Spillman looked like a solid suspect for the Huffman murders and he was immediately placed under surveillance. In the meantime, Douglas County officers carried out a search of the area where Spillman had been pulled over the previous night. They soon found what they were looking for, a bloody knife that would later return samples of both Rita and Amanda’s blood and be matched to the wounds on their bodies.
And that wasn’t the only evidence that investigators collected against Spillman. While they had him under surveillance, they’d seen him pull his pickup to the side of the road and walk into some bushes, only to return moments later and drive off. A search of the area turned up a bloodstained ski mask. This too would return samples of the victims’ blood as well as a macabre insight into Spillman’s M. O. Noticing a concentration of dried blood around the mouth opening of the mask, detectives came to the horrific conclusion that Spillman had placed his mouth to his victims’ wounds, most likely to drink their blood. (He’d later admit this).
The police now had enough to arrest Spillman and, on April 22, he was taken into custody. A search of his car and residence soon added a wealth of forensic evidence in the form of blood, hair and fibers. The case against Spillman looked like a slam dunk and, given the brutality of his crimes, there is every chance that he would have been executed. The D.A., however, had other ideas. He offered Spillman a deal, a full confession in exchange for life without parole. Faced with the almost certain prospect of the death penalty, Spillman jumped at it.
Spillman said that he’d decided to kill Mandy after spotting her on a street and following her home. Thereafter, he’d stalked her for several days before making his move. “I wasn’t interested in the mother,” he said. “She was just where she shouldn’t have been.”
With the prospect of the death penalty off the table, Spillman also admitted to murdering 9-year-old Penny Davis. He said that he had actually wanted Penny’s older sister but on the day that he came to abduct her, he couldn’t find the girl and so took Penny instead. Penny was taken to a remote cave that Spillman had picked out beforehand. There, he undressed the terrified little girl and began torturing her with a knife. “She died too quick,” he complained. Spillman had then raped the child’s corpse before burying her. He admitted that he’d later returned several times to the site and disinterred the corpse for sexual purposes.
Jack Spillman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, to be served at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center in Washington State. He had not achieved his ambition to become America’s most infamous serial killer. He will go down, however, as one of the most depraved individuals ever to pass through the criminal justice system.
Deadly Doctor Hyde
Frances Swope was in love and nothing that her family could say was ever going to change that. Her beloved, a dashing young doctor by the name of Bennett Clark Hyde, had proposed and Frances had instinctively said yes, not even bothering to consult her mother or the patriarch of the Swope clan, her uncle, Thomas Hunton Swope.
The Swopes were a powerful family in the state of Missouri in the early twentieth century. Colonel Thomas Hunton Swope had come west years earlier, having built his fortune in real estate and mining in New York and St. Louis. Now he owned a sizable chunk of the land in and around Kansas City. He was a man of influence but nothing he could say would sway his niece’s opinion of her beloved Clark. She had accepted his marriage proposal and that was the end of it. In 1905, with none of the Swope clan in attendance, the couple was married. Not even a last-minute hitch, when another young woman sued Hyde for breach of promise, could deflect Frances from her path.
Yet despite Frances’ admirable devotion to her new husband, few would have differed with the Swope clan’s reservations about the man. Born in Cowper, Missouri in 1872, Hyde was the son of a Baptist minister, who had attended medical school in Kansas City and remained in the city to practice medicine after graduation. From the very start, his career was dogged by scandal. In 1899, two men were arrested for grave robbing and later confessed that they were working for Hyde. Charges were filed but dropped due to a lack of corroborating evidence. Then, in 1907, Hyde was fired from his job as Kansas City’s police surgeon after a patient accused him of maltreatment. Between those dates, there were myriad allegations of sexual abuse and cruelty towards women.
Marriage however, appeared to have a calmative effect on Hyde. He was, by all accounts, a devoted husband and, in time, there was a thawing of relations between him and his in-laws. By 1909, Frances and her husband had been accepted into the fold. Not only that, but Dr. Hyde had become the de facto family physician.
In September 1909, Hyde was called to the bedside of James Moss Hunton, first cousin to Colonel Swope. Hunton had a stomach problem and Hyde decided that the best way to treat the ailment was to draw two pints of blood. He also gave the patient a couple of pills which sent him almost immediately into convulsions. A short while later, Hunton was dead. Dr. Hyde recorded the cause of death as apoplexy.
A few days later, Hyde was called to attend to another family member, Col. Swope himself. Swope had suffered a minor injury in a fall but had developed digestive problems while bedridden. Hyde provided a couple of “digestion pills" and instructed Swope to take them before his next meal. According to the nurse attending Swope, he’d been in good spirits, sitting up and reading the newspaper when he took the medication. But some twenty minutes later, he complained of stiffness in his limbs. Then he began groaning in pain, his body racked by such violent convulsions that at one point he cried out, “I wish I were dead." That wish was granted to him minutes later. The death certificate, signed by Dr. Hyde, listed the cause as "apoplexy."
A curse seemed suddenly to have fallen on the Swope family. In December of that year, eight family members, all of them named as beneficiaries in Col. Swope’s will, were struck down with typhoid. One of them, Chrisman Swope, died on December 6, his symptoms startlingly similar to those suffered by his late uncle.
It was all too much for Mrs. Logan Swope, Frances' mother, who had by now become convinced that her son-in-law was behind the spate of deaths. On December 7, she went to the police and voiced her suspicions. Dr. Hyde, she said, was systematically murdering members of her family, eliminating everyone that stood between Frances and the substantial fortune left behind by Col. Swope.
It was a very serious allegation and despite a lack of evidence to back it up, the police obtained a court order for the exhumation of Col. Swope and his nephew, Chrisman. They fully expected to find traces of poison but were disappointed with the autopsy results. The bodies did indeed contain strychnine. The concentrations though, were not enough to have caused death. It appeared that Dr. Hyde was off the hook.
But the reprieve was short-lived. A few days later, one of Hyde's colleagues – Dr. Edward Stewart – came forward to inform the police about a curious incident in which Hyde had taken a test tube filled with typhoid culture from their shared laboratory. He’d told Stewart that it was for “an experiment,” but had not elaborated further. Being as eight members of the Swope family had contracted typhoid just days later, and one of them had died, this was interesting information.
Hyde was arrested and charged with murder in late December 1909. The trial, commencing on April 11, 1910, once again pitted the loyal Frances against the rest of her family. That familial feud was perfectly summed up by a local newspaper which ran the headline, “Mother-in-Law tries to hang Son-in-Law,” on the first day of the proceedings.
The prosecution’s contention was that Hyde was fully aware of the provisions of Col. Swope’s will and thus had a motive for murder. Most of the prosecution witnesses were members of the Swope family and the picture they painted was damning. According to Margaret Swope (Frances' younger sister), “Dr. Hyde came into my room and looked over my medicines. A short time later, a nurse gave me a capsule. My convulsions followed." Another sister testified that Hyde had come to her room in the middle of the night and jabbed a needl
e into her arm. She’d become ill soon after.
These claims, however, did not go unchallenged. Hyde's defense attorney suggested that Logan Swope’s inherent dislike of her son-in-law had poisoned the rest of the family against him. He insisted that Col. Swope had died of old age and that the rest of the family had become ill after drinking contaminated water. It was up to the jury to unravel the evidence and they came down in favor of the prosecution. Bennett Clark Hyde was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
The sentence of course, went on appeal, with Frances Hyde issuing a terse statement on the courthouse steps insisting that her husband was innocent and would be freed. Ironically, it was the money she’d inherited from her uncle, the man he was accused of killing, that would finance his bid for freedom. Frances hired the best lawyers money could buy. In September 1910, a new trial was ordered.
Those proceedings began in October 1911 and ended in farce when one of the sequestered jurors escaped from his hotel room and returned to his family. Tracked down by police some days later, the errant juror said that he could no longer bear the strain of being separated from his loved ones. That left the judge with no option but to declare a mistrial.
A third trial, in 1913, ended in a hung jury and while a fourth was discussed, it never happened. In 1917, the charges against Hyde were dismissed.
Frances Hyde, the woman who had stood by her man in the face of public opinion and the ire of her family, appeared at last to be vindicated. Over the next three years, she bore Dr. Hyde a son and a daughter to complete their family unit. But there was to be no happy ending for Frances. In October 1920, she filed for divorce, citing “repeated and constant acts of cruelty and violence.” Perhaps she finally realized that her mother had been right all along.
Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity in the small town of Lexington, some 40 miles down the Missouri River from Kansas City. There he set up a modest practice and became a well-liked member of the community. In his later years, Dr. Hyde developed the habit of calling at the offices of the local newspaper, the Lexington Advertiser-News, each morning to get a sneak peek at the day’s headlines. He was doing just that on August 8, 1934, when he suddenly collapsed and died. His death certificate listed cause of death as apoplexy.
The Swope family’s influence can still be seen in Kansas City, Missouri today. Swope Park, a 1,805-acre green space in the center of the city, stands on land donated by Colonel Thomas Hunton Swope and is named in his honor.
Love Cuts Like a Knife
It was her first day at work and Marlene Lehnberg was terrified. The pretty 16-year-old had been raised in an extremely religious family, by an ultra-conservative father who believed in screening his kin from sinful outside influences. On the day that Marlene arrived to take up her job at the Red Cross Children's Hospital in Rondebosch, Cape Town, her social interactions had been limited to her immediate family and members of her church congregation. She hadn’t been allowed to make friends outside of that circle. She’d never even been to a movie theater.
But Marlene need not have worried. Her colleagues at the Orthopedic Workshop, where she’d been employed as a receptionist, were friendly and helpful. One, in particular, the workshop’s chief technician, took a shine to her. Before long, Christiaan van der Linde had become the caring father figure that Marlene had craved all her life. Under his tutelage, she thrived.
Whether or not the 47-year-old van der Linde had intended from the start to seduce the naïve Marlene, we shall never know. According to his later account, he saw their relationship as father/daughter. Marlene, however, was soon head-over-heels in love. She began flirting with van der Linde and it wasn’t long before her teasing was being reciprocated. Like many middle-aged men before him, Christiaan van der Linde found his teenaged temptress impossible to resist. Within a year, he’d taken her as a lover.
Throughout 1973, Lehnberg and van der Linde carried on their tempestuous affair. But finding time to be together wasn’t easy. Van der Linde was married and the father of three children. Still, the couple met up in parks and on deserted beaches; they stole moments at work; on occasion, they booked into a cheap hotel together. Then, early in 1974, van der Linde dropped a bombshell. He was ending the affair, he said. His wife had received an anonymous telephone call. She knew about them.
Marlene was devastated. Van der Linde had always warned her that he would never leave his wife, but she’d hoped, in the manner of illicit lovers everywhere, that her love would eventually win him over. Now he was dumping her.
The months that followed were difficult ones for Marlene. She still had to face Christiaan at work and how she hated being kept apart from him. The only solution, she decided, was to resign from her job. In fact, it might be better if she left Cape Town altogether.
However, when she handed in her notice to van der Linde and told him of her plans to move to Johannesburg, he persuaded her to reconsider. Was there some hope after all? Determined to bring matters to a head, Marlene decided to phone her lover’s wife and confront her. Susanna van der Linde was unimpressed. She called Marlene a “child” and put the phone down on her.
Undeterred by this setback, Marlene decided to try again. In October 1974, she phoned Mrs. van der Linde and asked if they could meet. To her surprise, Susanna agreed. But the meeting did not go off as Marlene had hoped. When she professed her love for Christiaan, Susanna sniggered and said that she was welcome to continue sleeping with him if that made her happy. Just as long as she didn’t mind playing second fiddle. “Chris will always put me and his children first,” she told the younger woman. Marlene left the meeting feeling angry and frustrated.
It was around this time that the fourth player in this sordid drama arrived on the scene. Marthinus Charles Choegoe was a colored (mixed-race) man of 33, who had lost a leg in a car accident. He was down and out, unkempt, and unemployed and he’d come to the hospital’s Orthopedic Workshop to have an artificial limb fitted. Marlene immediately saw in him a potential accomplice in the plan she had begun hatching.
Choegoe was flattered by the attention paid to him by the pretty young woman. When Marlene asked him to meet with her and then suggested that she might have a way for him to earn some money, he was immediately interested. However, he shirked when she explained to him what she needed him to do. “But Miss Marlene,” he said, “If I kill this lady, they’ll catch me and send me to the gallows.”
“They won’t catch you,” was Marlene’s response. “Not if you do it exactly like I tell you.” Marlene could be incredibly persuasive and, in truth, Choegoe was in awe of her. He finally agreed to do as she said.
A few days later, Choegoe went to the address in the suburb of Bellville that Marlene had given him. As he turned onto Gladstone Street and picked out the tidy bungalow that was the van der Linde residence, he spotted a woman standing in the garden. This, he was sure, was Mrs. van der Linde. She certainly matched the description that Miss Lehnberg had given him. In that moment, Marthinus Choegoe made a decision. He couldn’t go ahead with the murder. In fact, he decided, he was going to warn this woman of the plot against her.
Choegoe approached the house determined to let Susanna van der Linde know that her life was in danger. At the last moment though, his nerve deserted him. When Susanna looked up and rather rudely asked what he wanted, he mumbled something about spare change. Susanna replied abruptly that she didn’t have any. Then she turned and walked back towards the house.
Marlene was angry that Choegoe hadn’t carried through with his side of their deal. But she also knew that she still needed him. Rather than take out her frustrations on the man, she decided to sweeten the pot. In addition to the money she’d promised Choegoe for the murder, she’d throw in an FM radio. Choegoe, suitably incentivized, said that he’d do it. He was back in Bellville a few days later but again his nerve deserted him. On this occasion, he hobbled right past the house, barely breaking stride on his bad leg.
Marlene was by now getting desperate. Shortly after the second abortive attempt, she sent a note to Choegoe asking him to telephone her at work. During the subsequent conversation, Marlene sweetened the deal still further. She promised Choegoe a car and said that she’d have sex with him if he went through with the murder. It was an offer he could not resist.
During October 1974, Lehnberg handed in her notice at the hospital and told van der Linde that she was moving to Johannesburg. What van der Linde could not have known was that the move was not over their failed relationship, but rather to distance herself from the fallout that would result from his wife’s murder. Marlene and Choegoe had decided that Susanna would die on October 24.
But again their plans went awry. Susanna van der Linde spotted Choegoe loitering outside her house and recognized him as someone she’d seen in the area before. She called the police and Choegoe was arrested. Taken to Bellville Police Station, he was asked what he was doing in the neighborhood. When he could not provide an adequate reason, he was worked over by a couple of burly police officers and then released with a warning never to return to the area.
Murder Most Vile Volume 12: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Murder Books) Page 6
