circulated throughout the area. The circular also mentioned a rather unusual detail concerning this laborer; he was missing three fingers on his left hand.

Five months after the murder of Janet Marshall, Robert Avril, a 44-year-old laborer, was arrested, charged with stealing a bicycle. He was brought before Judge Jean DeTraux in Amiens. The judge took one look at Avril and then remembered the police composite that had been circulated in the Marshall slaying. He looked at the composite and realized that it bore an amazing resemblance to the man who stood before him. He asked Avril to hold up his left hand. Three fingers were missing. DeTraux asked Avril where he was on Aug. 26, 1955, and the laborer quickly, all too quickly for the judge, replied that he had been visiting his sister in Sucy-in-Brie. DeTraux also knew from police reports that Janet Marshall’s German-made camera, along with her wristwatch, had been taken following her murder. When police visited Avril’s sister she said that her brother had visited at the end of August and had left a camera with her. This proved to be Marshall’s camera. Moreover, articles of clothing belonging to the victim were found in Avril’s lodging. He was interrogated and confessed to having killed the school teacher, saying that he, at first, only thought to have sex with her but then he strangled her with a piece of string when she resisted. He insisted that he did not rape the woman but fled from the scene, stealing her watch, camera, and some small pieces of clothing.

At his trial in Amiens in May 1958, Avril recanted his original confession and was allowed to play to the sympathy of the jury by relating in detail his sad childhood. He described how he had lost his fingers at age seven in an accident, how his mother died when he was still a child, and that his father committed suicide after it was revealed that he had had incestuous relations with Avril’s older sister. In court, Avril also insisted that he had left Janet Marshall in an unconscious condition, that she was not dead and that someone else probably came along and murdered her after he fled. Against these self-defensive statements stood Avril’s long history of attacks on women. In April 1944, Avril had stopped along a roadway to help 22-year-old Madeleine Thiery remove some dust from her eye. He had then dragged her into some woods, raped her, and stole three pounds of butter from her. In June 1944 Avril attacked a 19-year-old girl and the following month he attacked and raped another 19-year-old girl and a 56-year-old woman, then another young girl some days later, this last victim escaping before Avril could drag her into a clump of bushes. In all these attacks, the victims had been on bicycles which Avril kicked out from under them as they pedaled past him, disabling them so that he could easily drag them off and compel them to have sex with him. He was arrested for these rapes in 1944 but not convicted until 1946 when Avril was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. He was released in 1951 and resumed his attacks on helpless women, culminating in his murder of Janet Marshall.

Every piece of evidence in the Avril case pointed to the man’s guilt, and it was further claimed by the presiding judge, Jean Bourdon, that Avril had denounced members of the Resistance to the dreaded Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of France. This was vehemently denied by the accused. Inspector Van Asche testified that Avril, when first arrested, told police, “I killed her (Janet Marshall) without meaning to.” Though the energetic Public Prosecutor Max Dussert argued long and hard for a death sentence, Avril escaped the guillotine. The jury deliberated his case for thirty-five minutes and then returned a verdict of Guilty “with extenuating circumstances,” meaning that Avril’s awful childhood had contributed mightily to his attitude toward women, and he was therefore not wholly responsible for his awful murder of young Janet Marshall. The killer was sentenced to life at hard labor with no chance of parole.