Student at the University of California in Berkeley who was executed in 1957 for kidnapping and murdering a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl.
Stephanie Bryan failed to return to her home after school on 28 April 1955. After several days, searchers found her school books in a field out of town but there was no trace of the girl. On 15 July, Mrs Georgia Abbott telephoned the police from nearby Almeda to report that she had found some of Stephanie’s effects in the basement. She had been looking for articles suitable for a theatrical production when she found a purse and identification card belonging to the missing girl.
Police made a thorough search of the Abbott home and found further articles belonging to Stephanie Bryan, including her spectacles and brassiere. Neither Mrs Abbott nor her husband Burton, a twenty-seven-year-old disabled veteran, was able to offer any explanation.
When the police learned that the Abbotts had a weekend cabin in the Trinity Mountains, some 300 miles from Berkeley, they decided to pay a visit. Aided by dogs, they found a shallow grave containing the decomposed body of Stephanie Bryan; she had been battered to death.
Burton Abbott was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murdering the girl. His trial began in Oakland in November 1955. The case against him was largely circumstantial although hairs and fibres in his car linked him with the victim and undermined his alibi. He simply maintained that he was out of town when the girl went missing. The prosecution described him as a constitutional psychopath and sexual deviant.
After considering its verdict for seven days, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping for which he was sentenced to death. Abbott strongly protested his innocence and launched several appeals which resulted in numerous stays of execution. On 14 March 1957, he entered the gas chamber at San Quentin; at the very moment that the gas was released, a further stay of execution was telephoned to the prison, but it was too late to save him.
[278, 948]
Convicted bank-robber and murderer whose letters to Norman Mailer, the celebrated writer, were published in 1981 in a book called In the Belly of the Beast.
Abbott spent over twenty years in prison, and much of his internment was in solitary confinement. In 1966, he began a fourteen-year sentence after stabbing a fellow prisoner to death. He devoted his time and energy to reading scholarly works and began writing to Norman Mailer. The author was impressed with Abbott’s potential as a writer and helped him to gain parole. For a while after his release, Abbott worked as Mailer’s researcher but he found adjustment to life outside prison difficult to manage.
In July 1981, Abbott was involved in an altercation with a restaurant waiter in New York and stabbed him to death. Ironically, his victim was a budding actor-playwright. Abbott went on the run for two months before being arrested in Louisiana. He was tried for murder and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.
Abbott acquired celebrity status on account of his book In the Belly of the Beast, and the way in which he was lauded in literary circles as a major new talent. Others thought the praise was misplaced for someone who simply romanticised crime.
In 1983, the book was adapted as a stage play in Chicago by a director who said he wanted to explore the human capacity for violence. Fifty-eight year old Abbott was found dead in his prison cell in February 2002. He had apparently hanged himself.
[1, 2]
John Bodkin Adams was the Eastbourne doctor who came under suspicion after several of his patients died in the 1950s leaving him valuable legacies.
In July 1956, Mrs Gertrude Hullett, widow of a stockbroker, was being treated by the doctor for a nervous breakdown. He prescribed barbiturate drugs to the extent that she became addicted to them. When she became seriously ill, Bodkin Adams spoke to the coroner to make arrangements for a private post-mortem. The coroner expressed shock at this outlandish request for a patient not yet dead.
Mrs Hullett died on 23 July and Dr Bodkin Adams certified death due to cerebral haemorrhage. The pathologist disagreed, suggesting she had died of barbiturate poisoning. Concern voiced by the dead woman’s friends was heightened when they learned that she had bequeathed her Rolls-Royce to the doctor. The inquest on Mrs Hullett returned a suicide verdict and Bodkin Adams received a reprimand.
Throughout his career the doctor had been the fortunate beneficiary in over a hundred wills, receiving cars, antiques and jewellery from grateful former patients. It was common gossip in Eastbourne that the doctor always carried with him on his rounds a supply of blank will forms. This state of affairs was made known to Scotland Yard and a trail of suspicious deaths involving Bodkin Adams was traced back to 1946.
In 1950 he had treated Mrs Edith Alice Morrell, a wealthy widow who was partially paralysed and suffered from severe arthritis. He prescribed heroin and morphine to control her pain and she became increasingly dependent on his visits. The sick woman made several wills and, at one time, left her entire estate to the doctor. When she changed her will, Bodkin Adams asked her solicitor to draw up a codicil concerning her Rolls-Royce and a box of silver which he claimed she promised to leave him. When she died on 13 November 1950, the doctor acquired both the car and the silver.
On 1 October 1956, after intensive inquiries, the police confronted Bodkin Adams about the manner in which he had acquired Mrs Morrell’s property. Of her death he said, ‘Easing the passing of a dying person is not all that wicked. She wanted to die – that cannot be murder.’ The doctor was charged with murder and in March 1957 was tried at the Old Bailey where he pleaded not guilty.
Weaknesses in the prosecution’s case were brilliantly exploited by Geoffrey Lawrence QC who defended the doctor and won his acquittal. Bodkin Adams did not testify, thereby denying the prosecution the chance to present damaging evidence about other cases. For example, the nurse who told Bodkin Adams about one of his patients, ‘You realise, Doctor, that you have killed her.’
After his acquittal, Bodkin Adams was convicted of forging prescriptions and was struck off the Medical Register. He remained in Eastbourne where he bore his disgrace quietly and continued to treat patients privately.
He was returned to the Medical Register in 1961 and resumed his practice. He died in Eastbourne at the age of eighty-four, leaving an estate valued at £400,000. A full account of the trial was published by Lord Devlin, the presiding judge, in 1985.
Dr Bodkin Adams was widely believed to have killed eight or nine of his patients during his thirty-five years as a medical practitioner. Some thought he murdered for greed, others believed he merely practised euthanasia.
[52, 237, 392, 438, 900]
The murder of a young woman in Bournemouth in 1921 was solved by a telegram and a set of car-tyre impressions.
Irene Wilkins, a young unmarried woman living in London, sought employment on the south coast. She inserted an advertisement in the Morning Post on 22 December 1921 stating her experience for a position as a school cook. She received a reply by telegram from Bournemouth on the same day. The sender asked her to ‘come immediately’ and offered to meet her by car, adding, ‘expense no object’.
The next day, the young woman’s body was found in a field outside Bournemouth. She had been bludgeoned to death and, although her clothing was in disarray, she had not been subjected to rape. Car-tyre impressions were noticed in the road close to the crime scene.
It transpired that two other telegrams similar to the one sent to Irene Wilkins, and in the same handwriting, had been sent from post offices in the area. The purpose of the telegrams appeared to be to lure women to Bournemouth.
The tyre impressions were identified as having been made by a Dunlop Magnum. A police round-up of the relatively small number of cars used at that time in the Bournemouth area resulted in an interview with Thomas Allaway. The thirty-six-year-old ex-soldier was working as chauffeur to a businessman whose car was a Mercedes fitted with three Dunlop Magnum tyres and one Michelin tyre.
To confirm their suspicions, detectives needed a specimen of Allaway’s handwriting. Betting slips found on him when he was arrested in connection with forging cheques bore writing similar to that on the telegrams. Postcards and letters which he had written to his wife were also made available for comparison.
Allaway’s defence when he was tried at Winchester in July 1922 was an unconvincing alibi. The jury convicted him of murder and he confessed his guilt to the Prison Governor on the eve of his execution. The lack of motive in this case has never been adequately explained. If it was sexual, why would Allaway bring a woman from 100 miles away when he could easily have picked up a girl in Bournemouth by driving his employer’s Mercedes along the seafront?
[1009]
Two men both in their twenties, Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans, were the last two persons to be hanged in Britain.
On 7 April 1964, John Alan West, a fifty-two-year-old laundry-van driver, was found dead in his house in Workington. He lived alone and was seen by a neighbour returning to his house in the evening after work. His next-door neighbour was awakened in the early hours by thudding noises in West’s house. Looking out of the window, he saw a car driving away down the street.
When the police arrived to investigate, they found West dead from a stab wound and head injuries. Their search of the house produced a raincoat holding vital clues about the attackers. In the coat’s pockets were a medallion inscribed to ‘G.O. Evans, July 1961’ and an Army Memorandum bearing the name, ‘Norma O’Brien’ and a Liverpool address. Miss O’Brien, a seventeen-year-old factory worker, told the police that in 1963 she had met a man known as ‘Ginger’ Owen Evans whom she remembered wearing a medallion similar to the one found in the raincoat.
Within forty-eight hours of finding West’s body, the police had arrested and charged two men with his murder. Gwynne Owen Evans (his real name was John Robson Welby) had West’s inscribed watch on him. His companion was Peter Allen with whom he lodged at Preston. Both men had been in trouble with the police before.
Evans maintained that he did not strike West and tried to shift the blame on to Allen. He admitted stealing the dead man’s watch and it was fairly obvious that he had planned the crime. Allen explained that they had stolen a car in Preston in order to drive to Workington to borrow some money from West who was a former workmate. His wife and children had apparently gone along for the ride.
Allen and Evans were tried in June 1964 at Manchester Crown Court. The judge put to the jury the question of whether one or both of the accused men had committed the murder. The jury decided they were equally guilty and they were convicted of capital murder. Their appeal was refused and both were hanged on 13 August 1964, Allen at Liverpool and Evans at Manchester.
Their act of robbery and murder, remarkable only for its callousness, nevertheless earned them a place in criminal history.
[490]
Justice finally caught up with this bigamist and murderer twenty-seven years after he killed his wife and children.
Patricia Allen and her two children aged five and seven disappeared from their home in Salcombe, Devon on 26/27 May 1975. Anthony Allen did not report them missing. He said that his wife had gone to live in the USA with another man. A huge police search was mounted to find the missing trio but to no avail. Although there were suspicions about Allen, there was insufficient evidence to mount a prosecution. Within two months he had moved in to live with Eunice Yabsley, a widow.
Allen was a bigamist who was already married with two children when he wedded Patricia. He lived with his first family in Surrey where he defrauded the building company he worked for. He deserted his responsibilities by staging a fake suicide at Beachy Head, re-appearing a few years later to marry Patricia. His deception was discovered and he was given a two-year suspended sentence for bigamy, theft and false pretences. Between 1974 and 1990, he spent six years in prison for various offences.
Enquiries into the missing mother and children were re-opened in 2001 following publication of a book by Eunice Yabsley. She related that at the time of the disappearances Allen had scratches on his arm from wrist to elbow. Witnesses also came forward attesting to rows between Patricia and Anthony Allen with their children pleading with him not to her hurt their mother.
With new evidence, a prosecution was brought against Allen and he was put on trial at Plymouth to answer murder charges. His reputation as a bigamist, philanderer and fraudster was unveiled together with his bogus suicide attempt. He told the jury that he had tried to reinvent himself.
The prosecution maintained that he had disposed of his wife and two children so that he would be free to pursue his philandering ways. He was convicted of their murders and sentenced to life imprisonment.
[173]
Twenty-three-year-old nurse found guilty in 1993 of murdering four babies in her care at the Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital. Her trial drew comparisons with that of Genene Jones in the USA.
Beverley Allitt had always loved children and wanted to be a nurse or a midwife. She qualified as a state enrolled nurse in 1990 and, because of a shortage of qualified staff, was taken on for six months to work in the children’s ward at Grantham.
Soon after her arrival, in the early months of 1991, there were twenty-four incidents of children suffering cardiac arrests and respiratory failure. Three babies and an eleven-year-old boy died. It became evident to the staff that all the emergencies occurred when Allitt was on duty. On 29 April 1991, blood tests on one of the children who came close to death revealed he had been given a massive dose of insulin.
Allitt was arrested but protested her innocence. The circumstantial evidence against her was strong and she was sent for trial. She collapsed midway through her trial at Nottingham Crown Court and received treatment for anorexia nervosa. She had a bad record for absenteeism and during her nursing training had been treated many times for either spurious ailments or self-inflicted injuries.
Her behaviour pointed to a phenomenon known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a condition in which a person seeks attention by making others ill. Allitt was found guilty of four murders, two attempted murders and seven instances of causing grevous bodily harm. She was given thirteen sentences of life imprisonment.
[24, 223]
Twenty-five-year-old registered nurse nicknamed the ‘Angel of Death’ by colleagues when he came under suspicion following a spate of hospital deaths.
Angelo was night-shift supervisor in the intensive care unit (ICU) at the Good Samaritan Hospital, West Islip, New York State. His patients were elderly people with cardiac and respiratory problems. Blue Code emergencies were fairly common and seemed to occur mostly when he was on duty.
Doctors became alarmed when the numbers of deaths in the ICU began to rise. There were twenty-five deaths in a six-week period in 1987. Crisis point was reached in October when two deaths and one near-fatal emergency occurred during a single night. The shift involved was Angelo’s, and the seventy-three-year-old patient who survived death reported that the nurse had injected something into his intravenous drip before he experienced severe breathing problems. Traces of Pavulon, a muscle relaxant of the same type as succinylcholine (see Genene Jones), were found in his blood and also in his intravenous tube.
Angelo was suspended from duty while doctors reviewed thirty-seven cases involving death or life-threatening crisis. A search of his hospital locker turned up a hypodermic syringe bearing traces of Pavulon. He was not at his apartment when detectives arrived to arrest him but ampoules of Pavulon were found among his effects. Angelo was at Albany attending a medical technicians’ conference.
He readily admitted guilt when he was arrested and made a tape-recorded confession. He said he had given unprescribed drugs to dozens of patients. He was unmarried and led a quiet life, being well-respected by his neighbours who thought he was religiously and studiously inclined. He collected rocks and was an avid reader. ‘I would never in a million years think this man could do anything to harm somebody,’ said an acquaintance.
Angelo described himself as an inadequate person who wanted to be seen as some kind of medical hero saving people’s lives in an emergency. A criminologist endorsed this self diagnosis, saying that Angelo had decided he could play God by interfering with the medical destiny of his hospital patients.
It was thought that ten to twenty patients had died from lethal drug doses during a three-month period at the Good Samaritan Hospital. Several of the victims were exhumed and found to have traces of Pavulon in their bodies. At his trial for murder, the ‘Angel of Death’ was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to over sixty years’ imprisonment.
[582]
Forty-eight residents died at the Archer Home for Elderly People in Windsor, Connecticut over a five-year period in the early 1900s.
James H. Archer founded the home in 1907 and, when he died three years later, his widow took it on. She married Michael W. Gilligan in 1913 but he died after a brief illness. The following year, one of Amy’s residents, Franklin R. Andrews, despite being in apparently good health, died at the home.
The citizens of Windsor voiced suspicions about the way the home was run, although the doctor who had examined the late Mr Andrews gave his cause of death as gastric ulcers. Nevertheless, the community’s concerns were discussed with the editor of the newspaper and the police were prompted to launch a discreet inquiry.
It was discovered that Mrs Archer-Gilligan’s conditions for accepting clients into her home for the elderly were that they paid up to $1500, for which they were promised a lifetime’s care. Viewed against the high death rate, which was six times greater than the average for the area, the investigators’ suspicions hardened. Two of the deaths, including that of Mr Gilligan, were re-examined. Exhumation of the bodies revealed that the real cause of death was arsenical poisoning.
Amy Archer-Gilligan was tried for murder at Hartford in June 1917. Powerful circumstantial evidence was brought against her, including her purchases of large quantities of arsenic from the local druggist. She claimed the poison was to be used for destroying rats. Amy made much of her devotion to the nursing profession and to the ideals of the church, but the poison found in the corpses of her former patients weighed heavily against her.
She was found guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree and was sentenced to death. She secured a retrial on appeal in June 1919 when her guilt was confirmed and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She died in 1928, aged fifty-nine, in an insane asylum. As one writer observed, she must ‘have been suffering from her climacteric, which deeply affects the endocrines of women and thus induces all kinds of abnormal and half-insane conduct.’
[871]
One of the classic English poison cases in which a solicitor and retired army officer was hanged for murdering his wife.
Major Armstrong, a small man with a mild manner, worked as a solicitor in Hay-on-Wye. He married a woman who combined a tendency towards hypochondria with the habit of nagging her husband.
Katharine Armstrong became ill in July 1920 and was certified as insane. She spent several months in an asylum before returning home where she died on 22 February 1921. The major recorded the event in his diary with the entry ‘K died’. Her death, which was attributed to natural causes, had been preceded by a painful, wasting illness.
A few months later, Armstrong became involved in a dispute with a rival solicitor over a legal matter. He invited Oswald Martin to his house for tea, ostensibly to settle the argument on a friendly basis. With the apology, ‘Excuse fingers’, he handed Martin a buttered scone, with the result that his guest was subsequently taken ill. Suspicion was aroused when Martin’s father-in-law, who was also the town’s chemist, recalled that Major Armstrong had recently bought arsenic at his shop. An analysis of Martin’s urine proved that he had indeed ingested arsenic.
The police made discreet inquiries about Major Armstrong who, because of his professional background, was regarded as something of a pillar of the community. Shock waves were sent around Hay-on-Wye when, on 31 December 1921, Major Armstrong was arrested at his office and charged with attempting to murder Oswald Martin. A full murder charge was brought after his wife’s body was exhumed and arsenic was found.
Armstrong’s trial at Hereford was dominated by medical evidence, with Sir Bernard Spilsbury testifying for the prosecution. The little major was severely questioned by the judge who wanted to know why Armstrong had a packet of arsenic in his pocket on the day he was arrested and why he had tried to conceal it. His fumbling excuse that it was for treating dandelions carried no conviction. It was far more likely that he was simply prepared to make another attempt to poison Oswald Martin.
The jury found Major Armstrong guilty of murder and he was hanged at Gloucester Prison on 31 May 1922. The Armstrong case has a number of parallels with that of Harold Greenwood. Both men were solicitors in Wales and both were accused of poisoning their wives with arsenic. The difference was that Greenwood was acquitted. The Armstrong case featured in a television drama called Dandelion Dead in 1994. The following year, a new book, Dead not Buried, purported to show that Armstrong was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
[43, 712, 1022]
The five-and-a-half-months-old son of John and Janet Armstrong died mysteriously at their home on 22 July 1955. Poisonous berries were first thought to be the cause of baby Terry’s death but then barbiturates were found and a murder charge followed.
John Armstrong, aged twenty-five, was a Royal Navy Sick Berth Attendant serving at Haslar Hospital, near Gosport. His nineteenyear-old wife Janet had borne three children, the first having died at the age of three months, leaving Pamela, nearly three years old, as the survivor.
It was known that Pamela had eaten poisonous berries from the garden and supposed that she had given some to baby Terry. This appeared to be the case when a post-mortem showed red skins in the dead infant’s stomach. The Armstrongs’ son was buried but suspicions about his death lingered. Further examination was made in Scotland Yard’s Forensic Laboratory of the red skins which proved to be not from naturally occurring berries but the gelatine capsules of the barbiturate drug, Seconal. Traces of the drug were found in the baby’s body after it was exhumed.
The parents denied having any Seconal in their home but again suspicion lingered when it was discovered that a quantity of capsules had been stolen from the drugs cupboard at the hospital where John worked. An open verdict was recorded at the coroner’s inquest and the affair appeared to be closed.
The Armstrongs drifted apart and, in July 1956, Janet’s application to the Gosport magistrates for a separation order was refused. She went to the police and made a statement admitting that there had been Seconal in the house which John had been taking to help him sleep. She said that he had instructed her to dispose of it.
John and Janet Armstrong were arrested on 1 September 1956 and charged with the murder of baby Terry. At their trial in Winchester, John admitted taking drugs from the hospital but denied any involvement in his son’s death. It emerged that he had returned home at lunch-time on the day the baby died and had the opportunity to be alone with him.
John Armstrong was found guilty and sentenced to death, although he was later reprieved. Janet was acquitted and, in a sensational statement a month later, admitted that she had given the baby a Seconal capsule to help him sleep. John maintained his innocence and there was pressure for him to be released from his life sentence. The Home Secretary declined to take any further action.
[28, 314, 496]
A number of violent killings committed in New Orleans between 1911 and 1919 were the work of an uncaught serial murderer.
The murderer acquired his name on account of his methods which involved smashing his way through the door of his victims’ home and axing them to death. He then left the murder weapon at the scene of the crime. His motive appeared to be a desire to kill Italian grocers.
Matters came to a head on 24 May 1918 when Joseph Maggio and his wife were found murdered in the room behind their store. They had been attacked with an axe and slashed with a razor. On 28 June, Louis Besumer and his wife were attacked in their store by an axe-wielding intruder. It turned out that the axe belonged to Besumer and that his companion, who died in hospital, was not his wife. Before she succumbed to her injuries, Harriet Rowe accused Besumer of attacking her. He was promptly arrested.
On 5 August, the Axeman struck again. On this occasion, his victim, a pregnant woman, survived. The victim of an attack on 10 March was not so fortunate. Joseph Romano died of his wounds. The panic which had seized New Orleans at this violent onslaught began to subside as the months passed without further incident. But then, on 10 March 1919, the Axeman returned. The Cortimiglia family ran a grocery business in the Gretna district of the city. Neighbours rushed to their aid when they heard screams coming from their shop and found Charles and Rosie Cortimiglia bleeding from head injuries. Worst still, they found two-year-old Mary dead. A bloodstained axe was near by.
When she recovered, Rosie Cortimiglia accused her neighbours, Iorlando and Frank Jordano, of being the attackers. Both men were arrested but strongly protested their innocence. The axeman struck twice more, his last victim being Mike Pepitone, another grocer, killed on 27 October.
This extraordinary story had several sequels. The Jordanos were tried for murder and convicted, only to be released in December 1920 when Rosie Cortimiglia admitted she had falsely accused them. Louis Besumer was tried and found not guilty and, on 2 December 1920, Mike Pepitone’s widow shot a man dead in a New Orleans street, claiming he was the axeman. The dead man was Joseph Mumfre, a businessman from Los Angeles.
With echoes of the infamous Jack the Ripper murders, a letter signed ‘The Axeman’ and sent from ‘Hell, 13 March, 1919’ was sent to the editor of the Times-Picayune. The writer claimed to have a ‘close relationship to the Angel of Death’. The murder of Italian grocers in New Orleans ceased with the death of Joseph Mumfre but the killings remain officially unsolved.
[901]