Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  With nowhere to hide, he figured that he risked being killed if he kept on running. In the small town of Pueblo, Colorado, he pulled over at a payphone and called the Santa Cruz Police Department to confess. The officers there were his drinking buddies from the Jury Room and did not believe what he was saying. They thought he was making a crank call and the duty officer told him to call back in the morning.

  At 5.00am, he rang back. Again, he spoke to someone whom he knew from the Jury Room. Kemper told him that he had killed eight people and was now in Pueblo, Colorado. ‘I have over 200 rounds of ammo in the trunk and 3 guns,’ he said, ‘I don’t even want to go near it.’

  The officer kept him talking while a colleague called the police in Colorado. The conversation was still in full flow when the officer said that the phone booth was now surrounded by armed men and he should come out with his hands up.

  Once in custody, Kemper waived his right to an attorney and began a detailed confession, which was taped. It continued when he was returned to Santa Cruz. He even admitted to slicing the flesh from the legs of at least two of his victims and cooking it in a macaroni casserole. Eating their flesh, Kemper said, was his means of ‘possessing’ his prey. He also admitted to removing teeth, along with bits of hair and skin as grisly keepsakes. They were the trophies of his hunt.

  After he had finished his confession, he went out with detectives – shadowed at a distance by newspaper men – to find the parts of the bodies that had not already been discovered. The police were photographed digging at the back garden of his mother’s house in Aptos to retrieve Cindy Schall’s head.

  He surrendered the other murder weapons he had and handed over the women’s personal possessions that he had kept. Forensic teams also found bloodstains in his car, further corroborating his story.

  After his arrest, he made four suicide attempts, once slashing his arteries with the metal casing of a ballpoint pen left in a folder of court papers. He tried to kill himself, he said, not because he did not like being locked up, but because the ‘kindness and respect with which I was treated by the people after a while started to get to me. I started feeling like I didn’t deserve all that nice treatment after what I had done. And I guess that’s why I started cutting myself up.’

  As Kemper had openly admitted to the crimes, the only course of action open to the public defender, James Jackson, was to enter an insanity plea. Kemper agreed as he was eager to go back to Atascadero.

  ‘After all, I grew up there,’ said Kemper. ‘That used to be, like, my home. Basically, I was born there, you know. I have a lot of fond memories of the place and I don’t know anybody else who has. I felt I definitely could have done a lot of good there, helping people return to the streets … I could have fitted in there quicker than anybody else.’

  Kemper had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic before. But the reputation of psychiatry was at an all-time low in California. Herbert Mullin had just been convicted of two murders in the first degree and eight in the second degree. He, too, had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic earlier, committed to a mental hospital and released to kill 13 people. He had also admitted his crimes, but a jury had found him to be sane and culpable because he had shown premeditation.

  For Kemper, the trial was just ‘a matter to decide by which method I won’t see society again. And I certainly wouldn’t trust me in society again,’ he said.

  The jury was played his taped confessions and both sides brought in expert psychiatric witnesses. His sister Allyn related some of the bizarre incidents from her brother’s childhood. She said that both she and her mother had suspected that Ed was the Co-ed Killer, especially when they heard that the victims had been decapitated.

  Kemper took the stand to talk about his interior life. Giving testimony he appeared shy and awkward, a stark contrast to the wisecracking braggart the jury had heard on the tapes. On the stand, he was sheepish; on the tapes, he revelled in the grisly details of what he had done. He admitted that, in his fantasies, he had made two of the girls ‘a part of me’ by eating ‘parts of them’. All his co-ed victims, he said, ‘were like spirit wives. I still had their spirits. I still have them.’

  Under cross-examination, he admitted fantasising about killing ‘thousands of people’, including District Attorney Peter Chang himself. When asked what he thought his punishment should be, he said quietly, ‘Death by torture.’

  At one point, he had even said that, if he was sent to prison, he would kill someone so that he could die in the gas chamber. ‘I wanted to kill “Herbie” Mullin, my fellow mass murderer,’ he said later. ‘There was a time when I thought it would be a good solution for everyone. It would be good for society and save everyone a bundle of money. Instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to lock the two of us up for life to protect us from people and people from us, I figured that if I killed Mullin and then they sent me to the gas chamber, it would be a good solution to the problem. I know I’d never get a chance to, though, and I don’t have any intention of killing him or anyone else.’

  Kemper and Mullin had been held in adjacent cells in San Mateo County Jail and Kemper made no secret of his contempt for his fellow mass murderer. ‘You are a no-class killer,’ he said when they first met.

  Under questioning from Chang, Kemper admitted he had thrown water through the cell bars on to Mullin to ‘shut him up when he was disturbing everybody by singing off-key in his high-pitched, squeaky voice.’ Kemper added, ‘When he was a good boy, I gave him peanuts. He liked peanuts.’

  The alternate water treatment and the peanuts, Kemper said, ‘was behavioural modification treatment. The jailers were very pleased with me.’

  James Jackson made an eloquent plea on behalf of his client. ‘There are two people locked up in the body of this young giant – one good and one evil,’ he said. ‘One is fighting to be here with us and the other is slipping off to his own little world of fantasy where he is happy.’

  It made no difference. The jury took just five hours to find Ed Kemper guilty on all eight counts of murder. The death penalty in California was suspended at the time, so he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge recommended that he should never be freed. There was no appeal. In jail, he said, he was happy to be ‘locked up in a little room where I can’t hurt anybody and I’ll be left to my own fantasies.’

  Interviewed after his conviction by Marj von Beroldingen of Front Page Detective magazine, Kemper still vied with Mullin. ‘It really sticks in my craw that Mullin only got two “firsts” and I got eight,’ he said. ‘He was just a cold-blooded killer, running over a three-week period killing everybody he saw for no good reason … I guess that’s kind of hilarious, my sitting here so self-righteously talking like that after what I’ve done.’

  At the end of the interview, Kemper told von Beroldingen, ‘You haven’t asked the questions I expected a reporter to ask.’ Asked for some examples, Kemper said, ‘Oh, what is it like to have sex with a dead body? What does it feel like to sit on your living room couch and look over and see two decapitated girls’ heads on the arm of the couch?’

  Volunteering the answer, he said, ‘The first time, it makes you sick to your stomach.’

  Another question he expected to be asked was, ‘What do you think, now, when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?’ Again, he answered his own question: ‘One side of me says, “Wow, what an attractive chick. I’d like to talk to her, date her.” The other side of me says, “I wonder how her head would look on a stick?”’

  When Kemper left court, he handed his cherished Junior Chamber of Commerce pin to Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Deputy Bruce Colomy, who had transported Kemper back and forth between San Mateo County Jail and Santa Cruz for court appearances and stayed with him at all times when he was out of his cell. ‘He’s more like a father to me than anyone I have ever known,’ said Kemper. ‘He’s like the father I wish I had had.’

  Confined in the state prison at Vacaville, he joined a volunteer grou
p of prisoners recording books for the blind. By 1987, he had made some 5,000 hours of recording, more than any other prisoner. At least six applications for parole have been turned down.

  9

  THE GIRLFRIEND’S GARDEN

  On 25 April 1992, Sharon Thompson returned home to her terraced house in Greening Street, Abbey Wood, to find her boyfriend, 24-year-old delivery driver Benjamin Laing, there. He was tired, sweaty and dishevelled, and told her that he had been digging over her back garden for her. Four days later, Laing was arrested and charged with fraud. Two days after that, he was charged with kidnapping 62-year-old widower Matthew Manwaring and his 23-year-old daughter Alison. It was then that Sharon Thompson called the police.

  Within hours, a team of officers arrived. A neighbour confirmed that she had seen Laing digging at the end of the garden with a pickaxe and spade in the pouring rain the previous week. Forensic experts erected a plastic tent over a large patch of recently disturbed soil. Using trowels, they slowly scraped away the earth; 2ft down, they found a black plastic bin-liner. There were ten bags in all. They contained the dismembered remains of Matthew and Alison Manwaring.

  The bodies had been beheaded and their limbs had been cut off using a Stanley knife and a hacksaw blade from Matthew Manwaring’s own toolbox. A post-mortem examination revealed that Matthew had been shot at point-blank range. The blast from a shotgun had ripped through his head; his daughter had been strangled. Laing was charged with two counts of murder.

  The tale of their horrendous end had begun innocently enough when Matthew Manwaring, a retired bank messenger, put a small ad for a Ford Escort Cabriolet XR3i in his local newspaper. It belonged to his son, an RAF fighter pilot, who was away on exercises in Greece. The paper came out on 23 April and had been on the streets for only a few hours when a potential buyer phoned to ask whether the car was still for sale. Told that it was, the caller said that he could drop by in the morning to look at the car. Mr Manwaring gave him his address in Aldersey Gardens, Barking, east London.

  At 10.30pm, Matthew was getting ready for bed when there was a knock at the door. The caller was a young man in his mid-twenties. He apologised, saying that he was the man who had called earlier. He had found himself in Barking that evening and asked if it was too late to see the car. A neighbour saw the two men talking on the doorstep before they went into the semi-detached house.

  The following morning, the Manwaring’s G-registered Cabriolet was gone. Six miles away in Hornchurch, Matthew Manwaring’s brother Derek was waiting for him; they were going trout fishing. He phoned his brother’s house; there was no reply.

  In Forest Gate, four miles west of Barking, the staff at the bank where Alison Manwaring worked were wondering why she had not come in. She had not phoned in sick and she was usually so reliable.

  Alison lived with her widowed father, but she was supposed to be moving into a new home with her fiancé, hospital worker Gordon Healis, in a few days’ time. He was surprised to hear that she was not there when he called her work. They had spent the previous evening together, measuring the windows of their new home for curtains. She had left at around 10.30pm to drive back to her father’s house in her Mini Metro.

  Gordon, too, called the house and got no reply. Again, no one answered when he called that evening. He grew concerned.

  Derek had a key to his brother’s house so, on Saturday 25 April, Gordon and Derek let themselves in. The curtains were drawn and the lights were off; no one answered their calls. A quick look round convinced them that there was no one home and they left, baffled.

  On Sunday, Derek went back to the house. It was still deserted. Now deeply worried, Gordon and Derek returned again on Monday, 27 April. This time they turned on the lights and opened the curtains. To their horror, they found Matthew Manwaring’s armchair and the carpet in front of it soaked with blood. Immediately they called the police.

  DS Mike Morgan from Scotland Yard’s Major Incident Pool and DI Phil Burrows from Barking CID arrived. They swiftly concluded that something very nasty indeed had taken place in Aldersey Gardens. Apart from the blood on the armchair and carpet, they found blood-soaked cushion covers in the washing machine. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to wash them.

  In the bathroom, they found that the bath had been cleaned, but there were still spots of blood around it. The frame of the door leading from the hall into the living room had been broken. Someone had tried to repair it crudely with filler and paint, but they could still see shotgun pellets embedded in the timber. Clearly, there had been a shooting.

  They also found a note in Alison Manwaring’s handwriting. It was addressed to Gordon Healis, saying that she and her father had gone away for a few days. She would explain why later. But why would Alison have left a note for Gordon inside the house when she must have known that he did not have a key? It was clear from the wording that she had been forced to write it.

  Alongside the note was a handwritten receipt for £7,750 in cash for the sale of the red Cabriolet. The buyer, it said, was a Mr Sinclair. Both the Escort and Alison’s Metro were missing, along with jewellery, a camera, cheque books, a building society account book and other items.

  The police decided to hold a press conference. On the morning of 29 April, the story of the missing father and daughter made headlines in the national newspapers. DS Morgan would only say that they had disappeared in ‘strange and suspicious circumstances’. However, they would like to interview a young man, possibly of mixed race, with a moustache and goatee, who had been seen talking to Matthew Manwaring beside his son’s car.

  That afternoon, a tall, powerfully built mixed-race man with a goatee and wispy moustache walked into Barking Police Station. It was Benjamin Laing, a delivery driver for Selfridges. He said that he had read in the newspapers that he had been seen talking to Matthew Manwaring and said that he had gone to the house after seeing the advertise-ment offering a car for sale in the local paper. He had bought the Cabriolet for £7,750 and had taken it away that night. When he had left Aldersey Gardens, Mr Manwaring and his daughter were alive and well, he said. That was all he knew.

  DI Burrows asked where the car was. Laing said that he had already sold it at an auction in Enfield, north London, on Monday. But Burrows had an ace up his sleeve. When they discovered the cheque books and building society books were missing, they alerted every bank and building society in London and Essex. On Friday 24 April, a man answering Laing’s description had walked into a branch of the Nationwide Building Society and tried to withdraw £200. But the signature on the withdrawal slip did not match the one in the book. Suspecting a fraud, the cashier switched on the hidden surveillance camera before refusing to hand over the cash. Laing had been videoed.

  When he was told this, Laing was shaken, but quickly regained his composure. He said that he had found the building society book in the car manual inside the Escort.

  ‘It was among the documents for the car,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how it got there. OK, I tried to get some money with it, but that’s all.’

  When the CID checked the records at Scotland Yard, they found that Laing had five previous convictions for armed robbery; they had taken place in 1987 when he was still a teenager and were all fairly petty – he had used a replica pistol to rob taxi drivers.

  With this, Benjamin Laing had thrown away a promising life. Born in Paisley, he was the son of Kojo Laing, a leading author and poet in his native Ghana. Benjamin had an IQ of 150. With ten O-levels and four A-levels, he had been offered a place at Loughborough University. Instead, he was sentenced to six years’ youth custody and released in 1990 after serving less than half his sentence. Unable to resume his academic career, he took a job as a £150-a-week van driver.

  Although DI Burrows was convinced that the Manwarings were dead and that he was looking at the killer, Laing was only charged with attempted fraud and remanded in custody in Pentonville Prison.

  Detectives contacted the auction site in Enfield. They confirmed that
they had sold the Escort; Laing had used his own name. That was why he had been forced to come forward; he had taken £7,600 for it. After the auctioneer’s commission, Laing had only got £7,000 – a loss of £750.

  The police tracked down the dealer who had bought the car. When they examined it, they found that the carpet in the boot was still damp with blood. It matched the blood found in the house. It seemed that Laing had killed his victims and used their own car to dispose of the bodies.

  Laing lived in East Ham Manor Way, Becton, just two miles from the Manwarings. He had given one of his neighbours a camera to look after. It matched the one missing from the Manwaring’s house.

  When Laing’s home was searched, they found exercise books spelling out his diabolical plot. It was difficult getting money by stealing cars, he wrote, because it was hard to sell them afterwards without the appropriate ownership documents. To get round this, he planned to study the small ads in the local papers and look for suitable victims, preferably someone old and frail. Matthew Manwaring fitted the bill.

  Laing’s plan was to pretend to be a genuine buyer. Once the ownership documents had been produced, he would kill the victim and make it look like suicide. His idea was to stage a suicide by sealing the victim in a van filled with carbon monoxide. He wrote: ‘Let owner call a “friend” from van on mobile phone – have not decided if just owner or family will be in van.’ He then wrote a shopping list of things he would need. His murder kit included bin-liners, handcuffs, a crossbow and a pump-action shotgun.

  The case was building against Laing. But still there was no direct evidence proving that Laing had killed Matthew and Alison Manwaring.