Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  When Christine received the death penalty she appeared shocked and collapsed – yet she’d previously told her jailers that she expected to be beheaded. Her younger sister was given ten years’ hard labour as she’d clearly been dominated by the more forceful – and less rational – Christine.

  Update

  Christine Papin’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but in jail she very quickly showed signs of insanity. She was transferred to a psychiatric hospital where she died age thirty-two. Lea served her own ten year sentence then disappeared from the public record. Free of her sister’s malign influence, she was not expected to offend again.

  Teri Depew & Carole Hargis

  This case stands out from many others because of the disturbing number of times – and the ways in which – the couple tried to kill their victim, a man who had done them no harm.

  Carole and Teri lived next door to each other in an attractive part of San Diego. Carole, who was thirty-six, was married to David who was in the Marine Corps. They lived with her two sons from a previous marriage, and it was clear to everyone that David doted on his ready-made family and was deeply in love with his attractive blonde wife.

  Unfortunately Carole soon fell in love with twenty-seven-year-old Teri and the two women decided that life would be much better without David. The fact that he had a forty thousand dollar insurance policy which named Carole as the beneficiary made his death even more attractive to them.

  During the first attempt to kill him, Carole pretended to trip whilst drying her hair and threw her hairdryer into David’s shower. He survived so she then drugged his food but he just thought that he had flu and was given medical treatment at his work. Incredibly, they then took the poison sac from Teri’s pet tarantula and fed it to David in a pie but he noticed the foreign object and put it to one side of his plate.

  The two sociopaths now tried even harder to kill the unsuspecting young man, drugging him then pushing a needle into his flesh in the hope of introducing an air bubble. But he jerked in his sleep and part of the needle broke off in his arm. The women got forceps and removed the telltale implement and when the drug wore off, David woke up and assumed he’d been bitten by a particularly ferocious ant.

  On the last night of his life, 20th July 1977, he took Carole’s children to a Boy Scouts meeting then spent time playing card games with Carole and Teri. He went to bed first and fell fast asleep, whereupon Teri hit him with a heavy weight. Horribly injured, he woke up and called his wife’s name, his voice getting weaker by the second. But she merely urged her lover to return to the bedroom and bludgeon him again. Teri obliged, after which they tried to drag his body to the Hargis’ truck. But he was bleeding so badly that they had to bandage his head and ears to staunch the blood.

  Eventually Teri drove off with the body and dumped it over a bridge. Meanwhile Carole laundered the blood-soaked bedding. But she couldn’t get all of the blood from the walls and resorted to repainting them.

  The next morning Carole reported David missing, explaining that he’d gone out snake-hunting the night before and hadn’t returned. But to her consternation his body was soon found beneath the bridge with the bandages still sticking to his ears and head. This clearly wasn’t an ordinary mugging as it was apparent that someone had tried very hard to staunch the blood.

  The investigators went to David’s house and found blood under the wet paint on the walls and blood in David’s truck. Now Teri told the police that she’d killed David in the truck after he made a pass at her – but they knew that he’d been killed in his own bed.

  Teri went to jail awaiting trial and soon turned Carole in. Carole, in turn, now said that Teri had made her go along with the murder plot by threatening her children. Love, as it so often does with unstable people, had turned to hate.

  In court during November 1977, Teri pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Carole’s trial followed a month later, during which she suggested that that her butch lesbian neighbour had terrorised her into covering up the murder. Carole sobbed throughout her testimony and sounded like a terrorised child. But the jury were allowed to hear the call she’d made to the police when she reported her husband missing, during which she’d wept, until they put her on hold – then talked calmly to Teri, not realising that the police tape was still recording. She’d cried some more as soon as the operator came back on the line. Carole hoped to win a forty thousand pound life insurance policy and an Oscar, but – like Teri – had to settle for life imprisonment.

  David Terence Sandman & Daniel Antonious Delker

  This British case is out of the ordinary because the ingredients include so-called witchcraft and a victim who had previously been a rapist. And one of the killers had killed before…

  Daniel Delker was a twenty-three-year-old trainee machinist living away from home when his mother Melanie met witchcraft enthusiast James Bowman at a psychic fair. Bowman was living in a hostel for the homeless but soon moved into her house in Cornholme, West Yorkshire. Sadly, she doesn’t appear to have had any psychic warnings about his past. For Bowman was a career criminal who’d served sentences for rape, indecent assault, abduction and robbery and had numerous failed relationships. Unsurprisingly, his latest love affair also failed.

  Melanie threw him out but he set up a campsite in the woods behind her house, upsetting her and one of her sons who she lived with. So she asked Daniel and his friend David Sandham to stay for the weekend. Daniel was a rational young man who would later tell the police that ‘I don’t believe in spirits or anything like that. It’s claptrap and I ignored it.’ But he felt sorry for his mother who claimed to have seen Bowman outside her house casting a voodoo spell over a bunch of flowers.

  On 14th September 2002, the young men went for a walk in the woods. They located James Bowman’s campsite and began to reign blows upon him. They battered his head with rocks and stones at least twenty times, fracturing his skull and damaging one of his eyes. They stabbed him in the chest, shoulders, back, thighs and buttocks then left him to die, a fate which may have taken two hours.

  Arrest and trial

  When James Bowman’s battered body was found, Daniel’s mother, one of his brothers, David Sandham, and Daniel himself were arrested. But Daniel’s mother was released due to lack of evidence and, though his younger brother went to court, he was also freed as the authorities weren’t convinced he’d helped kill the self-styled wiccan priest.

  The case against Daniel Delker and his friend David Sandham was tried in Leeds on 1st May 2003. A female friend had overheard Delker talking about kicking someone in the face near a campfire. But he continued to deny attacking James Bowman until he heard that Bowman’s blood had been found on his boots. He then said he’d kicked the man in the face after finding him near his mother’s property – but there was too much blood for it to have come from one glancing blow. Bowman’s blood had also been found on David Sandham’s trousers and the pathologist was convinced that Bowman’s injuries came from more than one assailant.

  The court heard that Daniel’s mother had suffered a breakdown during her relationship with Bowman and that Bowman had resented looking after her. The men – now twenty-four – heard witnesses say that Daniel Delker was protective towards his mother and wanted her to find a man who had a job and prospects rather than the charity cases she tended to adopt.

  The jury listened bemused as witnesses talked of how Bowman’s wicca had offended their own religious beliefs. It was a classic case of ‘my magic good, your magic bad.’

  After two weeks of evidence, both Daniel Delker and David Sandham were found guilty and given life sentences. Only then was it made public that David Sandham had killed before. Six years previously – in 1997 – he’d been given a five year sentence for the manslaughter of his brother who he stabbed to death after a row about the washing up.

  Magdalena & Eleazor Solis

  Magdalena Solis lived in Monterrey in north-east Mexico. In the late 1950s and early 60s
she made a living as a prostitute, her pimp being her homosexual brother Eleazor.

  In 1962 the siblings joined a cult based around offering sex to the gods and goddesses. This involved Magdalena having sex with the females of the group whilst Eleazor had sex with the men. These rituals were supposed to appease the gods and make the harvest prosper, so the cult received money from religious farmers in the area.

  Eventually the harvest failed and the farmers became disaffected – but Magdalena promised them renewed fortune if they sacrificed two human beings. She, her brother, and other members of the cult consequently stoned two men to death. This revitalised the farmers’ interest and over the next few months eight more cult members were sacrificed, after which Magdalena beat her lesbian lover to death. Her brother participated when another cult member had his heart cut out, at which stage word got back to the surrounding villages that people were joining the cult and promptly disappearing, never to be seen again.

  A police officer investigated and was soon hacked to death by the group. Angry at this death, one of the cult members then killed the cult’s founder. Reinforcements went in and arrested a dozen murderous devotees, most of whom received appropriately long sentences. Magdalena & Eleazor Solis were both sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, the maximum sentence that could be given in Mexico at that time.

  Daniel & Manuela Ruda

  Daniel Ruda began to lust for blood at the age of twelve, describing a metallic salty taste in his mouth which accompanied an urge to kill. He would later be diagnosed with a severe personality disorder and it’s likely it began at this early age. Nevertheless, he found work as a car parts salesman in his native Germany and regularly partied with friends.

  By his twenties he had become involved in the neo-Nazi movement, joining up with other skinheads and fascists to protest about Germany’s ethnic minorities. By the time of the 1998 general election he was canvassing for the fascist National Democratic Party. Through this movement he met the more extreme members of the German Gothic community, young men and women who practiced Satanic rituals and who drank each others blood.

  Some of these youngsters had been targeted by those in the extreme right who’d noted that it was possible to influence people politically through the entertainment industry. Unemployed young Goths, they could see, were searching for an identity and could be slowly persuaded to adopt an extreme right-wing stance. This started with persuading German Goths to wear neo-Nazi symbols as a way to shock their parents. The next step was to give them tickets to concerts featuring neo-Nazi bands. In this way, Daniel Ruda became involved in the extreme Gothic scene as well as with the far right. He lost friends because of his politics and became more and more alienated from society.

  But the party did badly in the election (after which their very legality was called into question) and Daniel drifted away from them, turning instead to black metal music, a variant of heavy metal, and joining a band called the Bloodsucking Freaks.

  When the freaks couldn’t satisfy his longing for a special companion, he placed an advert in a black metal fanzine which read ‘Black-haired vampire seeks princess of darkness who despises everything and everybody and has bidden farewell to life.’ Needless to say, the girls weren’t exactly queuing up for the vampire – but an equally alienated twenty-one-year-old called Manuela replied.

  Manuela

  Manuela was thirteen when she began to bite people in the street. She was sent to a psychiatrist but her problems continued. At fourteen she believed that the devil had contacted her – the mentally ill often have such religious hallucinations, as can others under stress. By her mid-teens she had dropped out of school and shortly afterwards took an overdose.

  At sixteen she ran away from home and travelled to London, becoming more firmly involved in the vampire scene through people she met at a Gothic club in Islington. The male clubbers followed her about but she pretended to only be interested in their blood and would claim ‘they were my blood donors.’ It’s more likely that she found she could keep their attention by playing hard to get.

  At age seventeen she travelled to Scotland and met up with other alienated Goths. Soon she was cutting her arms and sleeping on graves: photographs taken at the time show a somewhat overweight and desperately unhappy teenager, her white flesh spilling over constricting fetish clothes. But even vampires have to earn a wage, so she took a job as a hotel chambermaid.

  By now Manuela had read about a sixty-two-year-old recluse who called himself the leopard man and who lived on the Isle of Skye. She got in touch, telling him that she hated everything and everyone and when the hotel closed for the winter she moved in with him.

  In 1998 she travelled back to Germany. There she reestablished contact with a former friend who noted that she was always desperate to be the centre of attention and that she loved to be photographed. But her friend also saw her good qualities – that she was reliable and honest, though she didn’t let people get too close.

  Fewer people wanted to get close after she had two of her teeth removed and replaced with animal fangs which she later had sharpened to points, the better to pierce human flesh with. She pierced such flesh – and sucked the blood – of other so-called vampires and Goths. Most Goths are harmless individuals who simply enjoy the style of dress, the music: even those few extremists who suck blood don’t usually kill. But most vampires also don’t bite strangers in the street. It was eight years since Manuela had done so and she still hadn’t received significant psychiatric intervention. Now the girl who was full of hatred was responding to an advert from a man who also hated everything.

  Beast meets beast

  In autumn 2000 the couple met up and it was love at first bite. They began to spend more and more time together, and their blood lust intensified. Manuela cut a chunk out of Daniel’s flesh and ate it. She also carved a pentagram on his chest.

  They moved in together and Daniel drank from Manuela’s veins so often that she had cuts everywhere. She’d often worn outlandish punk haircuts in the past but now she shaved off most of her hair. More tellingly, she started to talk about other people as if they were vermin – and vermin is routinely destroyed.

  Daniel’s grip on reality also lessened during this time. He’d been good at his job and was so reliable that his boss was thinking of putting him in charge of a second-hand car showroom. But now he was often ill and absent, lying about at home listening to black metal lyrics. And when he and Manuela did go out it was to take part in a Satanic sect.

  Manuela bought a coffin which she sometimes slept in and she began to avoid the sun which must have played havoc with her body’s supply of Vitamin D.

  The couple (he was now twenty-six and she was twenty-three) decided to marry at the Registry Office and chose 6th June 2001. It was the sixth day of the sixth month but they needed another six to make up 666, the so-called number of the beast. So they decided to kill someone on the 6th of the following month.

  The murder

  On 6th July the couple invited thirty-three-year-old Frank Hackert to their home in Witten, West Germany. They believed that Lucifer had told them to kill and that he would like a court jester, so they chose Frank Hackert, a colleague of Daniel’s who made them laugh. They told Frank that they were having a party – but in truth he was the only guest.

  The couple chatted and shared drinks with Frank for a while, then Daniel walked behind him and dealt him two heavy blows to the head with a hammer. After a moment the bewildered man stood up and Manuela began to stab him with a knife, believing that it was glowing. In total she stabbed him sixty-six times. She’d later say that she saw his soul leave ‘for the underworld’ and added ‘we were empowered and alone.’ The couple then mutilated his corpse by cutting the veins and pouring his blood into a bowl, which they drank from. They left a scalpel protruding from his stomach and cut a pentagram, the sign of the devil, into his chest. They also mutilated his face and his arms and stubbed out cigarettes on his back.

  Life after
death

  After the murder, the couple took their car and went on a sort of pilgrimage to towns where Jewish people had been murdered. Before she left, Manuela sent a farewell letter to her mother which said ‘I am not of this world. I must liberate my soul from the mortal flesh.’ Fearing that her daughter had made another suicide attempt, Manuela’s mother went to the police who broke into the couple’s house and found Frank Hackert’s mutilated body decomposing on the lounge floor. The apartment was filled with knives, a hammer, scalpels and human skulls. The coffin which Manuela sometimes slept in was placed next to a radiator in the lounge.

  More worryingly, there were names written on the walls next to the words ‘be happy – you are next to die.’ There was also a list of sixteen names which police believe were men and women who the Rudas wanted to kill.

  Meanwhile the couple had travelled through Sonderhausen, on to Apold and, finally, Jena, which is where the police caught up with them. The Rudas had stopped at a petrol station because even people with a hotline to a supposed underworld run out of gas. They surrendered immediately, something police were glad of when they found a chainsaw in the boot of their car. The Rudas said that they’d tried to kill themselves several times whilst on the run, but it’s unclear why they failed.

  In custody, Daniel Ruda claimed to have no memory of the murder but his wife recalled every detail and happily described the killing to the police.