by Ray Black
LOVER SLAIN IN LOVER’S LANE
Another three year hiatus followed until 22 August 1965 when Joachim departed from his usual routine, attacking a couple making out in a lovers’ lane in Grossenbaum. Puncturing the tyre to their car, he waited until Hermann Schmitz got out of the vehicle before launching his attack. Plunging the knife several times into the young man’s chest, Kroll then turned to the victim’s girlfriend. It was the girl he really wanted.
Rather than freeze in fear, she reacted quickly, jumping into the driver’s seat of the Volkswagen and sounding the horn. She then slammed her foot down on the accelerator almost knocking Joachim over. This near miss was enough to dissuade him from any further action and he fled unnoticed. Moments later other startled couples reached the scene only to find Hermann dying in his girlfriend’s arms. He would remain Joachim’s first and only male victim.
This narrow escape did little to curb his incessant hunt for prey. On 13 September 1966 he strangled Ursula Rohling in Foersterbusch Park near Marl before posing her semi-naked corpse for police to find. Just before Christmas he kidnapped five-year-old Ilona Harke, taking her by train to Wuppertal where he drowned her in a shallow ditch.
The murders continued into 1969 when Maria Hettgen received the unwanted attention of the Ruhr Hunter. In 1970 thirteen-year-old Jutta Rahn took a short-cut home from school only to become yet another victim. It was not until after a six-year break in kills that police finally caught up with Joachim Kroll.
THE BOILING POINT
On 3 July 1976, four-year-old Marion Ketter had gone missing from a playground in Kroll’s neighbourhood. Police officers searched the area for the little blonde girl, enquiring door to door for any clue to her whereabouts. Nobody had seen her. She had, in fact, been lured by Joachim Kroll to his top-floor apartment to become his final victim.
The break came when Oscar Muller, a resident in the killer’s apartment building, passed Kroll in the hallway to use the communal toilet. He was warned by his neighbour that it was out of order – backed up, he said, with guts. Thinking it a joke, Oscar used the facilities only to discover the bowl filled with a bright red mess. In a flash, he rushed out into the street to inform one of the canvassing officers.
Police examined the contents of the drains and were shocked to discover bloody entrails were the cause of the blockage. Following a knock on Kroll’s door, he explained they belonged to a rabbit he was cooking, but when they entered his kitchen, he nonchalantly pointed to the stove. Boiling away in a pot along with carrots and potatoes was a tiny human hand!
Joachim immediately confessed to the death of Marion Kettner and over the next few days admitted to some fourteen other murders. Hoping in vain he would receive an operation to cure him of his wicked ways, he took police on a tour of his kill sites, many of which had remained unsolved over the years. With no surgical procedure to make him safe, and after a lengthy trial spanning two-and-a-half years, Joachim Kroll was convicted of eight murders and one attempted murder, receiving nine life sentences.
On 1 July 1991 Joachim Kroll died of a heart attack in Rheinbach prison.
John Haigh
No body, no murder. This was the core belief upon which one of Britain’s most publicized serial killers hinged his cunning plan: to lure as many as nine victims to their deaths, dissolving their bodies in acid and thus removing the evidence of any crime.
SIGN OF SATAN
As a young child brought up in the West Yorkshire village of Outwood, John George Haigh was made fully aware of the presence of evil. Members of an evangelical movement called the Plymouth Brethren, his strict parents filled his head with a fear of society, professing the outside world which lay beyond their three-metre high fence to be wicked.
Within the confines of their secluded home, John was brought up on Bible stories and became obsessed with sacrificial fantasies, often dreaming of a forest of crucifixes weeping blood. Prevented from socializing with children his own age, he was subjected to an unending, undiluted barrage of fire and brimstone sermons, living his monastic life in fear of God’s wrath.
Adding fuel to this fire, his austere father possessed a blue blemish on his forehead, which he said came from Satan as a result of his past transgressions. Terrified he would acquire a similar sign of the devil, the browbeaten boy spent much of his youth ensuring he never committed a single sin.
However as young Haigh grew older he made the inevitable discovery: each tentatively-told lie, every unavoidable indiscretion brought no mark of evil. With this sword of Damocles removed, he was free to act how he pleased. He felt invincible, and would begin a life of deception and murder, undeterred by the Lord or the law.
THE ACID TEST
Leaving school at the age of seventeen, the dauntless teenager worked a number of jobs, apprenticing at a car engineers, underwriting for an insurance company and then as a car salesman. In this latter role he made his début in crime, selling vehicles he did not actually own. Beginner’s misfortune led to his capture and he received his first spell in prison for fraud.
Fifteen months later, Haigh returned to a life of endless scams to make money rather than an honest living. Moving to London he became a chauffeur for William McSwan, a wealthy owner of an amusement arcade before moving on to trade as a phony solicitor bringing him yet more jail time. It was during this four year term, at work in the prison tin workshop, that Haigh would discover the corrosive abilities of acid. Practising on dead mice, he found it took just thirty minutes for the body to completely disappear. His cunning mind now began to forge a plan so evil it would soon make him famous.
MCSWAN SONG
In the summer of 1944 he met up with his old employer William McSwan. Becoming the best of friends, the arcade owner took Haigh to see his parents, William and Amy, who spoke openly of their recent investments in property. This caused his criminal mind to work overtime.
With summer on the wane Haigh enticed his old boss to 79 Gloucester Road, London where he rented a basement space. Once inside the cellar, Haigh clobbered McSwan over the head with a cosh. Next, after squeezing the corpse into a forty-gallon drum, Haigh proceeded to fill the container with sulphuric acid, slowly turning McSwan into nothing more than revolting dull-grey porridge. He then poured the odorous mess down the basement manhole linked to the sewer system. Informing his concerned parents that their son had simply gone away to Scotland to avoid the draft, Haigh wrote postcards to help with the deception. This worked liked a dream until the following year.
With the war coming to an end, his parents grew curious as to why he had not returned. So in July 1945 Haigh invited Mr and Mrs McSwan to the Kensington basement, disposing of their bodies in the same way.
The wilful murders of all three McSwans allowed Haigh to steal their wealth. Through forging papers and signatures, he was able to sell their five properties and amass something in the region of £6,000 – a small fortune in wartime Britain.
MEET THE HENDERSONS
By the summer of 1947 John Haigh had become an inveterate gambler. Running low on funds, he needed another mark. Answering an advert for another London property, the trickster met Archie and Rosalie Henderson. While he did not buy the house, he did become friends with the couple, sharing their passion for music, playing the piano in a bid to get them to ‘sing’ about their wealth.
Throughout the following winter, Haigh visited his unsuspecting prey, taking regular trips with them to Brighton. During this time, he also moved his instruments of evil from the Gloucester Road basement to a workshop in Crawley, West Sussex. It was here that John Haigh lured Archie Henderson on the morning of 12 February 1948.
Believing he had travelled to see an invention, Mr Henderson stepped inside the storeroom only to be shot in the head with his own revolver, stolen earlier by Haigh. The killer con-artist then dumped the body in a tank of acid, returned to Brighton and delivered Mrs Henderson to the same address. She met the same gruesome fate.
Another simple forgery saw the Henderson
’s possessions feather their killer’s nest. Anyone who questioned their disappearance was told they had chosen to emigrate to South Africa.
THE ACID REIGN CONTINUES
Haigh’s ill-gotten gains allowed him to move into Room 404 of the Onslow Court Hotel in Kensington. The residence played home to a number of wealthy old widows; prime targets for this thieving murderer. Posing as a liaison officer between patent offices and would-be inventors, he soon struck up a leading conversation with Mrs Olive Durand-Deacon, a plump sixty-nine-year-old woman also living in the hotel.
Her late husband had left her around £40,000 and she was keen to invest a portion of this sum in the manufacture and sale of plastic fingernails. Inevitably, Haigh invited the heavy-set old lady to Crawley where he said he owned a factory. On 18 February 1949 he drove her down in his showy Alvis saloon to meet her doom.
Following his modus operandi, Haigh shot her dead, stripped the body of all valuables then tipped the still-warm body into the large drum. He then displayed the cold, detached behaviour possessed by many serial killers by popping out for some tea at a nearby restaurant, before returning to engulf the corpse in sulphuric acid. He made a series of trips to the factory to check on the slow dissolution of the body. Two days later, he poured the appalling gunk into the workshop yard.
The same day he disposed of Olive’s inhuman remains. Haigh accompanied her friend and fellow hotel resident, Constance Lane, to Chelsea Police Station to report the rotund old widow missing. Feeling that Haigh’s manner was somehow suspicious, desk sergeant Lambourne decided to run a background check on the slick-looking gentleman. She quickly discovered his previous criminal history and Haigh became the number one suspect in Mrs Durand-Deacon’s disappearance.
WEIGHTY EVIDENCE
On 26 February police paid a visit to his Crawley factory on Leopold Road. Inside this bare brick space they uncovered a host of suspicious items, including three carboys of concentrated sulphuric acid, a .38 Webley revolver and fat-stained rubber gloves. It appeared Haigh was their man.
Meanwhile, in custody, Haigh was anything but concerned. Believing the authorities were powerless to convict him of murder without a body, he freely confessed to killing Olive and rendering her body into sludge. He also admitted to killing the McSwans and Hendersons along with three unidentified others over the years. Sadly for Haigh, his knowledge of English law was somewhat lacking.
All the police needed to do was establish the fact a murder had taken place. So a forensic team set about examining the contents of the Crawley address, retrieving 475 pounds of grease in which they unearthed three gallstones, eighteen bone fragments and a set of dentures. These items had remained intact thanks to the large amount of highly-resistant fat in which they were found. The false teeth were then positively identified by Olive’s dentist. Her weight may not have saved her but it helped catch her killer.
By the time the case came to trial in July 1949, John Haigh had become a celebrity. Over four thousand people flocked to Lewes Assizes to catch a glimpse of the killer before his defence – paid for by the News Of The World in exchange for the exclusive – made the plea for insanity. Sadly for the plaintiff, the jury rejected the tales of a maniac drinking the blood of his victims and, after just fifteen minutes deliberation, found him guilty of premeditated murder. Sentenced to death, three weeks later he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison.
John Wayne Gacy
Made Man of the Year by his local community, this fund-raising philanthropist led a double life during the 1970s. When not performing as Pogo the Clown this civic-minded saint succumbed to an insatiable lust for young men, luring his unsuspecting prey to their deaths and burying them beneath his home.
FAILING HIS FATHER
Named after the all-American film star his father idolized, John Wayne Gacy came up short in direct comparison to the famous cowboy. His father hoped his son would make him proud through manly sporting achievements but unfortunately the boy was more content helping his mother and two sisters in the kitchen and garden. This brought the overweight and often sickly child a torrent of verbal and physical abuse from his alcoholic father. Yet despite the drunken beatings, little Johnny des-perately yearned for paternal affection.
It never came, even after he was struck on the forehead by a swing at the age of eleven. The numerous fainting spells throughout his teens from the resulting blood clot on the brain were deemed by his uncaring father as pure play-acting. The head trauma did little to help his failing grades and he proceeded to flunk out of four separate high schools.
By the time he was twenty years old he left the family home in Chicago for a brief stint in Las Vegas, returning three months later to enrol at North-western Business College. Following graduation, he took a job with the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company proving to be a natural salesman. What he lacked in academic prowess, he more than made up for with keen powers of persuasion. He was quickly becoming his own man; focused, determined to succeed despite his father’s cold nature. The pain he had suffered during his childhood was now deeply suppressed and would later manifest itself in the most horrific manner.
A DARK CHAPTER
Transferring to Springfield, the capital of his home state, Gacy began dating shy book-keeper, Marlynn Myers, and by September 1964 the couple were married. Within two years he and his new bride had their first child, Michael, and they had moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where John had agreed to help manage his father-in-law’s three franchises of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The salesman blessed with the gift of the gab soon found being the boss suited him and his leadership skills were further enhanced after joining the Jaycees – the US Junior Chamber – along with a number of other civic organizations. His tireless volunteering work was soon acknowledged when in 1967 he made Vice President of the Jaycee’s Waterloo chapter and was even named Man of the Year. A family man and leading light within the community, it seemed John Wayne Gacy’s future would be an auspicious one.
However, there was a dark side to this civic-minded saint. Having been made chairman of the membership drive, Gacy appealed to the baser instincts of prospective members, arranging for pornographic film screenings and even orgies with prostitutes. Rumours were rife that he attended swinging parties and dabbled in drugs, yet the most telling tale was that this big-hearted public figure had a penchant for young boys.
A MODEL PRISONER
These whispers around the small Iowa town were true. He had already indulged in homosexual affairs with male co-workers even while his wife had been in labour with their first child. His sexual compulsion was growing and soon this dark secret caught up with him. After luring teenager Donald Vorhees to his basement, he got him drunk and then pounced, forcing him to engage in explicit acts. When Vorhees finally told his family about the ordeal, charges of sodomy were brought against Gacy.
On 3 December 1968 he was given the maximum sentence of ten years at Anamosa State Penitentiary, where he behaved as a model prisoner. He continued to be socially active, joining numerous clubs and was even made head chef of the kitchen. To this end, Gacy walked out of jail a free man on 18 June 1970, just sixteen months after his initial incarceration.
Returning to his home town of Chicago, the now-divorced Gacy began to rebuild his life. The ex-convict moved in with his mother, worked as a short order cook and by June 1971 had saved enough money to start his own contracting business: PDM Incorporated. To reportedly keep the costs down, Gacy employed young men to perform the company’s painting, decorating and maintenance work, but this money-saving act would lead John Wayne Gacy down a very dark path indeed.
By the end of the year he was well on the way to returning to a normal existence. He had bought a two-bedroom ranch-house at 8213 Summerdale in Norwood Park on the outskirts of Chicago and was now in a relationship with highschool friend Carole Hoff. Yet this reforming sodomite was unable to keep his obsession hidden. Back in February Gacy received a sexual assault charge after luring a teenage boy at a bus terminal into his c
ar for sex. He escaped conviction when the youth failed to show at court, yet this brush with the law would not prevent his perversions from escalating.
Just two days into 1972, Gacy was back at the Greyhound bus station scouting for a suitable young man. Fifteen-year-old Tim McCoy, on his way from Michigan to Omaha, became his next sexual pick-up, bringing the teen back to his new home. The next morning, during an alleged accident with a kitchen knife, the heavy-set man stabbed the boy in the chest. Burying the body in the forty-foot crawlspace beneath his home, his sexual deviance now linked with death, this newborn killer would soon feel the need to repeat the experience.
CLOWNING AROUND
His next murder came in July 1975. By this time his second wife, Carole, had filed for divorce leaving Gacy free to bring his prey back to an empty house. Using his natural charm, he lured many young men into his black Oldsmobile and subsequently to their deaths at 8213 Summerdale. Nineteen youths succumbed to his deadly advances over the next two years. Each one would voluntarily slip on Gacy’s handcuffs, believing it was part of a magic trick. Once incapacitated, they would be subjected to sexual torture, abused by various instruments of evil and ultimately asphyxiated by the twisting of a tourniquet about their necks.
The digging of endless graves beneath the house became a chore for Gacy so he ordered his young contractors to do the hard labour for him, persuading his teenage lackeys they were trenches for pipes. With space created for more bodies he could now increase the death toll and began killing a new victim every three weeks.
