The medical examiner counted “hundreds” of bruises that covered the corpse from head to toe. Some were fresh, others older, suggesting that the victim had been tortured over an extended period. The palms of the hands and the soles of his feet were badly bruised, while the buttocks and back were crisscrossed by numerous lash marks. Both eyes were severely blackened and there was a “hinge fracture” to his skull, probably caused by a blow to the back of the head with a heavy object. The bones in his nose, ribs, and throat were fractured and there were multiple cigarette burns, as well as elongated blisters, perhaps caused by a hot poker. Burns and abrasions pointed to an acidic agent being applied to the skin and then scrubbed with a wire brush. As to the cause of death, the M.E. believed it to be a vicious blow to the head, delivered with such force that it had caused a massive X-shaped fracture to the skull.
Homicide detectives deal with all manner of bestial crimes during the course of their careers, but the brutality of this one was such that the investigators were doubly determined to bring the perpetrators to book. And it did not take long before they had their first lead. On the evening before Buddy Musso's body was discovered, Suzanne Basso had made a number of frantic calls, including to his niece and to the local precinct. She’d reported him missing and suggested that he might have run away with a “little Mexican lady” he’d met at a Laundromat. This clearly warranted further investigation and the police therefore brought Basso in for questioning. It wasn’t long before she broke down and confessed, implicating O'Malley, Singleton, and the Ahrens family (Bernice, Craig, and Hope) in the murder. All were rounded up and arrested soon after.
At their respective trials, James O'Malley and Terence Singleton were given life sentences, while Bernice Ahrens got 80 years, and Craig Ahrens received a 60-year term. Hope Ahrens agreed to testify against Basso in exchange for a 20-year sentence.
Which left the undoubted ringleader of the collective, Suzanne Basso. She went on trial in July 1999, with the prosecution determined to seek the death penalty. That sanction was handed down by the trial judge on September 1, 1999, and upheld on appeal. Suzanne Basso was put to death by lethal injection on February 5, 2014. There was justice for Buddy Musso at last.
FOOTNOTE: Suzanne Basso was not the only convicted murderer in her family. Her uncle was Robert Garrow, a notorious serial killer from Dannemora, New York, who was shot and killed during an attempted prison break in September 1978.
Evidence of Murder
It had been a glorious summer’s day, one that 8-year-old Sarah Payne had spent playing with her siblings in a cornfield near her grandparents’ home in the village of Kingston Gorse, West Sussex. The game was hide-and-seek and Sarah was good at it, so much so that when she disappeared on that July afternoon in 2000, her sister and two brothers thought that she’d found another good hidey-hole and was challenging them to find her. It was only when their increasingly frantic calls failed to turn up any sign of Sarah that her siblings suspected that something was wrong. They ran back to their grandparents’ house and from there the police were called and a search was launched.
Police officers, of course, know the drill all too well. If a search for a missing child is to be successfully resolved, the child must normally be found within the first few hours. Every minute that stretches beyond that time frame makes it more and more likely that the child has come to harm. In Sarah’s case, the search carried on through the night and into the next day. By then, the police had begun to fear the worst, that she’d fallen into the hands of a predatory pedophile.
While the search was still ongoing, detectives had already begun scanning the Sex Offenders Register, compiling a list of likely suspects. One of those who made the list was a 41-year-old man who lived in the nearby town of Littlehampton, just five miles from where Sarah had last been seen. His name was Roy Whiting, and he’d served time for a sexual assault on an 8-year-old girl.
Roy Whiting was born in Horsham, West Sussex on January 26, 1959, the second of George and Pamela Whiting’s three children. As a child, he attended Ifield Community College but struggled academically and eventually dropped out in 1975, without graduating. Thereafter, he worked at various menial jobs before finding work as a car mechanic and spray painter at a local body shop.
Whiting found that he had a talent for mechanical work and he extended his interest in cars by becoming an amateur stock car racer. However, he quit the sport after he met a 19-year-old girl named Linda in 1986. Linda was obviously prepared to overlook Whiting’s poor personal hygiene and bad breath because the couple was married in June of that year. A short while later, Linda was pregnant with their first child but by then the relationship was already in trouble. By the time their son Terry was born in April 1987, they were living apart. They finally divorced in 1990. We do not know the grounds for the annulment. Perhaps it was because Linda, at 20, was a little too old for Roy Whiting’s sick appetites.
On March 4, 1995, an 8-year-old girl was abducted and sexually assaulted on a housing estate in Langley Green, Crawley, close to where Whiting was staying at the time. The child was too traumatized to provide the police with any details of her attacker, but an eyewitness reported seeing a red Ford Sierra racing away from the scene. Roy Whiting owned just such a vehicle, but he’d sold it at a knockdown price just a few days after the assault. When an acquaintance passed that piece of information on to the police, they elevated Whiting to the top of their suspect list.
Whiting was brought in for questioning but was released after he denied having anything to do with the crime. Three months later, and with the case against him building, Whiting was singing a different tune. Realizing that he faced life in prison if found guilty, he decided to come clean, hoping that a confession would get him a more lenient sentence. He was right. The sentence of the court was a paltry four years, of which he served just two-and-a-half before being released in November 1997. A psychiatrist who assessed Whiting in the run up to his parole warned that he was highly likely to re-offend. That advice, unfortunately, was ignored. The authorities firmly believed that the recently established Sex Offenders Register would be an effective means of monitoring, and thus supervising, pedophiles. In Roy Whiting’s case, they would be proven horribly wrong.
Whiting was one of the first sex offenders to be pulled in and questioned about Sarah Payne’s disappearance. He emphatically denied having anything to do with it, but the detectives couldn’t help noticing that his responses were different to everyone else they’d interrogated. He seemed disinterested in the little girl’s fate, as though it were already a foregone conclusion. The police also noted that he drove a white van, similar to a vehicle that had been seen in the area of the cornfield from which Sarah had gone missing. The alibi that he gave was also suspect. He said that he’d spent the day at a funfair in Hove and had been home by 9 and in bed by 10. Why then did the police have a fuel receipt that had him buying gasoline at a gas station in Pulborough, miles away from the fair where he claimed to have spent that Saturday afternoon?
The police needed answers but if they thought that Whiting might be inclined to help them, they were sorely mistaken. He stuck to his story, even when his false alibi was exposed. With Sarah’s body still missing and no evidence that conclusively tied him to her disappearance, the police were forced to let Whiting go. The case, however, was about to take a dramatic turn.
On July 17 came the news that everyone had been both expecting and dreading. A child’s decomposed body was found in the undergrowth of a field just north of Pulborough. Within a day, the police had identified her. It was Sarah Payne.
One can only imagine the trauma caused to Sarah’s family at the news. But the hurt ran even deeper than that. The entire nation was captivated by the case, with Sarah’s innocent, cherub-like face staring out from the front page of every newspaper. People were genuinely moved by the death of the little girl, genuinely angered that a sexual predator had been released from prison to commit this atrocity. Whiting had to move out
of his father’s house in Crawley when an angry mob hurled bricks and stones through the windows.
The police were now more convinced than ever that Whiting was their man. The fuel receipt from the Buck Barn garage in Pulborough placed him within three miles of the field where Sarah’s body had been found, at a time when he claimed to have been at home, tucked up in bed. It wasn’t long after that Whiting found himself back in custody, faced down by a determined team of detectives, asking difficult questions.
But still, Whiting hung tough. With forensics experts going through his apartment with a fine-toothed comb, he continued to deny responsibility for Sarah’s death. Eventually, the interrogators had to concede defeat. Whiting was not going to make it easy for them. The search of his apartment had turned up not a scrap of forensic evidence and without it, Whiting was very likely to walk free.
But the officers could not have known how much the pressure had begun to affect Whiting. Shortly after his release on bail, he went on the run, stealing a car and leading police on a high-speed chase before he was eventually arrested. That escapade earned him a 22-month jail term for car theft and dangerous driving. It also provided the police with the break they needed.
Forensic tests were carried out on Whiting’s white Fiat Ducato van and turned up the first piece of solid evidence – a long strand of blond hair. DNA test results provided a match that predicted a one-in-one-billion chance of it belonging to anyone other than Sarah Payne. In the meanwhile, a woman walking along a country lane had found a pair of child’s shoes and handed them in to the police. They turned out to be Sarah’s and to have fibers on them that would be forensically matched to the carpet in Whiting’s van. Despite Whiting’s continued denials, the police had him cornered at last.
The murder trial of Roy Whiting began at Lewes Crown Court on November 14, 2001. Among the witnesses called were Sarah’s 13-year-old brother Lee, who reported seeing a scruffy man with yellowish teeth drive past the field several times while he and his siblings were playing. Then there was the surveillance footage from the Buck Barn garage and the incriminating fuel receipt that placed Whiting in the vicinity of the crime.
The Crown’s case, however, rested heavily on forensics. Twenty forensic experts were called, covering such diverse fields as entomology, pathology, geology, archaeology, environmental profiling and lubricant analysis. In the end though, it all came down to a simple equation – Sarah’s hair had been found in Whiting’s van, fibers from the van’s carpet had been found on her shoes. Only one conclusion could be drawn from those two pieces of evidence.
Roy Whiting was convicted of the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne on December 12, 2001, with Judge Richard Curtis sentencing him to a whole life tariff, effectively life without parole. He was sent to Wakefield maximum security prison in Yorkshire to begin serving that sentence.
As is often the case with pedophiles, Whiting’s life behind bars has not been easy. Even among hardened criminals, those who prey on children are reviled. On August 2, 2002, convicted killer Rickie Tregaskis attacked Whiting with a razor blade, causing a six-inch gash to his right cheek, a trifling injury compared to the trauma he inflicted on Sarah Payne and on her family.
The Werewolf Butcher
On a pleasant April morning in 1995, a young woman called at the home of her mother in East Wenatchee, Washington. Not that she was paying much attention to the agreeable weather. She was worried. Her mother, Rita Huffman, wasn’t answering the phone and neither was her 14-year-old sister, Amanda, which was highly unusual. Pulling her car to a stop in front of their house she got out and approached the front door. There were no lights on in the residence and it seemed too quiet, way too quiet. When knocking at the door brought no response, she felt her anxiety growing. For a moment she considered driving to a nearby gas station and calling the police, but then she remembered the sliding door at the back of the house. Her mother usually left that unlocked.
Stepping with trepidation, the young woman rounded the building. The door, as she’d expected, was unlocked. In fact it stood slightly ajar, which didn’t exactly still her nerves as she entered. “Mom?” she called out. “Mandy?” Nothing. The house remained deathly still. She did pick up something though, a faint and unpleasant odor. “Mom?” Steeling herself, stilling her pounding heart, she crossed the kitchen and entered the family room. Then she stopped, breath catching in her throat. Something lay on the couch, something so drenched in blood that it was barely recognizable as a human corpse. The young woman staggered back, then turned and ran. Moments later, she was pounding on a neighbor’s door.
A patrol unit from the Douglas County Sherriff’s office was soon on the scene, with the officers quickly entering the house and just as quickly staggering out. Then an urgent call brought other units, detectives and a forensic team. None of the officers, not even the most experienced among them, could ever recall such a gruesome crime scene.
The body on the couch was that of 48-year-old Rita Huffman and she had not died easily. Thirty-one savage knife wounds had been inflicted on her and the investigators could only hope that she’d been dead by the time the killer started his other mutilations. Rita’s breasts had been cut off; her vagina had been hacked from her body, with the raw flesh crammed into her mouth. As a final indignity, the killer had left her in a sexually explicit pose.
But as grisly as that murder was, there was worse to come in the master bedroom. Fourteen-year-old Amanda lay on the bed, her body laced with stab and slash wounds. There was massive bruising where she’d been bludgeoned with a baseball bat. Her abdomen had been ripped open and the entrails pulled out. The killer had then sliced skin from her genitals and placed it over her face. Finally, he’d forced the baseball bat into her vagina. Two lumps of flesh left on a bedside table turned out to be the breasts that the killer had sliced from Rita. A forensic examination would later reveal that Amanda had also been raped.
The sheer ferocity of the murders left investigators staggered and also terrified. Someone with enough bloodlust to carry out such atrocities would definitely kill again, and probably soon. The race was on to catch him before he did.
By now a number of clues had begun to emerge. The most important of these was a wristwatch that Amanda Huffman had been wearing at the time of her murder. It had been smashed during the struggle and was stopped at 11:35, giving investigators a pretty accurate time of death. With this in hand they began working the neighborhood, going door to door. One man reported seeing a pickup parked outside the residence at around 11:30. It was a dark color and had Washington plates, he said, although he couldn’t recall the make and hadn’t paid attention to the license plate number.
The next bit of evidence came from the medical examiner. Despite the fury of the attack, he believed that the mutilations to the bodies had been carried out by someone who was skilled with a knife, perhaps a butcher or a hunter who was used to dressing deer carcasses. Neither of these descriptions matched Rita Huffman’s boyfriend, who had been the initial suspect. He was questioned and released after his alibi checked out.
The police meanwhile had been working another angle. Reasoning that the dark pickup seen by the eyewitness might have been picked up on a traffic violation, they began scanning the incident reports for the night of the murders. They soon hit pay dirt. A vehicle matching that description had indeed been pulled over, at around 2 a.m. in the morning, not far from the crime scene. The officers who made the stop thought that the driver, dressed all in black, was acting suspiciously, perhaps casing the area for a break-in. However, he’d satisfactorily answered their questions and they’d let him go. His name was Jack Owen Spillman III and he’d told the officers that he was employed as a butcher.
Looking into Spillman’s background, the police soon had reason to elevate him to the top of their suspect list. Jack Spillman was no stranger to law enforcement.
Jack Owen Spillman III was born in Washington State and raised in a trailer park in the Spokane Valley. He dropped out of scho
ol in the 9th grade, although his functional level was reportedly that of a 4th grader. Thereafter he began compiling an impressive rap sheet with numerous busts for burglary, auto theft and larceny. There were also arrests for assault, always against women. Jack managed to avoid serious prison time on all of those charges.
Then, in 1993, it appeared that the law finally had Jack Spillman dead to rights. He was arrested for sexual assault after he and his roommate brutally beat and raped a 26-year-old woman. Tried and judged guilty on that charge, he was sent down for some hard time at Washington State Penitentiary. The sentence however, amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. After serving just 124 days, he walked free. Perhaps, if the authorities had been privy to Spillman’s conversations with his cellmate, they’d have been less inclined to leniency. Spillman spoke incessantly about his desire to kill young girls and tear their bodies apart. His goal, according to the cellmate, was to become America’s most infamous serial killer.
And he might well have taken the first step towards fulfilling that ambition in September 1994. Spillman had moved to Tonasket, Washington after his release and had been romantically involved for a time with a young woman named Judy Davis. When Judy’s 9-year-old daughter, Penny, went missing, Spillman was the main suspect, although he steadfastly denied any involvement. Then, with the police asking too many questions for his liking, he relocated to Wenatchee, where Rita and Amanda Huffman would be killed just seven months later.
Murder Most Vile Volume 12: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Murder Books) Page 5
