by Ray Black
While he conned his employees and bus station pick-ups back to his deadly den for sex and strangulation, he continued to pursue his philanthropic endeavours. Dressing up as Pogo the Clown, a character of his own invention, Gacy took time to brighten the days of sick children in hospital. Little did they know this jolly joker with paint on his face also had the blood of over thirty young men on his hands.
THE SEARCHES OF SUMMERDALE
His evil double existence was soon uncovered following the murder of his thirty-third victim, fifteen year-old Robert Piest. On 11 December 1978, whilst bidding on a remodelling job in Des Plaines, he lured the teenager from a pharmacy with a promise of well-paid labour. When Piest was reported missing by his mother, police found witnesses who had seen the boy with Gacy. Following a background check revealing the sodomy charge, authorities obtained a search warrant and discovered a number of posses-sions belonging to missing youths inside the house. Yet they failed to find a single body.
Gacy was placed under surveillance in the hope he would reveal some damning evidence. It came unexpectedly on 20 December when the two detec-tives staking out the home were invited in for dinner by the suspect. The policemen quickly noticed a putrid smell emanating from below stairs. Surely this was a clue worth investigating. The next day forensic teams descended on the house, the stench leading them to a number of human remains. Over the next few months Gacy’s home became an excavation site as authorities unearthed over two dozen bodies under the floorboards. The community’s shining light could now be arrested for murder.
SEND IN THE CLOWN
Gacy soon confessed to nearly thirty murders beginning six years back in 1972. He admitted to tricking them into the handcuffs, their unspeakable defilement and pouring quicklime on top of the bodies down in the crawlspace. The makeshift graveyard beneath his house became so full of corpses that he told police he threw the final five victims off the I-55 bridge into the Des Plaines River. These brought a total of thirty-three murders making him the worst serial killer in American history at that time.
Despite confessing in graphic detail to killings and drawing accurate diagrams of where each corpse lay buried, Gacy refused to give evidence at his trial. On 12 March 1980 the Cook County jury rejected the defence plea of insanity and found him guilty of all thirty-three murders. Judge Garripo handed down the death sentence and the roly-poly killer spent fourteen years on death row until the day of his execution.
On 10 May 1994, with a 500-strong crowd baying for blood outside the correctional facility in which he was held, Gacy received a lethal injection. Pogo the Clown would bring no more smiles to young faces and Gacy the Killer would bring no more death to the teenage population.
PART THREE: LADY KILLERS
Belle Gunness
This heavyset pig farmer made an unlikely black widow, yet the nefarious Norwegian succeeded in luring as many as forty-two moneyed bachelors to her remote homestead with murder in mind.
AWAY FROM NORWAY
Belle Gunness began life as Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth on a backwater farm in the rural community of Innbygda in central Norway. Born in November 1859 far from the Great Lakes region of America where she would later commit her crimes, the youngest of Paul and Berit’s eight children was raised in relative poverty. From an early age she broke her back working on farms to bring food to the family table and soon came to realize life was a constant struggle.
Tough times came calling even when not slaving away on the land. An alleged incident in 1877 saw Brynhild, seventeen and pregnant, attacked by a man at a country dance. Kicked in the stomach, she lost the baby and suffered further indignation when her assailant escaped prosecution. Following this miscarriage of child and of justice, locals soon noticed a change in her personality.
Such adversity seemed to steel her resolve and the following year she took a job on a large, wealthy farming estate, saving all her earnings for a big move. Three years later, keen to leave Norway for a better life, she followed in the footsteps of her sister Nellie and emigrated to America. Settling in Chicago, she changed her name to Belle and began working as a servant.
In 1884, the burly Norwegian met and married store detective and fellow Scandinavian, Mads Sorenson, and two years later they decided to open a sweet shop together in downtown Chicago. The business proved unsuccessful and within a year the store burned down, apparently due to an exploding kerosene lamp. The pair collected on the insurance and with the money bought a new home in Austin.
BOUGHT THE FARM
Over the next few years, Belle gave her husband four children. However, when two of them, Caroline and Axel, died in infancy it appeared bad luck had followed Belle across the Atlantic. Acute colitis was presumed the cause of death, yet the symptoms of abdominal pain and nausea mirrored those of poisoning. Nobody suspected a thing even when the couple received another payout from the babies’ life insurance policies.
As fortune begat misfortune, a pattern started to emerge. Then on 30 July 1900, Sorenson suffered heart failure and died. His death fell on the only day on which two separate policies on him overlapped. When the grieving widow wasted no time in claiming the day after the funeral, it became clear this was less a case of bad luck and more of bad Belle. An inquest was ordered following suspicions of foul play but when the body was exhumed and no trace of poison found, the matter was dropped.
The two policies paid out a combined $8,500 with which she bought a pig farm on the McClung Road in La Porte, Indiana. Shortly after her move to the Maple City area she met Peter Gunness, a fellow expatriate from Norway, who agreed to marry Belle on the 1 April 1902 – a most apposite wedding date, it would turn out.
Just one week after tying the knot, Peter’s young daughter mysteriously died alone in the house with Belle. Before the year was out Peter Gunness would also be dead. In December 1902, the experienced butcher met with a tragic end when a meat grinder fell from a high shelf and split open his skull. When Belle banked a $3,000 insurance claim, the neighbourhood cried murder. Pregnant with her son, Phillip, Belle stood before a jury and was cleared of any wrongdoing.
HEART STRINGS TO PURSE STRINGS
Emboldened by her two lucky escapes from justice, Belle began placing adverts in Scandinavian newspapers across the Midwest, searching for eligible bachelors and rich widowers to take Peter’s place. Soon a steady stream of middle-aged men began to arrive at her farm ready and willing to combine fortunes. One of the first was John Moe from Elbow Lake, Minnesota, who brought over $1,000 to pay off her mortgage. He disappeared within a week.
The citizens of La Porte witnessed Belle, dressed in all her finery, bring her gentlemen callers into town one by one, making a bee-line for the bank where they would cash in their savings. Ole Budsberg, an elderly widower from Wisconsin, was last seen withdrawing funds here on 6 April 1907 before going missing. In January 1908, Andrew Helgelien followed the same routine after he had been hooked by Belle’s letters declaring undying love.
Her suitors were not the only ones to disappear. Jennie Olsen, her adopted child, vanished in December 1906 never to be seen again. When concerned locals inquired after the teenager, Belle informed them she had sent her to a Lutheran College in Los Angeles. The truth was far more sinister; she remained on the property, buried in the backyard.
SMOKING GUNNESS
While the neighbourhood smelled a rat there was one man who knew the truth. Ray Lamphere had been employed to run the farm shortly after the death of Mister Gunness. He quickly grew jealous of her endless suitors, developing an infatuation with the heavyset lady of the house. Consumed by envy, he began to cause trouble and on 3 February 1908 she fired him. Belle then paid a visit to the local courthouse and declared her former employee a menace to her and others, and even made out a will with her lawyer, M. E. Leliter, making it known she feared for her life.
In the small hours of 28 April, Joe Maxon, Lamphere’s replacement, woke to the smell of smoke in his second-floor bedroom. Discovering the house on fire,
he called for Belle and the children but received no reply. He escaped the blaze and went for help. When the fire department arrived the place was in ruins. Four bodies were found in the cellar, trapped under a grand piano. Three of them were quickly confirmed as Belle’s three children: Myrtle, Lucy and Philip. The remaining corpse proved to be more difficult to identify as she was missing a head.
Belle’s lawyer then came forward and informed authorities of his client’s misgivings regarding Lamphere. When a witness admitted seeing him running from the farm moments before the flames took hold, Sheriff Smutzer arrested and charged him with murder and arson.
Members of the sheriff department, aided by a number of volunteers, began sifting through the ruins for evidence. Their attention was directed to an area surrounded by a high-wire fence containing a number of filled-in holes. In the first week of May, the diggers discovered the bodies of Jennie Olson and Andrew Helgelien. Both had been cut into pieces, wrapped in oil cloth and buried in four feet of earth. Further excavation revealed as many as forty men and children dumped in shallow graves.
NO HEADWAY
As the shock of such a find spread through the town, many locals came to look at the charred remains of the headless woman and all refused to believe it was the body of Belle Gunness. Even bearing in mind the missing head and burnt flesh it looked nothing like her. Beefy Belle was known to be at least five feet eight inches tall, weighing as much as 280 pounds, yet the corpse lying in the morgue was five inches shorter and over a hundred pounds lighter.
Doctor J. Meyers examined the internal organs of the dead woman and found evidence of strychnine. Together with some surviving bridgework found in the ashes deemed insufficiently touched by fire, it looked more and more as if Belle Gunness had faked her own death and had escaped justice for a third time. The authorities hit a dead end, unable to confirm with any degree of certainty who the headless woman was. Yet again, Ray Lamphere was able to shed light on the mystery.
DEATHBED CONFESSION
Lying on his deathbed dying of tuberculosis, the convicted arsonist finally revealed his long-held secret to Reverend Schell in January 1910: Belle was still alive. He went on to confess to helping her bury many of her victims after she had either poisoned them or bashed in their heads while sleeping. He spoke of her decapitating a Chicagoan woman who had been lured to the farm by a promise of work. This was the mysterious headless woman found next to the three children; the three children Lamphere revealed she had murdered.
Before his death, the besotted accomplice explained how Belle had amassed great wealth through these murders. By his reckoning as many as forty-two men had met their end at the Gunness farm; their cashed-in savings filling her coffers to the tune of around $250,000, around $6 million in today’s money. Later, the banks revealed Belle had indeed withdrawn all her funds the day before the fire.
Many sightings of the elusive pig farmer were reported over the years. From Chicago to New York to Los Angeles, witnesses believed they had finally found her. Then, in 1931, twenty-three years after her disappearance, a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested in Los Angeles for the murder of August Lindstrom. Following her death in prison while awaiting trial, two former La Porteans managed to view the body and swore blind they had seen the body of Belle Gunness.
Beverley Allitt
Over an eight week period, the malevolent ministrations of this angel of death transformed a care-giver into a life-taker, breaking parents’ hearts when she stole their babies’ lives.
ATTENTION!
Many a child is forced to vie for attention when growing up in a large family. It was the same for Beverley Gail Allitt. Born on 4 October 1968, the little girl had to compete with three siblings in order to be heard. Yet unlike most children young Beverley would resort to extreme acts of odd behaviour, demanding the spotlight in increasingly disturbing ways.
It began with feigning injury to pull her parents’ gaze towards her. When this became commonplace she took to wearing dressings and casts over apparent wounds but would refuse to let anyone examine the injuries. Through her teenage years her weight ballooned and with each pound she put on, her behaviour became more aggressive. She even manipulated boyfriends, faking pregnancy and even crying rape to get her own way.
At the same time her need for attention increased. She started making endless trips to the hospital for a variety of simulated illnesses. From blurred vision to gall bladder pain, from ulcers to urinary infections; Beverley would use any condition to waste healthcare resources. And she was good at it. Her display of suffering was so realistic she even managed to convince doctors to remove a perfectly healthy appendix.
Picking at the stitches to ensure the wound remained a source of attention, she continued along this dangerous path to self-harm, cutting herself with glass and using a hammer to create new physical injuries. Her incessant hospital visits soon made her a well-known face and she was forced to resort to doctor-hopping; moving from hospital to hospital in order to receive the attention so clearly craved.
PATIENT TO PRACTITIONER
With her strong connection to the medical profes-sion, Beverley unsurprisingly chose to train as a nurse. This failed to curb her strange behaviour. During her training at a nursing home, she smeared faeces on the walls and even left excrement in the fridge. Along with these foul outbursts, Beverley notched up an inordinate number of sick days, persistently ill from a series of feigned ailments. Despite her poor attendance record and numerous failed attempts at passing the nursing exams, Beverley managed to find a job at a hospital. Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire had suffered a series of budget cuts and were chronically understaffed. Having only two trained personnel on the day shift and just one for the night, they were in dire need of a nurse on their children’s ward. So Beverley Allitt was thus granted a temporary six-month contract in 1991.
She joined Ward 4 and quickly settled in, proving a keen worker, always finding time to be close to the sick children that came in for care. Unaware of her troubled history, the staff were equally clueless that they were working side by side with a dangerous, unstable and twisted individual who would turn from care-giver to life-taker in a matter of weeks.
SPECIAL CARE
On 21 February 1991, seven-month-old Liam Taylor was admitted to Ward 4 with a chest infection. The new nurse on the team seemed to go that extra mile to help reassure the anxious parents who were told to go home and get some rest. On their return, Beverley broke the bad news; Liam had suffered a respiratory attack in their absence. Relieved to hear their son was showing signs of recovery, Mr and Mrs Taylor were heartened to find Nurse Allitt had volunteered to pull a double shift to keep an eye on Liam through the night.
Moments before midnight, Beverley sent her colleagues on an errand, leaving her alone with baby Liam. It was during this time that his condition took a dramatic dive. Ghostly pale and developing nasty red blotches on his skin, the child stopped breathing. Allitt reacted quickly, calling for the emergency doctors. So focused was the crash team on resuscitating poor Liam, that they overlooked the disquieting fact the alarm monitors had failed to sound.
After a long struggle, fighting to revive the infant, they were forced to put the baby on life support. All through the chaotic ordeal a detached Nurse Allitt watched silently from the sidelines. She then put on her coat and went home leaving the Taylors to make the worst of all decisions; to turn off the machine keeping their little son alive.
ARRESTS ON WARD 4
Two weeks passed before Beverley struck again. Suffering from cerebral palsy, eleven-year-old Timothy Hardwick was wheeled into Ward 4 following an epileptic fit on 5 March 1991. Left alone with the merciless nurse, the boy began to fade. The resuscitation team rushed to the scene to find young Timothy turning blue with no sign of a pulse. Despite a paediatric specialist being on hand to assist, the team were unable to revive the patient. The subsequent autopsy found no obvious reason for his death.
Three days later, Kayley De
smond went into cardiac arrest in the same bed in which Liam Taylor had died. Once again Allitt was the attending nurse. This time the doctors were able to resuscitate the one-year-old girl and she was transferred to the larger hospital in Nottingham. She had only come in with a chest infection. After her transfer, a strange puncture wound was located underneath her armpit. This clue to the crime was dismissed as being from an accidental injection. But it had been anything but an accident.
Encouraged by the lack of suspicion surrounding her, Beverley continued to tamper with alarms and aggravate the conditions of her charges. On 20 March, five-month-old Paul Crampton suffered insulin shock prior to discharge, slipping dangerously close to a coma on three occasions. Revived each time, the decision was made to transfer him to Nottingham, but this was not the end of the ordeal for baby Paul. Accompanying him in the ambulance, Allitt ensured another insulin overdose befell him. Thankfully, the patient survived the journey with evil by his side.
The unexpected cardiac arrests and inexplicable spikes in insulin levels suffered by the children on Ward 4 caused concern among the staff but still nobody was pointing the finger at Nurse Allitt. In fact, many remarked how attentive and eagle-eyed she was to have raised the alarm on each occasion. Over the next couple of days two more innocent children came close to losing their lives; both patients transferred to Nottingham hospital before she could administer the kill shot. Twice foiled, it would not take long for Beverley to succeed in murdering for yet more attention.
OH GOD MOTHER
On 1 April 1991, baby Becky Phillips was rushed to Grantham Hospital with gastroenteritis. One of twin girls recently born prematurely, she remained stable in the children’s unit under the watchful, attention-seeking eye of Beverley Allitt. Two days in, she reported the two-month-old infant cold to the touch but after an examination found nothing wrong, she was sent home with her mother. That evening, little Becky suffered convulsions and, despite a diagnosis of mere colic from an on-call doctor, sadly passed away.
