The night afterwards, Nelson murdered Emily Paterson, hiding her body under the bed in her bedroom. When her husband William returned to the house he could not find her, and noticed that money and clothing had been stolen from a suitcase in the bedroom. Alarmed, he reported her missing to the police but they were unable to help him. That evening, he knelt down by his bed to pray, only to discover the dead body of his wife underneath it – she had been raped and beaten to death.
Ghoulish finale
By now Nelson seemed to be losing sight of what he was doing and leaving clues all over the place for the police to find. The morning after the murder, he went to a second-hand clothes shop to sell the clothes he had stolen from the Patersons, and also visited the local barber’s for a shave. The barber noticed that he had blood in his hair. Once again, the police were alerted, but by the time they sent their men out, Nelson had disappeared again. However, they were now on his trail and were able to circulate a description of the killer. Before long, Nelson was recognised and handed over to the authorities. He was charged with the murder of Emily Paterson and went to court in Winnipeg on November 1, 1927, to be tried for the murder.
Nelson’s lawyers pleaded his insanity and it was clear that he was far from being in his right mind. His aunt Lillian gave evidence that this was the case, as well as his former wife. However, despite the fact that he was clearly completely insane, after four days of the trial he was found guilty of murder. The death sentence was the penalty for his crime and he was hanged in Winnipeg on January 13, 1928. In a ghoulish ending to the story, he appeared to remain alive for eleven minutes after the hanging, struggling to catch his breath and writhing in agony.
After his execution, the death toll of his victims became clear and it was found that he had murdered women all over the United States, ranging in age between sixty and fourteen. In one case, he appeared also to have strangled the baby of a woman named Germania Harpin in Kansas City. (He also strangled Mrs Harpin.) His killings took place in San Francisco, San José, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Kansas City, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago. In Winnipeg, Canada, he killed his last victims. To this day, the extent of the killings, and his travels, which took place over a single year, still remains a shocking story of how one man’s rage left a trail of devastation behind him.
PART THREE: Wicked Teams
Lucas and Toole
Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole joined forces to become possibly the deadliest serial murder team ever encountered. However, this title could easily be disputed as they later recanted on their original confessions of over 600 murders. In reality, no one really knows quite how many people they murdered, but there is no doubt that they were both cold-hearted, fiendish killers who were not fit to live in society. They both had childhoods that could only be described as the subjects of nightmares, which would go a long way to explaining their behaviour as adults.
henry lee lucas
Henry Lucas was born on August 23, 1936, in Blackburg, Virginia. His parents were both alcoholics, who brewed bootleg whisky as a sideline. His mother Viola ruled the household with a rod of iron and used to prostitute herself to earn some extra money. His father, Anderson, had lost both his legs in a train accident and spent his days trying to drown his misery in alcohol. Henry was one of nine children, although the majority were farmed out to relatives and foster homes over the years, but Henry was not to be so fortunate. He was one of the children that stayed at home but had to put up with the wrath of his mother. For some reason she seemed to despise Henry as soon as he was born and he spent his days trying to avoid the vicious beatings and violent outbursts that he suffered alongside his browbeaten father.
Henry and his father had witnessed a stream of men sharing Viola’s bed until Anderson snapped. Finding it too much to bear, he crawled out into the snow where he remained for the rest of the night. The experience killed him as he contracted pneumonia, which left Henry the sole recipient of his mother’s cruelty.
Subjected to constant abuse, both verbal and physical, Henry soon learned that life was worth nought. On occasion he would bring a pet home to give him something to love, but his mother would snatch it away and kill it, leaving the young boy distraught. On one occasion Henry gashed his eye while reportedly playing with a knife, but Viola left him to suffer until the withered eye became so bad it had to be surgically removed and replaced with a glass one. Henry lay semi-conscious for three days after he received a severe beating from his mother, and would probably have died had not his live-in ‘Uncle Bernie’ taken pity on him, driving him to the local hospital for treatment. It was the same ‘Uncle’ that introduced the young Henry to bestiality. He showed him how to torture and rape the unfortunate animals before they were finally killed.
Henry soon tired of animals and wanted to see what it was like to have sex with a girl. At the age of fifteen he picked up a girl and attempted to rape her. However, she resisted his clumsy fumbling and he had to resort to strangling her and then burying her body in the woods near Harrisburg, Virginia. The disappearance of seventeen-year-old Laura Burnley remained unsolved until Henry eventually confessed to her murder in 1983.
In June 1954, Henry spent a few years in prison following a series of local burglaries, finally being discharged on September 2, 1959. He went to live with his half-sister in Tecumseh, Michigan, but life took another turn for the worse when his mother, now seventy-four years old, turned up on his doorstep in January 1960. She constantly nagged him to return home with her, which was something Henry definitely wasn’t prepared to do. One evening the argument reached a climax after a bout of heavy drinking, and Viola struck out at Henry with a broom. For the first time in his life Henry retaliated and killed his mother with a knife.
Henry was arrested five days later and confessed to the murder and even bragged about raping his mother’s corpse, which is something he allegedly made up to shock his interrogators. He was given a prison sentence but within two months was deemed to be criminally insane and was moved to Ionia’s state hospital. He stayed there until April 1966 and was eventually paroled from prison in 1970, returning to Tecumseh to live with relatives.
Henry was back in prison within the year for molesting two teenage girls but was released back into society in August 1975. While working for a brief spell at a mushroom farm, Henry met and married Betty, who was the widow of one of his cousins. They moved to Maryland but the marriage was doomed from the start, and Betty divorced Henry on the grounds that he had molested his stepdaughters.
PERFECT PARTNERS
According to Henry’s own confessions, it was during this period that his ‘career’ really took off and he allegedly committed murder after murder as the mood took hold. Towards the end of 1976 he met his partner in crime, Ottis Toole, at a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida. Ottis’s reputation was no better than his own and the couple hit it off right from the start. Ottis, who had a very low IQ, had been classified as retarded, and had suffered a strange childhood to say the least. His father was an alcoholic, his mother was a religious fanatic, and his sister used to dress him up in girl’s clothes because she supposedly wanted a sister to play with as opposed to a little brother. His confusion as to his role in life was further exacerbated by his grandmother who was a Satanist, often being taken as a young boy to graveyards to fetch human body parts for use in her ‘magic charms’. Although Ottis repeatedly ran away from home, he always seemed to drift back and as he grew into his teenage years he started to suffer from uncontrollable seizures.
By the time the two men met, Ottis was a homosexual, an arsonist and, according to him, already a serial killer and they spent hours swapping their grisly stories. Over the next six years the two men spent their time together as friends, lovers and murderers, wreaking havoc wherever they went. They picked up hitchhikers along the motorways, all of whom, according to the Henry and Ottis ‘ended up dead’.
Finding himself homeless after his divorce, Henry moved in with the To
ole family where he was introduced to Ottis’s niece and nephew Frieda and Frank Powell. Frieda, who called herself Becky, was only ten years old, but Henry started to form a very strong affection for the child which soon turned into a sexual relationship. When she was placed in a juvenile home with her brother following the death of Ottis’s mother, Henry missed her so much he helped her to escape and the four of them spent a few years moving around. Frank reportedly witnessed such evil acts during this time that he went insane and was admitted to a mental institution in 1983. When the authorities came looking for Becky in 1982, she fled to California with Henry, leaving Ottis to go his own merry way.
In Hemet, California, Becky and Henry met up with a couple by the name of Jack and O’Bere Smart and worked as hired hands in return for board and lodging. In May 1982, O’Bere asked the couple if they would be prepared to move to Ringgold in Texas and look after her elderly mother, Kate Rich. They arrived in Texas on May 14, but only lasted four days before being booted out of the house by relatives for cashing cheques from the old lady’s bank account. As they hitchhiked their way out of town, the couple were picked up by Ruben Moore, who invited them to become members of his religious commune, the All People’s House of Prayer. The following day Becky made the mistake of slapping Henry round the face during an argument, and she was stabbed on the spot. Henry dismembered her body and scattered the pieces all around the countryside.
Kate Rich went missing on September 16 and police grew suspicious when Henry went missing from Ringgold the following day. His car was found abandoned in Needles, California on September 21 and he was eventually picked up by the police on unrelated charges. Henry confessed to the killing of Becky and Kate Rich and then spent the next few months bragging about a seemingly endless string of murders and atrocities. Ottis, who was serving time in Florida on an arson charge, was implicated in many of the crimes and added to this he had given the police a string of confessions, too.
Many of their alleged victims actually turned out to be alive and well, making their stories even more outrageous. Henry even admitted to committing murders in Spain and Japan, although there is no evidence that he ever left the USA. Henry was finally found guilty of ten homicides and sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of an unknown female hitchhiker who was given the name ‘orange socks’ for the only item of clothing left on her body. He was granted a stay of execution in September 1995 so that his claims of false confessions could be investigated.
Meanwhile, back in Florida, Ottis was diagnosed as being a paranoid schizophrenic and his death sentence was commuted to six consecutive life terms. Ottis died in a prison hospital on September 15, 1996, of liver failure.
On June 26, 1998, the governor of Texas, George W. Bush, commuted Henry’s death sentence to life imprisonment without any possibility of parole, and he died of natural causes in March 2001 without anyone knowing exactly how many murders he actually committed.
The truth about how many people they actually killed has gone with them to their graves, and many feel that the number became grossly exaggerated due to overzealous police officers wanting answers to unsolved murders. It is obvious both men were victims of untold abuse in their youth and, due to their uncertainty as to how to behave normally in society, inflicted their insecurities on innocent victims. There is no doubt they carried out some indescribable obscenities, including cannibalism on some of their victims, but as to the exact extent of their fiendish behaviour, no one will ever know.
The Hillside Stranglers
Between October 1977 and January 1979, Los Angeles was subjected to a particularly brutal series of killings. The women, mainly prostitutes, were found raped, tortured and murdered, and the killers turned out to be two cousins, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono.
As mirrored by so many of these serial killers, Kenneth Alessio Bianchi had a troubled childhood. He was born on May 22, 1951 in Rochester, New York, to a seventeen-year-old prostitute who had a serious drink problem. At three months of age Kenneth was adopted by Frances Bianchi and her husband, but he soon started to show some bad character traits. He started to throw temper tantrums and also became a compulsive liar, until his parents couldn’t believe anything he told them. Added to these problems, his mother was also diagnosed as ‘needing help’, when she took Kenneth to hospital when he was only three, saying that he wet the bed and had insomnia. Kenneth’s problems got worse and by the time he was five, it was back to the doctor because he kept lapsing into periods of inattentiveness with his eyes rolling back in their sockets. The doctor diagnosed the young Bianchi as having petit mal syndrome, or absence seizures which are linked to epilepsy. The physician tried to comfort his mother by saying that Kenneth would probably grow out of the condition, but he was treated again the following year for the same problem.
By the time he was eight years old, Kenneth was being treated for mental and behavioural problems and at school he was finding it hard to concentrate. He was described by his teachers as lazy and inattentive and he also showed a distinct lack of emotion, especially when his father died when he was thirteen years old.
Things started looking up for Kenneth when he attended high school and began to date girls. His childhood sweetheart was a girl called Susan, but when he proposed to her she turned him down which left him feeling hurt and inferior. After that he showed very little respect for the opposite sex and he was in and out of relationships until he married a girl called Brenda Beck. The marriage only lasted a few months because Kenneth said she failed to meet his accepted standards and in 1970, at the age of nineteen, he enrolled at Monroe Community College to train as a police officer.
Kenneth, with his heart set on his new career, married again but his wife left him after only eighteen months. He applied for a position with the sheriff’s office in 1972, but his application was turned down, leaving Kenneth feeling bitter and rejected once again. He went back to his one true love, Susan, and asked her again if she would marry him, but again she turned him down because he didn’t have a stable job. He took a job as a security guard but was often in trouble with his employers for stealing and in 1977 he moved out of Rochester, New York, to join his older cousin, Angelo Buono, who lived in California.
Angelo was seventeen years older than Kenneth and had a bad reputation. He worked as a car upholsterer, but he was also a pimp with a very brutal disposition. Angelo was also a sadist and introduced his young cousin to various sexual practices, which Kenneth seemed to get a great thrill out of. In fact, life was starting to look up for Kenneth as he landed a full-time job with the California Land Title Company and his mother sent him enough money to enable him to buy a 1972 Cadillac. He moved into his own apartment so that he could live with his girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, but she soon found out what a violent temper her boyfriend had and worried about their future together.
Kenneth applied for a job with the Los Angeles Police Department in 1977 but was turned down and for a while he became a drifter, turning to marijuana to try and dull the feeling of failure. When Kelli became pregnant, Kenneth proposed to her, but she turned him down even though she continued to live in the same house for a while.
an evil team
When money was starting to get tight, Kenneth turned to his cousin and they came up with the plan to pimp young girls to work for them as prostitutes. They purchased a list of proposed names from a girl called Deborah Noble and her friend Yolanda, but the girls had double-crossed them and gave them a list of fake identities. When Angelo and Kenneth found out they had been duped they sought revenge. They found out that Yolanda worked as a part-time waitress and she went missing on October 19, 1977. Her naked body was found several days later, with the piece of cloth used to strangle her still tied round her neck. Although the autopsy showed she had had sex with two men just before she died, the police did not consider this to be important as she was a known prostitute.
On November 1, 1977, the body of sixteen-year-old Judy Miller was found wrapped in a piece of tarpaulin. There we
re ligature marks round her ankles, wrists and neck, and her body had been dumped in a residential area of downtown Los Angeles. Another prostitute’s body, twenty-one-year-old Lissa Kastin, was found dumped on November 6, showing similar marks to the previous body. However, due to their high-risk lifestyle the murder of these girls was not taken too seriously, but when the murderers moved on to younger prey it made the police sit up and take notice.
The bodies of two schoolgirls, twelve-year-old Dolores Capeda and fourteen-year-old Sonja Johnson, were found by a nine-year-old boy who was taking out the rubbish for his mother. They had both been brutally raped and the ligature marks on their nude bodies indicated that they had been killed by the same person or persons. The bodies of more and more girls turned up and the police set up a thirty-strong team of officers to investigate the murders. They realised that they had a serial killer on the loose, as the murders all showed the same modus operandi, but they were no nearer to solving the crimes. On February 16, 1978, a police helicopter spotted an orange Datsun car abandoned on a cliff edge. When the police investigated, they found the nude body of twenty-year-old Cindy Hudspeth’s concealed in the boot. Although Cindy Hudspeth was to be Angelo’s last murder, Kenneth moved away to continue his spree of destruction.
Kenneth left Los Angeles to go to Bellingham, Washington, to be with his girlfriend Kelli and their newborn son, Ryan. In May 1978, Kenneth accepted a position with the Whatcom County Sherrif’s Reserve and was given the job of guarding a house while the owners were away in Europe. Up to his old tricks, he asked two young girls, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder to mind the house for him while he went out to get a part to repair the burglar alarm. While he was showing them where everything was, he dragged Karen to the basement and strangled her. He then did the same thing to Diane and dumped both bodies in the boot of his car. He dumped the corpses in a heavily wooded area, but was not very careful and left a trail of evidence, including a note that said ‘334 Bayside 7.00 p.m. Ken’, which led the police straight to Kenneth’s house. When they searched the property they found jewellery worn by some of his previous victims.
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