Doctors Who Kill

by Davis, Carol Anne; Davis, Carol Anne

  Meanwhile, Robert Handy was found guilty of mail fraud and of conspiring to commit mail fraud, and was sent to jail. He still wasn’t being tried for his part in any of the murders as he refused to talk for fear that he would compromise Glennon Engleman, his dearest friend.

  The deadly dentist’s trials were continuing. He was tried for the murder of Sophie Berrera, but this ended in a mistrial, at which he told the press that his horoscope showed his betrayal at the hands of a woman (presumably Ruth Jolley, though it could also have been Carmen Miranda) had been predestined at his birth. He added that his sister had drawn up his chart and this showed he would spend the last years of his life with the criminal underworld. He seemed to genuinely believe that the stars had preordained his fate, rather than looking at the truth of the matter – that he’d opted to lure various men and one woman to their deaths in order to both enjoy killing them and benefit financially.

  His second trial for the Berrera killing ended in a guilty verdict, but he was given a life sentence rather than the death penalty because he hadn’t actually planted the bomb himself, hiring an unnamed source to do that.

  Robert Handy’s convictions

  Robert Handy’s verdict was overturned on appeal but he was convicted again by another jury in a retrial in 1985 and sentenced to seventeen years. He aged visibly and lost weight over the next few months, then let it be known that he had information on three murders and would share that information in return for the possibility of a reduced sentence. He also smuggled out a letter to Glennon apologising for the negative things he’d have to say about him.

  The police visited Handy in jail, where he admitted that he might have had prior awareness of the Peter Halm murder. He said that he’d feared Glennon would kill him too if he tried to talk Carmen out of it. He also said that he’d tried to talk the dentist out of Sophie Berrera’s car bombing. Telling Robert that they needed more detailed information (which he wasn’t yet ready to provide as he only wanted to talk to the deal-makers), the police left.

  The authorities later explained to Robert that they intended to seek two death penalties for the Gusewelle murders. One would be Glennon Engleman – and the other would either be Barbara Gusewelle or Robert Handy himself.

  Robert paled – and then he started talking. He talked for two and a half hours, admitting that Barbara had only married Ronald Gusewelle at Glennon’s instigation, knowing that Glennon would kill the man and get the insurance policy, but that she had then discovered he was heir to his parents’ fortune and Glennon had decided to kill them first. For a year and a half, Robert Handy, Glennon Engleman and Barbara Gusewelle had discussed how and where to kill Ronald’s parents and her husband. Eventually they had the details figured out.

  After making a dummy run, Glennon went to Robert’s house and the two men took Robert’s car to the farmhouse. During the journey, Glennon told Robert that Ronald beat Barbara (this appears to have been a falsehood) and that he consequently deserved to die. Apparently he didn’t deserve to die, however, until his parents had been murdered and their wealth had passed on to him…

  The dentist stopped at a phone booth and called Barbara, who duly sent her children over to the Gusewelles on an errand, checking that they were home. They were, and the dentist shot them and ransacked the house. According to Handy he remained in the car throughout the double murder, but Glennon would later say that Robert had helped to trash the house. (Also, Arthur Gusewelle had said the word ‘two’ following the assault.) Robert now told the police that Glennon had promised him he’d get money from the Gusewelles estate – but the promised cash never materialised.

  After this double murder, according to Robert, the dentist had started to think up various ways of murdering Ronald Gusewelle. At first he thought he might flag the man down on the road, acting as if he had car trouble. (James Bullock may have been killed by such a con trick.) Then he considered tying Barbara up and getting her to say that there had been a robbery during which her husband had been shot dead.

  Finally deciding to murder Ronald Gusewelle in his own garage, Robert said that he and Glennon had driven there and waited with Barbara Gusewelle’s blessing. Robert said that he had felt nervous but that Glennon was calm. In his version of events the dentist did both the shooting and the bludgeoning, whereas the dentist said that Robert had been the one who used the sledgehammer to make sure that the man was dead.

  The two men had then stuffed Ronald’s corpse into his own car whilst Barbara staunched the blood from his head wound and cleaned up the blood that had already been spilt.

  As he’d cooperated with the police, Robert Handy was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charges of conspiracy to murder. He received fourteen years for three counts of conspiracy, to be served concurrently. These three sentences were also concurrent with the seventeen-year sentence he was serving for mail fraud and conspiracy charges on the Peter Halm murder.

  Barbara Gusewelle is arrested

  By August 1984, the authorities were ready to arrest Barbara Gusewelle for her part in her husband’s murder. They found her with her boyfriend and grown-up children enjoying a beach holiday at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. Three days after her arrest she spent her forty-second birthday in a Florida courtroom. She maintained a blank expression throughout her trial, but Robert Handy apologised to the court for his part in the murders and told the jury that Glennon had many good qualities. For the second time he had a letter smuggled out of prison in which he apologised to his friend, saying, ‘You’ve been like a brother to me.’

  The jury were out for fourteen hours, then they returned and found Barbara Gusewell not guilty of her in-laws’ murders, but guilty of her husband’s murder. She wept. Later she was sentenced to fifty years.

  Engleman gives it up

  Glennon Engleman was now expected to go to trial for the three Gusewelle murders, but he asked Barbara’s lawyer what birth sign he was, and when the man replied Scorpio, Glennon said, ‘I always have a bad time going against Scorpios.’ Later, he told the authorities to forget the trial, that he was willing to plead guilty to all three of the murders. He was given three life sentences without the possibility of parole.

  The myths

  The most abiding myth that has come out of the Engleman case is that he killed his female patients if they couldn’t pay him, but the reverse is true – he let very poor patients off with their bills or told them to pay him when they could. He didn’t victimise his patients. Rather, he was revered by many of them. The fact that he worked in tandem on several of the homicides has also largely been forgotten so that he’s simply described on various crime Internet sites as a male serial killer – but he couldn’t have killed Peter Halm without Carmen Miranda, who lured the man to his death and collected the insurance money. Robert Handy was also present at the shooting. Similarly, he had Robert Handy with him when he shot Ronald Gusewelle, and Glennon later alleged that Robert had struck the hammer blow as the already-injured Ronald fell to the garage floor. Robert also admitted to driving to the Gusewelles’ farmhouse knowing that the couple were about to be shot, and Glennon’s testimony plus that of Arthur Gusewelle himself put Robert inside the house.

  The rationale

  The homicidal dentist’s motives have proved difficult for criminologists to unravel. Superficially, these were murders for profit, but he was so vague about the financial side of things that he benefited very little. Glennon had expected to get more than $16,000 from Peter Halm’s shooting, but one of the young man’s policies was still in his mother’s name rather than in his wife’s, and Glennon only netted $4,000 from Barbara Gusewelle for murdering all three Gusewelles because of legal complexities.

  Glennon refused to see a psychiatrist but a law enforcement officer suggested that he was psychotic. Psychosis, however, implies a serious mental illness where the person withdraws from reality – in contrast, Glennon Engleman functioned in an entirely rational way. Psychotics also tend to have impaired relationships with people, yet Glen
non was close to his mother, sister and exwives and had several close friends.

  Other crime writers have suggested that the main motive was power, and this is the most likely reason for the seven homicides. It was clearly vital for Glennon Engleman – the son of an unskilled man, seriously underestimated at school – to feel important, superior to those around him. As such, he encouraged impoverished patients to rely on him. Some clearly regarded him as godlike and sang his praises to their friends.

  Glennon saw his dental nurse, Carmen Miranda, and her siblings, poor Mexicans, as being inferior to himself. He helped them but he also patronised them. Again, this doubtless made him feel significant. His mother also suggested that he tended to ‘marry down’.

  The dentist was equally keen to make an impression when it came to friendship. He was generous to his friends in social situations and was always trying to involve them in business ventures in which they would benefit.

  This amount of power, however, still wasn’t enough, so the dentist turned to the occult, deluding himself into believing that he could leave his body and travel around the countryside. Yet, after these supposed out-of-body experiences, he was still a slightly overweight, balding man in a cheap suit.

  Planning murder after murder changed all that. Suddenly he had the power to decide if someone lived or died. He chose death for his first victim and enjoyed the experience. Later he’d admit to police that he liked to kill. Indeed, he liked it so much that he would do so again and again.

  As he murdered as part of a couple, Glennon was able to feel powerful for months whilst talking about the proposed murders, then enjoy talking about the deed after it was done. He was angry when Carmen Miranda tried to change the subject in the weeks leading up to her husband’s death, telling Robert Handy that she’d become moody and was far too delicate. In contrast, he remained enthralled by his lover and co-conspirator Barbara Gusewelle, telling friends that she would never kiss and tell.

  Robert Handy would later tell the authorities that Glennon was excited in the hours leading up to a murder. Glennon retained that excitement for many months afterwards by talking about the deaths with his ex-wife Barbara, often after sex.

  His mindset was sufficiently skewed that he saw the murder of innocent people as something positive, telling other prisoners that not everyone had the courage to kill. The fact that some of the wives no longer wanted their husbands seems to have been enough of an excuse for him to commit murder – and he conveniently ignored the fact that these men had parents, siblings and friends who would mourn for the rest of their lives.

  Death

  The Eighties passed and Glennon Engleman gradually faded from the headlines. He continued to believe in astral projection, but his body remained very much in Jefferson City Correctional Center. There he received regular treatment for his diabetes and died of natural causes in the prison infirmary in April 1999. He was seventy-one.

  Robert Handy’s name also faded from the public memory – and when a documentary was made about the case, he was given a pseudonym.

  When Barbara Gusewelle had served twenty years of her fifty-year sentence for the murder of her husband, Ronald, she asked for clemency. In the interim, she had returned to her previous married name of Barbara Boyle. Ronald’s brother, however, (who, of course, had lost his parents as well as his brother thanks to Barbara and Glennon) protested, saying that life should mean life, so she remained incarcerated.

  22 Dr Kenneth Taylor

  A successful dentist, Taylor had a terrifying propensity for violence, as the women in his life soon found to their cost.

  A religious upbringing

  Kenneth was born in 1948, the first child of Jean and Zach Taylor. Jean gave up her beautician’s job and went on to have two more children whilst her husband worked in a hardware store and attended business college at night. The couple were Baptists though Ken would later say that his mother was the deeply religious one.

  When Ken was five, the Taylors moved to a rural part of Cincinnati and he joined the boy scouts, where his parents became scoutmaster and den mother. It sounded claustrophobic but Ken later described it as ideal and said that he had the perfect childhood, though he became a nail-biter between the ages of eight and nine, when his father seemed more interested in his younger brother than himself. He played baseball and basketball because he believed that excelling at athletics earned him his father’s approval and attention. A tall and slim young man, he did well with girls and lost his virginity at sixteen.

  At university, he studied Medicine but switched to Dentistry in his second year. Afterwards, some of his acquaintances claimed that his grades hadn’t been quite good enough to become a doctor but Ken himself claimed that he’d become emotional when viewing the bodies of two dead children in the mortuary and realised that he couldn’t cope with such daily death. He switched to Dental School at Indiana University and easily passed his exams, being sponsored by the Navy throughout his dental course.

  First marriage

  Ken had a lot of casual sex, and then, on impulse, asked one of his girlfriends, Lynn, to marry him. He was only twenty-one but liked the idea of settling down. Unfortunately, the reality was more mundane and he soon reverted to the lifestyle of a free man. At the time, drugs were readily available in the student subculture and Ken soon succumbed to them. He experimented heavily with acid, marijuana, uppers and downers, and when Lynn got a teaching job in another city, he began to date again as if he were a bachelor.

  He was shocked to find, in November 1973, that Lynn was expecting their baby and told her that she’d have to move out. Much to the consternation of his parents, who liked and admired Lynn, Ken later said that the baby wasn’t his. When she was in her ninth month of pregnancy he walked out on her and she never saw him again. They quickly divorced.

  Second marriage

  By now, Ken was dating the woman who would become his second wife, Rosalind, an air stewardess. They married on 14th December 1974, though she disapproved of his drug-taking. Aware of this, he began to cut down, but there was a weakness in him, an inability to face up to life’s challenges, so when he crashed their car he abandoned it and reported it stolen. He was arrested for filing a false police report.

  In the summer of 1975, he graduated. Immediately afterwards he reported to the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut. By now, he was falling out of love with his second wife so made up a threesome with his new dental nurse and her friend. He began to sleep around, just as he had with his first wife, and also returned to taking drugs, including amphetamines.

  In June 1978, he left Rosalind, then reunited with her and initially seemed pleased in December when she announced that she was expecting his baby. However, he continued to take uppers and allegedly stole several hundred dollars she had been saving to buy baby clothes. The couple had an enormous argument in April and Ken punched the fridge so hard that he fractured his hand and had to go to the hospital. A nurse patched him up and he took her out on a date the following night, conveniently forgetting that he was a married man.

  Later that same month, Rosalind awoke to find Ken holding a chloroform-soaked pad over her mouth. (Chloroform can be legitimately used to sedate people, but if too much is applied, or the person is particularly susceptible, it can cause unconsciousness or death. It is also used to put animals down.) She twisted about desperately on the bed and the dentist seemed to belatedly come to his senses and apologised. Afterwards the couple prayed together for guidance.

  Rosalind also called the Navy chaplain and Ken was counselled by the Navy psychiatrist, who considered him to be a homicidal maniac. He formed the opinion that Ken had never dealt with his problems, that he let everything build up until he snapped. Ken indicated that his father seemed most interested in his athletic abilities and that his mother interfered a great deal in his life. The therapist found that he had a passive-submissive personality and could not handle fear or rage.

  Unsure what to do, Rosalind reported the incident to the
police, explaining that she didn’t want to press charges but did want to make it a matter of record. The police, however, went ahead and arrested Ken on an attempted murder charge.

  Meanwhile, a second psychiatrist had decided that Ken’s drinking and drug use had caused the violent incident, that he would recover after treatment for his addictions. His wife still didn’t want to go to court so the charge against Ken was dropped and the case was sealed.

  In summer 1979, she gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, but the marriage continued to deteriorate and the dentist had many more affairs.

  Third marriage

  It was obvious that Ken and Rosalind were not going to live happily ever after so he began looking around for a new love object and found Teresa Benigno, who applied for a job as his dental hygienist in September 1980. She was only twenty-one, whilst Ken was thirty-two, but insecure men often target younger women. In the same time frame, he slept with other women and even one of his patients – a breach of trust.

  Teresa got pregnant and Ken angrily asked if it was his. She slapped his face and he apologised for doubting her, but he wasn’t yet divorced so she went ahead and had an abortion. Rosalind also became pregnant by Ken and aborted the foetus.

  On 10th July 1983, Ken and Teresa married in Acapulco and honeymooned there, but they did not return on the scheduled flight back to Kennedy Airport. Ken later phoned her parents to say that two men had broken into their hotel room and beaten them, and that the local police had locked him in a holding cell but he had managed to bribe his way out.