C

Calbeck, Lorene, 1922-89, U.S. Thirty years after Lorene Calbeck shot and killed her three toddlers outside a trailer park in Polk County, Fla., she shot herself.

The tragedy occurred on May 24, 1956, when the 34-year-old housewife took her three children for a ride in the family car. For reasons known only to herself, she shot each of them four times in the left side of the chest, and then carried them back to the trailer. Lorene placed them side by side: Shirley, five; Pamela, three; and Jane, aged fifteen months. She wrapped them in cellophane and then called the family doctor and asked him to come to her house in half an hour. After she hung up the phone, she fired two shots into her chest.

She left behind a suicide note explaining how to water the gardenias and giving various other instructions to her husband Mark, who was away in Michigan at the time. However, doctors were able to save Lorene Calbeck’s life. She was pronounced mentally incompetent by medical investigators. A Polk County grand jury refused to return an indictment, but remanded Lorene to the care of the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee, Fla. Seemingly on the road to recovery, she was released from the doctor’s care and returned to her husband Mark. On Jan. 3, 1989, Lorene Calbeck staged an eerie re-enactment of the events of that long-ago night. Armed with a .32-caliber pistol, Calbeck sat down in her lawn chair near the family plot at Lake Wales Cemetery. Despondent over the death of her husband and the direction her life had taken in the last few years, she fired a bullet into the left side of her chest, and then, in pain, drove back to her mobile home off U.S. Highway 27.

Calbeck phoned the 911 number to report the shooting. The emergency team arrived quickly, but was unable to get her to the hospital in time. She died in the ambulance. A search of her trailer turned up several notes explaining how to operate various mechanical devices, including her television and the car. The boxes on the utility shelves had been pre-arranged according to size, and her funeral had been paid in advance. In her last set of detailed instructions, Calbeck explained that she wanted to be buried beside her husband and children.

 

Caldwell, Roger, 1933- , U.S. Marjorie Caldwell and her husband Roger stood to inherit $8.2 million dollars upon the death of her adoptive mother, 83-year-old Elisabeth Congdon, inheritor of a Duluth, Minn., mining fortune, who lived at the thirty-nine-room family mansion on the shores of Lake Superior.

Marjorie’s financial recklessness disappointed Elisabeth, and she and Roger Caldwell were always short of money. For a time they used a credit card bearing Congdon’s name. In May 1977, Caldwell traveled from his home in Golden, Colo., to Duluth to ask for a $750,000 loan from the family trustees to buy a ranch. The family twice refused.

A month later, on June 27, 1977, an intruder broke into the Congdon mansion in the early daylight hours and climbed the stairs leading to Congdon’s bedroom. But he was accosted by the night nurse, 65-year-old Velma Pietila. He seized a brass candlestick holder and bludgeoned the nurse to death, then smothered Elisabeth Congdon with a satin pillow. He fled from the residence and drove off in the family’s 1976 Ford, which was later found at the Twin Cities Airport.

The Caldwells emerged as prime suspects in the murders. On July 5, police found a suede travel bag purchased at the Twin Cities Airport and jewelry and personal effects from the mansion in Roger Caldwell’s hotel room in Bloomington. Caldwell had checked himself into a hospital in St. Louis Park, where he was arrested on July 6 and charged with murder.

The case went before a Crow Wing County jury on Apr. 10, 1978. Defense attorney Doug Thomson tried unsuccessfully to show that the Caldwells were framed by Marjorie’s cousin Thomas Congdon and private detective William Furman. Strangely, Caldwell did not take the stand in his own defense.

On July 8, after eight weeks of testimony, Roger Caldwell was convicted of murdering Mrs. Congdon and her nurse. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. Three days later, Marjorie Caldwell was charged with conspiring to murder her mother. Her trial began in March and became the longest in Minnesota history, ending on July 21, 1979, with a Not Guilty verdict.

Around the time of Roger Caldwell’s 1977 arrest, a 1972 murder mystery filmed on the Congdon estate was rereleased, entitled, appropriately enough, You’ll Like My Mother.

 

Camb, James, 1916- , Brit. A ship’s steward on board the ocean liner Durban Castle, Camb was considered a shipboard Lothario and attempted to seduce many a young woman sailing the high seas. Attractive, 21-year-old Gay Gibson was no exception. She was a wide-eyed actress who had been acting in a number of plays as part of her duties with the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her full name was Eileen Isabella Ronnie Gibson. Gay Gibson was her stage name. She sailed for England from Cape Town, S. Afr., on Oct. 10, 1947, occupying Cabin 126 on B deck, a first-class berth aboard the Durban Castle. On the following morning, when the liner was about 150 miles off the West Coast of Africa, the actress was reported missing. Captain Arthur Patey ordered the vessel turned about and a desperate search of the shark-infested waters was made. No trace of the woman was found.

Captain Patey conducted an investigation aboard ship as it continued to steam toward Southampton. Watchman Frederick Steer reported that the service bell of Cabin 126 had been pushed several times, as if frantically, at 2:58 on the morning of Oct. 18, 1947, and he had responded to the call. He stood outside the cabin and knocked. Steer noticed that both lights, a red and a green one, positioned outside the cabin, were on, indicating that the occupant had called for both the steward and the stewardess. Usually passengers rang on only one or the other. The door opened a crack, and the watchman caught a brief glimpse of a man in uniform, the steward Camb, who quickly closed the door and said through the grille of the door, “It’s all right.” Steer went back to his duties, assuming that Camb, a steward, had answered the call. Camb, however, denied having been in Gay Gibson’s cabin, insisting that Steer was mistaken. He drew suspicion, however, during the rest of the voyage by wearing a long sleeve jacket when short sleeve uniforms were commonly worn in that tropical zone. When asked to bear his arms, Camb revealed scratches on his arm which he claimed resulted from a tropical heat rash. Meanwhile, Patey had informed authorities of the Union Castle Line in London about the actress’ disappearance to which he received a cable from the Criminal Investigating Department of Scotland Yard instructing him to “padlock and seal the cabin–disturb nothing–CID officers will come aboard at Cowes Roads.”

When the ship docked in Cowes Roads, Southampton, officers came aboard and quickly put together background on Gay Gibson and James Camb. The actress had not had a happy experience in her most recent play, enacting the role of Lorna, the prizefight manager’s trampy girlfriend in Golden Boy, a South African production that paid very little in salary. Witnesses were later to state that Gay Gibson was, in real life, close to the role she was playing in Golden Boy. She had proved to be an emotional actress subject to fits of hysteria and fainting. She also told someone before leaving South Africa that she was pregnant. One account had it that she had accepted the fare of £350 for the trip home from a less-than-reputable nightclub owner. Passengers attended a dance on the first night at sea and Gay Gibson was present, dancing with several male passengers. She caught the eye of steward Camb who remarked to another steward: “I have half a mind to take a drink to her cabin tonight.”

This kind of remark was typical of the 31-year-old Camb who wore his black hair slicked back like some Latin lover from the 1920s. He thought of himself as irresistible to young women who found his Lancashire accent amusing. To his shipmates, Camb was known as “Don Jimmy,” a notorious womanizer who, though married, boasted about having an affair with a female passenger on each voyage he made. Two women had accused him of rape in the past, but this did not lessen the ardor and efforts of Camb in approaching female passengers, taking great pride in attracting the prettiest women on each trip. Said one of his fellow stewards: “Jimmy was always saying that we were jealous of him.”

Camb was brought before Sergeant Quinlan who interrogated him slowly, telling him that if he had any explanation for Gay Gibson’s disappearance, this was the time to volunteer such information. The handsome steward seized upon this idea, volunteering the following remarks: “You mean that Miss Gibson might have died from a cause other than being murdered, she might have had a heart attack or something?” He then said that Gay Gibson had invited him to her cabin that night and he had brought her a drink. She was wearing a nightgown with nothing on beneath it and that when she removed this, he climbed into bed with her. During sexual intercourse, Camb said, her body suddenly stiffened, then went limp. He climbed out of the bed and described how he saw that she was foaming brownish froth at the mouth and that only one eye appeared to be slightly open.

“I tried artificial respiration on her,” Camb claimed. “While doing this, the night watchman knocked at the door and attempted to open it. I shut the door… I panicked. I did not want to be found in such a compromising position.” He related how he went to the door of the cabin and told Steer that everything was “all right.” When Steer went away, Camb returned to the actress on the bed, saying that he “could not find any sign of life…After a struggle with the limp body, I managed to lift her to the porthole and push her through.” In another police interrogation, Camb was quoted as saying that the body, upon hitting the water surface “made a helluva splash,” thus revealing his cruel, indifferent attitude toward Gibson. In the first police interview aboard the Durban Castle, Camb expressed wonder at the service bells having been pushed. “I cannot offer any explanation as to how the bells came to be rung as I most definitely did not touch them myself.” He admitted lying to the captain about being in the actress’ cabin, stating he had decided to tell the truth later. “I realized,” Camb admitted, “that I was definitely incriminated by the witness Steer.”

On Mar. 29, 1948, Camb was tried for murdering Gay Gibson before Justice Hilbery at the Winchester Asizzes, prosecuted by G.D. Roberts and defended by J.D. Casswell. His defense was a feeble one. He had already admitted shoving the body of Gay Gibson through a porthole for a lonely burial at sea. Camb undoubtedly and mistakenly thought that by getting rid of the body, he would be getting rid of the evidence of his crime, and that conviction was not possible without the presence of a body. (This, of course, was not the case; the previous murder-without-a-body case in England was that of Thomas Joseph Davidson who was convicted of drowning his 8-year-old son in 1934 and who had been sent to prison for life for the murder.)

But there was evidence. The scratchmarks on Camb’s arms had been examined by the ship’s physician, Dr. Griffiths, after Captain Patey had ordered the steward to submit to a medical examination. Griffiths testified that he found these marks on Camb’s shoulders and wrists and these scratches, in his opinion, had been made by a woman defending herself, not by someone undergoing some sort of seizure. Stains on the pillow in the cabin were examined by Dr. Donald Teare, a well-known pathologist and he testified that these were bloodstains. The blood was Type O. Since Camb’s blood was Type A, it could be assumed that this was blood from Gay Gibson’s body, not Camb’s. Dr. Teare stated that these stains, along with emissions of urine could be expected from one who had been strangled to death, emissions that would not stem from someone having a heart attack. Ironically, Dr. Frederick Hocking, a defense witness, reported that, indeed, urine stains had been found on the sheets of Gay Gibson’s bed.

Camb was caught in a number of untruths. He insisted that the actress had been wearing only a flimsy yellow nightgown with no undergarments when she lured him into her room. Yet Gay Gibson’s black pajamas which she was known to have packed and taken with her on the sea voyage, were missing and it was concluded that she had been wearing these when Camb pushed her through the porthole which further suggested that she had not invited the steward to have sex with her. The prosecution insisted that Camb had invented the story of being invited into the cabin, that he arrived at the actress’ door under the pretext of delivering a drink to her and once she opened her door he forced his way inside, and tried to rape her. She fought furiously, scratching his arms and wrists and he strangled her. Somehow, during the struggle, Gibson had managed to press the service buttons and this brought Steer to Cabin 126. By the time he arrived Camb had just finished murdering the actress and pretended that nothing was amiss when he sent away the watchman. (The watchman Steer, it can be assumed, though he knew that Camb was in the cabin, did not ask to see Gibson, the legitimate occupant, since he was accustomed, as it were, to the numerous “shipboard romances” occurring regularly on such voyages.)

The steward’s own admission that he had callously shoved the victim’s body through a porthole worked against him, along with the impressive forensic evidence provided by the prosecution. After four days of trial and following a forty-five-minute deliberation, the jury found Camb Guilty of murdering Gay Gibson. The steward, who had posed like a peacock in the dock, was stunned at the decision. Before sentence was passed by Justice Hilbery, he was asked if he had anything to say. He replied in a quavering voice: “My Lord, at the beginning of this case…I pleaded not guilty. I repeat that statement now. That is all.” He was then sentenced to death. His attorneys filed an appeal and while this was being considered, the House of Commons added an amendment to the new Criminal Justice Bill then before Parliament, one which would abolish capital punishment. The Home Secretary, while this bill was still being debated in the House of Lords (which later rejected it), decided to commute all capital sentences still pending to life terms and Camb was one of those who benefited from this decision.

It was after this commutation that several women came forward to tell how Camb had sexually attacked them on previous voyages of the Durban Castle, two of them claiming they had been raped. Another woman said that she had been attacked on deck by Camb who dragged her into a tool room where she fought desperately as he tried to strip her clothes away. He had lost patience and strangled her. She passed out, she claimed, and when she regained consciousness, she said that Camb was standing over her, grinning. Camb was paroled in 1959, changed his name to Clarke and was working as a head waiter in May 1967 when he was convicted of sexually attacking a 13-year-old girl. He was, incredibly, placed on a two-year probation. He later went to Scotland where he worked once more as a head waiter in a restaurant. A short time later he was charged with sexual misconduct with three schoolgirls and this time Camb’s parole was revoked and he was returned to prison to serve out a life term.

 

Campbell, Cecil, prom. 1928, U.S. On the morning of Feb. 6, 1928, the New York City police were notified that a murder had taken place at the Grand Hotel on Thirty-first Street. A young woman in her mid-thirties had been bludgeoned to death with a cheap dimestore hammer. A timetable listing the trains running in and out of Grand Central Station was found on the nightstand. The desk clerk informed the police that a man had signed the registry cards as Mr. T.J. James of Troy, N.Y., and that he had rented the room in the company of a woman, apparently his wife.

Using as evidence a timetable found in the hotel room and the maid’s description of Mr. James, police focused their search in the vicinity of New Rochelle in Westchester County. In the sleepy little hamlet of Mamaroneck, police learned the identity of the mysterious Mr. James from an apartment-house owner. He was Cecil Campbell, reputed to be a globe-trotting soldier-of-fortune who had taught military tactics at several academies before he settled down as the headmaster of a school in New Jersey.

In 1922, Campbell had married Mary Lyle McLean while he was still wedded to a telephone operator from South Wyndham, Mass. The bigamous marriage continued until his first wife filed for divorce in 1925. When Campbell was arrested by the police, he claimed that he and his wife had grown tired of life and of poverty and had agreed on a suicide pact. They discussed various methods of killing themselves, including drowning. Campbell and McLean boarded the Hudson River Ferry but lost their nerve in the presence of a deckload of passengers. Campbell bought the ten-cent hammer at his wife’s urging. He hit her over the head and prepared to jump out of the window. Campbell said that, looking down at the people in the street, he decided against it, fearing that he might injure an innocent passerby.

Against his protestations that he wanted to die, Cecil Campbell was convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty years to life.

 

Campbell, Gary Lee, 1958- , and Glasder, James, c.1958- , and Craig, Daniel, 1957- , and Shine, Joseph, 1959- , and Shine, John, 1957- , U.S. A deadly prank resulted in a murder conviction for a 19-year-old Algonquin, Ill., youth named Gary Campbell. Campbell and four of his friends were attending a marijuana and beer party on Oct. 20, 1977, when they hit upon the idea of turning U.S. Highway 14 into a rock-throwing range.

Campbell, Glasder, Craig, and the two Shine brothers removed thirteen white-washed rocks weighing twenty to twenty-five pounds apiece from the nearby Stone Lake apartments in Woodstock. They dropped boulders into the oncoming lane of traffic, resulting in the decapitation death of David Klawes, 26, who was driving down U.S. 14 in McHenry County. A second victim, Arthur Engle of Sharon, Wis., was severely injured in the incident.

On Feb. 11, 1977, Joseph and John Shine, Daniel Craig, and James Glasder pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and were sentenced to six years in prison by Circuit Court judge James H. Cooney. Gary Campbell was tried separately, and was convicted of murder on Apr. 1. The Campbell youth received fourteen to twenty-one years in prison for his part in the crime.

 

Campbell, Dr. Henry Colin, c.1870-1930, U.S. By all appearances, Dr. Henry Colin Campbell was a temperate, unassuming physician possessing all the desirable middle-class virtues. He resided with his lawful wife and two daughters in the pleasant neighborhood of Westfield, N.J. Then the police found the body of Mildred Mowry, a Pennsylvania woman, dumped on the side of a road outside Cranford, N.J., and the facade began to come apart.

Friends and neighbors of Mrs. Mowry explained to the police and members of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency that she had left her home in February 1928 to marry a man named Campbell, whom she had met through a Detroit matrimonial agency. Mrs. Mowry was a wealthy widow who had been persuaded by Campbell to deposit several thousand dollars in cash into a joint bank account. They were then married at Elkton, Md. Puzzled by her new husband’s long absences from home, Mrs. Campbell traced his movements to New York City, where she confronted him and demanded some answers. The bigamist decided to kill his second wife.

Soon he did. Police who discovered Mary’s corpse beheld a gruesome scene. There was a gunshot wound in her head, and her body had been doused with gasoline and burned. The crime closely paralleled a similar murder a year before, that of Margaret Brown, a New York governess.

Detectives quickly located the marriage certificate, which listed Campbell’s address as 3707 Yosemite Street in Baltimore. That was not enough to disguise the address, which was actually 3705 Yosemite Avenue. The murderer was soon located and taken into custody. It was discovered that the fast-living doctor had maintained a number of mistresses over the years, and had previously been convicted of forgery and embezzlement. No definite link was established with the widowed Margaret Brown, who had been involved with a Dr. Ross and was murdered. But with the available evidence, Colin Campbell was convicted and executed in the electric chair on Apr. 17, 1930.

 

Campbell, Peter, prom. 1967, Scot. Peter Campbell was an incorrigible young offender who bludgeoned a woman to death when he was only sixteen. In 1967, while serving his sentence, Campbell stabbed and killed a fellow inmate. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to a penal institution at Dumfries, which was specifically reserved for youthful criminals of Scotland.

 

Cantero, Jonathan Eric, 1969- , U.S. “The devil made me do it!” was a favorite gag-line of 1960s comics. It was always good for a laugh or two in those times. Twenty years later, however, it was no longer a laughing matter, for teenagers across the country were embracing Satanism, and its accompanying violence.

For Jonathan Cantero, a 19-year-old nursing student and short-order cook at a Tampa, Fla., Pizza Hut, it was the devil and the Geraldo Rivera television program that drove him to murder. On Oct. 6, 1988, Cantero watched a syndicated hour-long Geraldo Rivera program about Satanism and its practice by street gangs. Rivera interviewed teenagers who had, among other things, ritualistically killed animals. Cantero sat transfixed. Here were real-life stories about other youths like him from average American homes, young people who worshipped the devil.

Jonathan had been interested in devil worship for years. In recent weeks he had spent long hours in the public library, poring over every book he could find about demonic possession, the occult, and devil worship. In his bedroom he studied from a satanic bible, wrote letters of allegiance to the devil, and scrawled demonic symbols on his body, all of which terrified his mother, Patricia Cantero. She was a 38-year-old woman who worked nights as a waitress at the Toddle House Restaurant in Tampa. She also wrote religious verse in her spare time under the name “The Purple Rose,” and her son’s blasphemy broke her heart.

But Jonathan hated his mother and after watching the Geraldo Rivera program he summoned the courage to kill her. On Oct. 12, 1988, he drove to his mother’s apartment on West Hillsborough Avenue to “just say hello,” an unusual occurrence, given the strained relations between the two. This strain was brought on by Patricia Cantero’s despair at her inability to change her son and it led to her suicide attempt in 1986. According to a note written at the time, Jonathan had placed a spell on her.

When her son knocked on the door in 1988, however, she did what a mother would do. She let him in. Newly inspired by his demonic fantasy, Jonathan followed her into the kitchen and stabbed her forty times. He read a poem over the lifeless body and tip-toed out of the apartment, locking the door behind him.

He had completed the last item on his daily list of things to do. “Go to school. Pull up at mom’s house. Enter/greet mom. Go to bathroom. Prepare knife and handkerchief. Go directly to mom. When her back is turned stab until dead. Cut off her hand.” He buried the gruesome note, his bloody clothes, and a satanic poem in his grandfather’s back yard, where they remained until police investigators dug them up nearly two weeks later.

David Cantero, Jonathan’s 16-year-old brother, found his mother in the hallway of the apartment. Jonathan was brought to the police station for questioning, his hand heavily bandaged. He claimed the wound was caused by glass in his school parking lot, not as the attending physician at St. Joseph’s Hospital later told detectives, by a knife. When confronted with the doctor’s testimony, Cantero confessed. He was charged with first-degree murder, and locked up at the Hillsborough County Jail. According to the police report, Cantero said he “couldn’t take it anymore because his mother got on him for not coming to see her enough.” He also said he hated her for forcing Christianity on him and that demonic voices in the night ordered him to kill her.

To avoid a trial and the possibility of the death penalty, Jonathan Cantero agreed to serve a life sentence with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. He was led off to jail on Mar. 18, 1989, after embracing his aunt, the sister of Patricia Cantero. It was her wish that the boy be spared the electric chair.

 

Carey, Mary, and Carey, Howard, and Carey, James, prom. 1927-34, U.S. A mother and her two sons thought they had committed the perfect crime. And for seven years it certainly seemed that way.

Mary Carey and her boys lived in the small town of Omar, Del. Shortly before the local elections were held in November 1927, Carey decided to murder her brother Robert Hitchens. He was a reserved bachelor who was content to sit back and listen to the opinions of others. Hitchens was well-liked, and it seemed inconceivable that anyone wanted to murder him. Carey’s motive, though, was simple: she wanted to collect on his sizeable life insurance policy. To enlist the cooperation of her sons, she promised them a new car.

On Nov. 5, Hitchens told Mrs. Daisey, the grocery store owner’s wife, that he felt ill. It was the perfect opportunity for his sister to carry out her plans. The next day when Robert did not show up at the store as he usually did, Mrs. Daisey was concerned and notified Mary Carey. They went over to his place and rapped on the door, but there was no answer. A neighbor man jimmied open a window and climbed in to see what the trouble was. He found Hitchens on the living room rug. He had been beaten and shot.

The presence of a whiskey bottle near the corpse led the police to the conclusion that perhaps it might have been the work of a gang of bootleggers. The case was later entered into the records as “unsolved.”

In fact, the case was forgotten, until Dec. 5, 1934, when Mrs. Irving Powell returned to her darkened house and was accosted by an intruder. She dropped in her tracks after being winged by his errant bullet, but she had obtained a good look at the assailant before passing out. It was Mary Carey’s youngest boy Lawrence. The police took him into custody and questioned him about the Powell shooting and the murder of his Uncle Robert. “I know plenty,” he said, recalling the conversations he had overheard between his mother and two older brothers. As a result, Mrs. Carey, Howard Carey, and James Carey were tried and convicted of murder. Mary and Howard were hanged, and James was given life. Lawrence Carey received seven years for breaking and entering into the Powell residence.

 

Carey, Walter Burton, III, 1949- , U.S. The question of when a victim is legally dead became the central issue during the murder trial of Walter Burton Carey III, accused of killing 17-year-old Karen Ann Pomroy on the grounds of Long Island’s Islip High School, Nov. 29, 1976.

The girl was on her way to a tutoring job when Carey assaulted her with a heavy railroad spike. He stole $1 from her purse and left her for dead. However, she did not lose her vital signs. Taken to the Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, Karen Ann was placed on a respirator. She was pronounced neurologically dead on Dec. 2 by Dr. William Bloom. With the consent of her parents, Pomroy was disconnected from her life-support system. Contrasting her condition to that of Karen Ann Quinlan, Bloom pointed out that Quinlan “never had a loss of electrical activity in the brain. She never had a loss of movement. She never had loss of response to painful stimuli.”

District Attorney Henry O’Brien pressed for a murder indictment ment against Carey. Defense attorneys argued that Pomroy died when the respirator was cut off, not from the beating administered by the defendant. New York penal laws did not adequately define the condition of death at the time. “A court will be obligated to charge the jury…at least giving them a criterion that they can use to determine for them the question of fact, that is, when did death occur?” O’Brien said.

The case was tried before Justice George F.X. McInerney of the State Supreme Court, in Riverhead, Long Island. During deliberations, the judge sent the jury back to reconsider the matter after they reported that they were hopelessly deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict. Then, on May 27, 1977, the jury found Carey Guilty of murder. On June 20, Carey was sentenced to twenty-four years to life in prison. In passing sentence, Judge McInerney said, “If the assailant’s conduct is proven to be a sufficiently direct contributing cause of death, he may be held criminally responsible for the death and his criminal responsibility is not lessened or excused by the existence of another contributing cause or factor.”

 

Caritativo, Bart, 1906-58, U.S. Many wealthy Californians employed male servants from the Philippines. Bart Caritativo, one such houseboy, worked in a large home in Stinson Beach, a suburb north of San Francisco. He became friendly with the housekeeper at the house next door, who had the good luck to marry her employer. The homeowner soon died and left her his fortune. Caritativo continued his friendship with this lady, Camille Malmgren.

Malmgren was soon remarried to an Englishman named Joseph Banks, an alcoholic. During the next several years she committed him to an institution for treatment a number of times. She ultimately divorced Banks, though he continued to live in her Stinson Beach house. In September 1954, Camille Banks decided to leave the country for a while. A neighbor came by to see her just before she left on her trip and found her dead in her bedroom, her skull split open. Banks lay dead in the living room, surrounded by empty liquor bottles. In his hand was the handle of a large knife which was stuck in his stomach.

Among the papers police located in the house was a suicide note signed by Banks which read, “I am responsible to what you see and find.” Another was Camille Banks’s will, leaving everything to Caritativo. It, too, contained grammatical errors and awkward misspellings. Don Midyett of the San Rafael sheriff’s department compared Caritativo’s handwriting with that on the documents and, when experts found them the same, arrested Caritativo for murder.

Caritativo’s trial began in January 1955. The major evidence against him were the handwritten documents and the testimony of a pathologist that Banks, thoroughly drunk, could not have killed his wife or himself. When Caritativo saw things going against him, he fired his lawyer, telling the court, “I have lost the trust to my attorneys,” misusing the word “to” as it had been misused in Banks’s so-called suicide note. The jury found Caritativo Guilty of murder in the first degree. He was executed at San Quentin on Oct. 24, 1958.

 

Carney, John, prom. 1930s, Can. The murder of James Agnew, a farmer from Lindsay, Ontario, was a relatively simple matter for Canadian detectives. Agnew had been shot behind his barn during the middle of a blinding snowstorm. The unknown assailant ran off with a gold watch and a few dollars from the victim’s pocket. The shots were not heard by Agnew’s wife inside the farmhouse, and the killer slipped away undetected.

Detective Murray was called in to examine the evidence. The snow had covered the footprints by this time. But Murray dug deep in the snowdrifts and found impressions of a buckle and strap. The trail led to the door of Henry Logie, a neighbor who employed an 18-year-old youth named John Carney. Carney wore a pair of boots that matched the impressions in the snow near the Agnew farm. A search of Logie’s wash house turned up the stolen items.

Carney was convicted on a charge of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He avoided the death penalty because of his age.

 

Carpenter, Richard, 1929-56, U.S. Richard Carpenter entered neighborhood bars and small grocery stores in Chicago as they were preparing to close, held two Western-style guns on the clerk, and demanded whatever money was in the cash register. In this way, he made a steady though precarious living for two years.

In August 1955, Police Detective Bill Murphy, who had been briefed on Carpenter, spotted the 26-year-old thief on a subway train, and immediately arrested him. When they got off the train, Murphy tried to pull an identification poster from his pocket, giving Carpenter a chance to pull his gun. Carpenter fired once, directly into the policeman’s chest, killing him. Carpenter ran out of the station and hijacked a waiting limousine, telling the driver, “I’ve just killed a man, and I’ll kill you, too, unless you drive on and keep quiet!” Carpenter got out in the Loop business district.

Carpenter could not go to any of his familiar haunts, so he slept where and when he could. He was asleep in the back row of a downtown movie theater when he was spotted by another policeman, Clarence Kerr, who was spending an evening out with his wife. Kerr sent her out of the way, then woke the sleeping Carpenter to take him into the lobby. Carpenter pretended to trip, pulled out his gun as he rose, and shot Kerr in the chest.

As Carpenter rushed from the theater, a passing policeman shot him in the leg. Later that evening Carpenter knocked on the back door of the home of Leonard Powell, a truckdriver, and demanded to be let in. Powell and his wife calmly went about their business, held at gunpoint by the frantic murderer for more than a day. They kept their son and daughter ignorant of who Carpenter was, and Powell even went to work the next day, knowing that his family was held hostage. That evening, probably having no idea how he was going to get out of the situation, Carpenter said to the Powells, “It was a lousy life I led–but it’s too late now. Either the cops will kill me or I’ll go to the chair, but I hope I can see my mother before I die.” Powell told Carpenter that his wife’s mother would be expecting them to visit that evening, as they did every evening. Carpenter let them go, and the Powells ran for help. Within minutes, police surrounded the building. Carpenter ran to another apartment, but soon gave himself up. Found Guilty of murder, Carpenter, after a brief visit from his mother, was sent to the electric chair at Joliet State Prison.

 

Carroll, Janet Faye, 1940- , U.S. After murdering her second husband, a North Carolina woman drove with her four children and her new lover to bury her spouse’s corpse.

On June 13, 1969, Donald Carroll, recently discharged from the U.S. Army, fought with his wife, Janet, over the attention she had been paying to Jimmy D. Goins. Janet soon telephoned Goins from the Carroll’s Greensboro, S.C., trailer home, saying, “I’ve shot my husband. Come right over and help me. I don’t know what to do.” At the Carroll’s house Goins found Donald’s body on a bloodstained mattress; Janet Carroll had killed her husband with a .22-caliber rifle while he slept. The couple put the body in the car trunk, then placed Carroll’s children in the car and drove to nearby Sanford to leave them with Janet’s parents. Carroll and Goins took the corpse to Moore County, where they buried it and threw the rifle in the Deep River.

Within a month of the murder Carroll took out a warrant charging Donald with nonsupport, claiming that he had deserted her to seek work somewhere in Tennessee, and reporting him as missing. A year later, after she and Goins had moved to New York and then back to Greensboro, Carroll divorced her husband on grounds of desertion and married Goins. All went well until they quarrelled, and an angry Goins went to the sheriffs office to complain about his wife’s behavior. But Sheriff D.F. Holder of Lee County knew he had more on his mind than marital woes, “So we just kept pouring him coffee, and he just kept a-talkin’.” By midnight, Goins confessed all, taking deputies to the scene of the crime and leading them to the decomposing corpse.

Condemning evidence at the trial included the bloodstained mattress on which Donald Carroll had been killed, still being used by the trailer’s new tenants. Goins, convicted as an accomplice after the fact, regretted that his wife would have to do time, saying, “I wish I could do time for her.” When arrested, Carroll was driving with a loaded .22-caliber rifle under the seat. At first calling the killing an accident, she later confessed to committing the murder in a fit of anger. The judge sentenced Carroll to four to six years in the state penitentiary. Goins later received the same term.

 

Carroll, Mario, and Johnston, James, prom. c.1972, U.S. A slow-witted boy became convinced that an elderly, crippled man had money and jewels hidden in his mattress and enlisted the help of his mother’s lover to kill the old man.

Twelve-year-old Mario Carroll lived in a home with his crippled, divorced mother and admired Nazi uniforms, knives, and guns. From classmates he heard the rumor that Harry Lillywhite, also called Pops, an 82-year-old hunchback in the neighborhood, had a fortune hidden in his home. When he failed to persuade a schoolmate to help attack the old man, Carroll suggested the scheme to James Johnston, a 23-year-old laborer who was his mother’s lover. When Carroll rang the doorbell Lillywhite told the pair to go away, but they forced their way in, and Johnston smashed a heavy wrench down on the elderly man’s head. As Lillywhite screamed for help, Johnston bashed his skull. Searching the house, the killers found that Lillywhite had no hidden valuables, but instead lived in poverty on a small pension.

Within hours, police traced and questioned Carroll, who admitted his guilt. Carroll and Johnston were charged with murder and conspiring to rob Lillywhite. At the trial it was determined that Carroll had a low intelligence, with the reading skills of a 6-year-old. The judge, explaining that he did not want to punish the boy, but “to insure that he will receive the education and training that he has been so lacking in life,” sentenced Carroll to six years in a state school for boys. James Johnston, Carroll’s accomplice, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

 

Carter, George, 1931- , Brit. Apparently because he resented the financial burden of a family, a British laborer murdered his wife and caused permanent brain damage to his 6-year-old son. On Jan. 2, 1960, when 29-year-old George Carter came home from work for lunch, his pregnant wife, Ruby, thirty-three, lay dead in their bed, her skull fractured by three heavy blows. Carter’s 6-year-old son, Alun, was severely wounded in a similar way, and would suffer permanent brain damage. Carter claimed he had gone to pick up his wife at the Cowbridge High School for Girls, where she worked, and became concerned when she didn’t come out. A bureau in the Carter home was clumsily smashed, and according to Carter, £35 was missing. The wife had been dead for about six hours, so the murder had occurred at around 5:15 a.m., the time Carter left for work. The grieving but composed husband appeared on television to ask for assistance in finding his wife’s slayer.

On Jan. 3 a heavy metal object was discovered in a field near the Carters’ house. It was established as the murder weapon, and found to be from the factory where George Carter worked. On Jan. 16, he was charged with killing his wife. Although he maintained his innocence during his trial, Carter talked a great deal, presumably trying to deflect suspicion, and once claimed, “I have had to say I did not do it. But they can prove I did.”

Carter was tried at Glamorgan Assizes, Cardiff, on Mar. 21 in front of Justice Barry, with W.L. Mars-Jones, Queen’s Counsel as prosecuting attorney, and Norman Richards, Queen’s Counsel for the defense. Evidence against him included twenty-three tiny spots of blood on his right jacket sleeve and testimony from his coworkers that he had flashed a number of banknotes at work on the morning of the murder, presumably hiding them later to give credence to his claim of burglary and a mysterious intruder. Carter’s coworker, Paul Galton, testified that Carter, heavily in debt, had asked him for advice on how to end a pregnancy. Carter had been very proud of his recent purchase of a new car but was having difficulty making the monthly payments of £16, and apparently resented the financial strain of a growing family. Though all evidence was circumstantial, the jury found Carter Guilty as charged in just thirty-five minutes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

 

Carter, Polk, 1906- , U.S. The death of an elderly farmer in a small town in Georgia provoked so many rumors that, within a year, three of his relatives were accused of poisoning the old man. On Aug. 6, 1969, James Clark, a 77-year-old grocery store operator and farmer, died after a brief illness. He had married Effie Bell Clark less than three months earlier, and rumors that his marriage had hastened his death began to spread. Gossip also focused on Fannie Pearl Carter, Effie’s 34-year-old daughter, and Fannie’s husband, Polk Carter, fifty-three, who inherited most of Clark’s estate. The illiterate farmer had died of a stomach ailment, and an autopsy generated whisperings that poisoning was suspected. Local law officials investigated the case for a year before they issued indictments against Effie Bell Clark Bennett, who had since remarried, and Fannie Pearl Carter and Polk Carter, charging them with poisoning Clark with arsenic from July 27 until his death.

At the trial, less than a month after the three were charged, Georgia State Crime Laboratory toxicologist Dr. June Jones testified that Clark’s liver contained an arsenic concentration more than three times higher than normal, and said that he had suffered “massive liver and kidney damage.” Jones also stated that all products with substantial amounts of arsenic in them were colored pink in accordance with the law. Effie Bennett, granted immunity in exchange for her cooperation, testified that she had seen her daughter and her son-in-law lace her late husband’s food with “pink powder” several times.

Polk Carter, testifying in his own defense, denied preparing any food for his father-in-law and showed credit card receipts to prove he had been out of town during Clark’s alleged poisoning. Despite this alibi and his claims that Clark had died of lead poisoning from tainted moonshine, the jury found Polk Carter Guilty of murder after a two-hour deliberation and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

 

Carter, Rubin (AKA: Hurricane), 1937- , U.S. In a highly publicized and controversial case that spanned more than a decade, former leading middleweight boxing contender Rubin Carter became a cause célèbre of civil rights fund-raising efforts. On June 17, 1966, at 2:30 a.m., three people were killed by shotgun blasts at the Lafayette Grill, a tavern in Paterson, N.J., during a period of racial tension in that city. The victims were James Oliver, the 52-year-old bartender and part-owner of the tavern, Fred Nauykas, a patron, and Hazel Tanis, fifty-one, who died from bullet wounds a month later. Separately arrested and charged with the crime on Oct. 14 and 15, 1906, were John Artis and Rubin Carter, who claimed he barely knew Artis. The motive was said to be revenge for the killing of a black tavern owner in the same area earlier that evening; all three of the victims at the Lafayette Grill were white.

The policeman who apprehended Carter and Artis later testified that neither man had acted nervous or guilty, and that both had followed him to the scene of the crime with no reservations. A key witness at the initial trial, Alfred P. Bello, said he saw the defendants flee the tavern with guns and escape in a white car; Bello allegedly had been robbing a factory nearby when he was drawn to the scene of the murders after hearing shots. He admitted stealing money from the cash register of the Lafayette Grill soon after the shootings, and was present when police brought Carter and Artis in about half an hour after the attack. Both Bello and Arthur D. Bradley identified Carter and Artis four months after the shootings. Bello, who had served prison terms for burglary and robbery, recanted his testimony in 1974, claiming that detectives had coerced him into identifying Carter and Artis. He later disavowed his testimony a second time, offering two different versions of what he had seen. Another witness, Patricia Graham Valentine, who lived above the tavern, identified the two men although she had seen them only from the back, but she also described their escape car. And Emil DiRobbio, a homicide detective, testified that he had turned in shotgun shells found at the scene to the police property clerk’s office.

In May 1967, Artis and Carter were convicted, found Guilty on three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case became a liberal cause, with Carter receiving support from the black community and from sports and entertainment figures. In December 1975 a “Night of the Hurricane” benefit held at New York City’s Madison Square Garden helped raise money for an appeal. By March 1976, the New Jersey State Court overturned both convictions, ruling that important evidence had been withheld from the defense. Carter was freed on $20,000 bail, and Artis on $15,000 bail.

Because of prejudicial publicity against the defendants in Passaic County, the second trial was moved from Patterson to Jersey City. It began on Oct. 12, 1976, and was presided over by Judge William J. Marchese, who disqualified himself on Oct. 19 when defense lawyers protested that he might become a witness at the trial since he had sentenced Bello in an unrelated 1974 case.

Marchese was replaced by Judge Bruno L. Leopizzi. Patricia Valentine added to her testimony of ten years earlier that police had shown her a cartridge and shotgun shell they said they had found in the car Carter and Artis were driving when they were arrested. In the 1966 trial, detective Emil DiRobbio never mentioned showing the shell or cartridge to anyone but the police. The question of whether they had been found the day of the killings was a key issue in the 1966 trial. An investigation by New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab led to the reopening of the case.

Bello, the key prosecution witness, recanted earlier testimony which claimed that he had been “brainwashed” by police into identifying Artis and Carter as the murderers. Bello then renounced his recantation and declared in court on Nov. 15 that he had lied consistently throughout the trial and during the 1975 grand jury hearings. Asked about statements he had made in an affidavit to Assemblyman Eldridge Hawkins in 1975, Bello replied, “It’s true that I said it, but it’s not true.” He later added, “Most of the things I said were complete lies to avoid the issue.” Bello would later claim that both a television producer and an investigator from the State Public Defender’s Office had offered him bribes to change his testimony.

On Nov. 22, Detective Donald LaConte corroborated Patricia Valentine’s testimony when he said he, too, had seen the bullet and shell when he brought her to police headquarters so she could identify the car driven by Artis and Carter. The defense contended that the bullet and shell were planted by police to frame their clients. LaConte, the officer to whom Bello had first identified Carter and Artis as the men he had seen at the murder scene, said Bello told him later that he was “scared” because friends of Carter’s had threatened him. LaConte said Bello told him, “You guys had the right men and you let ‘em go,” referring to Artis and Carter.

On Nov. 18, Judge Leopizzi prohibited anyone from contacting the jurors or their families about the case. The defense emphasized that the descriptions of the killers did not match either defendant, except that they were black, and that there was no strong case against the defendants until they were identified by Bello and Bradley four months after the crime. Vincent DeSimone, Jr., who had headed the initial investigation into the shootings, told a 1966 grand jury twelve days after the triple murders that the clothing worn by Carter and Artis did not fit descriptions from witnesses. DeSimone had said, “With the time element, we feel it is almost impossible that these men could have changed clothes.” In the four-month interim between the incident and the arrest of Carter and Artis, DeSimone secured a positive identification of the defendants from Bello. In the 1976 trial, Desimone, referring to a deal he made with Bello to drop charges on Bello’s robbery attempt on the night of the killings, said, “If I could solve a murder by not taking action on a lesser crime, I’d do it every day of the week. I’d do it again tomorrow.” William Hardney and Welton Deary, two former friends of Carter’s, testified on Nov. 27 that they had been asked, prior to the 1967 trial, by Carter and his attorney at the time, Raymond Brown, to say that they had been with the former boxer at the time of the slayings. Hardney did not testify at the first trial. Deary had testified, and now admitted giving false testimony when he said he had been with Carter at the time of the murders.

Artis testified on Dec. 15, again telling the jury that he was not guilty. Carter declined to testify, just as he had in 1967. In final summations on Dec. 20, Passaic County Prosecutor Burrell I. Humphreys said the evidence built a “rope strong enough to bring two murderers to justice,” while defense lawyers Myron Beldock and Lewis Steel, attorneys for Carter and Artis, respectively, challenged the credibility of most of the state’s witnesses and focused on the uncertainty of the identifications of the defendants. On Dec. 26, 1976, Carter and Artis were found Guilty for the second time on three counts of first-degree murder. On Feb. 9, 1977, Carter was sentenced to two consecutive life terms and one concurrent life term and will not be eligible for parole until 1996. When Chicago novelist Nelson Algren died in 1981, he was working on a novel about Rubin Carter.

 

Carter, Theodore H., 1932- , U.S. A mildly retarded youth was discovered to be the murderer of a young woman in a small town after police spent several weeks following false leads.

On May 13, 1950, Alice Huen discovered the body of Lorraine Hess, a 17-year-old high school student, when she went to collect her son’s socks from the clothesline in the backyard of her Millville, N.J. home. The socks, along with a green belt from Hess’ coat, were wrapped around the neck of the strangled woman.

Heading the investigation were Public Safety Commissioner David Reid and Police Chief Samuel Fithian, later joined by State Police Lieutenant Jules Westphalen and detectives from nearby Bridgeton, the county seat. The investigators discovered that Hess had seen a play with friends the night of the murder, May 12, and had been dropped off by them about two blocks from the house of an uncle, John J. Sherman, where she planned to spend the night. Two men who had been out that evening, Charles Whilden, a college student returning from a date, and Edward Keen, a factory worker driving home, both had seen Hess with a man on the street corner about a block from the murder scene, at around 12:30 a.m. Whilden’s parents and a neighbor had heard screams, but had dismissed them.

After following several false leads, including the arrest and questioning of a local millhand and a traveling chemist with previous arrests as a Peeping Tom, police picked up Theodore Carter, an 18-year-old stockboy from Millville, who had left town shortly after the killing. Arrested in Bridgeport, Conn., where he had gone to stay with an uncle, Carter had been charged with disorderly conduct and was serving a ten-day jail sentence when turned over to New Jersey police for questioning.

On June 15, District Attorney Stanger stated that Carter had made a full confession to the slaying, saying, “I’m awfully glad to get these things off my mind. I’m full of shame.” Though his mother denied that Carter had left town right after the murder, claiming her son had not gone to Connecticut until late May, Carter made five separate confessions to the crime. Since he could neither read nor write, he signed his name with an X and later declared in court that he made the confessions voluntarily. He was tried in late October 1950, in Bridgeton, N.J., in a trial that lasted two weeks and involved more than 100 witnesses. Carter’s defense attorney pleaded for acquittal, saying that Carter had the mentality of an eight-year-old and that the police had dictated his statements and confessions. After several hours of deliberation the jury found Carter Guilty of first degree murder, recommending mercy based on his mental condition. On Nov. 10, 1950, Carter was sentenced to life in prison.

 

Cartier, Andre, prom. 1936, Brit. On Jan. 25, 1936, the body of a 55-year-old man was found on a quiet road on the outskirts of London, in St. Albans, Hertfordshire. The victim had been thrown out of a moving car after being shot six times. Scotland Yard detectives sent in the cleaning tag from the man’s expensive coat and learned that the murdered man was Emil Haye, a jewelry salesman from Canada who lived in the Soho district of London. Sending Haye’s fingerprints to the Yard, investigators discovered through American police and the French Surete investigations that “Haye” was actually Bull Jaw Donohue, a notorious American racketeer. When police Constable Howard Barber, walking his regular beat in Little Newport Street, found three large glass splinters, he disposed of them by pushing them into the curb, and reported the incident to his sergeant. An inspector called Barber a few days later, showing him the photograph of Hayes, which Barber recognized from newspaper reports on the killing.

The two police officers went to the house in front of which the glass splinters were found and checked out the apartments there, discovering one, formerly occupied by a couple named Taylor, that had been abandoned in obvious haste. Sending the charwoman and the landlady to Scotland Yard, the police learned that the “Taylors” were really Yvette Constantine, who had previously operated an illegal racket in Paris, and Andre Cartier, a notorious gangster once sentenced to Devil’s Island. In the apartment inspectors found a broken window, a half-burned slip of paper bearing the name Yvonne Ducre, with a list of wages paid for her services as a maid. Under questioning Ducre said Donohue had come to France from America to set up organized racketeering, and Cartier, his partner, had killed him in a fight over money. When Donohue was shot in Constantine’s apartment, he staggered to a window, breaking the glass before falling dead. Cartier and Constantine were arrested soon after in Paris, and both were tried for Donohue’s murder. Constantine was acquitted, and Cartier got a twenty-year jail term.

 

Case, William, 1855-1939, U.S. An elderly man who had raised evergreen trees on his Ohio farm since early childhood committed murder when thieves stole more than 200 trees after a local magazine publicized him.

William Case, eighty-four, of Strogsville, Ohio, was known as “Santa Claus” for his generosity in donating an evergreen tree annually to decorate Cleveland’s public square and for his tradition of handing out nickels to children at Christmastime. Since boyhood, Case had tended the trees on his farm. In December 1939, he was written up by The American Magazine for his charitable nature. Following the article, people came to his farm to steal trees by the truckload. On Christmas Eve Day, Case heard the sounds of yet another tree being chopped down. He picked up his shotgun, slipped up on two people tying a tree to their car, and fired twice, killing William Rousseau, thirty-seven, an unemployed man, and wounding his wife, Minnie Rousseau, twenty-nine. Case calmly explained his actions, saying: “The tree was theirs for the asking…But when people steal them it’s different.” After being told his arraignment was a formality, Case pleaded innocent to manslaughter and was released on bail. Later, at the request of Mrs. Rousseau, a grand jury refused to indict Case for manslaughter. He died in June 1939; his demise was withheld by relatives to avoid further publicity.

 

Casella, Louis, prom. 1910s, U.S. A hit-and-run driver was tracked down through the painstaking detective work of a police sergeant who trained officers how to identify cars in the early days of the automobile.

In New York City, prior to WWI, streets held a combination of the motor car and the horse and buggy. One June evening, around Sixty-ninth Street between Park and Lexington Avenues, a speeding car hit the horse and buggy of John McHugh, a city street cleaning foreman, as he began his night inspection tour. McHugh was found by Patrolman John G. Dwyer and taken to the hospital where he died a few hours later. Dwyer assembled twenty-one broken pieces of glass from the scene of the hit-and-run and reported the incident. The next morning a street cleaner found a fragment of rubber, about three inches long, that apparently had come from a tire of the car.

Assigned to investigate the case was Sergeant John F. Brennan, instructor in the new field of car identification at the police training school. Carefully reconstructing the glass fragments, Brennan discovered that they were parts of lenses from gas and oil lights, and he uncovered patent dates showing the lenses had not been manufactured since 1912. Discerning minute fragments of gray paint on splintered wood shards the officer narrowed the make down to a gray 1909 Packard, Model 18, and surmised that it was probably in a garage for repairs that had resulted from the accident. Police checked all cars of that type, finding in a Long Island City garage a Packard of that make that belonged to Louis Casella which had been stored in the Long Island shop but had disappeared two days earlier. Brennan went to Casella’s home address, found him missing, and traced his mail to Allenhurst, N.J., fifty miles north of New York City. When he finally located Casella in Allenhurst the suspect had an airtight alibi, but Brennan managed to detach a small piece of rubber when he examined Casella’s car and sent it to a chemist for analysis, where it was matched with the piece found at the scene of the crime.

Brennan, with the assistance of detective Edward J. Cousins, tracked down receipts for repairs to Casella’s car, the evidence was assembled, and an indictment of first-degree murder was made. Casella, however, had disappeared. Brennan, presuming that the suspect would contact a lawyer, found the name of Casella’s attorney and hid in a phone booth outside the law office, with the doors arranged to reflect the sun and keep him out of sight, until Casella finally appeared and was arrested.

 

Castalas, Louis, prom. 1980, Fr. A decorated and patriotic Frenchman killed his wife’s lover when he realized that his 7-year-old son was sired by another man.

Louis Castalas had been a leader in the French Resistance in 1941. He was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald and though experimented on by Nazi doctors, refused to reveal the names of his comrades. Awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, Castalas continued to fight for his country against the Viet Cong in Indochina. He was again decorated with the Military Medal for gallantry. Married twice, Castalas did not tell his first two spouses that the Nazi operations left him sterile, hoping the diagnosis would prove wrong. Working as a police inspector at the age of forty-three, Castalas married a third time to Josiane, a woman seventeen years his junior. When his wife announced her pregnancy, Castalas was thrilled and became a devoted father to his son, Herve.

When Herve was seven, Castalas came home one night and learned that his wife, visiting a nearby village, was stranded by a snowstorm, and would spend the night with her friends, the Tardes. Castalas went to pick her up the next day and found her talking with Pierre Laurent. Noticing the marked resemblance between Laurent and Herve, Castalas immediately confronted Josiane, who angrily confessed, “Yes, he is my lover and the true father of Herve!” Castalas shot Laurent, drove his wife home, then turned himself over to the police. He was tried and sentenced to a seven-year prison term by the judge who described him as “a Frenchman of great courage and a glorious soldier of France.” Castalas refused to see his wife or the boy he once called “son” again.

 

Cawley, Brian, prom. 1929-60, Brit. An unemployed radio technician has the dubious distinction of having the shortest murder trial on record in England.

Brian Cawley, thirty, lived with his wife and their three children in a New Road, Basingstoke, house owned by Rupert Steed, a retired bachelor who had befriended the Cawley family. The Cawleys lived rent free with Steed, who enjoyed giving them gifts and being their benefactor. Cawley began to drink and his wife left him, taking the children. One night, Cawley returned home and beat Steed to death for no apparent reason. Cawley was tried on Dec. 14, 1959, at Winchester Assizes. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment, with the entire proceedings taking only thirty seconds.

 

Cayson, Jesse, and Cayson, Doyle, prom. 1958, U.S. When his father was murdered by local thugs, a 12-year-old boy vowed he would find the killers. Eighteen years later he did. On Mar. 15, 1940, Les Wilson, father of six and candidate for sheriff in the Okaloosa County race, was in his Crestview, Fla., home with his wife and children, listening to the radio, when a shotgun blast through the porch window killed him. Ray Wilson, his 12-year-old son, told himself that night that he would track down whoever had murdered his father, and help clean up Okaloosa County, where gambling proliferated and illegal whiskey was sold openly, and where murders and unusual disappearances were regular occurrences. Les Wilson’s life had been threatened before; as police chief of Crestview, criminals despised him, and his candidacy for sheriff threatened the gangsters’ free rein.

An investigation into his murder was ordered in October 1940 by Governor Fred P. Cone and closed by Governor Fuller Warren in 1949 after there had been no results. Ray Wilson graduated from high school, served in the U.S. Army and returned to Crestview around 1950, determined to run for sheriff. With no initial support, he garnered the confidence of the public on a platform of impartial law and order and won the post in 1956, becoming, at twenty-eight, Florida’s youngest sheriff and embarking on a successful campaign to clean up Crestview.

With Walter R. Steinsiek, Jr., Pensacola police superintendent of identification, Wilson began the search for his father’s killer. He looked through old police files and eventually came up with Jesse and Doyle Cayson as possible suspects. The brothers had become unaccountably prosperous after Wilson’s murder, and connections with organized crime were thought to be the cause. A woman who had twice changed her name was tracked to San Antonio, Texas, and interviewed by Wilson. She refused to testify but admitted that she had heard the Caysons leave with shotguns the night of the murder and had later been beaten by them and told to keep her mouth shut. She and her husband had been shot at sometime after that, and they moved from Crestview in fear for their lives. When Wilson promised her protection, “Jane” agreed to testify, saying, “I’m scared, but I’ve been waiting all these years to clear my mind of what happened that night.”

Another witness who had overheard Jesse Cayson tell several people he had murdered Les Wilson was found, and a switchboard operator who had listened to one of the suspects call to find out if Wilson was driving a taxi that night also came forth. In June 1958, after eighteen months of intensive investigation, having questioned more than 200 people, Ray Wilson went before a grand jury to present evidence in his father’s murder. The Caysons were brought to trial soon after and in November of that year, were found Guilty of the first-degree murder of Les Wilson. The killers were sentenced to life in prison.

 

Cerny, Wenzel, prom. 1936, Czech. When a prominent judge’s bride took a contract out on her husband’s life, the killer she hired agreed to do the job, saying the judge had sent him to jail two years earlier because he “didn’t like my looks.”

An upstairs neighbor called the police at about 10:20 p.m., Mar. 16, 1936, to report a commotion in the apartment of Czechoslovakian Court Judge Jan Velgo. Police officers broke in to find a man groaning on the livingroom floor, shot in the forehead, after his attempt to kill himself. In the bathroom the body of Judge Jan Velgo lay submerged in the bathtub, a deep gash in his head. A medical examiner announced that he had been dead for fifteen minutes, and pronounced the cause as drowning. In the closet of one room police found Marie Havlick Velgo slumped on the floor and unconscious. The 21-year-old woman opened her eyes and asked after her husband of six weeks, saying she had been forced into the closet where she had fainted. The wounded man was identified as Wenzel Cerny, a petty criminal with a record of arson, assault and battery, robbery, and fraud dating back ten years.

Questioning the Velgo’s maid and several other people, police learned that the couple had just recently married for convenience only, and that Velgo had planned to divorce his wife when he learned of a vacancy in the supreme court. Hoping to be appointed, he decided a divorce scandal would disqualify him. The distressed bride confided to her maid that she would like to get rid of Velgo and the maid procured Cerny’s name. When Cerny was questioned, he was more than willing to talk, with no idea of “shielding that she-devil.”

He had met with Marie Velgo in a cafe and agreed to murder her husband for a fee of $200. They had even drawn up a promissory note, which he told police to look for in the lining of his coat. The official-sounding document was dated Feb. 16, 1936, one month before Velgo’s death. Tricking Marie Velgo into signing her name, police found that her signature matched that on the promissory note. Confronted with this evidence, she dropped her story of a burglary and confessed to arranging the murder, but said she had had a change of heart later and unsuccessfully begged Cerny not to go through with it. According to her testimony, the killer had brushed her off, then locked her in the closet when he heard Velgo’s key in the door.

Cerny and Velgo were tried on Feb. 11, 1937. A jury took twelve minutes to find Cerny Guilty as charged and the less than bereaved widow Not Guilty “in view of irresistible force exercised upon her” by Cerny. The state’s attorney called for a new trial based on improper evidence brought in by the defense. Velgo was retried in October 1937, found Guilty, and sent to jail for a twelve-year term.

 

Chapin, Charles (AKA: Rose Man of Sing Sing), 1858-1930, U.S. As the editor of Pulitzer’s New York Evening World, Charles Chapin made numerous enemies among the reporters for the way he used his power. Chapin invested every penny he earned for many years in speculative stocks, which provided him with a yacht, servants, and multiple homes.

When the bottom fell out of the sugar market, only a loan from a friend kept Chapin from going to jail for misusing a trust fund for which he was guardian. He swore never to speculate again, but could not keep the promise. In 1914, he lost $100,000 overnight when Germany declared war. For the next four years, Chapin was continuely hounded by creditors and frequently contemplated suicide. As bankruptcy neared, he decided that he could not ask his wife to live in the poverty he foresaw. He purchased a gun and, on Sept. 16, 1918, as his wife slept, Chapin shot her in the chest, planning to kill himself immediately. However, she did not die at once, and by the time she did, he had lost the nerve to take his own life. Chapin turned himself in to the police and asked that he be electrocuted. The newsman refused to defend himself, but a volunteer lawyer managed to get the charge reduced to second-degree murder. The 60-year-old Chapin was sentenced to serve twenty years at Sing Sing.

Warden Lewis Lawes got Chapin interested in publishing a prison newspaper. When that was suspended, Chapin asked to be allowed to create a garden out of the prison yard, and was so successful that he earned the nickname “Rose Man of Sing Sing.” His gardening skills became known throughout the area, but, again, the men who were required to work for him found Chapin an arrogant and intolerable slavedriver. Chapin died at the age of seventy-two on Dec. 13, 1930.

 

Chapin, Kenneth R., 1936- , U.S. Bernard Goldberg and his wife were out for the evening when their 4-year-old son Stephen, and his babysitter Lynn Ann Smith were brutally murdered in the family home in Springfield, Mass. The murderer later served as one of the pall bearers at the funeral.

Lynn Ann Smith was reading Gone With the Wind when 18-year-old Kenneth Chapin, the brother of her best friend, rapped at the window the night of Sept. 25, 1954. The teenage babysitter had been warned about admitting strangers in the house. But Kenneth was no stranger. He was active in Boy Scouts and was a regular church-goer. Once inside the house, Chapin attempted to force himself on Lynn. When she resisted, he killed her with a knife. Fearing that Stephen would tell his parents what he had witnessed, Chapin bludgeoned the boy to death in his bedroom.

The police found a length of crocheting yam near the Goldberg residence. Chapin had used it to tie a piece of paper around the handle of the knife. A house-to-house search revealed that the Chapin family had the only matching ball of yarn. On Oct. 8, Kenneth confessed to the double murder. In March 1955, he was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to die. A day before his scheduled execution, Chapin’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, after Dr. Frederic Wertham pronounced the young man a schizophrenic and therefore not responsible for his actions.

 

Chapman, Mark David, 1955- , U.S. “We’re going to live, or we’re going to die. If we’re dead, we’re going to have to deal with that; if we’re alive, we’re going to have to deal with being alive.” A few hours after he said those words, rock star and former Beatle John Lennon was shot to death by Mark David Chapman, a deranged fan who thought that he was Lennon.

Chapman, born in Texas and raised in Georgia, ran away from home when he was fourteen. He was away only a few weeks, but remained part of the drug scene for another two years. Becoming a Beatles fan as a teenager, he tried to emulate them with his own band. However, after Chapman became a born-again Christian, he was offended by Lennon’s remark, “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” Thus, Chapman gave up the Beatles, as he had given up drugs, and used his spare time to work with children at the YMCA. Chapman’s friends watched him become increasingly preoccupied with internal struggles concerning the sinfulness of the “Bad Mark.” He moved around the country, working at various jobs and studying religions in his free time. He was arrested for armed robbery, kidnapping, and possession of drugs. He tried to commit suicide in 1977, and received psychological care. In 1979, he married a travel agent and moved to Hawaii, where he insisted that she never watch television or read newspapers. He frequently stood outside a Church of Scientology and shouted abuse, and month by month he became more irrational, although he kept that side of him hidden from most people. In 1980, he changed the name tag on his security guard’s uniform to read “John Lennon,” and on Oct. 23 he quit his job, signing out as John Lennon.

From that time, it became necessary for Chapman to get rid of the other Lennon. That other Lennon had dropped from the public eye and turned introspective. Chapman wanted the brash Lennon from the old days back again, so he became that Lennon. Chapman first bought a .38-caliber pistol. Then he borrowed $2,500 from a credit union and flew to New York City on Dec. 6, 1980. He began to spend long hours stationed outside the Dakota, the apartment building where Lennon lived with his wife Yoko Ono and their son. On Dec. 8, Lennon emerged to go to a recording studio, and Chapman had him autograph his most recent album, Double Fantasy. Chapman stayed where he was as Lennon and Ono drove off, then turned to continue reading a copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. At 11 p.m. that night, Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota. Chapman called out, “Mr. Lennon.” Lennon looked up and Chapman shot him five times in the chest. Lennon died in a squad car as a patrolman tried to get him to a hospital.

After killing Lennon, Chapman sat down and returned to reading the Salinger novel. He was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. He told the police, “I have a small part in me that cannot understand the world and what goes on in it. I did not want to kill anybody, and I really don’t know why I did…” His lawyer, Jonathan Marks, wanted him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but Chapman told the court that God had told him to confess to murder. He was sentenced on July 24, 1981, to twenty years to life in prison, with a recommendation that he be treated psychiatrically. Even his own attorney asked the judge not to sentence him too lightly. “All reports came to the conclusion that he is not a sane man. It was not a sane crime. It was…a monstrously irrational killing.” Chapman’s only response to the sentencing was to read aloud a passage from The Catcher in the Rye. He was sent to Attica State Prison in upstate New York, where he was put to work as a janitor.

 

Charing Cross Trunk Murder, The, See: Robinson, John.

 

Charlton, Porter, b.1889, Italy. Porter Charlton was the son of Paul Charlton, who served as judge of the territorial court of Puerto Rico. A shy, withdrawn type who suffered from epileptic seizures, Charlton married a divorced woman named Mary Crittenden Scott Castle, the wealthy daughter of a San Francisco coal merchant who was also a minor star of the theater. The fiery Mrs. Castle was considerably older than Porter Charlton, and from the very beginning of their marriage there were quarrels and angry outbursts between them.

On June 10, 1910, a cable reached the U.S. with the news that Charlton had bludgeoned to death his wife with a crowbar while on a European tour, and the remains were found floating in a trunk on Lake Como, near the village of Moltrasio, Italy. The 21-year-old husband readily confessed, explaining that his wife’s uncontrollable temper finally got the best of him. He seized a wooden mallet and had struck her over the head repeatedly. Two weeks later, police detectives arrested Charlton in Hoboken, N.J., as he disembarked from the German liner and onto U.S. shores. He was taken to the Hudson County Jail in Jersey City, where he languished for the next three years, while Italian authorities and the U.S. State Department attempted to resolve the delicate matter of extradition.

The case went before the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that Charlton had to be returned to Italy to stand trial. In August 1913, the prisoner was transported to the jail at Como, Italy, but given the numerous court delays, and the outbreak of WWI, Charlton did not go to trial until Oct. 18, 1915, when he was found Guilty of murder and was sentenced to six years and eight months imprisonment. Given his epileptic conditions, and some lingering doubts about his sanity, Charlton served just twenty-nine days before earning a final release from custody.

 

Charriere, Henri-Antoine (AKA: Papillon), 1907-73, Fr. On the morning of Mar. 26, 1930, 24-year-old Roland Legrand was shot dead on the Boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre, Paris. Legrand was a pork-butcher by trade, who doubled as a pimp. His assailant was Henri Charriere, commonly known as Papillon, because of a bow tie he always wore and a butterfly tattooed on his chest.

Papillon lived off the earnings of Georgette Fourel, a 19-year-old prostitute he lived with in Montmartre. He supplemented his income by receiving and selling stolen goods, and trafficking in drugs. Legrand discussed Charriere’s underworld activities with the police, and so was killed. George S. Goldstein identified Papillon as the murderer. The killer was tried, and on Oct. 28 was sentenced to penal servitude for life. On Dec. 22, 1931, he married Georgette Fourel as part of a strategy to avoid deportment to French Guiana. But the plan failed. Authorities detained him for a year in prison in Caen, then shipped him to Cayenne.

He spent three years in the penitentiary there before he escaped. He hid in a leper colony, then made his way by boat to Venezuela, where he lived among the natives near Maracaibo Bay. When French authorities recaptured Papillon, they sent him to the notorious and supposedly inescapable penal colony on Devil’s Island and kept him in solitary confinement for two years. On his eighth attempt, Papillon escaped from Devil’s Island and paddled his raft made of dried coconuts through shark-infested waters to Venezuela. He settled there, married, and became a restaurateur and Venezuelan citizen.

In 1969, 62-year-old Charriere published Papillon, his memoir of his adventures and escapes. The book became a best-seller, and in 1973 the movie of the same title premiered, starring Steve McQueen as Papillon.

 

Chase, Richard Trenton, 1950-80, U.S. A man who was once found with the blood of a cow covering his naked body confessed during his trial that he had drunk the blood of one of his six murder victims.

Richard Trenton Chase admitted not only to drinking blood, but also to killing six people, five by shooting them to death and then butchering them. The killing rampage occurred between Jan. 23 and 27, 1978, and Chase’s five-month trial began in January 1979. It was in Palo Alto, Calif., after the venue had to be changed from Sacramento because of the widespread publicity. Farris Salamy, the public defender representing Chase, pleaded that Chase was not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury, finding Chase sane, returned a verdict of Guilty on May 8, 1979, after deliberating for six hours over two days. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison on Dec. 26, 1980.

 

Chenault, Marcus Wayne (AKA: Servant Jacob), 1951- , U.S. Just over six years after his son, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death outside a Memphis, Tenn., motel, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., watched, along with 400 others, as his wife, 69-year-old Alberta Williams King, was shot and killed at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., by Marcus Wayne Chenault.

Chenault, a 23-year-old black Ohio State University dropout from Columbus, Ohio, had traveled by Greyhound bus from Dayton, Ohio, to shoot Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., on June 30, 1974. Instead, Chenault shot Mrs. King, daughter of the church’s founder Reverend A.D. Williams, in the face as she was playing the church organ. He then shot in the neck 69-year-old deacon Edward Boykin, who died later at Grady Hospital, and wounded 65-year-old Mrs. Jimmy Mitchell. The gunman yelled, “I’m taking over, I’m taking over,” before church members managed to wrestle Chenault to the floor. He had fired all the bullets in the two handguns he carried. With the shooting spree ended, it was learned that Chenault’s intended victim was only the second target on a list of ten assassinations he had hoped to commit.

In March 1973, Chenault met 70-year-old Hananiah E. Israel, who preached that only by killing all black ministers could black people be free. A month later, Chenault told the Reverend Billy Robinson that he planned to kill the Reverend Howard B. Washington in Akron, but he did not act on the threat. Two weeks prior to his rampage in Atlanta, Chenault had planned to kill the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, whom investigators learned was number one on the gunman’s hit list. A bus ticket to Chicago, where Jackson lives, was found in Chenault’s apartment with the message, “Father’s Day massacre canceled,” written on it. Chenault, who called himself “Servant Jacob,” informed the police that he was on a mission from his god to kill the Reverend King. These statements and the killer’s actions led police to investigate Chenault’s possible connection with the shooting deaths of Dayton, Ohio, ministers 56-year-old William Wright on May 12, 1974, and 29-year-old Eugene Johnson, Sr., on June 3, 1974. His lawyer, Randy Bacote, attempted to enter a plea of no contest, but Judge E.T. Brock entered Not Guilty pleas and Chenault stood trial.

At Chenault’s trial, the defense tried to prove that the killer was insane at the time of the shooting, a contention that prosecutor Lewis Slaton was able to disprove by the testimony of two psychiatrists who stated that Chenault knew the difference between right and wrong. On Sept. 12, 1974, the jury in the court of Judge Luther Alverson took one hour and fifteen minutes to decide that Chenault was Guilty and sentence him to die in the electric chair. Upon hearing the jury’s recommendation for capital punishment, Chenault blew kisses to the jurors and pointed his finger like a gun at Alverson and Slaton.

 

Chigango, Chief, prom. 1923, Rhodesia. In order to appease the Rain Goddess and bring an end to the drought that began in 1922, Chief Chigango ordered that his own son Mandusa be offered as a sacrifice to the great spirit Mwari. The sacrifice may or may not have ended the drought–the day after Mandusa was killed, it began to rain profusely–but it did bring an end to Chigango’s reign as tribal chief.

Like his ancestors, Chigango, the chief of a Mtwara tribe village, believed in and followed the traditions concerning the Rain Goddess. Legend has it that the Mtwara god, Mwari, had given an earlier tribal chief a wife who was to remain a virgin throughout her lifetime. This woman became known as the Rain Goddess, and it was through her that the tribe would ask Mwari to send them rain. If no rain came even after offerings were made to Mwari, then it was a sign that someone had seduced the Rain Goddess, and that person must be sacrificed to Mwari. When the drought continued into January 1923, it was believed that Chigango’s son was the man who had defiled the Rain Goddess, who was personified by a young girl chosen at birth. Instead of trusting members of his own village to carryout the human sacrifice, Chigango called upon another chief, Chiswiti, to handle the affair. The following night Mandusa was taken in his sleep to be burned alive.

Police in Mount Darwin learned of the murder from Mandusa’s younger brother, who feared for his own life in the event that rains did not come. Seven tribesmen were arrested and tried for the murder, including Chigango, Chiswiti, and Chiriseri, a tribal leader. All were found Guilty of murder except Chiswiti, who was acquitted. Because of the circumstances of the crime, the death sentences were commuted.

 

Childers, Jimmy, 1961- , U.S. On July 9, 1978, 17-year-old Jimmy Childers of Pekin, Ill., arrived home late from a date. An argument ensued with his parents that escalated when mention was made of the boy’s intention to marry the girl that winter. The fight ended with three dead at the hands of young Childers.

In a taped confession, Childers admitted killing his stepfather, 42-year-old Robert Rotramel, when the gun he was waving about went off. He then chased after his mother, 37-year-old Nora Rotramel, stabbing her to death with a knife in the kitchen, and finally using the knife to kill his 15-year-old brother, Warren Childers, as he tried to run out the front door. The confession, taken twenty-four hours after the killings, was played in court and convinced the jury to return a verdict of Guilty on Feb. 3, 1979.

Defense attorney Joseph Napoli had argued that Childers was temporarily insane, which was corroborated by two psychiatrists for the defense. However, two prosecution psychiatrists determined the boy to be perfectly capable of distinguishing right from wrong. Although tried as an adult, Childers was too young to receive the death penalty, but Judge James Heiple sentenced the youth to three terms of life imprisonment on Mar. 8, 1979. Childers burst into tears at hearing the sentence, just as he did upon hearing the jury’s verdict.

 

Choi, David Puilum (AKA: Choi; Tsoi Pui), c.1952- , U.S. After allegedly stabbing a person to death in California, David Puilum Choi escaped capture and has since eluded the FBI. The one-time Chinese waiter is known for wearing flashy and trendy clothing as well as prescription glasses. Choi was last seen in San Jose, Calif., where a federal arrest warrant was issued on Nov. 18, 1985. At this writing, Choi is still at large.

 

Christie, Balm, prom. 1973, U.S. Balm Christie, a criminal with a long list of offenses beginning in the 1960s, shot and murdered his wife on Jan. 1, 1973. Earlier charges lodged against Christie included theft, assault and battery, and breaking and entering. Reputedly, Christie’s past criminal activities and the strong objections of his wife’s relatives were partially responsible for the friction within the household. Christie stood trial and was sentenced to prison. Balm Christie lived in the Kentucky-Tennessee mountains.

 

Christie, John Reginald Halliday (AKA: Waddingham), 1898-1953, Brit. One of the most horrific killers in modern British history, Christie was half monster, half human, although in appearance he seemed to be nothing more than a meek-mannered middle-class citizen. Christie lived in a grimy, grubby little house at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill Gate, North Kensington, London. In 1948, Timothy John Evans, his wife Beryl, and baby daughter Geraldine rented the top floor of the Christie house (the Christies lived on the ground floor). On Nov. 5, 1949, Mrs. Evans’ father visited with her and this was the last time she was seen alive. Police conducted a search and, on Dec. 2, 1949, the bodies of Mrs. Evans and her infant were found in a wash house in Rillington Place, both strangled to death. Evans, a 24-year-old, dim-witted truck driver, had walked into the small police station at Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, to inform officers that he had found his wife dead in his apartment and he had placed her body down a drain. After the bodies were found, Evans was returned to London under guard and there he confessed to murdering his wife and child.

Evans was charged with murdering his child, but before he was brought to trial at the Old Bailey, he withdrew his confession. He insisted that Christie had performed the killings. Christie emphatically denied having anything to do with the deaths of Mrs. Evans and her child. Moreover, he and his wife appeared as witnesses for the prosecution and gave evidence that helped to convict Evans. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison on Mar. 9, 1950. Mrs. Christie then disappeared. She was last seen alive on Dec. 12, 1952, and Christie gave nervous explanations for her absence, claiming she was visiting relatives or that she had gone on a vacation. He then left his apartment in early 1953, subletting the place to a couple named Reilly. These people were quickly evicted by the owner of the building, a Jamaican named Beresford Brown, who moved into the Christie residence.

On Mar. 24, 1953, Brown went into the kitchen of the Christie apartment and began looking for a beam behind the wall into which he could screw a bracket for a wall-mounted radio. He tore away a loose piece of wallpaper and discovered an opening in the wall, a sort of large closet that had been covered by a thin sheet of posterboard and then covered with wallpaper. Taking out the board, Brown saw that three bodies had been stuffed inside the hollow area. He immediately called the police. Another body was discovered beneath the floorboards, and officers unearthed the skeletal remains of two more corpses found in the garden. These were easy to detect when an officer noticed that a human bone was propping up a fence and the police merely dug at this spot to find the rest of the remains. All of the bodies and remains were that of women. The corpses found in the closet and the one beneath the floorboards in the front room were for the most part naked, and three had been wrapped in blankets. Contrary to most later reports, there was very little odor from the bodies and there was no “overpowering stench” which led to their discovery. All were dehydrated and the atmospheric conditions in the apartment kept the smell of the dead bodies to a minimum.

The body beneath the floorboards was Mrs. Ethel Christie, whose husband had left 10 Rillington Place three days earlier. Those in the cupboard area were all known prostitutes, Hectorina McLennan, twenty-six; Kathleen Maloney, twenty-six; and Rita Nelson, twenty-five. The remains found in the garden were subsequently identified as those of Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian girl who had been murdered by Christie in 1943, and Muriel Eady, a girl who had worked with Christie at the Ultra Radio Factory in Park Royal in 1944. The shocking story of the mild-mannered mass murderer broke just at the time when police were conducting a nationwide search for Christie. He was found on Mar. 31, 1953, by Constable Ledger as he stood near Putney Bridge, watching a group of children at play. Christie, bald, wearing horn-rimmed glasses over weak eyes, with a flabby, middle-aged body, offered no resistance. He quickly confessed to the murders of the six women, saying that his first victim had been the Fuerst girl, followed by Muriel Eady. Christie stated that he strangled the Fuerst girl while he was having sex with her. He had not murdered for nine years but he suddenly went on a murder spree in late 1952, luring the prostitutes to his apartment when his wife was away and, after killing them, raping the corpses. He detailed his necrophiliac acts, which made him appear to be all the more inhuman. He had murdered his wife on Dec. 14, 1952, Christie said, as an “act of mercy.” He could no longer bear to witness her “convulsive attacks”–she suffered from some sort of undefined malady–and so, when she went into one of her fits while they were still in bed, Christie grabbed one of her stockings, rolled over, and strangled her with it.

Sir Francis Camps, one of England’s most brilliant pathologists, examined Christie and his murders in minute detail. He learned that when Christie had brought his prostitute victims to his flat, he would ply the women with liquor. When they were drunk, he’d get them to sit in a chair with a canopy, under which he had affixed a gas pipe. He would then turn on the gas, and, when they were unconscious, strangle the women, then rape them. The trick with the gas explained the carbon monoxide Camps found in the blood of the three women hidden in the kitchen enclosure. But there were strange sexual undertones to this case which puzzled Camps. He found that all three prostitutes were naked, but were wearing what amounted to handmade diapers. Semen had been found in them, as well as in an old pair of Christie’s shoes, indicating that he had ejaculated following the murder-rapes. A tin can was found in the kitchen enclosure, and inside of this was found four separate tufts of pubic hair which Christie had plucked from his victims and preserved, but for what purpose Camps could not determine.

Camps probed deeper into the sexual mysteries of John Reginald Halliday Christie, discovering that the myopic, always frail Christie had had psychological problems rooted in childhood. Born in Boothstown, Yorkshire, in April 1898, the son of carpet designer Ernest Christie, and one of seven children, Christie was treated with unloving harshness by his martinet father. He was disciplined often for the slightest infractions. Introverted, weak, the boy was labeled a “sissy” by his classmates who made fun of his poor eyesight. He took to stealing small things which caused him to be returned home by constables. His father, at these times, responded with the typical Victorian action, a beating. At the age of fifteen in 1913, Christie quit school and took a job clerking for the Halifax Borough Police, but he was fired when he was suspected of stealing small items. About this time, Christie was seduced by an older girl who later made fun of him when he could not finish the sex act. The girl spread the story and Christie was the butt of sex jokes among his peers who called him “Can’t Do It Christie.” He was confined at home for a time, ill again. Christie’s confession was punctuated repeatedly by statements claiming his lifelong illnesses, and it was apparent to Camps that he was a confirmed hypochondriac.

Following a severe bout with pneumonia, Christie claimed, he went to France in 1915, serving in the trenches until he was blown out of a trench and inhaled mustard gas, which caused him to go blind for several months and lose his voice for three years. This was attributed to hysteria and not physical damage received when the artillery shell blew him out of a trench. Whenever Christie was excited after that, he would lose his voice or it would rise to a high whine. In 1920, Christie met and married his wife Ethel, a union which produced no children. Christie claimed that he did not have sex with his wife for two years following the marriage and continued to have a pervasive feeling of inadequacy. Following a quarrel with his wife in 1923, the couple separated and Christie lost his voice completely, he claimed.

Bad luck followed Christie wherever he went, he said in his confession. In 1934, a hit-and-run driver knocked him down, injuring his head, knee, and collar bone. Worse luck, most brought about by Christie himself, dogged his work life. He seldom kept a steady job, the longest being five years while working as a clerk for a transport company. He was a postal employee at one time, but it was proved that he stole money orders and he was sent to prison for seven months. During his 1923 separation from his wife, Christie was imprisoned briefly for false pretense; he had falsified documents which claimed that he was a rich man at one time but had lost his money. He went to Brixton and Battersea and there put on the air of a once-wealthy man who was down on his luck. When a woman rebuffed his advances, Christie hit her on the head with a cricket bat and was arrested and sent to prison once more.

During WWII, Christie was a member of the War Reserve Police, a blackout warden who marched about his neighborhood pumped up with authority. He delighted in turning in those who ignored blackout rules. In 1943, his wife went to visit relatives in Sheffield, and it was at this time that Christie committed his first murder, bringing Ruth Fuerst home with him and murdering her, burying her corpse in the back yard. Although Christie admitted to murdering the six women, he was contradictory about Mrs. Evans and her child. He claimed that he found Mrs. Evans unconscious in her flat after she had quarreled with her husband about “a blonde woman.” She had tried to commit suicide by turning on the gas, Christie said. He gave her a cup of tea and told her to calm down.

Mrs. Evans tried to kill herself once more, Christie said, and he again came to her rescue. Then she said she was pregnant and Christie, who had no medical knowledge, offered to perform the abortion she desired. She panicked when he was applying the gas to make her unconscious prior to the operation and thus died. He varied this tale by saying that Mrs. Evans, despondent over her husband’s sexual escapades, asked Christie if he would kill her since she had botched two other suicide attempts. She said he could have sexual intercourse with her, Christie claimed, if he would but help her die. He strangled her, Christie said at one point, and then had sexual intercourse with her corpse. When Evans returned home, Christie told him that she had gassed herself and that he had best flee since authorities would think Evans murdered his wife. Evans then reportedly murdered his child and sold off the household furniture before fleeing. His confusing statements throughout his trial concerning the death of the Evans child and his wife are impossible to decipher at this time.

Following the deaths of the three prostitutes, Christie said he sold his wife’s wedding ring and the household furniture, and wandered about London with a total loss of memory. When he was arrested, he said, he had been sleeping in a cheap hotel. At the time he looked like a common tramp with dirty clothes, unshaven beard, and empty pockets. Christie was tried at the Old Bailey for three days, June 22-25, 1953, before Justice Fennemore. The killer was prosecuted by Sir Lionel Heald, then attorney general, and defended by Derek Curtis Bennett. Little defense could be offered on Christie’s behalf, so Bennett opted to plead his client insane. Several medical experts examined Christie and testified that he was sane. The jury returned a verdict of Guilty and Christie was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 15, 1953.

The conviction and execution of the monster Christie left many believing that Timothy Evans’ conviction and hanging was a gross miscarriage of justice, that he had been executed for a crime that Christie himself had committed, the murder of Mrs. Beryl Evans, although considerable doubt exists that Christie killed the Evans child. This is the one murder that he said he did not commit, and the one murder that Evans admitted committing. The Evans case remains a baffling mystery, which is exactly the way Christie wanted it, for he in no way cleared up the Evans murders but, through his whining statements, seemed to add even more confusion as to who was the real killer of Mrs. Evans and her child. Such were Christie’s strange perversions that he would be content to go to the hangman knowing that he had created a lingering doubt in the minds of those who sent Timothy Evans to his death. From the grave, Christie would nag the consciences of good men, whereas he was without conscience altogether.

 

Christofi, Styllou, 1900-54, Brit. A Greek Cypriot peasant woman was charged in 1924 with murdering her mother-in-law by jamming a burning stick down her throat, but a jury acquitted her. The woman, Mrs. Styllou Christofi, continued to live with her husband and to raise her son, Stavros Christofi, in the island’s matriarchal tradition.

In 1937, Stavros went to England, where he soon married a German refugee named Hella Bleicher. They had three children, and by July 1953, Mrs. Christofi had saved enough money to visit them in England. She moved into Stavros’ Hampstead apartment and tried to take charge of his life. She was particularly scathing about Hella and the way she spent money. Within days, Hella, who was to take the children to visit her parents in Germany, told her husband that if his mother was there on her return, she would leave him.

That evening, July 29, 1954, as Hella prepared to take a bath in the basement apartment, Mrs. Christofi grabbed a heavy ash plate from the stove and rushed into the bathroom, where she slammed it down on her daughter-in-law’s head. She then dragged her unconscious into the kitchen, where she strangled her to death with a scarf. To hide the crime, she poured kerosene over the corpse and tried to set fire to it. A neighbor, a John Young, happened to look down through the glass doors into the basement entrance to the kitchen. He saw the woman working with the fire but, assuming that the waxy-looking figure on the floor was a mannequin, he went on his way. Soon thereafter, Mrs. Christofi began to fear that the flames were getting out of control. She ran out into the street and stopped a car, begging, “Please come! Fire burning, children sleeping!” Mr. and Mrs. Burstoff ran into the kitchen, saw blood on the floor, the smoldering figure, and called the police.

Mrs. Christofi tried to tell the constable that she had been wakened in the night and found Hella burning, but her bed had not been slept in and she inadvertently added, “My son married Germany girl he like, plenty clothes, plenty shoes, babies going to Germany.” Mrs. Christofi was charged with murder. Her attorney tried to persuade her to plead insanity, especially in light of the earlier death of her mother-in-law, but she would not. She was convicted of murder and executed on Dec. 13, 1954.

 

Chung Yi Miao, 1900-28, Brit. Chung Yi Miao, a 28-year-old Chinese-American, married Wai Sheung Siu, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Hong Kong, in New York in May 1928. Their whirlwind courtship and subsequent marriage ended in murder during a two-month honeymoon trip abroad in June. After a brief stop in Edinburgh, the couple continued on to England where they desired to tour the English Lake District. They arrived at the Grange-In-Borrowdale Gates Hotel, Cumberland on June 18, 1928.

The next day the couple went out for a walk, but the husband returned to his hotel alone with the explanation that Wai Sheung had gone on toward Keswick to do some shopping. When she did not return that night he made inquiries with the police. By this time a local farmer had notified constables from the Southport Borough station that he had found a young woman lying dead under a tree. She was clad in a very expensive fur coat.

When questioned by police at his hotel room, Chung revealed more information than what he would have otherwise known if he had not been mixed up in her death. A search of his suitcase turned up two rolls of undeveloped film. When the contents were emptied out, Wai Sheung’s diamond wedding ring and a diamond solitaire tumbled out. It was the same jewelry she had been wearing when she left the hotel. The young law student was charged with murder and placed on trial at the Carlisle Assizes on Nov. 22, 1928. The trial lasted just three days, after which a Guilty verdict was returned. Chung Miao was hanged at the Strangeways Jail in Manchester on Dec. 6, 1928. The motive for the murder, according to a published article in the Sunday Express of Mar. 24, 1929, was Wai Sheung’s inability to bear her husband children.

 

Church, Harvey, 1898-1922, U.S. Guards carried Harvey Church to the gallows in a kitchen chair. He could neither move nor speak, and in his last days was force-fed through a tube. Church, according to psychiatrists, became paralyzed with fear, when, on Dec. 21, 1921, Judge John R. Caverly had pronounced the death sentence. If he was trying to cheat the hangman, it did not work.

Known as the ‘’Twin-Six’’ murderer, Church, at 135 pounds, seemed incapable of killing–least of all the two burly car salesmen he murdered on Sept. 9, 1921. Church lived on the West Side with his aging mother, working as a brakeman for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway.

At 4 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 10, a black Packard sedan stopped on the Lake Street bridge over the Des Plaines River between west suburban Maywood and River Forest. The driver of the car was observed dropping a large weighted object over the stone railing and into the river. Thinking it was just a prank, the pedestrians who witnessed it continued on. Later that morning, 10-year-old William Baker of nearby Melrose Park identified the mysterious object as a man. With a grappling hook, the body was fished out by suburban police.

They found a cord wrapped around the victim’s neck and severe cuts on the skull. The victim’s hands were shackled. Chicago police were contacted and an effort was made to identify the large-boned man. The mystery was solved when the Chicago sales office of the Packard Automobile Company reported that two salesmen–Bernard J. Daugherty and Carl Ausmus–were missing after selling a car to Harvey Church of West Fulton Street. A company employee, Edward Skelba, was sent to locate the salesmen, but all he found was a note tied to the steering wheel of a roadster. It read: “Ed, go back to office. Will come in later.”

Church had just purchased a twin-six Packard for $5,400, explaning that the car was for his father in Adams, Wis. He asked the two salesmen to accompany him to the Madison-Kedzie State Bank where he would withdraw the money, but first he had to get his passbook at home.

Daugherty, a former football star and war hero, followed Church into the basement while Ausmus waited outside. In the basement, Church pulled a gun on the salesman, handcuffed him, and strangled him with a rope. He then beat him with a baseball bat.

He followed the same procedure with Ausmus, who entered the house to see about the delay. Church then buried Ausmus in a shallow grave in the garage, beneath the broken-down Harroun automobile he wanted to replace, and, early next morning, dropped the mangled body of Daugherty into the river.

When police detectives entered the Fulton Street house, Church was out joyriding with his mother. The baseball bat, a hatchet, and a trail of blood led the police to where Ausmus’ body had been buried hours earlier. The salesmen’s hats were found on the floor. Police worked through the night excavating the yard.

Mother and son were located in Adams, Wis. When presented with the evidence, the old woman fainted, but she would later stand by her son’s alibi. “My mother was with me at the time. She saw the payment,” Church said.

How such a small man alone could easily overpower two men, one a former athlete, baffled police. They were convinced Church had help in committing the crime, but he neither named accomplices nor confessed.

Back in Chicago, Church was interrogated but he refused to bend. The police, in frustration, took him back to the scene of the crime, forced him to his hands and knees, and pressed his face into the empty gravesite. Only later, upon seeing the corpse, did Church finally crack. He claimed that Leon Parks and Clarence Wilder had helped him. The two men, it turned out, were clearly not involved.

Church then said he killed the men out of fear, that a mysterious telephone caller threatened to kill his father unless he produced a new car before Sept. 10. Nonetheless, despite expert testimony that he was deranged, Harvey Church was convicted of the “twin-six” murders. During the trial, he slipped into a stupor, impervious to all efforts to rouse him–even being jabbed with needles and touched on the nose with a lighted cigar evoked no response.

Defense attorneys argued for a new trial, but Judge Kickham Scanlan sustained the death sentence. At the last minute, attorneys Frank Tyrrell and J.C. McGloon ran from court to court frantically trying to procure a written order. They found Judge Caverly and pleaded for a little more time, but the judge declined, at the moment when guards were carrying Church from his cell in a kitchen chair.

 

Cibuku, Gazi, 1947- , U.S. Numerous plastic bags strewn about a field in Detroit, Mich., led to the arrest of a 23-year-old cook from Albania. Inside the bags were the remains of 25-year-old Sandra Sue Snell, whose body was identified from fingerprints in police files taken from a check she had bounced in December 1969, the year before her death.

The cook, Gazi Cibuku, was arrested along with his roommate and fellow countryman, 21-year-old Accra Khan. Khan was arrested in New York. Cibuku admitted that he shot Snell to death after she had attacked him with a knife during a fight over money. He denied dismembering the woman’s body, which he said he had placed in a closet, accusing Khan of doing so. Khan, in turn, testified that he had returned from work one evening to find Snell’s body in the closet, and two nights later noticed that her body had been cut up and placed into four bags. First-degree murder charges against Khan were dismissed by the judge, but Cibuku was sentenced to forty years in prison.

 

Ciucci, Vincent, 1925-62, U.S. Thinking to rid himself of a burdensome family, Vincent Ciucci, on the night of Dec. 4, 1953, chloroformed his wife Anne and three children, then shot each one in the head. He then set fire to his Chicago, Ill., apartment, a three-room affair which was behind his grocery store. He intended to collect the insurance money and marry another woman. Ciucci remained in the burning apartment until the firemen arrived. He then stumbled outside, pretending to be overcome with smoke, feigning surprise that his entire family was dead. The murder plan was idiotic. Ciucci had ignored the basic routine of medical examiners, who soon reported that the Ciucci family members had been shot in the head. He believed that the burned flesh of his victims would hide the bullet wounds.

Detectives confronted Ciucci, but he denied having anything to do with the killings. “I admit that I am a gambler,” he blurted at police headquarters, “and I like to fool around with women, but I wouldn’t do a thing like that. How could a man kill his own children? He would kill himself instead!” He refused to admit his guilt, even stating at his trial that unknown killers had framed him by sneaking into his apartment, shooting his wife and children to death and then setting the house on fire. When asked how he could not have heard four shots being fired, Ciucci mumbled something about being a “heavy sleeper.” Ciucci was convicted and given a death sentence. After a number of appeals, Ciucci was sent to the electric chair in 1962.

 

Clark, David Scott, 1954- , U.S. Believing that his roommate was trying to steal his tree-trimming business from him, David Scott Clark murdered the man on Christmas Day 1978. The next day al but the torso of 27-year-old Lynn Allen Lizer was recovered from three trash containers in Lake Worth, Fla.

Clark confessed to dismembering Lizer, whose blood was discovered in the apartment and in Clark’s car, under a plea-bargain agreement with prosecutors, whereby he was convicted in March 1981, of second-degree, rather than first-degree, murder. Clark was sentenced to life imprisonment, and had served more than seven and one-half years as a model prisoner before he escaped on Dec. 27, 1988. Because of Clark’s prison record, he had been transferred to the Brooksville Road Prison, designed for inmates unlikely to escape or pose a threat of danger. His escape came while he and four other prisoners, watched by an unarmed guard, were mowing the grass alongside the road. Clark ignored the guard’s commands to come back and fled into the woods.

 

Clark, Douglas Daniel (AKA: The Sunset Slayer), 1959- , and Bundy, Carol, 1943- , U.S. Carol Mary Bundy was anxious to please the depraved sexual fantasies of her young lover, Daniel Clark. In 1980, Clark and Bundy committed a series of grisly sex murders in Los Angeles. Bundy would cruise the Sunset Strip in search of blonde prostitutes for Clark to allegedly shoot and then engage in sexual acts with the corpse.

By his own estimate, Clark, a former factory worker, killed fifty women. According to Bundy, he hoped to double that figure before his arrest on Aug. 11, 1980. No one could say with absolute certainty just how many women he killed, but Clark was officially charged with six murders when his trial opened in Los Angeles in January 1983. On Feb. 15 the jury sentenced him to die in the gas chamber. He remains on Death Row. Bundy, a former Burbank nurse and the mother of two children, was sentenced to fifty-two years in prison for murdering her former lover John Robert Murray in 1980, and then decapitating him.

 

Clark, Joseph Reginald Victor (AKA: Kennedy), c.1907-29, Brit. Upon his return to England in 1927, after living with relatives in the U.S., Joseph Reginald Victor Clark became a parasite on women. He had a number of intimate relations with women who willingly gave him money. Clark persuaded one to give him money so that she could have a well-dressed escort; another, in Nova Scotia, regularly sent him cash; and at one point, he dated four sisters in Liverpool, England, without any of them knowing about the others until he tried to marry the youngest girl by using the birth certificate of the eldest sister. In fury at the failure of his plan, Clark tried to strangle the youngest sister with a pajama belt. No charges were brought for the assault.

Clark was using the last name of Kennedy when he met Alice Fontaine and became a lodger at her mother’s home in Liverpool, living rent-free and constantly borrowing money. But when Fontaine discovered a letter from one of Clark’s former girlfriends, she told him to leave. He returned, however, in October 1928, and strangled Alice Fontaine’s mother, and again tried to use a pajama belt to murder his former sweetheart. At the Liverpool Assizes Court on Feb. 3, 1929, Clark was tried for murder. His lawyer, Basil Nield, pleaded insanity for Clark, but the defendant chose to plead guilty and the trial was over. Only four-and-one-half minutes had elapsed from the opening of the trial till the close when Clark was sentenced to death–one of the quickest murder trials on record.

 

Clark, Lorraine, 1926- , U.S. Lorraine and Melvin Clark began to draw apart after ten years of marriage. The night of Apr. 10, 1954, Melvin came home early and found his wife in bed with another man. Lorraine had been active in a new pastime in Amesbury, Mass.–wife swapping. A group would get together, throw their house keys in a bowl, and then each choose a key and go with its owner for the evening. When Melvin found his wife with her lover, the couple quarreled. Lorraine Clark ended by stabbing her husband with a knitting needle. That gave her time to grab the gun she kept at their lakeside home, and she shot Melvin twice.

When Lorraine realized that she had killed her husband, she set about methodically disposing of the body. She trussed it in chicken wire to make a small parcel. After transporting it by car to the Merrimack River, she tied weights to it and dumped it from a bridge. Assuming that the motion of the tidal river would carry the corpse out to sea, Lorraine pretended to friends and neighbors that her husband had left after a major quarrel. She backed up this story by suing Melvin for divorce on grounds of cruelty. But on June 2, Melvin’s badly decomposed body was found in the marshlands by a birdwatcher, and it was identified by its fingerprints.

When the police asked Lorraine for an explanation of the bullet holes in her husband’s body, she confessed to killing him. Although she was indicted for first-degree murder, she was found Guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

 

Clark, Michael, 1949-65, U.S. A 16-year-old boy decided to play “king of the hill” overlooking a California freeway north of Los Angeles, where Mexican bandit Solomon Pico had fired at stagecoaches more than a century ago. Clark’s “game,” however, played in Spring 1965, involved his father’s powerful Swedish Mauser deer rifle and armor-piercing bullets aimed at unsuspecting drivers.

Michael Clark stole his family’s Cadillac and drove about 150 miles north along the California coastline to just outside Santa Maria, where he rammed the car into a guard rail on Route 101. From a vantage point on top of a nearby hill, Clark opened fire at 6 a.m. the next morning on the freeway below. He missed the first driver but shot the second, William Reida, through the neck, seriously wounding him. Another shot hit Reida’s 5-year-old son, Kevin Reida, in the head and killed him. Reida’s wife managed to flag down two passing cars, but Clark shot and killed each driver before they could help the woman. While Mrs. Reida, who did not know how to drive, steered the car down the road, Clark continued to shoot at passing motorists. No one else was killed, but three others, including a police officer, were wounded by bullets, and six others were struck by flying glass. At 8:30 a.m., the siege came to an end as police and civilians closed in on Clark. Clark yelled, “Come and get me,” then pointed the rifle at his forehead and fired. It was never determined why a seemingly normal and happy youth had gone berserk.

 

Clark, Dr. Ronald E., c.1913- , U.S. Dr. Ronald Clark was granted a license to practice medicine in the state of Michigan in 1954. Four years later, his wife committed him to the state mental hospital following a series of incidents that endangered the lives of several of his female patients. The same year that Dr. Clark opened his practice, he was accused of raping two women after giving them an anesthetic. A third woman complained to the police that Clark had performed an unauthorized abortion on her.

After two and a half months in the state hospital, Clark was permitted to return to his practice in Farmington Township near Detroit, but the complaints continued. By the time of his arrest on Nov. 16, 1967, Ronald Clark had had his license revoked four times, once for what officials called “gross moral conduct,” twice for “moral turpitude,” and a fourth time for unspecified charges. Three patients died in Clark’s office from drug overdoses, and two girls, aged eleven and fifteen, were molested. Yet the Michigan State Board of Registration had reinstated Clark in each instance.

On Nov. 3, 1967, a policeman found the body of Mrs. Grace Neil, forty-three, in Dr. Clark’s office after he noticed an illegally parked hearse outside. Neil had worked for Clark as a part-time office assistant. Her death was the result of a lethal dose of sodium pentothal that Dr. Clark administered. It was the second time in less than a year that one of Clark’s female employees died under mysterious circumstances. On Mar. 20, 63-year-old Hannah Bowerbank of Detroit also died from a drug overdose.

Dr. Clark was arrested on Nov. 16, 1967, outside Port Austin, Mich., 125 miles from Detroit. He was captured in deep snow after a bloodhound was put on his trail. Oakland County prosecutor S. Jerome Bronson announced that his office would investigate six other deaths that might have been linked to “therapeutic misadventure” on the part of Dr. Clark.

Clark was charged with manslaughter and held on a $50,000 bond, but after considering the evidence in the case of Mrs. Bowerbank, the judge ordered the defendant arraigned on first-degree murder charges. In a plea-bargaining arrangement engineered by defense attorney Philip E. Rowston, Dr. Clark offered to plead guilty to manslaughter to reduce the severity of sentence. He received three to fifteen years at the state prison in Southern Michigan.

 

Clarke, Philmore, 1918- , U.S. A rejected lover murdered his ex-girlfriend and dumped the body in the Anacostia River where it was laden with black silica slag.

Philmore Clarke, a 40-year-old carpenter, was dating a divorcee, Ruth Reeves, a 38-year-old elevator operator who worked in Washington, D.C., at the time she cut off her relationship with him and began seeing another man. Enraged, Clarke strangled Reeves on Sept. 7, 1958, left the body in her house, and then visited another girlfriend, who provided his alibi that night. Slipping out of her house, he then picked up the body, attached concrete weights to it, and dumped it in the river.

A building engineer where Reeves worked noticed a newspaper article about an unidentified body found on Sept. 8 in the Anacostia River. When she failed to show up for work, he notified police. Police found Clarke’s picture at Reeves’s home, and, in a search of his residence, they discovered baling wire and holes where slabs of concrete had been removed from the front of the house, materials identical to the concrete slab and wire fastened to the dead woman’s leg. On Sept. 9, Clarke was arrested, but he refused to confess. However, the police case against Clarke grew stronger after black silica slag, a residue from industrial furnaces, was found on Clarke’s shoes, in the car he drove, and on Reeves’s clothing. Police also learned that a power company’s refuse containing slag had been put on the road near where the body was found.

Clarke was tried on Dec. 9, and convicted of second-degree murder. He received a five-to twenty-five-year sentence.

 

Clements, Dr. Robert George, 1890-1947, Brit. At first, the examining physicians at the Astley Nursing Home in Southport, Lancashire concluded that the fourth Mrs. Clements died from myeloid leukemia. But Dr. Andrew Brown, the Staff Surgeon, noticed the “pin-point” positioning of the pupils of her eye–an indication of morphine poisoning. Thus, the death of wealthy heiress Amy Victoria Burnett Clements on May 27, 1947 ended the murder spree of husband George, a Belfast doctor who belonged to the Royal College of Surgeons.

During a thirty-five-year span, Dr. Clements married and killed four wives, three of whom were quite wealthy. In 1912 he joined hands with Edyth Anna Mercier, who expired in 1920, about the same time as her fortune. A year later, he married Mary McLeery, who lasted until 1925 when her death was occasioned by what Dr. Clements described as endocarditis. Katherine Burke, his third wife, was the only poor woman in the group. The third Mrs. Clements died in 1939 from cancer, arousing suspicion of the police. Before an autopsy could be conducted, the body was cremated.

The police concluded that Clements had turned his fourth wife into a morphine addict. A second postmortem examination was ordered, and the examiners concluded that she had been poisoned. When the police arrived at his Southport home, they found Clements dead. He had poisoned himself with cyanide, leaving behind a note which read in part: “To whom it may concern…I can no longer tolerate the diabolical insults to which I have been recently exposed.”

 

Clutter Family Killings, See: Hickock, Richard Eugene.

 

Codarre, Edwin, 1930- , U.S. When 13-year-old Edwin Codarre of New York City was led from the courtroom to begin his sentence at Sing Sing Prison, he wore long pants for the first time since the trial began.

Codarre murdered 10-year-old Elizabeth Voigt on a road near Fishkill, N.Y. Her body was found the next day partially concealed under a pile of brush. She had been sexually assaulted and bludgeoned to death.

Elizabeth’s parents owned a dairy farm near a Kiwanis Boys Farm Camp where their son Arno was spending the summer, along with boys from the city, including Edwin Codarre. John Horton, a 70-year-old neighbor, saw Edwin walking along the road where the corpse was found. He led detectives to the camp.

Codarre was arrested on Aug. 14, 1943, after breaking down under questioning. He admitted that he sexually assaulted Elizabeth as they walked through a secluded area. A blow to the larynx with a large stone caused her death. Codarre said they were looking for Arno at the time.

When the case went to trial in November 1943, Edwin Codarre pleaded not guilty, but later changed his plea to guilty in hopes of a reduced sentence. Judge J. Gordon Flannery of Dutchess County sentenced him to thirty years, of which he served nearly twenty-three before his parole on July 26, 1966.

 

Coetzee, Jacobus Hendrik, prom. 1935, S. Afri. A police officer with a bright career was sent to investigate the murder of a pregnant girl, a murder he himself had committed on Jan. 31, 1935.

The victim, Gertrina Petrusina Opperman, worked as a nurse at a farm 126 miles from Pretoria. She met Jacobus Hendrik Coetzee, a detective sergeant with the Railway Police, at a local dance in Summer 1934. One night two weeks later, on July 17, her employer discovered them together in bed. Opperman became pregnant, and Coetzee wrote her a letter two days before her death which said, “…Everything is still arranged. We will then talk.”

The girl’s body was found, bruised and with a bullet wound to the head, nineteen miles from Pretoria. The baby, which had been due in February, was born just before she died, but it did not survive. Alerted to the murder, Coetzee and another officer went to investigate. When Opperman’s employer heard about the murder, he called the police, thinking it might be the nurse. He identified the body and turned over the damning letter. Coetzee was arrested on Feb. 3, and tried on murder charges in May 1935. During the trial, he said that although he was not the baby’s father, he had offered to support it. The jury found Coetzee Guilty but recommended mercy because the girl had falsely tried to pin him with paternity. Coetzee was sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor for life. He was released on Feb. 25, 1947.

 

Coffelt, Elijah, prom. 1947, U.S. Elijah Coffelt shot his 21-year-old nephew, killing him, because they both liked the same woman. Both men were allegedly drinking at the time. Coffelt then turned himself in to police in Washington, Ky. In November 1947, he was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to life imprisonment.

 

Cohen, Ronald John Vivian, 1929- , s. Afri. Ronald Cohen was a self-made man. The 41-year-old millionaire owned and operated a lucrative finance company that bankrolled various South African building projects. In 1963, he married for the second time. His wife Susan Cohen was considerably younger, but she ran the affairs of the Cohen household in a competent manner. Seven years later, in a moment of insanity, Ronald killed his young bride.

The murder occurred on Apr. 5, 1970. Cohen roused his housekeeper from a deep sleep to tell her that a home invader had assaulted them, and that Susan was dead. The police found no signs of upheaval that bore out the presence of an intruder. Further, there were scratches on Cohen’s arms which indicated that he was the assailant Susan had unsuccessfully tried to fend off.

There was no evidence of rape or robbery, therefore police concluded that Cohen’s motive was purely rage. Arrested and tried in Cape Town, Cohen pleaded loss of memory and an anguished mental state for his actions. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison under the terms of the “diminished responsibility’’ statutes.

 

Colby, Robert A., 1922- , Ger. In June 1945, Robert Colby, twenty-three, of Geetingsville, Ind., was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army. On June 10, he went AWOL and was found near Wiesbaden, Germany, outside his unit’s restricted area. His company commander, Captain Richard J. Brown, directed that he be punished with four days at hard labor after training hours. That evening, Colby worked until 10 p.m., and then went to his tent and got a rifle. Going to the officer’s area, he shot Captain Brown and First Lieutenant Donald H. Wade, firing four times at the men. Both men died within an hour. Colby then turned over his rifle to a sergeant, saying, “I shot the old man, but didn’t want to shoot the lieutenant.”

Colby was tried by a general court-martial on June 23 and sentenced to death. The sentence was approved by a divisional commander and by General Dwight D. Eisenhower on Aug. 29. In December 1945, Colby’s sentence was commuted to life at hard labor by General Joseph T. McNarney, commander of the U.S. forces in Europe.

 

Collins, James Thomas, 1900- , Brit. On June 13, 1926, 69-year-old grandmother Janie Tremayne Swift, her 35-year-old daughter Janie Stemp, and her 13-year-old granddaughter Peggy Stemp were picnicking in King’s Woods near Ashford when a serviceman approached them with a rifle and shot all three to death. The 26-year-old army private, James Thomas Collins, picked up the body of Peggy Stemp, carried it to their car parked nearby, and dumped the corpse in a ditch several miles down the highway.

London police later received an anonymous telephone call from a man who told them they could find three badly injured bodies near the road between Ashford and Chatham. The unknown caller was James Thomas Collins. When police arrived at the picnic site, Swift still held in her hand the sandwich she had been eating the moment she died.

Collins was taken into custody in London after he pulled his gun on a policeman and engaged others in a chase and shootout. Filled with remorse, he later confessed to shooting the three women.

Collins was convicted but determined insane. Presiding Justice John Anthony Hawke sentenced him to Broadmoor hospital for the mentally insane.

 

Collins, John Norman (AKA: The Ypsilanti Ripper), 1947- , U.S. Between July 1967 and July 1969, seven young women were found raped and murdered near the campus of the University of Michigan. The communities of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti recoiled in horror. Before the identity of the killer was learned, police officials desperate for information brought in European psychic Peter Hurkos to lend his talents to the investigation.

The killing rampage began on July 10, 1967, when Mary Fleszar, a student at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), disappeared. Her mutilated body was found on Aug. 7 by two teenagers in Superior Township. The killer struck again on July 1, 1968, when 20-year-old Joan Schell disappeared after accepting a ride from a stranger driving a red car. Her body was found five days later by construction workers in Ann Arbor. It, too, bore evidence of sexual assault. In 1969, the unknown killer, no doubt encouraged by the lack of progress in the police investigation, stepped up his attacks. Between March and June, four more women were killed: Jane Mixer, a student at EMU; Maralynn Skelton, who was reputed to be a drug abuser; Dawn Basom, thirteen; and Alice Elizabeth Kalom, a recent college graduate. Peter Hurkos entered the investigation at this point. While he could not positively identify the killer, he guessed that the man was about twenty-five, heavily built, and would strike again.

He did, one more time. On July 26, the body of Karen Sue Beineman, an 18-year-old freshman at EMU, was found near a wooded gully. Eyewitnesses reported that Beineman had accepted a ride from a man on a motorcycle three days earlier. The police checked the available leads and identified 22-year-old John Norman Collins of Center Line, Mich., who attended classes at EMU. His aberrant behavior was well known. An average student, Collins was preoccupied with women. One of his girlfriends said he was oversexed. He was positively identified as the “Ripper” when police found hair clippings that matched those found in the briefs of the last victim, Karen Beineman. The suspect had recently cut the hair of the children of State Police Sergeant David Leik. Collins was the nephew of Officer Leik’s wife. He was arrested on July 31, 1969.

Described as a “bondage freak” who had fantasized about torturing women for years, Collins was convicted of murder in Ann Arbor on Aug. 19, 1970, and was sentenced to life imprisonment by Judge John W. Conlin. “I know my son didn’t do it,” sobbed Mrs. Loretta Collins, who had mortgaged her home to pay for her boy’s defense.

 

Collins, Melvin (AKA: Bad Boy), 1910-48, U.S. Melvin Collins had already stabbed his brother and served two terms in a Virginia state penitentiary for two shooting incidents when, in November 1948, he went on a shooting spree that wounded three people and left seven dead, including one police officer.

Collins had recently moved to Chester, Pa., where he rented a room in a downtown boarding house. One morning, he leaned out the window of his second-story room and began firing his rifle at the pedestrians below. One man was dead before police Detective Elery Purnsley returned fire from across the street. Collins gunned down Detective Purnsley as pedestrians scattered, running for cover. When curiosity seekers ran to windows to see what the commotion was about, Collins picked off additional victims from open windows and balconies.

Over seventy-five officers arrived on the scene soon after the shooting began. Collins barricaded himself in the apartment and continued firing at the officers. They responded by riddling Collins’ building with heavy gunfire and lobbing some twenty canisters of tear gas through his open window. When Collins ceased firing, police entered the building. As they forced his door open, he shot himself through the roof of the mouth.

 

Columbo, Patricia, 1957- , and DeLuca, Frank, 1938- , U.S. At eighteen, Patty Columbo went to work for an Elk Grove Village, Ill., pharmacy. She and the pharmacist, 38-year-old Frank DeLuca, quickly fell in love and were soon sharing an apartment, despite the fact that DeLuca had a wife and five children. But Patty wanted her parents to approve of the relationship, which they refused to do. Frank Columbo, forty-three, was so angered by the situation that he accosted DeLuca in front of his pharmacy, jammed the butt of a rifle into his mouth, and broke his teeth. Patty began to worry that perhaps her angry parents would disinherit her.

In October 1975, Patty Columbo met Lanyon Mitchell, an employee of the Cook County sheriff’s office. Within days, she convinced him and his friend, Roman Sobcynski, former deputy sheriff, to kill her parents in return for sexual favors. She joined in orgies with them for several months as they continued to bring up reasons why they could not keep their part of the bargain. First they demanded photos of the would-be victims, then floor plans of the Columbos’ house, then money that they knew she could not provide. Finally, on May 4, 1976, Patty and DeLuca went to her parents’ house and did the deed themselves. Three days later, neighbors called the police, who found Frank Columbo shot four times and with his head crushed; Mary Columbo, shot between the eyes; and Patty’s younger brother, Michael Columbo, stabbed eighty-four times.

The day after the murder, Frank DeLuca went to work and proudly told his employees about the deed as he washed his bloodstained clothing, but he threatened their lives and their children’s lives if they told anyone. Patty told anyone who would listen that she was certain that the murders had been done by wild kids high on drugs. But the police found on the steering wheel of Frank Columbo’s car the print of a three-fingered hand. Frank DeLuca had only three fingers on one hand, the result of a skydiving accident. A friend of Patty’s told the police about Lanyon Mitchell, who told them the whole story. Patty Columbo and Frank DeLuca were arrested for murder. Their 1977 trial lasted six weeks, during which Patty tried to distract the jury with her attractive body. On July 1, 1977, the jury found the couple Guilty of three counts of murder. They were each sentenced to two hundred to three hundred years in prison. At the Dwight (Ill.) Correctional Center, two years later, Patty Columbo was accused of arranging sexual orgies for inmates and prison officials.

 

Combe, Michael, 1960- , U.S. Military recruits from around the country filled the U.S. Navy’s Rescue Swimming Pool at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., on Mar. 2, 1988, for a routine course on naval lifesaving techniques taught by several instructors, including 28-year-old Michael Combe. Nineteen-year-old Airman Recruit Lee Mirecki had a diagnosed phobia of submersion in water. He feared this segment of his military training, but cooperated with instructors until the training became violent.

Combe attempted to teach Mirecki a lifesaving technique in which he grabbed him from behind and held him in a headlock underwater. Mirecki had been taught to break such a hold, but was afraid of the water and so resisted Combe’s encouragement to try.

Students in the class later testified that Combe forced Mirecki back into the pool, though Mirecki repeatedly shouted requests for permission to drop the class. Witnesses said Mirecki was pried from the equipment rack he clung to and thrown back into the pool where Combe once again practiced the stranglehold on him. The private struggled to break the hold.

When Combe received the cease command from Petty Officer Richard Blevins, who stood outside the pool, he released Mirecki, who had turned pale. When Mirecki was pulled to the side of the pool, he was dead. He died in Combe’s arms after suffering a heart attack caused by panic.

Combe faced a court martial on charges of manslaughter and battery. He testified that he did nothing incorrect or against Navy regulations. On Nov. 25, 1988, Combe was found Guilty of negligent homicide and conspiracy to commit battery. He was demoted a rank, reprimanded, and sentenced to ninety days in a military prison.

 

Coneys, Theodore Edward (AKA: Matthew Cornish; Spiderman), 1882-1967, U.S. After twenty-nine years, Theodore Edward Coneys returned to Denver to haunt and inadvertently kill one of the few friends he had as a child.

Born in Petersburg, Ill., Coneys was a sickly, over-protected child. His mother, who had lost her husband when Coneys was an infant, feared a second loss and so sheltered the boy, diverting him from sports into music. At seventeen, after years of mandolin lessons, Coneys and his mother moved to Denver, where he performed for the West Moncrieff Mandolin Club.

It was there that he first met Phil Peters and his wife, Helen–regular concert-goers who admired the young Coneys and listened, often over dinner at their bungalow, to the story of his troubled young life. The relationship continued until the death of Coneys’ mother in 1912.

Coneys then left Denver, and would not return for twenty-nine years. By then, Phil Peters, now seventy-three, was preoccupied with the recovery of his wife, then in the hospital. His neighbors were looking after him, inviting him for meals, but one evening he never showed up. Checking the house, and finding all the doors and windows locked, they pried open a screen and crawled inside.

Furniture was overturned, things were strewn about, blood was splattered on the walls, and Phil Peters lay dead on the bedroom floor–beaten about the head with the handle of a gun and an iron shaker, used to stoke the flames in the wood-burning stove.

Led by Captain Jim Childers, the Denver Police Department could find no clues. But had their investigation been as thorough as they thought it was, had they discovered the false plyboard ceiling in the closet, they would have turned up the only clue they needed–the murderer himself.

One year later and still no leads. Helen Peters, after learning of her husband’s October 1941 murder, had since abandoned the house. It stood empty, except for the ghosts: images in the windows that could be described in no other way were sighted first by children, then by adults–sightings dismissed as superstition until Helen moved back in 1942.

Needing round-the-clock care, Mrs. Peters hired a live-in nurse. But the nurse and later her replacement both quit within weeks after seeing sights and hearing sounds they could not explain. Helen Peters moved out again soon after, having fallen and broken her hip. She said she had been startled but would not say by what.

Captain Childers began a twenty-four-hour stakeout of the now locked and vacant home. One morning, Childers and his partner saw a shadow pass behind the front window. They bolted to the porch and kicked in the front door. Hearing footsteps on the floor above, they ran upstairs just in time to glimpse a figure climbing through a tiny hole in the ceiling of the bedroom closet.

Theodore Coneys told police he had been living in the bungalow’s attic since his return to Denver in September 1941. Broke and homeless, he went to the Peters for a loan. They were not at home, but he went in anyway, eventually coming upon the hole in the closet leading to the attic.

For one month Coneys lived above the Peters, lying still, when they were home, on a makeshift bed–an ironing board laid across suitcases–and stealing food downstairs when they were gone.

In time Coneys grew brazen, climbing down from his attic hideout while Peters was home. (By then his wife was in the hospital.) He told police he would often shadow the man as he walked through the house, hiding behind doorways to avoid detection. Coneys maintained he meant no harm to Peters, that he stalked him for entertainment.

One evening in October 1941, Coneys crept down to the kitchen, thinking Peters was out. Standing at the icebox, however, he soon found himself face to face with Phil Peters, who had been asleep on the couch. Startled, Coneys grabbed a gun from a kitchen drawer and beat Peters on the head, hitting him with the iron shaker when he tried to escape.

Never actually knowing if Peters recognized him as the 17-year-old mandolin player he had last seen thirty years before, Coneys was nonetheless convicted for murdering him and was sentenced to life in prison at Colorado’s Canon City Penitentiary, near Colorado Springs.

 

Conroy, Thomas, 1903-42, U.S. When 10-year-old Genevieve Connolly disappeared from her Bronx tenement house on Nov. 6, 1940, her parents suspected anyone but soft-spoken Tom Conroy, their friend from the old country.

The thin-faced Irishman worked as a janitor in an apartment building on East 138th Street. The Connollys lived nearby, on Brook Avenue in the South Bronx. From time to time they fed and entertained Conroy and his 10-year-old son, taking pity on the motherless child.

At 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 6, Genevieve left home to visit her girlfriend, who lived next door to where Conroy worked as a maintenance man. When she didn’t return by 11:30, Genevieve’s father, Robert Connolly, telephoned Conroy to find out if he had seen her in the neighborhood. The janitor explained that yes, she had stopped by, and he had asked the girl to run over to Frank Moran’s candy shop to buy him a package of cigarettes.

That much of the story was true. Moran told police he sold the girl cigarettes and she left the store, seemingly carefree. Over 140 Bronx detectives and sanitation workers combed the neighborhood. The police had no leads so they returned to question Conroy. This time, they noticed he wore his shirt inside out. Detectives ordered him to remove it only to find blood stains on the inside.

“Tommy, if you know anything about Jan, I ask you for God’s sake and from a mother’s heart to speak up,” Mary Connolly pleaded in the Alexander Street police station. When the parents left the room, Conroy confessed. He said that after Genevieve left her friend Eileen O’Brien, she made a second trip to the candy store to buy some penny chocolates. At 9 p.m., as she walked to her tenement building, Conroy called her. He fondled her. Then, afraid the girl would tell her parents, he carried her into the cellar of his building. “I threw her on the coal pile,” he explained. “She made gurgling sounds. I pressed her throat and she stopped.” He disposed of the corpse in the furnace. At 1 a.m., shortly after the detectives visited him for the first time, he removed the ashes and placed them in a trash barrel for pick-up.

When the case went to trial Conroy repudiated his confession on the grounds that it had been obtained under duress. On Apr. 4, 1941, the jury convicted him of strangling Genevieve Connolly. He was put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on Jan. 29, 1942.

 

Coo, Eva, d.1935, U.S. Canadian-born “Little Eva” Coo set up a combination brothel, roadhouse, and gas station outside Cooperstown, N.Y. But when the end of Prohibition caused the demise of many such houses, Eva Coo took in Harry Wright, the crippled alcoholic son of an old friend. He stayed with her for four years, until June 15, 1934, when his battered body was found in a ditch about 300 feet from her place. Police first thought he was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, but then an insurance policy on Wright’s life, with Eva Coo as the beneficiary, turned up. She and her best friend, Martha Clift, were arrested as material witnesses, then interrogated by the police and insurance investigators until they incriminated each other.

Martha Clift and the prosecution held that Eva Coo had taken Harry to an empty “haunted” farm nearby and hit him over the head with a mallet. Then she had Martha Clift run over the body with her car, after which she moved it to the highway where it was found. They showed that Coo had taken an interest in the terms of Wright’s life insurance, double checking that accidents were covered. Harry Nabinger, Coo’s live-in lover, testified that he had written to insurance companies for her, comparing policies and helping her determine which one to buy. Martha Clift, who said she had been promised immunity from a charge of first-degree murder, then reported that Eva had discussed ways of killing Harry Wright with her several times, and she described the murder in detail. Eva Coo was found Guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair. She was executed on June 28, 1935.

 

Cooney, Terence George, 1939- , Brit. On the night of Feb. 24, 1958, Terence George Cooney stabbed to death Alan Godfrey Johnson at a dance hall in Barking, in the county of Essex.

A fight broke out when a group of men who had been at a nearby billiard hall arrived at the dance looking for men who were from Canning Town. Only one of the attackers reportedly carried a knife. The others were unarmed. When Johnson was approached and admitted he was from Canning Town, he was attacked and wounded fatally in the stomach. The fight spilled into the street and escalated into a small riot.

When apprehended, Cooney, a 19-year-old laborer, admitted stabbing Johnson, eighteen, but swore that he did not kill him. He claimed that he arrived after the fight began, and that Johnson had attacked him and made a move to his pocket as if fishing for a knife. Cooney said it was then that he pulled his own knife and stabbed Johnson in self-defense. Cooney admitted that Johnson did not have a knife, but said he had no way of knowing that at the time.

Four days of testimony and a twenty-minute deliberation brought the jury to a verdict of Guilty. Terence Cooney was sentenced to life imprisonment.

 

Cooper, Herbert, d.1911, Brit. A coroner’s jury found Herbert Cooper Guilty of the Nov. 28, 1911, murder of 85-year-old Lord George Sanger on Sanger’s farm in East Finchley. Cooper, an emotionally unstable man, was the son of the manager of Sanger’s farm. He apparently felt that the lord was not lavishing enough attention on him, and, therefore, killed him with several blows of a hatchet. Soon after, Cooper committed suicide by lying on the railroad tracks between Crouch End and Highgate. He was decapitated.

Forty-five years later, the victim’s grandson published a very different account of the events that took place on Nov. 28, 1911. According to the book, The Sanger Story, Sanger was accidentally struck on the head with a brass candlestick during a fray with Cooper. Sanger, still conscious, then went to bed and died while asleep.

 

Cooper, Ralph, and English, Collis, prom. 1940s, U.S. Known in the media as members of the “Trenton Six,” Cooper and English were originally convicted and sentenced to death along with four other black men for the murder of Fred Horner, a 72-year-old junk dealer, in Trenton, N.J. Their trial and conviction set off a flurry of legal controversy that consumed the interests of the American Civil Liberties Union, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Communist Party.

The Trenton police force and judicial system were under intense pressure to convict someone for this crime. The year was 1948. The mayor of Trenton had recently been indicted for bribery. That, plus the failure of his administration to solve a number of other crimes had both the public and press screaming for law enforcement reform. The six men who became known as the “Trenton Six"–Ralph Cooper, Collis English, Forrest McKinlay, John McKenzie, James Thorpe, and Horace Wilson–were rounded up and arrested for the crime. They all had strong alibis, but after days of brutal police interrogation that included sleep deprivation and the refusal to grant them access to attorneys, five of the six signed vague, confusing confessions to the murder. In June 1948, on the strength of these confessions all six black men were convicted of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.

The Communist Party, ACLU, and NAACP all became involved in an appeal process that eventually won the “Trenton Six” a new trial when the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned their conviction in June 1949. The defense of five of the six men was assumed by the NAACP and members of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. The second trial began on Mar. 5, 1951, and lasted for more than fifteen weeks. The result: four were acquitted; English and Cooper were once again convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

The decision was peculiar because the widow of the victim, Elizabeth Maguire, said with certainty in her first recorded statements that the men she had seen enter the store on the day of her husband’s murder were light-skinned blacks. Of the six, Cooper and English were the darkest.

During the second trial, Dr. J. Minor Sullivan III, who testified at the first trial that all the suspects had signed their confessions of their own free will, admitted that four of the six appeared to have been either drugged or bribed to sign their confessions. Sullivan was later convicted on seven counts of perjury for giving this contradictory testimony.

Another appeal was made, this time on behalf of English and Cooper. English died in prison before the appeal was heard, and Cooper eventually pleaded non vult, a plea equivalent to “no contest,” and was released.

 

Cooper, Ronald Frank, 1950-78, S. Afri. “I have decided that I think I should become a homosexual murderer and shall get hold of young boys…and I shall rape them and then kill them …My first few victims shall each be killed in a different way, which shall be as follows: Victim No. 1: Strangled by hands… “

This Mar. 17, 1976, entry in the diary of Ronald Frank Cooper made it easy for the prosecution when Cooper was tried for murdering a child in Johannesburg, S. Afri.

A 26-year-old, unemployed laborer, Cooper had described at length in his diary how he would murder thirty boys and six women and possibly use human sacrifice or rape. He had, in fact, already tried to fulfill his written promises a month before by pulling a gun on Tresslin Pohl, ten, and forcing him into a park. After a few minutes, however, he lost his nerve and released the boy.

Cooper botched two more attempts but finally succeeded on the fourth try. On May 16, 1976, he trapped Mark John Garnet, twelve, in a Parktown area apartment building elevator and strangled him until the boy was unconscious. Tying a rope around Mark’s neck, Cooper tried unsuccessfully to rape him. Failing at this, he loosened the rope, hoping the boy might survive. “To murder someone is not a nice thing to do, as I have now found out,” he later confided to his diary. “I really am a monster.”

When Tressin Pohl, Cooper’s first attempted victim, found out that his friend Mark had been murdered, he went to the authorities. He told them that in April, during a Saturday matinee, he had noticed Cooper sitting in a theater filled with children. When the movie was over, Tressin had shadowed him home to the St. Kilda Hotel.

With this information, Cooper was easily apprehended. His diary did the rest. On Jan. 16, 1978, Ronald Frank Cooper was hanged.

 

Cooper, Ronald John, 1938- , Brit. On the evening of July 23, 1964, Ronald Cooper shot and killed Joseph Hayes, sixty-seven, the managing director of a ship repairing company at his home in Barking, Essex. Cooper snatched £1,878 in payroll checks from the kitchen table and then fled through the hallway, shooting Mrs. Elsie May Hayes in the back. Cooper fled to New York the next day, and then continued on to the Bahamas where he went to work as a gambling casino croupier. Meanwhile, British police established the suspect’s identity through fingerprints left behind on a newspaper and on a chromium stair railing.

Cooper was arrested in the Bahamas and extradited back to England where he went on trial in the Central Criminal Court on Dec. 3, 1964. Two weeks later, on Dec. 14, a Guilty verdict was returned against Cooper and the death sentence was passed. He became the first man to be convicted of a capital offense after Sydney Silverman’s bill to abolish hanging was introduced into the House of Commons. Four days before the scheduled execution at Pentonville Prison on Jan. 27, 1965, Cooper was given a reprieve by the Home Office.

 

Copeland, Michael, 1934- , Brit. Before Michael Copeland was arrested for the murders of William Elliott and George Stobbs, the police referred to these murders as the Carbon Copy Murders. Both victims frequented a tavern called the Spread Eagle, both were found dead near Chesterfield, England and both of their automobiles had been abandoned on Park Road in Chesterfield.

Elliott and Stobbs were homosexual, which Copeland later told police was “something I hated.” Elliott’s body was found on June 13, 1960, on Clod Hill Lane in Baslow. On Mar. 29, 1961, Stobbs’s body was discovered beside a road near Wingerworth.

The trail eventually led to Copeland, a 26-year-old former soldier, whose home was near the location of the abandoned cars. He was also accused of the November 1960 murder of Guenther Helmbrecht, a young soldier, in Verden, Ger. At his trial, Copeland retracted his original confession to the murders of Stobbs and Elliott, but the evidence was overwhelming. He was found Guilty of all three murders and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison when it was proven that Copeland was under mental stress at the time of the murders.

 

Coppolino, Dr. Carl, 1933- , U.S. Dr. Carl Coppolino, a Brooklyn-born anesthesiologist, was accused of murdering his first wife with a relaxant called succinyl-choline, a drug commonly used during surgery. Used to excess, the drug was capable of paralyzing the muscles of the lungs, bringing on death. Once in the body, the drug broke down into its component parts making it difficult, if not impossible, to trace its presence.

After suffering heart problems, Dr. Coppolino abandoned his practice in New Jersey and moved to Sarasota, Fla., with his wife, the former Carmela Musetto. Although the insurance company suspected that Coppolino was faking his illness, they paid him a yearly benefit of $22,000. The couple lived comfortably in Florida from the insurance money, and the income derived from Carmela’s own medical practice. Shortly before Carmela Coppolino died in 1965, her husband insured her life for $65,000. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, and the matter was pursued no further until Carl Coppolino’s jilted lover Marjorie Farber informed the police and a Florida physician that she had watched him kill her husband in 1963.

Motivated by jealousy when Coppolino married a 38-year-old divorcée named Mary Gibson, Farber told Dr. Juliette Karow that she had carried on a love affair with Coppolino back in New Jersey. Coppolino became jealous of her new husband, a retired army colonel, and injected him with a chemical substance, and then smothered him with a pillow. The cause of Colonel Farber’s death was listed as coronary thrombosis. Coppolino was subsequently indicted for murder in both New Jersey and Florida. Confused by conflicting medical evidence, the jury found Coppolino Not Guilty in Farber’s case. When Carmela’s body was exhumed and re-examined it was found that the victim had been in good health and had not suffered a heart attack, as Coppolino had alleged.

Dr. Joseph Umberger, a noted toxicologist, conducted six months of intensive research before locating traces of succinic acid in the system of the corpse. On the witness stand, Dr. Umberger testified that while succinic acid is naturally present in the human brain, it is in “bound” form. The evidence showed that the acid found in the victim was “unbound.” This evidence and the fact that Carmella was injected immediately prior to death tended to confirm the view that she had been murdered.

Despite the efforts of defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, Dr. Coppolino was convicted in 1967, of second-degree murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Avon Park Correctional Institution. At the conclusion of the trial, Bailey publicly assailed the prosecution and the battery of witnesses, behavior for which he received a one-year suspension from practicing in New Jersey. In 1977, Mary Gibson Coppolino began a fight to win her husband’s freedom. She gathered reports from scientists claiming the New York City medical examiners were “out to get” Coppolino at the time. Although these statements had little effect on the parole board, Coppolino was released on Oct. 16, 1979, for exemplary behavior at the prison facility.

 

Corens, Henry, prom. 1945, U.S. When Henry Corens reported to the Bethesda, Md., police that his wife had vanished, it seemed like another routine missing-persons case–until police received two cryptic notes in the mail. “Pearl gone for good. Not returning,” the first one said. It was postmarked Norfolk, Va. A few days later, a second letter arrived from Miami, Fla., that said: “Don’t bother to look for Pearl.”

Police ascertained that the couple had had marital problems for years. Henry Corens’ affairs led Pearl’s brother, Grover Walker, to surmise that she had finally run off with someone else.

The police investigation was stymied until two farmers who were fishing in the Potomac River noticed a human head in a wooded area adjacent to the bank. Dental charts confirmed that it belonged to Pearl Corens.

A young sailor who had shown an interest in Pearl was located and questioned, but it was impossible to establish a direct link to the murder. A search of the Corens’ house produced a hacksaw and washtub cover with traces of human blood. A pathologist claimed that the blood was Pearl’s, but it was pointed out that Henry Corens shared his wife’s blood type.

A young girl that Corens had an affair with supplied the motive when she told the court that Corens had begged her to marry him. Circumstantial evidence and a batch of love letters written to his sweetheart helped convict Corens of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to eighteen years at hard labor. No clues were ever found as to who had sent the letters from Miami and Norfolk.

 

Corll, Dean Allen, 1939-73, and Henley, Elmer Wayne, 1956- , and Brooks, David Owen, 1955- , U.S. On Aug. 8, 1973, 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley called the Pasadena (Texas) Police Department and said he had just shot his friend Dean Corll. The police found Dean Corll lying face down with six slugs in his shoulder and back, and then the whole story began to come out. Henley and his friend David Brooks were accomplices to twenty-seven murders in the previous three years as Corll indulged his sado-masochistic sexual fantasies by murdering teenaged boys.

Corll was punished harshly as a child, and when his parents divorced, he and his brother Stanley were shuttled between nursery schools and baby sitters. In 1964, Corll was drafted into the army, and by 1969 his disturbing personality disorders came to concern his friends and relatives. After the army, Corll returned to Houston and went to work for the Lighting and Power Company. He began to associate with teenaged boys, and sniffed glue with two of them, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks.

The killing began in 1970 when Corll lured hitchhiking University of Texas student Jeffrey Konen to his house in Pasadena. But Corll usually relied on Henley, a high school dropout, to find victims from the depressed Heights section of Houston. Corll promised to pay $200 for each victim lured into the trap, but he usually reneged. Brooks, Corll’s first willing recruit, said he met the man in the schoolyard and Corll gave him some candy, after which they lived together for a time. In 1970, Brooks came home and found Corll engaged in sexual acts with two young men who had been bound and gagged. Brooks was given a car to keep silent.

Brooks and Henley soon became willing participants in murder. In the next two years, the three murdered twenty-seven young boys. Victims were lured to Corll’s home for drug and alcohol parties. After the victims fell unconscious, Corll tied them up, sexually molested them, and killed them. He disposed of the bodies in either a remote spot near the Sam Rayburn Reservoir or a boat shed in southwest Houston rented for the purpose.

On Aug. 8, 1973, Henley violated the “trust” by bringing 15-year-old Rhonda Williams to the apartment. “You weren’t supposed to bring any girl!” Corll bellowed. The girl had run away from home and needed a place to stay for the night, and Henley said his friend Dean wouldn’t mind. Varnish sniffing began, and Henley, Williams, and Timothy Kerley, sixteen, passed out. When he awoke and discovered that Corll had tied them up, Henley pleaded for his life. Corll released him when he promised to rape and kill Williams while Corll did the same to Kerley. But Henley was too upset to perform a sexual act with the girl. He seized a .22-caliber pistol and pointed it at Corll, who taunted him. Henley fired six shots, and then called the local police. Later that day he took police to shed number eleven at the Southwest Boat Storage and the excavation began. After the twenty-seventh body was removed from the shallow graves at the boathouse and near the lake, the search stopped. A “record” had been established, eclipsing the slayings of twenty-five migrant workers in California in 1971. But Mary West, Corll’s divorced mother, thought there might be more victims. The Houston police were unwilling to continue, despite hundreds of parents’ requests for information about their missing children.

On Aug. 11, 1973, the Houston district attorney filed murder charges against Brooks and Henley. Judge Preston Dial barred the press during jury selection. The trial opened in San Antonio in July 1974. Henley and Brooks were convicted of the murders of six of the twenty-seven victims, and were each sentenced to life imprisonment.

Jack Olsen’s 1974 book about the case, The Man With the Candy, referred to Mary West’s confectionery business, which she had operated with the help of her son in Vidor, Texas.

 

Corona, Juan Vallejo, 1933- , U.S. Few mass murderers match the ruthlessness and systematic slaughter demonstrated by Juan Corona, a killer who murdered at least twenty-five migrant workers in the space of six weeks during 1971. Corona, a Mexican migrant worker himself, had arrived in Yuba City, Calif., in the 1950s. By the early 1970s, he was a labor contractor, hiring migrant workers to pick the various fruit crops in the Yuba City area. He was also, by that time, a man who suffered from several forms of mental illness. He had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. He was also a homosexual and a brutal sadist. As early as 1970, the Corona family was involved in violent sex. Corona’s half-brother, Natividad, was charged with sexually attacking a young Mexican worker who was found bleeding in the washroom of the half-brother’s Guadalajara Cafe located in Marysville, close to Yuba City. When the youth sued the half-brother and won a $250,000 settlement, Natividad fled back to Mexico.

The odd thing about Corona’s murder spree which was umbilically connected to homosexual attacks was the fact that he was a married man with children. Heterosexual or not, Corona also craved sex with his own gender, an uncommon but not unheard of tendency on the part of some sex killers. As a labor contractor. Corona hired migrant workers, and housed these single men in a barracks-like building on the Sullivan ranch. These men were, for the most part, elderly alcoholics, social dropouts, and misfits. They began disappearing in early May 1971. On May 19, a Japanese fruit farmer noticed a large hole seven feet long and three and a half feet deep that had been scooped out of his land in a peach orchard. The next night he went to the same spot and saw that the earth had been packed back into the hole. He called the police who dug into what was a fresh grave. Inside of it was Kenneth Whitacre, a hobo who had homosexual literature in his back pocket. He had been sexually assaulted and then stabbed to death, his head chopped with a machete.

Another farmer noticed what appeared to be a freshly dug grave on his land and police began digging again, this time finding an elderly man. More graves in this area yielded more men, all of them sodomized, stabbed–one was shot–and chopped viciously about the head with a machete. In one grave police found a meat market receipt made out to “Juan V. Corona.” The bodies kept turning up including that of John Henry Jackson, an elderly worker who had been seen some weeks earlier riding in the back of Corona’s pickup truck. The police kept digging until June 4, 1971, unearthing twenty-five bodies, along with more receipts that had the name of Juan Corona on them. Corona was arrested and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty, but his defense lawyers, who maintained that another person had done the murders, had an uphill battle against the overpowering evidence of bodies, receipts, and eyewitnesses who had seen the murdered workers with Corona shortly before they disappeared.

There was speculation that Corona and another man had committed the murders, but no other suspect was ever found, let alone arrested. Psychiatrists ventured many theories about Corona, one claiming that as the spring deepened and the fruit ripened, Corona’s madness increased until the climate drove him into a frenzy of murder and mutilation so that he was compelled to kill someone each day to satisfy his blood lust. The availability of victims increased as warmer weather set in and scores of migrant workers drifted into the Marysville-Yuba City area. Corona simply had to stop his truck at any roadside and pick up the lonely workers, social pariahs no one would ever miss. He would work these men a few days and, when it came time to pay them, the burly, 200-pound Corona would sexually molest them, murder them, and bury the bodies. These included Kenneth Whitacre, Charles Fleming, Melford Sample, Donald Smith, John J. Haluka, Warren Kelley, Sigurd Beierman, William Emery Kamp, Clarence Hocking, James W. Howard, Jonah R. Smallwood, Elbert T. Riley, Paul B. Allen, Edward Martin Cupp, Albert Hayes, Raymond Muchache, John H. Jackson, Lloyd Wallace Wenzel, Mark Beverly Shields, Sam Bonafide–also known as Joe Carriveau–Joseph Maczak, and four men who remained unidentified.

In several instances, the prosecution at Corona’s trial proved that Corona had planned his murders in advance, digging graves days before he had any victims to put into them. Added to this were the damning bloodstained knives, machete, pistol, and Corona’s blood-caked clothes found in his home, along with an equally damning ledger in which Corona had officiously listed the names of his victims and the dates of their murders. The jury in the Corona case deliberated for forty-five hours and then brought in a verdict of Guilty in the case of each of the twenty-five murdered men. In January 1973, Judge Richard E. Patton sentenced Corona to twenty-five life terms to run consecutively with no hope of parole. Corona was attacked in prison, stabbed thirty-two times, losing sight in one eye. He later won an appeal that claimed he had not received adequate defense, that he should have pleaded insane. He was placed in an asylum for the criminally insane.

 

Cossentino, Armando, c.1942- , U.S. A 19-year-old man used a hammer to rid his lover of her domineering husband. New York police felt they had found a crime of passion when they examined the body of Dr. Joseph DiFede, thirty-eight, who had been hit with a hammer and stabbed repeatedly on the night of Dec. 7, 1961. An investigation of the doctor’s patients led police to the stylish apartment of unemployed Armando Cossentino and his jobless roommate.

They soon learned that Cossentino’s rent was paid by the doctor’s wife, Jean DiFede, thirty-five, with whom he was having an affair, and interrogated the roommates. Cossentino revealed nothing, but his roommate confessed that he and Cossentino killed the doctor, who also was involved in affairs. Cossentino was convicted of murder and received the death sentence, later commuted to life imprisonment. DiFede was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison.

 

Costa, Antone C., c.1945- , U.S. An admitted drug addict failed to prove insanity in his trial for the murders of two 23-year-old women from Providence, R.I.

The dismembered bodies of Patricia H. Walsh, a second-grade teacher, and Mary Ann Wysocki, a college senior, were found in shallow graves in Truro, Mass., on Mar. 5, 1969, about six weeks after they disappeared. They were last seen, with Costa, on Jan. 25, 1969, in Walsh’s car in Provincetown, Mass., en route to Truro, where Costa invited them to use drugs he had hidden in the small town. Costa was suspected of taking part in the women’s disappearance because he was seen driving Walsh’s Volkswagen, which he claimed she had sold him.

When the women’s graves were discovered, the Provincetown resident was immediately arrested. In his room police discovered a .22-caliber revolver with bullets that matched the bullets found in the victims’ bodies, bloodstains, fingerprints linking Costa to the women, and some possessions the women brought for their weekend visit in Provincetown. With so much evidence against his client, defense attorney Maurice Goldman claimed the defendant’s extensive drug use–he had been taking mind-altering drugs such as LSD since 1965–had caused him to lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong. The prosecution, however, pointed to Costa’s deliberate efforts to conceal his crime, such as forging a note and telegram in the dead women’s names. After six-and-a-half hours of deliberation, Costa was found Guilty of both murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.

 

Cowan, Frederick W. (AKA: Second Hitler), 1944-77, U.S. Frederick Cowan’s pleasures in life were Nazi memorabilia, his weapons collection, and weightlifting. He bore tattoos of Nazi symbols on his arms, and expressed his hatred of Jews and blacks to anyone who would listen. He attributed his hatred of blacks to a time during the Vietnam War when a black man refused to help him. But Cowan was never in Vietnam. Then his neighbor in New Rochelle, N.Y., Theresa Schmidt, started dating a black man. On Aug. 2, 1975, when Schmidt walked by Cowan’s house, he pointed her out to a nearby kid as a “nigger lover.” Schmidt, overhearing, turned on him and demanded to know what he had said. Cowan went to the trunk of his car, grabbed a rifle, and said, “Get out of there before I blow your brains out!” Schmidt ran to call the police, but the officer who answered the call expressed no interest in pursuing the matter when Cowan was not in sight on his arrival. Months later, when Schmidt passed Cowan’s house again, he pointed a rifle at her and pulled the trigger, but the weapon was not loaded.

In January 1977, 33-year-old Cowan’s opinions got him in trouble at his job. He was suspended after refusing to work for a man he thought was Jewish. The superior who suspended him, Norman Bing, was himself Jewish, and later said, “The guys figured he was a lot of talk. He had no history of violence. Everybody said he was a pussycat.” But on Valentine’s Day 1977, his first day back at work, Cowan drove to work at the Neptune Moving Company, stood in the parking lot, and armed himself as if for battle with pistols, hand grenades, bandoliers of ammunition, and a semi-automatic rifle. He walked into the main entrance searching for Bing, and immediately shot and killed two black men passing through the office. Cowan told another employee, “Go home and tell my mother not to come down to Neptune.” He continued into the company cafeteria, up the stairs, killing two more people on the way. When a squad car arrived, Cowan saw it from a window and killed one policeman as he emerged from the car. Within minutes, the Neptune building was under siege, a New York City Police Department armored personnel carrier on hand to help.

The killer, moving back and forth from the offices to the roof, would not answer loudspeaker calls for several hours, even when his mother arrived and spoke to him. Once he shouted that he had “plenty of grenades and other guns to last me all day.” Another time he answered a phone and said, “I’m sorry for your trouble. Tell the mayor that I’m sorry to be causing the city so much trouble.” At 2:40 p.m., a single shot sounded. As the police cleared the building, they found that Fred Cowan, killer of five, had killed himself with a gunshot to the head.

 

Cox, Frederick William, c.1897-1924, s. Afri. A young man failed to fulfill his part in a suicide pact with his paramour, resulting in his death by execution for murder.

Frederick William Cox, who was unemployed at the time, attempted to defraud a neighbor, borrowing £15 to supposedly establish a partnership between the two. When the man threatened to press charges of theft against him, Cox denied the ruse, agreeing to meet the disgruntled partner and a detective at a bank the next day. On Feb. 21, 1924, Cox met the men, then excused himself briefly to pick up his secret girlfriend, his cousin Annie Cox, whom he called Dolly. Aghast at the thought of being separated because of Frederick’s crime, and already forced to hide their feelings because of Annie’s disapproving father, the couple decided they would rather die together than be apart, according to Frederick Cox’s testimony at his sentencing.

As arranged, Frederick led his lover into an office where he stabbed her, surprising Annie who probably expected a quicker death, according to witnesses who observed her fight to live. Cox, apparently devastated that Annie suffered and that he had no time to kill himself, confessed.

Cox’s trial started on May 19, 1924, with examining doctors calling him sane. Cox, protesting any efforts by his lawyer to help him avoid the death penalty, was found Guilty after twenty-five minutes of jury deliberation. Sentenced to die at the gallows he lost some of the composure he showed during sentencing and was hanged on July 1, 1924.

 

Craig, Christopher, 1936- , Brit. Christopher Craig grew up in comfortable surroundings in the suburb of Croydon. His father was a bank executive, and by all accounts Christopher and his brother were never in want. Despite his obvious advantages Craig turned to a life of crime, and together with his partner Burney were trafficking in stolen furs and clothing. Both men were living in Kensington where they were cornered by police on Sept. 14, 1952. After a violent struggle, the pair were arrested and charged with armed robbery. Craig and Burney were convicted and sentenced to twelve years and nineteen years in prison, respectively. The matter did not end there. On the night of Nov. 2, two men broke loose from prison and holed up inside a London warehouse. The Croydon police arrived on the scene minutes later, attempting to reason with the felons. “If you want us, well come and get us!” shouted Craig. Shots rang out. Two unarmed policemen were felled by bullets: Officer P.C. Miles who was killed instantly, and Detective Constable Fairfax who sustained a shoulder wound but nevertheless managed to subdue the second man, Derek Bentley.

Bentley was convicted of murder, and summarily executed at Wandsworth Prison after the Home Secretary turned down his request for a pardon. Craig, who was only sixteen years old at the time, was ordered detained at the Queen’s pleasure.

 

Crane, Cheryl, 1944- , U.S. The only child of Hollywood actress Lana Turner, Cheryl Crane was born to Turner and Stephen Crane, the actress’ second husband, a marriage that lasted only a few months. Turner had already been married to Artie Shaw and, after her annulment from Crane, went on to marry Henry J. “Bob” Topping, Lex Barker, Fred May, Robert Eaton, and Ronald Dante. The marriage to Barker, it was claimed, had been broken up by Cheryl, who continued to live with her mother through her host of husbands. The girl was surrounded by her mother’s enormous wealth–a mansion, servants, jewels, expensive cars, and mostly fame. Teenage jealousy of her mother prompted Cheryl, some claimed, to whisper nasty gossip to her mother about her husbands and those she dated between marriages. One of these was the handsome, smooth-talking gangster, John Stompanato, one-time chauffeur and bagman for Los Angeles gambler and gangster Mickey Cohen.

Stompanato, born in Woodstock, Ill., in 1925, had served as a Marine during WWII. He had attended an exclusive military school and then Notre Dame briefly before enlisting in the Marines in 1944, serving three years. The rugged Stompanato had married and divorced twice by 1948 when he went to work for Cohen in Los Angeles as Cohen’s bodyguard, driver, and later as bagman, collecting the profits from Cohen’s gambling and extortion rackets. He then struck out on his own, operating as a Hollywood lounge lizard, picking up lonely but wealthy women who were married, then making love to them in a room where hidden motion picture cameras recorded every move. Stompanato would then sell the film to the compromised women at staggering extortion prices.

When Lana Turner’s marriage to Lex Barker ended, she received a call from Stompanato, asking her for a date. He first used the name John Steele when introducing himself to Turner and her daughter Cheryl. The lonely 38-year-old Turner accepted and their tempestuous affair began. The gangster was nothing like Turner’s husbands or previous lovers. He was loud, crude, gauche, a braggart and a bully, who wore shiny shirts open almost to his navel to reveal his chest. He oozed Latin charm and earthiness, but at the same time his passions were violent and menacing. Cheryl Crane was enamored by her mother’s new lover; she and Stompanato spent hours horseback riding or swimming together in her mother’s Olympic-sized pool. Stompanato played the older brother to her, writing her long letters when she was traveling with her mother. Turner, meanwhile, lavished Stompanato with expensive gifts, clothes, and then loaned him $10,000–money that was never repaid. When he joined her and Cheryl in London while Turner was filming Another Time, Another Place, Stompanato moved into the luxurious townhouse Turner and Cheryl were sharing. The gangster then asked the actress for another loan, $50,000, to secure the rights to a film script for a movie in which, he, Johnny Stompanato, would star. The gangster had long nurtured the secret ambition to become a film star.

The actress turned him down, saying that she did not have that kind of cash and that her financial advisers had ordered her not to give him any more money. Her refusal caused Stompanato to go berserk. He threatened the star, who walked out on him, going to the set of Another Time, Another Place where she began to rehearse with co-star Sean Connery. Stompanato suddenly appeared on the set, raging, ordering Connery to “stay away from Lana!” Connery turned his back on Stompanato, who grabbed the burly actor and swung him about, waving a gun in Connery’s face. The actor’s response was to land a powerful punch to the gangster’s jaw, sending him to the floor in a half-conscious state. Stompanato got up and walked away, swearing revenge. Back at the townhouse, the gangster cornered Turner and shrieked: “When I say hop, you’ll hop! When I say jump, you’ll jump!”

The actress ordered Stompanato out of the townhouse. He yelled: “I’ll mutilate you! I’ll hurt you so that you’ll be so repulsive you’ll have to hide forever!” With that he leaped forward, grabbed the actress around the throat and began to choke her. He then threw her down to the floor and threatened her with a razor, saying that he could cut her “just a little” but he could “do worse.” She pleaded with Stompanato, who then relented, but he warned her: “That’s just to let you know that I’m not kidding. Don’t think that you can ever get away!” Cheryl Crane had heard the commotion and expressed fears for her mother’s life. The director of the film Turner was working on called Scotland Yard, and Stompanato was politely escorted to the airport and put on the next plane to the U.S. Lana Turner had successfully gotten rid of the menacing thug.

Once the film in England was completed, however, Turner and Cheryl returned to Los Angeles and the actress made the mistake of calling Stompanato, showing herself to be much more dependent upon him than she had previously admitted. Stompanato now moved into her mansion to fully enjoy Lana Turner’s luxurious lifestyle, swimming in her pool, lounging in the sunray and massage rooms, watching the latest Hollywood films in her private screening room. The couple took a seven-week vacation to Acapulco, renting a suite at the Via Vera Hotel. When they returned to Los Angeles, Cheryl Crane, now a tall girl who towered over her mother, was present to welcome the pair home. The arguments began all over again, beginning with the Academy Awards. Turner had been nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Peyton Place (she did not win) and had decided to attend the ceremonies without Stompanato. When he learned that he was not invited, the gangster went into a raging tirade, accusing the actress of being ashamed of him, that she did not want to be seen in public with him.

More importantly, Stompanato had been gambling heavily in gambling spas owned by his former employer Mickey Cohen, and Cohen held several IOUs Stompanato had signed. On the evening of Apr. 4, 1958, Stompanato demanded that Turner pay these debts. He confronted her in her lavish bedroom and she, in turn, utterly refused to give him any more money. Again the gangster lost control and began screaming that he would use a razor to disfigure her for life. Cheryl Crane, downstairs, could hear the gangster yelling: “If a man makes a living with his hands, I would destroy his hands. You make your living with your face, so I will destroy your face. I’ll get you where it hurts the most! I’ll cut you up and I’ll get your mother and your daughter, too…That’s my business!”

Stompanato grabbed the actress by the arm and she broke away. She opened the bedroom door to see her daughter standing there. “Please, Cheryl, please don’t listen to any of this,” the actress told her, and closed the door. She then ordered Stompanato to return to his own room. He picked up a hanger with a jacket on it and approached her, poised it seemed, to attack her with it. The actress then told the gangster that she was finished with him and that he was to get out of her house. She again opened the door and Stompanato came rushing toward her, holding the jacket and the hanger. Cheryl Crane was there, moving past her mother into the bedroom, holding a butcher knife with a nine-inch blade which she had gotten in the downstairs kitchen. The actress was later to testify: “I swear it was so fast, I–I truthfully thought she had hit him in the stomach. The best that I can remember is that they came together and they parted. I still never saw the blade.”

The gangster, holding his stomach, fell backward on the thick carpet. Lana Turner went to him and pulled back his shirt to see the deep knife wound. Stompanato tried to speak but only a gurgle came out of his throat. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom and tried to staunch the flow of blood but it was useless, her lover was dead. Her daughter stood sobbing nearby as Turner called her mother and then her lawyer, the famed Jerry Giesler. She said to Giesler: “This is Lana Turner. Could you please come to my house. Something terrible has happened.” Within minutes, Giesler was driving toward the Turner mansion. Cheryl Crane then called her father and asked him to come to the house. Crane asked a patron in his restaurant to drive him to Turner’s Beverly Hills home and was the first to arrive there. Cheryl met him at the door. Crane looked at Stompanato’s stiffening body in the upstairs bedroom while his sobbing daughter blurted: “I did it, Daddy, but I didn’t mean to. He was going to hurt Mommy. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.”

Giesler showed up, meeting the actress for the first time, but promising her that his office would do all to protect her and her child. Clinton Anderson, Beverly Hills police chief, then arrived with several officers. Reporter Jim Bacon quickly appeared, gaining access to the house by telling uniformed officers stationed outside that he was from the coroner’s office. Lana Turner was by then pleading with Anderson to put the blame on her, that her child only meant to protect her. “I don’t want her involved, poor baby,” Turner said through tears. “Please say that I did it.” Stompanato was by this time examined and pronounced dead.

Giesler immediately introduced his defense by putting his arm around Turner and saying: “Your daughter has done a courageous thing. It’s too bad that a man’s life is gone but under the circumstances the child did the only thing she could do to protect her mother from harm.” Giesler looked at Chief Anderson and spoke to Turner but kept his eyes on the police officer: “I understand your concern for the child’s welfare. But you won’t get anyplace by hiding the truth, will she, Chief?”

Lana Turner then gushed the whole sordid affair between herself and Stompanato while Bacon and other reporters took notes. Anderson sympathetically listened to her and then to Cheryl’s description of how she plunged the knife into the gangster who was about to attack her mother. The chief reluctantly informed the actress that he would have to lock up her 14-year-old daughter. “Can’t you arrest me instead?” Turner pleaded with him. “Poor baby’s not to blame for all this mess.”

Cheryl Crane was arrested and locked up in the Juvenile Section of the city jail, charged with murder. The newspapers blared the killing from coast to coast and most of the gossip columnists used the Stompanato death to parade Turner’s torrid love affairs in print. She was pilloried for subjecting her daughter to a series of reckless marriages and love affairs, and some even wildly speculated that Turner herself had murdered Stompanato after finding her daughter in bed with him. Only Walter Winchell came to the defense of the movie queen, asking that fans understand the tragedy and give their hearts “to the girl with a broken heart.”

Few of Turner’s peers had anything to say about the killing. The outspoken Gloria Swanson, sex goddess of the silent era, did voice a scathing opinion, attacking Winchell for defending Turner, saying that his defense of the actress was “disgusting…You are trying to whitewash Lana…She is not even an actress…she is only a trollop.” Gangster Mickey Cohen then suddenly appeared in the editorial offices of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, dumping Lana Turner’s love letters to Stompanato into the editor’s hands. He had ordered his goons to go to Stompanato’s apartment after hearing about the killing and obtain these gushing billet doux, after being stuck with the bill for Stompanato’s funeral, costs he expected the actress to bear. He released the letters out of spite.

By the time Cheryl Crane appeared in court, the charge against her had been reduced to manslaughter. Giesler brilliantly placed Lana Turner on the stand and softly talked her through the nightmare killing. The actress detailed everything that occurred that evening, weeping, wiping away perspiration with her handkerchief, her face distorted in anguish, a mother’s pain. Some say it was the greatest performance of her career. Then Cheryl Crane testified, repeating almost word for word the story her mother had given. The coroner’s jury, relying exclusively on the testimony of the two females, ruled that Cheryl Crane had committed justifiable homicide. She was made a ward of the state and placed in her grandmother’s custody. The press photographers had a field day with Lana Turner on the stand that day and reveled in taking photos of her kneeling at her mother’s feet, a penitent pose that was no doubt meant to elicit sympathy.

Cheryl Crane did not adjust well. Her grandmother, Mildred Turner, could not control her. The girl ran away several times and was later placed by court order in the El Retiro School for Girls in the San Fernando Valley. She later worked for her father as a hostess in his restaurant. The American public favored Lana Turner and her daughter in this sensational killing, and the actress’ next few films were box office hits. She and her daughter survived the scandal, emerging as heroines. Cheryl Crane later became a success as a San Francisco real estate broker and wrote a book about her life, detailing the Stompanato murder in terms that repeated her original statements, a book in which she revealed she was a lesbian. Only the publicity-seeking gangster Mickey Cohen angrily spoke up on behalf of Johnny Stompanato, declaring to the world: “Look, this was a great guy!”

 

Crane, James, 1947- , Brit. Fifteen-year-old James Crane could not stand to see his mother abused by his father. In Fall 1962, Mrs. Crane told her husband of her plans to end the marriage and take her three children away. The 42-year-old dock-worker was furious, and vowed to kill her if she did so. But James promised to protect her, and to kill his father.

As his father slept in the daybed on the first floor of their home, James fired a shotgun at him from a distance of three feet. When Mrs. Crane heard the shot, she ran downstairs and found her husband dead. The police were summoned and took the boy into custody. James Crane was later found Not Guilty of murder, but Guilty of manslaughter. He was ordered confined to a mental institution on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

 

Crawford, George, prom. 1932, U.S. The murder of prominent socialite Agnes Boeing Ilsley at her estate in Loudoun County, Va., on Jan 12, 1932, was apparently motivated by revenge. Police investigators found no evidence of theft, just the mangled bodies of Mrs. Ilsley and her elderly maid, Mina Buckner, in their beds. The likely culprit was George Crawford, a young black chauffeur recently dismissed for pilfering liquor from the Ilsley wine closet. The men of the nearby village organized a posse to track down Crawford.

But Crawford had fled to Boston, where he was arrested for larceny one year later. The controversy over his extradition pitted New England liberalism against the entrenched racial attitudes of the South. U.S. District Court Judge James Lowell, a descendant of famous abolitionists, granted a writ of habeas corpus to Crawford in April 1933. As grounds, he cited the exclusion of blacks from Virginia juries, and ruled that any conviction returned there would be voided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ruling incensed Southern legislators. U.S. Representative Howard Smith of Virginia introduced impeachment proceedings against Lowell on the floor of the House, charging him with high crimes and misdemeanors. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned Lowell’s controversial ruling. While the House Judiciary Committee was investigating his conduct, Judge Lowell died at his home in Boston. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision of the Court of Appeals. Crawford was returned under heavy guard to Leesburg, Va., where his trial began on Dec. 11.

After a five-day trial the jury returned a Guilty verdict, and Crawford was sentenced to life imprisonment. He narrowly escaped the death penalty because, as defense attorneys argued, he would eventually be needed to testify against his accomplice, Charles Johnson, who was still at large. On Feb. 12, 1934, Crawford received a second life sentence for the murder of the housemaid Mina Buckner.

 

Crawford, James (AKA: Harry Kirby), prom. 1922, U.S. Facial reconstruction so expert it made the victim’s sister faint led to the arrest and eventual suicide of the woman’s killer.

On Apr. 13, 1922, a skeleton found in a shallow grave on Cheesecock Mountain in New York caused a scandal in nearby wealthy Tuxedo Park. Commissioner Richard Enright of the New York City police department, seeing an opportunity to climb the social ladder, gladly accepted the case although it was outside his force’s jurisdiction. Enright relied on retired police captain Grant Williams, a skeletal expert, to identify the corpse. Williams, inspired enough by the challenge to suspend retirement, instantly set about his investigation, soon identifying the body as belonging to a woman who had suffered from curvature of the spine. Three small fractures on the left side of the woman’s head were caused by blows from a hammer, Williams revealed, most likely struck by a left-handed attacker.

After treating the skull with a formaldehyde solution and covering it with a thin layer of sculptors’ clay, Williams embarked on a two-day project to reconstruct the victim’s face. The shape of the jaw and nose convinced him that the victim was of Irish descent, and, when a policeman gave Williams the woman’s scalp, complete with hair, he added blue eyes that typically belong to the Irish. Armed with photographs of Williams’ work, police stormed the area adjacent to the mountain, most notably Letchworth Village, an institution for the mentally ill, where the victim was identified as Lillian White, a waitress who quit Sept. 15, seven months before the body was found. White was Irish and had curvature of the spine. She also had a dislocated jaw, as Williams had foretold.

Mary Hamilton, the first woman to serve in the New York City police department, took over the investigation, apparently to protect the residents of Tuxedo Park from interrogations by a brusque male. Hamilton quickly learned that White had a roommate named Mabel, who gave a box of White’s love letters to the policewoman. Inside were slightly illiterate notes from a man named John, who, according to handwriting experts, was right-handed. Instead of losing faith in Captain Williams’ theories, Hamilton concentrated on a Robert Browning verse found in the box, written by someone other than John or White.

Letchworth Village staff members revealed that Ruby Miller, a nurse who had quit the previous September to get married, was an avid fan of Browning. Officer Hamilton found a marriage certificate linking Miller to James Crawford, an attendant at Letchworth, who had quit the same day as White. He and Miller were married on Sept. 17, but the minister who performed the service remembered the groom had an infection on his right hand, which explained the location of White’s head wounds. Williams, upset that his work in reconstructing the woman’s face had not led to any arrests, again sidestepped retirement to search for Crawford. He gathered fingerprints at Crawford’s home in Maine, but the suspect had fled. Three years later, New York Police found the fingerprints matched those of Harry Kirby, who had fled Maine after shooting to death Aida Hayward. Crawford, or Kirby, was captured shortly thereafter and jailed in Winthrop, Maine. He killed himself after admitting he murdered White with a hammer as Williams had deduced.

 

Creighton, Mary Frances, d.1936, and Appelgate, Everett, 1899-1936, U.S. Everett Appelgate worked as an investigator for the Veterans Unemployment Bureau of Nassau County, N.Y., and lived with his wife Ada and their 12-year-old daughter Agnes at the home of Mrs. Appelgate’s parents. It was an unpleasant arrangement, and Appelgate asked his friend John Creighton if the family could live in his house until things began to turn around. In November 1934, the Creightons welcomed the Appelgates into their home.

The Creightons had two children, 15-year-old Ruth, and a 12-year-old son named Jackie. Their mother, Mary Frances Creighton, also had a skeleton in her closet. In 1923, she had been tried for murder in connection with the poisoning of her brother Raymond Avery, who left her his insurance money. There was evidence that she administered arsenic to her brother, but since there were no witnesses, she was acquitted. Mrs. Creighton was also indicted for murdering her mother-in-law, but the jury decided that the small quantity of arsenic found in the body was not enough to cause death. The Creightons left New Jersey in disgrace and settled on Long Island.

The rather small Creighton house was inadequate for the two families. The girls slept in a cramped, dirty attic, while the Creightons were consigned to a small back bedroom. This overcrowding led to some peculiar sleeping arrangements. The Appelgates invited Ruth Creighton to share their bed on occasion, which led to sexual intimacy between Everett and Ruth. Mrs. Appelgate, in whom Everett had lost all interest, apparently approved. Mrs. Creighton found out about it, but kept quiet after Appelgate threatened to expose her as a poisoner. On Sept. 25, 1935, Appelgate gave Mrs. Creighton some arsenic to place in his wife’s eggnog, intending after her death to marry Ruth Creighton. At the same time, he was having an affair with Mrs. Creighton behind her husband’s back.

Mrs. Appelgate became sick and eventually died in the hospital. Newspaper clippings describing the circumstances of Raymond Avery’s death reached the district attorney, who, ordered an autopsy. The world-famous toxicologist Dr. Alexander Gettler was brought in to examine Mrs. Appelgate’s internal organs in which traces of arsenic trioxide were found. Dr. Richard Hoffman questioned Ruth on behalf of the district attorney’s office, and she admitted having sexual relations with “Uncle Everett.”

Only then did Mrs. Creighton confess her involvement in the murder. She and Appelgate were indicted for murder and placed on trial side by side on Jan. 13, 1936. The murder trial became national news. The jury returned a Guilty verdict on Jan. 30. On July 19, 1936, the two poisoners were executed in the electric chair. Mary Frances Creighton, prostrate with fear, had to be wheeled to the chair unconscious.

 

Crimmins, Alice, 1941- , U.S. The attractive, 26-year-old Alice Crimmins lived in Queens, N.Y., with her two children, Eddie, age five, and Alice Marie, called Missy, who was four. She had been separated from her husband Edmund, who visited regularly with the children. On the morning of July 14, 1965, Edmund Crimmins visited his children only to find them missing from their room in the ground-floor Crimmins apartment. A desperate search took place and Alice Marie was found later that day in a vacant lot, strangled to death with her pajamas. Eddie Crimmins was found a week later about a mile from the Crimmins home and he, too, had been strangled, although forensic experts were uncertain if this was truly the case because the little boy’s body had rapidly decomposed. Mrs. Crimmins explained to suspicious investigators that a hook-and-eye fastener on the door leading to her children’s room was missing, that she always fastened this apparatus to prevent them from leaving their room to raid the refrigerator.

Mrs. Crimmins seemed rather unemotional at the time of her children’s death. When she was taken to the barren lot at 162nd Street where her daughter’s body was discovered, Crimmins appeared to go into a faint but recovered within moments. She shed not a single tear, nor was any trace of emotion present in the woman. Later, Mrs. Crimmins explained precisely what happened on the night her children left their room. She said that she had fed both her children manicotti and string beans at 7:30 p.m. She said she looked in on them at midnight and they were sleeping peacefully in their beds. Mrs. Crimmins added that she was awake until 4 a.m., and that her children must have left their room after that time or were kidnapped and later killed for inexplicable reasons after that time. Questioned repeatedly about these time periods, Alice Crimmins insisted that the times she had provided were correct, that she had checked several clocks in the house. These statements led to the conviction of Crimmins later in one of the most sensational murder trials of the 1960s.

The police suspected Mrs. Crimmins from the start, but they cautiously built their case against her. Twenty-three months later, she was charged with murdering her children, and in May 1968, placed on trial for the murder of her daughter Missy. The prosecution demonstrated how Mrs. Crimmins had led a promiscuous life and even her own lawyer described his client as “amoral.” It was for this reason that her husband was suing for divorce at the time of the children’s deaths. The custody battle was intense and full of vicious charges from both sides. Mrs. Crimmins, the prosecution contended, had murdered her children rather than let her husband take custody of them; an act, she felt, that would label her as an unfit mother.

Dr. Milton Helpern, one of the leading pathologists in the country, testified that he had examined the contents of the Crimmins daughter and that the child had, indeed, been fed manicotti and string beans. But the girl had not digested this food, Helpern said, at the time Mrs. Crimmins insisted she had fed her children, the little girl having died about two hours after eating the meal. Helpern stated that the girl had eaten the food only a short time before her murder and that Mrs. Crimmins’ statements were “impossible–just impossible. If she said she saw them alive before midnight, how could the stomach of Missy show that she must have died within two hours of taking a meal at 7:30…It is patently absurd to think that death might have occurred in the predawn hours after her mother had gone to bed.”

A neighbor, Mrs. Earomirski, then testified that she looked out her second-story window about 2 a.m. on the morning of the deaths, and recognized Alice Crimmins with a man, going toward a car. The man was carrying a blanket bundle and Alice Crimmins was leading a small boy by the hand. The man threw the bundle into the back seat of the car and Crimmins said to him: “My God, don’t throw her like that!” Mrs. Earomirski said she then began to close the window which squeaked and caused Crimmins to look toward the window and say to the man: “Somebody’s seen us!”

The guilt of Alice Crimmins was firm in the minds of the jury, who convicted her of first-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to twenty years in the New York State Prison for women. Her lawyers, however, managed to win an appeal and the appellate court quashed the sentence, ordering a new trial which occurred in March 1971. This trial proved to be more devastating to Crimmins than the first one. One of her lovers, Joseph Rorech, a building contractor, testified that Crimmins was with him in a motel room following the deaths of her children and that she confessed that she had murdered both the little boy and girl so that their father would not get custody of them. This drew Crimmins’ only emotional outburst in her long fight for freedom. She called Rorech a liar and then lapsed into silence. Crimmins was found Guilty of first-degree murder in the death of her son Eddie and of first-degree manslaughter in the death of her daugher Missy. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. After two more appeals, Crimmins was released on bail in 1975. The New York Court of Appeals dismissed the murder conviction of her son but upheld the conviction of manslaughter in the case of her daughter. Crimmins was transferred in 1976 to a release institution in Harlem where she finally took work as a secretary.

 

Crimmins, Craig (Phantom of the Opera Case), 1959- , U.S. A husky, baby-faced, young man with extraordinarily large hands, Craig Crimmins grew up in the North Bronx, N.Y. As a child he was a slow learner, and was afraid to appear stupid in front of his teachers. Withdrawn and oversized for his age, Crimmins was the favored child of three offspring. At the age of three, he began to sleepwalk, which was often a problem for his parents. One night his mother followed him out of the apartment building and through a snowswept street to return him to his bedroom; he had no recall of the event. After managing to squeak through high school, Crimmins followed his father, brother, and stepfather into stagehand work. He was employed by the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan, and there he was attracted to pretty Helen Hagnes Mintiks, a 30-year-old violinist who worked in the orchestra pit during regular performances. On the night of July 23, 1980, Crimmins was in a sub-level elevator when Mintiks entered. Impulsively, Crimmins leaned next to her and suggested they have sexual intercourse. Mintiks turned crimson and slapped his face. Then, realizing she was alone in the elevator with the hulking Crimmins, the violinist panicked and hit several buttons on the elevator control board. The elevator stopped at a lower level and she got out. Crimmins followed her.

The violinist realized that the area was deserted and tried to strike up a friendly conversation with Crimmins, according to his later confession. He grabbed a hammer and ordered her to undress. She obediently disrobed. When she was naked, the stagehand attempted to rape the woman but was unsuccessful. In frustration, he marched Mintiks up the backstairs of the Met to the roof and there tied her to a pipe. He claimed later that he had no real intention of hurting her and that he told her he would “call someone” and let them know where she was. As he went to a rooftop door, Mintiks broke free of the rope which Crimmins had used to tie her up. He raced back to the pipe, caught the woman, and tied her up again with rags he found in a nearby bucket.

Again, according to his later statement, Crimmins started to leave the roof, but he turned around to see the violinist about to once more break free. “I heard her pouncing up and down,” Crimmins was later quoted, “and that’s when it happened. I went back and kicked her off.” Crimmins, at that point, walked up to the bound woman and kicked her through an opening in an air conditioner fan shaft. Her naked, bound body was found the next day. New York police conducted an exhaustive search for the killer, combing the maze-like dressing rooms, backstairs, elevators, basements, and sub-basements for clues. More than 200 suspects were interviewed; their backgrounds examined in detail. On Aug. 14, 1980, the two chief detectives assigned to the case, Michael Struk and Jerry Giorgio, began to systematically photograph and fingerprint every Met employee. They noticed that one of them, Craig Crimmins, was extremely nervous when it came his turn to have mug shots taken and his fingerprints and palms printed. Both officers noticed that Crimmins was hyperventilating while the printing process went on. Shortly thereafter, the detectives matched Crimmins’ palm print to a perfect print found on the pipe of the roof of the Met where the victim had been tied.

The two officers played a cat-and-mouse game with Crimmins, interviewing him several times but not charging him with the murder, running him about the Met as if seeking information from him. In a final marathon and exhausting interrogation on Aug. 29-30, Craig blurted his confession to Giorgio. He was charged with the murder and tried before Judge Richard G. Denzer the following spring. Crimmins’ attorney argued that the stagehand’s confession had been manipulated out of the slow-witted youth and obliquely referred to the case of George Whitmore, Jr., another dim-witted youth who had been manipulated into confessing the murder of Janice Wylie in 1963–a celebrated Manhattan slaying. (Whitmore was later released when pharmacist Richard Robles admitted killing Janice, the daughter of writer Max Wylie, and her roommate Emily Hoffert.)

Both Giorgio and Struk underwent grueling courtroom examinations but remained unruffled. Their testimony reflected proper police procedure during their investigation of the killing and their conduct concerning Crimmins. The jury believed the detectives and that the confession was legitimate. On June 4, 1981, the jury, after deliberating five-and-a-half hours, found Crimmins Not Guilty of intentional murder but Guilty of felony murder. Judge Denzer later sentenced the killer to twenty years to life, which meant that Crimmins would not be eligible for parole until serving the entire twenty-year sentence. At the turn of the next century, Craig Crimmins will be forty-one, in the prime of life, and will begin petitioning the parole board for his freedom.

 

Crippen, Dr. Hawley Harvey (AKA: John Philo Robinson), 1862-1910, Brit. Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was a meek, inoffensive man and the last person anyone would select as a brutal murderer. For that very reason, and because of his sensational escape and capture, Crippen has found a permanent place in the annals of murder as a celebrated slayer. Born in Coldwater, Mich., Crippen attended the University of Michigan and received his medical degree from the Homeopathic Hospital College in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1885. He then served his internship at Hahnemann Hospital in Manhattan where he met and married a student nurse, Charlotte Jane Bell, who was born in Ireland and brought up in the strict manners and morals of a convent. The first Mrs. Crippen was a moody, young woman who had to get a special dispensation to wed the doctor–he being Protestant, she having been baptized a Catholic. After making love, Crippen later complained, she would hurry to a local priest to confess her “sin.” Charlotte nevertheless bore the doctor a son, Otto Hawley Crippen, and was about to give birth to another child in January 1892 when she died of apoplexy. Crippen left his son to be raised by his parents in California while he looked about for another wife in New York.

The woman who became the second Mrs. Crippen was a bosomy teenager, the daughter of a Polish grocer, named Kunigunde Mackamotzki who was then appearing on the stage under the name Belle Turner. She was being kept by a wealthy Brooklyn stove manufacturer named Lincoln, and had apparently suffered a miscarriage for which she was treated by Dr. Jeffrey who was assisted by Crippen. Young Crippen was impressed by the sensual, ambitious Belle, but he was quick to see her dominant personality. “She would never give in to anything,” he later lamented from the dock when tried for her murder. Belle Turner took a liking to Crippen, and the couple married on Sept. 1, 1892. Belle had told Crippen the lie that her father had been a Polish nobleman whose vast estates she was still trying to regain. The mild-mannered Crippen soon learned that his second wife was just the opposite of the first, so sexually demanding that she “fairly exhausted” him. Moreover, she never stopped talking about how she would some day be a great opera star like the celebrated Adelina Patti who received $5,000 a performance.

There would be no children in the marriage as Belle had had an operation which prevented her from giving birth. The couple settled down to a hum-drum life, and Belle soon began complaining that Crippen’s meager salary did not cover the cost of her singing lessons–an expense that her lover Lincoln had absorbed. Economic depression and the public’s declining patronage of homeopathic medicine, one which relied heavily on drugs, caused Crippen to field about for a way to make the kind of money his wife thought due their station. He and his wife opened up a patent medicine shop on East 14th Street and Sixth Avenue and they began to make considerable money selling quack drugs and cure-alls, most of which were nothing more than alcohol and opiates colored and sweetened with sugar. Crippen then came under the wing of Professor Munyon, king of the patent medicines. He was soon promoted to general manager of Munyon’s widespread U.S. operations.

Though the couple saved no money from Crippen’s considerable income, they began to live luxuriously, and Belle hired the best singing coaches in New York. They spent most of their money on diamonds for Belle and she would, each night, take these out and “babble to her diamonds and kiss them,” according to one report. Belle also flirted with almost every man she met, and Crippen suspected her of having brief affairs when he was out of the city on business for Munyon. Crippen was sent to England in 1897 by Munyon to open a London branch of Munyon’s operations with a $10,000 salary, a hefty sum for that time. When the Crippens arrived in London, they took up residence in a comfortable flat, but Belle insisted that she launch her singing career, and Crippen spent most of his money arranging for her to appear at the Old Marleybone Music Hall. She appeared as Cora Motzki in an operetta which left the audience sitting on their hands. She was cancelled after a week and thereafter appeared occasionally in the cheaper music halls.

Belle, however, felt that her failure was due to Crippen who had meekly opposed her music hall career and that he had somehow sabotaged her future on the stage. She was forever criticizing him and his lack of vision in her talent. To vex him further and to enhance her own vanity, Belle took several lovers, including an actor named Bruce Miller, flaunting these affairs in front of her cuckolded husband. The five-foot-four-inch Crippen took these humiliations in silence. Meanwhile, he lost his job with Munyon’s and began selling his own quack remedies. He muddled along year after year, abused and ignored by his wife, trying to make ends meet, especially struggling to pay for the new Crippen residence, a sprawling house at 39 Hildrop Crescent, Camden Town, in North London.

Crippen’s prospects improved, however, when in 1903 he hired a new assistant, a pretty, young girl named Ethel Clara LeNeve who had large grey eyes and a sensual mouth. Her father had been a drunken brute, and she craved any type of affection. The gentle, kind-hearted Crippen provided that, and by 1905, a deep relationship had developed between the two. Crippen promised that he would rid himself of his now overweight, vain wife and marry Ethel, but he kept putting this off, making no move to finish his second marriage. His wife intimidated him so much that he feared she might resort to violence. Her lover, Bruce Miller, had returned to Chicago where he had a wife and child, and Belle, who was now using the stage name Belle Elmore, finally had enough of her do-nothing husband, informing him in December 1909 that she intended to leave him and would be drawing their life savings from the bank.

On Jan. 17, 1910, Crippen ordered five grains of hydrobromide of hyocine, a deadly drug he knew was fatal if only a few grains were ingested. On Jan. 25, 1910, Ethel LeNeve arrived at her boarding house in a state of near hysteria, and her landlady later reported that she was ill and trembling all through the night. Whether or not she was aware of Crippen’s recent decision to murder his wife was never learned, but Ethel did tell her landlady that Crippen’s accounts were very low and that she worried about the future. Six days later, on Jan. 21, 1910, Crippen and Belle held a small dinner party for Belle’s music hall friends, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Martinetti. Following dinner, Belle “entertained” her guests for several hours, as was her usual custom, by babbling about her stage career–a career that her friends, and silent husband, knew was practically nonexistent. The guests did not leave until 1:30 a.m. Belle saw them to the door and was about to step outside as they walked down the steps of her house. Mrs. Martinetti turned and called back to her: “Don’t come out, Belle, you’ll catch a cold!” Belle waved goodbye and closed the door, never to be seen alive again.

Two days following the dinner with the Martinetti’s, a letter from Belle was received by the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, of which Belle was a staunch member, informing the Guild that she was resigning her position and was hurrying to the U.S. to visit a dying relative. The letter was written by Crippen who informed the Guild that his wife left in such a hurry that she had no time to write the note herself. Some days later, Crippen pawned some of Belle’s jewelry, receiving £80. Neighbors were then shocked to see Crippen’s petite secretary, Ethel LeNeve, move into the Crippen house at 39 Hildrop Crescent. She appeared in local restaurants with Crippen, wearing Belle’s furs and jewelry, and Crippen introduced Ethel as his new housekeeper. Then Crippen placed an advertisement in Era Magazine, informing its readers that his wife had died. The ad informed Belle’s fans that “she passed on of pneumonia up in the high mountains of California.” Crippen next appeared at the grand ball given by the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild with Ethel LeNeve on his arm. Ethel was wearing a diamond brooch which had been Belle’s favorite piece of jewelry. In fact, the Martinetti’s had last seen the brooch on the bosom of Belle when they dined with the Crippens on Jan. 31, 1910. Then the doctor and the housekeeper packed their bags and took a vacation to Dieppe together, a trip Crippen made no pains to hide. Such scandalous conduct on the part of the otherwise proper Crippen raised more than a few eyebrows with neighbors who promptly notified Scotland Yard about their suspicions.

In response, Inspector Walter Dew, accompanied by Sergeant Arthur Mitchell, began looking into the disappearance of Mrs. Crippen. Dew, who was the intrepid Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), was anything but a severe detective. He was kind-hearted, understanding, and always gave the benefit of a doubt to any suspect. Dew visited Crippen’s offices while the doctor was periodically treating some patients, asking a few polite questions concerning Belle’s whereabouts. Crippen was most affable and cooperative, finally telling Dew with considerable embarrassment: “It’s extremely humiliating, sir, to inform you that my wife is not visiting any ailing relative in America, nor did she die in California. I’ve tried to protect her reputation and my own humiliation and failure. The truth is, sir, that my wife has left me for another man, a man better able to support her than myself.” Crippen then told Dew that the man was none other than the actor, Bruce Miller, who had returned to the U.S. Belle had simply followed him.

Dew’s suspicions were further put to rest when Crippen suggested they have lunch the next day, which they did. Crippen then suggested that Dew inspect his home at 39 Hildrop Crescent. Dew, accompanied by the extremely cooperative Crippen, walked through every room of the house while the detective looked about rather sheepishly. Dew even inspected the cellar and garden and concluded that, aside from the absence of Belle, nothing was amiss. The matter seemed to be one of a domestic nature and Scotland Yard washed its hands of Belle Elmore Crippen and her cuckolded husband. The woman Dew was seeking was, at one point during his search of the Crippen house, directly beneath the detective’s feet, buried in the cellar. Crippen had poisoned Belle with hyocine, then dragged her heavy body to the cellar where he decapitated the body, the limbs, and filleted the rest of the corpse, burning the bones in a cellar grate, a job that took several days and nights. Crippen, on hands and knees, cleaned the blood and bone chips from the grate for hours. The rest of the remains he buried in small hole in the cellar floor, wrapped in men’s pajamas which were packed with quicklime.

The visit from Inspector Dew alarmed Crippen to the point that he felt he would be arrested at any moment. He and Ethel packed their bags and left for the Continent, arriving in Rotterdam. Ethel was dressed as a boy, wearing some of Crippen’s clothing, and pretending to be his son to avoid detection as a couple traveling together. On July 11, Dew returned to 39 Hildrop Crescent to check the exact date Belle had left for America, but he found that the doctor and his housekeeper had left three days earlier. Dew acted immediately, ordering his men to thoroughly search the house and surrounding area. For several days, investigators tore apart cupboards, peeled back wallpaper, dug up the garden and, finally, dug up the cellar where the bundle of flesh wrapped in a man’s pajama top was unearthed. There was not much to go on. The sexless remains consisted of pieces of skin, a human buttock, chest and stomach organs, and bits of muscle. One hunk of flesh revealed a scar which appeared to have been the result of an abdominal operation. This scar was checked against Belle’s medical records and it was identified as an old incision made during one of Belle’s many operations.

Dew swore out a warrant for Crippen and LeNeve on July 16, 1910, and a nationwide manhunt ensued. Unaware of the search being conducted for them, Crippen and Ethel boarded the S.S. Montrose at Antwerp on July 20, traveling as father and son. The Montrose was en route to Canada. Once in Canada, Crippen hoped to begin a new life with Ethel. No sooner was the 5,431-ton Montrose out of Antwerp harbor than its captain, Henry Kendall, looked through a porthole of his cabin to see two men on deck, standing behind a lifeboat and holding hands in what for that day was a shocking display of homosexual affection. Said Captain Kendall later in triumphant retrospect: “The younger one squeezed the other’s hand immoderately. It seemed to me unnatural for two males, so I suspected them at once.” Kendall did not explain exactly what it was that he suspected. Kendall encountered the pair when the Montrose reached the open sea and invited the two to have lunch with him at his table.

Crippen introduced himself as John Philo Robinson, a merchant who was taking his 16-year-old son to California for his health. At this point, Ethel, her hair pulled back and tucked beneath a cap, dutifully coughed and looked ill. (Crippen’s alias was plucked from his family tree; his uncle was named Harvey Robinson and he had a cousin in Michigan named Philo Robinson.) Crippen was not wearing a beard as a disguise as later artists would draw him but was clean-shaven for the voyage. He had discarded, however, his glasses, although the tell-tale marks from his spectacles remained at the bridge of his nose. He seemed to talk incesssantly, making remarks about the weather, the speed of the ship, other passengers, the scenery. In contrast, the boy appeared to be a mute, saying little or nothing. The youth appeared to Kendall to be dressed awkwardly; some of the clothes Ethel wore drooped and sagged on her. Other garb seemed too tight, and the youth appeared to be bursting at the seams.

Captain Kendall noticed also that the youth had curves instead of angles, and that Robinson’s “son” had a face that was decidedly feminine. All of these observations by Kendall were later made, some said, to enhance his image as an amateur sleuth, when, in reality, he had read about the murder of Belle Elmore before sailing and immediately identified Crippen and Ethel in their ineffective disguises. Kendall had taken pride years earlier when he exposed a number of card sharps who were traveling on board the Empress of India, for which he was then first mate. Ever since that day, Kendall had suspiciously eyed every passenger traveling on the vessels he commanded, ferreting out culprits and malefactors.

Captain Kendall did admit later that he thought about wiring Scotland Yard about his two suspicious passengers almost from the time of his first conversation with the Robinsons, but he was uncertain as to their true identities and that he would be risking his reputation, as well as that of the Canadian Pacific Line if he was proven wrong. He conducted an experiment, he later pointed out, by going to his cabin and leafing through the latest Continental editions of the London Daily Mail, finding one dated July 14 which bannered the murder of Mrs. Crippen and offered a photograph of Dr. Crippen. Kendall took a piece of chalk and whited out the glasses and mustache on the Crippen photo and was satisfied that the merchant Robinson was one in the same. Before the Montrose was 150 miles from land, the longest distance where its wireless messages would be picked up, Kendall sent the following message to the directors of the ship line: “Have strong suspicions that Crippen, London cellar murderer, and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off, growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Voice, manner and build undoubtedly a girl. Both traveling as Mr. and Master Robinson. Kendall.”

The message was to electrify the world. It was forwarded by the ship owners to Scotland Yard and Chief Inspector Walter Dew. The policeman took a copy of Kendall’s telegram to his superior, Sir Melville Macnaghten, asking for permission to chase Crippen across the Atlantic, saying: “I want to go after them in a fast steamer. The White Star liner Laurentic sails from Liverpool tomorrow. I believe it is possible for her to overtake the Montrose and reach Canada first.”

Smiling at the thought of this daring plan, Macnaghten authorized Dew to begin the chase. Dew had already learned that the Laurentic’s sailing time was only seven days but the Montrose, a much older cargo ship which also carried passengers, had a sailing time to Canada of eleven days. The code name given to Dew’s assignment was Operation Handcuffs, and the chief inspector was so secretive about his mission that he told his wife only that he had “to go abroad for a few days on a matter of some urgency.” Like Crippen and Ethel LeNeve, Dew chose to disguise himself, boarding the Laurentic as a simple passenger and using the alias “Dewhurst.” The newspapers by this time had gotten hold of Kendall’s telegram–the first time any criminal was identified and hunted down through an electronic device. They also learned that Dew was in pursuit on a faster ship and readers clamored for each day’s editions to learn whether or not the chief inspector would reach Canada before the fleeing Crippen. The drama was intense, and readers on both sides of the Atlantic were held in suspense while the chase went on. There was a grim irony to it all. While Crippen and Ethel were sitting at the captain’s table deciding what to order from the menu, the rest of the world, unknown to them, was reading about their flight to Canada and the dedicated detective from Scotland Yard who had vowed to apprehend them.

On board the Montrose, Crippen let his beard grow but shaved his upper lip. He strolled along the deck with Ethel, stoking his beard. He sat in deck chairs with her, holding her hand and cracking nuts for her. He was solicitious and attentive to her at all times, giving her half his salad at dinner. Kendall, playing his role of detective to the hilt, began to keep a diary, and whenever possible, sent off more wires to authorities, saying that he had spotted a revolver in Crippen’s pocket. Here he was mistaken; the mild-mannered murderer was unarmed. Kendall also stated that he had crew members collect all newspapers that carried the story of the Crippen murder which were on board when the Montrose sailed so as not to alert the disguised couple to the fact that they were suspected by the captain and crew. Kendall, who had been commended for his actions by his superiors, now heightened the tension by sending out wireless messages, no matter how trivial, that dealt with the Robinsons, whom he openly identified as Crippen and Ethel. His wireless message on July 29, 1910, read: “Ethel’s trousers are very tight about the hips and split a bit down the back and secured with large safety pins. Kendall.”

When this was published in the next editions, the tense drama changed to comedy. That very night in a London music hall, a singer sauntered to the footlights and sang:

Oh, Miss LeNeve, Oh, Miss LeNeve,

Is it true that you are sittin’

On the lap of Dr. Crippen

In your boy’s clothes

On the Montrose

Miss, LeNeve?

Captain Kendall enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game he played with Crippen, often joining him and Ethel in their walks about the deck. On several occasions, he would approach the pair from behind, calling after Crippin, using the alias the murderer had assumed. Crippen did not respond to the name Robinson, called out three times by Kendall, until Ethel tugged at his sleeve. Crippen turned about and said: “Excuse me, I didn’t hear you. The cold air of the sea has made me a bit deaf.” On another occasion, Crippen looked up at the wire stretching from the mast to the wireless shack and said to Kendall, not realizing that he was talking about the instrument that had spelled his own doom: “What a marvelous invention it is! How privileged we are to be alive in an age of such scientific miracles!”

On July 27, the Laurentic passed the slow-moving Montrose. At one point, the ships were reportedly in sight of each other. Inspector Dew wired from the Laurentic to the Montrose the following message for Kendall: “Will board you Father Point. Please keep any information till I arrive there strictly confidential. Walter Dew, Chief Inspector, Scotland Yard.” Kendall testily wired back: “What the devil do you think I have been doing?”

Crippen, as the voyage neared its end, became more and more nervous, asking questions about their arrival in Canada and checking the boat chart showing the Montrose’s progress. He and Ethel no longer attended the ship concerts and sing alongs. They kept more and more to their cabin, and when Crippen was seen on a deck chair he was absorbed by an Edgar Wallace thriller, The Four Just Men. He later went to Ethel and gave her all his money, telling her that she might have to go on alone without him, a statement that perplexed and troubled her. He assured her that she would like Quebec, their ultimate destination, and that she could always find work with her typing and millinery skills.

It was later believed that Crippen had planned to fake a suicide attempt, leaving a note and hiding out with a bribed ship’s quartermaster who would later smuggle him ashore. In his memoirs, Dew stated that he believed Crippen honestly meant to kill himself before the ship docked, by that time believing that he was identified and would be captured. He did not want his fate to befall the woman he loved. Most British criminolgists at that time, and even the celebrated detective writer Raymond Chandler in later years, agreed that Crippen could have escaped had he not brought along his lover, Ethel LeNeve. It was her easily detected disguise which gave him away. But love ruled the passions of Crippen, and for this reason he became one of Britian’s most memorable murderers. He would not give up the woman he loved to escape the hangman.

In the early hours of July 31, 1910, a Sunday, with the Montrose off Father Point, Inspector Dew, along with members of the Quebec Police Department, boarded the vessel from a small tugboat. Still in disguise, wearing a pea jacket and the visored cap of the pilot service, Inspector Dew and the other officers went straight to the bridge where Captain Kendall met them. Kendall pointed out a small man in a frock coat who was emerging from behind a funnel on deck. Dew went to the man, followed by the Quebec officers and Kendall. As Dew was later to write: “Presently only a few feet separated us. A pair of bulgy eyes were raised to mine. I would have recognized them anywhere.” Then, in a statement certainly equal to the “Doctor Livingston, I presume” salutation of H.M. Stanley, Dew said to the fugitive: “Good morning, Dr. Crippen. I am Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard. I believe you know me.”

Crippen blinked his large eyes up at the tall Inspector Dew. His adam’s apple worked up and down and then he replied in a low voice: “Good morning, Mr. Dew.”

The chief inspector informed Crippen that he was being arrested for the murder of his wife and the doctor was taken to the stairs leading to the decks and cabins below. Crippen suddenly turned and said to Chief Constable McCarthy of the Quebec Police: “Do you have a warrant? What is the charge?”

McCarthy produced the warrant and Crippen grabbed this out of the constable’s hand, reading for himself: “Murder and mutilation! Oh, God!” Crippen threw the warrant to the deck and he was moved into a cabin under arrest. Some minutes later, passengers heard Ethel LeNeve shriek as Inspector Dew burst into her cabin and he placed her under arrest. With the fugitives safely under guard, Kendall, by prearranged signal, ordered a crewman to give three blasts on the Montrose’s siren.

The tugboat Eureka, which had been waiting off some distance, then came alongside and swarms of reporters poured from the tugboat onto the Montrose, running wildly about the deck, molesting passengers who spoke no English, to see if they might be Crippen and Ethel LeNeve. Mayhem ruled the decks of the Montrose as Captain Kendall gave quick interviews to dozens of reporters who jammed their scribbled stories into bottles and frantically threw these overboard to be picked up by little boats waiting to take these “scoops” to the Quebec newspapers. The Montrose then leisurely made its way up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec where Crippen and Ethel were taken ashore and locked up. The historic chase was over. Crippen and Ethel sailed back to England under guard, and his trial took place at the Old Bailey on Oct. 18, 1910. From the beginning, Crippen’s only thought was to protect Ethel. He insisted that she had nothing to do with the killing of his wife. Crippen alone was convicted after a four-day trial, and sentenced to death.

Crippen awaited the hangman in Pentonville Prison where he pleaded with authorities to spare his lover who was being tried at the time as an accessory after the fact. One of Crippen’s imploring letters to authorities read: “In this farewell letter to the world, as I face eternity, I say that Ethel LeNeve has loved me as few women love men, and that her innocence of any crime, save that of yielding to the dictates of her heart, is absolute. My last prayer will be that God will protect her and keep her safe from harm and allow her to join me in eternity.” A few days later, Ethel was found Not Guilty which allowed Crippen to go to his death with some satisfaction. His last request, before being hanged on Nov. 23, 1910, was that a photo of Ethel LeNeve be placed in his coffin. This was done.

At the hour appointed for Dr. Crippen’s execution, Ethel LeNeve boarded the White Star liner, Majestic, which was sailing for New York. She was dressed in black and a heavy black veil covered her face. Using the alias “Miss Allen,” Ethel sailed to a new life and oblivion in America. Captain Kendall later went on to become the skipper of the Empress of Ireland which was rammed and sunk by the collier Storstad on May 29, 1914, while the two ships were trying to navigate the St. Lawrence in a dense fog. The Empress of Ireland suffered the loss of 1,024 passengers and Kendall, once the hero of the Crippen chase, was digraced by the disaster.

The fate of the Crippen residence, 39 Hildrop Crescent, was worse. Following Crippen’s hanging, the owner tried repeatedly to rent or sell the property, but no one wanted to live in a house everyone said was haunted. An entrepreneur named Sandy McNab then purchased the property. First he tried to run the place as a boarding house for elderly musical hall entertainers, but none cared to live in the place. Next, McNab turned the place into a Crippen museum of sorts, displaying press clippings of the murder and the chase, along with clothing and family artifacts. Only handfuls of the curious paid to see the place, and soon the house was again empty, except for, of course, the ghost of Belle Elmore, according to local residents who swore for years that they heard her piercing screams from the basement. Gone to ruin, the boarded up house remained empty until WWII when well-placed Luftwaffe bombs hit it squarely and demolished the landmark of murder.

 

Croft, William James, d.1943, Brit. The accused said his girlfriend had killed herself and that he had tried, but failed, to take his own life. The jury said he was lying, but they gave him what he said he had wanted anyway: death.

It was against the backdrop of early winter in war-torn England, 1943, that a young soldier, William James Croft, claimed that he and his beloved, Joan Lewis, had decided to make a commitment. Theirs was to be a commitment to death. Each would sit beside the other in the summer home at Camborne, in Cornwall, sharing a revolver between them, until one of them decided to make the first move. “Don’t let us do it in the News of the World way. We will each shoot ourself,” Lewis supposedly said.

Lewis, Croft said, made the first move, putting the revolver to her heart and pulling the trigger. The blast wasn’t enough to kill the girl so Croft went running for help, when, he said, he heard a second shot. He returned to find his girlfriend lying on the floor with a fatal bullet wound to her head. Croft said it was then that he tried to shoot himself in the temple, but the gun wouldn’t fire.

Neither of Lewis’ wounds could have been self-inflicted, pathologist Dr. Hocking testified. Croft was subsequently found Guilty of murder at the Winchester Assizes and was sentenced to die.

The jury didn’t believe Croft’s story, but in England at that time, the survivor of a suicide pact was guilty of a double crime. Even if the trial’s outcome had been different, the sentence would have been the same. Croft was destined to die from the moment he said he wanted to die.

 

Crosby, Henry Grew (Harry), 1898-1929, U.S. Following WWI, wealthy Americans, many of them young and purposeless, went to Europe, specifically Paris, where they embraced the expatriate life. It was a manner of living wherein that which was labelled as vice-ridden at home was an expression of art in Europe. One of the leaders of these youthful, effete dilettantes was a young man who lived only to dwell upon self, Harry Crosby. He was a sensualist and a part-time poet, a publisher for the sake of literary image and excuse for excesses, one who made a career of glorious disillusionment, and one whose fatalism was his only confidence. He was the saint of sophisticated sin, this heir to one of America’s great fortunes. He was Harry Grew Crosby, nephew and godson of billionaire J. Pierpont Morgan, and his premature death would be marked by murder.

Crosby, born into great wealth on June 4, 1898, in Boston’s Back Bay, could boast of a lineage (though he expressed hatred for all that was ancestral in America) that ran to the marrow of the founding fathers. He was related to Alexander Hamilton, William Floyd, and other luminaries of the American Revolution. Riches had flowed into the Crosby coffers since the early seventeenth century when another relative, General Stephen Van Rensselaer, established a fiefdom on his land (through a Dutch grant) that ran for twenty lucrative miles along the Hudson River.

Harry’s father, Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby, a pillar of Harvard and Back Bay society, was the eternal club man who became a partner in the banking investment firm of F.S. Mosely. Harry’s family ties knotted tightly about the vast fortunes of the richest man in America, if not the world at that time, J. Pierpont Morgan. It was as natural as sunrise that Harry would attend the exclusive St. Mark’s Preparatory School and then go on to Harvard. WWI interrupted the schedule with Harry sailing to France to become an ambulance driver just after taking his entrance examinations to Harvard in 1917.

For Crosby and his schoolmates, the war in Europe was high adventure–not much more, at the beginning, than a tour similar to those European junkets taken by offspring of the rich before entering college. The difference became sharply apparent when the youthful Crosby encountered horrible, mutilating death. The shock of recognition changed his life forever, especially after his close friends, Oliver Ames, Jr., Richard Fairchild, and Aaron Davis Weld, were killed in battle.

Worse still, on Nov. 22, 1917, the 19-year-old Harry Crosby was hemmed in by a barrage as he attempted to rush his ambulance to a field hospital near Verdun with a friend bleeding to death inside. It was a brutalizing incident he was never to forget, writing ten years later in his diary (absent of almost all punctuation, a writing quirk): “The hills of Verdun and the red sun setting back of the hills and the charred skeletons of trees and the river Meuse and the black shells spouting up in columns along the road to Bras and the thunder of the barrage and the wounded and the ride through red explosions and the violent metamorphose from boy into man.”

Crosby’s abrupt loss of innocence was replaced by anger and resentment. He blamed God for the war and, in justifying his own slim survival, he concluded that there was a bit of the Superman about him; that he had been forged into a special human being who was, by birth and station, already special in his own mind.

He returned home with a chestful of medals, including the Croix de Guerre, which he coveted and likened to achieving an “H” grade in college. Crosby, impatient to get out of the service at war’s end, begged his parents to prevail upon his omnipotent uncle, J. Pierpont Morgan, to “try and get me a discharge,” according to Crosby’s War Letters. “Anything can be done by means of graft.” Whether or not Crosby meant for Morgan to use his considerable influence or merely buy off authorities to get him released early is not known. But there certainly was a venal streak in Crosby, among myriad eccentricities and vices, all of which, in his short life, he would tax to exhaustion.

When he was mustered out, Crosby arrived in New York and immediately went to the Morgan mansion where, in the absence of his uncle, he ordered a feast which he devoured alone while servants did his bidding. (He called them “lackeys” and “menials.”) Then he began to down goblet after goblet of ancient, priceless wine until he was drunk. In that state, he later arrived by train in Boston, staggering into the arms of his waiting family.

Harry’s intoxication did not alarm Mr. and Mrs. Crosby; he was their only son and his ordeal in France was excuse enough for his unpredictable behavior. Crosby was quick to take up the same rationale, using his war experience for the rest of his short life as an excuse to wallow in the libertine life.

At first Crosby seemed to adjust, entering Harvard where his grades were less than spectacular. He studied literature and language, excelling in French in which, by virtue of his war experience, he was fluent. Crosby, like many other veterans of that day, was allowed to earn a “War Degree” at Harvard, which granted a shorter time of study in achieving a degree as compensation for serving overseas. He graduated in 1921.

A year earlier, Crosby had met and fallen in love with a married woman; he was to develop a habit–approaching mania–of trysting with married women for the rest of his days. The buxom, attractive female, six years older than Crosby, was Mrs. Richard Rogers Peabody (maiden name Mary Phelps Jacob), whom everybody called Polly. They met at a beach outing and both were smitten. Crosby told his parents that he intended to marry Polly, no matter what the consequences.

The Crosbys recoiled in shock. Polly would have to divorce her husband, another scion of a Back Bay fortune, to marry their son, and divorce, at that time, was inconceivable. Yet Harry persisted, telling his father that he would kill himself if he failed to have Polly as his bride. Polly reciprocated Harry’s dedication. Her husband, the youthful Mr. Peabody, was a gentleman about it all. He told his wife to think it over during a trial separation. Polly did exactly that, going to New York with Crosby. At the end of six months, she still asked for a divorce and Peabody, who had taken to heavy drinking (he would later write about his alcoholism in The Common Sense of Drinking), agreed to let his wife go.

Harry and Polly married seven months after she received her divorce. Before that time, Crosby took to drink. He had accepted a desk job, arranged by his father, in the Shawmut National Bank in Boston, and hated it. He told his parents that he found Boston stifling, that the environment strangled his will to write great works. He promptly went on a six-day binge and quit his job. Next he begged uncle Jack (Morgan) to get him a job in Paris, something that would allow him and Polly to live in the “City of Light” where he could follow his artistic urges. Morgan arranged for Crosby to work in the Paris offices of Morgan, Harjes & Co. Delighted, Harry asked Polly to marry him and they were wed on Sept. 9, 1922, in New York City. Two days later, they sailed to France on the Aquitania. It was all idyllic, a fantasy come true; but then again, Harry Crosby had been born into fantasy and he always got what he wanted.

After living in expensive Paris hotels and running up staggering bills paid for by Crosby’s relatives, Harry and Polly took a series of apartments, finally renting the huge flat once occupied by Princess Marthe Bibesco in St. Germain. For a year, Crosby halfheartedly worked at his uncle’s banking concern, but he spent more time during each workday strolling the boulevards, drinking in bistros, and chasing women, than he did in his office.

Another rich relative, an older cousin, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, who had been living in European luxury for more than a decade, learned of Harry’s writing ambitions and suggested that he quit his job with Morgan. Crosby, using his older cousin as a sanction of the literary life, quit, and wrote his parents that he was, from that point on, dedicating his life to the muse, so would they please sell off a few thousand shares of the great amount of stock he held and forward spending money? They did–they always did.

By 1923, the Crosbys set the style of the young rich expatriates in Paris, or, at least, the mode of morality, a sort of glossy, intellectual hedonism. Harry was an artist and his temperament demanded that he seek release with women other than his wife. Among the many affairs he openly conducted was a torrid interlude with Constance Coolidge who was the niece of Frank Crowinshield, editor of Vanity Fair. The darkly attractive and willful Constance, divorced from diplomat Ray Atherton, had once been the scandal of China where here husband had been stationed. There she had raced horses and carried on in such a manner as to earn herself the sobriquet of “The Queen of Peking.” Crosby, who met her at a racetrack in Paris, called her “The Lady of the Golden Horse.” He was forever dubbing his mistresses with romantic names–Helen of Troy, The Tigress, The Lady of the White Polo Coat, The Sorceress, Nubile, The Youngest Princess, The Fire Princess. These were the names he used in his diaries in referring to his many sexual escapades.

Polly, whose name the Crosbys later changed to Caresse for alliterative, arcane reasons, seemed not to care about her husband’s sexual adventures. She knew these “other” women well; they were social acquaintances and many of these ladies were introduced to her womanizing husband by none other than herself.

Yet Harry was inexplicably loyal to Caresse. Constance Coolidge insisted Harry leave Caresse for her. When he refused, she went off to marry the Comte de Jumilhac, thereby becoming a rich and landed countess. Harry continued to see her periodically, considering her part of his stable.

There were others, many of them, including petite, dark Polia Chentoff, a Russian painter who excited the Crosbys with her weird, bizarre tales of famine in Russia. On one occasion, she said that the people in her village were so hungry that they ate an American missionary who had brought them a little food.

While Harry’s harem increased in numbers, Caresse was not idle. She, too, took on a series of lovers, boldly mentioned by Crosby in a letter to his over-indulgent mother. “Caresse’s boy friends are,” wrote Crosby casually, “the Comte Civry, the Tartar Prince, Ortiz, Frans de Geetere (the husband of a couple who had been living on a barge docked on the Seine), Lord Lymington…”

As early as 1923, Crosby had gotten the reputation of a crazy millionaire American who gave vent to any sensual urge and wrote poetry on the side. One of Harry’s passions was attending the raucous Four Arts Balls which heralded the closing of the art academies in Paris each summer. These were nothing more than costume orgies into which Crosby hurled himself with glee. In 1923, Crosby attended the ball wearing a Roman toga. He returned to his apartment stripped of this garment, his underpants, and all his money. Emerging completely drunk and stark naked, he staggered down the street and into his lodgings, to the amazement of his bug-eyed neighbors. Had this been the conduct of a resident Frenchman, the police would certainly have been summoned, but Crosby was too rich to arrest. Two years later, he found a monkey at the ball and got it drunk.

In 1926, Harry and Caresse shocked even the wild students attending the ball. Crosby went as an Incan chieftain, donning a loin cloth and coating his almost naked body with red ocher. Around his neck he wore a necklace of dead pigeons. Caresse matched Harry’s abandon by appearing with a turquoise wig and was naked from the waist up, displaying her large breasts to hundreds of hooting students. (Caresse Crosby consistently complained that no female undergarments served as a proper halter for her mammae and, so she later claimed, she invented the brassiere.) The ball culminated with Caresse, breasts flopping wildly, being carried about the ballroom in the mouth of a papier-mache dragon made up of dozens of students.

These balls were held in enormous halls, where as many as three to five thousand people jammed inside. Half of the guests were whores plying their trade. The police looked the other way on these occasions, tolerating any and all excesses, except assault and battery. It was not an uncommon sight, following the closing of the ball, to see hundreds of naked men and women dancing in the streets and atop cabs, and scores more fornicating in doorways and near the hall.

Before the balls, the Crosbys invariably gave a party which became the pre-ball party. Hundreds flocked into their spacious apartment to guzzle their gin-laced punch and fall to the floor in amorous embrace. In 1927, Crosby threw a party that alarmed even his own sense of expansive tolerance. Males in attendance mobbed his maid and almost raped her. Ushering out most of the guests, Harry retired to the bathroom with Caresse and other close friends, and all stripped down and sank into the hot water held by an enormous, specially built bathtub. Then Harry painted himself green, grabbed a bag of snakes, and headed for the ball, where he distributed the reptiles as necklaces to horrified guests.

THE ELEGANT PLAYBOY WORLD OF HARRY CROSBY, 1920s ILIAD WHICH ENDED IN MURDER & SUICIDE

When bored with Paris, Harry would suddenly hustle Caresse off to Athens or Africa to see the sights and sample the perversions. In 1925, Harry and Caresse traveled to Tunisia, where they both made love to an 11-year-old girl named Zara. In Constantinople, on a later trip, Harry scouted the city to find just the right kind of entertainment and one night took Caresse to an enormous whorehouse, where they paid exorbitant prices to watch couples fornicate.

In Egypt, they visited a huge brothel, one of Harry’s favorite visiting spots; the Crosbys sank into utter sexual perversion, seeking out young girls with which to sleep. It was here that they (especially Harry) developed a great taste for opium and hashish, buying the drugs in great quantities. Crosby consumed so much opium on one occasion that he almost died from an overdose (he developed the habit of swallowing opium pills and mixing this with champagne).

The ancient land held a deep and morose fascination for the American millionaire. He collected strange artifacts from its crypts and tombs. On one occasion, he paid a large sum for three mummified hands of young girls, each having a blue ring on the forefinger. Another time he bought the skeleton of a young girl, which he pridefully hung in the library of his Paris apartment at 19 Rue de Lille. What cabalistic rites attended these purchases was never learned. Yet the mysteries of Egypt continued to hold Crosby in a trance throughout his short life.

His uncle, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, had an abiding interest in all things Egyptian, and his influence upon Harry to seek the answers to that land’s mystical secrets was permanent. It was in Egypt that Harry Crosby became enamored with sun worship, following the ancient Egyptian rites to the sun god, Ra. He thought of the sun as God, and at every opportunity stripped naked and baked beneath its rays, absorbing its heat, its fire, until, toward the end of his life, the normally pale-skinned young man from Boston appeared to friends as a “red Indian.”

Walter Berry further enriched Crosby’s life when he died on Oct. 12, 1927, leaving to Harry most of his estate and his collection of rare books, almost eight thousand tomes. This behest infuriated author Edith Wharton, who expected not only Berry’s fortune, or part of it, but also Berry’s library of priceless volumes. (The two had been lovers and Berry, an aristocratic, knowledgeable intellectual, had served as Mrs. Wharton’s mentor.) For weeks–after Harry supervised the cremation of his cousin and sneeringly greeted distinguished mourners at the funeral in Paris–Crosby and Wharton vied for the library. Crosby feared that Mrs. Wharton, who, under the Berry will could choose whatever books she wanted, would swallow the entire library. Harry thought of her as “a bad sort,” and Mrs. Wharton, according to Geoffrey Wolf, writing in Black Sun, told a friend that “Walter’s young cousin Crosby turns out to be a sort of half-crazy cad.” In the end, Mrs. Wharton selected only a few books and Harry received the bulk of the library.

That he read any of these rare volumes is debatable. What he did do with many of the books would have caused Mrs. Wharton, had she known, to collapse with apoplexy. The Berry library caused the normally spacious Crosby apartment to overflow with books; they were everywhere–on the walls and piled high on the floors of many rooms, so that the Crosbys had to move about the place through narrow paths. Harry solved the problem by giving hundreds of books away to complete strangers, cab drivers, prostitutes, bartenders, those whose interest in ancient literature was considerably less than ravenous. Crosby then amused himself by donning disguises, a rag peddler, say, and slinking through the open-air book stalls lining the Seine where cheap books were sold. He would slip from a bag slung about his shoulders many of his cousin’s priceless books and secretly bury them among the tawdry novels. It amused him to think that uneducated book buyers would casually pick up one of Berry’s cherished volumes for a few francs, not knowing the book’s true value, which would also be the case with the unschooled book dealers along the Seine.

Crosby’s own literary aspirations were grossly inflated by himself, his wife, and his friends. He and Caresse started the Black Sun Press to publish their own awkward poetry and then expanded to include the most well-known writers of the day–Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, and others, but these writers merely tolerated the Crosbys, giving them fragmentary works that were expensively published and for which the authors received handsome pay. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, demanded that the millionaire playboy pay him for a short work in gold pieces, and Harry dutifully complied.

Literary figures Crosby admired repeatedly told him he was a talented poet. They should have known better, but perhaps they were merely stroking the golden goose. As a result of such boulevard flattery, Crosby began to submit his material to other publications, but not before he made substantial financial contributions to such struggling expatriate periodicals as Transition. In this fashion, Crosby’s neurotic, erotic poetry found a wider audience than the Black Sun Press could provide. To the literary set, he quickly became known as a weird playboy poet whose work screamed out doom and death wish.

To Ernest Hemingway, Crosby was certainly nothing more than a rich social acquaintance who paid the way at the restaurant and racetrack during the author’s lean years. It amused the author, once he learned of Crosby’s fanatical sun-worshipping, to jibe him about it. From Cuba in 1929, Hemingway sent Harry a newspaper clipping that ridiculed sun-worshippers, but it did not daunt Crosby’s belief in the ancient rite. By 1929, Harry Crosby had become hopelessly involved in himself. He lived only for pleasure. More and more, he escaped the real world to indulge in his fantasies, not unlike the time when he was on the way to a Paris bank to place Caresse’s expensive jewelry in a safe deposit box. He spotted an attractive female relative, a distant cousin, and drank with her, attempting to seduce her. When Crosby departed the cafe, he left Caresse’s jewels behind; they were never found. More and more, Harry sank into prolonged stupors from drugs and great quantities of absinthe (wormwood alcohol, banned even in Paris where the deadly drink had driven poet Paul Verlaine insane and killed others).

In 1928, Caresse and Harry moved into an old mill in the Ermenonville forest, near Paris, on the 9,000 acre estate of Armand de la Rochefoucauld, renting it by the year. Renovating the place to a posh spa-like quarters, the Crosbys invited phalanxes of artists, writers, and bon vivants to spend weeks with them, drinking and cavorting. Hart Crane, the distinguished poet published by Crosby, came to marvel at the luxury and flaunt his insatiable homosexuality–he seduced Crosby’s chauffeur. (Crane would commit suicide in 1932 by jumping from a ship while returning from Mexico, swimming directly into the propellers.) Guests were encouraged to drink themselves blind night and day, and when not blind with booze, to amuse themselves in the gleaming, enormous pool (into which they consistently jumped fully-clothed), or participate in donkey races which Harry religiously conducted. Some of the guests stayed but briefly at Harry’s wild retreat.

Writers Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, as recalled in Being Geniuses Together, left one of the wild parties late at night, going from the main building to the guest cottages after a riot erupted. “It’s too damned depressing,” McAlmon groaned to Boyle, “so depressing that I can’t even get drunk. They’re wraiths, all of them. They aren’t people. God knows what they’ve done with their realities.”

Reality had long run out on Harry Crosby. He shielded himself from it with money and the rays of the sun. Crosby was forever adorning his body with pagan symbols; in Africa he had crosses tattooed on the soles of his feet. In 1928, he paid a Hindu to tattoo a huge sun on his back in the dead of night as he lay face down in a boat wallowing on the Nile. It was also in 1928 that Harry Grew Crosby began planning his suicide and that of his wife. Caresse agreed with her husband to end their lives on Oct. 31, 1942, a date Harry had arrived at through crazy-quilt theories of his own mad invention.

The year 1928 was momentous for Crosby. It was also in that year, on July 9, that he met at the Lido 21-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch, a darkly attractive Boston socialite. He fell madly in love with her, calling her his “Fire Princess.” For three weeks they carried on a torrid affair, but when Harry refused to leave Caresse for her, Miss Rotch sailed for the U.S. The following year, on June 21, she married Albert Bigelow, a wealthy member of a distinguished East Coast family.

Harry brooded over the loss of another mistress. His extravagances increased as did his erratic behavior. He leaped into a cab one night to drive down the Champs Élysées in Paris, hurling gold coins to startled passersby. He bought racehorses he never raced, and lost fortunes through reckless, stupid gambling, paying for his debts by selling off huge blocks of stock. (In 1929, Crosby wired his father: PLEASE SELL TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE. This wire came as no surprise; the Crosbys had led nothing but the life of wastrels to that time.)

Desperate to occupy his hours with something, anything, that would provide stimulation, Crosby suddenly became obsessed with flying. His mania led him to take many commercial flights between Paris and England (at a time when only a handful of passengers, at great expense, could cram aboard the small planes available, traveling at about 100 mph and at an altitude of no more than 1000 feet). Looking down from a plane on one flight, it occurred to Harry Crosby that it would “be fun to drop bombs” on the peaceful French countryside below.

Crosby took flying lessons and, in his gnawing vanity, saw himself as another Lindbergh, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. He saw himself a hero, a pathfinder, but he never went beyond student status as a pilot. Next came racing cars. Crosby raced for weeks, but soon exhausted his zest for dirt tracks, sputtering engines and oil-smeared hands. For a while, the would-be literary giant decided to become the world’s greatest photographer and purchased almost every known camera. He tired of this, too.

Caresse tolerated her husband’s excesses and went her own way, becoming engrossed with the duties of a publisher at Black Sun Press. Harry thought only of Josephine, his fire princess, and corresponded with her. His thoughts also, more and more, turned to suicide, about which he wrote reams of poetry and talked incessantly. He had apparently little regard for his own poetry. Early in March 1929, while staying at the old mill, he dragged out eighty-some copies of his self-published book, Red Skeletons, and blew them to pieces with a shotgun. He then burned the remains.

On Nov. 18, 1929, Crosby received a trans-Atlantic wire from Mrs. Josephine Rotch Bigelow, urging him to come to her in America. Harry was at first reluctant to return to his native land. His last visit in 1928 produced in him a hatred for his hometown. In one poem, he called Boston a “City of Dead Semen.” Worse, on that trip Harry had barraged Boston’s literary bastion, The Atlantic Monthly, with more than fifty poems, all of which were rejected.

But Harry did return with Caresse. Keeping him company on the boat trip was an other old flame, Constance, the Comtesse de Jumilhac. After going to Boston, Harry met with Mrs. Bigelow on Nov. 28, 1929. Caresse went to New York and registered at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel on Nov. 25. Her husband showed up three days later but stayed only a week. Harry then took a train to Detroit, where he had arranged to meet Mrs. Bigelow. He and Josephine registered under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crane, using the name of Crosby’s poet friend, Hart Crane. The love tryst lasted for two days before both returned to New York and their spouses.

Crosby began drinking heavily in early December as he and his wife prepared to return to Paris. Hart Crane gave them a party, but Harry seemed disinterested, even when Crane let in a horde of drunken sailors whom he, Crane, attempted to seduce on the spot. Unknown to Caresse, her husband had broken more than his marriage vows; it was already settled in his mind that he would not live up to their suicide pact scheduled for 1942. He intended to end it in 1929 “with a bang, not a whimper,” (Harry’s convolution of T. S. Eliot’s premise) and with another woman, the fire princess.

Dec. 10, 1929, was an auspicious day for the Crosbys. They were to dine in the august presence of J. Pierpont Morgan, Harry’s uncle. That morning, Harry and Caresse attended an exhibition by a sculptor who had done a bronze of their dog, Narcisse Noir. Then Harry left his wife, kissing her and telling her he would see her and his mother at “uncle Jack’s.” From there, they would join Hart Crane for dinner and the theater.

Following a quick lunch, Crosby took a cab to 1 West 67th Street, getting out at Hotel des Artistes and going to the duplex studio occupied by his friend, Stanley Mortimer, a portrait painter. Here, he met Mrs. Josephine Bigelow. They had met several times at Mortimer’s and the artist, an obliging friend, had given Harry a key to his ninth-floor abode. They arrived together at noon to be greeted by Mortimer. They had a few drinks and then Crosby led Josephine to an upstairs bedroom with an overhanging balcony. Mortimer continued painting, but the couple leaned over the balcony and “kidded me,” according to Mortimer later. “Crosby gave me a signal and I got on my street clothes and went out.”

While Crosby spent unknown hours in Mortimer’s place with Mrs. Bigelow–described as a “strange wild girl who delighted in saying things to shock people” and who was extremely possessive of Harry-Crosby’s wife and mother spent an uncomfortable tea-time with uncle Jack Morgan in the financier’s behemoth mansion, trying to explain the absence of the errant Harry. Caresse and Mrs. Crosby finally left the Morgan house without waiting for Harry, returning to the Savoy, where they dressed for dinner. Still, Harry did not arrive. They went to the Caviar Restaurant and met Hart Crane. Halfway through the meal, Caresse later claimed, she had a terrible premonition, and left the table to phone Stanley Mortimer at his mother’s house (this, of course, made it obvious that Caresse knew all along that her husband was not only meeting with Mrs. Bigelow, but was using Mortimer’s apartment as a love nest). Mortimer told Caresse that he would check on Harry.

The artist reached his studio at 9:30 p.m. and found it bolted from inside. No one answered his calls. He raced to the superintendent of the building and demanded he break down the door. The man wielded an ax to batter down the door. Inside, Mortimer found Harry Grew Crosby and Josephine Rotch Bigelow–he was then thirty-one, she twenty-two–both dead on his bed. A bullet hole was in Josephine’s left temple, another in Harry’s right temple. Both were fully clothed, according to later newspaper reports. Their left hands were entwined and Harry’s free arm was wrapped loosely about her neck, the right hand clutching a .25-caliber Belgian automatic pistol.

Police arrived to find more than $500 in cash stuffed in Harry’s pockets, along with the steamship tickets which Harry and Caresse were to use on their return voyage to France. Crosby had removed a gold ring, one he called his “sun ring,” which he had promised his wife he would never take off. It had been flattened, as if he had stomped on it.

Caresse learned of the suicide-murder, as it was later termed by police, late that night. She did not go to the scene of the crime, nor did the Crosbys utter a word of the disgrace their son had brought down upon the family name. It became their practice for decades that none of the Crosby relatives ever mention the name of Harry Crosby again.

The bizarre end of Harry Crosby and his Bryn Mawrtrained mistress captured the nation’s headlines. The Chicago Tribune, which bannered the deaths with the headlines, CROSBY DIED FOR A THRILL, stated that: “As a writer and publisher and a wealthy, amusing fellow besides, Crosby just about set the pace for the whole crowd of expatriates, who credit him with having ‘lived more fully than any man of his generation.’ None of his fast-moving crowd believe Crosby committed suicide for love, and are sure he sought death just to see what it was like… “

But for Josephine, according to Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Thomas Gonzalez of New York City, there was no such intention. Gonzalez, along with Inspector Mulrooney, stated that, from the position of the bodies and the varying states of rigor mortis, Crosby had murdered Josephine, then spent several hours alone in the apartment before killing himself. Gonzalez was quoted as saying that homicide was obvious, along with “the expression of smiling expectancy on the dead face of the beautiful young wife, indicating that she had gone to her rendezvous expecting a caress, not deadly bullets.”

Albert Bigelow arrived in New York from Boston the following day, while his wife and Harry were taken to separate mortuaries to await burial. The outraged husband, a Harvard man, told a reporter from the Daily News: “This man lured her to his apartment and murdered her. I don’t believe in any suicide pact no matter what the police or anybody else says, and I believe my wife to be the victim of a mad poet who turned murderer because he could not have the woman he wanted–and who was true to me.”

Bigelow proved his loyalty to Josephine by having her remains buried in the family plot at Old Lyme, Conn. Harry’s body was cremated two days later, and the remains were given to Caresse in an expensive urn which she took with her to Paris. (She would die on Jan. 24, 1970, still promoting Harry Crosby to the world as an offbeat, misunderstood rebel poet who simply happened to be rich.) Critic Malcolm Cowley further eulogized Crosby in his 1920s literary memoirs, Exile’s Return, remarking about this supremely self-indulgent young man: “Harry Crosby, dead, had…become a symbol of change …In spite of himself he had died at the right time.” It was Cowley’s thought that the death of Harry Crosby signaled the close of the Roaring Twenties, the age of excess, only moments before a great night of depression and war blanketed the world.

Poet E.E. Cummings dealt with the murder-suicide as would a deadline-hounded newspaper editor, captioning the strange deaths with:

2 Boston

Dolls found

with

Holes in each other

’s lullaby

 

Crossman, George Albert (AKA: Charles Seymour) , 1871-1904, Brit. The honeymoon at Kensal Rise in England ended too soon for Mrs. Ellen Sampson when George Crossman murdered his bride the day after the wedding.

Because Crossman couldn’t settle on just one woman, he “married,” under various names, at least seven. The first three marriages were legitimate, the last four were polygamous. The fifth “Mrs. Crossman” turned out to be the unluckiest of all. Crossman, under the name Charles Seymour, took Ellen Sampson, nurse and widow, as his wife in January 1903. The two moved to Ladysmith Road to live, as Sampson no doubt believed, in wedded bliss. But the pressures of married life got to Crossman and the morning after the wedding night, he killed her by hitting her over the head. He hid the body in a room upstairs, so as not to disturb the fourth Mrs. Crossman, Edith Thompson, who was to return from a visit with friends in Peckham that day.

For more than a year, the two lived happily together. Thompson remained ignorant of the facts that downstairs, the remains of her husband’s fifth “wife” were decaying in a tin box, and that her husband was, in fact, not her legal husband, and that during that year he married “wives” six and seven during occasional trips to London.

But Crossman and Thompson didn’t live happily ever after. Crossman’s lodger, William Dell, started to complain about smells seeping from a closet under the stairs. He continued to complain until, in March 1904, Crossman made arrangements to have the 15-month-old corpse removed. Meanwhile, the suspicious Dell had arranged to have the police come and check the house. The police found the body, and in the ensuing confusion, fearing retribution, Crossman took off at a run. Three quarters of a mile away, he pulled out a razor and slit his throat, ear to ear.

 

Crump, Michael Tyrone, 1961- , U.S. Between October 1985 and February 1986, the bodies of six Tampa, Fla., prostitutes were found in empty fields near cemeteries. The county police could not identify the killer, but they suspected Michael Crump, a former construction worker with a criminal record for aggravated assault dating back to 1981. Crump was arrested and indicted for the Oct. 9, 1986, murder of Areba Jean Smith, a 34-year-old prostitute. When the woman became “impatient” with Crump, she pulled a knife. According to his own testimony, Crump strangled her during the fight. Following Crump’s conviction in July 1987, Circuit Court Judge Donald C. Evans sentenced him to life imprisonment. On Mar. 31, 1989, Crump was found Guilty of murdering a second prostitute, Louvinia Palmore Clark, whose body was found near the Shady Grove Cemetery on Dec. 12, 1985. Citing Crump’s violent history, Judge M. William Graybill imposed the death sentence. Michael Crump accepted the verdict impassively.

 

Crump, Paul, 1930- , U.S. It was a question of life and death, and it took nine years and fourteen reprieves to answer. For nine years in post-slavery/pre-civil rights America, convicted murderer Paul Crump, waited while the state of Illinois decided his fate. At the very last minute, even as he watched officials test his electric chair twenty steps away, the 32-year-old black man was granted his final sentence: He would live–all of his days in prison–but he would live.

At twenty-three Crump was found Guilty of killing a guard in a March 1953 robbery of payroll clerks at Libby, McNeill & Lobby’s Chicago plant. Originally called “savage” and “animalistic,” he had become, under the guidance of Warden Jack Johnson, thoughtful, insightful, a convert to Catholicism, and truly sorry for what he had done. His attorney, Donald P. Moore, based an appeal to the state parole board on an argument rarely attempted: that Crump had been rehabilitated. The convict read Socrates, Nietzsche, William Blake, and the Bible. To give his own life some meaning in the face of death, he had written a novel, Burn, Killer, Burn. “One ought to be ashamed to die,” he said, “until he has contributed something in justification of his living.” Through all those years of learning, Crump was scheduled fourteen different times to die. Finally, clergymen, newspaper columnists, penologists, politicians, and convinced citizens called for a permanent stay of execution for the young man.

Crump’s salvation became a massive public cause. Even opposing Assistant State’s Attorney James Thompson was moved by the eloquence of trial lawyer Louis Nizer’s testimony that Crump was “a rehabilitated man, a newborn man, a transformed personality.” Nizer read from fifty-seven affidavits attesting to this change of character. In the end there was no end. Illinois Governor Otto Kerner changed Crump’s sentence to life in prison without parole.

 

Crumpley, Ronald K., 1942- , U.S. A minister’s son, former New York City transit police officer, husband, and father of two, stalked and killed homosexuals for the good of the nation and himself.

Ronald K. Crumpley, thirty-eight, faced his aversion to homosexuality with two automatic pistols, a magnum handgun, a machine gun, and the will to kill. He entered Greenwich Village, known for its gay nightclubs, in a black Cadillac he stole from his father, let go of all inhibition and began shooting at random. In seconds, two lay dead, four injured.

Crumpley believed that “demons in the guise of homosexuals” were after him and that he “was merely protecting the nation and himself.” He was found Not Guilty on two counts of murder by reason of mental disease or defect and sentenced to a battery of psychiatric tests. In September 1981, Judge James J. Leff committed Crumpley to the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, N.H.

 

Cullins, Eddie, c.1903-31, Ire. A native of Crete, Eddie Cullins, twenty-eight, and a Turk, Achmet Musa, twenty-six, formed a partnership to profit from a human oddity. They charged people money to see Zara Agha, said to be a 156-year-old native of the Asia Minor region.

On Sept. 4, 1931, Musa’s body was found near Belfast, Ire. He had been shot in the head twice. His bloodied clothes were found in the Belfast town center, and in Britain, police recovered a suitcase containing a pistol that was linked to the murder by Scotland Yard detective Frederick Churchill. Eddie Cullins was arrested, tried, convicted, and hanged. No motive was established, but after Cullins was executed, a girlfriend alleged that the two associates were gunrunners and that Musa had threatened to reveal the scheme.

 

Cummins, Gordon Frederick (AKA: The Count; The Duke), 1914-42, Brit. The British press believed they were onto a second “Jack the Ripper.” Within four days in March 1942, four women were savagely murdered in London air raid shelters during the blackout.

Gordon Frederick Cummins was the illegitimate son of a member of the House of Lords. Cummins’ friends called him the “Duke,” or the “Count,” because of his social pretensions. When the war came, he enlisted in the RAF. On Feb. 9, 1942, the mutilated body of Evelyn Hamilton, a 42-year-old schoolteacher, was found in the central district of London known as Marylebone. The killer placed the body in an air raid shelter. The next day, Mrs. Evelyn Oatley was found dead in her Soho apartment. Police also discovered a blood-stained can opener nearby which the killer had used to rip open the lower portion of the victim’s body. Oatley, under the name of Nita Wood, had turned to prostitution to support herself. Cummins attacked again, murdering his latest victim, 42-year-old Margaret Lowe, on Feb. 11, but the body was not discovered until three days later. The mutilation convinced police that the same killer was responsible. Like Oatley, Lowe was a prostitute.

The body of the fourth murder victim, 40-year-old Doris Jouannet, was found just hours later in Paddington. Another prostitute, she was in the custom of picking up servicemen in Leicester Square. Cummins assaulted two other women, Greta Heywood and Catherine Mulcahy who were fortunate to escape with their lives. Cummins left one clue near the shelter where he accosted Heywood: a gas mask bearing an easily traceable serial number. The police arrested him near St. John’s Wood. Fingerprints found at the murder locations matched Cummins’. It took a jury at the Old Bailey in London only thirty-five minutes to find Cummins Guilty of murder. Lord Chief Justice Humphreys dismissed his appeal, and Cummins was taken to Wandsworth Jail, where he was hanged on June 25, 1942.

 

Curtis, Charles, 1960- , U.S. Before Charles Curtis, a drifter from Martinsburg, W. Va., confessed to the murder, the disappearance of Judith Lynne DeMaria of Sterling, Va., baffled Loudoun County Deputy Sheriff Robert Turner. After two years, everyone else had given up hope. But Turner kept the case alive and made it his own personal crusade. He even carried DeMaria’s driver’s license in his pocket.

Turner painstakingly reconstructed the events of the afternoon of Aug. 2, 1985, when the 27-year-old jogger disappeared from the Washington & Old Dominion bike path in rural Loudoun County. Witnesses later told police that Judith DeMaria was last seen crossing the bridge’ over Broad Run Creek. Blood was found in a field nearby, but there was no trace of a body.

The case might have gone unsolved if not for the killer’s desire to confess to someone he trusted. Charles Curtis admired Captain John Sealock, who had befriended him in 1975. “Chuckie and I go back a long way,” Sealock said.

On Sept. 9, 1987, a man called the Loudoun County Sheriffs Police to talk about the DeMaria case. He would speak only to John Sealock. In the company of Police Investigator Jay Merchant, Robert Turner, and Captain Sealock, Curtis pointed out a shallow grave near Dulles International Airport. The remains were identified as those of Judith DeMaria.

Charles Curtis told Jay Merchant that in his druginduced state he had intended to rape DeMaria but she put up a struggle. Her death was caused by repeated slashes from a carpet razor. Curtis said that he had been on his way to a marijuana growing area where he was “going to rip off a couple of pot patches” in order to buy more PCP.

Charles Curtis claimed to have experienced visions, and to have spoken with “the Lord.” “I am absolutely certain that his reason for coming forth when he did was the result of the torture he had been going through,” explained his attorney Blair Howard.

Indicted on a charge of first-degree murder, Curtis pleaded guilty on Feb. 22, 1988. On May 5, 1988, Curtis was sentenced to the maximum two life terms plus twelve years, which were to be served consecutively.

 

Cvek, George, 1918-42, U.S. George Cvek hitchhiked along U.S. Highway 1 in New Jersey and told whoever picked him up that he was the “Mayor of Boy’s Town,” and that he was on his way to his sister’s home. Cvek panhandled for money, which the drivers were often willing to give after hearing his sad tales. Cvek asked for each driver’s address so that he could send a check.

Cvek would then turn up at his benefactor’s door a few days later and introduce himself to the wife as a business associate or “close friend” of the husband. After providing just enough details to be convincing, Cvek would be admitted. Once inside, he would ransack the house and often sexually assault the woman. He repeated this crime fifteen times between July 1940 and January 1941.

On the night of Feb. 4, 1941, Cvek entered a Bronx apartment house in search of a victim. He rang the doorbell of the first apartment he passed and was greeted by a middle-aged Greek woman, Mrs. Catherine Pappas. Cvek pretended to know her husband, who was away. The woman even put out a plate of cookies and some brandy for her guest. Cvek wrapped his arm around her neck and choked her. She lapsed into unconsciousness as Cvek bound her hands with his necktie and placed a cloth around her ankles. He made off with a small amount of cash, and some jewelry items that were later pawned. The police, who by this time were familiar with Cvek’s technique, questioned the other robbery victims at length. They traced him to the Mills Hotel on Seventh Avenue at 36th Street. The next night Cvek was arrested. He was taken to the Bronx Police Headquarters and interrogated around the clock. The next morning Cvek broke down and confessed. The “Mayor,” as the press referred to him, went on trial for his life two months later. But a mistrial was declared on Apr. 28 because adverse newspaper publicity prejudiced the jury. A second trial was held in the Bronx County Court in May, which resulted in Cvek’s conviction. He was sentenced to die at Sing Sing, and was executed on Feb. 26, 1942, after Cvek’s appeals were exhausted.