Baekeland, Antony, 1946-81, Brit. Barbara Baekeland’s relationship with her son Antony bordered on obsession. On Nov. 17, 1972, Tony murdered his adoring mother at their lavish London penthouse.
Antony Baekeland, great grandson of the “father of modern plastics” and heir to the family fortune, was a troubled youth with homosexual tendencies. When he was twenty-one his parents separated. While living with his mother, Tony began experimenting with LSD. After he stabbed Barbara in the London penthouse, he placed an order for Chinese food just as the Chelsea detectives arrived. His trial began at the Old Bailey on June 6, 1973, and it was a sensational one, highlighted by rumors of incest between Barbara and her son. Witnesses told how the former movie star desired to “cure” her son of his homosexuality. Tony Baekeland, was convicted of manslaughter under the “diminished responsibility” statute in British law. He was sent to Broadmoor, where he remained for the next seven years. In July 1980, Tony was discharged from custody and flown to New York to live with his grandmother Nina Fraser Daly. A week later, Baekeland assaulted the elderly woman with a knife because she refused to “quit nagging him.” Mrs. Daly survived the attack, but criminal charges were filed, and once again the young heir found himself behind bars, this time on Riker’s Island. It was there that Tony Baekeland ended his life, on Mar. 21, 1981.
Bagg, Arthur Richard, 1914- , S. Afri. On Nov. 23, 1937, Arthur Richard Bagg, a 23-year-old South African, savagely stabbed his 17-year-old lover in a fit of jealousy and rage and later dumped her mutilated body under a viaduct on Oaklands Atholl Road outside Johannesburg. He was taken in for questioning several days after the partially-clothed body of Marjorie Patricia Rosebrook was found stabbed twice in the breast with a small knife.
Bagg became a prime suspect three days later when, during questioning, his accounts of his activities on the day of Rosebrook’s murder did not correspond to those given by witnesses who had seen the two lovers together that day. After several attempts by Sub-Inspector U.R. Boberg to compel him to tell the truth, Bagg finally broke down and confessed to the murder. He later re-enacted the events of that day, taking detectives to the site of the crime and explaining his actions in detail.
Although Bagg had confessed, police were unable to locate the murder weapon and several articles of clothing missing from the dead girl’s body. They repeatedly scoured the sites where Bagg claimed he disposed of them, but turned up nothing. After threatening to search his house, Bagg agreed to lead police to the missing items.
Bagg, described as somewhat eccentric, was an artist interested in mysticism and the occult. Unknown to anyone was his special affinity for the legendary vampire, Count Dracula. Bagg worshipped him and frequently conducted ritualistic services in his honor. He led police to the site of these rituals–a secret earthen chamber located below the floor of his bedroom. A trapdoor hidden underneath the linoleum provided access to the chamber, where police discovered the murder weapon and the missing bloodstained clothing. In addition, they found a piece of leather with writing carved into it: “I hereby befile (sic) the living God and serve only the Dark One, Dracula; to serve him faithfully so I may become one of his faithful servants.” It was signed by Bagg.
Bagg’s trial began on Feb. 28, 1938. During his testimony, he changed his confession and claimed the girl had committed suicide and that he was covering up for her with his earlier confession. The jury failed to believe him, and, after slightly less than two hours of deliberation, they returned a verdict of Guilty. Justice Saul Solomon sentenced Bagg to death, the maximum punishment for his crime, but this was later reduced to life imprisonment based on psychiatric evaluations of his mental state. Bagg was released in 1947 after serving only nine years of his sentence.
Bailey, George Arthur, d.1921, Brit. The January 1921 murder trial of George Arthur Bailey was the first murder trial in England in which women served on a jury. After the four-day trial was over, the three women jurors helped convict Bailey for the poisoning murder of his wife. He was sentenced to death and executed on Mar. 2, 1921.
Bailey, Raymond (AKA: Ray Carter), d.1958, Aus. Raymond Bailey was driving a DeSoto sedan with his wife on the Alice Springs-Port Augusta Highway in South Australia on Dec. 6, 1957. In the middle of the night, Bailey left his caravan, carrying with him a Huntsman single-shot rifle. He used it on Thyra Bowman, her 15-year-old daughter Wendy, and their friend Tom Whelan, who had set up camp for the night in the wilderness.
The Bowmans were on their way to Adelaide when they were overtaken by Bailey. Their bodies were located by an aerial search party looking for their missing automobile. Near their campfire several .22-caliber shell casings were found which matched the rifle found in Bailey’s possession. In Kulgera, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a DeSoto sedan. The car was spotted on Jan. 21, 1958, by Constable Glen Hallahan at Mount Isa in Queensland.
When questioned by police, Bailey said his name was Carter. He could not, however, explain a concealed .32-caliber handgun sewn under the front seat of his car. The suspect finally confessed to the shootings, but changed his story four times. Bailey was extradited to Adelaide and tried for murder. Deliberations opened on May 12, 1958, Sir Geoffrey Reed presiding. Less than eight days later the jury returned a verdict of Guilty. The death sentence was imposed within minutes, and Bailey was executed at the Adelaide Jail on June 24.
Ball, Edward, 1917- , Ire. Though the body of 55-year-old Vera Ball was never found, her son Edward was tried and convicted of her murder. Mrs. Ball was the wife of a Dublin physician. Following their separation, she lived with her 19-year-old son in Boosterstown, a suburb of Dublin. On the morning of Feb. 18, 1936, a newspaper delivery man stopped to investigate an automobile parked on an odd angle in Shankill, County Dublin. He found traces of blood on the front seat.
Identifying the car as belonging to Mrs. Ball, police went to the Boosterstown home. Here they were greeted by Edward Ball, who said he had last seen his mother the previous evening. Police searched the house, turning up several items of bloody clothing and discovering a large stain on his mother’s bedroom rug, none of which Ball could explain. When pressed further, he said his mother had suffered a recent bout of depression and had killed herself with a straight razor. Ball said he found her dead in her room, took the body to Shankill, and threw it into the sea.
His explanation did not convince the police, however, and Ball was charged with murdering his mother. Police believed he used a hatchet found in the garden, covered with blood. He was convicted of murder, but the jury also declared him insane. The judge ordered Ball detained at the discretion of the local governor-general.
Ball, Eli, prom. 1919, U.S. On Feb. 19, 1919, Ball murdered his sister Lilly Billings, and her husband Abe Billings, as they tried to remove furniture from the rural Kentucky home that had been willed to him by his sister, Nell Washam, when she died the previous year. Lilly Billings maintained that she was entitled to some of the farm’s furnishings, as it had all been inherited from the family by Nell when her parents died. Ball served several years in a state penitentiary for the murders, but was released to return to the homestead in Bear River Valley, Ky.
Ball, George (AKA: George Sumner), 1892-1914, Brit. The 22-year-old Ball worked as a clerk in the shop of John Bradfield in Liverpool. He was assisted by a dim-witted 18-year-old, Samuel Angeles Eltoft. The shop’s manager was 40-year-old Christine Catherine Bradfield, a hard taskmaster who was known to neighbors as a kindly person. She tolerated no nonsense in the shop which sold tarpaulins manufactured by John, her brother, and she was forever prodding Ball, who was known as George Sumner by his employers. On the night of Dec. 10, 1913, Walter Musker Eaves, a ship’s steward who was waiting for his girlfriend in Old Hall Street and who was standing directly in front of Bradfield’s, suddenly had his new hat knocked off his head when one of the shop’s shutters blew off. The shop appeared dark but within a few minutes Eltoft appeared and picked up the shutter. Eaves showed him his hat and demanded that he be paid for the damage done to his bowler by the shutter. Eltoft politely asked him to wait and soon emerged with Ball who courteously paid Eaves two shillings for the creases made in the hat.
Eaves was still in Old Hall Street when, a short time later, both Ball and Eltoft appeared, pushing a tarpaulin-covered cart with considerable effort up the street, and disappearing around the corner. The next day Eaves read a newspaper report about a woman’s body being found in the Leeds-Liverpool canal by a bargeman who had fished the body, sewn into a sack, out of the canal. The steward went to the police who had just escorted John Bradfield from the morgue. Bradfield had also responded to the newspaper report when his sister had failed to return home from the shop and he had identified the body, telling officers that he had no idea who would want to murder his sister.
Detective Inspector Duckworth of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), after interviewing neighbors and shop customers, realized that the only real suspects in the case were the two clerks, Ball and Eltoft. He decided to interview Eltoft first, realizing, when John Bradfield talked about the pair, that the younger clerk was impressionable and gullible. He waited until late on the night of Dec. 11, 1913, then forced his way into Eltoft’s room, startling the youth and grilling him so intensely that Eltoft blurted out the fact that his superior, George Ball, had bludgeoned Christine Bradfield to death. Ball hated her constant nagging and, after she ordered him to do something, he had suddenly exploded and crushed the woman’s head with an iron pipe, forcing Eltoft to help him dispose of the body. Duckworth, placing Eltoft under arrest, then raced to Bell’s boarding house but the young man had fled. His landlady later stated that Ball had returned home the night before and she had noticed bloody scratches on his face. He told her that he had received the injuries at the shop where he worked, adding: “It’s a rotten business.”
The scratches, coupled with some of Eltoft’s confusing statements later given in court, suggested that Ball had raped the spinster in a back room of the shop and she had scratched his face; in retaliation he had struck her on the head with the pipe.
The Liverpool police, despite a desperate search for Ball, were unable to locate him. Duckworth was struck with an inspiration. He was a movie fan who believed that the movie theaters springing up all over Liverpool could be of great service to the police in tracking down Ball. He had the fugitive’s photograph shown on all the screens of the theaters between features, running beneath the photo a title card which read: “GEORGE BALL, WANTED FOR MURDER, REWARD.” This was the first time that movies had been used in tracking down a wanted criminal, and the technique proved effective. Ball, who had moved and disguised himself, was identified by someone who had seen his photo in one of the theaters as he left a football match on Dec. 20, 1913. He was immediately arrested and tried in February 1914 at the Liverpool Assizes, Justice Atkin presiding. He was defended by Sir Alfred Tobin, who had been the lawyer for the notorious wife-killer, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. Prosecuting the case was Sir Gordon Hewart.
The trial was one-sided with Hewart utterly destroying the testimony of the nervous Ball who rattled off a fantastic story about “a tall chap with a dark brown mustache” who sprang from behind a pile of tarpaulins in the shop just before closing and attacked Christine Bradfield, killing her, then held a revolver on Ball and Eltoft, telling them that if they did not dispose of the body for him, he would kill them both. Hewart shredded this tale quickly, asking Ball why, when he went to the street to pay Eaves for the destruction of his hat, he did not ask the burly steward for help since, according to Ball’s own testimony, the killer was still in the shop at the time. Ball could only mutter: “I was afraid.” Moreover, Hewart pointed out that the victim had been carefully sewn into a tarpaulin sack with a system of stitching that was peculiar to the method used by Ball.
The jury returned a Guilty verdict, and Ball, as he was being dragged away by four warders, cried out: “I am innocent! Innocent!” He was sentenced to death and his dull-minded accomplice Eltoft was given a four-year prison sentence. When realizing that there would be no appeals or commutations, Ball confessed the murder of Christine Bradfield to the Bishop of Liverpool only hours before he was hanged at Walton Prison on Feb. 26, 1914. See: Crippen, Dr. Hawley Harvey.
Ball, Joseph (Joe), 1894-1938, U.S. Joseph Ball was a serial killer who murdered perhaps as many as twenty-five women. All of his victims were young and beautiful. Though Ball took their possessions and whatever money they had when he murdered his victims, his motive was love. He killed one woman after another, including his second and third wives, so that he would be able to devote his time to his next paramour. To Joe Ball, these murders were not without a utilitarian end; he chopped up his victims and fed them piecemeal to the five pet alligators he kept in a foul-smelling pool behind his inappropriately named gin mill, The Sociable Inn, located near Elmendorf, Texas. This Lone Star native was educated at the University of Texas but he found legitimate pursuits uninteresting and, at the dawn of Prohibition in 1920, he became a bootlegger, amassing a considerable fortune.
The young bootlegger worked hard at his illegal profession which confused his friends who knew that his wealthy family had offered Ball any number of lucrative positions in its vast holdings in cattle and commerce. He had turned all this down to go his own way. He bought a house in Elmendorf and operated out of here during the 1920s, selling flavored alcohol at $5 a gallon. Though the house was modern, Ball lived without the benefit of a cleaning lady, and he was always in an unkempt condition. He padded about in a dirty bathrobe when clients called to buy liquor and he spent most of his time in bed with beautiful young women, a bottle of booze, and a plate of fried chicken on the bed table at all times. His only greeting to customers was: “Got the cash?” When the client produced the necessary money, Ball whistled to his black handyman to bring forth the liquor shipment. Often as not the uncaring Ball returned to his bed and the arms of his lover, continuing his lovemaking, oblivious to the gaze of his caller.
Ball was a large, big-boned man, well over six feet, who was muscular but overweight, thanks to his ravenous eating habits. He was expert with a revolver and carried one with him at all times, on occasions whipping out this weapon and firing a practice shot or two to impress witnesses with his marksmanship. In the late 1920s, Ball opened his crudely appointed saloon, The Sociable Club, about fifty feet back from U.S. Highway 181. He developed a liking for alligators and bought five, placing them in a large cement pool behind his club. He would, after a night of drinking, take his best customers outside and amuse them by throwing large chunks of meat into the pool and hoot and holler as the roaring beasts jawed the food, their thrashing tails violently churning the murky water.
For the more sadistic of his friends, Ball arranged his own little horror shows. He kept stray dogs and cats in a pen near the pool and he would take these poor creatures out of the pen and hold them over the pool, teasing the always hungry reptiles and terrifying the animals. Tiring of the game, Ball would throw the strays into the pool where they would be torn apart by the alligators. As he brutalized these animals, he himself became more and more brutal. He shouted instead of talked and threatened anyone who disagreed with him. Yet Ball managed to keep employed a steady stream of beautiful barmaids, radiant young ladies he reportedly paid extremely well and all of whom, it was said, became his mistresses. These women came and went with alacrity which aroused the suspicions of a local constable and neighbor of Ball’s, especially when such favorites as Hazel Brown and Minnie Mae Gotthardt disappeared.
When asked by the constable why the girls had suddenly vanished, Ball exploded and pulled his revolver, shoving this into the constable’s face and threatening to kill him if he went on probing into his affairs. The constable, afraid for his life, did not report the incident. This was not the case with Texas Ranger Lee Miller. When relatives asked police to investigate the disappearance of Hazel Brown in the fall of 1938, Miller and several deputies went to Ball’s roadhouse. They entered the Sociable Inn on Sept. 24, 1938. Ball greeted them affably and then asked if they wanted some beers. “No, Joe, we’re here to have you answer some questions about Hazel Brown.”
The saloon keeper shrugged and then walked behind the bar. “Then, I’ll pour one for myself.” Instead of pouring a beer, Ball went to the cash register and opened the bottom drawer. He pulled out a revolver and the officers, thinking he was about to fire at them, pulled out their own guns and aimed these at Ball. The saloon owner gave them a crooked grin, then put the revolver to his temple and squeezed the trigger, blowing off the top of his head. Later, the deputies found hunks of human flesh floating in a water barrel behind the house, and in the pool where the alligators swirled, there was a trace of blood. Clifford Wheeler, the terrified handyman who worked for Ball, admitted that his employer had murdered many young women and two of his own wives, that he had witnessed Ball shoot one of his wives and his subsequent chopping up of her body and the feeding of her remains to his alligators. Wheeler said he did not dare say a word to authorities about Ball since his employer said he would kill him. He was given a four-year prison sentence as an accessory to murder.
No clear number of Ball’s victims was ever recorded but it was estimated that Joe Ball killed at least twenty women. Most of these young women had been impregnated by the killer and he murdered and dismembered them when they began to demand that he marry them. He did marry two of his victims, but he tired of these ladies and dispatched them to the alligator pool. “Joe, he weren’t no marrying man,” Wheeler told police.
Baniszewski, Gertrude Wright, 1929- , U.S. A native of Indianapolis, Ind., Gertrude Baniszewski lived with her three children Stephanie, Paula, and Johnny, surviving on a meager income. To make ends meet Baniszewski took in children for the summer to earn extra money. In 1965, Baniszewski agreed to board Sylvia Likens, sixteen, and her sister Jennie, fifteen. Jennie Likens would be no problem, the housewife believed since she was crippled and could get about very little. The parents of the two sisters worked in a circus and paid Baniszewski $20 a week to take care of their children. During the first week of their stay, the two girls were fed little, receiving a few slices of toast in the morning and no lunch. A bowl of soup was their only supper. At the end of the first week, Baniszewski dragged both girls to an upstairs room of the house and mercilessly beat them, screaming that she was boarding them “for nothin’!”
The hardened housewife, though receiving weekly payments from the Likens’ parents, resented having the two girls in her home and cursed them whenever they were in her presence. A deep-seated streak of sadism began to manifest itself whenever she was near them; she struck out at them, hitting them so hard that her hands stung from the impact, she later admitted. She reserved her most sadistic treatment for the older girl, Sylvia, whom she beat regularly and then took to paddling on the bare buttocks with a board that left scars. Baniszewski then began encouraging neighborhood children and her own offspring to beat the poor girl, who begged them to stop without relief. The housewife then ordered the other children to put out burning cigarettes on the girl’s arms and hands. One of Baniszewski’s children, Paula, whipped into a frenzy of hatred by her mother, beat Sylvia so hard that she broke her hand which had to be put into a cast. The Baniszewski girl then used the cast to beat Sylvia on the head.
Baniszewski then decided that Sylvia Likens was a whore and tied her up in the basement, releasing her only to beat her and then force her to dance naked in front of other children. Directing a dim-witted neighborhood boy, Ricky Hobbs, needles were heated and used to brand the girl’s stomach with the words: “I am a prostitute and proud of it.” This horrible torture completed, Baniszewski then released the full fiendish fury of her nature, beating the girl, slamming her head against the basement wall with such force that Sylvia Likens died from the blow. The housewife panicked and called police, telling them that Sylvia had run off with a gang of boys, then returned and was mutilated and killed by them; she had found the poor girl in her basement. Her young children repeated this story to investigating officer Melvin Dixon. As Dixon was about to leave, Jennie Likens hobbled forward and whispered to him: “Get me out of here and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
The officer took the girl away and quickly learned the truth about the vicious Gertrude Baniszewski. She was charged with murder and convicted, given a life sentence. Baniszewski won a new trial on appeal but was again convicted and sent back to prison to serve out a life term. In all of the many interviews conducted with this murdering sadist, the housewife has but one excuse for her slaying of a defenseless girl left in her care: “I had to teach her a lesson.”
Bankston, Clinton, Jr. (AKA: Junebug), 1971- , U.S. When it happened, everyone who knew him expressed the greatest surprise. “This all did shock me. He didn’t seem the type,” said Agnes Freeman, a neighbor in the Nellie B. Apartments of Athens, Ga., northeast of Atlanta. Clinton Bankston lived with his mother in this deteriorating section of Athens, an area of high unemployment and gang activity. Bankston was a high-school dropout who spent most of his time riveted to his television. His perceptions of the world were shaped by the images of violence on prime-time television.
On Aug. 15, 1987, Bankston committed a real-life crime so horrible and senseless that its barbarity eclipsed anything law enforcement officers of this small Georgia city had ever encountered.
Robbery was foremost in Bankston’s mind when he entered the home of Sally Nathanson in the fashionable Carr’s Hill section of Athens. Nathanson and her visiting sister, Ann Orr Morris, who lived in an adjacent house, were found dead. Her 22-year-old adopted daughter, Helen Nathanson, was later found lying dead in one of the bedrooms by police investigators. All three had been savagely butchered with a hatchet.
The mutilated bodies could be positively identified only through the efforts of the state crime lab in Atlanta. Athens Police Chief Everett Price conducted a thorough investigation and was able to link the murders of the three women to a similar crime committed against two elderly people the previous April. Items belonging to the earlier murder victims, Glenn and Rachel Sutton, had been found in the Bankston apartment. Bankston was arrested on Sunday morning near his grandmother’s house on Moreland Avenue.
District Attorney Harry Gordon urged the courts to try the 16-year-old Bankston as an adult for the murders of five people. The Supreme Court of Georgia, however, ruled that underage offenders convicted of murder could not receive the death penalty. Bankston pleaded guilty, citing insanity as his defense. On his seventeenth birthday, the quiet boy who liked to ride around the neighborhood on his bicycle received five consecutive life sentences.
Bannon, Charles, 1909-31, U.S. In 1931, Bannon became only the eighth white man to be lynched in North Dakota following his slaying of a rural family of six. Bannon worked as a hired hand on the farm of A.E. Haven near Shafer, N.D. In February 1930, Bannon slaughtered the six-member Haven family and buried their bodies in the barn. He continued to live on the farm for nine months during which time the murdered family was not missed. Bannon was apprehended in November when he attempted to sell some of the Haven livestock at a local market. He was questioned in the family’s disappearance and, after the bodies were found, charged with their murders. Bannon was lynched in February 1931.
Barber, Susan, prom. 1981, Brit. Barber was an Essex housewife engaged in a torrid love affair with her husband’s best friend in May 1981. Her lover’s name was Richard Collins, and the tryst had gone on for nearly eight months before the cuckolded husband came home unexpectedly one day to find them both in his bed. Michael Barber reacted violently. He beat his wife and threw Collins out of the house. But this did not cool his wife’s ardor.
The next day Susan slipped a deadly weed poison known as Gramoxone into his steak and kidney pie. In small doses, Gramoxone is deadly to humans. Death is brought on by fibrosis of the lungs, which makes breathing all but impossible.
Michael Barber was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital in London where he was diagnosed as suffering from pneumonia and kidney failure. Upon further examination doctors concluded that Barber was afflicted with Goodpasture’s Syndrome, a rare nervous disorder. After he died, a pathologist named David Evans conducted the post-mortem. He was not convinced that the cause of death was natural. Blood samples were taken and sent over to the National Poisons Unit and to the company which had manufactured the weed killer. A trace of paraquat, a toxic herbicide, was found in each instance. Based on this chemical analysis, Mrs. Barber and Richard Collins were arrested in April 1982 and charged with murder. Collins received two years’ imprisonment, and Susan Barber, who by this time was no longer interested in her former boyfriend, received a life sentence.
Bardlett, William, 1951- , U.S. Without an apparent reason a 25-year-old elevator repair man named William Bardlett borrowed his sister’s .22-caliber pistol and killed three family members on Nov. 25, 1976. The Thanksgiving Day tragedy on Chicago’s West Side was a grim reminder of the random violence plaguing big city ghettos.
In this case Bardlett murdered two nephews, 9-year-old Dwayne, and 2-year-old Cecil Jr., and his brother-in-law Cecil White, Sr. White and the two boys had gone to the Bardlett home to share a Thanksgiving dinner, believing that William was at work. Bardlett burst into the Harding Avenue apartment and shot White and his son before fleeing. Police later found the revolver underneath the body of the 2-year-old and spent shell casings strewn around the apartment. Officers from the Shakespeare Avenue Police District arrested the suspect at his sister’s residence when he stumbled in without warning during a routine interrogation.
Bardlett was brought before Judge William Cousins on Nov. 28, 1978, and charged with murder. He was declared unfit for trial, and the case continued. He appeared before Cousins again on May 29, 1979, and was remanded to the Department of Mental Health for a fitness hearing. On Nov. 6, Cousins ruled him Not Guilty by reason of insanity in a bench trial. However, in a separate ruling handed down on Dec. 17, the court found the defendant not in need of hospital treatment but decided that he should visit the Isaac Ray Center for periodic mental health checkups. William Bardlett was back on the streets.
Barlow, Kenneth, 1919- , Brit. Elizabeth Barlow was pronounced dead in her bathroom on May 3, 1957, by a doctor called to her home at Thornbury Crescent, Bradford. He had been summoned by Kenneth Barlow, Elizabeth’s husband, who told the physician that he discovered his wife in the bathtub, her head beneath the water. He had tried artificial respiration, he said, but it did no good. At first authorities believed that the dead woman, known to be ill and in a weakened condition, had suffered an accidental death, but the doctor who first examined the body took note that the dead woman’s eyes were dilated. Also, at a later postmortem, several injection marks on the buttocks of the corpse were detected. Officials found hypodermic syringes in the Barlow residence, but this was not considered unusual since Barlow was a male nurse.
Police were suspicious from the beginning, noting that the pajamas Barlow had been wearing when the doctor arrived were not wet, in spite of his claim of seizing the dripping body and giving it artificial respiration. Also, detectives calculated, a drowning person would make some sort of splashing movement that would soak the floor about the bathtub, but the floor was dry when the doctor first arrived. Barlow was charged with murdering his wife, but he insisted that he loved her, saying that he did not have a reason in the world to kill her. (It was later learned that Barlow’s first wife had died less than two years earlier at the young age of thirty-three, but her death had been attributed to natural causes; this death was never revealed in Barlow’s trial.)
At Barlow’s trial before Justice Diplock at the Leeds Assizes, the most damning statements came from Harry Stork, who had worked with Barlow two years earlier. He recalled how Barlow had boasted of discovering the perfect murder weapon, an injection of insulin which would quickly be dissolved in the bloodstream and be undetectable. Moreover, authorities at St. Luke’s Hospital in Huddersfield where Barlow worked, reported that three ampoules of ergotamine had been discovered missing from the medical supplies. Involved statements from medical authorities then argued whether or not insulin was injected into the dead woman, although some traces were found in the body, according to one report. The defense, headed by Bernard Gillis, countered that Elizabeth Barlow, realizing that she was drowning, and in a state of utter panic, released a massive discharge of insulin into her own bloodstream. The prosecution made short work of this preposterous and obviously desperate claim by quickly proving that, for the dead woman to have done so, her pancreas would have had to produce in seconds more than 15,000 units, a physical impossibility.
It was Barlow’s own darkly jocular talk with patients and nurses about the perfect murder that eventually brought him down. In addition to Stork, a nurse named Waterhouse at East Riding General Hospital, told the court how Barlow explained that insulin could kill a person without a trace. Barlow had also told a patient, Arthur Evans, then at Northfield Sanitorium in Driffield, Yorkshire, where Barlow was then working, that he could inject insulin into someone and that no one would ever know that this was the cause of death since it could not be traced. The jury stayed out for only a short while before returning to find Barlow Guilty. He was sent to prison for life.
Bartlett, Helen, prom. 1959, U.S. After her first husband died in 1940, Helen met Alfred Babin. They were married during the war and lived together until his death in 1956. Helen Babin discovered his body. She notified the police, explaining that she had found him in his bath lying face down. During the day, she said, Alfred had been drinking heavily. The coroner reported that Mrs. Babin’s story was indeed true because a large quantity of whiskey had been found in his stomach. Husband number two left behind a $69,000 insurance policy.
During her short period of grief, Babin met 69-year-old Wright Bartlett, a veteran with an assured income of disability payments, who was recuperating from a long illness at the Veterans Hospital. They were married in 1959, and, at his wife’s suggestion, Bartlett agreed to go on a long honeymoon to Texas and Florida. By this time insurance investigators became suspicious of Helen’s motives–she had recently insured her husband’s life in excess of $110,000.
Several months later the newlyweds returned to Buffalo, where Bartlett complained of poor health. He explained that his wife had fed him sandwiches instead of the hot meals to which he had been accustomed. By this time police had entered the case. Under heavy questioning Helen Bartlett admitted to murdering her second husband, Babin, by holding his head under water in the bathtub.
Battice, Earl Leo, 1903- , U.S. A four-masted schooner named the Kingsway set sail from Perth Amboy, N.J., in 1926, bound for the Gold Coast of Africa where the skipper was to deliver a load of lumber. The Kingsway, a rusting, barnacle-infested hulk, was manned by a sullen, suspicious-looking crew and a captain named Lawry.
The ship dropped anchor in Puerto Rico. Lawry went ashore and recruited 23-year-old Earl Battice who signed on as a cook. Battice insisted on taking his wife Lucia on the long voyage, but Lawry said no, reasoning that one woman among a crew of men would cause trouble. Battice refused to compromise and at length the captain, with trepidation, agreed to hire them both.
What Lawry did not realize was that his cook never intended to bring his wife aboard. It was his mistress Emilia Zamot, a poor Creole girl from the streets of San Juan that he wanted to take with him. The jealous wife got wind of this scheme, however, and drove Zamot from the ship.
The Kingsway slipped out of the harbor of San Juan on Dec. 15. Battice proved to be an excellent cook and his wife a pleasing addition to the crew. But after several weeks, Lucia became enamored with the burly German engineer Waldemar Karl Badke, whom everyone feared. They began conducting an affair, flagrantly, and without regard for the cuckolded cook.
The situation became intolerable for Battice, but there was little he could do. His fellow crewmen held him in low regard, and the captain was powerless to intervene, for Badke was feared and respected, and any attempt to thwart him might end in mutiny. Both captain and cook were effectively emasculated by the time the ship approached Monrovia.
Battice finally took matters into his own hands. On Feb. 4, 1927, he seized a razor and assaulted his wife in the storeroom where she was with Badke. It was a surprising gesture from one as docile and timid as Battice. The other crew members now felt some grudging respect for their cook, who was placed in irons by Captain Lawry. Lucia lingered on for seven days before succumbing to her wounds, but during that time, she confided to the captain that Battice had planned her murder in Puerto Rico. When she finally died, her body was dropped over the side of the ship.
Lawry completed his business in Monrovia and headed back to the U.S. amidst growing fears among the crewmen that Battice had placed a deadly curse over them all. Four men became violently ill from the food prepared by the new cook, an African tribesman named Codgo.
Lawry removed Battice’s leg irons and returned him to the kitchen. The Kingsway reached the coast of the U.S. in August 1927. The year-long voyage, filled with so many perils, had at last ended and Battice was arrested and tried for second-degree murder. He received a ten-year sentence at the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.
Bayly, William Alfred, 1906-34, N. Zea. Ever since William Bayly’s father sold his farm in Ruawaro, N. Zea., to Samuel Pender Lakey, there had been bad feelings between the two. Then Bayly bought property next to the Lakey dairy farm and moved in. At first their petty disputes involved land boundaries and sheep-grazing rights, but over the years the problems took on more serious overtones. “You won’t see the next season out, Lakey!” Bayly had threatened on one occasion.
The threat was not an idle one. On Oct. 16, 1933, Mrs. Christobel Lakey was found floating face-down in a duck pond. Her husband had disappeared, and Bayly volunteered a possible solution to the police. He said that the couple had been quarreling a lot lately, and that Samuel had probably murdered his wife and then run away. The police were suspicious. They searched William Bayly’s property and uncovered evidence of a body. Bone fragments were scattered piecemeal on the farm. They also found Lakey’s watch and cigarette lighter. Blood in Bayly’s tool shed was clear evidence to investigating police officers of recent foul play.
Despite his denials, Bayly was found Guilty of murder after a month-long trial in Auckland. He was executed at the Mount Eden jail on July 30, 1934, just a few days after his twenty-eighth birthday.
Bean, Harold Walter, 1939- , U.S. Describing his scheme to get rid of a wealthy elderly widow, Harold Walter Bean told a cohort, “We’ve added another round to our bag of tricks…Murder.”
Dorothy Polulach, an 81-year-old widow, lived quietly as a recluse in her expensive South West Side Chicago home, which was barricaded with locks and elaborate security systems to protect her costly antiques and jewelry. One afternoon in mid-February 1981, a man in priest’s garb stopped to talk with her as she shoveled snow off her front walk, suggesting that a lady her age should have help, and offering to bring someone to assist her soon. On Feb. 17 the priest returned with a companion. Recognizing the one man, Polulach let them in. Bean, disguised as a priest, began to beat the elderly woman, who fought back. His accomplice, Robert Byron, also called “Spook,” quickly filled his briefcase with jewelry and ransacked the house for other valuables, for the killing was intended to look like a robbery. Bean knocked Polulach down, then handcuffed her and dragged her upstairs, shackling her ankles and breaking her glasses before putting a .38-caliber pistol to her head and shooting her twice. Her body was discovered three days later by Phyllis Mahl and her husband. Mahl called Polulach’s stepdaughter, Ann Polulach Walters, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to tell her of her stepmother’s death. Though Walters appeared shocked, actually she had hired Bean to murder Polulach as she would inherit as much as $750,000 and the Polulach home when her father’s second wife died.
Detectives Tom Ptak and Mike Duffin took over the case. Mahl told them that Walters was exhibiting strange behavior, like hiding pastries at the funeral services and finding mysterious messages in the wake register. Then a man named Jimmy Steele was heard to brag in a Cicero tavern about the slaying, saying the victim had been shot twice in the head–information only the killer could know. Ptak and Duffin questioned Steele, learning that he was the stepson of Harold Bean. Steele then confessed that he had rented the priest’s outfit for Bean and had heard him talking to an attorney about Walter’s potential inheritance. Bean, a master of disguise and a criminal since he was sixteen, had once hidden from the FBI for six years. With these leads, the detectives went to visit Walters, now enmeshed in witchcraft rituals to exorcise her murdered stepmother’s spirit, and asked her to look at some mug shots, including one of Bean.
Walters’ response was, “You know the whole thing, don’t you?” She and her husband, Wayne Walters, confessed and were charged with murder and conspiracy on Apr. 5, 1981. Bean was arrested in a remote area of the Palos Hills Forest Preserve on Apr. 25, and Byron soon after, charged with helping Bean break into the Polulach home. Robert Danny Egan, who drove the getaway car, testified against Byron and Bean and received a seven-year prison term for his part in the crime. In October 1981 Bean and Byron were convicted of murder and sentenced by Judge James M. Bailey to die in the electric chair. Walters pleaded guilty to plotting the murder and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Wayne Walters received a seven-year prison sentence for conspiracy.
Beard, Arthur, prom. 1919, Brit. A notable criminal trial involved night watchman Arthur Beard, who raped and strangled 13-year-old Ivy Lydia Wood on July 25, 1919, in Hyde, Cheshire.
On Oct. 6, 1919, Justice Clement Meagher Bailhache sentenced Beard to death. An appeal was immediately filed, and the verdict in the first trial was overturned on the grounds that Beard was incapable of forming the intention to murder because of his severe state of drunkenness at the time of the assault. “Malice aforethought” was therefore absent, and the court ordered the charge reduced to manslaughter.
The Crown was displeased with the verdict, and Lord Hewart and Sir Charles Matthews brought the matter before the House of Lords. Lord Frederick Edwin Birkenhead, Lord Haldane, and Lord Reading reversed the judgment on Mar. 5, 1920. The judges argued that Beard had not been too drunk to rape the child. Lord Birkenhead re-established the original charge of murder but ruled that Beard could not be executed. The prisoner began serving a life sentence.
Beattie, Henry Clay, 1884-1911, U.S. In 1911, the city of Richmond, Va., was rocked with news of a bloody slaying five miles outside the city. Henry Clay Beattie, on the night of July 18, arrived at the home of Thomas E. Owen, which was off the Midlothian turnpike. Breathlessly, he pointed to his open auto. The Owens moved cautiously to the car. In the back seat they saw Mrs. Louise Beattie. The top of her head had been blown off.
Beattie told police that he and his wife had been stopped by a tall highwayman who waved a gun in their faces. The bearded man had shouted at them: “You had better run over me… You have got all the road!” or, at least, that’s what Beattie claimed the man said. Beattie tried to drive around the tall highwayman, he said, but the man raised his weapon and fired just as the car passed him. Mrs. Beattie was killed instantly by the blast and the killer fled, howling through the nearby woods. Or had he been laughing? Beattie could not remember, he told police. The gun? Beattie remembered stopping the car, running after the man, and wresting the weapon from him before the murderer escaped. He could not recall where he had thrown the gun.
Mrs. Beattie was buried before the coroner’s jury could make up its mind about her demise. That was decided by Detective L.L. Scherer, who found the murder weapon alongside the C&O Railroad tracks. Tracing its sale, Scherer discovered that a Paul Beattie had purchased the gun for H.C. Beattie. The husband was quickly arrested and tried for the murder of his wife.
Beattie emphatically denied his guilt, although a staggering case had been built against him. Even after he was sentenced to die in the electric chair, the convicted man refused to admit to the slaying. The 27-year-old was led into the death room on Nov. 24, 1911, still mumbling about the tall, bewhiskered highwayman who had murdered his wife. (It was eventually learned that Beattie had been a student of the Old West and that he had described a photo of Jesse James which was kept in his album of gunslingers.)
Not until he was executed was the truth learned from Beattie himself. His religious advisors, the reverends J.J. Fix and Benjamin Dennis, provided newsmen with Beattie’s handwritten confession which they had witnessed the day before his electrocution. It read:
“I, Henry Clay Beattie, Jr., desirous of standing right before God and man, do on this, the 23rd day of November, 1911, confess my guilt of the crime charged against me. Much that was published concerning the details was not true, but the awful fact, without the harrowing circumstances, remains. For this action I am truly sorry, and believing that I am at peace with God and am soon to pass into His presence, this statement is made.”
Beck, Martha Julie (or Jule), 1921-51, and Fernandez, Raymond Martinez (AKA: Charles Martin), 1914-51, (AKA: The Lonely Hearts Killers), U.S. Fernandez, born in Hawaii of Spanish parents, was an adventurous youth who reportedly served with British Intelligence during WWII, winning commendations. He was wounded in the head in 1945, an injury that altered his personality from sanguine to phlegmatic, according to one report, and sent him on a criminal career in which he bilked well-to-do widows out of their savings after proposing marriage. He was tall and thin, covering his almost-bald head with a cheap black wig. But the love-desperate women who fell for his pedestrian pitch of woo, thought of him as an irresistible Latin lover. In the words of one newsman: “He was a rather seedy Charles Boyer.” Fernandez found his victims in the then-popular lonely hearts clubs or through the lonely hearts columns of newspapers. He even married several women, having one family in Spain, another in the U.S., and according to some reports others still in Mexico and Canada.
One of the lovelorn ads Fernandez answered turned out to have been placed by Mrs. Martha Beck, a registered nurse who ran a home for crippled children in Pensacola, Fla. When the sleazy Lothario arrived on Mrs. Beck’s front door in 1947, he was taken aback by the obese woman standing before him. She welcomed him with open arms and Fernandez the con man, for some inexplicable reason, fell in love with the unattractive Martha. Mrs. Beck, who had been divorced since 1944, lavished attention on Fernandez who confessed his swindling ways to her. To his surprise, she not only approved of his crooked pursuits but asked to be part of his widow-bilking schemes. The couple traveled northward, stopping in cities along the way to answer lonely hearts advertisements and mulct the lovesick widows.
Their usual procedure was for Fernandez to woo and win the lovelorn lady and, during the course of a brief courtship, introduce Beck as his sister. Then, following the wedding, Beck would move in with the newlyweds, and the looting of savings and jewelry quickly ensued. Most of the women, more than 100 of them, were in their late fifties or sixties, but Beck could not bear to be in the same house with Fernandez and a new wife, knowing he was making love to another woman. Her jealousy grew whenever the victim was young and attractive, such was the case with Mrs. Delphine Dowling of Grand Rapids, Mich. Mrs. Dowling, twenty-eight, had a 2-year-old daughter, Rainelle, and was apprehensive of Fernandez, allowing him and his “sister” to move into her home but delaying the nuptials with her newly found Latin lover until she was convinced her spouse-to-be was sincere. Beck found it impossible to sleep in the next room while her own man was on the other side of the wall with a younger, more attractive woman. They would not wait for the wedding ceremonies, Beck told the docile Fernandez. Mrs. Dowling and her daughter had to go. Both disappeared in January 1949.
Neighbors, noticing the absence of Mrs. Dowling and her daughter, called police and when officers arrived at the Dowling residence, Beck and Fernandez calmly invited them inside, telling them they had no idea where Mrs. Dowling and her child had gone. Police thought the pair looked suspicious and insisted that the home be searched. Beck shrugged and Fernandez waved them into the parlor. Investigators found a fresh patch of cement on the floor of the basement. “It’s the size of a grave,” said one officer and they soon unearthed the bodies of mother and child. The Lonely Hearts Killers, as Beck and Fernandez were quickly dubbed by the press, collapsed immediately, freely admitting the murders and then bragging that there were as many as seventeen other victims they had killed. Beck, glorying in her publicity, explained that she dosed Mrs. Dowling with sleeping pills, but the young woman was strong enough to resist the drugs and Fernandez shot her in the head. They originally did not plan to murder the little girl. When she cried for her mother, Martha Beck said, as if displaying her humanity, they bought her a dog. But the child continued to whine so Martha dragged her into the bathroom, filled the tub, and held the girl beneath the water until she drowned.
Fernandez and Beck, of course, were well aware of the fact that the state of Michigan had no death penalty and undoubtedly reasoned that they would be imprisoned and later be paroled, in spite of their heinous crimes. (This was the same tactic earlier employed by Fred R. “Killer” Burke, one of the machine gunners at the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.) With that comforting thought in mind, the pair bragged about their other murders. “I’m no average killer,” Fernandez boasted. “I only got five hundred off the Dowling woman,” he said disappointedly, “but take Mrs. Jane Thompson, I took six thousand off of her.” He explained how he married Thompson and took her to Spain where he murdered her, poisoning her with digitalis. He then returned to the U.S. to explain that he and his poor wife had been in a train wreck and she had been killed. The Thompson family did not bother to check if there had been such a wreck; they merely took his word for it. Fernandez was so convincing a liar that he moved in with Thompson’s mother, Mrs. Wilson, wooed and bilked her and then murdered her, too.
Throughout the long confession, Beck was at Fernandez’ side, chuckling perversely as he droned his litany of murder. She found it all too amusing but was solicitous of her lover. When he began to sweat, he removed his cheap wig. Beck reached over to pat his bald pate dry with her handkerchief, thickly scented with cheap perfume. Then she urged him to continue, as if she were a child begging for a tale to be completed. Fernandez recalled a Mrs. Myrtle Young. He took her to Chicago in 1948 on their honeymoon. He laughed and said: “Poor woman, she died of over-exertion.” Beck could no longer allow Fernandez to hog the limelight. She blurted out her own confessions rapidly, her heavy jowels jiggling as she rattled off murder after murder. One she vividly recalled–there were so many that taxed her memory–involved Mrs. Janet Fay of Manhattan. She and Fernandez had already taken the 66-year-old woman’s last cent, but she was murdered anyway, only because Beck’s jealousy exploded when the old woman cried out for Fernandez as the couple was leaving Fay’s apartment.
Beck was incensed at Fay’s display of affection for her man, and she grabbed a hammer and smashed it down on Fay’s head, crushing her skull. Then Beck said in her best child’s voice: “I turned to Raymond and said, ‘look what I’ve done,’ and then he strangled her with a scarf.” Beck explained that although she had already murdered Fay, Fernandez, out of his deep love for Martha, insisted on taking part in the killing by strangling the lifeless corpse. Both killers were amazed when the state of Michigan abruptly allowed them to be extradited to New York to stand trial for their self-admitted slaying of Mrs. Fay–New York still had the death penalty. Both defendants were tried before Judge Ferdinand Pecora, pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychiatrists examining both of them reported them sane and the trial went ahead. On one occasion, when Beck was being brought into court, she broke away from her female guards and lifted the startled Fernandez out of his chair, kissing him on the mouth and neck and cheeks. She had to be pried loose, screaming: “I love him! I do love him and I always will!”
A jury quickly convicted the pair and Judge Pecora sentenced them to death, their execution to be held on Aug. 22, 1949, at Sing Sing. While awaiting the electric chair, the couple exhanged love letters, sent between the male and female cellblocks. When Beck heard that Fernandez was regaling his fellow prisoners in death row with her eccentric behavior, she exploded, sending him the following message:
You are a double-crossing, two-timing skunk. I learn now that you have been doing quite a bit of talking to everyone. It’s nice to learn what a terrible, murderous person I am, while you are such a misunderstood, white-haired boy, caught in the clutches of a female vampire. It is also nice to know that all the love letters you wrote ‘from the heart’ were written with a hand shaking with laughter at me for being such a gullible fool as to believe them. Don’t waste your time or energy trying to hide from view in church from now on, for I won’t even look your way–the halo over your righteous head might blind me. May God have mercy on your soul.
M.J. Beck
Through appeals filed by their lawyers, Beck and Fernandez managed to postpone their date with the electric chair until Mar. 8, 1951. Fernandez ordered a large meal but, with his death only a few hours away, he could not eat it. He did smoke a long Havana cigar down to a small stub. Then he handed a note to one of the guards, saying that these words would be his last utterances on earth. The note, later widely published, read:
People want to know whether I still love Martha. But of course I do. I want to shout it out. I love Martha. What do the public know about love?
Martha Beck, who was tired of being portrayed as a flabby, fat woman, told a female guard that she would show the world what kind of woman she was; she would resist ordering a feast for her last meal. That said, she ordered fried chicken and fried potatoes and a salad–a double order of each. She announced that she still loved Raymond Fernandez. There existed at Sing Sing a tradition that when two persons were to be executed, the weakest was to be sent to the chair first. This was Fernandez. He was half-carried to the electric chair by several guards and was in a state of nervous collapse when the switch was thrown. Martha Beck followed, walking on her own, confident, smiling as she almost threw her great bulk into the chair.
Becker, Charles, 1870-1915, U.S. The image of the crooked cop without conscience, compassion, or remorse for his ruthless acts was devastatingly summed up in the character of Charles Becker, a lieutenant of the New York Police Department. Becker made a fortune by protecting New York City gamblers until he decided one of these sharpers should be killed, and he ordered the murder of Herman Rosenthal. This blatant slaying by hired killers under Becker’s command eventually led Becker to the electric chair, but long before that, a decade before, Becker ruled the gambling empire of New York City. His word was law–to break his law was to face unendurable punishment, ruination, and early death. Becker, the corrupt cop, came into being not at his source environment, but in the heart of New York City, or, to be exact, in its Tenderloin, the most exciting, dramatic and vice-ridden area of America at the time. This land of payoff and kickback was far from the green, comfortable hills where Charles Becker was born on July 26, 1870. The sixth child of ten, Becker was born in Callicoon Center, N.Y., a hamlet in the foothills of the Catskills in Sullivan County. He was a large boy and did not shirk fights. At home he was truculent and slow to obey his parents. At school he was even slower to complete assignments. Yet his honesty was never questioned and he excelled in athletics and manual labor. By the time he was eighteen, he had developed a tall, powerful body with broad shoulders, massive arms, and enormous hands that, when doubled into fists, were like the flat sides of two stonemason hammers.
At this time Becker bid farewell to his family and rural life, and traveled to New York City to see a German baker who was a friend of his father’s. The baker gave him a job and a room above the bakery, which was in the German section of the city in the old Seventh Ward. To the south was the Bowery and to the north was the wealth of Manhattan which beckoned like a beacon fire to the ambitious Becker. After a brief affair with the baker’s daughter, which found Becker confronting the baker and being ordered from his establishment, the youth, then nineteen, went to work as a waiter at The Atlantic Gardens, a sprawling beer garden which had once been the pride of the German community, where free music and excellent nickel beer was offered to a generally middle-class patronage. With the ending of the Civil War, this great spa had declined so that by 1889, when Becker went to work there, the place was populated at night by gamblers, thugs from the Bowery, and prostitutes plying their trade. The well-built, no-nonsense Becker found himself knocking the heads of thugs who created disturbances. He soon built a reputation as a man who could best almost any plug-ugly with a mind to starting trouble.
The job of bouncer was offered to Becker, and the 21-year-old accepted, working in another beer garden. Here he became known as a brutal overseer no thug would think to anger. Even the most fierce of the early day New York gangsters such as Edward “Monk” Eastman gave Becker a wide berth. Eastman not only grew to respect the quick-fisted Becker but he befriended him, taking him to his political sponsor, Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan, the powerful head of Tammany for the entire East Side of Manhattan. Sullivan used Eastman and his fearsome gang as strikebreakers and political strong-arm thugs who made sure that every election was a Tammany triumph. Tammany also dictated the politics for the entire city at that time and Sullivan lived like a czar, making appointments to political and police posts at will and whim. Sullivan sized up Becker as someone above the status of an ordinary thug, a young man with intelligence and street sawy–one who not only would be loyal to Tammany but to Sullivan himself. The police force, Sullivan concluded, was the right spot for Charles Becker. In 1893 Becker paid a $250 fee to Tammany for his appointment to the police force. This was customary and was publicly known and excused, at least by the political sachems who ran things, as a way of assuring the fact that men known to the organization, who were screened as good candidates by Tammany and were not strangers with criminal records, were thus brought onto the force. The screening process cost Tammany money and the applicant was merely paying back the organization’s investment. Such money was no small investment. At the time, $250 was one-third the yearly pay of an average cop on the NYPD. The force at that time had more than 5,000 men on the streets, all of them white and most of them, like Becker, Catholic.
The type of police officer the NYPD then hired and kept on the force was not very much different than the type of thug who worked for Monk Eastman, except that they wore uniforms and never openly committed theft. Patrolmen were burly, big men who used their long nightsticks to club anyone who got in their way, either innocent citizen or hooligan. Even to ask a question of the beat cop in those days was to risk being poked in the chest with his stick and hustled down the street for bothering an officer of the law. The man who established and maintained this hardboiled attitude was Inspector Alexander “Clubber” Williams, who was infamous for his brutality and ruthless manner. It was the grafting Williams who gave the wide-open vice district its name. He had been serving in a West Side precinct in the 1870s and when he was transferred to the choice area, he remarked to a newsman: “I’ve been living on chuck steak for a long time. Now I’m gonna get me some of the tenderloin.” Williams supervised an area that stretched approximately between Twenty-third and Forty-fourth streets and between Third and Seventh avenues, this being the old Twenty-ninth Precinct. Here could be found the best hotels, the finest theaters and restaurants, as well as hundreds of posh gambling dens, bordellos, and vice dens of all sorts, a plum for grafting policemen such as Williams.
During the Lexow Committee Hearings, which began just about the time Becker joined the force, Inspector Williams was the focal point of the investigation into police graft. Prosecuting counsel John Goff, who, ironically, was to preside over Becker’s own first murder trial almost twenty years later, revealed that Williams had more than $250,000 in the bank, owned a mansion and a yacht, and lived like a king. Williams boldly admitted that he took what he liked in the district he controlled and he was later dismissed from the force, though never prosecuted. His was the enduring image that etched itself into the mind of the ever ambitious Charles Becker. He, too, would someday preside over the Tenderloin and make his own fortune, this he vowed. Long before that time, however, Becker found himself in continuous trouble, so much trouble that he gleaned more press coverage in that day than any other common cop on the force. At first Becker was assigned to the Fulton Street area and later, due to the strings of his mentor, Inspector Williams, moved to the Tenderloin. It was here that he ran headlong into the famous writer, Stephen Crane, who had seen him years earlier on a dark street pounding the face of a helpless prostitute who had failed to pay him off that night.
Crane had established himself as one of America’s finest authors the previous year, in 1895, with the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, and was the toast of New York at the age of twenty-four. He disdained the literary parties and salons, preferring the company of Bowery lowlifes, bums, and apprentice hoodlums and their women, mostly prostitutes. He had long taken the view that the beat cop in New York was nothing more than a thug in uniform and had been writing a series of articles exposing their grafting, brutal ways, communicating with the new police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. On the night of Sept. 15, 1896, Crane found himself at the Broadway Gardens, assigned by the editors of the New York Journal to write about the underworld types who crowded the tables there. With him were two streetwalkers of his acquaintance and they were joined by another whore named Dora Clark. At 3 a.m., Crane put one of the girls on a streetcar, and when he returned to the sidewalk, he found the large, lumbering Becker arresting his other two friends for soliciting. Crane stepped forth and said one woman was his wife. Becker, who was later described by Crane as “picturesque as a wolf,” then reached out and grabbed the other girl, Dora Clark, arresting only her on charges of prostitution. As he dragged the girl off, Crane protested and Becker smirked, snarling: “You ain’t married to both of ’em, are you?”
Rushing to the Tenderloin station house, Crane obtained Becker’s name and badge number, then told newsmen that “whatever her character (that of Dora Clark), the arrest was an outrage. The policeman flatly lied!” Crane appeared as a witness for Clark later in court, where Becker insisted that he had seen the woman solicit two men within five minutes. Crane told the presiding magistrate that this was a boldfaced lie, that he had been with the woman for several hours and nothing of the kind happened. Dora Clark then testified that she had been persecuted for several months by Becker and other policemen in the area because she had resisted the advances of a cop named Rosenberg. This officer had solicited sex from Dora and she, thinking he was black because of his swarthy complexion, had replied: “How dare you speak to a decent white woman!” Calling the officer black when he was not was thought by fellow officers to be the worst insult their ranks could receive and Dora Clark had been marked for vengeance.
After listening to the statements, the magistrate, who had recently received a favorable profile by Crane, shocked Becker and dozens of other officers who had lent him support by siding with Crane and accepting his version of the events. Dora Clark was released. Becker had received his first minor setback, but this incident was nothing compared to his next ill-fated news notice. Becker was working the graveyard shift on Sept. 20, 1896, with another officer named Carey when, close to dawn, the two patrolmen saw three men flee from a tobacco shop carrying sacks of loot. They gave chase, shouting for the burglars to halt. Though heavyset, Becker was fast on his feet and he caught up with one of the burglars, bringing him down with one blow from his nightstick. A second burglar outdistanced the pair. Then one of the officers, it was never determined who, shot the third from some distance. This escapade was played up in the press and Becker was hailed as a hero. The dead man, Becker insisted, was a notorious second-story man named John O’Brien. There was talk of giving Becker a commendation and an important promotion until, three days later, the relatives of the slain man identified him as 19-year-old John Fay, a plumber’s assistant. Fay had accidentally stepped in the line of fire which both Becker and Carey knew, Fay’s family claimed, but they assumed no one would inquire about a dead young man they were passing off as a notorious thief. John Fay’s reputation had been tarnished, his relatives said, so that a pair of “gun-happy killers” could make the police force look good in the press. Becker and Carey were suspended for a month and were privately warned by their superiors to make sure of their targets in the future.
By the time Becker returned to his post in the Tenderloin, he was surprised to see Commissioner Roosevelt come into the precinct station to review the men there. He singled out Becker, shook his hand, and commended him for his considerable bravery in taking on thieves face to face but then he turned and told the entire group that they should all be more careful in their treatment of “unfortunate women,” that even these fallen angels had the same rights as law-abiding citizens. In this way, without singling Becker out, Theodore Roosevelt had subtly upbraided him, warned him. But Becker was not a man of subtleties. He proved that when he sought out Dora Clark in October 1896 and beat her until he blackened both her eyes and broke her nose. He was stopped by fellow officers from choking her to death. He left her on the sidewalk, warning her that she would “wind up in the river” if she ever again accused a New York cop of anything. But Dora Clark was stubborn and brought charges against Becker. A police hearing was held, the longest on record up to that time, and Becker got off with a casual reprimand.
It appeared to Becker that his political influence through Big Tim Sullivan was not only intact but would protect him against any pesky citizen daring to challenge his authority. On one occasion Becker arrested a society woman whom he accused of soliciting. She turned out to be perfectly innocent, having said goodbye to one of her lawyers on the street after a meeting in his office. Becker, confronted with the testimony of the lawyer, gave the man his usual sneer, refusing to back down and stating: “I know a whore when I see one!” He was reprimanded and sent back to the street where, a short time later, he arrested another woman who approached him and asked directions to the subway. He mumbled something to her she did not understand and she questioned him again. Annoyed, Becker grabbed the poor woman and ran her into the station house, booking her as a common drunk. She turned out to be the wife of a New Jersey manufacturer. This incident caused Becker’s superiors to slavishly apologize to both the woman and her influential husband, and even Becker’s political sponsor, Big Tim Sullivan, had to step in and persuade the couple not to sue. Sullivan had a quiet talk with his protégé, telling him that he had to be more cautious in the future when arresting women. He had plans for Becker, Sullivan told him, big plans, so it was important that he maintain an unblemished record.
Some time later, however, the easy-to-anger Becker, while on a raid against a gambling house, was shoved by a gambler who boasted of his political influence. Becker, who was alone in the room with the man at the time, pulled a pistol and shot the gambler dead, later claiming that the man puled a gun. No witnesses were present to contradict him but Becker’s superiors again had a quiet talk with him, warning him severely to keep his hand off his gun unless it was absolutely necessary to use it. To make sure that he got the point, Becker was suspended for a month. The hamhock-fisted officer took this time to marry Vivian Atteridge. He had been married briefly in 1905 to a pretty young girl named Mary Mahoney, but she had died nine months later of tuberculosis. The marriage to Atteridge would last until 1905 when Becker would divorce her. Vivian would remarry in 1907, wedding Becker’s brother John who was also a member of the NYPD.
In 1901, Becker came under the direct command of Captain Max Schmittberger, the very man who had exposed the corrupt practices of Inspector Alexander Williams. Though Clubber Williams was no longer on the force, he acted as an adviser to Becker, who had long ago embraced the Clubber’s philosophy of brute force. Becker, by then a roundsman (one status above patrolman, similar to the rank of corporal), was known by Schmittberger to be a Williams partisan and, as such, was treated coldly and suspiciously by his superior. Schmittberger was thought of as a squealer and a turncoat who had exposed his own people to the Lexow Committee and, as such, many high-rankers on the force wanted to see this man disgraced and deposed. It was with this in mind that Commissioner Bingham and later Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, who had been told by angry police officials that Schmittberger was corrupt, secretly ordered Becker to dig up evidence that would expose Schmittberger. The police captain knew this, of course, and moved to get rid of Becker by having him transferred to another precinct. After meeting with Williams, Becker filed malfeasance charges against Schmittberger. The enraged captain filed countercharges, but all of these charges were dropped after Commissioner Bingham brought the aggrieved parties together and told them to forget their differences for the sake of the department.
For some time, little was heard of Charles Becker. He must have concluded that the ways of Clubber Williams could do little to advance his career and he maintained a low profile for several years, keeping his record clean. Then, in 1904, Becker suddenly received the department’s highest award for heroism which put his name back into the headlines. He had seen a young man in the Hudson River struggling to stay afloat. Fully clothed and without a moment’s hesitation, Becker jumped into the river and pulled the man to safety. He turned out to be an unemployed clerk named James Butler who blubbered his thanks to a grinning Becker before newsmen who had conveniently been called to the scene. Butler praised Becker to the newsmen as one of the bravest fellows he had ever seen, explaining that a plank he was walking on gave way and he fell into the River near 10th Street. But it was only a week later when Butler called up the same newsmen and complained that Becker had reneged on his promise. What promise was that, he was asked. Becker, Butler explained, had offered him $15 to jump into the Hudson so that he could jump in after him and appear to be the great hero. But Becker had never paid him the $15 and now Butler was angry at having ruined his only suit for nothing. Becker denied the whole story, laughing at the idea, which he called preposterous. By then he had his medal and a promotion to sergeant.
A short time later, through his Tammany contacts, Becker was promoted to lieutenant and he began to make his moves against the posh gambling and vice dens of the Tenderloin. One story has it that about 1907, Becker made the rounds of all the big time gambling dens and demanded $15 payment a week for himself even though the gamblers explained that they had already paid their “protection” money. After collecting $150, Becker was called into Schmittberger’s office and the captain told him to put the money down on his desk, explaining that he knew exactly how much he had collected. Becker tossed the money on the desk and Schmittberger handed him back $15, telling him that that amount was his end, ten per cent, and from that day forward he would be Schmittberger’s personal bagman and receive ten percent of everything he collected. Becker the bagman went to work with a vengeance, becoming rich in the course of the next few years. But in 1911, Police Commissioner Waldo decided to crack down on the Tenderloin gamblers after being goaded by scores of enraged reformers objecting to the blatant vice district. Waldo believed that Schmittberger was the core of the rotten apple in the Tenderloin. Years earlier he had, as a Deputy Police Commissioner, met with Becker secretly, ordering him to get evidence against Schmittberger, not knowing, of course, that Becker was Schmittberger’s bagman and heir apparent to wholesale graft in the precinct. Becker, quite naturally, agreed to the secret investigation, sitting as he was in the catbird’s seat, able to provide snippets of information on his captain without ever giving Waldo enough evidence to bring about Schmittberger’s removal.
At the same time Becker made himself look good to downtown superiors by appearing to energetically attack the gambling and vice dens by conducting incessant raids against these places. Yet he went on making enormous illicit profits from the gamblers he was protecting, satisfying both Waldo and his protection-paying gambling dens. In 1911 Becker organized and led 203 raids into the Tenderloin where he and his men made 898 arrests which resulted in 103 convictions, a staggering record that outwardly made Becker look like a law enforcement crusader. But what the record also showed, if one dug deeper, were sentences that amounted to next to nothing. Most of the convictions ended in suspended sentences or small fines seldom exceeding $50. Waldo blamed the court system and corrupt judges for such leniency, and to some extent he was correct, since many judges were then, as before and after this golden age of kickbacks and payoffs, on the take. Becker, however, was the man who manipulated these judicial decisions. He simply ordered his men, when appearing in court, to have loss of memory as to the particulars of the raids they conducted. They conveniently misplaced or lost vital evidence that would have assured strong sentences. Faced with this type of shallow prosecution, judges were compelled to issue light sentences. The whole system worked both ways for Charles Becker.
By late 1910 Becker operated autonomously as the head of the gambling squad or, because of the violent manner in which the squad often tore apart gambling dens (those who had been slow to make payoffs), the group known as “the strong-arm squad.” His word was law in the Tenderloin by then and he paid nothing to Schmittberger who had been neutralized and later ousted by Big Tim Sullivan. Becker, after minor payoffs to his own officers, split his payoff take only with Big Tim and this further enriched his own coffers by tens of thousands of dollars. To keep the gamblers and vice lords in line, Becker, through Big Tim, employed the worst gang of thugs in New York to perform beatings and even murder, chores too messy for his own corrupt policemen. Monk Eastman had been sent to prison by then, abandoned by Tammany as uncontrollable and had been replaced by Jacob “Big Jack” Zelig (whose real name was William Alberts), a towering, fierce thug who had been Eastman’s right-hand man, a gangster with much more cunning than Eastman, one who knew how to keep his organization in line. Zelig and his host of killers worked directly under Becker’s orders, going on his payroll but being directed in their nefarious activities by gamblers who took their orders from Becker.
If any of these gangsters ever disobeyed Becker’s dictates, he merely had them arrested for violating the Sullivan Law, a law ironically put on the books by none other than Big Tim when, in 1909, he decided to return to the state senate. A disloyal or disobedient gangster would be dragged into court and charged by Becker’s minions with carrying concealed firearms, thus violating the Sullivan Law. This carried with it a mandatory eight-year sentence. Of course, when this law went into record, the gangsters never carried firearms unless on the job. Becker got around this by simply having his men provide “throw-away” guns or spare pistols and automatics which were supplied by police officers in quickly convicting a gangster who did not cooperate with the system. Herbert Bayard Swope, later the chief journalist covering the Becker-Rosenthal murder, would later write that “Becker was the System. Like Caesar all things were rendered unto Becker in the underworld. Like Briareus he had a hundred arms…and more power in the Department than the Commissioner.”
But Becker was not without competition. A number of other lieutenants under his command lusted for his power position and they would do just about anything to come into the good graces of Big Tim Sullivan, the Tammany sachem and real czar of influence and power in New York. Big Tim was many times a millionaire with villas, mansions, yachts, and endless sources of cash; he had been on the take since Boss Croker abandoned his leadership at Tammany in 1901, retiring to the French Riviera with his own millions hustled from the city. Yet Big Tim had no ambitions to retire. He had to have more and more and knew that the Alexandrian philosophy of dividing and controlling his henchmen, Becker included, was the key to the flowing cornucopia of graft. Becker knew this also, that Big Tim would quickly replace him at any time if convenient. So Becker shrewdly began to cultivate certain members of the press as early as 1910, giving crime reporters inside tips on raids and making sure that he and only he received glorification in print. He even went so far as to hire Charles Plitt as his press agent, making sure that the newspapers were informed of his daily activities, or those that made him look like a police hero to the public. Thus for two years leading up to the Rosenthal killing, he overshadowed almost every policeman in the department, except for the commissioner. This caused Becker to undoubtedly become the most disliked member of the department but he was also the most dangerous. As such, no officer dared to openly criticize or confront him. The specter of Big Tim cast a shadow across every precinct.
Becker’s alliances with the press would later backfire on him, although he reaped numerous benefits for a short time from his liaisons with crime beat reporters. In late 1911 a reporter warned Becker that there was a conspiracy within the department to have him framed as a bagman, and Becker, fearing this report was real, went straight to Commissioner Waldo, asking that he be assigned to another position other than heading the “strong-arm” squad. Perhaps by then he had amassed what he considered to be the fortune that would take him comfortably through retirement. Perhaps his meeting with Waldo was nothing more than a fishing expedition. Waldo assured him that he was not being investigated, that he was doing an excellent job, and that he should keep up the good work. Becker went back to being the czar of the Tenderloin. But there was some truth to the reporter’s tip. Waldo had been receiving letters from an informant using an alias. One of these letters, received in March 1912, stated: “I would like to have you investigate quietly Lieutenant Becker. He is now collecting more money than Devery (Big Bill Devery, New York’s thoroughly corrupt chief of police during the 1890s), and it is well-known to everyone at Police Headquarters. Please do this and you will be surprised at the result.”
This letter, incredibly, was sent by Waldo straight to Becker. It was the commissioner’s policy, as sort of a naive procedure of fair play, to send such blind accusations to the officers being accused so that they could respond directly. In reality, the officer accused of misconduct was expected to investigate himself and dutifully report on his own wrongdoings. Of course, such officers never found credence in any of these accusations, all of them to the last letter being the work of cranks and malcontents. Becker shrewdly went one step further and returned this letter to Waldo, saying prudently that he was not in a position to react to such a document and that perhaps it would be better if the commissioner were to send this letter on to another person in the department. He knew that such a straightforward response would all the more readily confirm in Waldo’s mind that he, Charles Becker, was beyond reproach and nothing more would come of the accusation, which is exactly what happened. Waldo’s decision to simply file this and other letters concerning Becker’s wholesale graft as crank mail later caused him much embarrassment.
Becker, unlike the high-living Sullivan and former police bigwigs who had taken payoffs with both hands for years, kept a low profile outside of his police duties. He was a conservative and cautious crook, secreting his illegal loot in so many banks that most of his fortune was never fully tracked down, even years after he was executed. He continued to live in a modest apartment at 159th and Edgecomb Avenue with his third wife, Helen, whom he had married in 1905 after his divorce from Vivian Atteridge. Helen was a schoolteacher, born in 1874 and a dedicated educator who went on teaching slow high school learners at P.S. 90 for $1,820 a year, even in 1912 when her husband had amassed a reported $1 to $2 million. As a couple, they enjoyed simple pleasures such as horseback riding and gardening. They planned to build a modest house in the near future. Helen would later defend her husband with a fierce loyalty that saw her pleading for his life right up to the last second, abandoning her pride to prostrate herself before Governor Whiteman, the very man who had convicted her husband. No matter what evidence was later put before her, Helen Becker refused to believe that her husband, whom she called Charlie-Lover (he called her My Queen), ever committed a single illegal act. Charles Becker was an honest man, Helen insisted, a simple man from a large family; she never tired of saying how she, like her husband, came from a family with ten children.
The one indulgence practiced by Becker was taking his grateful wife to the best restaurants in town. They dined with political dynamos and business tycoons who curried Becker’s favor. They feasted upon sumptuous meals at Rector’s, Sharkey’s, Sherry’s, Luchow’s, and never picked up a check. When going to dinner or an occasional show, the Beckers rode in chauffeur-driven limousines owned by such people as millionaire broker Henry Sternberger. Although Helen Becker did not know them by profession, scores of other men would table-hop to sit with the Beckers and whisper in her husband’s ear before then moving off, men glittering with diamonds and full of conspiracy. These were the top Tenderloin gamblers, not the least of whom were young sharpers who had come under the protective arms of Big Tim Sullivan, chiefly Arnold Rothstein and Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal. Sullivan had mentioned these two gamblers by name to Becker, telling him that he felt “paternal” toward both these two young Jewish sharpers and would like to see their careers blossom.
It was not surprising therefore that Becker went out of his way to befriend the more social of the pair, Rosenthal, when meeting him at an Elks’ Club Ball on New Year’s Eve 1911. At the time, Becker sent Helen home and stayed to get drunk with the pudgy young gambler, or pretended to be drunk, displaying an inordinate amount of affection toward a man he had just met, throwing his bear-like arms around Rosenthal, kissing him on the cheeks several times and then lumbering onto a table and shouting to all his cronies: “Boys, Herman Rosenthal is my best friend and anything he wants, he gets!” He got down and hugged the gambler once more. “Anything in the world for you, Herman. I’ll get up at three o’clock in the morning to do you a favor! You can have anything I’ve got!” Becker then called three of his top officers over and told them: “This is my best pal and you do anything he wants you to do.” Becker continued to cultivate this strange new friendship by meeting with Rosenthal at the Lafayette Turkish baths, at the Elks Club, and various restaurants. In the Turkish baths the hulking Becker would sit, towel-wrapped, next to the chubby, flabby Rosenthal and pump him subtly about the strength of Big Tim’s support. Rosenthal told him that Big Tim had authorized a new, posh club, which Rosenthal intended to call The Hester Club, that would be opened shortly. Becker not only promised him protection for this club but went on to tell the gambler that he was “getting hold of a lot of money” through the easy efforts of his strong-arm squad, and that he might be interested in investing in The Hesper Club. Of course, Becker was making a bid to short-cut Big Tim’s own investment in the club so that he would be on an equal footing with Sullivan on the interest level of many clubs. Becker’s ambition was still white-hot and he undoubtedly was thinking of somehow supplanting Big Tim as he had Schmittberger.
Thanks to Providence, Becker did exactly that. In the spring of 1912, Big Tim’s dissolute lifestyle caught up with him. He was seized by paresis of the brain, generally caused by long-standing syphilis, and became bedridden, half-conscious most of the time. He was no longer an effective force in New York’s system of graft. Becker, without waiting for approval from Tammany, took over Sullivan’s role as soon as he heard his political mentor had fallen ill. Becker immediately leveled an enormous duty on all gambling dens and bordellos, sending his men around to obtain the weekly increase. Some of Becker’s police goons arrived at the newly opened Hesper Club where the strong-arm cops were told: “No payoffs here. This is Big Tim’s house.” True, Sullivan had fronted a good deal of the money Rosenthal had used to establish this lavish gambling den in a three-story brownstone at 104 West 45th Street, just off Sixth Avenue. The place sported thick carpets and heavy, dark drapes, massive furniture, which was the vogue of the era, and the latest gambling wheels, tables, and devices. But, ironically, Becker himself had also invested in the club, giving Rosenthal $1,500 for twenty percent of the profits, and holding a mortgage on all the furniture as well for his small investment. It was his thinking that, despite the profits Rosenthal paid him, he could still enjoy an additional $500-a-week payoff from The Hesper. Rosenthal, however, balked at this double payoff and refused to give Becker’s boys a cent.
When Becker heard of this refusal, he met with Big Jack Zelig and ordered the thugmaster to see Rosenthal personally. Zelig went to Rosenthal and told him: “You better pay. Sullivan’s out and Becker’s the boss now.” Rosenthal told Zelig that he was crazy and that he would see Sullivan about it. But Sullivan was dying in bed and Rosenthal found only the boss’s politically inept brother Florrie, his nephew Jim, and Frank Farrell lounging in Big Tim’s sumptuous office. They had no idea what he should do. They were trying to figure out Big Tim’s secretly organized empire themselves and were getting nowhere. The obstinate Rosenthal left, later telling Zelig that he had no intention of giving Becker anything, including the twenty per cent on the investment.
When Becker heard this, he exploded. He roared at Zelig: “Make him pay!” Zelig and some of his goons, “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Whitey Lewis, Dago Frank and Lefty Louie, the four men who were to take Rosenthal’s life in full view of dozens of stunned witnesses. They grabbed the gambler as he was stepping out of his club one night and beat him unconscious. Still the stubborn gambler refused to pay off. He went back to Big Tim’s relatives who told him: “Make a deal with Becker, that’s all we can tell you.” Rosenthal was beaten. He called Becker and the two men met. Rosenthal complained that his club was new and not doing as well as he had hoped. He needed more time to pay the additional money Becker was demanding. Becker told him he had a month and to make sure he got his percentage, installed one of his cronies in Rosenthal’s club. This man was Jack Rose, better known along the Main Stem as Billiard Ball Jack because he did not have a human hair on his shining bald head. Rosenthal had always hated the pugnacious Rose and he found the gambler’s permanent presence in his club offensive. He brooded about this until his pent-up rage broke loose in diatribes against New York police lieutenant Charles Becker. He began to speak to anyone, everyone, about this “crooked cop,” until his incessant carping was heard by the crusading district attorney, Charles Seymour Whitman.
Before Whitman acted on the Rosenthal rumors, Commissioner Waldo received another letter which complained about the blatant operations of a gambling den at 104 West 45th Street, Rosenthal’s Hesper Club. This was in Becker’s Tenderloin and Waldo called the lieutenant into his office. Here he confronted Becker with the letter, his usual custom, informing him: “I can’t understand how this could have escaped your attention.” Waldo gave Becker a direct order to close The Hesper and keep it closed. This was one letter Becker did not return to the Commissioner. He had no alternative except to comply with orders. He informed Rosenthal that he had to “close you up for a while.” Rosenthal protested but Becker was firm. Not only was the Hesper Club closed but, to make sure it remained closed, Becker placed a police guard around the clock in the front room on the main floor. The presence of these cops drove Rosenthal nearly crazy since he lived on the premises and he bitterly complained to any and all who would listen that it made him and his poor wife feel like prisoners. It was intolerable. He wouldn’t stand for it. He would do something to show Becker that he could not treat Herman Rosenthal “like a dog.”
The presence of the police in his home so enraged the beefy gambler that he began to war with the department. He announced that he would lock out these interlopers and, on one occasion, he slammed the doors and bolted them during a changing of shifts. He stood outside and dared the police to break into his place. The answer came in hours when a crew showed up on West 45th Street with a new hydraulic lift which could tear out the entire door frame. Before permanent damage was done Rosenthal capitulated, running across the street and unlocking the door. As the late spring brought hot weather, Rosenthal threatened to stoke up the furnaces in his building and “roast those cops out of there,” but this proved to be an idle boast. Rosenthal’s wife, Dora, a buxom and demonstrative woman, nagged her husband incessantly about policemen roaming her home, and every time the shift would change, she would lean out of her third-story bedroom window and shake her fist at the officers changing the guard, shouting that they were violating her home.
When Rosenthal could no longer bear this continuing indignity, he filed harrassment charges against several high-ranking policemen in the department but oddly never mentioned Becker. Although local judges scoffed at the complaints Rosenthal made, the gambler persistently filed new complaints. All of this got back to Becker. Now the crooked cop felt the kind of pressure he had only administered in the past. He became enraged. How dare this gambler create problems for the police and for him? He would not tolerate such defiance. He had Zelig’s goons threaten Rosenthal again but the gambler refused to back down. Becker decided then and there that only one course of action was left to him. According to the sensational thirty-eight-page confession later made by Jack Rose, Becker came to him and ordered him to organize the death of Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal. Rose was to employ his fellow gamblers, Harry Vallon (Harry Vallinsky) and Louis Bridgie Webber in organizing Rosenthal’s death with Zelig’s gunsels. Becker was specific in his command to Rose, telling him: “I want Rosenthal croaked! I want him murdered, shot, his throat cut, any way that will take him off the earth!” Rose told Becker that Zelig and his men might be hesitant to kill a man who was so much in the public eye, a man whose vendetta against the NYPD had put him on the front pages of the daily newspapers. “If those rats don’t go along I will find out where they hang out and frame every one of them and send them up the river for carrying concealed weapons!” Becker emphasized that nothing would happen to anyone who killed the man he had marked for murder. “All that’s necessary,” Becker told Rose, “is to walk right up to where he is and blaze away at him and leave the rest to me. Nothing will happen to anybody that does it. Walk up to him and shoot him before a policeman if you want to and nothing will happen!”
Rose reluctantly set about organizing the murder of Rosenthal but he dragged his feet, as did Webber and Vallon. Becker pursued them like a terrier, at one point shouting that he would frame the gamblers unless they got the job done quickly. “Why isn’t he croaked?” Becker would say in his daily phone call to Rose. “Why isn’t that man dead yet? You’re all a bunch of damned cowards!” He literally hounded the gamblers with threats up to the night when Rosenthal was finally murdered. Only hours before this happened, Becker was on the phone to Rose, saying: “If only that s.o.b. is croaked tonight, how happy I will be, how lovely it will be!” The problem in getting Becker’s gruesome job done lay within the ranks of the gamblers who worked at cross-purposes. All of them owned interests in various gambling joints and competed with each other, distrusting each other’s motives. All of them would have just as readily put each other on the spot if Becker had asked for their deaths. None of them, however, had any love for Rosenthal.
Only a few years earlier Rosenthal and Webber had fought Becker over gambling territories that brought out their respective gunmen in open warfare. Rosenthal had actually arranged for Webber’s murder in 1909, hiring a notorious thug named Spanish Louie (or Louis) to beat Webber to death. Rosenthal had actually watched from a shadowy doorway while this goon nearly beat Webber to death but was interrupted by a patrolman who gave chase to the fleeing Louie. With that, Rosenthal sauntered across the street, pretending to be passing by, and helped Webber to his feet, wiping away the blood pouring from his broken nose with his own handkerchief and telling Webber how awful it was that the streets were no longer safe. The next year Spanish Louie was shot to death from a speeding auto by four gangsters in Webber’s employ, these being Christian “Boob” Walker, Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Lefty Louie and Whitey Lewis. These were Zelig’s boys but the same gunmen were for hire by anyone with money and they often free-lanced for Rosenthal. Still, the gamblers found dozens of excuses for not killing Rosenthal, hoping that Becker would change his mind. Rosenthal didn’t aid his own cause by loudly accusing the police of wholesale graft. Not having any success with the local magistrates who refused to indict anyone on his accusations, Rosenthal went to the press, badgering newsmen to print his story of wholesale corruption in the police force. Everyone turned a deaf ear, except a reporter for the World, Herbert Bayard Swope. Swope had known Rosenthal for some years; a habitue of Tenderloin casinos, he and Rosenthal had been on more than speaking terms, the gambler steering the reporter to the best play in town, often enough feeding him tips on various horse races. Swope not only listened to Rosenthal but decided to print his affadavit in the World. The story that Rosenthal gave Swope was nothing like the tale he had brought to the city magistrates. To Swope the gambler described in detail his relationship with Police Lieutenant Charles Becker, from the very first moment they had met at the Elks Club on New Year’s Eve to the massive payoffs he had made to the crooked cop, along with all the other payoffs Becker was receiving throughout the Tenderloin. Rosenthal named every gambler in on the payoffs, all the police collectors and bagmen, all the backup thugs who did the dirty work for the cops. After the Swope story ran, the most important of his life and the story that would make him into a newspaper magnate, the newsman went after Whitman to make sure the district attorney did his duty. He persuaded Whitman to take Rosenthal’s direct statement and bring a grand jury indictment against Becker.
Before Whitman took Rosenthal’s deposition, Becker heard of the affidavit in the World office and marched to the newspaper with his lawyer. He inspected the document and snarled: “This is a pack of lies!” He turned on his heels and went back to badgering Rose to have Rosenthal killed immediately. Rosenthal was oddly carefree about the lethal peril he had created for himself. “I know I’m a marked man,” he told a newsman, “and I’ve probably signed my own death warrant but I don’t care.” Despite these words of bravado, Herman Rosenthal cared very much, and he took pains to stay out of his usual haunts, holing up on the third floor of his brownstone. He ventured forth to seek the advice of the rising young gambler, Arnold Rothstein, who offered him money to leave town. Rosenthal said he would never let himself be run out of New York but he later returned to Rothstein, asking for the money. Rothstein turned a cold shoulder to his one-time friend Rosenthal and told him it was “too late to do anything.” This meeting with Rothstein occurred on the afternoon of July 15, 1912. Rosenthal thought about Rothstein’s remark and decided that there was something more to do. He had earlier stated that “this is a fight to the finish. I know that the whole police department will be against me and that all the gamblers, big and little, will fight me, too, because this means a big investigation that will clean up the city.”
Late that day and into the evening, Herman Rosenthal talked for five hours to District Attorney Whitman and key staff members, reiterating everything he had revealed to Swope and promising to reveal even more when brought before a grand jury, if he lived that long. Whitman promised that if he stayed in his home, he would be all right. The district attorney was the only key official in New York who had no strings to Tammany, having gotten elected without that organization’s help. He was the mortal foe of Tammany mayor William Jay Gaynor (who had disavowed his Tammany connection once in office) and especially eschewed the friendships of such sachems as Big Tim Sullivan. A crusader and a tireless reformer, Whitman vowed to use Rosenthal’s accusations to clean up the city. Before leaving Whitman’s offices that night, however, Rosenthal gave himself little chance of ever appearing before a Grand Jury, telling Whitman: “I may not live to do it. You may never see me again alive.” His words, undoubtedly couched for dramatic effect, could not have been more prophetic.
That night, at about 10 p.m., Rosenthal received a phone call from someone he considered important enough to meet later. He told his wife that he would be going out to keep an important rendezvous but he refused to reveal the identity of the man who had called. Dora Rosenthal begged her husband not to go out, reminding him that he was in great danger but Herman Rosenthal somehow felt confident that no one would dare harm him; he had become too public, too well-known. Why, he was on every front page of every newspaper in New York. He had attacked the New York Police Department and the police of the city would never dare let anything happen to him now. His indictment against the NYPD was his insurance policy. He had not reckoned on the ruthless indifference Charles Becker had to such logic.
So confident was Rosenthal that he walked all the way to his meeting place, his favorite hangout, The Metropole Hotel, on 43rd Street, just east of Broadway. The hotel was owned by the Considine Brothers and Big Tim Sullivan, Rosenthal’s mentor; nothing could happen to him there, the gambler reasoned. The place was a favorite after-hours haunt for actors, newsmen, gamblers, racetrack touts, and Broadway characters of every stripe. Its bar and restaurant teemed with the most colorful (and often dangerous) people in town, the kind of place Herman Rosenthal loved. As Rosenthal neared the hotel he ran into some gamblers he knew. One of them reached out and said: “Herman, it’s not safe for you to be out tonight. Go home. Turn around and go home right now.” Rosenthal laughed off the warning as he pulled away. He intended to keep his appointment at the Metropole. He turned into the hotel lobby shortly before 1 a.m., July 16, 1912, and as he passed the bustling, jam-packed bar, there was a moment of silence, a strange hush as the scores of drinkers paused for a moment as if to acknowledge the passing of a ghost.
Rosenthal sauntered into the dining room and sat down at his favorite table, and here, too, the crowd stared momentarily at him in a strange awe, not expecting him to be there in the flesh, to be alive at all. From the scores of statements made later and over the years it was evident that everyone in the Metropole, everyone “in the know” in Manhattan, knew that Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal was going to die that night, “go on the spot,” as Damon Runyon later put it and he later intimated that he was present in the bar that night. The Metropole was teeming with Runyon characters, the very prototypes who would later people his Guys and Dolls and other Broadway tales. Oddly, Rosenthal sat down next to Christian “Boob” Walker, one of the goons who worked for his arch nemesis, Bridgie Webber. Other Webber cronies, Fat Moe Brown and Butch Kitte sat down for a while while Rosenthal ordered a steak and a horse’s neck (ginger ale and a lemon twist). The Metropole had a number of unique drinks created by its gambler patrons. Billiard Ball Jack Rose, hated by Rosenthal, had created his own drink which was forever after known as a “Jack Rose,” this being a cocktail containing a jigger of applejack, juice of half a lemon, and a half ounce of grenadine, which was all shaken with cracked ice and strained.
When the steak came, Rosenthal wolfed it down, keeping his eye on the door, as if expecting someone to come in at any moment. Boob Walker later stated that “Herman ate as if he could take it with him.” Finishing his supper, the gambler excused himself, got up, and shuffled into the lobby where he bought the latest editions. He was on the front pages bigger than ever. He bought a copy of the World which blared the headline: “GAMBLER CHARGES POLICE LIEUTENANT WAS HIS PARTNER.” He tucked this under his arm and ambled back to his table in the restaurant which was near one of the large windows that faced the street and still gave Rosenthal a clear view of the front door. He spread the newspaper out in front of him and the other gamblers at his table took one look at the headline and quickly excused themselves. A group of gamblers at the next table stared at him incredulously.
Rosenthal shot his French cuffs blazoned with huge gold links, shoved his chair back so that his stomach bloated forward over a huge gold belt buckle which featured his initials in large letters reading HR, and smirked at his friends sitting at the next table. “What do you think of the papers lately?” he said in a conspiratorial voice. “You boys aren’t sore at me, are you?” Rosenthal asked this question without really expecting an answer. One of the gamblers shook his head and said: “Herman, you’re a damned fool.” Ignoring this remark, Rosenthal ordered a cup of coffee and began to read the newspaper, dwelling on every word that dealt with his accusations. Some of the gamblers sitting nearby who had been whispering among themselves looked up at the entranceway to the dining room and suddenly fell silent. At the doorway was a police detective named William J. File. He glanced about the room and then disappeared into the crowded lobby which, instead of emptying out at that time of the morning, was actually filling up so that standing room was getting scarce. It seemed as if everyone in the know on the Main Stem wanted to be there at the kill, or, at least, that was the image of the thronged Metropole that many writers later created. Other plainclothes NYPD detectives were also on hand that night, and out on the street, no less than six–some said more than a dozen–patrolmen strolled the sidewalk on both sides of the street on the block where the Metropole was located, its bright marquee lights flooding light up and down the street. The public killing of Herman Rosenthal was undoubtedly an event no one wanted to miss. Someone in front of the Metropole, a man in a dark suit and a straw boater, his voice full of authority, began to order the taxicabs parked there to move on and he continued to have the cabs pull away from the entranceway for twenty minutes, until the front of the hotel was completely clear of parked vehicles right up to the moment Herman Rosenthal stepped outside to meet his terrible fate.
Oblivious to his own impending execution, only a half hour away, Rosenthal went on bathing in his press glory. He was the talk of the town and he knew it, reveled in it, glorified in the danger he had brought to his own door. He feared nothing, his expression told everyone; he alone would clean up New York. Even when his arch enemy Bridgie Webber sauntered into the hotel dining room a little after 1:30 a.m., Rosenthal gave him a slight smile. Webber walked casually up to Rosenthal and placed his hand on the pudgy gambler’s shoulder, saying affably: “Hello, Herman, how’s everything?” Rosenthal nodded and said: “Fine, everything is just fine. How is it by you?” Webber did not reply, merely stood there for a moment, then he patted Rosenthal’s shoulder several times, turned around, and walked quickly out of the hotel. This was the signal to waiting gangsters outside who could see through the dining room window which of the diners was to be their victim. Months later, at Becker’s prolonged trial, Webber sat calmly in the witness stand and was asked: “When you went to the Metropole, for what purpose did you look for him (Rosenthal)? Was it for the purpose of having him murdered?” The answer was a quiet, unperturbed “Yes, sir.” Webber’s pat on the shoulder was his kiss of death. After making sure that Rosenthal was at the Metropole, Webber went outside to inform the eight men waiting there, four of them gangsters with guns bulging in their pockets, that their victim was almost ready for the slaughter.
It was almost 2 a.m. when a waiter carrying a tray of dishes stopped at Rosenthal’s table and told him that “there is a man in the lobby who wants to see you,” Rosenthal looked through the dining room door to see Harry Vallon, a gambling henchman of Webber’s–a man with the face of a bloody hatchet. Vallon stood staring at him, impassive, his hands jammed into his coat pockets. Rosenthal got up and slowly walked up to Vallon in the lobby. “Can you come outside for a minute, Herman? There’s someone outside who wants to see you,” Vallon told him. The utterly unsuspecting Rosenthal shrugged and followed Vallon outside into the sultry, steaming night. The heavyset gambler followed Vallon outside to the sidewalk, standing under the bright lights of the Metropole, a perfect target. Vallon suddenly stepped back, out of the light and into the shadows. Several gamblers Rosenthal knew stood nearby, including Dave Mendelsohn, Sigmund Rosenfeld, and Chick Beebe. They stood off in the distance and in the shadows, twenty feet or so from the hotel entrance. Also standing in the shadows talking with cronies was Billiard Ball Jack Rose, talking with another gambling intimate, Sam Schepps. Down the block several uniformed policemen could be seen milling about. The street was crowded but no one seemed to take any notice of a huge 1909 Packard that was idling almost in the middle of the street. A dark, swarthy man sat at the wheel. Four other dark, swarthy men (some reports said five men), all described later as short in stature and dressed in dark suits and wearing soft felt hats, stood in front of the car, forming an arc before the hotel entrance.
One of the men shouted: “Over here, Herman!” Rosenthal, who had lit a cigar when crossing the lobby, squinted into the darkness, unable to identify the man who called out to him with an unfamiliar voice. Rosenthal took a hesitant step forward, saying: “Who’s that?” The killers closed in on him, just barely entering the glaring arc lights from the marquee, and five shots rang out, striking Rosenthal at close range (powder burns were to blacken his face). The bullets struck him in the neck, the nose and two in the head. One wild shot struck the door frame of the hotel. Rosenthal, spouting blood, fell dead in the street, the newspapers he had been carrying flying upward and then settling over his crumpled, prostrate body.
Eyewitnesses later claimed that the chief killer, the fierce Gyp the Blood Horowitz, had stepped forward before the fusillade erupted and hailed his victim with the words “Hello, Herman.” After Rosenthal collapsed from his lethal wounds, Horowitz leaned over to make sure the gambler was dead, then stood up, and said, “Goodbye, Herman.” He then casually stepped over the body and joined his fellow gangsters, getting into the Packard which quickly roared down the street. (One witness swore that Gyp the Blood had sneered at his fallen victim and snorted the word “Gotcha!”) Rosenthal lay in the street for some minutes, the many witnesses on the sidewalks frozen in a murder scene motif. In a doorway down the street, some later insisted, mob leader Jack Zelig lit a cigar and walked away from the scene. Then the street exploded with shouts and panic. Police came running from everywhere and witnesses raced to patrolmen to give varied descriptions of the killers and several versions of the license plate on the Packard.
One unlikely witness to this gory murder was none other than the esteemed drama critic for the New York Times, Alexander Woollcott, who would later become a best-selling author and remembered for his radio appearances as the Town Crier. Recalling the Rosenthal murder twenty-two years later when writing While Rome Burns, Woollcott summed up the livid scene: “I shall always remember the picture of that soft, fat body wilting on the sidewalk with a beer-stained tablecloth serving as its pall. I shall always remember the fish-belly faces of the sibilant crowd which sprung in a twinkling from nowhere, formed like a clout around those clamorous wounds. Just behind me an old timer whispered a comment which I have had more than one occasion to repeat. ‘From where I stand,’ he said, ‘I can see eight murderers.’”
As evidence and the testimony of several gamblers scrambling to save their necks would later prove, there were four murderers, plus the man who ordered the killing, all of whom would later sit down in the electric chair for their blatant display of firearms. The killers and their driver fled down 43rd Street in the large Packard sedan. As the car turned onto Broadway with a squeal of tires, Detective File raced from the hotel, his .38-caliber revolver in his hand. He took a look at Rosenthal’s body, the left side of the face blown away, and ordered two patrolmen nearby to follow him. They ran down the street to Broadway where Police Lieutenant Edward Frye met them. The four officers jumped into a cab and order the taxi driver to follow the Packard which was fast disappearing down Broadway. It soon outdistanced the taxi and disappeared. Fortunately, a young, unemployed cabaret singer, Charles Gallagher, had been walking toward the Metropole when the shooting occurred and had the presence of mind to write down the license plate of the car as it sped past him. He later had to argue with policemen to give them the number “NY-41313.”
District Attorney Whitman was awakened at home by the indefatigable Swope who told him that his star witness had just been murdered. Whitman climbed out of his pajamas and into street clothes, going immediately to the 47th Street Precinct Station where the body of Rosenthal lay on a slab in the back room. Some minutes after the bleary-eyed Whitman arrived at the station, he turned to see Charles Becker enter. Becker later claimed that he too had been awakened by a newsman giving him the news of the killing and rushed to his own precinct station to verify the slaying. He took one look at the body and then he met the eyes of Charles Whitman glaring at him. For a moment the hardboiled crooked cop tried to stare down the district attorney but Whitman’s eyes narrowed to slits of contempt and Becker, without a word, lowered his eyes and turned around, leaving the station quickly. He later met with Rose, Webber, and Vallon to congratulate them on the killing, telling the gamblers that he had just gone to the station house and how “it was a pleasing sight to me to see the squealing Jew lying there, and, if it had not been for the presence of Whitman, I would have cut out his tongue and hung it on the Times Building as a warning to future squealers.”
An hour later, Whitman returned home, beside himself with anger over the killing of Rosenthal, telling his wife that “I’m going to get Becker if it’s the only thing I ever do. New York is supposed to be the greatest city in the world…But as long as Becker and all those like him are allowed to defy and corrupt every law by which decent people live, New York will never be anything but a human sewer!” He vowed to send the killers, including Becker, to the electric chair. Whitman was greatly aided in his goal by soon receiving word that the license plate of the murder car had been traced to a rental garage. The killers could not have selected a more conspicuous auto to use in New York’s most sensational murder of the decade. It had once belonged to the great fighter, John L. Sullivan, and was easily traced. It had been rented by a number of gamblers and these–Vallon, Rose, and Webber–were soon under arrest. They were housed in the Tombs but refused to admit to anything until it appeared quite obvious to them that they, not the actual triggermen, would be charged with the killings.
Rose was the first to crack, giving Whitman his famous thirty-eight-page statement in which he liberally quoted Becker’s “Croak Rosenthal” decree. Realizing that Rose was saving his own skin, Webber and Vallon soon joined the chorus, corroborating every damning word Rose said, all, of course, with the promise of immunity extended to them. Through the cooperation of the gamblers, the killers, Harry Gyp the Blood Horowitz, Lefty Louie (Louis Rosenberg), Whitey Lewis (Jacob Seidenschmer) and Dago Frank Cirofici, were all convicted by a jury that took twenty minutes to make up its collective mind on Nov. 19, 1912. All four young killers were electrocuted in Sing Sing on Apr. 14, 1913, a Monday. The previous day, the three Jewish men, Horowitz, Rosenberg, and Seidenschmer, were fed a Passover Dinner prepared in an Ossining hotel, which consisted of stuffed Hudson River bass, chicken soup and macaroons, roast chicken, mashed turnips, matzos, hard-boiled eggs, and peaches. All claimed to be innocent, saying that Vallon was the real killer. Dago Frank Cirofici called for a Catholic priest, then later “confessed” to warders, saying that Vallon and Gyp the Blood had done the killing. He was innocent, he claimed, being at home that night. The men swaggered to their deaths, heroes to the underworld in their own weird code, dying without begging for mercy. Their end came long before that of the man who had ordered them on their murderous mission. It took three years for the law to run Charles Becker to ground.
Once the gamblers made their confession, District Attorney Whitman allowed them their freedom, provided they would testify against Becker at his trial which was scheduled for Oct. 7, 1912. Whitman took no chances. Knowing that he must have corroboration for all the damning statements made chiefly by Rose, he brought another gambler named Sam Schepps into the picture. Schepps was assured immunity and confessed his part in the Rosenthal killing which he too claimed was ordered by Lieutenant Becker. The once-powerful Becker was by then suspended from the NYPD and had been locked in the Tombs to await trial. His attorney, John F. McIntye, was able and quick-witted, but he was up against an almost predetermined case since the shocking, brutal statements by Rose, which revealed Becker to be nothing more than a bestial and inhuman creature, had been broadly printed in the press. Moreover, Whitman was an eloquent and formidable opponent who was by now imbued with a messianic crusade to rid the world of police corruption and that particular venality was personified by Charles Becker. To Whitman, Becker was evil incarnate and he had taken it upon himself to eradicate this scourge personally. He was no less inspired in seeking this legal goal than was the mythical Sir Perceval who had hunted through the bogs of hell to find the Grail.
For his part, Becker exuded confidence from his prison cell. It was all a frameup, the gamblers had lied to save their own skins, Whitman was using him as a scapegoat in winning the governorship. He told his wife the trial would come to nothing and he would be back on the job before Christmas. What reasonable jury would take the word of such Broadway trash as Vallon, Rose, Webber, and Schepps over that of an upstanding police officer who had received his department’s highest commendation for valor? He expected aid from Mayor Gaynor and, of course, his gentle superior, Commissioner Waldo. Yet, curiously, support from these totemic government officials was absent. Also, no one in the department, other than Becker’s brother John, by then a lieutenant on the force, had come forward to lend strong support. There was a silence that befell Becker, ominous and knowing. And all but Becker, his blindly loyal wife, and some close relatives, accepted this man’s doom.
A quicker death awaited Becker’s gangster chieftain Big Jack Zelig. One day before Becker’s trial began, Zelig, the most feared thug in New York, was murdered by an obscure goon whose motives were as absurd as the manner he chose to rid the city of a crime czar. Zelig was to testify at Becker’s trial; he was listed as a defense witness, but Whitman, as he later stated, intended to have the gangster speak on behalf of the prosecution. If this was known by members of the underworld at the time, the presence of Zelig’s killer was not a lone act of an unthinking thug, but a planned killing ordained by the leaders of the system.
Zelig acted in the last moments of his life as if he hadn’t a care in the world. On the night of Oct. 5, 1912, Zelig had dropped into Siegel’s Coffee House on Second Avenue and there enjoyed the company of a half dozen gangsters under his command. He drank heavily, downing several glasses of gin. He decided to get some air and stepped outside, lit a cigar, and looked about for the two detectives whom he knew had been assigned to watch him–since he was now an important witness in the Becker trial–and also to gather information on his on-going illegal activities. Zelig had been off-handedly grateful for this police surveillance since he knew he had been marked for death by a fierce new rival for his underworld territory, Jack Sirocco.
Although he had been expected to return to his men at Siegel’s, Zelig inexplicably strolled a block or so and then, seeing a streetcar going uptown, jumped on board, walked to the back of the car, and squeezed his large frame between an old man and a young woman. As the car moved away from the Fifth Street stop, Zelig noticed from his bench seat a young, tall man racing after the car. He took the cigar out of his mouth and encouraged the passenger to catch up with the car, saying, “C’mon, you can make it, old boy!” The young man reached out, caught the outside handle bar, and swung himself onto the running board of the streetcar. Instead of entering the car, the slightly breathless passenger worked himself behind the last bench on the outside of the car so that he hung from the rear, standing behind Zelig. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a .38-caliber revolver. Zelig and the others in the car were facing the other direction and no one saw the killer place the muzzle of the gun behind Zelig’s left ear. He fired one shot. Zelig leaped forward with the impact, his face a mask of blood, crashing to the streetcar floor where his dying body gave one shuddering spasm and went limp. Screaming women and shouting men in the car pointed frantically to the sour-faced killer hanging at the end of the trolley.
The killer wasted no time, leaping from the car as it moved on. His jump was ill-chosen for he landed almost at the foot of a startled patrolman, banging into him, his revolver still in hand. The cop raised his nightstick and instinctively began clubbing the killer until he lay senseless on the sidewalk. He was identified a short time later as 30-year-old Philip “Red Phil” Davidson, who had occasionally worked as a fruit peddler but had a long criminal record as a narcotics pusher, gambler, and white slaver. He laconically told police that he had killed Zelig because the gangster had stolen $400 from him earlier that day. Later Davidson changed his story, saying that he had misstated the amount. Zelig had cheated him out of $18 and that is the reason why he felt compelled to murder the man. Of course, it was all nonsense. Zelig was a wealthy man who gave $20 to bootblacks for a mere shine and would not have spent a second bruising his knuckles over such a paltry amount. Davidson, after a brief trial, was given twenty years in prison and was released in twelve.
Whitman made much of Zelig’s killing, claiming that the gangster would prove that Rose and the other gamblers had been telling the truth and that Becker was guilty. McIntyre, for the defense, said that such statements were ridiculous, that Zelig would have proved that Rose, Vallon, and Webber, all sworn enemies of Zelig’s, had planned the killing of their worst competitor on their own and had used Zelig’s best killers to do it and that Becker had no connection with the Rosenthal murder. It was, however, with Big Jack dead on a morgue slab, a moot issue. Becker’s trial went ahead as planned and was over in twelve days.
Judge John Goff, a no-nonsense law-and-order magistrate, argued throughout the trial with defense counsel McIntyre and seemed to show a decided interest in having Becker found guilty. He allowed Whitman every opportunity, and made McIntyre battle himself into illness to make the meagerest point. Goff had long been a conservative foe of political graft and police corruption in New York, challenging the powers of Tammany as early as the 1890s during the Lexow and Mazet hearings. (Goff, during this trial, as was his habit with any other, took his lunch inside his chambers; this consisted exclusively of milk and crackers which he always washed down with a long swig of Irish whiskey.) His conduct was much in question and it drove Becker, outwardly calm during the entire course of the trial, to near rage when talking with his attorney in his Tombs cell. At one conference with McIntyre, Becker shouted at his beleaguered attorney: “Between that judge and your inability to stop the DA, I’m going to fry! I could have done better by myself.” He insisted on taking the witness stand to clear himself but McIntyre persuaded him against this, assuring Becker that Goff’s high-handed ways would prejudice the case and assure a victory for the defense in the Appeals Court. “It doesn’t matter what the jury does,” McIntyre told his client. “No conviction will ever survive an appeal.”
Becker came to believe that the prosecution’s case would not hold up, that the jury would reason that a bunch of murderous gamblers were obviously trying to frame a police officer who had persecuted them. He became so confident that he would be acquitted that he told his wife to wear her best dress on the last day of the trial. They would go to one of the best restaurants in town to celebrate his release. No one was more shocked when he was found Guilty and later sentenced by Goff to reside in Sing Sing where he would later be executed. McIntyre, however, was proved correct. The Appeals Court overruled the conviction, citing Goff’s conduct and other discrepancies in the trial. Becker was tried again, and brought back from Death Row to the Tombs.
Judge Samuel Seabury who was as famous as Goff in combating New York corruption, presided over Becker’s second trial which began on May 2, 1914, Whitman’s choice in that he was more even-handed and careful in his supervision of the trial. Whitman did not want another reversal. Becker had to die in the electric chair and that meant that the second trial must end in a conviction that would be upheld at any judicial level. W. Bourke Cochran, an exjudge, served as Becker’s attorney, but he was no match for Whitman who once more paraded his gamblers before the jury with their inflammatory but utterly memorable testimony. Seabury avoided the pitfalls of Judge Goff and was extremely cautious in his instructions to the jury. On May 22, 1914, the jury took one hour and fifty minutes to convict Charles Becker of the murder of Herman Rosenthal. Becker was later sentenced to die in Sing Sing’s electric chair on July 6, 1914. But one appeal after another postponed that date with death.
While Becker and his lawyers fought for his life, Whitman ran for the governor’s office and, with the Becker conviction as the single most important achievement in his career to bolster support, he was swept into the Albany mansion with a tremendous Republican landslide on Nov. 3, 1914. Now Becker and his attorneys were faced with seeking Whitman’s mercy after all other appeals failed. This Becker found intolerable, saying: “My life has been sacrificed on the altar of Whitman.” But, as Becker’s final date for execution approached, July 30, 1915, the condemned man found himself writing a pleading letter to the very man who convicted him, begging Whitman to commute his sentence. Whitman, through an aide, stated: “The Governor cannot pardon a man he convicted.” Whitman himself, just before the execution, after denying Becker’s plea for clemency, said: “As far as Becker’s conviction is concerned, there was never a criminal case more perfectly proven in the annals of crime. I have never had any doubt about Becker’s guilt. If I had any now I would pardon him.”
In a dramatic last minute effort, Mrs. Helen Becker went personally to Governor Whitman and begged for an interview. Whitman, through an aide, agreed to see her but when she appeared at the Governor’s mansion in Albany only twelve hours before her husband was to die, she found the governor gone. She learned he was in Peekskill reviewing a military event. She trailed him there only to learn he had gone to Poughkeepsie. She found him at the Nelson House. Here the governor, cornered, as it were, by the desperate wife who had never given up on her husband or lost a second of belief in his innocence, was forced to face Helen Becker who implored him to consider her husband’s last plea for a review of his case. Whitman only stood in the center of the Governor’s suite, arms clasped behind his back, saying nothing. Mrs. Becker, understanding his silence to be a final refusal, broke down.
Nothing stopped Becker’s execution on July 30, 1915. He entered the death room at Sing Sing and stoically, some reporters later stated “arrogantly,” approached the electric chair, sitting down while staring ahead, his chin up, his eyes glaring at the twenty-odd witnesses. He repeated the litany being said by the prison chaplain, Father James Curry. The convicted killer looked massive and powerful as he sat in the chair, thick, muscular legs that were exposed at the calf where the trousers had been slit for the electrodes, an expanding chest that breathed evenly. Charles Becker insisted upon his innocence to the end and decided to show himself unafraid. He held a crucifix and when the first jolt of electricity was thrown into him, 1,850 volts of current, his large body of 215 pounds lurched against the straps with such force that the leather creaked and groaned, almost bursting their anchors. In ten seconds the current was shut off but an examining physician, Dr. Charles Farr, reported that Becker was still alive. Another ten-second jolt was thrown into him. Again his body strained against the straps. The doctor listened again to Becker’s heart with his stethoscope and announced that the man was still alive. For a third time the body was given another jolt and this time Dr. Farr, after listening closely for a heartbeat, turned and said: “I pronounce this man dead.”
By then the witnesses were exhausted with the shock of Becker’s awful death, one that had taken nine minutes and was later considered one of the most “botched” executions in Sing Sing history. The nine minutes had seemed like an eternity to the witnesses, one of whom was a World reporter who later wrote: “To those who had sat in the gray-walled room and watched and listened to the rasping sound of the wooden switch lever being thrown backward and forward and had seen the greenish-blue blaze at the victim’s head and feet, and the grayish smoke curling away from the scorched flesh, it had seemed an hour.” The Crookedest Cop in the World was dead.
Becker, Marie Alexander, b.1877, Belg. A native of Liege, Marie Becker, fifty-three, was a bored housewife, married to a cabinetmaker. While buying vegetables at a street stall in 1932 she was approached by Lambert Beyer, a middle-aged lothario who propositioned her. She accepted without qualification and was soon involved in a deep love affair, convinced that the only way to recapture her youth was to murder her husband and go on with her girlish affairs. Becker poisoned her spouse with digitalis and, after tiring of Beyer, poisoned him with the same lethal drug. The once proper Becker, much to the shock of neighbors, became a nightlife creature, haunting dance halls and nightclubs, wildly dancing with men half her age. She paid these gigolos to accompany her to her bed and was soon out of money. Becker had opened a dress shop some months earlier from the proceeds of her husband’s insurance and, to obtain money for her expensive affairs, she began to poison her female patrons with digitalis, dropping this in a cup of tea in the back of her shop while discussing a new order with a customer. She would steal whatever money her patrons possessed and then, while the customer was in a drugged condition, manage to get them home where they shortly died of “unknown causes.”
The number of murders committed by the homely housewife totaled ten known homicides, but there may have been twice that before Becker was arrested. She brought suspicion to herself when a woman friend casually remarked that her husband was aggravating her so much that she wished he were dead. “If you really mean that,” responded the poisoner, “I can supply you with a powder that will leave no trace.” The friend went to the police who had long suspected Becker because of the number of her clients who had mysteriously perished after visiting her shop. She was arrested and, while in detention, the bodies of her husband, Beyer, and some of her customers were exhumed and traces of the poison were found.
Witnesses at Becker’s trial told how they had seen the killer attend the funerals of her victims, kneeling at gravesides and weeping hysterically. She would later be seen that night doing erotic dances in Liege nightclubs, spending the very money that she had pilfered from her hapless victims. Becker held back nothing at her trial, gloating over the murders and describing with arch disdain the way her victims died. One of her victims, she said, “looked like an angel choked with sauerkraut.” Another she described as “dying beautifully, lying flat on her back.” Convicted, Marie Becker was sent to prison for life, there being no death penalty in Belgium at that time. She died in prison sometime during WWII.
Belachheb, Abdelkrim, 1945- , U.S. When a woman in a Texas bar refused the sexual advances of the man she was dancing with, he went out to his car and returned to shoot her, killing six other people at the same time.
Abdelkrim Belachheb, a 39-year-old from Morocco, was at Ianni’s Restaurant and Club in North Dallas in the early morning of June 29, 1984. When a woman he was dancing with admonished him for his aggressive behavior by pushing him away, he blew her a kiss, then went to his car and loaded a Smith and Wesson .459 automatic pistol. Returning to the club, he walked over to the woman who was now seated on a barstool and shot her to death. Belachheb again returned to his car, reloaded the gun, walked a second time into the bar, and randomly shot patrons off their barstools, killing five more and critically wounding another, who died at Parkland Memorial Hospital shortly after. According to Sergeant Bill Parker, he then fled in his station wagon, abandoned it after a traffic accident, and walked to the home of Mohammed Benali, about ten miles from the restaurant. The two men spoke in Arabic, according to Benali’s friend, Anne Avis, then went to a back room of the house where they sat for about an hour of fasting, honoring the last day of Ramadan, a religious holiday during which Muslims keep a strict fast from sunrise to sunset and refrain from even thoughts of violence. Three hours after the shootings, they called the police, who arrested the killer.
Victims included Marcelle Ford, thirty-two, Frank Parker, forty-nine, Joseph Minasi, thirty-six, Linda Lowe, forty-three, and Janice Smith, forty-six. The police withheld the name of the sixth victim, a woman. Belachheb was put on trial in the Dallas District County Court of Judge Meier, and convicted on multiple charges of murder and attempted murder. On Nov. 15, 1984, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and is currently serving his term at the Texas Department of Corrections Prison in Huntsville, Texas. Police spokesman Bob Shaw called the case “the worst multiple killing in the city’s history in modern times.”
Bell, James E., 1901-29, U.S. A man with a persecution delusion terrorized the streets of Newark, N.J., during a morning rush hour, killing two people and wounding three others before he committed suicide.
At 9 a.m. on Apr. 2, 1929, Julius Rabinowitz, thirty-eight, a jewelry salesman, was directed to the third floor apartment of James E. Bell by Louise Hooper, a neighbor in the tenement building. Intending to drop off some laundry work for Bell’s wife, he knocked on the door. Bell flung it open and fired four shots from an automatic pistol into Rabinowitz’s body, then shot him in the head with a shotgun. As he raced down the stairs with a weapon in each hand, Bell called back to Hooper, “Please tell my wife I’ve killed a man.” On the street, Bell fired at a passing car, attracting the attention of 45-year-old William H. Bahrs, a post office clerk who was at home reading. As Bahrs looked out his window, Bell fired, hitting the man in the face and killing a caged canary inside the house. Bahrs stumbled to the phone and called the police. Charles Ramsperger, a 51-year-old cashier on his way to work, was Bell’s next victim. The crazed killer also wounded Louis Pollack, a 43-year-old store owner, with a random shot.
Patrolman Thomas J. Hackett of the Newark police arrived and Bell shot him as he tried to draw his gun. Hackett then commandeered a taxicab to drive him around the block in an effort to catch Bell from behind. Joined by officer Samuel Cobb, Hackett found Bell dead in the alley, shot through the head with one of his own bullets. The wounded were rushed to City Hospital, Ramsberger dying on the way. Police found an arsenal of weapons in Bell’s apartment, including two swords, a long curved knife, two blackjacks, 100 shotgun cartridges, sixty bullets, and a bag of buckshot.
One of Bell’s neighbors, the Reverend Mr. Douglas, told of going to the man’s apartment a few days earlier, jokingly calling to him, “I’ve got a warrant for you.” When the excited Bell saw who it was he begged the minister never to do anything like that again, explaining, “I’ve been persecuted something awful and I’m liable to kill somebody anytime.” An autopsy revealed that Bell was suffering from a blood disease.
Bell, Mary Flora, 1957- , Brit. Mary Bell was only eleven years old when she killed two small boys in Newcastle, England. Children in the Scotswood district of the city began to have serious accidents in the spring of 1968. On May 11, a 3-year-old boy fell from the roof of an air-raid shelter where he had been playing with Mary Bell and another girl named Norma Bell (not related). The boy survived the fall but was seriously injured. The following day, the mothers of three small children went to police to complain that Mary Bell had been choking their boys and girls, all about age six. A constable visited Mary Bell and gave her a lecture about keeping her hands off other children. On May 25, 1968, the night before Mary Bell turned eleven, some boys playing in an abandoned house found the body of 4-year-old Martin George Brown. No cause of death was apparent and it was concluded he had swallowed some pills he found in a bottle. Later that day Norma Bell’s father stopped Mary Bell from choking his 11-year-old daughter; the father had to slap the girl to get her to stop.
On the following day, May 26, a nursery school was broken into and damage was done. Investigating officers discovered a crudely written note laced with misspelled obscenities and a line that read “We did murder Martin Brown.” Some days later, Mary Bell went to the Brown house and asked if she could see Martin. The distraught mother told her: “No, dear, Martin is dead.” Replied Mary Flora Bell: “I know. I wanted to see him in his coffin.” On May 31, police responded to a recently installed alarm in the nursery which had recently been vandalized and found Mary Bell and Norma Bell inside. Both girls swore they had never been in the school before and were sent home with a stern lecture. Mary Bell then began telling people that her friend Norma had killed the Brown child. When she heard that Norma’s parents had become incensed over these remarks, Mary Bell ran to her friend’s house and pantingly apologized.
On July 31, 1968, 3-year-old Brian Howe disappeared in the Scotswoord area and when a search ensued, Mary Bell told Howe’s older sister that she saw the boy playing on concrete blocks in a deserted lot. Searchers found the boy’s body near the blocks. The boy had been strangled to death and there were cuts on his stomach and legs. A pathologist reported that the killer could have been a child since little force had been employed in the murder. All the children in the area were then questioned as to their whereabouts on the night of Howe’s death. Mary Bell stated that she had been playing near the area where the boy was killed and that she had seen an 8-year-old boy beating Brian and that the older boy was carrying a pair of broken scissors. The boy was interviewed and found to have been somewhere else on the night of the murder. Suspicion was directed toward Mary Bell since no one knew that a pair of broken scissors had been found at the murder site. Norma Bell was then interviewed and she said that she and Mary Bell had walked through the murder area and that Mary Bell had stumbled over the body of the Howe child and then admitted to her that she had killed him.
When Mary Bell was brought into police headquarters for further questioning, she assumed a very adult posture, insisting that she be allowed to contact a solicitor while accusing the police of “brainwashing” her. Norma then informed police that she had been with Mary when Mary Bell killed the boy, but that she had run away when Mary had “gone all funny” and began strangling the child. She returned to see Mary Bell mutilating the corpse with the scissors and with a razor she used to cut the stomach. Norma Bell correctly told police that the razor could be found beneath a rock. Mary retaliated by accusing Norma Bell of the murder. Chief Inspector James Dobson of the CID had for some time suspected Mary Bell of murdering the Brown and Howe boys. He had been watching her for some days and witnessed her strange actions on the day that the body of the Howe boy was removed from his home in a small coffin. “That was when I knew I couldn’t risk another day,” Dobson later stated. “She stood there laughing, laughing and rubbing her hands. I thought, My God, I’ve got to bring her in or she’ll do another one.”
Both Mary Bell and Norma Bell were placed on trial on Dec. 5, 1968, but it was clear early on that Norma Bell was completely under the domination of Mary Bell and that she was innocent of the murders. Mary Bell, who had told a police woman that she wanted to be a nurse so she could stick needles in people and that she “liked hurting people,” was found Guilty of manslaughter in both the Brown and Howe cases due to “diminished responsibility.” She was sent to Moor Court, an open prison, to serve a life sentence, since no asylum would accept her. She escaped with another inmate for three days in September 1977 but was recaptured within three days. Mary Bell proudly announced that she and the other girl had picked up some boys and that she had lost her virginity. She added that she felt that if she were left at large she could quickly become a useful citizen, a claim that found no support with officials.
Mary Bell’s childhood in the impoverished Scotswood area certainly played a key role in creating her murderous personality. Her mother was only seventeen and unmarried when she gave birth. When she did marry, the mother, whose personality was volatile, left Mary alone a great deal of the time and often vanished for days on end. Her father was also gone a great deal of the time, and the Bell home was described as “poorly furnished and dirty.” In school, Mary was known to be a habitual liar and an exhibitionist, one who liked punishing others. After Mary Bell’s imprisonment, her father was sent to prison for robbery.
Belvin, Paul Augustus, 1943- , Ber. Appealing to a killer’s vanity, two Scotland Yard detectives invited him to be an amateur detective and help solve his own crime.
On July 4, 1971, at 4:30 a.m., the partly clothed body of Jean Burrows, a 24-year-old British journalist vacationing with her husband in Bermuda, was discovered floating in three feet of water in Hamilton Harbour, a yacht basin for millionaires. The night before, Burrows, her husband, and two other journalists had ridden mopeds home after a dinner date at the popular Hoppin’ John’s restaurant, but she did not arrive with the others. A post-mortem by Dr. Wenwyon, the local pathologist, revealed that she had been raped, knocked unconscious by a heavy blow to the head, and then drowned by being held under water. Bruises indicated an attempt at strangulation before the drowning. Her moped was hidden three hundred yards from the body in a tall patch of grass. Recruited from Scotland Yard in London to investigate the crime were detectives William Wright and Basil Haddrell. After sending slides and photographs assembled by Wenwyon for analysis in London, the detectives set up house-to-house inquiries and came up with the name of Paul Augustus Belvin, a 28-year-old local man frequently seen in the basin where the body was found. Two witnesses recalled him as the winner of a competition the year before in which he had found a hidden key and won a cash prize, gaining some publicity.
When the detectives called Belvin in for questioning they found him to be clever, with a great deal of information concerning local gossip and the area. Wright surprised Haddrell, his superior, by asking Belvin if he would like to be an amateur detective and assist them in the investigation. Belvin eagerly agreed, and then proceeded to act out the entire crime in accurate and precise detail, even leading the detectives to the murder weapon, an iron pipe he had thrown into the sea. Tests on Belvin’s clothing proved conclusively that he was the murderer. On Sept. 1, 1971, he confessed. Belvin was found Guilty and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life in prison.
Bembenek, Lawrencia (Laurie Bembenek), 1959- , U.S. A former policewoman and ex-Playboy bunny was convicted of murdering her husband’s former wife because the ex-wife received substantial alimony.
On May 28, 1981, Christine Schultz was shot dead in her home in Milwaukee, Wis. In June, Laurie Bembenek, married to Elfred Schultz, Christine’s ex-husband and a former police detective, was charged with the murder. Bembenek had been fired from the police force in September 1980, and Elfred Schultz resigned as a detective in December 1981. Witnesses at the March 1982 trial, said Bembenek, a former Playboy bunny in Lake Geneva, Wis., had talked about having Christine Schultz killed, complaining that her alimony payments were too large. Prosecution witnesses included Schultz’s two sons: Shannon Schultz, eight, who testified that the person who came into his room seconds after shooting his mother wore a green jogging suit, and 12-year-old Sean Schultz who remembered the murderer in a loose green army jacket. Four witnesses testified that Bembenek owned a jogging outfit like that described. Hairs from a wig found hidden in Bembenek’s apartment matched hairs found near the slain woman’s body. Robert Kraemer, assistant district attorney, headed the prosecution’s case, portraying Bembenek as a woman addicted to “the fast life,” while defense attorney Donald Eisenberg said his client was framed, quoting the Bible and Pope Paul VI in his four hours of closing arguments. Bembenek was found Guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced by Judge Michael Skwierawski to life imprisonment. A large crowd of spectators followed the fifteen-day trial.
Benitez, Martin Rivera (AKA: Big Soul), prom. 1970s, Mex. A killer for hire, Benitez was a native of Hildago who would murder anyone if the price was right. Between 1969 and 1972, it is estimated by Mexican police that he killed at least fifty persons. Twelve headless bodies were found in his “morgue,” in a woods near his Jazatipan house. Benitez, serving life, explained later that he was so much in demand that lines formed around his house and that to prove that the victims were indeed killed by him, he would cut off the heads and show these to his employers. “I saw nothing wrong in killing for money,” the mass murderer said without a bit of remorse. “If I had not done it, someone else would.”
Benson, Steven, 1951- , U.S. Threatened with being cut out of his wealthy mother’s will, a 34-year-old would-be entrepreneur planted two pipe bombs in her car, murdering two people and severely injuring a third.
Steven Benson was born into money, the son of tobacco tycoon Edward Benson and Margaret, his heiress wife. Gifted at electronics, Steven Benson, at an early age, built a television set, an achievement his mother spoke of proudly. By the time he reached adulthood, however, he had become greedy, unsuccessful at his many business adventures, and twice divorced. Benson spent copious amounts of the family money on small businesses that repeatedly fell apart. After his father died in 1980, Margaret Benson continued to give her eldest son money for his ventures, but when she learned he was lifting funds from the businesses into his own pocket, she threatened to write him out of her will. On July 9, 1985, Benson, then living with his mother and his nephew, Scott, twenty-one, in Naples, Fla., planted two twenty-seven pound bombs in his mother’s car. Set off by an electronic device, they killed Scott, Margaret Benson, and severely injured Carol Lynn Kendall, Scott’s mother and Steven’s sister.
Kendall served as the state’s main witness, testifying against her brother. One year after the bombs exploded, Benson was found Guilty of murder and condemned to serve two consecutive life sentences, along with thirty-seven years for attempted murder and arson.
Berkowitz, David (AKA: Son of Sam), 1953- , U.S. David Berkowitz, an unbalanced slayer who terrorized New York for more than a year as the “Son of Sam,” was born June 1, 1953, the bastard son of a woman who gave him up for adoption. Throughout his miserable life, he had a deep sense of rejection. He grew up shy and terrorized by women. His stepfather, Nat Berkowitz, ran a hardware store in the Bronx and later retired to Florida. His stepson David remained in New York, living on Pine Street in Yonkers. He worked at odd jobs and his room was always littered with garbage. He could not sleep, he complained in letters to his stepfather, because the sound of trucks on the street and a neighbor’s barking dog kept him up every night. He became paranoid, insisting that strangers on the street displayed hatred for him and spat at him as he walked past. “The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most,” he wrote his stepfather. On Christmas Eve 1975, Berkowitz attacked two girls with a knife at separate sites. The first girl frightened him off with her wild shrieking, but he plunged the blade into the lung of the second girl, a 15-year-old schoolgirl and left her for dead. She survived. Berkowitz waited seven months before striking again, this time on the night of July 29, 1976. He found two girls, Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti talking in the front seat of a car parked on Buhre Avenue. Calmly taking a gun from a brown paper bag, he fired five shots into them, killing Lauria and wounding Valenti in the leg. Police were baffled–the killer was a person without motive and was thought to be one who killed for thrills. Berkowitz shot and wounded Carl Denaro on the night of Oct. 23, firing through the rear window of his car as Denaro sat with his girlfriend, Rosemary Keenan, in front of a Flushing bar. On Nov. 26, two more girls, Joanne Lomino and Donna DeMasi, sitting on the stoop of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens, were approached by Berkowitz, who began to ask them directions, but stopped in mid-sentence. He pulled his gun from the brown bag and fired blindly, wounding both of them before fleeing. Lomino was paralyzed by a bullet that lodged next to her spine. Other bullets dug out of the wooden stairs of the stoop matched those in the Lauria-Valenti shooting.
Police still had no clue as to the identity of the killer, despite efforts to trace the gun. Then, on Jan. 30, 1977, Berkowitz spotted a young couple necking in a car in Ridgewood. He crept up on the car, took the gun out of the brown paper bag, and fired through the window, one of his bullets striking the head of Christine Freund, who collapsed into the arms of her boyfriend, John Diel. She was pronounced dead a few hours later. On Mar. 8, 1977, Berkowitz walked up to Virginia Voskerichian, an Armenian student he had never met, pulled out his gun, and fired point-blank into the girl’s face, killing her as she walked down a Forest Hills street. Witnesses described Berkowitz as about five feet, ten inches tall, with black hair combed straight back. He was described by authorities as “a savage killer” and women were warned not to travel alone at night in the city. On Apr. 17, 1977, Berkowitz came upon Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau, sitting in a parked car in the Bronx, only a short distance from where he had shot Lauria and Valenti. He shot both of them at close range. Suriani was killed instantly and Esau, with three bullets in his head, died in the hospital some time later.
Following this shooting, a note was found addressed to Police Captain Joseph Borrelli, who had made several statements about the killer to the press. To Borrelli, Berkowitz wrote: “I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater (sic). I am not. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I am a little brat…I love to hunt, prowling the streets, looking for fair game …tasty meat…The weman of Queens are prettyist of all.” In this letter, Berkowitz, seeming to emulate the letters Jack the Ripper sent to authorities almost a century earlier when prowling the streets of London, claimed that he had been brutalized by his father when he was a child and that he was later ordered by his father to go into the streets and murder. Berkowitz sent a similar letter to New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, who had been writing extensively about the slayer.
Berkowitz struck again on June 26, 1977, shooting Judy Placido and Salvatore Lupo as they sat in a car in a street in Queens. This time Berkowitz had fired quickly and his aim was poor; his victims were only slightly wounded. Berkowitz roamed the streets of the Bronx and Queens looking for victims but police seemed to be everywhere. He went to Brooklyn and, on July 31, 1977, found Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante sitting in a car. He fired four shots through the window, killing Moskowitz and blinding Violante. A woman walking her dog saw Berkowitz run to his car and leap in, speeding away. She told police that the car had a parking violation ticket in its windshield. Police checked to find that only four parking tickets had been issued that morning and the carbon copy of one of these bore the registration number of David Berkowitz of Yonkers. Police Inspector Tim Dowd and others found the car parked near Berkowitz’s apartment and waited for him to appear on Aug. 2, 1977. Berkowitz walked toward the car at 10:15 p.m. Dowd stepped forward and said: “Hello, David.”
Berkowitz stood still for a moment, then his pudgy face crinkled with his peculiar beamish smile. “Inspector Dowd!” he said, recognizing the officer from his newspaper photos. “You finally got me.” He surrendered meekly and later tried to mount a defense of insanity, but psychiatrists testified at Berkowitz’s trial that he was faking. The sinister Son of Sam name was an invention of Berkowitz’s, taken from his neighbor, Sam Carr. It was Carr’s dog who had kept him up nights. He had shot the dog but the animal recovered and it was later claimed by Berkowitz that the dog spoke to him as one of the voices that told him to go out and murder. Berkowitz pleaded guilty to murder charges when he was arraigned on Aug. 23, 1977, and was never tried. He was sentenced to 365 years in prison with no hope of parole. His apartment was later looted by souvenir hunters.
Bernardy, Sigoyer de (Marquis de Bernardy), d.1947, Fr. Though placed in an insane asylum during the 1930s–once for claiming to have eaten a missingman whose identification papers were found in his home–Sigoyer de Bernardy managed to obtain his release and became quite wealthy during WWII by opening a restaurant selling wholesale liquor to German soldiers.
De Bernardy, who called himself a marquis, married Janine Kergot and they had two children. He also had one child by the nursemaid of his children, Irene Lebeau, for which his wife left him in 1944. The court ordered de Bernardy to pay 10,000 francs a month, but an attempt to collect this alimony one month proved to be fatal for Kergot, who disappeared without a trace after going to his home to inquire about the money.
Her disappearance would have remained a mystery if not for letters written by de Bernardy to Lebeau while he was imprisoned after the war for collaborating with the enemy. One letter alluded to a cask which held clothing and jewelry belonging to the missing woman, while another spoke of a red armchair which Lebeau said was the chair Kergot was sitting on when de Bernardy strangled her. De Bernardy claimed he was innocent, stating he had only helped Lebeau conceal the body after she had shot Kergot.
The missing woman’s body was discovered in the wine cellar of de Bernardy’s warehouse in the Rue de Nuits, but no bullet wound was found. At the joint trial of de Bernardy and Lebeau on Dec. 23, 1946, Lebeau was acquitted but de Bernardy was sentenced to death and guillotined in June 1947.
Bertucci, Clarence V., 1921- , U.S. The war was over. For the German prisoners still confined in the POW camp at Salina, Utah, in July 1945, all that remained was the long trip home to begin their lives anew. Located 150 miles south of Salt Lake City, Camp Salina received hundreds of Nazi prisoners during the war without incident. By day the buses transported the men to Sevier and Sanpete counties where they picked beets under the direction of U.S. Army personnel. It was a quiet, if not dull, existence for both POWs and GIs during the closing months of WWII.
All this changed on July 8, when in a moment of mental duress 23-year-old army private Clarence Bertucci seized a 30-caliber air-cooled machine gun perched atop a guard tower and began strafing the tents of the sleeping German prisoners.
Bertucci, who had been confined to the stockade on three occasions for insubordination and desertion, was scheduled to report for duty at Tower One at midnight. At 11 p.m. he shared a few beers in town with some local Salina girls before grabbing a quick cup of coffee at an all-night diner near the camp.
It was a cool, cloudless night as Bertucci climbed the guard tower and took over the gun. He looked out across the tent city where 250 Germans slept. He loaded 250 rounds into the weapon. Then, for the next fifteen seconds, he riddled forty-three tents from left to right as frantic prisoners scurried for cover. Wakened abruptly, Lieutenant Albert Cornell ran to the tower and ordered Bertucci to cease firing. He did, because all the ammo in the machine gun had been discharged. Corporal Delmire Butts charged up the ladder to bring him down from his post.
When all the tents were checked, eight Germans had been killed and twenty more wounded. The victims were laid to rest at Fort Douglas and accorded a proper military funeral. For the rest of the prison-camp population unhurt in the hail of bullets, there were more beets to pick. Colonel Arthur Ericsson, commanding officer of the Army Services Forces POW camp at Ogden, refused their request for a two-day layoff. “We declined the request on the grounds that it would be better for them to work than to stay idle,” he said.
When questioned by an investigating board, Bertucci showed no remorse for what he had done. He said he hated Germans, and he wanted to kill them. The tedium of a noncombat assignment had apparently been too much for this young soldier. “Something must have happened to him,” explained his mystified mother upon hearing the news.
On Aug. 18, a panel of medical officers and psychiatrists at Bushnell General Hospital concluded that Bertucci was “mentally unbalanced.” Five days later he was granted a discharge from the Army and sent to Mason General Hospital, Brentwood, Long Island, N.Y., for further tests and evaluation.
Back home in New Orleans, his thirteen brothers and sisters recalled that shy, withdrawn Clarence had acted strangely when he returned on a furlough from England in 1944. After he left for his tour of duty in the Utah desert, they discovered a cryptic message penciled on a doorsill. It read: “Live and let live.”
Best, Alton Alonzo, 1956- , U.S. When Alton Best was led away to prison to begin serving an 18-year sentence for the murder of 20-year-old nursing aid Janice Elaine Morton, defense attorney Neal Kravitz noted with a tinge of sadness, “Mr. Best is a really nice, thoughtful, nonviolent man who did something horrible because of his drug use. It is sad. It really is a tragedy.” But many others would not agree.
What the baffled Washington, D.C., detectives do not know is just how many more deaths the “nice, thoughtful” drug user may have been responsible for. Between Dec. 13, 1986, and Jan. 12, 1987, five badly mangled bodies were found in a remote wooded area near the Bradbury Recreation Center in Suitland, in Prince George’s County, Md. Janice Morton’s body was found on Jan. 15, 1987, a couple of miles away. All six of the victims were poor, young, black women and they had all been sodomized.
Alonzo Best, a groundskeeper for the National Park Service on winter furlough, had a record of violent crime dating back to December 1981 when he kidnapped and robbed two young women, but the charges were later dropped. In 1983 he was arrested and convicted for possessing PCP and two years later was convicted of mail fraud. At the time of his arrest for murder, he had several arrests for drug possession.
On Jan. 15, 1987, Best drove a black van belonging to his nephew, Washington, D.C., policeman William Armah, into an alley near 414 Eastern Avenue, in the northeast section of the city. There he deposited the severely lacerated body of Janice Morton, who was twelve weeks pregnant when she died. Her body was found a few hours later by a witness who identified Best as the man who had left a large item in the alley. The hunt for the black van started. Later that afternoon, Best returned the van to his nephew, who discovered bloodstains in the rear. Best told him that the blood was from an injured friend he had taken to a hospital.
Janice Morton’s mother had reported her disappearance to police, though she had not seen her daughter for nearly eighteen days. The body was not identified for another twelve days, when Morton’s employer recognized the sketch in the newspaper. A search of the Morton residence turned up an address book and the name of an acquaintance who was able to link the killer to the victim.
Strangely enough, two days before Best was apprehended, the now-famous black van was pulled over by Prince George’s County police, but the officer neglected to search the vehicle because the driver showed police credentials. Best, beside his nephew, must have thought he was safe, but he was finally arrested on Jan. 30 1987. The van was located in a repair shop, and the bloodstains were found. The police soon learned that Armah and Best had shared an apartment near Suitland prior to the murders of the five women. They also found that Best had tenous links to at least three of the women found at Suitland. But the evidence connecting Best to those murders stopped there.
Prosecutors presented the court with a seemingly airtight case against Best for the murder of Janice Morton. Best pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for the government’s agreement to drop first-degree and rape charges. There was no chance of securing a death sentence against Best because capital punishment had long been abolished in Washington, D.C. Judge Reggie Walton of the D.C. Superior Court sentenced Best to fifteen years to life, with an additional forty months to five years for sodomy. If Best had chosen to dump the body a few hundred feet away, he would have been in Maryland, where capital punishment exists.
Beto, Joseph Anthony, 1945- , and Zamp, Jerome, 1947- , U.S. It took three months and a search as far away as New Orleans, La., before the killers of Dr. Hans Wachtel were caught.
Wachtel was shot twice in the head on Feb. 2, 1977, while sitting in his car parked outside his South Side Chicago apartment. The 67-year-old doctor was the chairman of the obstetrics-gynecology department at Woodlawn Hospital. His assailants were Joseph Anthony Beto, who was arrested May 13, and Jerome Zamp, arrested in New Orleans two days later.
Both were found Guilty of murder and sentenced by Judge Barbaro to spend from 200 to 300 years in prison. Others were sought and arrested for the crime but no other convictions were made.
Bianchi, Kenneth (AKA: The Hillside Strangler; Steve Walker; Anthony D’Amato; Nicholas Fontana; Billy), 1952- , and Buono, Angelo, Jr., 1935- , U.S. These two bestial killers slew ten young women and girls who were mostly part-time prostitutes, murdering them from 1977 to 1979 in Angelo Buono, Jr.’s home in Glendale, Calif., committing the slayings attributed to the Hillside Strangler. Kenneth Bianchi, who had been born in Rochester, N.Y., and had been raised by foster parents, arrived in Los Angeles in 1977 to stay with his cousin Buono, who was a street-tough sub-normal creature always trying to prove his manhood and authority. He reveled in being Italian and flew the Italian flag 24 hours a day from a flagpole on the grounds of his house. He ran an upholstery business out of his garage and was already continually parading prostitutes through his home by the time Bianchi arrived. One night, as the cousins sat about getting drunk on beer, they speculated as to what it might be like to actually murder someone.
They started their mass murder spree by killing Elissa Teresa Kastin, twenty-one, on Oct. 6, 1977, dumping her naked body near Chevy Chase Drive in Glendale. Their next victim was 19-year-old Yolanda Washington; her body was found on the slopes of the distinguished Forest Lawn Cemetery, the resting place of movie stars, on the night of Oct. 18, 1977. The body was naked, cleaned by the killers so as to leave no clues, and posed in a lascivious position. Bianchi and Buono went on to murder eight more women. On Oct. 31, 1977, the naked body of 15-year-old Judith Lynn Miller was found on a hillside next to the road in Glendale. She had been raped, sodomized, and strangled to death. Her wrists, ankles, and neck bore the marks of the ropes that had bound her, as was the case with the Washington woman and those victims to come. Bianchi and Buono, to show their contempt for lawmen looking for them, made sure that this body and the others had been cleaned, leaving no clues whatsoever, but placed the corpses in spots where they could easily be found and usually close to police stations, as if to thumb their noses at police.
On Nov. 20, 1977, the killers slew three more, Kristina Weckler, twenty; Dolores Cepeda, twelve; and Sonja Johnson, fourteen, dumping the nude body of Weckler on a slope in Highland Park and the corpses of Cepeda and Johnson in Elysian Park. They killed Jane Evelyn King, twenty-eight, on Nov. 23, 1977, dumping her body at the off-ramp of the southbound Golden State Freeway. On Nov. 29, 1977, Bianchi and Buono murdered Lauren Rae Wagner, eighteen, placing her naked body on Cliff Drive in Glassell Park. Next, on Dec. 14, 1977, police found the naked body of Kimberly Diane Martin, eighteen. The intensity of the murders slackened but, on Feb. 17, 1978, Cindy Lee Hudspeth’s naked body was found in the trunk of a car. The killings had all been committed in Buono’s home and the bodies dumped in a rough circle around that house.
Police announced regularly that they were closing in on the Hillside Strangler and that several “good” suspects had been pulled in for questioning, but when the killings stopped, police had little to say and less to investigate, their special team of investigators reassigned to other chores. Los Angeles detectives were perplexed when the killings suddenly ended. The reason for this was hygiene. Bianchi left Buono’s home because of the filthy conditions there, going to Bellingham, Wash., where, in January 1979, he raped and strangled to death with a cord two college women, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, packing the bodies into the trunk of Mandic’s car. Following a missing persons report, these bodies were found and Bianchi came under suspicion as having been seen with one of the women shortly before her disappearance.
Ironically, Bianchi was working as a security guard and had applied for a job with the Bellingham police department. (He had also applied for a job with the Los Angeles Police Department and, in fact, had gone along on a few rides with officers in Los Angeles while the Hillside Strangler was being sought.) Bianchi, who had steeped himself in psychiatric studies, played a game with doctors examining him, pretending, it was later reported, to have a split personality, or many personalities, one of which being the killer of the women. He claimed that he had blackouts and could not remember his actions. He presented all the symptoms of someone unbalanced, out of control, legally insane. His act, however, did not work, and he was charged with the murder of the two Bellingham women. Then Bianchi offered prosecutors a deal; he would turn over his cousin Buono, the real Hillside Strangler, he said, if he were removed to California and did not have to face the death penalty in Washington, that of hanging. Washington authorities agreed to the deal, as long as Bianchi pleaded guilty. He did and received a life sentence, then was shipped to California to testify against his brutal cousin, Buono, after which he would serve his time in a California prison, one less austere and rigid than Washington’s Walla Walla Prison.
On Bianchi’s statements, Buono was charged with murder but Bianchi, who had fooled six Washington state psychiatrists into labeling him legally insane, now could not testify against Buono since he was a lunatic. Yet it was shown that he had planned his “insanity’ position years earlier, reading endless studies on psychiatry and particularly studying the novels Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, preparing for his own positioning of multiple personalities, a psychological profile he assumed when confronted with the Washington murders. Bianchi had gone so far as to claim he had a degree in psychiatry and was about to actually open up a practice in Los Angeles before going off to Washington. Bianchi also had faked being hypnotized, according to most reports, when being examined in Washington, and then released his other “identities,” claiming that these personalities had done the horrible murders with his beast-like cousin Buono.
Bianchi nevertheless gave a complete profile of the murders he committed with Buono once back in Los Angeles, describing how he and Buono drove about in Buono’s car, using phony badges to identify themselves to young women as policemen, ordering them into Buono’s auto, which they passed off as an unmarked police car. Once the women were in the car, they were taken to Buono’s home, tortured, forced to have sex with both of them, and then tied up and murdered, usually strangled, although the killers experimented with injections and other murder methods that proved unsuccessful. Then the murderers fastidiously washed their victims and dumped their naked bodies at remote spots.
Buono was arrested in 1979 after Bianchi’s Washington conviction, and he was eventually tried on Nov. 16, 1981. A grueling two years passed during which more than 400 witnesses were heard, 55,000 pages of trial transcript were compiled, and millions of dollars were spent to convict Buono. A jury, more than two years later, convicted him of nine counts of murder on Nov. 14, 1983. The trial was aptly labeled a “judicial extravaganza” by the press, one in which Buono insisted, in court and out, that he was innocent of the murders his cousin claimed he had performed. (He had been extremely thorough in cleaning up his home after Bianchi left, not one fingerprint of the victims, not even his own, could be found by police, although a single eyelash belonging to one of the victims was unearthed and a few strands of fiber from one of Buono’s chairs was found on one of the bodies.) A surprise prosecution witness was 27-year-old Catherine Lorre who identified both Bianchi and Buono as the two men who had stopped her on a Hollywood street in 1977, saying they were detectives and demanding her identification. She had shown her driver’s license and next to it, Bianchi saw a photo of her as a little girl sitting on her father’s lap, her father being the famous character actor of films, Peter Lorre. Bianchi later admitted that he had let Lorre go because he feared that murdering the child of a celebrity would bring more police heat down upon him and Buono.
Judge Ronald George, who had refused to drop charges against Buono “for lack of evidence,” as asked by the prosecution during the initial stages of his trial when it felt it would lose the case altogether, had conducted a fair and impartial trial for more than two years. He pronounced sentence on Angelo Buono, Jr., on Jan. 9, 1984, giving him life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Bianchi, against his clever designs, was ordered sent back to Walla Walla Prison in Washington to serve out a life sentence without possibility of parole until the year 2005. Stated Judge George after sentencing: “I’m sure Mr. Buono and Mr. Bianchi, that you will only get your thrills by reliving over and over the tortures and murders of your victims, being incapable as I believe you to be, of ever feeling any remorse.”
Biegenwald, Richard F., 1941- , U.S. There is no honor among thieves. Richard Biegenwald, a sadistic killer from Asbury Park, N.J., realized this too late in the game. He also learned a valuable lesson in human nature: what you say in an unguarded moment can return to haunt you. While serving time in prison for killing during a holdup, Biegenwald made the acquaintance of Dherran Fitzgerald. Later, when both men were released, they decided to share an apartment together with Biegenwald’s wife in Point Pleasant, N.J. Biegenwald took Fitzgerald into his confidence and revealed the sordid details of five different murders he had committed between 1981 and 1983.
Biegenwald had a long record of violent crime dating back to 1958, when he murdered New Jersey municipal prosecutor Stephen Sladowski during a grocery store holdup. The victim’s wife urged the courts to spare the life of the young killer, with the tearful explanation that there had been too much bloodshed already. In 1959 the 19-year-old was sentenced to life in prison. He was twice denied parole and had been disciplined on several occasions before gaining release in 1975.
His next brush with the law occurred in 1980 when he violated his parole by moving to Teaneck, N.J. That same year he was implicated in a Staten Island rape case. The charges were dropped, but Biegenwald found himself behind bars at Rahway State Prison until his discharge was granted in February 1981. There he met Dherran Fitzgerald.
Acting on a tip from Fitzgerald, investigators searched a lonely spot off Route 35 in Ocean Township where the remains of 18-year-old Camden resident Anna M. Olesiewicz were found. The girl had been missing since Aug. 28, 1982, when she was lured into Biegenwald’s car to share a marijuana cigarette. After driving aimlessly through Asbury Park, he shot her four times in the head with a small-caliber handgun.
Fitzgerald and Biegenwald were arrested in their Asbury Park apartment on Jan. 22, 1983, eight days after the body was discovered. An arsenal of handguns, grenades, shotguns, and silencers were found along with a cache of illegal drugs. Monmouth County Prosecutor Alexander D. Lehrer followed up on Fitzgerald’s tip and other pieces of evidence that led him to two unmarked graves in the quiet Charleston section of Staten Island where Biegenwald had disposed of the bodies of 17-year-old Maria Ciallella of Brick Township, N.J., and William J. Ward, a 34-year-old hoodlum who had tried to hire Biegenwald to perform a contract hit. The Ciallella woman was found in the backyard of a frame house belonging to Biegenwald’s mother. She had been abducted on Halloween night, 1981, while walking home on Route 88. Biegenwald had blasted two fatal shots into her head, then disposed of the remains in his mother’s backyard.
The bodies of two other teenaged girls, 17-year-old Betsy Bacon and 17-year-old Deborah Osborne, were uncovered in two Jersey sites. Forensic experts identified the remains through dental charts. Deborah Osborne had been abducted at the Idle Hour Tavern in Point Pleasant, near a motel where she had been working as a chambermaid. Police theorized that she had left the tavern and hitched a ride with Biegenwald.
A sixth victim, 57-year-old convict John P. Petrone, was linked to Biegenwald when it was learned that the two men had become friends in prison. Petrone was silenced when Biegenwald suspected him of being a police informer.
Staten Island District Attorney Richard D. Murphy raised the possibility that the full extent of Biegenwald’s crimes might never be known. Investigators continued to comb the areas adjacent to the grave sites but found only a few animal bones.
On Dec. 7, 1983, Biegenwald was convicted of murdering Anna M. Olesiewicz. He became the second New Jersey man to be sentenced to die by lethal injection under the newly reinstated death penalty, which took effect three weeks before he fired the first fatal shots. He sat on Death Row for more than three years, until Mar. 5, 1987, when the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in a 6-1 decision that the law was constitutional, but that in Biegenwald’s case the death sentence should be overturned because of grave errors in the sentencing hearing. The court upheld his conviction but ordered that a new sentencing hearing be scheduled to determine if he should be executed or sentenced to prison for life.
On Jan. 23, 1989, a jury in Freehold, N.J. deliberated for six hours before deciding that Biegenwald should be executed. The defense attorneys urged leniency, on the grounds that the defendant’s sociopathic behavior should be carefully analyzed. The jury rejected this argument, and Judge Patrick McGann set Mar. 15 as Biegenwald’s date of execution. The date was automatically postponed pending a mandatory Supreme Court review.
Bird, Jake, 1901-49, U.S., mur. Jake Bird was convicted of a double ax murder in Tacoma, Wash., and confessed to several other murders while awaiting his execution in prison. Bird was born on Dec. 14, 1901, in Louisiana. He spent his adult years wandering around the country, staying briefly in New York, Maine, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis. Though he worked several temporary jobs and found frequent employment with the railroad, he was a professional criminal who burglarized homes wherever he found himself. He spent a total of thirty-one years in prison in Utah, Iowa, and Michigan, all on burglary charges. While in prison, he read law books and learned the strategies and tactics of the legal system. Those investigators who worked on his case remembered Bird as a man who thought little of committing violent acts. A black man, Bird hated both whites and women, and especially loathed white women. He was described by many as sophisticated, calculating, witty, an able conversationalist, and extremely dangerous.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 30, 1947, two police officers, Patrolmen Evan “Skip” Davies and Andres “Tiny” Sabutis, responded to a report of a woman screaming in a neighborhood on South J Street in Tacoma. Approaching the house where the screams originated, Davis saw a man running from the back of the house. He pursued the man and cornered him in an alley. The man was not wearing shoes, and his clothes were spattered with blood. The man charged Davis, who drew his gun and repeatedly struck him over the head. The man drew a knife and slashed the officer’s hand. Sabutis arrived and found Davis clubbing the man with his gun. But when he attempted to handcuff him, the knife wielder slashed Sabutis across the back. Enraged by the violence, Davis beat the man around the face until he lay panting on the ground. The officers brought the man back to the home, where they discovered the bodies of Mrs. Bertha Kludt, fifty-two, and Beverly June Kludt, her 17-year-old daughter. The daughter was lying between the bedrooms and the kitchen and her mother lay in one of the bedrooms. Both were beaten and slashed with the blunt end and the blade of an ax. They were dressed in their nightgowns and covered with blood. Police identified the suspect in custody as Jake Bird.
Within a few hours of his arrest, Bird signed a confession to the murders of the Kludt women. He said he had been in Washington only three days when he walked through a residential district seeking a home to burglarize. He found an ax in a nearby shed and took it with him for protection. Finding the back door of the home on South J Street unlocked, he entered the house, took off his shoes, went into one of the bedrooms, and took the purse he found there. As he tried to open the purse in the kitchen, he was startled by Mrs. Kludt, who approached him from behind. Bird threatened her, but told her he only wanted to rob the house. The commotion woke Beverly, who entered the kitchen and jumped on Bird’s back. Mrs. Kludt likewise grabbed Bird and began screaming. Bird grabbed his ax and began swinging, knocking the two women down. He could not remember how many times he hit them after that.
Bird’s prosecution, however, was not cut and dried. He withdrew his confession shortly after signing it, and claimed he signed it because the police beat him and he feared for his life. Bird claimed that the officers had cracked his ribs, whipped him around the legs until he had no skin left, and beat him around the face until four of his teeth were knocked out and he required several stitches in his head and face. The police neglected to mark evidence from the scene of the crime, and later had difficulty identifying it. Furthermore, there were no fingerprints, and Bird could be placed only within the vicinity of the crime. Yet, within hours of his arrest, several cities, including Los Angeles, Louisville, Ky., Orlando, Fla., Evanston, Ill., and Kansas City, Kan., indicated that Jake Bird might be involved in one of their unsolved murder cases. According to Bird’s later confessions, he participated in more than ten murders throughout the U.S. Police retained the services of Dr. Charles P. Larson, a well-known criminal pathologist. Dr. Larson found brain matter and two blood types in Bird’s pants. With this evidence, the prosecution secured Bird’s conviction.
At his trial, the jury found Jake Bird Guilty of two counts of first-degree murder after only thirty-five minutes of deliberation. Sentenced on Dec. 6, 1947, Bird addressed the court for the first time when Judge E.D. Hodge asked him if he wished to say anything. Bird pronounced his own ominous sentence. “All of you who have had anything to do with my case will be punished,” Bird claimed. “I am putting the Jake Bird hex on you. Mark my words, you will die before I do.” With that, Judge Hodge sentenced Bird to be hanged by the neck until dead and scheduled the execution for Jan. 16, 1948. The convicted man began a campaign of legal manipulation and bargain making in order to stay his sentence. His first appeal went unacknowledged by Judge Hodge. Bird then informed Walla Walla Prison officials that he would help them solve ten murders if Governor Mon C. Wallgren granted a stay of execution. The governor agreed to listen to Bird and grant a stay only if he helped clean up unsolved murder cases.
In the presence of undersheriff Joe Karpach, governor’s representative Pat Steele, a court reporter, and Warden Smith, Jake confessed for three days. As he was very clever and well read, he tricked his audience on several occasions, divulging only half-truths. He never claimed ignorance in any area, and twisted sentences and questions to his own ends. Bird was also well versed in law and understood how to make the most of the little he knew. His stories of two murder cases contained details that secured him one reprieve. One case, from Evanston, Ill., involved the burglary and murder of Lillian Galvin and Edna Sibilski, her maid, on Oct. 22, 1942, in which $31,000 in jewelry and fur coats was stolen. Because of the details Bird knew about this killing, he was granted a sixty-day reprieve on Jan. 16, 1948, only hours before the scheduled hanging. Bird also claimed to have committed several murders in Cleveland which had been attributed to the “Mad Killer.” He told in detail how he and an accomplice robbed a man, stabbed him to death, cut off his head, and dumped his body–cut in sections–into Bull Run Creek. They killed several others, making them look like victims of the Mad Killer, who turned out to be a 45-year-old man named Frank Carter. Bird won an appeal on May 20, but the court upheld the previous conviction and sentence. On the day of his second scheduled hanging, Bird won a hearing for a new trial “on order to show cause in the matter of the application for a Writ of Habeas Corpus.” Appearing before Judge Sam M. Driver, Bird took the stand for the first time and acted as his own counsel. He claimed he was tortured to obtain a confession, that he was inadequately represented by counsel in his first trial, that his counsel, attorney J.W. Selden, encouraged the jury to find him guilty, and that the trial judge ignored his appeal. Judge Driver refused to grant a new trial. Twelve hours before his third scheduled hanging, Bird produced a “Certificate of probable cause for appeal to the Court of Appeals in San Francisco.” This won him a thirty-day stay of execution, but did not ultimately save him. Chief Judge William Denman denied his appeal. When told of the decision, Bird said “Well, that’s too bad.” Bird returned to the court where he was originally convicted so that his execution could be rescheduled. On the trip to Tacoma, a guard asked Bird if he had any regrets about the murders he committed. Bird said he regretted only one–a little boy he killed with a rock in Omaha, because the boy called him a nigger. He said it was an accident and that he should not have done it.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of Bird’s trial was the hex he placed on those who played an active role in convicting him. The condemned man claimed they would die before him. One month after sentencing Bird, Judge Hodge, who was in excellent health, died of a heart attack. One of Bird’s attorneys, J.W. Selden, died on the anniversary of Bird’s sentencing. Joe Karpach, who took Bird’s three-day confession at Walla Walla, died in January 1948, followed soon after by chief court clerk Ray Scott. One of the officers who took Bird’s confession after his arrest, Sherman Lyons, died of a heart attack. The last to die was Arthur A. Stoward, one of Bird’s guards at Walla Walla. The strange coincidence of these deaths, however, left Dr. Larson nonplused. “Those six men who did die didn’t die of Jake Bird, they died of coronary occlusions,” he said.
Jake Bird was hanged on July 15, 1948, twenty months after his conviction. The prison physician pronounced him dead after fourteen minutes. See: Carter, Frank.
Bishop, Arthur Gary (AKA: Roger W. Downs; Lynn E. Jones), 1951-88, U.S. Arthur Bishop was born in 1951 in Hinckley, Utah. An honor student and popular teenager, he was also devoutly religious, and later served as a missionary in the Philippines for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). Circumstances began to go wrong for Bishop in 1974, when the church excommunicated him. He went to work at a Ford dealership in Murray, Utah, but was arrested for embezzling $9,000 by forging the owner’s signature on a check. In 1981, Bishop decided to disappear. He ended all contact with his family, and changed his name to Lynn E. Jones, and later, Roger W. Downs. By this time, two small boys had vanished from their homes without a trace.
Alonzo Daniels, four, was playing in the front yard of his Salt Lake City home on Oct. 16, 1979, when he disappeared. His abduction was the first of five that would puzzle police in the next four years. Kim Peterson, eleven, was taken on Nov. 27, 1980, followed by Danny Davis, four, on Oct. 20, 1981; Troy Ward, six, on June 22, 1983; and Graeme Cunningham, thirteen, on July 14, 1983. In the case of Danny Davis, eyewitnesses said they saw a man and a woman leading the boy out of a grocery store. Davis’ grandfather was shopping at the time. Kim Peterson had told his parents that he was going to meet a man who wanted to buy his roller skates on a corner near his home. Police found his body in a shallow grave in Cedar Fort, Utah County. The bodies of Danny Davis and Alonzo Daniels were found nearby.
Police wanted Bishop for embezzling $10,000 from Ski Utah, one of his many employers. He was arrested on July 25, 1983, after police questioned him about the disappearance of Graeme Cunningham. They learned that Bishop had been planning a trip to Southern California with the boy the week after he had disappeared. The county sheriff revealed that Bishop had been living in the immediate vicinity at the time of the five murders. Bishop confessed to police, then led investigators to the shallow graves near Cedar Fort, and to a secluded area in Big Cottonwood Canyon where the remains of Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham were found. There was evidence of sexual assault, and police found explicit sexual photographs at Bishop’s residence.
Arthur Gary Bishop was convicted after a six-week trial in 1984 of five counts of first-degree murder, five counts of aggravated kidnapping, two counts of forcible sexual assault, and one count of sexual abuse of a minor. Under Utah law, he could choose death by firing squad or lethal injection. Bishop chose to take the injection on June 10, 1988. He spent his last moments studying the Book of Mormon, and expressing regret for his crimes.
Bishop, Arthur Henry, 1907-26, Brit. Arthur Henry Bishop, angry at being fired from his position as hall-boy at the residence of Sir Charles Lloyd, murdered the sleeping Frank Edward Rix on the night of June 7, 1925. Bishop was tried for murder, although his lawyers attempted to have the charge reduced to manslaughter, arguing that Bishop was drunk at the time. Justice Swift sentenced him to death at the Old Bailey after the jury found him Guilty. He was hanged on Aug. 14, 1926.
Bishop, Oliver, prom. 1939, U.S. Only his advanced age saved Oliver Bishop from the Florida electric chair. His crime was murder, and the victims were his son George and his son’s fiancee Louise.
In the eyes of the old man, his son was about to commit a mortal sin by marrying a woman to whom he was distantly related. But George and Louise were in love, and they planned to drive from Oliver Bishop’s Tampa Bay home to a place where they might procure a license legally. The night before they were scheduled to depart, Bishop went to his woodshed and found a heavy sash weight. He crept into his son’s bedroom and crashed the piece of iron down on his skull, killing the young man instantly. Louise was still awake, and when she saw what Bishop had done, she tried to flee through the yard. Bishop caught up with her near the fence and bludgeoned her to death. He buried the bodies in the marshy sand of McKay Bay. Weeks later, on May 28, 1939, a crab fisherman scouring the beach found the remains of the young couple. Police checked the missing persons reports and interviewed the estranged wife of Oliver Bishop at her home in Palmetto Beach. She reported that George and Louise had set out on a trip on Easter weekend and had not sent word of their whereabouts.
The trail led to Oliver Bishop’s home in Tampa. Assistant Chief of Detectives Malcolm Beasley connected Bishop to the crime by comparing the mud on his shoes to the sand and silt of McKay Bay. They were the same. Confronted with this evidence, Bishop confessed to killing both victims. He was indicted for first-degree murder, found Guilty, and sentenced to life in prison.
Bishop, William Bradford, Jr., 1937- , U.S. A total mental breakdown was blamed for the slaughter of William Bishop’s family on Mar. 1, 1976. Bishop, a rising foreign service officer in the State Department in Washington, D.C., had been a brilliant student, graduating from Yale and serving in Army Intelligence in the early 1960s. He married his childhood sweetheart, Annette Kathryn Weis, the couple producing three sons. In 1965 Bishop joined the State Department and he was quickly promoted with assignments as a foreign service officer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Milan, Italy; and Gaborone, Botswana. Upon his return to Washington, Bishop bought a fashionable home in Bethesda, Md., and settled into Washington assignments at the State Department. By 1976 he was an incurable insomniac, constantly worried over not having had a promotion in five years. He suffered long periods of depression and began seeing a psychiatrist, taking sleeping pills, and even consulting a hypnotist in a desperate attempt to be able to sleep.
Living by the book became a credo to Bishop. He established a weird, unswerving regimen, allowing himself just so many hours in the week to do everything he felt he had to do, so many hours for work, so many hours for watching TV, so many hours to exercise by walking and playing tennis, so many hours with his family, and with his wife. Bishop even allocated exact hours each week in which he would allow himself to get drunk. All of this he entered in a diary, keeping precise notes on his every waking moment. Bishop spent so much time chronicling his every move that, in his own words, he developed an “enormous new capacity for love of self…a whole new confidence and style, an intellectual and moral integrity…the real self.” Then the “real self” of Bishop’s personality, according to psychiatrists later charting his lethal course, emerged on Mar. 1, 1976. Bishop was last seen at a Texaco service station filling a five-gallon drum of gasoline, chatting happily with attendants. He went home and beat to death his wife, Annette, thirty-seven, three children, William Bradford III, fourteen, Brenton, ten, Geoffrey, five, and mother, Lobelia Bishop, sixty-eight, piling the bodies into his station wagon. He drove to a lonely spot outside of Columbia, N.C., dumped the bodies into a ditch, soaked them with the gasoline from the five-gallon drum, and set them afire–or, that is the way police later reconstructed the mass murder of the Bishop family.
Smoke from the smouldering bodies was seen by some drivers on the road and the bodies were discovered a short time later. But Bishop had disappeared. Two weeks later his abandoned station wagon was found near Gatlinburg, Tenn., in the Great Smoky Mountain range. FBI agents investigating Bishop’s disappearance were convinced, and still are to this day, that Bishop, indeed, murdered his family and then vanished. Agents proved that he had used one of his credit cards on Mar. 2, 1976, the day after the murder of his family, in Jacksonville, N.C. On that day the killer bought considerable sporting equipment, as if he intended to spend some time in the wilds. He was believed to have entered the Great Smoky Mountain range where he, an experienced camper, could lose anyone following him. Some speculation was made about Bishop going into these wilds to commit suicide but it was reported in July 1978 that Bishop may have been spotted in Sweden and that he could have reached that country through his contacts in the foreign service. Since Bishop was indicted as a federal fugitive, the FBI has not closed its books on this case and agents are still searching for the killer.
The profile of Bishop as a mental case, some officials claim, was one which the murderer invented for himself long before killing his family, a mass murder he had planned long in advance of the so-called breakdown symptoms he later openly manifested, symptoms and actions that were designed to convince psychiatrists that, coupled to his murderous acts, he had become insane. His blind, suicidal trek into the Great Smokies was also made to appear as the unbalanced act of a man who had lost all control and would later die in the wilderness of starvation. All of this was an act, officials state, to persuade police that William Bradford Bishop, Jr., was dead. Some claim that he had met a foreign woman, fallen in love with her, and killed his family to be with her, that he escaped the wilds of the Great Smokies and left the U.S. and is now residing somewhere in a Scandinavian country. Such a devilishly clever plan was not beyond the intellectual scope of Bishop, who prided himself on his mental agility and whose every act was directed by a bloated ego that told him he was capable of achieving any goal in life, even the perfect murder.
Bittaker, Lawrence Sigmond, 1941- , U.S. The man who raped, tortured, and murdered five teenage girls between June and October 1979, in the suburbs of Los Angeles was captured five months after his last attack.
On Apr. 28, 1980, Lawrence Sigmond Bittaker was charged with five counts of murder, ten counts of rape, five counts of kidnapping, three counts for other sex crimes, and one count for conspiracy to commit murder, rape, and kidnapping. The killer was also charged with illegal possession of tear gas, and for allegedly soliciting two other inmates at the county jail to kill 29-year-old Jan Malin, the victim and a witness of his tear gas attack at Manhattan Beach.
After a month of testimony and almost a week of deliberation, Bittaker was convicted on Feb. 17, 1981, after California’s first televised trial. Roy Lewis Norris agreed to plead guilty for his involvement in the slayings in order to avoid the death penalty. He received forty-five years to life imprisonment. Bittaker was sentenced to death by Torrance (Calif.) Superior Court Judge Thomas W. Fredericks on Mar. 24, 1981, with the stipulation that should the killer’s sentence ever be reduced to life in prison, he would have to serve 199 years and four months. This verdict was challenged in an appeal, but the California Supreme Court upheld Bittaker’s death sentence on June 22, 1989. Lawrence Bittaker is currently awaiting execution in the gas chamber at California State Prison in San Quentin.
Bittaker’s victims included 13-year-old Jacqueline Leah Lamp and 15-year-old Jackie Gilliam, both from Redondo Beach; 16-year-old Shirley Ledford of Sun Valley; 16-year-old Lucinda Schaefer of Torrance; and 18-year-old Andrea Hall of Tujunga.
Bjorkland, Rosemarie Diane (Penny), 1941- , U.S. A resident of Daly City, Calif., Rosemarie Bjorkland awoke on the morning of Feb. 1, 1959, and told herself, as she related in court: “This is the day I will kill someone. If I meet anyone, that will be it.” The 18-year-old girl was obviously in a deranged frame of mind when she took a .38-caliber pistol from her parents’ home that day and began wandering through the hills of San Francisco, looking for a person to murder. She found a gardener, August Norry, emptying refuse from his pickup truck on a lonely road. He apparently thought she was stranded and asked if she wanted a lift into town. Penny Bjorkland smiled and thanked him. Then she drew the pistol and emptied it into the hapless father of two children, killing him. She reloaded the weapon and fired another clip of bullets into the dead body, twelve shots in all. Then the young killer climbed into the victim’s truck and took it for a thrill ride through the hills.
Police, examining the bullets that killed Norry, noticed they were unusual “wadcutters” used mostly for target practice. They traced the bullets to a gun shop, and its proprietor, Lawrence Schultz, reported that the bullets had been purchased by Penny Bjorkland. She was quickly arrested at her parents’ home and confessed almost immediately, explaining that all she did was follow a “sudden urge.” Bjorkland was tried and convicted. Before she was led away to begin serving a life sentence, Bjorkland shook her head at reporters and said: “This is not what I expected.”
Black, Edward Ernest, 1886-1922, Brit. Ed Black, an insurance agent, was married to a woman eighteen years his senior who owned a candy shop in Tregonissey, near St. Austell, Cornwall, at the time of her death on Nov. 11, 1921. Badly in debt and no longer in love with his wife, Black purchased two ounces of rat poison from Timothy White’s store in St. Austell, explaining that he planned to kill some pesky rodents.
He added the deadly substance to his wife’s breakfast on Oct. 31, 1921. Three days before she died he fled Cornwall to take up residence at Cashin’s Temperance Hotel in Liverpool. Mrs. Black died from what physicians believed was gastro-enteritis, an affliction she had suffered from for some time, and for which she received regular medication from her druggist. However, a post-mortem examination carried out by a second doctor dissatisfied with the original diagnosis showed arsenic in her tissues.
Meanwhile, police arrested her estranged husband in the hotel after he failed in an attempt at suicide by cutting his throat. In court, Black called his signature on the poison register at the apothecary a forgery. This defense failed him, and he was convicted and hanged at Exeter on Mar. 24, 1922. See: DeMelker, Daisy Louisa.
Black, Robert, 1947- , and Hearn, John Wayne, 1945- , U.S. Robert Black, of Bryan, Texas, decided to murder his wife Sandra in order to collect $175,000 from a life insurance policy–money that he planned to use to leave Bryan and run off with his cousin. With this plan in mind, Black responded to a classified advertisement placed in Soldier of Fortune Magazine in 1985. The advertisement read:
Ex-Marines, 67-69 Nam Vets. Ex-DI, weapons specialist—jungle warfare. Pilot. ME. High risk assignments. U.S. or overseas…
John Wayne Hearn, a self-styled “Rambo” and an ex-Marine had placed the ad. Black contacted Hearn and offered him the job of killing his wife for $10,000. Soon thereafter, Sandra Black lay dead, shot twice in the head as she carried groceries into her home. She died instantly.
Robert Black was convicted of first-degree murder on Feb. 26, 1986, in the 85th District Court of Texas and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His conviction is under appeal. That same day, Hearn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison, with an affirmative finding–meaning that he must serve a minimum of twenty years before being granted a parole hearing. He was then returned to Florida and convicted for an earlier murder.
Meanwhile, attorneys for the family of Sandra Black filed a $22.5 million civil lawsuit against the publishers of Soldier of Fortune, charging them with criminal negligence for running a gun-for-hire ad. Defense attorney Larry Thompson defended the magazine’s right to publish such material, and pointed out that it did not mention any illegal activity. “It’s a very innocuous ad,” he said. In March 1988, a federal court in Houston awarded $9.4 million in damages to the victim’s family. Soldier of Fortune is appealing the award.
Blake, Robert, d.1929, U.S. Robert Blake was a condemned prisoner in Texas who was executed in 1929 for murder. Before going to the electric chair, Blake kept a curious chronicle of activities and dialog between other condemned prisoners on Death Row. His remarks, which detail the anxiety of nine condemned men waiting to be put to death, appeared in the July 1929 edition of The American Mercury and were later used in the grim prison drama, The Last Mile. The prisoners mostly concern themselves with the possibility of a reprieve. When a telegram does arrive for one of the prisoners, he is incensed that it is not from the governor ordering a stay of execution, but from a sheriff asking if he can bring some additional visitors to see the man electrocuted. The prisoners share their last cigars and fruit and endlessly discuss their impending deaths, one stating in forced doggerel:
Why do they pull a black cap over your face And let it remain until you’re dead? Because the high voltage of electricity Will make your eyes pop out of your head!
The Death Row area described by Blake in his grim narrative was immediately adjacent to the room housing the electric chair. At the end of his chronicle, Blake states: “These lines are written while Six (referring to the condemned prisoner taken from cell number six) is being strapped into the chair. The door between the death chamber and Death Row is open.” He quotes the words of the condemned man which he and the others can hear as Six awaits the current of electricity which will end his life: “I hope that I am the last one who ever sits in this chair. Tell my mother that my last words were of her.” Then Blake adds: “The lights go dim as we hear the whine of the motor when the switch is turned on…The lights go dim twice more.” One of the prisoners shouts from Death Row: “They’re giving him the juice again. Wonder what they’re trying to do, cook him?” One of the condemned men says, “I won’t be able to sleep for a week.” Another replies from his cell: “I’m going to sleep now. You’ll be able to sleep all right. Forget about it.”
One week after writing the above report, Robert Blake himself walked into the dreaded room and sat down in the electric chair to face his own end.
Blazek, Frank, 1906-40, U.S. Born in Austria, Frank Blazek moved to New York City and went to work in the city water works department. He was a brooding intellectual, fond of poetry and classical Viennese music, all of which impressed 16-year-old Virginia Bender. Blazek, twenty-eight, was sophisticated and worldly. They became engaged in 1936 but her parents wanted Virginia to finish her schooling before she married.
During their two-year engagement Blazek’s jealousy and possessiveness finally got the best of her. Virginia called off the engagement and moved away. A year later Blazek read in the newspaper about her impending engagement and called her on June 5, 1939, to wish her luck. “Do you mean that?” she asked. “You bet I do,” he said. “You’re going to need luck.”
On June 19 Blazek purchased a hunting knife at an Army-Navy surplus store on 125th Street. He proceeded to her apartment on 137th Street in the Bronx where he stabbed and killed her. Then he covered her with a blanket, because, as he later explained, the sight of blood repulsed him.
Bender’s fiance appeared in the vestibule a short time later and Blazek, peering through a crack in the door, told him to go away. Detective Captain Glen Armstrong of the Bronx Police was summoned and not long afterwards the Viennese killer was arrested. He confessed to Assistant District Attorney Martin Klaus and was tried, condemned, and executed in the electric chair on Sept. 11, 1940.
Bokassa, Jean Bedel, 1919- , Bangui. In 1960 France recognized the independence of its former colonial possession Bangui, located in the Central African Republic. At the time, the arid wasteland was a drain on the French economy and many politicians were happy to see the government let it go.
The Republican government established by France in Bangui was deposed in a bloody coup headed by a tyrannical madman named Jean Bokassa, whose penchant for pomp and royal splendor was exceeded only by his reputation for lunacy. In December 1977 Bokassa crowned himself emperor of the new Central African Republic and invited a score of dignitaries from Europe and all across Africa to witness his coronation, which cost an estimated £10 million.
The forty-eight hour gala was patterned after his great hero, Emperor Napoleon’s coronation, which flattered the government of France which generously established a £1 million credit line for Bokassa to purchase a fleet of Mercedes limousines for the royal procession. This took place in a country where only ten percent of the two million population could read or write. Bangui, despite an impressive uranium reserve, was an impoverished country.
Many Western nations refused to send envoys to attend the event as a sign of protest. The U.S. cut off all economic aid to express its displeasure over the policies of the new Napoleon. Those who attended feasted at a lavish table, not knowing that some of their appetizers were human entrails from the bodies of recently executed prisoners.
Two years after Bokassa’s coronation the embarrassed French engineered a palace revolt after learning of Bokassa’s genocide of Bangui school children. Two hundred youngsters were rounded up by the Imperial Guard after their parents refused a direct order to outfit them in school uniforms they could not afford. Taken to a prison, Bokassa’s guards systematically beat the children to death and their remains were fed to the emperor’s pet crocodiles.
The deposed African statesman David Dacko was placed in charge of the government by his French protectors when Bokassa visited his ally Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The power-mad emperor was exiled to Paris where he opened a boutique that supplied safari suits to African tourists.
Bolles, Don, See: Adamson, John Harvey.
Bolton, Mildred Mary, 1886-1943, U.S. From the very beginning, Charles W. Bolton, Jr., realized that he had made a mistake when he asked for Mildred’s hand in marriage in 1922. The docile insurance broker from Chicago proved to be no match for the jealous, high-strung woman from Kalamazoo, Mich. The couple moved to Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side. Charles Bolton commuted to his downtown office every day, and returned at night to face the stern admonitions of his jealous wife. Mildred believed that her dowdy, middle-aged husband was carrying on affairs with the women at the office.
Mildred beat her husband senselessly. When Charles refused to divorce her, his employers delicately suggested that he might want to go into business for himself. He did not and one night Mildred slashed him with a razor. Chicago Police later questioned Mildred at home. Smoking a cigar, her feet up on a table, she casually explained that his “accident” was the result of careless shaving. It was three in the morning.
Charles Bolton finally had enough. He filed for divorce on Jan. 20, 1936. Mildred, however, refused to give up so easily. On June 11, she purchased a revolver and four days later turned up in her husband’s downtown office. She rode the elevator to the tenth floor and coolly discharged six bullets into her husband. As he lay in agony on the floor, Mildred said, “Why don’t you get up and stop faking?” Charles Bolton died shortly thereafter. Mildred was originally sentenced to death in the electric chair, but Governor Henry Horner commuted her sentence to 199 years at the women’s penitentiary in Dwight, Ill. There she died on Aug. 29, 1943, having slashed her wrists with a stolen pair of scissors.
Bonin, William (AKA: The Freeway Strangler), 1947- , and Butts, Vernon, prom. 1980, U.S. Bonin was shuttled in and out of detention homes following his first criminal conviction at the age of ten. His father was a drunk and a gambler, and his doting mother more often than not became the servile victim of her husband’s murderous rage. In 1969, the young truck driver from Downey, Calif., was convicted of his first sex crime, charged with molesting five boys. Bonin was sent to Atascadero State Hospital but after two years physicians concluded he was not receptive to treatment. For the next five years William Bonin darted in and out of prison on a variety of sexual offenses. A psychiatrist’s report concluded that his homosexual problems were related to his mother’s domination during childhood.
By his own estimate, Bonin killed at least twenty-one teen-aged boys between 1978 and 1980. With the help of several willing accomplices including Vernon Butts, Bonin cruised the highways of Los Angeles and Orange counties targeting young homosexuals for death. Butts, who was at first shocked, quickly became a more than willing participant in the killing orgy, which always accompanied “rough sex.” “After the first one, I couldn’t do anything about it,” Butts explained. “He (Bonin) had a hypnotic way about him.”
The naked and battered bodies were deposited near the on-off ramps of the Los Angeles freeways. The press quickly dubbed the unknown assailant the “Freeway Strangler.” Police from four counties assisted in the investigation which yielded no new clues. Butts grew tired of the game and temporarily dropped out of sight, but this did not deter Bonin who recruited younger, more willing henchmen to help him locate victims. Two of these men, Greg Miley and James Monro, were drifters who wandered into Hollywood where they met Bonin.
Police finally were tipped off to the identity of the “Freeway Strangler” by a 17-year-old youth Bonin tried to enlist as an accomplice. Bonin was arrested in Hollywood after parking his van at a closed gas station.
Charged with fourteen counts of murder, he was arraigned in Los Angeles Superior Court along with Butts who confessed to helping in five of the killings. However, the prosecution lost its star witness when Butts hanged himself in his jail cell. On Mar. 12, 1982, Judge William Keene sentenced the serial killer to death. After the trial ended Bonin admitted that even if he were freed he would continue to kill. “I couldn’t stop killing,” he said. “It got easier each time.”
Booher, Vernon, d.1929, Can. On July 9, 1928, four murders took place at the Booher farm at Mannville, near Edmonton, Alberta. Police found the bodies of field hands Gabriel Cromby and Bill Rosyk in the bunkhouse, and those of Mrs. Booher and her son Fred inside the house. Booher’s son, Vernon Booher, had reported the multiple shootings, but could shed no light on the identity of the likely killer.
The police determined that the four victims had been shot with a .303 rifle belonging to a neighbor, Charles Stephenson, who said the weapon had been stolen from his home the previous Sunday. In desperation, police turned to a Viennese psychic, Dr. Maximilien Langsner, who was credited with solving a recent burglary case in Vancouver through ESP. At the inquest, he stared thoughtfully at Booher. When it was over, he declared with a degree of certainty that Vernon had killed his family, but was unsure of the motive. Langsner then led police to a patch of prairie grass where the murder weapon was buried.
Booher was arrested on July 17, and held as a material witness in the Edmonton Jail. Langsner visited him and ascertained his motive for the murders. Booher had been denied permission to marry the daughter of a local farmer. In anger, he murdered his family. A diminutive woman, Erma Higgins, had witnessed Vernon sneaking out of church that Sunday to steal the rifle from Stephenson. When confronted by Higgins, Vernon broke down and confessed to the killings. The first of Booher’s two murder trials began on Sept. 24 at the Supreme Criminal Court of Alberta. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. However, the appellate division of the supreme court granted Booher a new trial because additional evidence had been produced by the defense. The second trial ended on Jan. 23, 1929, with another Guilty verdict. Booher was hanged in the Alberta Jail at Fort Saskatchewan on Apr. 29, 1929.
Boost, Werner (AKA: The Dusseldorf Doubles Killer), 1928- , Ger. In the years following WWII, Werner Boost earned his living transporting refugees across the East German border. He then moved to Dusseldorf in 1950. On Jan. 7, 1953, Boost and a companion shot a lawyer named Dr. Serve, who sat in a parked car with his male lover. Serve’s lover was beaten and robbed.
Two years later, on Oct. 31, 1955, Boost and his accomplice, Franz Lorbach, apparently struck again, this time allegedly taking the lives of a young couple who had just left a Dusseldorf restaurant. The battered remains of Thea Kurmann and Friedhelm Behre were found in a water-filled gravel pit. Their skulls had been crushed. The press dubbed the unknown murderer the “Doubles Killer.”
On Feb. 7, 1956, a gardener employed in Lank-Ilverich, a village outside Dusseldorf, reported his discovery of two charred bodies in a burnt haystack. The night before, someone driving a stolen black Mercedes had raced through the neighborhood minutes before a fire of mysterious origin broke out. Boost allegedly set the fire and committed the murders of Peter Falkenberg and Hildegard Wassing.
Police captured Boost on June 10, 1956, as he crept up on a parked Volkswagen in the woods outside Dusseldorf. Lorbach, who had been taken into custody earlier said that he had been “hypnotized” by Boost into carrying out the “Doubles Murders.” Lorbach also said Boost would inject the couples with a sedative and rape the women before killing them. Lorbach received six years in prison. Werner Boost eventually was found Guilty of the murder of Dr. Serve. The evidence in the other murders proved inconclusive. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Dec. 14, 1959.
Born, Ronald Joseph, 1935-76, U.S. Wanted for driving a stolen car, a fugitive killed three policemen, then shot himself rather than be captured.
On Apr. 2, 1976, Ronald Joseph Born, a fugitive believed to have been from Blue Island, Ill., was staying at the Beach Motel in Miami, Fla. Wanted for failing to show up in the U.S. District Court of Miami on charges of interstate auto theft, he had been registered at the motel for almost a month under the name Joseph Moulood. According to officials, three policemen, acting on a hunch, went to Born’s room to ask about a stolen Lincoln sedan he had been driving. When they approached him Born fired on them with a shotgun. Fatally wounded were Thomas Hodges, thirty-two, Clark Curlette, twenty-eight, and Frank Dazevedo, thirty-one. Born then fired a pistol into his own head, apparently when he realized he was trapped by other policemen. A police spokesman explained, “U.S. marshals told me this morning that he had vowed he would never be taken alive.”
Boston Strangler, The, See: DeSalvo, Albert Henry.
Bougrat, Dr. Pierre, prom. 1927, Fr. A Marseilles bank cashier, Jacques Rumebe, was reported missing by his wife on Mar. 15, 1925. Nearly 85,000 francs were also missing, causing police to conclude that the motive for the crime was robbery. Two months later, police searched the office of Dr. Pierre Bougrat, one of the last places the cashier was seen. In a large cupboard in the physician’s operating room, the police discovered the decomposing remains of Rumebe. Dr. Bougrat explained that Rumebe had dropped by for his daily injection on the afternoon of Mar. 15. This time, Rumebe said that he was in dire financial difficulty. He needed to raise the equivalent of £800 or face ruin. Bougrat agreed to go into the city to try to locate the money, and when he returned he discovered Rumebe dead on the floor and his poison cabinet broken into. It was a suicide to be sure, but given the incriminating circumstances, he had no other choice but to conceal the body, he said.
Bougrat was arrested on a charge of murder. His trial opened in Marseilles in March 1927, two years after the murder of Rumebe. The prosecution contended that Bougrat, and not the murder victim, was in serious debt. Various witnesses testified to Bougrat’s numerous attempts to raise money, usually through highly illegal means. It was intimated at the trial that Rumebe was not the first victim of the physician. A Greek heiress named Odette Lepocal, who had been under Bougrat’s care, vanished from her nursing home. She was found by the police bound and gagged. The story of her abduction, and Bougrat’s subsequent ransom demand, led to his arrest.
Bougrat was found Guilty and was transported to Devil’s Island in French Guiana for the remainder of his life. But he escaped to Venezuela in October 1928, one of only a handful of men to accomplish this feat in the long history of the penal colony.
Boulogne, Henri, prom. 1929, Fr. Clement Pascal fancied himself a master swindler and enjoyed the nickname given him by the editors of Paris’ Le Matin: the “Napoleon of Crooks.” Pascal was released from the Loos Prison in late August 1929, but his vanity got the best of him. He decided to write his memoirs, but in order to arouse interest in such a project he needed publicity.
Clement Pascal invented a French version of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society known as the Knights of Themis. This organization sent a series of letters to Le Matin describing their abduction and ritualistic torture of Clement Pascal, each one more lurid in content than the last.
The Knights of Themis letters drew considerable attention. In his last correspondence, shortly before Oct. 1, Pascal said he was going to be buried alive. He actually went through with it, recruiting an ex-convict named Henri Boulogne to help him dig the grave near the Bois de la Justice. Detailed instructions were given to Boulogne. He was to mail a last letter to the newspaper announcing that Pascal had been buried alive. An oilskin package containing copies of the letters, newspaper clippings, and other paraphernalia was buried next to the grave. In twelve hours, Henri Boulogne was to return to make sure everything was alright.
There was only one problem. The breathing pipe connecting the coffin to the surface did not work. Pascal had tested the device in his cottage by placing himself inside the box and breathing through the pipe. The cracks in the wood provided the necessary suction to draw the air into the coffin. But under the weight of the earth the suction disappeared, and it was impossible to extract air from ground level. Pascal perished within hours.
The unwitting Boulogne told this fantastic story to the police who charged him with “murder by imprudence.” He was found Guilty and was sentenced to prison for eight months.
Bouvier, Leone, 1930- , Fr. Leone Bouvier was born into a peasant family in the village of Saint-Macaire-en-Mauges. She was the victim of drunken, abusive parents who imbibed “gniole,” a locally produced cider whose properties were known to induce madness if consumed in excess.
In 1951, Emile Clenet, a 22-year-old garage mechanic, seduced Bouvier with false words of love and a vague promise of marriage. They met regularly for sex on Sundays, but after Leone became pregnant, Clenet soon lost interest and ordered her to get an abortion. She agreed to his demand, but contracted an illness from the operation which prevented her from working. Bouvier was dismissed from her factory job, and when she heard no further word from Clenet, she found him at his place of employment in Nantes.
Emile Clenet told his one-time girlfriend not to bother him at the garage again. Penniless, she spent the month engaged in prostitution. With the few dollars she earned, Leone purchased a cheap .22-caliber pistol from a Nantes gunsmith. Then in February 1952, at a local dance, Clenet told her of his decision to move to North Africa to start all over. As for marriage, it was never in the cards for them, Clenet said. During a farewell embrace, Leone fired a shot into the back of his head.
The young woman was charged with murder and placed on trial at the Assizes of Maine-et-Loire, at Angers, on Dec. 10, 1953. Defense lawyer Claude Fournier pointed to the sorrowful homelife endured by his client. Her drunken father was brought forward into the witness box for everyone to see. But Leone’s mother stated that her other daughter was a nun. Judge Diousidon then rebuked the defendant. “You see! There was no need for you to go wrong!” he cried. “I loved him,” she replied meekly. Leone was sentenced to life imprisonment, the maximum penalty under French law.
Bowden, John, 1956- , Brit. In 1981 John Bowden, along with Michael Ward, a Camberwell gravedigger, and David Begley, a porter from Walworth, two other alcoholics, murdered Donald Ryan, a former amateur boxer. Bowden, who at twenty-four had already spent five years in jail, for crimes that included robbery, blackmail, burglary, assault, and carrying weapons, had taken to preying on derelict South Londoners. When he, Ward, and Begley met Ryan they lured him to a south London apartment, then struck him on the head, leaving him semiconscious. The sadistic killers then immersed Ryan in a tub of scalding water where he fainted. Taking him to another room, they cut off his arms and legs with an electric carving knife, beheaded him with a machete and a saw, disposed of his trunk and limbs in empty lots, and stored his head in the refrigerator for a time, later dumping it in the garbage. Bowden was said to have joked and laughed as he held the decapitated head aloft. All three murderers went out to drink at a nearby pub before returning to the apartment to sleep near the grisly remains.
Justice Mars-Jones who tried the case at the Old Bailey, said, “Bowden is a man who obviously enjoyed inflicting pain and even killing.” Sentenced to life imprisonment, Bowden yelled at the judge, “You old bastard, I hope you die screaming of cancer.” Evidence at the trial was so dreadful that court was adjourned when four members of the jury became ill after viewing photographs. Afterward, Bowden’s parents said their son had been a “good boy, gentle and kind,” until kept in solitary confinement for escaping when jailed on an earlier charge. A year after he began serving his sentence at the Isle of Wight maximum security prison, Bowden and another inmate, James McCaig took the assistant governor of the jail hostage, holding him at knifepoint while they called a Fleet Street newspaper to air their grievances, releasing the official after the British Home Office promised to look into their case.
Bowen, Nancy, prom. 1930, U.S. In March 1930, Nancy Bowen walked into the Buffalo, N.Y., home of artist Henri Marchand and confronted his wife, Clothilde Marchand, asking her if she was a witch. When Mrs. Marchand facetiously replied, “Yes,” Bowen beat the woman to the ground with a hammer, stuffed chloroform-soaked paper down her throat, and left her dead. Lila Jimerson, a Seneca Indian woman who had posed for Marchand’s pictures, commissioned by the Buffalo Natural History Museum, was charged with instigating the killing. Also known as “Red Lilac,” Jimerson had fallen in love with Mr. Marchand after he seduced her, and believed that eliminating his wife would free her lover to marry her. Jimerson had told Bowen on the reservation where they both lived that Mrs. Marchand was a witch who had caused the recent death of Bowen’s husband, Charley Bowen. Initially tried for first-degree murder, the consumptive Jimerson collapsed in the Buffalo courtroom. Judge F. Bret Thorn dismissed the jury and declared a mistrial. The prosecution’s main witness at the first trial was Henri Marchand, who admitted his intimacy with Jimerson but insisted it had been a matter of “professional necessity” done to get her to pose as his model.
From her Buffalo City Hospital bed Jimerson pleaded guilty to reduced charges of murder in the second degree, answering all the questions posed to her by Judge Thorn by nodding her head. Not once did she speak. She was expected to be formally sentenced when released from the hospital but instead she hired new attorneys who refused to withdraw her initial plea of guilt to second degree murder, arguing that the improvised sickbed courtroom had been illegal and that their client was still on trial for first-degree murder. At Jimerson’s retrial, late in 1930, she contended that the artist had plotted the murder of his wife and used her to carry it out. She was acquitted by a supreme court jury on Feb. 28, 1931. On Mar. 13, 1931, Nancy Bowen, who had pleaded guilty to reduced charges of first-degree manslaughter, was sentenced by Judge Thorn to a one- to ten-year prison term. But because she had already been detained in jail for longer than the amount of her minimum sentence, she was immediately freed.
Bowers, Martha, prom. 1903, U.S. Born Martha Byers, the daughter of a respectable mother in Portland, Ore., the fickle Martha had been married and divorced twice when she met and married a bridge builder, Martin L. Bowers, in San Francisco in 1902. On June 5, 1903, Mrs. Bowers called a Dr. Carl Von Tiedemann to prescribe medicine for her husband who was, she explained, ill as a result of ptomaine poisoning caused by eating ham. Von Tiedemann treated Mr. Bowers, later dropping treatment after a financial misunderstanding with Mrs. Bowers. A second physician, Dr. J.F. Dillon, prescribed for the patient and then stopped visiting him when improvement was shown after a short time. When Martin Bowers suffered a relapse, his wife called in Dr. A. McLaughlin who concurred with the diagnosis of the previous doctors but insisted that the patient be taken to the Waldeck Sanitarium for observation. Though puzzled by some of the sick man’s symptoms, McLaughlin was not suspicious. After a month’s stay the convalescent was returned, at his spouse’s entreaty, to his home, with a doctor’s instructions for the wife to give her husband a daily massage. One week later, McLaughlin made a house call and discovered that his instructions had not been followed and that the patient’s condition had deteriorated. He ordered that the sick man be taken to the German Hospital, where Bowers died on Aug. 25, 1903. The widow, present at the death, flung herself on the corpse and wept copiously.
Harry Bowers, the deceased’s brother, was suspicious of his sister-in-law and demanded an investigation. Four grains of undissolved arsenic were found in the dead man’s stomach, and two investigating chemists determined that it was impossible for Bowers to have died from ptomaine poisoning through eating ham, since the salt and creosote found in that meat would most likely have destroyed the arsenic. The report was highly publicized and brought forth a druggist, J.C. Peterson, who recalled a woman coming to him on Aug. 20 with a prescription, written on a blank sheet of paper and signed by a Dr. McLaughlin, that called for an unspecified amount of arsenic. The description of the woman fit that of Martha Bowers’ sister, Zylpha Sutton, who was positively identified by Peterson.
Found in the Bowers’ home was a composition school book with a page torn out that matched that on which the fraudulent prescription was written. A handwriting expert testified that songs in the book matched the handwriting on the prescription, and that both were the work of Martha Bowers. It was also proved that the grieving widow had been in the company of her lover, Patrick Leary, within two hours of her husband’s death.
The prosecution contended that Bowers murdered her husband so that she would be free of his strong objections to her involvement with Leary. Mrs. Sutton was released for lack of evidence, but Bowers was charged with murder, tried on Jan. 14, 1904, and found guilty on Jan. 20. Appropriately, the woman undone by romance was sentenced to life imprisonment on Valentine’s Day 1904.
Bowers, Sam H., Jr., prom. 1964-68, U.S. On June 21, 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights activists on a deserted road in Neshoba County, Miss. The slain activists, Andrew Goodman, twenty, James Chaney, twenty-one, and Michael Schwemer, twenty-four, became a media sensation, and the ensuing trial evolved into the decade’s most closely followed criminal proceeding. Schwemer, a veteran field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality, had moved to the town of Meridian, Miss., six months earlier to organize voter registration within the black community. The local white racist population hated Schwerner, not only because he was Jewish, but because he represented the civil rights movement. Goodman, also Jewish, was a college student who arrived in Philadelphia, Miss., June 20. Chaney worked with Schwerner as a co-organizer in voter registration drives and was the group’s link to the black community. The three were driving back to Meridian after visiting a burned-out black church near Philadelphia, Miss., when Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil R. Price, a secret Klan member, arrested them on trumped-up charges of speeding. He released the three around 10 p.m. that evening. Price stopped them again, after a high-speed chase through the backroads of Neshoba County, and turned them over to a lynch mob formed by the Ku Klux Klan and led by the 43-year-old Klan Imperial Wizard, Sam H. Bowers, Jr. The lynch mob shot each of the victims individually and buried them in open graves, then created an earthen dam over them the following week. Just before he was killed, Schwerner reportedly turned to his executioner and said: “Sir, I know just how you feel.”
The summer of 1964 was a time of optimism and hope for the civil rights movement. It was the year of the historic “Freedom Summer,” during which more than 1,000 college students came to Mississippi to aid a grass-roots movement to register black voters. They hoped their work would focus national attention on the evils of segregation. At that time, only five percent of the 500,000 blacks eligible to vote in Mississippi were registered. Mississippi was an effectively segregated state. The Ku Klux Klan, with its law enforcement connections, intimidated the black community. Fear of Klan terrorism, bombings of homes and churches, and cross-burnings kept blacks from seeking basic voting rights. Occasionally, blacks who attempted to register simply disappeared.
The FBI involved itself in the case when state authorities grew lethargic. The FBI code named the investigation “Miburn” because the case began with the burning of the black church. For five months, 150 agents worked on the case, piecing together evidence of the plans that culminated with the lynch mob on June 21. Spurred by the grieving families and enraged civil rights workers from around the country, the investigations became one of the most extensive in FBI history. Forty-four days after the execution, and after days of wading through swampy land, volunteers unearthed the badly decomposed bodies of the civil rights workers. With the help of an informant and one confession, the FBI learned that the Ku Klux Klan ordered and executed the lynching. Twenty-one men were initially charged with murder and conspiracy to murder, but their prosecution was thwarted when the state court refused to allow the Justice Department to introduce the testimony of Horace D. Barnette, one of the accused who confessed to his part in the crime. The case was dismissed, and the department was forced to seek a grand jury indictment. Aided by the testimony of Barnette, the FBI’s star witness James E. Jordan, and Philadelphia resident Florence Mars, the grand jury indicted eighteen men on an old federal law prohibiting conspiracy against the rights of another citizen. Each of those convicted faced a ten-year maximum sentence and $5,000 in fines.
The trial, which lasted two weeks and received national coverage, was presided over by U.S. District Court judge W. Harold Cox. Cox was decidedly unsympathetic to civil rights, and once publicly referred to several blacks registering to vote as “a bunch of chimpanzees.” The all-white jury initially deadlocked when they could not convict all the defendants. Yet when Judge Cox further instructed them that they could find individual defendants guilty, they returned a verdict the following day, Oct. 20. Seven men were found Guilty of conspiracy to murder: Sam H. Bowers, Jr., Cecil R. Price, Horace Barnette, Jimmy Arledge, a 30-year-old truck driver, Billy Wayne Posey, a 30-year-old gas station operator, Jimmie Snowden, a 34-year-old laundry truck driver, and Alton W. Roberts, a 29-year-old sales representative. The jury, however, acquitted eight men, including the Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey, and came to no judgment on three of the defendants.
When the verdict was read, Judge Cox said, “I very heartily enter into this jury’s verdict.” The judge then denounced Roberts and Price and ordered their immediate incarceration because of the threats they made before the jury returned its verdict. On Dec. 29, the judge sentenced Bowers and Roberts to ten years’ imprisonment, Price and Posey to six years, and Barnette, Arledge, and Snowden to three years’ imprisonment. None of those convicted were fined. Jordan, the federal witness, received a four-year prison sentence on Jan. 13, after a separate trial.
The lynching and the trial had an enormous impact on Mississippi and on the civil rights movement. Blacks increasingly dominated the movement and abandoned nonviolence for militant action. Yet the voter registration campaigns that summer brought into the political process tens of thousands of blacks who had never attempted to register. And the town of Philadelphia, Miss., changed. The public schools eventually desegregated, and an effort was made to broaden job opportunities for blacks. Despite the tragedy, many civil rights workers echoed the sentiment of Freedom Summer volunteer Haywood Burns, who claimed, “…it was one of our finest hours.”
Bowles, Frank, prom. 1902, U.S. Frank Bowles, a Kentucky youth, had been spending time with one of the girls in the Christie family against the will of her father, Isham Christie. These two families in the Honey Creek area of Kentucky had been at odds for some time, and tensions increased when Christie found two of his steers dead in the pasture and ordered young Bowles not to carry a gun on his land. According to Christie’s daughter, several hogs belonging to the nearby Boyer family were discovered missing about a week after the Christie family’s dead steers were found. Rumor had it that the notorious Bowles family had once again stolen hogs from their neighbors, had salted them, and hidden the meat away in a cave.
The girl’s uncle, Carl Boyer, went to Magistrate Tom Washam and obtained a warrant to search the Bowles farm. Two of the Christie boys were deputized to go with him. Nearing the house, they saw Frank Bowles sitting on the side of the road, a shotgun in his lap. Isham Christie and Bowles began to argue and when Christie called Bowles “a damned sheep-eyed devil,” Bowles shot and killed his visitor, then ran away. He was arrested a few days later, taken to Shelltown to appear before Magistrate Dale Rigney, and released, supposedly bartering for his freedom at the cost of ten dollars and a gallon of whiskey. Learning of the payoff, the dead man’s youngest son went to the grand jury and obtained an indictment against the accused, who fled to Alabama to hide out at his parents’ home. Sheriff George Crutchfield and his sons went to Alabama to arrest Bowles, bringing him back to Kentucky to stand trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to a ten-year term in the state penitentiary.
Bowles, Homer, prom. 1913, U.S. On May 13, 1913, Cindy Curtis, a landowning black woman who had recently lost her husband, went to Ben Emory’s store to collect some money for laundering work she had done for Emory’s wife. After collecting, she sat on the porch of the store to rest. Also on the porch were Homer Bowles, Bess Talbot, and Lura Lee Talbot, Homer’s girlfriend. According to Emory’s nephew, who witnessed the slaying, “All of them was barefooted…and Bowles kept pointing his gun at the girl’s feet. This old colored woman was there, and he turned the gun on her and let it go off. On purpose.” Curtis’ head was blown off by the force of the blast. Though Bowles maintained that the killing was an accident, it was generally believed that he had been hired to murder the woman by her nephew, who lived with Curtis and would inherit the property at her death. Bowles was convicted and sentenced to serve time in the state penitentiary at Nashville, Tenn.
Boyce, Arthur Robert (AKA: The Trousseau Murderer), d.1946, Brit. In Summer 1946, an English woman, Elizabeth McLindon, was hired by King George II of Greece to refurbish his wartime home in Chester Square, Belgravia, London. She accepted, and moved in with her fiance, one Arthur Robert Boyce, a painter and decorator from Brighton. McLindon did not know that her man was already married and had, in fact, served a prison sentence on a bigamy charge.
The king dropped by to inspect his summer house on June 9, but was perturbed by his housekeeper’s absence. Three days later, Papanikolaou, the king’s private secretary paid a second visit, and still there was no sign of the 41-year-old McLindon. Police were called to investigate on June 14 and found the body of the housekeeper in a locked room. She had been shot once through the back of the head. A letter signed, “Your loving and true hubby, Arthur” was found next to the body.
A search of Arthur Boyce’s lodgings in Brighton turned up a luggage label bearing the name of John Rowland, the owner of the .32-caliber Browning automatic pistol used to kill McLindon. Rowland told police that the gun had been taken from him, and he strongly suspected Boyce. A ballistics test conducted by Robert Churchill showed that the bullets extracted from the body were fired from the same gun. Boyce was put on trial in September 1946. No motive was clearly established; however, it was known that McLindon was increasingly suspicious of Boyce’s background, and fearing possible scandal, he decided to murder the woman. Boyce claimed the gun was given to McLindon for her own protection, but the jury, discounting his claim, returned a Guilty verdict. Boyce was sentenced to die by Justice Morris. He was executed on Nov. 1, 1946.
Boyle, William Anthony (Tony), 1904-85, U.S. Tony Boyle and Joseph Albert Yablonski were longtime members of the American United Mine Workers Union. Boyle had served a term as president and Yablonski, suspecting him of embezzlement and of publicly lying about safety violations that led to a November 1968 mine explosion in West Virginia, decided to run against Boyle in an effort to clean up the union, which had been rife with strongarm and terrorist tactics for more than a decade. Suspected in the coal mining intimidation was Albert Pass, treasurer of the East Kentucky branch of the union. William Prater, a union representative who had been one of the strong-arm members, spoke to Silous Huddleston to set in action the plan for Yablonski’s murder. Huddleston contacted his son-in-law, Paul Gilly, who hired two young burglars, James Phillips and Claude Vealey, to do the job. When Phillips got drunk the night they stole guns for the killing, Aubrey Wayne (Buddy) Martin, another young burglar, replaced him for the slaying. Yablonski lost the election. Convinced that Boyle had won dishonestly, he was prepared to challenge the election results in court.
On Dec. 30, 1969, Vealey, Martin, and Gilly drove from Cleveland, Ohio, to Clarksville, Pa., breaking into Yablonski’s home just after midnight and brutally slaying him along with his wife, Margaret, and daughter, Charlotte. The three men then drove back to Cleveland, throwing their guns into a river along the way. The bodies were discovered six days later when the Yablonskis’ son became alarmed at getting no response to phone calls. The police had one clue: the killers had visited Yablonski two weeks before the slayings, pretending to be miners looking for work. When Yablonski did not invite them in they decided not to kill him then. Suspicious, Yablonski had written down the license plate number of their car, and police traced it to Huddleston’s daughter, Annette Gilly.
Police rounded up the three killers, along with Huddleston and the daughter. Vealey was the first to talk, bargaining for his life. Martin and Gilly were tried separately and both sentenced to death, Martin’s sentence later being reduced to three consecutive life terms. Prater and Pass were each convicted of participating in the killings and sentenced to life in prison. William Turnblazer, another union executive, implicated Boyle when he admitted overhearing Boyle order Yablonski’s murder. Before he could be arrested, however, Boyle, already sentenced to five years in jail for embezzlement of union funds and having lost the presidency, attempted suicide. When revived, he was tried and, in April 1974, found Guilty of the murders. Sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the crimes, he was released on Mar. 17, 1977, for a retrial when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the trial judge had improperly refused to admit testimony that might have aided the defense. Boyle, then seventy-five, was convicted a second time in 1978, and sent back to prison. He died on May 31, 1985.
Bozzeli, Peter, prom. 1953, U.S. Gloria Bozelli’s nude, beaten body was found floating in a duffel bag in Iron Ore Creek, N.J. Known to be Peter Bozelli’s favorite child among his eight offspring, Gloria, twenty-four, had been the surrogate mother for the family in the three years since her mother’s death. An over-protective father, Bozelli was described by one of Gloria’s boyfriends as “like one of those Spanish duennas…a chaperone.” The father claimed that he and his daughter had eaten out together the night of her disappearance, but the restaurant where he said they had been at around 9:30 p.m. had closed at 7:30 p.m. When police examined Bozelli’s home they found numerous traces of blood. Breaking down, Bozelli confessed to murdering his daughter, jealous of her possible marriage. “I loved my daughter…I didn’t want her to leave,” he said. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in 1954 after a prison hunger strike.
Bradford, Priscilla, 1944- , and Cummings, Joyce Lisa, 1962- , and Gould, Janice Irene, 1946- , U.S. John Young Bradford, Jr., a wealthy optometrist from Melbourne, Fla., suspected that his wife was trying to kill him. The 53-year-old doctor had even quickly prepared a new will. On Mar. 30, 1980, Dr. John Bradford, Jr. was found dead in the kitchen of his Melbourne, Fla., home. Bradford had been beaten by his 36-year-old wife Priscilla Ann Hadley Smith, who explained that she was fighting for her life. Police Chief C.W. “Jake” Miller was at first sympathetic to the wife, who bore the visible marks of violence. And so too, were Priscilla’s companions: Joyce Lisa Cummings, eighteen, and Janice Irene Gould, thirty-four. Both worked in Bradford’s optical lab.
Bradford left an estate worth $300,000 and a lucrative eyewear business that brought in $12,000 a month. Now it all belonged to Priscilla, Bradford’s second wife. When police questioned the first wife Deenie, she said that in twenty-eight years of marriage, John had never struck her once. Tracy Smith and John Lockhart, two of Bradford’s lab employees, told police about Priscilla’s determination to push her husband out of the way to wrest control of the business.
This was mere conjecture though, until Priscilla’s teenage daughter, Eden Elaine, came forward to provide substantive weight to the allegations. She told of a fiendish murder plot hatched by Priscilla Bradford with the connivance of Gould and Cummings. After failing in an attempt to poison him, they decided to ambush him as he sat down to what he thought was going to be a “reconciliation” dinner with his wife. “It’s going to be his last supper,” Priscilla joked. On Mar. 28, they carried out the plan, and Eden was ordered to keep the shower in the bathroom running, so that the three murderesses could wash off the blood traces. Gould and Cummings selected their murder weapons from the kitchen–Priscilla chose a frying pan. The three women beat him senseless, and then ordered Eden to “keep hitting him…everywhere!” Finally, after repeated blows to the head and face, he died.
Eden was granted immunity in the murder trial that began Apr. 10, 1980. While in jail Priscilla approached a prostitute named Ursula Mattox in hopes of finding someone to murder Tracy Smith and John Lockhart. Priscilla even brought her own mother into the plan. She was to “drop” the $2,000 down payment for the hired killer at a pizzeria. Mattox pretended to go along with the scheme but instead informed prison authorities, who notified the police. With the help of Mattox, police allowed the plan to continue, intervening when the money was actually dropped off to an undercover officer. The evidence gathered was then used to tack on additional charges of conspiracy to commit murder to the original murder indictment. Cummings, Gould, and Bradford were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Said Joyce Cummings at the conclusion of her trial: “All we wanted was an all-female lab.”
Brady, Ian, See: Moors Murders, The.
Braeseke, Barry, 1957- , U.S. At twenty-five, Barry Braeseke was serving a life sentence for the 1976 killings of his mother, father, and grandfather, when, in 1982, the California Supreme Court upset the 1977 conviction, ruling that Braeseke confessed before police properly advised him of his rights. As part of the hearings for the retrial, Judge Stanley Golde of Alameda County ordered the CBS News Program “60 Minutes” to bring twenty-eight minutes of unused material from an interview it had aired with Braeseke. Golde had declared a 1980 California state law permitting reporters to withhold their sources unconstitutional on Jan. 18, 1982, calling the shield law a First Amendment privilege that must give way to the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a fair trial for the accused. The two minutes of “60 Minutes” that had been broadcast in 1977 showed Braeseke saying he was under the influence of the drug PCP when he murdered his relatives. On Jan. 26, 1982, when CBS News delivered the tape to Judge Golde, he responded by vacating his earlier ruling that called the shield law unconstitutional. CBS lawyer Edwin Heafey, Jr., said the network had “attempted to reach an accommodation to protect the rights the court was worried about.” The tape was admitted as evidence for the defense in Braeseke’s second trial and viewed by the jury. In February 1982, he was convicted of the murders a second time and resentenced to life in prison.
Brain, George, 1911-38, Brit. Twenty-seven-year-old George Brain drove a van for a shoe repair business on Pancras Street, Tottenham Court Road, London. Occasionally his employer would let him take the company van home for the night. On July 13, 1938, Brain used the van to pay a social call on his bride-to-be in Kingston. However, he missed his connection. Undaunted, he drove about the city in search of something else to do. Near Wimbledon Common he recognized a familiar face: 30-year-old Rose Muriel Atkins, a street walker known as “Irish Rose.”
Brain offered her a lift, but she pan-handled him for money. He refused, and Atkins threatened to tell his employer that he had been driving the van around the city for pleasure. Furious with her demands, Brain struck her repeatedly with the starting handle until she died. To cover his tracks and alleviate suspicion he placed the body curbside and drove over it, hoping to give the impression that Atkins had been the victim of a hit-and-run driver.
Witnesses reported seeing Irish Rose enter a green van, possibly an Austin Seven or Morris Minor. These were the only two vehicles that matched the tire tracks found on the dead woman. The abandoned van was found on July 16. It was eventually traced back to Brain. Police sent his photograph to the papers and requested from the public any information regarding his whereabouts. A Richmond school boy recognized Brain near the Minister Cliffs at Sheerness on July 25. The following September he was placed on trial at the Old Bailey. It took the jury only fifteen minutes to debate his fate. A Guilty verdict was returned, and Justice Wrottesley passed sentence. The sentence was carried out at Wandsworth Prison on Nov. 1, 1938.
Branch, Mark, 1969-88, U.S. The celluloid delusions of teenage videophile Mark Branch became an inescapable horror for 18-year-old Sharon Gregory, found stabbed and mutilated in her Greenfield, Mass., home on Oct. 24,1988. Branch’s fascination with horror movies may have been a contributing factor in the brutal death of Gregory, because, as he once explained, “I want to know what it’s like to murder someone.” His alter ego was Jason, the fictional psychopath in the 1979 film Friday the 13th. When Branch cut firewood in back of his parents’ house at 112 Meadow Lane in Greenfield, he would sometimes don a leather mask like the one worn by the maniacal killer in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. Branch was a frequent customer at Greenfield’s Video Expo One, where, according to owner Bob Quesnel, he rented everything on the shelf that promised blood and gore by the minute. “I could have seen this coming,” Quesnel said. “I don’t think he would watch a regular movie.”
But Branch attended therapy sessions and had begun working in a store. By all accounts, he seemed to be putting his life back in order. Then Sharon Gregory was killed, and Branch, who quickly became a prime suspect, was missing. Quesnel recalled a statement Branch had made nearly four years earlier. “He said that if anything really bloody ever happened around here, people would automatically think he did it because they know he’s into it.”
Gregory’s body was found by her sister in the bathroom of the family home on South Shelburne Road, Greenfield. A medical examiner from the coroner’s office concluded that the girl had suffered multiple stab wounds. Police told reporters only that witnesses had observed Branch entering the Gregory home early that day. Based on the identification of Branch’s gray Chevette near the murder scene, police issued an all-points bulletin for the young man. Later that day the vehicle was found on Avery Road in Buckland, a secluded spot west of Greenfield in Franklin County. The driver of the car was gone.
Police concentrated their search in the woods near Hog Mountain, but were unable to find a trace of the suspected killer. Michael Duquette, Branch’s brother-in-law, conducted his own search of the area but came up with nothing. A full month passed without any new leads, until Nov. 29 when Kevin Purinton found Branch’s body while tracking deer in the woods. It was hanging from a tree on Hog Mountain, two miles from where the car had first been found. Purinton had made it his own private mission to locate the remains. “I had told my mother I was going to find him,” he said to reporters. “I just had that gut feeling.”
Branch was hanging by his boot laces, an apparent suicide. “He’s been there awhile,” Greenfield Police Chief Joseph LaChance said, adding that police search parties had come within a hundred yards of the body when searching the densely wooded area. A final identification of the decaying corpse was made at the state police crime lab, closing the book on the “Jason” case.
Brandon, Mark, d.1944, Brit. On an October evening in 1942 Beatrice Swanson put her three children to bed and walked over to snuggle with her husband, Samuel Swanson. Outside the window of their home a shot shattered the glass and Samuel Swanson slumped forward. His frantic spouse tried to drag him out to their car in an effort to reach Meadville, the nearest town, for help. As she appeared in the doorway, a man jumped her, knocking her unconscious. When she revived and staggered toward the car again, he fired two shots at her and she dropped to the ground. At 5 a.m. Morton Brown, a friend who drove Swanson to work every day, came to pick him up and saw Samuel’s body sprawled in the doorway. The Swanson children were still sleeping. Finding Beatrice Swanson unconscious and wounded, Brown carried her back into the house, put her to bed, then went for the police. Officers discovered threads of heavy blue serge cloth on the ground near the house. Later, as Mrs. Swanson lay dying, she said that their hired man, Mark Brandon, had made advances to her. Her description of Brandon was similar to that of the suspect in a Meadville case that the sheriff and undersheriff were working on. Calling Meadville to report the resemblance, they were told that the murder was known to officers there, for it had been related in great detail by a young man in a cafe to an officer having breakfast there. The description of the young man matched that of Brandon again.
Around midnight officers picked up a pedestrian who claimed he was Ted Harris from Phoenix, Ariz. But relatives of Brandon’s quickly identified him. When confronted with the evidence of the threads that matched those torn from clothes he had been seen wearing the day before, Brandon confessed. The trial began on Dec. 10 and Brandon was found “Guilty of murder, with the recommendation of the death penalty,” on Dec. 24. Later, the case went to higher courts, and Brandon obtained one stay of execution but lost an insanity plea. He was hanged for the double murder on Aug. 10, 1944.
Brannan, Joshua, prom. 1925, U.S. The Kentucky sawmill camp where Joshua Brannan and Boris Beary both worked was notorious for weekends of excessive drinking and aggressive behavior. Beary was married, but had been spending a great deal of time with Brannan’s eight-months pregnant wife. The level of hostility had gotten so intense that Brannan had recently purchased a new pistol. On Saturday, May 2, 1925, Beary got drunk enough to follow Brannan home, presumably after again flirting with his coworker’s wife. When Beary forced his way into their house, Brannan shot and killed him. A man who surveyed the scene of the crime just after the shooting said Brannan’s wife was temporarily trapped inside the logging camp house when Beary’s corpse lay in the doorway, and a plank had to be taken off the back of the lodging so she could exit, as she refused to step over the dead body.
Sentenced to life in the state penitentiary, Brannan was paroled early. His spouse divorced him not long after the murder and soon remarried, dying in 1970. Brannan also married again, dying in the late seventies.
Branson, William, prom. 1916-20, U.S. Convicted in 1916 of murdering, on Oct. 8, 1915, William Booth, a rancher in Yamhill county and the husband of Anna Booth, with whom Branson apparently was involved, the young man was tried, convicted of second-degree murder in 1916, and sentenced to life in prison. The decision was later appealed and reversed on the basis of improper jury instructions. In 1917 Branson again was tried, convicted, and given a life sentence. He was sent to the state penitentiary in Salem, Ore., on Mar. 3, 1917. The state parole board became so convinced of his innocence–one of the central questions in the trial apparently had been whether he or Anna Booth had actually pulled the trigger–that they wrote to Governor Olcott asking his release, explaining, “We…are satisfied after a full and complete investigation of this case that the accused was not guilty of the crime with which he was charged.” Both the warden of the penitentiary, Louis Compton, and the state hospital superintendent, Dr. R. Lee Steiner, added their names to the parole board’s recommendation for pardon. According to Olcott’s statement when he paroled Branson, the accused had been (twice) convicted on “the sheerest kind of circumstantial evidence,” and another man had confessed to committing the crime and was held afterwards in the insane asylum for life.
Anna Booth was paroled on Jan. 31, 1920. Branson received his unconditional pardon in September of the same year.
Braun, Thomas Eugene (AKA: Mike Ford), 1948- , and Maine, Leonard, 1948- , U.S. Thomas Braun was born in the state of Washington. When barely into his adolescence, he was forced to shoot the family dog because his drunken father thought the dog was “a chicken killer.” On Aug. 17, 1967, Braun left his job as a gas station attendant in Ritzville, Wash., to ride off with Lenny Maine. They took with them a .22-caliber Luger and a Frontier Colt single-action .22-caliber pistol.
Heading for Seattle, they overtook a late-model Skylark driven by 22-year-old Deanna Buse on Route 72 outside Richmond. They motioned her over to the side of the road on the pretense that her tires were going flat. When she stepped out of the car, Braun pointed a gun at her head and told her to get into their car. Maine hopped in the Skylark and followed Braun to a secluded spot near Echo Lake. There Braun shot and killed Buse, with five bullets from his pistol. The two left her body and then continued on to Seattle, where they abandoned their car and took the Skylark.
The next day, Braun and Maine crossed into Oregon and tried to register at a resort motel. The owner was suspicious of the unkempt strangers, and asked to see their vehicle registration. They drove off, but had a flat tire a few miles away. Samuel Ledgerwood, who had just come from his favorite fishing spot, offered to help. Braun pumped two shots into Ledgerwood’s head, and then set fire to the Skylark. The two killers drove off in Ledgerwood’s shiny new Buick. They continued south to Northern California. On Route 120, Braun stopped to pick up two 17-year-old hitchhikers, Susan Bartolomei and Timothy Luce. Early the next morning, the Mease family stopped their car on the same highway to investigate what they believed was an accident. They found Susan Bartolomei lying on the side of the road, barely conscious. She said that two men named Mike and John from Oklahoma had shot them, killing Timothy. Meanwhile, searchers found the body of Deanna Buse. Oregon police reported the murder of Samuel Ledgerwood, and soon the manhunt had begun as three states pooled their resources. Several days later, Maine and Braun were captured at a motel in Jamestown, Calif., after Constable Ed Chafin noticed the green Buick Skylark with Oregon plates. The boys were barely awake in their rooms when the police broke in. Braun reached for a gun but was subdued. After being shown still photos and movies of the victims, they soon confessed to their vicious crime spree.
On Dec. 2, 1968, Superior Court Judge Joseph Kelly of San Jose, Calif., sentenced Braun to die in the San Quentin gas chamber. However, the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Leonard Maine also received a life sentence.
Brazier, Nicola, c.1950-70, Brit. On Sept. 17, 1970, Nicola Brazier was found dead, shot in the back of the head, and her body bound with wire, in the woods near Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. Brazier had last been seen driving from her High Street, Whitechurch, Buckinghamshire, home to go to work at her job as a company representative in the Broxbourne area. A few days after the murder, police found several of her belongings, along with a checkbook and a pistol engraved with the number 40084, in a locker at the Euston train station. Around that same time, a young man committed suicide by throwing himself under a train near Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, not far from where Brazier was murdered. Following routine procedure, police fingerprinted the man’s corpse. There was no reason to connect the suicide with Brazier’s murder.
Toward the end of December, with the Brazier case still unsolved, police rechecked all the evidence and this time found that the dead man’s fingerprints matched those on the weapon that killed Brazier. Checking into the suicide’s background, they realized they had found the killer. The pistol was traced to Canada and to South Africa, where it had once been owned by a merchant seaman who had sold it to the murderer.
Brazilian Carnival Murders, prom. 1980s, Braz. Each year at least a dozen murders occur during the frenetic Brazilian Carnival held in Rio de Janeiro. Amidst the round-the-clock drunken revels, wild street dancing, constant parties, and fetes, hundreds of deaths, mostly accidental, occur. It is also a time when murder victims are most public and vulnerable to their enemies. In 1982, officials recorded 282 violent deaths in Rio during the festivities. In the following year, 110 persons died during the revelry. In 1984, 171 people were killed one way or another and nineteen of these deaths, according to authorities, were murders, this number considered average by police who find it impossible to cope with killings while the entire population is in the streets and most are wearing costumes–the perfect method by which killers disguise their identities. One recent murder victim was killed while dressed in lingerie and a blonde wig. He was reportedly killed by another man dressed similarly in female clothing.
Brekke, Carstein, prom. 1949, Nor. Odvar Eiken and Anders Muren had been the best of friends since they had served together in the Norwegian Air Force in the final days of WWII. Following their return to civilian life, they enrolled at the same medical college in Lund, Sweden, and became roommates. In the summer of 1948, Eiken visited Muren’s family home in Norway, where he met and fell in love with Randi Muren, Anders’ 22-year-old sister. The couple courted for nearly a year, and looked forward to announcing their engagement on Easter of 1949 when Eileen received an anonymous letter, telling him of Randi’s alleged infidelities, and a newspaper clipping that announced Randi’s engagement to Carstein Brekke, a fellow student and old-time friend of hers who also attended her teachers’ college in Kristiansand. Randi also received several anonymous letters telling her about Eileen’s affairs in Sweden. In February, Randi received a letter from a Signe Lundgren, who claimed to be Eiken’s mistress and pregnant with his child. The lovers discussed these strange letters, deciding that they were practical jokes played on them by friends.
Shortly before Easter, Eiken received a parcel containing a small bottle of liquor in an old cigar box, mailed from a Kari Straume, with an indecipherable address. Both wondered vaguely who Kari Straume might be. He raised a toast to his upcoming engagement with his brother-in-law to be, and though both became mildly sick, they did not attribute it to the alcohol. One week later Eiken received another parcel, containing four matchboxes with chocolates inside, and a note from Randi, sending her love and asking him to eat them all. On Mar. 12, Eiken shared the candy with Muren, and with his landlady’s 8-year-old daughter, Marianne Svendson, who in turn shared the sweets with her friend, Barbro Jakobson. That night all four were rushed to the hospital in Lund, where Marianne Svendson died in agony.
In the small town of Malmo, near Lund, Superintendent Alf Eliasson took over the investigation. Autopsy tests on Svendson revealed traces of arsenic. Randi Muren was questioned and told of the anonymous letters. Faint scribbles on the newsprint in which the lethal treats had been wrapped revealed the name Flemming Rosborg, a Dane who had met Randi Muren at a Vraadal hotel the year before and had been strongly attracted to the coed. But it was proved that he had no connection to the parcels or letters. Investigations in Oslo and Copenhagen revealed that neither Signe Lundgren nor Kari Straume had anything to do with the case–police suspected their names had been taken from telephone directories.
Police had little to go on until Carstein Brekke came into headquarters to announce that somebody had also sent him a box of poisoned chocolates, with the name S. Kihle on the wrapping. After eating one, he had been sick for three days and had come to the police because he was scared after hearing about Svendson’s death. A model student from a good family, Brekke was courteous and cooperative. But when Randi mentioned that he had been in Oslo on both days when the parcels were postmarked, he quickly became a suspect. When Randi was also shown the cigar box in which the doctored liquor had been mailed she identified it as the same box in which Brekke once brought her fresh eggs from his family home. Detectives then found an old school notebook in the training college trash, with examples of Randi Muren’s signature and practiced forgeries of her handwriting.
Five hours after his arrest Brekke admitted to poisoning the chocolates, refusing to be further cross-examined and insisting on writing out his confession in the intellectual form it required. His statement on a long, formal paper explained how unrequited love for Muren had driven him to create an elaborate scheme of revenge.
Brekke had happened to be visiting Randi at her house when she received a letter from Eiken thanking her for the liquor. She wrote him back, explaining she had not sent it. Addressing her lover, “My dear husband,” she gave the missive to Brekke to mail on his way home. When Brekke opened the letter instead and read it, he later confessed to police, “Something snapped inside of me.” It was then he decided to implicate Randi with the poisoned candy. Brekke was charged with two counts of attempted, premeditated murder, and with the manslaughter of Svendson. Found Guilty, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison and, according to Norwegian law, a ten-year loss of his rights as a citizen. When he appealed, a supreme court found him Guilty again. Judge Carl Kruse Jensen remarked to the jury that “the condemned’s extremely serious actions disclosed an emphatic criminal disposition.” In the May 1951 sentencing, an additional three years were added to Brekke’s term.
Brennan, William Theodore, b.c.1898, Brit. On the Rowlands farm, at Model Farm, Penyffordd, near Mold, on Mar. 5, 1925, a farm laborer named Evans noticed a man he presumed to be a poacher and told his employer, John Rowlands, about it. When Rowlands went to check into the matter, Evans heard a gunshot and ran out into the field to see a man in a light coat fleeing. Chasing after him, Evans saw the man turn around and point his gun at him, and the farm worker retreated.
Under suspicion was William Brennan, a 27-year-old Irishman who had recently returned to Penyffordd to live with his parents. With a history of fits of rage, and a strain of insanity in his family, Brennan had frequently been in trouble since leaving school, and his parents decided it would be best for him to live with them in the relative quiet of the country.
Brennan claimed to have been home all day when Rowlands was shot, and no weapon was found in his house. His coat had been recently cleaned. A few days after his arrest, Brennan admitted to the killing, explaining that Rowlands had approached him and attempted to take his gun. Brennan had offered to pay for the rabbits he had stolen, but would not release his shotgun. The two men struggled, the gun went off once harmlessly, and then an enraged Brennan had reloaded and murdered the farmer, later hiding the gun in a drain. A jury at Mold Assizes found Brennan Guilty but Insane, and he was sent to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Bretagna, Santo, and Rosenberg, Willie, prom. 1948, U.S. On New York’s East Side on Jan. 13, 1948, a policeman heard shots in his own First Street building and rushed to the apartment of Benjamin (Chippy) Weiner, a minor hoodlum, who lay dying on his kitchen floor. When the officer asked Weiner who shot him, the man just shook his head, following the underworld code of refusing to give information to the law. He died moments later. Neighborhood residents had heard the shots but no one could, or would, tell the police who had done it. A month later, Edward Fennessey, arrested for a holdup in Brooklyn, told the King’s County District Attorney’s office that Weiner’s killers were Santo Bretagna and Willie Rosenberg. Although Rosenberg was captured, Bretagna disappeared.
Police questioned Bretagna’s East Side acquaintances for two months until one of them, a young tough on parole, confessed that he had been sending money to Bretagna. On Mar. 13, 1948, police arrested Bretagna in Boston.
He told them he went to Weiner’s apartment with Rosenberg, who wanted to collect his share of the profits from a recent hijacking. On the way up to the apartment, Rosenberg casually asked Bretagna to kill Weiner for him as a favor. Weiner invited the two in, and when he went to the kitchen to make drinks, Bretagna followed and shot him. Faced with Bretagna’s confession, Rosenberg admitted his part in the murder. Both men were later executed in the electric chair.
Brewer, Morris Sutton Ramsden, 1926- , Aus. Morris Brewer was a religious and dutiful son, raised in the Plymouth Brethren religion which forbade films, plays, and dancing. The overwhelming intensity of his moral fanaticism more than likely contributed to a nervous breakdown for he had been in a mental hospital. He had been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Alexander John Maum Sinclair, for more than a year when in 1949 he met 18-year-old Carmen Walters when they both took a course in herd-testing at Burnley Agricultural College in Melbourne, Aust. Walters’ demure and reserved demeanor belied her spirit of adventure–in the short time since she left school she had studied to be a missionary, worked as a trainee nurse and as a tax department employee, and had run away to the Northern Territory, some 2,000 miles from her home, to work as a secretary.
This unlikely couple courted, fell in love, and became engaged in February 1950, planning to marry later that year. Brewer went into herd-testing for a while in the nearby dairy district of Gippsland, and Carmen, switching work again, became a dental nurse. But Brewer began to doubt his bride-to-be, remembering discrepancies in things she had told him, finally confronting her with, “Why did you lie to me?” Walters tried to explain that she had merely fibbed about the length of her stay in the Northern Territory because she had not known how much they would come to mean to each other.
When Brewer approached retired RAAF Squadron Leader Roy Walters to ask for his daughter’s hand, the father, concerned about Brewer’s rigid behavior, gave his prospective son-in-law three conditions: that his daughter be allowed to visit her family after marriage, that she be free to continue seeing movies with her relatives, and that the couple not get tied down with a family right away. Brewer agreed to the first, but was vague about the other two. Although wedding plans continued, Carmen Walters began getting moody, talking more about her traveling plans rather than about the upcoming nuptials and eventually admitting to Brewer that she had been close with another man when she lived in the Northern Territory. Brewer was shocked and repulsed, and a doctor advised the distraught young man to leave his betrothed.
On Mar. 10, 1950, Brewer met Walters at a railway station and ended their affair. According to his father, Robert Charles Brewer, his son did not sleep for five weeks after that day. The couple made several tentative and unsuccessful efforts to get back together. On May 13, they had dinner in suburban Mordialloc and were walking toward Walters’ home when she told Brewer his parents had been a partial cause of their breakup, adding: “I have caused my parents a lot of worry and trouble in the past, and you’ll do the same.” Brewer then punched Walters in the face and strangled her to death.
When her body was found the next morning by a neighbor, Richard Hall, he did not recognize his longtime acquaintance. The police search for Brewer ended on May 17 in a State Electricity Camp, where he had gone to plead for food. The night of the murder, he had hitchhiked 100 miles into the bush, borrowing a razor at a workers’ camp and unsuccessfully trying to cut his wrist. Confessing to Detective Cyril Currer, Brewer said: “She told me lies…she told me I would cause my parents a lot of trouble.” Edward Francis Campbell, the Royal Melbourne Hospital psychologist who examined the killer, finding him to be a repressed personality with traits of schizophrenia, said Brewer had “hidden symptoms that could break out into aggressive insanity under emotional strain.” A jury found Brewer Not Guilty on the grounds of insanity, and Mr. Justice Barry ordered that he be sent to an asylum for the criminally insane.
Brewer, Rudolph, d.1927, U.S. In September 1927, 70-year-old Charles Gundlacht, a native of Germany who continued making home brew in his adopted country after it went dry, offered a glass of beer to Rudolph Brewer, who had stopped for directions, as he did to every visitor to his small Leonardtown, Md., farm. Brewer returned later that same day, when Gundlacht was out, showed Mrs. Gundlacht his credentials from the Prohibition Bureau, and then broke every bottle he could find. When he returned on Sept. 16, with three other agents, Gundlacht held a shotgun on them, saying as they flashed their badges, “I know who you are and I don’t give a damn.” Warning them to stay where they were, he fired as they advanced, wounding one agent in the knee. They returned fire and Gundlacht fell to the ground, wounded in the foot by their bullets. As he lay prone, begging for mercy, Brewer stood over the old man and shot him through the head. Charges against the other agents were dropped, and a federal jury accepted Brewer’s plea of self-defense. Gundlacht was one of the hundreds of liquor law violators or suspects killed by agents during Prohibition.
Brighton Trunk Murder, The, See: Mancini, Tony.
Brinkley, Richard, d.1907, Brit. At the death of 77-year-old Johanna Maria Louisa Blume, Richard Brinkley, one of her lodgers, presented her will, claiming possession of Blume’s money and Fulham, England, home. Blume’s granddaughter contested the will, and Brinkley realized the people he had procured to witness the false will would quickly tell the truth in court. Thus, he set out to kill his witnesses, beginning with Reginald Parker.
Brinkley acquired some prussic acid–in order to kill a dog, he claimed–placing it in some stout he took to Parker’s home on Apr. 20, 1907. He left the bottle of stout in the kitchen, not realizing that the beer might attract others. As it happened, Parker’s landlords, Richard and Elizabeth Ann Beck, and their daughter drank the poisoned stout. It killed the elder Becks and left the daughter very ill. Police quickly discovered who provided the stout and Brinkley didn’t help matters when he claimed to know nothing of it being poisoned before the police even brought up the subject. Even though Brinkley’s intent was to kill Parker, there still was a willful act committed in the deaths of the Becks, so he was tried at the Guildford Assizes and convicted of murder. The trial was noteworthy because of the use of scientific evidence to determine the different kinds of ink used. It was shown that three different pens had been used in the will. Exhumation and examination of Blume’s body showed that she had not been murdered. Brinkley was hanged on Aug. 13, 1907, at Wandsworth Prison.
Brique, Micheline, 1954- , and Chamand, Jocelyne, 1956- , Fr. It is more than likely that Jean-Michel Ray had believed himself lucky when he picked up two young, attractive, and scantily-clad female hitchhikers. Micheline Brique, eighteen, and Jocelyne Chamand, sixteen, had spent most of their adolescence in and out of trouble, finally being transferred from a juvenile delinquent home to the tighter security of a hospital. Two days after escaping from the hospital, on July 13, 1972, Brique and Chamand spent the last of their money on two butcher knives at a hardware store in Macon, Fr. The next day, Bastille Day, they began hitchhiking along Route Nationale 6, intent upon killing a driver for his money.
Ray was the fourth driver to pick up Brique and Chamand that day, the first three not being suitable victims. The women enticed him to pull off the road into a secluded glade where they savagely attacked him, stabbing him eleven times. They watched for more than half an hour as he bled to death. Brique and Chamand then caught another ride into Lyons. They were later apprehended carrying the bloodstained knives. Both women admitted their guilt and were sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Brisbon, Henry, Jr. (AKA: The I-57 Killer), 1956- , U.S. On the night of June 3, 1973, a car carrying four men forced a woman’s car off Interstate 57, just south of Chicago. One of the men forced her from the car at gunpoint, then ordered her to strip naked and climb through a barbed-wire fence. He then shot her between the legs with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, leaving her in agony for several minutes before killing her with a shot to the throat. The four killers, returning to the road to seek out more victims, ran the car of a young couple off the road near Country Club Hills less than an hour later.
Dorothy Cerny and James Schmidt, both 25-years-old, were engaged to be married in six months. The couple, ordered to lie on the roadside, pleaded for mercy, but their killer shot them in the back after telling Cerny and Schmidt to “kiss your last kiss.”
Henry Brisbon, Jr. was found Guilty of both conspiracy to commit murder and the murder of Cerny and Schmidt and was sentenced in November 1977 to 1,000 to 3,000 years in prison. His youth at the time of the killing–he was seventeen–and the law, which then prohibited capital punishment, prevented the judge from imposing the death penalty. At Brisbon’s sentencing, Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Ficaro said, “He is a wild, savage beast that should be caged…he would gladly kill again if he got the chance.” Amazingly, Ficaro proved to be quite prophetic.
On Oct. 19, 1978, the I-57 killer struck again, but this time behind bars. While serving his sentence at the Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Ill., Brisbon used a sharpened soup ladle to murder fellow inmate Richard E. Morgan. Brisbon was convicted of this murder on Jan. 22, 1982, and it took an all-male jury less than an hour and a half on Feb. 24 to sentence Brisbon to death in the courtroom of Herman Haase. The I-57 killer, who had instigated a prison riot and taken part in fifteen attacks on guards and inmates, declared as he was led away from the trial, “You’ll never get me. I’ll kill again. Then you’ll have another long trial. And I’ll do it again.”
Indeed, another murder attempt by Brisbon took place when he broke away from his armed escort at the Menard Correctional Center’s death row unit on Feb. 15, 1983. He managed to arm himself with a piece of metal wire which he used to stab two other condemned inmates, including mass murderer John Wayne Gacy. Neither of the prisoners was seriously wounded.
Will County State’s Attorney Edward Petka remarked that Brisbon was “a very, very terrible human being, a walking testimonial for the death penalty.” The Illinois Supreme Court disagreed, overturning the death sentence on Apr. 19, 1985, claiming that the state had prejudiced the jury by introducing inflammatory evidence concerning the highway murders. Once again Brisbon appeared in court for sentencing, and once again, on Oct. 7, 1986, he was sentenced to death.
Brisbon continues to cause trouble in prison, even in maximum security where he is currently being held at Menard awaiting further appeal of his sentence. On Aug. 3, 1987, he threw a dumbbell at another prisoner, fracturing the skull of 34-year-old convicted murderer John Phillips. See: Gacy, John Wayne.
Briscoe, Ricky, 1972-88, U.S. Linette West was only sixteen years old when she died on Mar. 25, 1988, in her home at 1200 Nova Avenue in the Capitol Heights district of Washington, D.C. She lived with her family and her 3-month-old child born out of wedlock. Linette’s killer was Ricky Briscoe, a former boyfriend whom she had broken up with after her baby was born.
On Mar. 25, 1988, Briscoe turned up at the West residence. When Linette and Juanita, her sister, tried to send him away, Briscoe threatened Linette. “Don’t go to sleep ’cause I’m going to kill you,” he told her.
About 4 a.m., Juanita was awakened by the screams of her sister in the living room. Briscoe had her pinned to the floor. There was a distinct aroma of kerosene. “Help me!” cried Linette. “He’s going to burn me!”
Pregnant herself, Juanita ran next door for help, but there was no answer. She ran down the street knocking on doors but there was no response. Returning to her home, she met the unspeakable horror of seeing her sister engulfed in flames. Linette fled the house and ran nearly a hundred yards to her uncle’s house. She was rushed to Washington Hospital Center, where she was found to be burned over 90 per cent of her body. She died shortly before 9 a.m. on Mar. 28.
After setting Linette on fire, Briscoe was unable to escape the flames and died, after becoming entangled in some drapes. His body was found near the front door. Shocked and grief-stricken neighbors complied with the family’s request and asked a local man to sing I’m Climbing on the Rough Side of the Mountain at Linette’s funeral, the song echoing the life of one black family.
Brittle, William, prom. 1964-65, Brit. Peter Thomas had lent William Brittle £2,000. Coincidentally, Thomas was found dead the month the loan was due to be repaid. The discovery of Peter Thomas’ body in Bracknell Woods on June 28, 1964, and its state of decomposition caused by bluebottle fly larvae led pathologist Dr. Keith Simpson to conclude that Thomas had been dead for at least ten days. This estimation matched the information known to Detective Superintendent Horace Faber that Thomas had been missing from his home in Lydney since June 16 or 17. Dennis Roberts, however, claimed to have seen Thomas alive on June 20. Brittle claimed he repaid Thomas the day he disappeared. Even with a strong witness supporting his story, a coroner’s jury still named Brittle as murderer, and he was tried at the spring assize of 1965, in Gloucester.
At the trial, Queen’s Counsel Quintin Hogg represented Brittle. He had two more witnesses, Jane Charles and Gwendoline Padwick, who swore they saw Thomas alive on June 21–a minimum of three days after he was dead, according to Simpson. The prosecution, led by Ralph Cusack, could not refute the testimony of the defense witnesses, and the testimony of one defense witness, Professor McKenny-Hughes, unexpectedly corroborated Simpson’s theory as to time of death. The jury decided that Thomas could not possibly have been alive when the witnesses stated and found Brittle Guilty of murder, for which he received a life sentence.
Brogile, Prince Jean de, 1921-76, Fr. Prince Jean de Brogile, a prominent politician and supporter of French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, was shot in the neck and chest while walking along a Paris street on Dec. 24, 1976. His death was believed to have been politically motivated after a message–later proven bogus–was received from the extreme rightist Charles Martel Club. Within five days of the murder, however, police had arrested six people in connection with a plot involving two restaurateurs who planned to repay their debts with the proceeds of an $800,000 life insurance policy on Brogile. The six arrested were: the prince’s business partners Patrick Allenet de Ribemont and Pierre de Varga; police detective Guy Simonet, who arranged the murder for the partners; a pimp named Gerard Frech, who had pulled the trigger; and Simon Kelkewitcz and Serge Tessedre, who assisted Frech.
The sudden arrests and solution to the case quickly erupted into a scandal concerning a possible coverup of the murder by Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski. Although the possibility of a coverup did affect the elections in France, no official misconduct was ever proved. Four men were found Guilty in the murder conspiracy; three were sentenced on Dec. 23, 1981, to ten years in prison and the fourth to five years.
Brook, John, c.1943- , and Johnson, Nicholas de Clare, prom. 1970s, Brit. Knowing he was suspected of murder, George Ince turned himself into police but maintained his innocence. Police were seeking him for the murder of Muriel Patience, who was shot and killed on Nov. 5, 1972. It took two trials before Ince was proven innocent and a third before the true murderer was convicted.
When Bob Patience, the owner of the Barn Restaurant in Braintree, Essex, refused to open the safe for robbers, they shot him and his daughter Beverly and killed his wife Muriel. Then they got into the safe and stole £900. Ince testified that he was with his fiancee Dolly Gray that night. At Ince’s first trial in May 1973, at Chelmsford, no verdict was reached, while at the second trial he was found Not Guilty. Not long after his acquittal, on June 15, the murder weapon was located.
The gun that killed Patience was discovered sewn into the mattress of John Brook’s bed, and after his accomplice Nicholas de Clare Johnson admitted to the robbery and accused Brook of the shootings, the two were brought to trial. At the trial in January 1974, Brook was found Guilty of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison, while Johnson received ten years for manslaughter.
Brookins, Louis Dwight, 1925-46, U.S. The killer was as cold as ice as he recounted the exact moments leading up to the murder of a 32-year-old department store manicurist named Helen Caputo. Veteran police officers were shocked by Louis Brookins’ laconic, unfeeling attitude. When he finished his story, he asked Deputy Elmer Wood of the Rochester (N.Y.) Police Department, “What do you think they will give me?” Wood’s reply was unprintable.
The 20-year-old ex-soldier met his victim at a downtown Rochester restaurant on July 9, 1945. The charming young man dressed as a Marine flattered Helen Caputo, an older woman, and suggested that they go to Ontario Beach Park for a late-night swim. The suggestion appealed to the lonely woman who had been an orphan since childhood. Caputo, who was unmarried, had just been stood up by a girlfriend. She took Brookins to her rooming house at 5:15 p.m. The couple remained in the building until 8:30 p.m., when they were last seen walking near James Street.
Brookins had already decided to attack and rob Caputo, who did not know that she was being lured to the identical spot where a first victim had been assaulted twenty-four hours before. At a desolate spot near Cherry Road in the Lakedale subdivision, Brookins told his date to walk ahead. Puzzled, she complied with his request.
Knocking Helen to the ground, Brookins sexually assaulted her. A broken street light left the scene in darkness, unnoticed by passersby. She screamed, but neighbors paid no attention. He stuffed a handkerchief she had given him several hours earlier into her mouth. An autopsy later revealed that she had died of strangulation.
“Lots of people come up from the lake at night, laughing and screaming,” Mrs. V.E. Lacy, who lived on Leander Road, explained later.
To conceal his crime Brookins dragged Caputo’s body into a thicket next to the road. Before he fled, he removed $450 from his victim’s purse, a wristwatch, and two expensive rings. The watch was later smashed. The body was found the next day by Mrs. Russell McFarland, who was taking a shortcut through the brush when she noticed a face partially covered by a bloody handkerchief.
Satisfied with himself, Brookins walked up to Lake Avenue where he hitched a ride with three young women and their male escort. They stopped for a sandwich at Ontario Beach Park before driving back downtown. With his pocket full of cash, Brookins picked up a young prostitute on Main Street and took her to a motel where he paid her with some of the jewelry lifted from Caputo.
The next day the pair took a bus to Brookins’ hometown of Syracuse where they registered in a hotel as husband and wife. In a military surplus store, he purchased a new Marine uniform and enough campaign ribbons to make a person believe that he single-handedly won the battle of Corregidor. They returned to Rochester the next day, registering in a hotel with a second man.
Based on a tip supplied by room clerk Charles Hartel, a squad of detectives led by John Rowan and Victor Raycroft burst into the hotel room where they found Brookins, the 19-year-old prostitute, and the second man. Hartel had been supplied with a physical description of the suspect several hours earlier by city detectives. His suspicions were aroused when Brookins registered under his own name, though he claimed that the girl was his wife. Brookins and the prostitute were arraigned on vagrancy charges pending a hearing. It was one of the fastest arrests of a murder suspect made by the Rochester Police in many years, because they were on his trail before he even met up with Caputo. Brookins had been linked to three other recent assaults in the city, and was identified by a woman he had accosted near the Lake Avenue bus stop. She successfully fended off her attacker by pummeling him in the face. As she ran away, she heard Brookins mutter an angry curse, adding, “You’d make a good corpse.”
Brookins accompanied the detectives to the murder site, where he reconstructed the events of that night. The police also learned that their suspect had been taken into custody by the Navy Shore Patrol in Rochester a few days earlier, when he was “unable to give a good account of himself.” He claimed that he had been discharged from the Marine Corps in 1944, classified as unfit for service. When they checked out his story they found out he had been discharged from the Army, not the Marines.
Brookins was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die. He was on death row at Sing Sing for fourteen months before being executed in the electric chair at 11:06 p.m. on Sept. 12, 1946.
Brooks, Charles, 1942-82, U.S. In 1976, used-car sales-man David Gregory took Charlie Brooks and Woody Lourdes for a trial drive. The result was a trial for the murder of Gregory–for which each man was found Guilty and sentenced to death–and notoriety for Brooks as the first convicted killer to be executed by a lethal injection.
Lourdes was able to successfully appeal his conviction on the grounds that the jury had been improperly selected, and he received a commuted sentence of forty years in prison. Just minutes before his scheduled execution, Brooks was denied a stay of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court. Brooks’ death at 12:16 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1982, also made history because he was the first man executed in Texas in eighteen years and the first black man put to death since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976. The lethal injection administered to Brooks by a medical technician–and not a physician, because the American Medical Association strongly opposed the taking of a life by a doctor–was a solution of pancurionum bromide, potassium chloride, and sodium thipental, also known as the truth drug, sodium pentothal.
Brooks, Donald (AKA: Frank Whitney), prom. 1944, U.S. Mary Finn was killed on her wedding day, July 1, 1944. The pretty young bride-to-be from Baltimore left her home the night before the wedding with $600. The money was the nest egg that Mary and her fiance Charles Rommell had been saving for their honeymoon.
When Rommell left for the graveyard shift at a nearby defense plant at 10:30 p.m., he told Mary to wait for him at her home. She was nervous about carrying the money back home again, but agreed. The next day at about 9 a.m., Rommell returned home to prepare for his wedding. He found his bride-to-be dead on the floor. There was blood everywhere. Dazed, he called a policeman.
The police questioned many friends and relatives who were on the guest list. All of them except Irene Ayres had airtight alibis. Ayres worked as a riveter at the bomber plant, and she had a boyfriend named Don Brooks who was well known to Rommell. When police talked to Irene, they discovered she had disappeared, along with her boyfriend.
A rented Buick coupe was traced to Brooks, who used the name Frank Whitney. Inside, a blood-spattered newspaper section dated June 30 was found. It was part of the same paper found in the Rommell apartment. Under direct questioning, Irene Ayres denied that Brooks had killed Mary. But when threatened with a charge of accessory to murder, she broke down and admitted that her boyfriend killed Mary Finn for the $600, which they used to pay for a weekend in New York. Brooks was convicted of first degree murder on Oct. 6, 1944.
Broome, William (William Brooks), prom. 1910, Brit. Following on the heels of the sensational murder trial of Dr. Hawley Crippen, the British police had another notorious killer to contend with–William Broome, an army veteran whose father owned a shop on High Street, Slough.
When an elderly woman named Mrs. Wilson was found dead in the building next door, local gossip directed Elias Bower of Scotland Yard to young William Broome, who used the name William Brooks. One Sunday morning Bower took the man in for questioning just as he was leaving the local church. Bower discovered a facial scratch running from Broome’s cheek to his nose. It was the kind of wound that would be sustained during a scuffle. In coming days, three different people told three different stories about the origins of the scratch, which at the very least proved that Broome was a bad liar.
When Broome’s room near Regent’s Park was searched, an envelope containing £20 in gold was found. This was the precise amount that had been taken from the old lady. Dr. William Wilcox of the Home Office conducted an exhaustive examination of a slip of brown paper found in Broome’s possession that connected him to the victim.
William Broome protested that on the day of the murder he had been in London applying for a job as a taxi driver. No evidence could be found to back up this assertion, so Broome was tried and duly convicted at Reading. On the day of his scheduled execution, a stiff dose of brandy helped Broome overcome a severe case of the jitters. A second before he was dropped he screamed, “I am innocent!” But it was too late.
Brown, Arthur Ross, 1925-56, U.S. On Aug. 4, 1955, Mrs. Wilma Frances Allen, a prominent Kansas City, Mo., wife and mother, left a beauty parlor at 12:30 p.m. on a rainy day and hurried to her convertible. Five hours later, concerned about not finding his wife at home, Mr. Allen, a car dealer, sent his salesman to search for her car; a few hours later, he notified the police. At 2:10 a.m. patrolman Ronald Erhardt found Mrs. Allen’s locked Chevrolet under a dark viaduct. There were bloodstains on the rear seat and floor, and in the trunk were her torn and bloodstained clothing. Finger and palm prints found by police inside the auto were too blurred to be clues. From the Allen’s mileage logs, police estimated that the Chevrolet had been driven sixty to seventy miles. They blocked out an area covering parts of Missouri and Kansas, and police nationally were notified to question any violent sexual deviants in their records. Leads poured into Kansas City, but none of them yielded any clues.
On Aug. 7, a Kansas farmer, Richard A. Taylor, noticed a blue handbag in a ditch on Highway 69. When he read about the Allen case in the paper, he notified police. On Aug. 7, Clifford Erhart and his son Milton were searching for a stray cow and calf about six miles from where the handbag had been found. They discovered an open pasture gate and then saw the nude corpse of Wilma Allen. She had been shot twice in the back of the head, her hands were tied behind her back, and all her jewelry was missing. With proof that the victim had been carried across state lines, Midwestern FBI agents poured into Kansas City. But rains had washed away any footprints or other evidence, and for weeks the case dragged on with no further clues.
On Aug. 31, Arthur Ross Brown, a parole violator from California, critically wounded a sheriff in Wyoming and escaped when the officer tried to arrest him. Brown’s criminal record of assaults, robberies, and attempted abductions reached back sixteen years. Soon after the Wyoming incident, Brown stole a car in Sheridan, Wyo., then robbed a liquor store in Rapid City, S.D. A man matching Brown’s description stole several cars as he made his way through Florida, Texas, and Indiana, holding up liquor stores, preferring those with women clerks working alone. The FBI, still connecting him only with the charges in the shooting of the Wyoming sheriff, kept surveillance on the homes of Brown’s relatives.
On Nov. 9, a Kansas City caller reported to police that his neighbor, Mrs. Arthur Ross Brown, had just been abducted at gunpoint by her estranged husband. Four hours later, the incoherent woman returned home; her spouse had disappeared. Anticipating that Brown would return to California, FBI agents interviewed his mother in San Jose. The anxious woman said that she believed her son was mad, and asked the police to stop him before he did further harm. On Nov. 13 Brown called his mother, saying he had tried to visit her, but fearing a trap, had fled. He added that he was going to kill himself. That night, he was picked up by officers outside his aunt’s house in San Francisco, asleep in his car.
Initially denying his guilt, Brown soon broke down and confessed to shooting the sheriff in Wyoming, adding: “But where I’m really wanted is Kansas City.” In a full confession to the murder of Wilma Allen, Brown said his motive was robbery, explaining: “I was looking for someone to rob. She looked wealthy.” He had climbed in beside Allen as she got into her car in the beauty-shop parking lot, and forced her to drive at gunpoint. Finding the open pasture gate was, he told police, “just…lucky.” He had shot her as she begged for mercy, then stripped the body to prevent identification before dumping her in the field. He tried to clean the car before driving it back into town. Court-appointed psychiatrists found Brown sane, and the jury found him Guilty. He was executed in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Prison on Feb. 24, 1956.
Brown, Barry Austin, prom. 1974, U.S. In a San Mateo, Calif., Superior Court, Barry Austin Brown pleaded guilty to three first-degree murder charges. He admitted killing Lois McNamara, the mother of a high school friend; a hitchhiking, discharged sailor whom he had picked up; and Richard Pipes, a grocery store employee whom Brown murdered when he held up the Santa Cruz store. Robbery was the motive in all three slayings, and the killer had netted about $1,500 and a car from McNamara, but only a backpack from the sailor. The thoughtful slayer told a probation officer, “I don’t believe murder is part of my character. I believe I can, if given the chance, offer a lot to the people around me. I want to discover why I committed those acts. I don’t want to be put in prison to rot away.” Brown received three concurrent life sentences.
Brown, Conrad, 1935- , U.S. On Mar. 23, 1977, two men came into Conrad’s Food & Liquors on Chicago’s South Side. They were Thomas Patzke, twenty-six, a loan specialist, and Robert Fender, fifty-two, an auctioneer; both worked for the U.S. Small Business Association. Patzke had been friendly with owner Conrad Brown for some time, and was trying to help him out with his many financial problems. Reportedly $500,000 in debt, Brown had lost his liquor license, begun bankruptcy proceedings, and was about to be evicted for non-payment of rent. When Patzke and Fender came into the store, they told the employees to leave, intending to take an inventory and padlock the place as a preliminary step in foreclosing on the SBA loan. Brown beat both men with a metal pipe, then set fire to the store. When their bodies were found in the smoldering ruins by firemen the next day, Fender’s hands had been tied behind his back.
Brown was charged with murder, felony murder, and arson. Tried before Judge Frank J. Wilson, Brown admitted that he had beaten both men and started the fire. Three psychiatrists testified that Brown had lost touch with reality and was legally insane when he committed the murders, but Assistant State’s Attorney Robert Quinlivan declared that the killings were premeditated because Brown was “all washed up in business.” Defense Attorney Frederick Cohn said that his client “went berserk” when Patzke and Fender tried to padlock his store. On Aug. 31, 1978, Brown was found Guilty on two counts of involuntary manslaughter and one of arson. He was sentenced to two fourteen-year prison terms on each of the three counts, to be served concurrently.
Brown, Ernest, 1898-1934, Brit. Ernest Brown murdered his employer, Frederick Ellison Morton on Sept. 5, 1933. Morton was a well-to-do cattle farmer in Yorkshire, England. Brown was having an affair with Morton’s wife, Dorothy. When Mrs. Morton tried to end the liaison, Brown intimidated her into continuing it. On Sept. 5, while Frederick was away, Brown and Mrs. Morton quarrelled because she had been swimming with another man. Brown knocked her down. While she hid in the house waiting for her husband to return, Mrs. Morton heard a gunshot. Brown appeared shortly and explained that he had been shooting at a rat in the barn. Around 3:00 a.m., there was an explosion and Mrs. Morton looked out to see the garage ablaze. She escaped with her baby and her companion, Ann Houseman, and reported the fire to the police.
When the fire was extinguished, both of Frederick Morton’s cars and his badly burned body were found in the garage. The body, the cars, and garage had been doused in gasoline. Morton had been shot in the stomach before his body was set on fire. Brown was charged with murder and tried at the Leeds Assizes. He was convicted and hanged at Armley Prison on Feb. 6, 1934.
Brown, Leslie, 1944- , U.S. Leslie Brown, twenty-eight, a secretary for the Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago, Ill., was apparently tired of her husband, Clarence Brown, fifty-four. She would later tell police that her spouse forbade her to spend money and beat her. Leslie Brown hired Hubert Lewis, twenty-two, on Dec. 29, 1982, to kill Clarence, asking that the job be done during a New Year’s Eve party and offering Lewis $500 on completion of the killing, with another $1,000 promised later. Obtaining a sawed-off shotgun from Emmitt Neal, eighteen, Lewis purchased gun shells from Todd Allen, twenty-seven, before coming to the party. At the celebration, Lewis asked Leslie Brown if she was sure she wanted to go through with the murder, and she said yes. She gave her husband $10 and handed Lewis her car keys so the two could buy more liquor. Brown was shot about 1:40 a.m. in an alley on his way back to the party with Lewis. The killing was Chicago’s first of the New Year. Lewis returned to the New Year’s event, and Mrs. Brown gave him $300, which was later found in his sock.
Indicted on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder were Brown, Lewis, Neal, and Allen. Lewis pleaded guilty to murder charges on Oct. 26, 1982, before Criminal Court Judge Earl E. Strayhorn, and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Allen pled guilty to conspiracy charges and was sentenced to three years in prison, and Neal also pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to four months of a work-release program and thirty months in jail. Brown, who was also charged with murder, was judged to be psychologically unfit to stand trial and was sent to the Mental Health Center in Elgin, Ill.
Brown, Thomas Mathieson, prom. 1906, Brit. In the winter of 1906, Thomas Mathieson Brown, a retired coal mine manager, mailed an iced shortcake as a gift to his wife’s aged uncle, William Lennox, of Old Cumnock, Ayrshire. The card enclosed read, “Hearty greetings to an old friend.” Lennox and Grace McKerrow, his housekeeper, ate some of the shortcake and both became ill. Lennox recovered but McKerrow died. When the dessert was analyzed, it was found to contain large amounts of strychnine, as did the dead woman’s body. Brown, who had called at Lennox’s house to offer his condolences, was arrested and tried at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. Medical evidence revealed that Brown suffered from chronic epileptic insanity; he had been an epileptic for more than forty years and was affected with the mental deterioration that may result from extensive, severe epilepsy. Brown was found Guilty but insane, and was detained in strict custody.
Browne, Frederick Guy (AKA: Leo Brown; Sydney Rhodes; Harris), 1881-1928, and Kennedy, William (AKA: William Henry Kennedy; Ginger), 1891-1928, Brit. Both Frederick Guy Browne and William Kennedy were small-time British gangsters who had criminal records dating back to their early teens. Browne had been a bicycle thief at the turn of the century, leading a gang of thugs at Oxford. He received several prison sentences for burglary and housebreaking, and when released from Dartmoor Prison in 1927, Browne vowed he would never again be taken alive to spend another moment behind bars. Kennedy, who also had a long police record, albeit one less serious than Browne’s, operated a garage in Clapham. Browne joined him after leaving prison, and the two embarked on a series of car thefts, bringing autos to the Clapham garage where they were altered and later sold.
On the night of Sept. 27, 1927, the pair stole a Morris Cowley car in Billericay, Essex, from the garage of a Dr. Lovell and drove back to Clapham, going through the back roads to avoid constables they knew to be on duty in Brentwood. Between Romford and Ongar, Browne and Kennedy were flagged down by Constable George W. Gutteridge, who waved his flashlight at them. Browne ignored the signal and kept driving, but Gutteridge blew his whistle and Browne brought the car to a stop. Constable Gutteridge walked to the driver’s side of the car where Browne was seated and began to question him, writing his report in a notebook. Browne drew his Webley and shot Gutteridge twice. Then he got out of the car and looked down at the constable who was either dead or dying, but whose eyes stared back up at the killer. “What are you looking at me like that for?” Browne demanded. Then, at close range, he shot out the officer’s eyes. (It was later claimed that Browne believed in the old canard that a dead man’s eyes photograph his murderer, and wished to eliminate the possibility of later being detected in this way. It is more likely that he performed this sadistic act through his own intense hatred for the police.)
Hurrying from the murder scene, Browne recklessly smashed into a tree and damaged the car’s front bumper. He and Kennedy later abandoned the car on Foxley Road in Brixton. The killers then caught a train for Clapham. Gutteridge’s body was found the next morning, along with the abandoned car. A thorough examination of the stolen car revealed not one fingerprint. Blood was found on the driver’s side of the car, but this was assumed to be that of the slain officer. A single cartridge was found at the scene of the killing. The murder rested there, unsolved, and Scotland Yard officials believed that there was scant chance of locating the murderer. Then Browne stole another car and, while driving wildly through the streets of Sheffield, he forced a van into a wall. The irate driver wrote down the license plate number of the car Browne was driving and notified police. Detectives from Scotland Yard tracked down the car to a Clapham garage and arrested Browne, holding him for trial.
A search of the Clapham garage unearthed the Webley Browne had used to murder Constable George Gutteridge. A routine check of this weapon led to a comparison of the cartridge found after the Gutteridge murder; a ballistics expert matched the cartridge to the Webley, and Browne was charged with the policeman’s murder. Kennedy, arrested in Liverpool on Jan. 25, 1928, quickly confessed to wholesale car robberies and detailed Browne’s murder of Gutteridge. Both men were tried at the Old Bailey before Justice Avory on Apr. 23, 1928, with Browne represented by E.F. Lever and Kennedy defended by F.J. Powell. Solicitor General Sir Boyd Merriman prosecuted for the Crown. The defense had a doubly hard time with Browne who was offensive and bullying in court and surly in the dock. Kennedy, who tried to blame the murder of Gutteridge on Browne and therefore avoid the expected death penalty, was proved to have the same murderous temperment as his friend Browne. When he was about to be arrested in Liverpool, officers testified, Kennedy pulled a gun and aimed it at a detective, squeezing the trigger several times, but the safety catch was on and the weapon did not go off. Officers arresting Browne told how the killer had snarled that he would have shot six of them had he been in his car and had his weapon, adding: “What I can see of it, I shall have to get a machine gun for you bastards next time!”
Ballistics expert Robert Churchill testified at great length during the Browne-Kennedy trial, demonstrating in exacting detail how Browne’s Webley was matched to the cartridge and the bullets which killed Constable Gutteridge. It was this newly developed forensic science, coupled to Kennedy’s testimony, that convicted both men of the murder. Churchill presented graphics in court that showed how the markings of the weapon and the bullets matched. He also pointed out how the ammunition used for the Webley revolver was an obsolete brand that had not been available since WWI; the same kind of bullets were removed from Gutteridge’s corpse. The skin of the murder victim had been discolored by black powder burns which could only result from the type of ammunition employed by Browne, according to expert Churchill.
The evidence provided by Churchill was a triumph for forensic ballistics and, because of this case, established this form of police science in England as readily as it was accepted in the U.S. in the recent Sacco and Vanzetti case. Both men were quickly convicted and sentenced to death, Browne being hanged at Pentonville Prison and Kennedy at Wandsworth on May 31, 1928.
Bruhne, Vera, 1910- , and Ferbach, Johann, prom. 1960, Ger. Each time Dr. Otto Praun of Munich found himself a new lover, he would set her up in his sprawling pleasure estate on Spain’s Costa Brava. Then, after his ardor had cooled, Praun would reclaim the $250,000 villa and give it to his next girlfriend. Praun, who was rumored to have earned his fortune through rum-running, dope peddling, and by performing illegal abortions, finally met his match with Vera Bruhne, an elegant 50-year-old blonde.
When the time came for her to lease the premises in 1960, she devised a little scheme. She informed Dr. Praun that she had arranged a sale of the villa to one Dr. Schmitz, who wanted to finalize the transaction at the mansion. Praun, who wanted to sell the estate, agreed to meet Schmitz. The next day, police found Otto Praun and his housekeeper dead. They concluded that Dr. Praun had suffered a nervous breakdown, killed the housekeeper, and then took his own life.
The Munich police began receiving reports that Praun and the housekeeper were murdered. Their remains were exhumed. He had been shot twice in the head, ending the suicide theory. Vera’s 14-year-old daughter supplied the missing details. She said that the killer was Johann Ferbach, a German army deserter who fled from his regiment in 1944. He became Vera Bruhne’s devoted love slave through her previous marriages and numerous affairs. When ordered to pose as Dr. Schmitz, the ex-Nazi readily agreed. Ferbach murdered Praun, killed the housekeeper, and then tried to make it appear that the doctor had gone berserk. But he made one mistake. Ferbach left behind the letter of introduction that Vera had written.
Handwriting samples were compared, which revealed Vera Bruhne’s duplicity. The twosome was found Guilty of murder and given life sentences.
Bryant, Charlotte, 1904-36, Brit. Charlotte Bryant married a British soldier who was part of a regiment sent into Ireland to maintain peace and order in the early 1920s. Frederick Bryant took his bride back to England where they set up housekeeping in Dorset. Though Charlotte bore her husband five children, she also engaged in many sexual liaisons with men she met in the Dorset ale houses. Charlotte often brought her lovers home to share the bed she slept in with her husband. Frederick did not seem to care about his wife’s activities.
One young man in particular seemed to catch Charlotte’s fancy. His name was Leonard Parsons, an itinerant gypsy who had his own wife, and several children. Yet, he moved in with the Bryants in 1933. The affair lasted until 1935, at which time Charlotte forsook the formalities of a divorce, and decided instead to poison her husband with arsenic. Bryant died on Dec. 22, 1935. Charlotte stood trial for murder the following year, but Parsons was totally unconcerned about her fate. The gypsy was drinking and cavorting in a local pub when he heard the news that Charlotte had been hanged on July 15, 1936. While awaiting her execution, the condemned woman’s hair had turned white. See: DeMelker, Daisy Louisa.
Bullock, David, 1960- , U.S. Openly defiant and lacking all concern for the six people he murdered, street hustler, part-time male prostitute, and armed robber David Bullock told Justice Burton Roberts of the New York State Supreme Court that killing was “fun.” Bullock told of murdering Herberto Morales on Dec. 22, 1981, because he had started “messing with the Christmas tree.” So he decided to shoot him. “It was in the Christmas spirit,” Bullock said. “It makes me happy.”
Two weeks earlier, the remorseless killer took the life of James Weber, a 42-year-old actor who was appearing in a production of Victor Herbert’s “Babes in Toyland” at the 74th Street Playhouse. The body was left in Central Park.
Bullock was a criminal sociopath who derived an emotional high from the murders he committed. He used a .38-caliber pistol to extinguish the lives of five of his victims.
A special task force under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Power arrested Bullock in his apartment on Jan. 14. He confessed in a ninety-minute videotape to committing over 100 armed robberies and the murders of the six Manhattanites. It was later played back during the trial.
David Bullock pleaded guilty before Justice Roberts on Oct. 26. On Nov. 29, the defendant received six consecutive sentences of twenty-five years to life. In a lengthy prepared statement, Justice Roberts angrily denounced the defendant as “a small-time street punk, a petty thief, a shoplifter, a male prostitute.” He warned the cold-hearted killer, “You are going to die in prison and then go before the Supreme Judge of us all and let Him impose whatever additional sentence He feels you so rightfully deserve.”
Bundy, Theodore (Ted, AKA: Chris Hagen), 1947-89, U.S. The public personality of Ted Bundy suggested nothing of the serial killer he truly was. Handsome, apparently well educated, and a glib talker, Bundy struck those who met him for the first time, if they were to think ill of him, as someone who might be guilty of practicing smooth confidence games, but never one capable of violent crime. Everything in his posture and conversation smacked of culture, and his sense of humor was instant and infectious, one that won over new friends quickly and established trust on the part of the women who found him attractive. This was a fatal attraction for perhaps as many as forty young females, all of them brutally murdered. A number of pretty, young women began to suffer violent attacks from a strange intruder and others disappeared in western states in early 1974. The first of these was Sharon Clarke of Seattle, who was attacked in her bedroom while she slept, her head brutally smashed with a metal rod. She suffered skull fractures but survived and the rod was found in her room. There was no explanation for the attack and Clarke could not identify her attacker, even as to whether or not the attack was made by a male or female.
While authorities pondered this strange attack, Lynda Ann Healy, a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, who lived only a few blocks from Clarke, disappeared from her rented room on Jan. 31, 1974. Then, over the next seven months, young women began to disappear with dreadful regularity. Donna Gail Manson, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., went to a concert on Mar. 12, 1974, and vanished. Susan Rancourt, a Central Washington State student, disappeared in Ellensburg while going to see a foreign film on Apr. 17, 1974. Out for a late night walk on May 6, 1974, Roberta Kathleen Parks, an Oregon State University student living in Corvallis, disappeared. Brenda Ball left the Flame Tavern near the Seattle Airport with an unknown man at 2 a.m. on June 1, 1974, and vanished. On the evening of June 11, 1974, Georgann Hawkins left her boyfriend and began walking back to her sorority house at the University of Washington and she, too, disappeared.
At Lake Sammanish, Wash., on July 14, 1974, a number of attractive, young women were approached by a good-looking, dark-haired young man who called himself Ted. He had an arm in a sling and asked a number of women to help him load a sailboat on top of his car, a Volkswagen. One woman agreed and accompanied Ted to a parking lot but when he told her that they had to drive to a house on a hill to load the boat, she refused. Others did the same. Blonde-haired Janice Ott agreed to help Bundy and disappeared. Some hours later Denise Naslund was seen walking toward the public washrooms at the lake and was not seen again. Other women were seen talking to the handsome young man with the arm sling and many were seen to accompany him to the parking lot that day. On Sept. 7, 1974, two hunters near the lake found the decomposed bodies of Denise Naslund and Janice Ott, along with that of another unidentified female. The remains found were in bits and pieces, scattered by wild animals, officials later concluded.
Detectives began an extensive investigation, learning from a young woman in Ellensburg that a young man wearing a sling had tried to pick her up on the night Susan Rancourt vanished. Another Seattle woman recalled a young man wearing a sling and driving a Volkswagen who tried to pick her up. When she refused to get into his car, he shrugged and blithely took his uninjured arm out of the sling and drove off, using both hands on the wheel. Another woman reported that a man wearing an arm sling drove onto a sidewalk, attempting to block her path, in an effort to get her into his Volkswagen, but she managed to avoid him. During these investigations, the remains of two young women were found, one in northern Washington who was identified as Carol Valenzuela of Vancouver, Wash., who had vanished some months earlier. The second body, or what was left of it, was found in southern Washington State near the Oregon border. She remained unidentified. Both women had been apparently murdered. Police by then had many suspects they thought capable of having committed the abduction-murders.
One strong suspect was a depraved young man named Warren Forrest, a park employee who had picked up a Portland, Ore., woman, convincing her to pose for him. In a secluded area of the park, he tied her up, taped her mouth, stripped her naked, and fired darts at her naked breasts. Forrest sexually attacked her before strangling her and leaving her for dead. She survived, however, and identified her attacker. Another strong suspect was exconvict Gary Taylor, who was accused of abducting Seattle females under various pretexts. Then an anonymous female caller phoned police to tell them that she believed that Ted Bundy was the man who had been abducting and killing young women in Seattle. Officers duly noted the report and filed it with the thousands of other leads they had collected. But the women continued to disappear. On Oct. 2, 1974, Nancy Wilcox vanished and, on Oct. 18, after leaving an allnight party in Midvale, Utah, Melissa Smith, daughter of the local police chief, disappeared. Her raped and strangled body was found on Oct. 27, 1974, in the Wassatch Mountains, east of Salt Lake City. In Orem, Utah, Laura Aimee went to a Halloween party after midnight on Oct. 31, and vanished.
Then, on Nov. 8, 1974, a young man pretending to be a police detective approached Carol DaRonch in a Salt Lake City shopping mall, demanding the license plate number of her car, explaining that someone had tried to break into it. She accompanied him to her car but found that it was undisturbed. The fake detective persuaded her to accompany him to police headquarters to view a suspect. She got into his Volkswagen but once they were on a quiet street, the imposter stopped the car and produced a set of handcuffs, snapping one end onto DaRonch’s wrist. She let out a scream and he pulled a gun, placing this next to her head and ordering her to keep quiet. DaRonch was not the typically submissive type of woman the abductor-killer had dealt with in the past. She forced the door open and jumped out, he went after her with a crowbar in his hand. He tried to smash her skull with this but she caught the bar in mid-air and struggled with him. Then DaRonch saw a car coming down the street and leaped in front of it, forcing it to come to a stop. She leaped into the auto which drove away.
The gall of the killer knew no bounds. Even with a potential victim escaping and now able to identify him, the young man tried to pick up a pretty, young French teacher outside Viewmont High School but she turned him down. A short time later Debbie Kent vanished when she went off to meet a brother at an ice-skating rink. Police searching for Kent found a key to a set of handcuffs in the school playground where she disappeared. Salt Lake City police received the name of Ted Bundy from Seattle detectives, who stated that they had received an anonymous tip that Bundy had been kidnapping and killing young females. Bundy’s photograph was also sent along to the Salt Lake officials and shown to Carol DaRonch, who said that Bundy was not the man who tried to abduct her. Laura Aimee, who had vanished in Orem, Utah, on Oct. 31, was found dead, her naked body having been tossed into a canyon.
The killings went on. In Snowmass Village, a Colorado ski resort, on Jan. 12, 1975, Dr. Raymond Gadowsky, staying at the Wildwood Inn, went to the room of his fiancee, Caryn Campbell, only to find her gone. Her remains were not found until Feb. 17, the naked corpse hidden in some thick underbrush. She had been raped and her skull had been crushed. In another resort town, Vail, Colo., Julie Cunningham vanished on Mar. 15, 1975, after going to meet a girlfriend in a bar. A short time later the remains of two missing women, Susan Rancourt and Brenda Ball, were found on Taylor Mountain, Wash. Then Melanie Cooley of Nederland, Colo., disappeared on Apr. 15, 1975, her body found on Apr. 23, only a dozen miles from her home. Unlike the other victims, she was fully clothed but her jeans had been slipped from her waist, showing that sex was the motive for the attack that killed her. Her head had been battered with a rock found nearby. Shelley Robertson disappeared on July 1 from her Golden, Colo., home. Three days later, Nancy Baird, a gas station attendant in Golden, Colo., vanished from her workplace. On Aug. 23, Shelley Robertson’s naked body was found in a mine shaft outside of Berthoud Pass, Colo.
Then police, on Aug. 16, 1975, arrested Ted Bundy. He was stopped by a Salt Lake City patrolman who thought he was acting suspiciously, driving his Volkswagen down a street slowly as if inspecting homes for possible break-ins; the area had suffered a rash of recent burglaries. Bundy did not stop when ordered to by the patrol car and a chase ensued. His car was finally brought to the curb and Bundy was placed under arrest. His room was searched but nothing incriminating could be found, only a pile of maps and brochures of Colorado. At the station, Bundy explained that he was a psychology student who lived in Seattle. He said that he had also worked on the governor’s campaign there and was presently in Salt Lake City studying law. The Colorado brochures reminded detectives that a number of girls had recently been abducted and murdered in that state, and they took particular notice of brochures about Golden, Colo., which Bundy had in his possession. The detectives knew that Shelley Robertson had been killed in that town. Forensic experts went over Bundy’s car and found a hair on one of the seats that matched that of Midvale, Utah, victim, Melissa Smith. Then a witness insisted he saw Bundy at the Snowmass retreat in Colorado on the night Caryn Campbell disappeared.
Bundy was charged with murder and taken to Aspen, Colo., to stand trial. Here he charmed his wardens and prosecutors, affably cooperating with them, or seeming to, and giving an impression of an intelligent young man who was anything but a berserk sex slayer. He was shown every courtesy, given special health foods to eat and allowed to attend court without being manacled. Bundy insisted that he defend himself and received whatever law books he requested. Witnesses, however, showed Bundy for what he was, an inveterate liar, a cunning, crafty character who would go to any impossible lengths to get his way. Carol DaRonch, who had at first failed to recognize Bundy from a photo as the man who tried to abduct her in Salt Lake City, then came forward and identified Bundy as the man who had attacked her. As the pretrial hearings dragged on, Bundy was allowed to roam about the law library in Aspen. Even though he was under guard, Bundy managed to open a window of the library and drop twenty feet to the ground, escaping. He was tracked down eight days later at a deserted shack on Smuggler’s Mountain and brought back to Aspen, where he was now kept under heavy guard.
Bundy insisted that he was a victim of circumstance, that he merely happened to have been in the same places where all these women disappeared and that there were many young men who bore a resemblance to him. He was also adept in using the law to create one legal motion after another to delay the case. While implementing this systematic legal stall, the insidious Bundy slowly took off weight in preparation for his next escape attempt. He somehow obtained a hacksaw and carved a hole around the light fixture of his cell; removing the fixture on Dec. 30, 1977, and squeezing through the one-foot opening (by then he had lost enough weight) Bundy made his escape. He moved to Chicago, then Ann Arbor, Mich., then on to Atlanta, and finally, he settled in Tallahassee, Fla., living only a few blocks from the sorority houses of Florida State University.
On the night of Jan. 15, 1978, Nita Neary saw a man holding a log and lurking about the front door of her sorority house. As she thought about calling the police, a student named Karen Chandler, blood flowing from wounds, staggered from her room. A madman had entered her room and had savagely beaten her on the head. Her roommate, Kathy Kleiner, had also been attacked in the same room, her jaw being broken. In another room of the sorority house police later found two other students Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Both had been sexually abused. Bowman was dead, strangled with her own pantyhose. Lisa Levy had been brutally battered about the head and died en route to the hospital. Only a few hours later another female student, Cheryl Thomas, was brutally attacked in her room at another sorority house and was severely injured, but she survived the attack.
Though police began a widespread manhunt for the sorority house killer, they could find no one answering the sketchy description of the attacker. On Feb. 9, 1979, 12-year-old Kimberley Leach left her classroom in Jacksonville and disappeared. Some days later Bundy, who had been living in Tallahassee under the name of Chris Hagen and using stolen credit cards to purchase essentials, sneaked out of his Tallahassee apartment when his rent was long overdue. He stole an orange Volkswagen and drove to Pensacola, where a policeman stopped him and checked the license plates. Discovering the car was stolen, the officer arrested Bundy. Bundy bolted and the officer tackled him, struggling with him. When the officer fired a shot, Bundy meekly surrendered. He first identified himself as Chris Hagen, then admitted he was the fugitive, Theodore Bundy, wanted by Colorado authorities on charges of murder. He was held on charges of using stolen credit cards and stolen autos while detectives worked hard to tie Bundy-Hagen to the Tallahassee sorority house slayings. Meanwhile, the body of Kimberley Leach was found in the Suwannee River Park, her privates violated and mutilated; she had been strangled to death.
Still, the vain and strutting Bundy refused to admit to any murders. He claimed he was innocent. The police had made a terrible mistake. Detectives then came for Bundy on Apr. 27, 1979, and took him to an examining room. When he learned that they intended to take a wax impression of his teeth, Bundy went berserk, struggling violently so that a half-dozen men had to pin him down and hold his mouth open for the impression to be made. Bundy knew what they were after. The impressions of his teeth were later perfectly matched to the bite marks found on the buttocks of the murdered student, Lisa Levy, and it was this bizarre piece of evidence that would later, more than anything else, convict Ted Bundy of the many serial murders he had so ruthlessly committed.
Charged with the Levy and Bowman murders, Bundy was taken to Miami and placed on trial. He pled innocent, again acting as his own lawyer. He smiled at jurors, swaggering before the judge as he spouted law and precedent-setting cases of the past. He exuded confidence that he would never be convicted. His demeanor changed as he was compelled to sit quietly and listen to arresting officers tell the court how he had admitted having sexual problems, that he had begun his sexual offenses in Seattle as a voyeur and quoting Bundy as having said: “Sometimes I feel like a vampire.” Dental experts then came forward to positively identify Bundy’s teeth impressions with the bite marks on the body of Lisa Levy, and this convinced the jury of Bundy’s guilt. He was found Guilty and sentenced to death by Judge Edward D. Cowart, who expressed regret that Bundy had gone “the wrong way” and that “you’d have made a good lawyer…I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me.” Bundy was also found Guilty of the murder of the Leach girl and sentenced again to death.
Oddly, all of those around this vile and utterly cunning killer, his guards, arresting officers, the judges who heard his cases and ordered him executed, as well as most of those who later devoted tedious books to his rather unimaginative murders, especially Ann Rule, and Michaud and Aynesworth, who warmed too brightly to the man, showered him with the kind of attention given to Hollywood celebrities. The writers complained about the limelight Bundy bathed in and then flooded him with it. The killer was an actor as well as an unrepentant criminal and the portrait he drew of himself caused all about him to empathize about a future he never had, as if he deserved a future. Though various crime scribes tried to point out his talents, there was nothing redeeming about Ted Bundy and nothing to learn from him, except to recognize his pattern of serial murder as an alarmingly increasing modus operandi among modern killers. Like the vicious killer Jack Henry Abbott, Theodore Bundy was undeservedly a came célèbre, and he played his part to the hilt, acting the pundit and even the criminologist as he waited to be executed, issuing cautionary statements to the young on how not to go wrong, to avoid pornography, to stay in school, to follow the legitimate road through life.
For a decade, this vile murderer kept himself alive with one appeal after another, reaping millions of words from the nation’s press about his so-called “intellectual thought process,” and his “psychological makeup,” but his act finally closed when all appeals, stays, and last-minute delays were exhausted. In a last ditch stand to save his miserable life, Bundy began a recital of all the murders he committed, twenty-three in all. (At least fifteen more murders were attributed to Bundy by authorities.) The killer finally went to the electric chair at Florida’s State Prison on Jan. 24, 1989. His last nervous words were: “Give my love to my family and friends.” He was led to the execution chamber, his head and right calf shaved so that the electrical conduits would work properly. He sat down in the chair and was strapped in.
Bundy gripped the arms of the chair and his head, strapped to a stationary position, could not move, but his eyes darted about wildly and, according to witnesses: “He was totally white, very scared.” His eyes rolled frantically before the twenty-four witnesses gathered to observe the awful killer’s end. Then, promptly at 7:07 a.m., 2,000 volts went through his body, and he was pronounced dead four minutes later. Outside the prison, more than 100 reporters moved through a huge crowd that had assembled, trying to milk one more story out of Theodore Bundy. But none in the crowd protested this execution. Signs were held high that read “Buckle up, Bundy, it’s the law,” and “Roast in Peace!” When the black flag went up to signal the serial killer’s death, the throng cheered wildly and firecrackers and other fireworks were set off in celebration. One Florida resident, hoarse from cheering the execution, told a reporter: “I waited eleven years to see that creep fry.”
Buono, Angelo, See: Bianchi, Kenneth.
Burch, Ronald (William George Arthur), d.1968, S. Afri. A South African schoolteacher first discovered the remains of a human torso on Oct. 27, 1964, during an early morning jog around a lake at Boksburg in the Transvaal region. In the next few weeks, more body parts were found floating in the lake. Someone had cut up the victim, carefully placing the remains in suitcases, which were then deposited in the lake. But the cases had torn open and the body pieces rose to the surface. The Johannesburg police surmised that the victim was a female who had been gruesomely decapitated while still alive. The unpleasant task of identifying the body still remained.
Four years passed and still the police were unable to provide positive ID to the Boksburg torso, until the daughter of Catharina Louisa Burch came forward to identify her mother based on forensic photos supplied by the District CID. A young girl at the time of Mrs. Burch’s disappearance, she had been unable to offer any viable clues at the time of the disappearance. But now her testimony began to make sense. The composite drawing of the victim matched the description and photos provided by the daughter.
Suspicion fell on Mrs. Burch’s second husband, Ronald William Burch, who had informed his wife’s employer that she was leaving the company the same day she turned up missing. But now Ronald Burch was missing as well. Efforts to glean information from his 77-year-old mother proved fruitless. The trail led to Cape Town where Burch had moved after his wife’s disappearance. He was reported to have been seen in various brothels and vice dens catering to prurient sexual tastes.
The investigation gradually shifted back to Johannesburg and the house where the elderly Mrs. Burch lived. There, on Nov. 28, 1968, police found the killer hiding in a wooden shed on the back of the property. When they burst in on Ronald Burch, he threw a light switch that activated an electric current that flowed into a pair of metal handcuffs attached to his wrist. He was dead within seconds. The aged and infirm mother went to her grave in 1974, still refusing to share any additional information with the police. Finally, after 30,000 statements had been taken and over 500 missing-person reports thoroughly investigated, the case was officially closed.
Burke, Charles, d.1933, U.S. It was St. Patrick’s Day 1933. The flood waters of the Ohio River had risen to a dangerous level. Officer Harry Levey of the Covington, Ky., police had strict orders to control the flow of traffic in his river town just outside of Cincinnati by whatever means necessary.
As he observed the slowly moving traffic, Levey could not help but notice a car with expired 1932 license plates. He pulled the vehicle over and questioned the driver, Charles Burke of New York. The man was nervous and fidgety, and his face bore three unmistakable cut marks. Curious, Levey examined a tarpaulin sack lying on the back seat. Reaching inside, he discovered the severed remains of a human body!
Suddenly Burke pulled a straight razor and sliced his throat and wrists. He was dead before the ambulance could arrive. In his clothing police found a court order from the Hudson County Circuit Court directing Burke to pay $50 a month, beginning Mar. 15, to Ella Burke pending a divorce trial. The Covington Police later determined that Charles Burke had killed his wife on Mar. 16, 1932, after deciding not to pay alimony. He was about to begin a new life with a younger girlfriend. After cutting up his exwife’s body into small parts, he drove to Kentucky with the package in the back seat. He never expected the flood waters of the Ohio River to be his undoing.
Burkley, Bluitt, 1914-34, and Burkley, Thurman, 1915-34, U.S. The stillness of a warm summer night in Texas was punctured by loud blasts of gunfire. The murder of a young couple was an ugly crime, made uglier by its racial overtones. When the farmers of Pleasant Mound, Texas, learned that the killers were two black men who tended crops nearby, the lobby of the tiny jail at Main and Houston Streets was filled to overcrowding. Deputy sheriffs milled through the crowd reminding people that matters were well in hand. It was Labor Day weekend, 1933. Sentiments against blacks ran deep in the South at this time, and the word “lynch” was now on everyone’s lips.
Bluitt Burkley, nineteen, and his brother Thurman, eighteen, were arrested on Aug. 31, 1933, for the murder of Katheryn Prince, a 21-year-old woman, and her escort, 27-year-old Mace Carver. The pair were last seen alive as they walked home from the Oak Cliff Baptist Church. The Burkley brothers, approaching them from behind, fired into the back of their heads. Death was instantaneous for Prince. Carver was removed to Parkland Hospital in Dallas where he lingered until the next day.
The wheels of justice turned quickly. Within twenty-four hours, the two men were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton and brought to the home of William McCutcheon, where they were transferred under heavy guard to the Dallas city jail. Their signed confessions were taken by Captain E.V. Bunch and Lieutenant Will Fritz.
Before another day had passed, an indictment was returned by the grand jury charging the brothers with murder and assault. The case came before Judge Grover Adams of the Criminal District Court. Five months later, on Feb. 9, 1934, the Burkley brothers were executed.
Burnett, Melvin, 1955- , and Martin, Billy, 1959- , U.S. Carl Stohn had just finished working as an extra during the filming of the movie Thief, when he was overtaken by four youths near his home on Chicago’s Gold Coast. The 58-year-old theatrical executive who had previously worked as a producer and director at the suburban Drury Lane Theatre and Pheasant Run Playhouse, had taken a bus back to his car at 1:45 a.m., Aug. 21, 1980, when he was heldup at gunpoint. Stohn grabbed one of the assailants, later identified as 20-year-old Billy Martin, by the lapels in a vain attempt to thwart the robbery. When Stohn refused to release Martin, Melvin Burnett shot and killed him. Afterwards, he made off with his cash and jewelry.
Burnett and Martin were arrested on Nov. 15, when Clay Steen and Wayne Griffin of the Chicago Police Department Gang Crimes Unit received a tip from a suspect in custody. The two killers were named as members of a South Side street gang known as the Disciples. Carl Stohn had been randomly selected, police learned. “This is just awful,” said Michael Mann, director of Thief. “You should be able to get off a bus and get in your car and drive away without being killed.”
Appearing before Judge Earl Strayhorn in a bench trial that began at the Criminal Court in December 1981, Burnett claimed that he was nervous and that the gun went off accidentally. Judge Strayhorn convicted both men of conspiracy, attempted armed robbery, and murder. Melvin Burnett received a sentence of twenty years’ imprisonment, followed by ninety years’ imprisonment, and accomplice Billy Martin received a seventy-five-year sentence.
Burns, Alfred, and Devlin, Edward Francis, prom. 1951, Brit. Alfred Burns and Edward Devlin cut open a kitchen window pane and entered the home of Beatrice Rimmer of Cranborne Road, Liverpool, the night of Aug. 20, 1951. The two house burglars then battered the 54-year-old widow to death.
When they were arrested two months later and charged with murder, Burns told police that they were breaking into Messrs. Sunblinds Limited on Great Jackson Street, Manchester, at the time of the widow’s death. There had been a robbery committed that night in Manchester, but Devlin and Burns were both convicted of murdering Rimmer even though it could not be positively proved that bloodstains found on their clothing matched those of the victim.
Based on the testimony of 17-year-old Marie Milne, who was acquainted with the suspects, Burns and Devlin were sentenced to die by Justice Finnemore that same year.
Burrows, Albert Edward, 1861-1923, Brit. In 1918, Albert Burrows, a 57-year-old farmer from Glossop, Derbyshire, began seeing a pretty young woman named Hannah Calladine. The 28-year-old mother of two bore him an illegitimate child.
Determined to make things right, the aging lothario married Calladine without bothering to divorce his wife. He received a six-month prison sentence for bigamy and was required to pay Hannah Calladine seven shillings a week. Balking at the payment, he was sent to prison in November 1919 for defaulting on a court order. Meanwhile Calladine moved into his house in Glossop, and the first Mrs. Burrows angrily walked out. The offended woman filed a maintenance suit against her husband. As Burrows languished in jail, he realized that he was hopelessly obligated to two women regardless of which one he chose to live with.
Recovering his wits and his freedom, Burrows resolved to do something about his problem. On Jan. 11, 1920, he took his new wife and her bastard son Albert Edward to Symondley Moor where he murdered them both. He tossed the bodies down a 105-foot air shaft into an abandoned coal mine where they remained undetected for nearly three years. To avoid any slip-up, he added a third victim the next day, Hannah Calladine’s 3-year-old daughter.
On Mar. 4, 1923, a small boy named Thomas Wood disappeared from his Glossop home. Burrows became a suspect when several townspeople reported having seen him with the 4-year-old. Under steady questioning by the police, he admitted to sexually molesting the boy and dropping him down the mine shaft. A search of the area uncovered the remains of young Thomas as well as Hannah Calladine and her children.
Brought before the Derby Assizes, Burrows was pronounced Guilty by a jury that deliberated for only eleven minutes. He was hanged at Nottingham on Aug. 8, 1923.
Burrows, Erskine Durrant (AKA: Buck), and Tacklyn, Larry Winfield, prom. 1973, Ber. A frantic call to Scotland Yard in London brought detectives Bill Wright and Basil Haddrell racing to Bermuda in September 1972, to investigate the mysterious shooting death of colonial police commissioner George Duckett at his suburban home.
It was the first of many politically motivated assassinations on the island that soon had the local police baffled. Duckett had been killed by a bullet from a .22-caliber revolver fired from his backyard at close range. On Mar. 10, 1973, Sir Richard Sharples, royal governor and commander in chief of Bermuda, was shot with Captain Hugh Sayers of the Welsh Guards on the terrace of the Government House by two unidentified black men.
On Apr. 6, before any viable leads could be established, two shopkeepers named Victor Rego and Mark Doe on Victoria Street, Hamilton, were killed execution style, which was apparent by the prone position of the bodies.
There were now five victims and no new clues to these pulling, yet seemingly related crimes. The colonial government posted a reward of $3 million for the apprehension of the killers. Eyewitness discriptions of the shopkeepers’ murder led police to Larry Tacklyn. His accomplice was Erskine Burrows, who came to the attention of the police after he robbed the Bank of Bermuda on Sept. 25, 1973.
Burrows remained a fugitive for nearly a month. He was finally ambushed and captured on Oct. 18, after being knocked off his motorbike under cover of darkness by Detective John Donald of the Bermuda police. Guns belonging to the pair were found cached at various locations around the island. With the two bandits in custody, nervous residents came forward to supply evidence against them.
Tacklyn and Burrows were career criminals whose motive was robbery. They killed Sir Richard, Captain Sayers, and the police commissioner in sympathy with the aims of the Black Power movement which sought autonomy from the Crown. Erskine Burrows was convicted of killing George Duckett. Tacklyn admitted to murdering the shopowners and was found Guilty on two counts. Both men were hanged later that year.
Burton, Walter William, 1884-1913, Brit. In the little town of Gussage St. Michael, there lived a 29-year-old man named Walter Burton who was employed as a rabbit catcher at the Manor Farm. He lived above the local post office with his wife who taught school and cared for their only child. His wife was quite a bit older than Burton, and he no longer found her interesting. So he gadded about town with various women and created quite a scandal.
In October 1912, Burton made the acquaintance of Winifred Mary Mitchell, a cook at the farm. She had a sophisticated beauty but was innocent in her ways. Walter Burton spent the next two months trying to seduce her. He promised her many things, including a new life in Canada. By March 1913, he had won her over, but when he suspected she was pregnant, he quickly lost his enthusiasm for the girl.
Promising to elope with her on the 29th, Burton made plans for her early death instead. He borrowed a gun to “kill a cat,” and then lured Mitchell to an isolated spot near Sovel Plantation where he shot her. The body was not discovered until May 2, when the shallow grave was opened. Fragments of torn letters written by Burton were found at the Manor Farm. These hastily scrawled notes were enough to implicate him in the murder. Tried before Justice Ridley, Walter Burton was condemned to death at Dorchester Prison. He was the last man to be hanged there.
Butler, William, prom. 1938, Brit. William Butler was identified as the assailant who had bludgeoned Ernest Percival Key to death in his jeweler’s shop in Surbiton on Dec. 24, 1938.
The shopkeeper’s body was examined by Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Dr. Eric Gardner, the county pathologist for Surrey. The killer left behind a black bowler hat, which was enough evidence from which the two examiners could gauge its owner’s physical characteristics. Stories were planted in London and Berlin newspapers, and it was not long before the killer was flushed out. Butler was tried, condemned, and hanged for the crime. Scotland Yard received a letter from the Reichkriminal-Polizeiamt in Berlin asking for additional information about the amazing powers of the “clairvoyant” Eric Gardner.
Butterfield, Neale Allen (AKA: Butterfingers), 1933- , U.S. Explaining later that he just wanted to “see someone die,” 16-year-old Neale Butterfield decided to cut his classes on Nov. 16, 1949, so that he could conduct his own experiment in murder.
Frank Watson, principal of Heyburn High School in Burley, Ida., recalled how Butterfield freely joined in the murder gossip the day after the body of 7-year-old Glenda Joyce Brisbois was found in an irrigation canal outside town. “He showed no signs of worry or even of knowledge of the affair,” Watson said. “He came into my psychology class and asked me calmly, ‘Did you know, Mr. Watson, that they found that girl’s body?’”
“Butterfingers” Butterfield was a member of the high school football team and a student leader, popular with both boys and girls. It seemed inconceivable at the time that he could wantonly take the life of a little girl. As a matter of habit, Butterfield had provided taxi service to a number of small children attending the local grammar school. He picked them up and drove them home, and none of the parents seemed to notice the peculiarity of it, or to even comprehend that the pleasant-looking high school boy was a dangerous pedophile.
The killing took place in Cassia County. The murder weapon was a tire jack, and Butterfield’s motive was purely sexual. When he went home after murdering Glenda, Butterfield ate a full meal, popped some corn, and went to bed.
Arresting officers held Butterfield in the Twin Falls county jail, a distance of forty-one miles from Burley, where emotion was running high. Judge Hugh A. Baker advised Twin Falls law enforcement personnel “not to take Butterfield to Burley, or he might not be alive in the morning.” Because Idaho law required that a criminal must be charged in the county where the deed was committed, Butterfield was arraigned just inside the Cassia County line in an open field.
In jail Butterfield remained dispassionate. He ate heartily and slept well. The only emotion he showed was when the sheriff denied him a package of cigarettes.
Prosecutors believed that Idaho law would permit them to seek the death penalty, though Butterfield was a minor. They cited the case of a 15-year-old boy from Idaho County who was tried as an adult and sentenced to death. However, that boy’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the state pardons board. In regard to Butterfield, Dr. Paul De River, in his case study Crime and the Sexual Psychopath, concluded that the defendant was “medically and legally sane at the time he committed the crime.”
Butterfield was convicted of first-degree murder but was spared the death penalty. The prison doors slammed shut on Feb. 14, 1950. He served twelve years before receiving a parole on Nov. 14, 1962. He was granted a final discharge on Nov. 30, 1967, after meeting all of the board’s requirements. At last report, Butterfield was married and had become a father.
Button and Badge Murder, See: Greenwood, David.
Butts, Vernon, See: Bonin, William.
Byrne, Patrick Joseph, 1932- , Brit. Patrick Joseph Byrne’s blustering swagger around the boys could not disguise his anxieties toward women. The few he managed to date in Birmingham would later recall his painful shyness. Byrne, an Irish construction worker fond of strong drink and the companionship of his pub mates, was too shy to ask his dates for a goodnight kiss. Byrne’s gnawing feelings of sexual inadequacy drove him to commit a heinous murder at Edgbaston YWCA hostel on Dec. 23, 1959.
He selected his victim, 29-year-old Sidney Stephanie Baird, at random. She worked as a shorthand-typist in the city. After watching Baird undress from outside her room, Byrne summoned the necessary courage to rap on her door. “I watched her for a long time, and stood close to the window…the urge to kill her was tremendously strong. Before she could say no, I kissed her,” he said. “She tried to shove me away but couldn’t, and for a second I got her around the waist.” Byrne stifled her screams with his hands and kissed the struggling woman until she fell over backwards, fracturing her skull. Baird was dead, but Byrne stripped to his shorts, sexually abused the corpse, then cut off its head. Byrne left behind no fingerprints, just a hastily scrawled note that read: “This was the thing I thought would never come.” The police discovered Baird’s remains when they investigated a complaint filed by a second female assault victim who lived in the hostel, Margaret Brown, whose loud screams saved her life when Byrne attacked her in the hostel laundry rooms.
Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Haughton, head of the Birmingham CID, conducted a relentless investigation. Over 20,000 men were interviewed, before the identity of Byrne was established. Detectives were put on Byrne’s trail after questioning a bus driver who had picked up a passenger near the YWCA. Drops of blood found on the seat of the bus were found to be the same type as Baird’s. Byrne was traced to Warrington, and was brought in for questioning on Feb. 10, 1960. After some verbal sparring between the suspect and the detective, Byrne suddenly blurted out his confession.
Byrne was placed on trial at the Birmingham Assizes the next month before Justice Stable. He was found Guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Following an appeal, the charge was reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of the defendant’s probable insanity. The penalty however, remained unchanged.
Bywaters, Frederick, See: Thompson, Edith Jesse.