World's Worst Crimes

INTRODUCTION

The motives that drive people to commit the most ghastly and hideous crimes are many and varied, and so are the criminals. There is an undeniable and compelling interest in these crimes and the people who carry them out. We may not care to admit it, even to ourselves, but evil has its attractions – even if it is only to act as a warning to others.

Some people will kill for money, having no real sense of right or wrong to show them that a handful of cash is not worth a human life. John Haigh tried to claim bizarre motives for his murders in a bid to get a verdict of insanity, but he undoubtedly killed for cash benefit. Belle Gunnes likewise murdered for profit, working her way through an unknown number of husbands and lovers to gain their money.

Others kill out of pride or to show their fellow criminals that they are worthy of respect. Many a gang member has killed, sometimes more than once, simply so that he would fit in. The true gang bosses, of course, keep themselves carefully removed from any actual crimes. Al Capone was famously convicted of tax evasion after police failed to find any evidence to link him directly with the many crimes that his gang carried out on his orders. Dutch Schultz was similarly careful, but this did not save him from being murdered by his fellow gangsters when he got too arrogant.

A few crimes spring from simple amoral arrogance. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed because they were bored and wanted to see if they could outfox the police.

Sex has long been a prime motive in killing. Jealous rage or lust has been enough to turn some men into killers. More disturbing perverted urges have driven others. Peter Kürten roamed Germany in the 1930s killing for pleasure with ever-increasing ferocity. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono found fame as the Hillside Stranglers in 1970s California as they raped and butchered a succession of women. Some find the most unlikely accomplices. Sex killer Paul Bernardo had the help of his attractive girlfriend Karla Homolka, even when her own sister became a victim.

Some get a taste for murder and kill for many reasons. Charles Ng and Leonard Lake killed men for money, women for sexual kicks and children if they got in the way. They did away with about 25 people in 14 months.

The most prolific serial killer of all was Dr Harold Shipman who snuffed out the lives of hundreds of his patients. Disturbingly, nobody really knows why.

Few of those who have perpetrated the most horrific crimes would fit the general image of evil come to life. Some are quiet, others gregarious. Some are charming, others rude. Only their heartless devotion to killing, mayhem and crime links them together.

Doubt hangs over the convictions of some. Albert DeSalvo was convicted of the Boston Strangler murders. Although he was undoubtedly a perverted sex offender, some think he was no killer, but had been framed by the real culprit. Doubt of another kind hovers over John Dillinger: many think that it was another gangster who died in a hail of police bullets in 1934 and that he got away.

No doubt hangs over the fact that there are evil men and women among us. Many make mistakes and are caught. Others are still active. They kill, rob and maim, but they are not caught. They are out there still.

THE ACID BATH MURDERS

Arguably one of Britain’s worst serial killers, John George Haigh the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’ remains something of an enigma. Was he a calculating swindler who murdered for profit? Did he deliberately portray himself as a crazed lunatic who needed to drink human blood so that he could plead insanity? Or was he indeed a modern-day vampire?

John Haigh was born on 24 July 1909 in Stamford, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Soon after his birth, his parents, John Robert and Emily, moved to Outwood, near the larger town of Wakefield. They were both members of the Plymouth Brethren, an ultra-puritanical Christian sect, with a hellfire ideology based on sin and punishment.

BACKGROUND

The family seems to have been settled enough, but religion dominated Haigh’s childhood. His father often showed him a scar that he said was a punishment from God for committing a sin. The young Haigh at first lived in fear of receiving such a mark himself, but when he did sin and received no such mark, he began to develop the profound cynicism that would characterize his adult life.

On leaving school, Haigh worked briefly as a car mechanic. Although he loved cars, he had a lifelong aversion to dirt (later he would habitually wear gloves to avoid contamination). He soon left the job and worked briefly as a clerk before finding a career in which he was able to exploit an already well-developed ability to embellish the truth: he became an advertising copywriter. He did well at the job and bought himself a flash Alfa Romeo car. But before long he was sacked after some money went missing.

In 1934 he met and married Beatrice Hammer. Four months later he was convicted of fraud for a scam involving hire-purchase agreements, and sent to prison. While he was there, Beatrice gave birth to a child who she immediately gave up for adoption. On his release, Haigh left Beatrice and then simply ignored her, acting as if he had never been married.

Prison seemed to have shocked Haigh back on to the straight and narrow. He started a dry-cleaning company that prospered until his partner in the business died in a motorcycle accident, and business began to decline with the coming of war. Haigh then moved to London where he worked in an amusement arcade, owned by a man named Donald McSwann. A year later, he struck out on his own with a scam that resulted in him being sent to prison again, this time for four years. In prison he talked a lot to his fellow inmates about committing the perfect crime. An imperfect understanding of the law allowed him to develop the notion that if the police could not find a body, then the killer could not be convicted of murder. He decided that the best way to effect this would be to dissolve a body in acid. He experimented in the prison workshops, managing to dissolve a mouse in acid.

LIFE AFTER PRISON

Once back in the community, he put his plan into action. He met up with McSwann, luring him to a workshop that he was renting. Haigh then killed him and, with some difficulty, dumped his body into a large barrel of acid that he had prepared for the purpose. The plan worked perfectly and Haigh was able to tip the last sludgy remains of his friend down a drain. McSwann’s parents were suspicious but Haigh managed to fob them off with the story that McSwann had fled to Scotland to avoid being drafted to fight in the war.

When the war ended and McSwann failed to return, his parents became more suspicious. Haigh took drastic action. He lured the parents to the workshop and murdered them both, just as he had killed their son. He then forged letters to enable him to sell off their substantial estate.

For the next three years he lived off the money he had received. Thanks to his gambling habit, however, the money ran out and he had to look around for new victims.

He found a couple called Archie and Rosalie Henderson, who met the same fate as the McSwanns and once again Haigh managed to get his hands on their estate. However, it took him less than a year to get through their money. By February 1949 he was unable to pay the bill at the hotel he was living in, a place called the Onslow Court, popular with rich widows. He persuaded one of the widows, Olivia Durand-Deacon, that he had a business plan she might be interested in. She agreed to come with him to his new workshop, located next to a small factory in Surrey, just outside London. Once there he shot her in the head, removed her jewellery and fur coat, and dumped her in an acid bath.

Within two days a friend of Mrs Durand-Deacon alerted the police and mentioned that she had been planning to meet Haigh. Haigh claimed that she had never arrived at the meeting, but his manner was suspicious and they decided to investigate further.

They learned of his workshop in Surrey and obtained a search warrant. They found several clues to suggest that Mrs Durand-Deacon had been there, and then obtained evidence from a local shopkeeper, who identified Haigh as the man who had sold him the widow’s jewellery. They duly brought Haigh in for questioning.

THE DEFENCE

Once in custody, Haigh boasted that Mrs Durand-Deacon would never be found because he had dissolved her in acid, believing that without her body they would be unable to charge him. In fact, once the police went back and dredged through the hideous sludge in the bottom of the acid bath, they found several pieces of human bone and part of Durand-Deacon’s dentures.

The game was clearly up for Haigh, who now switched his tactics. Clearly aiming to plead insanity, he confessed to the murders of the McSwanns and the Hendersons, as well as three other murders of unidentified victims. He claimed that the motives were not financial but that he was tormented by dreams that dated back to his religious childhood. These dreams apparently gave him an unquenchable thirst for human blood – that he sucked up through a drinking straw. It was generally believed that he had added a confession to the three mystery victims because the motivation for the murders of his actual victims was so clearly financial.

The defence found a psychiatrist to attest to Haigh’s insanity, but the jury was not convinced, and he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out at Wandsworth Prison, London, on 6 August 1949.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

From the age of 9 until he was 32, Charles Manson, who was born illegitimate, spent almost all of his life in institutions, though he did spend enough time on the outside to be sent down for armed robbery (at 13), homosexual rape (at 17) and car stealing, fraud and pimping (at 23). In prison for this last set of offences, he became, by an odd coincidence, the protégé of another killer, Alvin Karpis of the notorious Barker Gang, who taught him the guitar well enough for him to be able to boast later:

‘I could be bigger than the Beatles.’

In a way of course, Manson was. For, let out of prison in 1967, the year of ‘the summer of love,’ he became the most hated and vilified figure in America, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in the 60s.

Emerging from San Pedro prison with little more than a beard, a guitar and a line in mystic hocus-pocus, Manson was soon playing hippie Jesus on the streets of nearby Haight-Ashbury to a group of adoring disciples – most of them middle-class drop-outs who lived on a diet of hallucinogenic drugs and acted out their fantasies in sex orgies. It wasn’t long, though, before he decided his ambitions were too big for San Francisco. So he took his ‘Family’ south, picking up new acolytes on the way, and settled in the grounds of the Spiral Staircase club in Los Angeles, where he began to attract the attention of the wilder fringes of the Hollywood party scene: musicians, agents and actors looking for kicks or black magic – or the next big thing.

Manson’s vision, though, by this time was becoming darker, more apocalyptic; and by the time he moved the ‘Family’ to the Spahn Movie Ranch 30 miles from the city, he was no longer interested in merely sex, drugs and adoration. He believed that there would soon be a nuclear day of reckoning, called Helter Skelter. He drew up a death list of people he envied or wanted revenge on (‘pigs’ like Warren Beattie and Julie Christie); and he became obsessed with the idea of a dune-buggy-riding army of survivalists which would escape into the Mojave Desert.

To set up this army – and its transport – he, of course, needed money. So, like a latter-day Fagin, he set his ‘Family’ to crime: drug-dealing, theft, robbery, credit-card fraud, prostitution and eventually murder. First, a drug-dealer, a bit-part actor and a musician were killed on his orders; and then, when some of his ‘Family’ were arrested on other charges, he announced Helter Skelter day.

That night, August 8th 1969, four of his demented disciples invaded the house of movie director Roman Polanski and murdered five people, including his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. Before they left, they used Tate’s blood to daub the word PIG on the front door.

When he later heard the names of the victims, Manson – who’d chosen the house only because one of the people on his death-list had once lived there – was delighted. As Hollywood panicked, he led the next murderous raid himself, selecting a house for no other reason than that it was next-door to someone he disliked. This time a forty-four-year old supermarket president called Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary were stabbed in a frenzy, and their blood used to write DEATH TO PIGS, RISE and HEALTER (sic) SKELTER on the walls. The word WAR was carved onto Mr LaBianca’s stomach.

The two cases of multiple murder were investigated by different law-enforcement agencies and at first no connections were made. Manson and members of the ‘Family’ were arrested, but on other charges, and were eventually released. But then one of Manson’s female acolytes told a cell-mate that she’d been involved in the murders. Manson and members of the ‘Family,’ two of whom later turned state’s evidence, were picked up.

The trial of Manson and three of his female acolytes – others were tried elsewhere – lasted nine months, and was not without sensation. When Manson appeared in the dock one day with a cross carved with a razor-blade onto his forehead, the three girls soon burned the same mark onto theirs. On another occasion 5-foot 2-inches tall Manson jumped 10 feet across the counsel table to attack the trial judge, who afterwards took to carrying a revolver in court under his robes.

In the end all four were sentenced to death, but were spared execution when the California Supreme Court voted to abolish the death penalty in 1972. Manson worked as a chapel caretaker in Vacaville Prison in southern California, relocated to San Quentin and is currently incarcerated in Corcoran State Prison, Kings County, California. At the age of 78, he was turned down for parole in April 2012 and will not be eligible again until 2027.

BEER BARON OF THE BRONX

Born in a different time and place, Dutch Schultz was one of those men who might have aspired to greatness. He had brains and vision, plus a definite streak of ruthlessness. However, as he was born into grinding poverty in the Bronx at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not altogether surprising that he put these attributes to work in the services of organized crime.

BEER BARON OF THE BRONX

Like many other mobsters of his generation – from Al Capone to Lucky Luciano to Meyer Lansky – it was Prohibition that made Schultz his fortune. Known for a time as ‘The Beer Baron of the Bronx’, Schultz became one of the most powerful and feared men in New York, before his violent life finally led to a violent death.

Dutch Schultz was born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer on 6 August 1902 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were both German Jews and his mother Emma, in particular, tried to pass religious values on to her son. She was successful only to a limited extent. Schulz did take an interest in religion, but not a consistent one. He described himself at various times as Jewish, Protestant and Catholic. As he grew up, he joined one of the street gangs that ruled the streets of the Bronx. When Schultz was fourteen, his father abandoned the family, and young Arthur decided to adopt the criminal life. He started doing jobs for a local mobster, Marcel Poffo. In 1919, when he was seventeen, he was caught burgling an apartment and received his one and only prison sentence.

As often happens, prison only served to turn the young Arthur from apprentice hoodlum to fully fledged criminal. When he came out he had a new name, ‘Dutch’ Schultz, and a reputation as a hard man. Prohibition had come in the previous year and it was becoming clear that there was big money to be made now that alcohol was illegal. Schultz worked his way up, starting as a hired muscle protecting deliveries, then driving a beer truck, then working in a speakeasy run by a gangster named Joey Noe, a childhood friend. Noe saw Schultz’s potential and made him a partner in their bootlegging business. The duo bought their own delivery trucks and gradually forced all the other speakeasy owners in the Bronx to buy their beer from them. Anyone who refused was treated with extreme brutality.

WAR IN GANGLAND

Once they had taken over the business in the Bronx, they turned their attention to Manhattan and stated delivering to speakeasies across the Upper East Side. This soon brought the gang into conflict with ‘Legs’ Diamond, the mobster who dominated the Manhattan scene. On 15 October 1928, Diamond’s men ambushed Joey Noe outside the Chateau Madrid nightclub, shooting him dead. War had been declared; mob money man Arnold Rothstein was shot dead two weeks later. Schultz’s main gunman, Bo Weinberg, eventually shot Diamond dead, but not for another three years.

The next threat to Schultz came from within his own organization. In 1931, a gunman named Vincent Coll set himself up as a rival. Angry over an unpaid loan, Schultz brought matters to a head by assassinating Coll’s brother. Coll responded by killing four of Schultz’s men and hijacking his beer lorries. Schultz refused to stand for this and, after several near misses, he finally had Coll shot dead in a drugstore in February 1932.

EASING IN ON THE NUMBERS RACKET

By now it was clear that the great Prohibition experiment was coming to an end. Schultz was smart enough to look for another lucrative scam. His attention alighted on the numbers racket, a popular form of gambling particularly prevalent in New York’s black communities.

Organized crime had paid little attention to the numbers because the individual stakes were generally very small. Schultz, however, realized that if all the different small-scale outfits could be brought together, the total daily take would actually be sizable. With a characteristic mixture of diplomacy and ruthless violence, Schultz proceeded to take over the Harlem lottery.

Soon afterwards, Schultz alighted on another scheme: systematically intimidating the restaurants of New York into paying a weekly amount of protection money – disguised as voluntary membership dues paid to a front organization called the Metropolitan Restaurant & Cafeteria Owners Association. This was run for Schultz by a hood named Jules Martin. Schultz appeared to be riding higher than ever as Prohibition drew to a close, helped by his links to the city’s corrupt mayor.

THE LAW CLOSES IN

Nemesis, however, was just around the corner in the shape of Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was determined to nail Schultz.

His chosen weapon was the one that had been so effective against Al Capone in Chicago: tax evasion charges. Rather than catch a gangster red-handed, all the prosecution needed to do was prove that he had received substantial earnings and that he had paid no taxes on them.

Thus, on 25 January 1933, Dutch Schulz was indicted for tax evasion. His immediate response was to go on the run. For more than a year, he avoided the law and carried on running his businesses.

Finally, however, he grew tired of running and, in November 1934, he gave himself up for trial.

While out on bail, Schultz discovered that Jules Martin had been skimming money from the restaurant shakedowns. Schultz invited his own lawyer and Martin to a meeting. When Martin admitted skimming, Schultz shocked the lawyer by immediately shooting Martin in the head, killing him instantly.

VIOLENT DEATH

Soon after this incident, Schultz’s trial began. The first jury was unable to come to an agreement. A retrial was ordered and, much to Dewey’s fury, the jury this time acquitted Schulz. When Dewey started preparing new charges. Schultz decided to put out a hit on Dewey. Fellow mob bosses, including Lucky Luciano, decided it would be very bad for business to have Dewey murdered. Instead, they put out their own hit on Schultz. On 23 October 1935, Schultz and three of his men were shot dead in the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. Thus ended the career of one of the mob’s most formidable gangsters.

THE BELTWAY SHOOTINGS

For three weeks in October 2002, John Allen Muhammad, a black ex-US army sergeant, and John Malvo, a Jamaican teenager Muhammad had adopted as his son, brought terror to the area surrounding Washington DC. Known to the media as the ‘Beltway Sniper’, Muhammad and Malvo killed at least fourteen people and wounded at least five more before they were finally captured. Muhammad was definitely the dominant partner in the killings but his motivation remains obscure. Some believe that, as a convert to Islam, Muhammad may have been carrying out a deliberate terror attack on Washington. By contrast, his ex-wife, Mildred, believes it was part of an elaborate, if crazy, plot to kill her and gain custody of his three children.

EXPERT MARKSMAN

John Muhammad was born John Allen Williams in Louisiana on 30 December 1960. His mother died when he was young and his father was absent, so his grandfather and aunt raised him. Muhammad became a excellent football player, marrying his high-school sweetheart Carol Williams in 1982. He enlisted in the army in 1985, training as a mechanic and combat engineer. He was transferred to Germany in 1990, fought in the Gulf War in 1991, returned to the United States the following year, and was given an honourable discharge from the army, as a sergeant, in 1994. Unconfirmed reports suggest that his discharge was connected with a grenade attack that Muhammad was accused of carrying out on his fellow soldiers. He did not receive specific sniper training while in the army, but qualified as an expert with the M-16 rifle, a civilian version of which – the Bushmaster .223 – would be the weapon he had when he was finally arrested.

CONVERSION TO ISLAM

After leaving the army, Muhammad settled in Tacoma, in Washington state. By now he was living with his third wife, Mildred, and their three children. Muhammad worked as a car mechanic and started a martial arts school. He converted to the Nation of Islam, changing his name to Muhammad.

At his stage, Muhammad appears to have been a well-respected member of the community. Then things started to go wrong. Soon, he was locked in a bitter custody battle with Mildred. He took the children and fled to Antigua in the Caribbean. There he tried to establish himself as a businessman but ended up helping people to obtain false papers for entry into the US. One of those he helped was a teenage boy called Lee Malvo, originally from Jamaica. When things failed to work out in Antigua, Muhammad returned to Washington state with his three children plus Malvo, whom he claimed was his stepson. Muhammad moved to the town of Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, and attempted to register his children in school there. At this point investigators tracked him down and returned his three children to their mother, who promptly left the state and went into hiding in Maryland.

Muhammad and Malvo, now calling himself John as well, stayed in Bellingham for a while. They lived in a homeless shelter but Muhammad seemed to have enough money to take regular flights around the States. During this period, the pair carried out their first murder: they intended to kill a friend of Mildred’s in Tacoma, but accidentally shot the woman’s niece instead.

In the late summer of 2001, Muhammad and Malvo took a trip down to Louisiana, where Muhammad visited his relatives. He claimed to be doing well, to have a family and business in the Virgin Islands, but his big talk was belied by the fact he had not washed or cut his hair. His relatives were worried