World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds

by Greig, Charlotte

  The prosecution alleged that to the contrary, Hooks had killed the women in a frenzy of violence. He was a crack addict who had become mentally unstable as a result of his addiction. The prosecution suggested that he had tried to force the women into a sex orgy with him. When Adams, who he knew, tried to flee he had stabbed her some 10 times after cornering her in a closet.

  ‘Once it went bad, everybody had to go. He wasn’t going to leave any witnesses,’ Miller said.

  Death Penalty

  Jurors were heard arguing – shouting at times – as they began deliberations. At the end of the first day, the jurors reported they were split 10-2 after six hours of discussion. On the second day of deliberations they spent eight hours arguing.

  What held their deliberation up was the fact that it was hard to understand how five women could have been killed – apparently easily – by one man, but in the end they decided that that was what had happened. They therefore returned a verdict of guilty. On hearing the verdict, Hooks showed no reaction. He was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Commenting on the death penalty for Hooks, the daughter of victim Phyllis Adams, Barbara Booker, said ‘I don’t think he deserves to live because those women did not have a choice’.

  The Crime of the Century

  It was called at the time the Crime of the Century, a ‘superman’ murder. But in reality the 1924 killing of Bobbie Franks by two young University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, was both senseless and lazy. Far from being the ‘perfect’ murder, a secret demonstration of how much ‘better’ and ‘less bourgeois’ they were than their friends and relatives, it only proved that even intellectuals can be supremely cack-handed.

  Fourteen-year old Bobbie, the son of a millionaire, was abducted outside his school on 21 May 1924; and soon afterwards his mother received a call saying that he’d been kidnapped and that a ransom note would arrive through the post. The next day it came, demanding $10,000. But before anything could be done, the police found a body that matched Bobbie’s description. It had been discovered by maintenance men – strangled and with a fractured skull – in a culvert near the railway. Nearby lay a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

  It took only a week for the spectacles to be traced to a rich nineteen-year-old law student and amateur ornithologist called Nathan Leopold. Leopold immediately agreed that they were indeed his, and he claimed that he must have dropped them while bird-watching in the area some time before. But the spectacles showed no sign of having been left outside for long; and when Leopold was asked what he’d been doing on the afternoon of May 21st, all he could come up with was that he’d been with his friend, fellow-student Richard Loeb, and two girls called Mae and Edna. Loeb soon corroborated this, but neither man could give any sort of description by which the two girls could be traced. Besides, Leopold’s typewriter, when tested, was found to be exactly the same model as the one which had written the ransom note.

  It was, oddly, Richard Loeb – easily the more assured and dominant of the two men – who first confessed under questioning. But he was soon followed by Leopold, whose younger brother, it turned out, had been a friend of Bobbie Franks. The fourteen-year-old had been chosen as their victim, it transpired, not because of any particular enmity, but for a much simpler reason: he’d be easy to get into their car.

  Two months after the killing, defended by famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, they came to trial. Darrow did his best, claiming that both his clients were mentally ill, either paranoiac (in Leopold’s case) or schizophrenic (in Loeb’s). This defence probably saved their lives, but there could be no doubt of their guilt. They were imprisoned for life for Bobbie’s murder, and given a further ninety-nine years’ sentence for his kidnapping.

  Twelve years later, Loeb was killed by a fellow-inmate. But Leopold, who’d been throughout his term a model prisoner, was finally released in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, got married, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.

  Leopold and Loeb thought they had committed the ‘crime of the century’. They were wrong.

  The Custom-Built Dungeon

  As individuals, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng were both unsavoury characters. Together, they were a deadly combination. In the space of little over a year, they killed, tortured and raped at least twelve and perhaps as many as twenty-five people, including men, women and two baby boys. The men were mostly killed for money; the women, for sexual thrills; and the babies simply for being in the way.

  Interest In Guns

  Leonard Lake was a fat old hippie obsessed with survivalism. Charles Ng was a young ex-marine from Hong Kong, with an addiction to stealing. What brought the two of them together initially was an interest in guns.

  The sexual enslavement of women had long been a fantasy of the older of the two men, Leonard Lake. Lake was born in San Francisco on 20 July 1946. His parents by all accounts had a dreadful relationship and, when Lake was six, his mother left, leaving him with his grandmother. As a child, Lake collected mice and enjoyed killing them by dissolving them in chemicals (a technique he would later use to help dispose of his human victims). In his teens, he sexually abused his sisters.

  At eighteen, Lake joined the US Marines and made the rank of sergeant. He served two tours in Vietnam as a radar operator. Following a spell in Da Nang, he suffered a delusional breakdown and was sent home before being discharged in 1971. He was already married by this time, but his wife left him because he was violent and sexually perverted.

  Lake became part of the hippie lifestyle centred around San Francisco. He also became increasingly obsessed with the idea of an impending nuclear holocaust, and for eight years lived in a hippie commune near Ukiah, in northern California. There he met a woman named Claralyn Balazs, or ‘Cricket’, as he nicknamed her. A twenty-five-year-old teacher’s aide when he met her, Balazs became deeply involved in Lake’s fantasies. She starred in the pornographic videos he began to make, the latest manifestation of his sexual obsession. His other obsession was with guns – part of his survivalist paranoia – and through a magazine advert he placed in 1981, he met Charles Ng.

  Arsonist

  Born in Hong Kong, Ng, or ‘Charlie’ as Lake called him, was a disruptive child, obsessed with martial arts and setting fires. His parents sent him to an English private school in an effort to straighten him out, but he was expelled for stealing. Next, he went to California where he attended college for a single semester before dropping out. Soon after that he was involved in a hit-and-run car crash and to avoid the consequences he signed up for the US Marines, fraudulently claiming to be a US national. It was at this time that he met Lake. They came up with a plan to sell guns that Ng would steal from a marine arsenal. However, Ng was caught stealing the guns and was sentenced to three years in prison.

  When he was released in 1985, he immediately contacted Lake, who invited him to his new place, a remote cabin near Wilseyville, California, that he was renting from Balazs. He had custom-built a dungeon next to the cabin ready for his friend Charlie to come up and have fun. It is thought that by then Lake had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, in order to steal their money and, in Gunnar’s case, his identity.

  Over the next year Lake and Ng indulged themselves in an orgy of killing, rape and torture. Their victims included their rural neighbours, Lonnie Bond, his girlfriend Brenda O’Connor plus their baby son Lonnie Jr, and another young family, Harvey and Deborah Dubs and their young son Sean. In both cases the men and babies were killed quickly, while the women were kept alive for Ng and Lake’s perverse sport. They would rape and torture the women – Lake filming the whole awful business – before putting them to death. Other victims included workmates of Ng’s; relatives and friends who came looking for Bond and O’Connor; and two gay men.

  The career of evil might have gone on a lot longer if it had not been for Ng’s addiction to stealing. On 2 June 1985, Ng was spotted shoplifting a vice from a San Francisco hardware store,
probably for use as a torture implement. Ng ran away from the scene. Lake then appeared and tried to pay for the vice. By then, however, the police had arrived. Officer Daniel Wright discovered that Lake’s car’s number plates were registered to another vehicle, and that Lake’s ID, in the name of Scott Stapley, was suspicious. When Wright found a gun with a silencer in the trunk of the car, he arrested Lake. Once in custody, Lake asked for a pen, paper and a glass of water. He then wrote a note to Balazs, and quickly swallowed the cyanide pills he had sewn in to his clothes. After revealing his true identity and that of Ng, he went into convulsions from cyanide poisoning and died four days later.

  Kilos Of Bone

  Further investigation soon led the police to the Wilseyville ranch. Ng was nowhere to be seen. However, they found Scott Stapley’s truck and Lonnie Bond’s Honda there and, behind the cabin, they found the dungeon. Officers noticed a human foot poking through the earth, and proceeded to unearth 18 kilograms of burned and smashed human bone fragments, relating to at least a dozen bodies. (A month or so later, less than a mile away, they were to find the bodies of Scott Stapley and Lonnie Bond, stuffed into sleeping bags and buried.) They also came across a hand-drawn ‘treasure’ map that led them to two five-gallon pails buried in the earth. One contained envelopes with names and victim IDs suggesting that the full body count might be as high as twenty-five. In the other pail, police found Lake’s handwritten journals for 1983 and 1984, and two videotapes that showed the horrific torture of two of their victims. If there was any doubt that the missing Ng was as heavily involved as Lake, it was dispelled by these tapes, that showed Ng right there with Lake, even telling one of the victims, Brenda O’Connor: ‘You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won’t do any good. We are pretty – ha, ha – cold-hearted, so to speak.’

  Ng, meanwhile, was on the run. He had flown to Detroit and crossed the border into Canada where he was eventually arrested. In a Canadian prison, he began an epic legal battle against extradition back to the United States on the grounds that Canada did not have the death penalty, and thus to send him back to the US would be in breach of his human rights. It was not until 1991 that he finally lost this battle and was shipped back to the States. Even that was not the end of the story. Ng stretched out pretrial proceedings for seven years at the cost to the state of $10 million. Finally, in May 1999, Ng was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. To no one’s surprise, Ng appealed against the verdict.

  In 2012, he was still on death row in San Quentin prison awaiting the outcome of his latest appeal. He had also taken up art, enrolling for a correspondence course at the University of Fraser Valley.

  Leonard Lake – custom-built a dungeon in the woods.

  Charles Ng – shoplifting was to be his downfall.

  Dark, Dark Fantasies

  On the surface, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka seemed the most unlikely of serial killers. They were a middle-class young Canadian couple, both good looking and fair-haired. However, these ostensibly model citizens conspired together in the rape, torture and murder of at least three young women, including Karla’s own sister, Tammy. At her trial, Karla blamed all the crimes on her abusive husband Paul. Subsequent evidence showed that she herself was deeply implicated. However, it is probably true to say that without Bernado, Homolka would never have killed – while Bernardo almost certainly would have done, whether or not he had had a lover to aid and abet him.

  Abusive Father

  Paul Bernardo was born in the well-to-do Toronto suburb of Scarborough in August 1964, the third child of accountant Kenneth Bernardo and home-maker Marilyn. At least that is what Paul believed when he was growing up; it was only when he was sixteen that his mother revealed him to be the offspring of an affair she had had. By this time, it was abundantly clear that all was not well in the seemingly respectable Bernardo household. Kenneth was physically abusive to his wife and sexually abusive to his daughter; meanwhile, Marilyn had become grossly overweight and remained virtually housebound.

  Nevertheless, up to that point Paul appeared to be a happy, well-adjusted child, who enjoyed his involvement in scouting activities. It was only when he became a young man that he revealed a darker side to his nature. He was good-looking, charming and, not surprisingly, popular with women. However, his sexual appetites turned out to be anything but charming. He would beat up the women he went out with, tie them up and force them to have anal sex. This behaviour carried on through his time at the University of Toronto, a period during which he also developed a money-making sideline in smuggling cigarettes into the US. After leaving college, he got a job as an accountant at Price Waterhouse. Not long afterwards, in October 1987, he met Karla Homolka at a Toronto pet convention.

  Karla Homolka was born on 4 May 1970 in Port Credit, Ontario, the daughter of Dorothy and Karel Homolka. She had two sisters, Lori and Tammy. Like Bernardo’s, this was a middle-class family, but in this case it seemed to be a genuinely happy one. Karla was a popular girl who attended Sir Winston Churchill High School and then became a veterinary assistant, working at an animal hospital, which was where she met Paul Bernardo.

  Dark Fantasies

  Unlike most of his previous girlfriends, Karla was not repulsed by her new boyfriend’s sexual sadism. Instead, she joined in enthusiastically, encouraging him to go ever further into his dark fantasies. Before long, this meant going out and finding women to rape. Over the next few years, Bernardo carried out well over a dozen rapes around the Scarborough area. How far Homolka was involved is not entirely clear, though one victim reported seeing a woman lurking behind the rapist, filming the event.

  The police took a long time to deal with the case. In 1990, they finally released a photo-fit sketch that produced an immediate identification of Paul Bernardo. A blood test was taken from Bernardo, revealing that he had the same blood group as the rapist. Further tests were called for. Unbelievably, it took the police laboratory three years to carry out detailed tests, which proved conclusively that Bernardo was the ‘Scarborough Rapist’. By that time, however, he was also a murderer.

  As time went on, raping strangers was no longer enough for Bernardo. He developed a fantasy about raping Karla’s fifteen-year-old sister Tammy. Once again, Karla was a willing accomplice. She decided to drug Tammy, using anaesthetics stolen from the veterinary clinic where she worked. On 24 December 1990, Karla got Tammy drunk and administered a drug called Halothane to her. Both Paul and Karla then raped Tammy and videotaped the entire episode. They did not initially intend to kill Tammy but the anaesthetic caused her to choke on her own vomit, and she died on her way to hospital. The official cause of death was suffocation. Karla’s grieving parents put the tragedy down to an accident, caused by Tammy having drunk too much.

  Marriage Of Minds

  Karla grieved briefly but was soon engrossed in planning her wedding that summer. A few weeks beforehand, she lured one of her friends, a teenager named Jane, round to the house and gave her the same treatment she had doled out to her sister. This time, though, Jane survived the experience, awaking from her drugged sleep confused and sore, but unaware that she had been raped by both Karla and Paul. This lapse of memory undoubtedly saved her life.

  The couple’s next victim, fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy, was not so lucky. Paul abducted her on 15 July 1991 and the couple raped and tortured the girl over a twenty-four hour period, filming the event, before Paul finally killed her. Her body was found soon afterwards, dismembered and encased in cement on Lake Gibson. The same day that Mahaffy’s body was found, Paul and Karla were married in a lavish affair at Niagara.

  Four months later, on 30 November 1991, fourteen-year-old Terri Anderson disappeared. She may well have been murdered by Bernardo and Homolka, but the case remains unproven. Their final victim was seventeen-year-old Kristen French, abducted from a church parking lot on 16 April 1992. This time, the couple kept their victim alive for three days, raping and torturing her. They finally murdered her when they realized they were due
to attend an Easter dinner at Karla’s parents house.

  This was the last murder the couple committed. By the summer of 1992, Bernardo had started to take out his rage on Homolka and in January 1993 she left him. The following month, the police lab finally ran the test on Bernardo’s blood sample and discovered that he was the Scarborough Rapist. As Bernardo’s name had also come up in the investigations into the murders of Mahaffey and French, the police finally put the whole case together. Homolka successfully painted herself as just another victim of the dominating Bernardo, and agreed a plea bargain whereby she would plead guilty of manslaughter and receive a twelve-year prison sentence in return for testifying against Bernardo.

  Willing Partner

  Homolka’s trial duly began in June 1993. She once again played the abused wife and received the agreed sentence. However, two years later, when Bernardo’s trial began and the prosecution revealed the new evidence of Bernardo’s videotapes, the judge and jury were able to see, in all too graphic detail, how willing a partner Homolka had been in the rape and torture of Mahaffey and French. Bernardo did his best to put the blame back on to Homolka, but the videotapes were utterly damning, and he received a life sentence in prison. Homolka, however, was released from prison in July 2005 and went to live in Montreal under supervisory conditions imposed on her by a judge.

  Paul Bernardo had a close escape early in his criminal career that left him free to kill.

  The presence of Karla Homolka may have allayed the suspicions of victims.

  The Death of JFK

  In the United States, the Mafia, perhaps, has never aimed quite so high. But it should be remembered that in the 1960 election, which brought President John Kennedy into office, the outcome in the end was decided by a few hundred thousand votes and that the Democratic majority in Cook County, Illinois was finally key. Cook County, Illinois just happens to have been Al Capone’s old stamping-ground, as Kennedy’s father Joe, who’d been a bootlegger and had associated with the Italian Mafia, knew well; and Mafia boss Sam Giancana – who shared at least one lover with President Kennedy – later boasted of having swung the election there for Joe’s son as a favour. Giancana and the Mafia were also involved in American-sponsored attempts to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba and several of the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of the President in November 1963 claim that he was killed at the behest of the American Mafia because he refused to return the favour it had done him. Indeed, by allowing his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, to investigate the Teamsters Union and Jimmy Hoffa, he’d made matters much worse.