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

by Greig, Charlotte

  His passport and the clothes he’d intended to wear that night for a dinner with friends at a gambling club were later found at the house he’d been living in. His car was found near the south coast. It was at first assumed that Lucan had boarded a cross-channel ferry to France in the early hours of the morning to flee the man hunt that was bound to pursue him. Foreign police were alerted to the need to the trace the good-looking aristocrat. He was assumed to have access to rich and powerful friends who might be persuaded to believe his version of events and so help him out.

  No trace of him has ever since been found, though reports that he’d been spotted, in South Africa, Australia, Ireland, the Caribbean and elsewhere, soon began arriving. He is now presumed dead, the most usual theory being that he drowned himself in the English Channel. Indeed his son has now succeeded him to the Lucan title.

  However, the rumours – of rich, aristocratic friends who smuggled ‘Lucky’ Lucan out of the country and still support him – persist. If he ever turns up, it may be on his death, if that has not already happened.

  The Macivor Case

  When investigators first come upon a crime scene where there are multiple victims, they have to determine the nature of the crime with which they are dealing and identify which victim was the real target since it is possible that the other victims were innocent bystanders. Such was the problem facing FBI profiler Dayle Hinman in the case of the brutal murder of an attractive young couple, Missy and Michael MacIvor.

  The MacIvors were discovered dead in their luxury home in the Florida Keys on an August morning in 1991. The initial suspicion was that it was a drug-related killing. Michael was an aircraft mechanic and pilot who had allegedly become mixed up with drug dealers, but thought himself ‘bullet-proof’, according to a friend. Four years earlier he had been arrested by customs for landing a plane with narcotic residue, but he had not been convicted. More recently he had bought himself a plane that had been impounded during a drug seizure and he was heavily in debt.

  His body had been found on the living room floor, his eyes and ears covered with duct tape. His wife’s naked body was discovered in the master bedroom at the foot of the bed. She too had been tortured and hog-tied (hands and feet trussed up behind her back in one binding) with a belt and a man’s tie, then strangled with a cloth belt from a towelling robe. A ladder had been found propped up against a balcony outside the house and the phone wires had been cut, which indicated a degree of planning.

  When FBI profiler Dayle Hinman saw the crime scene photographs she immediately discounted the drug connection. If it had been a drug hit, she reasoned, the killers would have brought their own restraints and weapons. Moreover, they would not have covered Michael’s eyes and mouth if they had intended him to witness the torture of his wife or force him to give them information. Another clue lay in the fact that Missy’s restraints had been tied and untied several times, indicating that she had been the object of the attack while Michael had been murdered merely because he had been in the way.

  There were bruises on the back of his neck indicating that he had been struck repeatedly and once unconscious he was left alone. A metal pole was found nearby that looked a likely murder weapon.

  Missy had been repeatedly assaulted and strangled indicating that the killer was a sadistic psychopath who enjoyed dominating and tormenting his victims.

  The Search For The Suspect

  As no other crime of a similar nature had been reported in the area in recent months, Hinman felt it safe to assume the murder was the killer’s first and that he was following the usual pattern in having graduated from burglary to rape and finally to murder. On her recommendation detectives began combing the vicinity for likely suspects, since this type of criminal will begin his career in his own area as he knows it well and will have his eye on escape routes should anything go wrong. This is what is known as the ‘comfort zone’.

  Within days a likely suspect was in their sights. Thomas Overton was a small-time cat burglar who fitted the profile. He specialized in breaking into houses where the owner was present. At the time he was working at a local gas station where Missy was a regular customer. This gave detectives a reason to question him but no right to arrest him. Until, that is, he was caught red-handed breaking into a house in the neighbourhood some months later.

  Unfortunately, even a criminal caught in the act of committing a crime is not obliged to give a sample for DNA analysis, and with no hard physical evidence to connect Overton to the MacIvor murders there were no grounds for compelling him to submit to a swab under ‘probable cause’.

  But then the police had a break. While in custody Overton cut himself shaving and threw the bloody tissue away. It then became the property of the police and could be subjected to analysis. A search of the DNA database proved a positive match to the semen found at the crime scene. This was the kind of hard, irrefutable evidence that can crack a case, as there is a one-in-six-billion chance that it could belong to anyone other than the suspect. But it was not enough to prove beyond doubt that Overton had murdered the MacIvors, only that he had been in the house. The police needed to get Overton to deny that he had ever been in the house, then it would prove he was covering up the fact that he had been there on the night in question.

  The Case Is Closed

  The detectives devised a strategy to draw out a confession, based on the psychological profile Hinman had provided. They exploited his vanity by inviting him to the police station as an expert burglar to help clear up a series of unsolved break-ins. Overton was encouraged to believe that he might earn a shorter sentence if he cooperated.

  He willingly looked through numerous photographs of houses, some of which he had burgled and some of which had been broken into by his associates. When the photograph of the MacIvor house was placed before him, he claimed he had never been there and so implicated himself in the murder.

  Had he admitted that he had broken in on the day of the murder a smart lawyer might have been able to argue that some unknown assailant had murdered the MacIvors after Overton had left. And as unlikely as that sounds, it might have sown sufficient doubt to get him a life sentence for sexual assault instead of a death sentence for premeditated first-degree homicide.

  Mail Order Murder

  When a home-made pipe bomb killed 17-year-old Chris Marquis in his home in Fair Haven, Vermont, detectives had little hope of catching the killer and that was because the lethal ingredients were common household items that could be purchased anywhere in the United States.

  Neighbours often joked that Chris and his mother lived in the safest house in town – a bungalow right next door to the local police station. But one morning in March 1998 violent death came to Fair Haven in an innocuous-looking package. Christopher’s mother suspected nothing as she carried the parcel to her son, although she didn’t recognize the name of the sender or the return address. Chris ran a small CB radio sales and repair business from his bedroom and this looked as if it might be something that he had ordered from a supplier. But Chris didn’t recognize the sender either. He opened it anyway and the next moment there was a tremendous explosion which tore a hole in Chris’s leg and left his mother with serious injuries. Chris later bled to death in hospital, leaving his mother distraught and wondering who could have wanted her son dead and why.

  Detectives soon had an answer to both questions. On Chris’s computer, investigators found emails from angry customers claiming that Chris had cheated them by advertising an expensive radio over the internet and then sending a cheaper model in its place once he had cashed their cheques and pocketed the difference.

  Suddenly they had several hundred suspects. But could any of them really have been so angry that they would take revenge by killing a 17-year-old that they had almost certainly never met?

  While detectives trawled through the list of Chris’s customers, forensic experts combed the bungalow looking for physical evidence that could give a clue as to the identity of the perpetrator. They fo
und Styrofoam packaging material and pieces of pipe, wire, grains of smokeless gunpowder and tiny hex nuts – all ingredients of a home-made pipe bomb, but nothing that pointed to a specific individual. The return name and address on the package proved to be fictitious and none of Chris’s outraged customers lived in Mansfield, Ohio, where the package had been posted.

  A Lucky Break

  But then they had a break. The story had made the national news and someone had phoned in with information. This anonymous source had recently been in a bar where he had overheard a long-distance truck driver complaining that he had been ripped off by a mail-order CB radio repair service in Vermont and was planning to go down there and teach the guy a lesson. The truck driver’s name was Christopher Dean.

  The detectives went to Dean’s house in Indiana, where they found hex nuts of the type and size used in the bomb, lengths of wire and even a plastic funnel with grains of what proved to be smokeless gunpowder residue. But again, these did not amount to conclusive proof.

  To find out if the hex nuts in Dean’s house were the same as those found at the crime scene, forensic scientists took scrapings of both samples and placed them in a neutral solution before putting them in a plasma atomic emission spectroscope which vapourized the samples at an extremely high temperature. Different compounds such as zinc and copper vapourize at different speeds, revealing the chemical make-up of any metallic object, and computer analysis of the test results revealed that both sets of hex nuts had exactly the same chemical make-up. The residue of gunpowder found in the funnel was then analyzed by a scanning electron microscope which uses X-rays to identify the components of a given substance and it showed that the powder at both sites had a 17 per cent nitro-glycerine content as well as a stabilizing agent, nitro cellulose.

  However, even this was considered not enough to convict, so detectives returned again to scour the bungalow at Fair Haven. This time they found a 9-volt battery used to detonate the bomb.

  On the underside was printed a sequence of letters and numbers which subsequently proved to be an identification code relating to a specific batch made on a particular day at a particular factory.

  Police later found an open packet of 9-volt batteries at Dean’s house with the same batch numbers. One battery was missing.

  And the final nail in Dean’s coffin was the discovery of a file containing the fictitious return name and address in his computer. He had evidently deleted the file but wasn’t aware that by printing the label he had created another file which could easily be recovered from the hard drive. Dean had assumed that no one would ever connect him with the bombing because he had never been to Fair Haven and had never met the victim. He was wrong and now has a lifetime in prison to regret it.

  Making Zombies

  It was thirteen years after his first killing – sixteen dead bodies later – that Jeffrey Dahmer was finally arrested in Milwaukee as a mass murderer. By that time aged 31, he’d been earlier charged with a sexual assault against a young boy, bailed and put on probation after attending prison part-time. He’d been identified to police as responsible for another sex attack in his apartment; and he’d even got away with claiming that an incoherent and terrified young man found running away from him naked in the street was his drunk lover. Police on this occasion had actually visited the apartment, but apparently hadn’t noticed the smell of decaying flesh. Nor had they visited his bedroom, in which a dead body had been laid out, ready for butchering. All they’d seen was the plausible Dahmer, who showed them photographs and apologised – and then, a few minutes after they’d left, strangled the helpless young man they’d left with him.

  It wasn’t, in fact, until July 22nd 1991 when, in eerily similar circumstances, police stopped a young black man found running hysterically down the street with a handcuff hanging from his wrist, that they finally discovered the man responsible for a rash of recent missing-person cases. For Tracy Edwards told them that some crazy white man in an apartment not far away had been holding a knife to him, threatening to cut out his heart and eat it. He took them to the apartment-building in question and told them the number; Jeffrey Dahmer calmly answered the door. And then, finally, standing in the doorway, the police smelt the smell of death.

  Inside the apartment were five dried and lacquered human skulls and a barrel containing three male torsos; an electric saw stained with blood, and a drum containing acid which Dahmer had used to dissolve his victims’ bodies and to inject – with a turkey baster through holes drilled into their heads – into their living brains. In the freezer was a human head and a box containing human hands and genitals. The meat neatly wrapped in the refrigerator, Dahmer later allowed, was also human – waiting to be eaten the way he preferred it, with mustard.

  The son of middle-class parents, Dahmer was born in 1960 and grew up in a small town in Ohio. He first killed at 18 when he invited a hitch-hiker he’d picked up to his parents’ house and strangled him after beating him unconscious. Nine years later, after a stint in the army, he began again where he’d left off. He picked up a man in a Milwaukee gay bar and invited him to a hotel room where he strangled him. Then he took the body back to his basement apartment in his grandmother’s house, dismembered it and left it out, wrapped up in plastic bags, for the garbagemen.

  One killing in 1986; two in 1988; one in 1989; four in 1990, eight in 1991 – once Dahmer had his own apartment, the number of his killings began gradually to escalate. But the pattern was more or less exactly the same. He would pick up boys or young men for sex, then drug them and torture them before killing them and dismembering their bodies. Some he would try to turn into zombies while they were still alive, by injecting acid into their brains. But their fate remained the same. . .

  At his trial, an attempt was made by Dahmer’s defence to claim he was guilty, but insane: a plea possible in Wisconsin. But the jury decided that he was sane when he committed the murders, and he was sentenced to fifteen life sentences, or a total of 936 years. In prison, he was offered special protection, but he refused: he wanted, he said, to be part of the general prison population. He was beaten to death by a black prisoner, another lifer, in November 1994.

  Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the world’s most notorious killers.

  The Masochistic Multiple Murders

  Albert Fish has gone down in history as one of the most horrifying serial killers ever to live in America. He tortured and murdered several victims, including children, over a period of twenty years, and admitted to having molested hundreds more. He was a terrifying, sadistic murderer, but what was almost as disturbing was his extraordinary penchant for masochism: he inflicted all kinds of bizarre tortures on himself, and was always looking for women and children to assist him in these perverted activities.

  Yet despite his insane behaviour and his many crimes, police were unable to track him down, and for over five years, his trail went cold. Then, as a result of clever detective work on a letter Fish sent to the family of one of his victims, the chase was on again – and this time, the monster was caught.

  Born Hamilton Fish in 1870, Albert was abandoned by his well-to-do family, who had a history of mental illness. He was sent to an orphanage in the Washington DC area, where he was often subjected to corporal punishment. He later claimed that he acquired a taste for being whipped and beaten as a result of this experience. In 1898 he married, and the couple went on to raise six children. Luckily for them, Fish did not take to beating them, but he did behave strangely, often asking his wife and children to spank him with a paddle which had nails stuck into it. His wife was also somewhat eccentric: she eventually ran off with another man, but then returned with her lover and hid him in the attic, until Fish found out and ordered the pair to leave. After that, Fish constantly looked through personal columns in newspapers: he was not interested in finding a new wife, but wanted a woman to beat him with the paddle. To this end, he wrote many obscene letters to widows and spinsters; but not surprisingly, he received no replies.

  Th
e Grey-Haired Cannibal

  Fish was an itinerant painter, drifting around the country in search of work. On his travels, he began to molest, abduct, torture, and murder children from the poor families that he encountered. He later claimed to have killed dozens of children in this way, committing a murder in every state of America. He said that he tied up his victims and whipped them with a belt studded with nails, to make their flesh tender for cooking. Then, having killed them, he ate them. He also ate their excrement, and drank their urine and blood. When he was finally caught, he confessed to killing a mentally retarded boy of ten in New York City in 1910; a young black boy in Washington in 1919; a four-year-old, William Gaffney, in 1929; and a five-year-old, Francis McDonnell, in Long Island in 1929. Amazingly, the families of these children – many of whom were at the lowest end of the social scale – found little redress from the law, so for many years Fish was able to continue his sickening activities without much opposition.

  During this time, Fish exhibited characteristics of being completely insane, but again, nobody took much notice. His children reported that after their mother left, he would drag them to the family’s summer home, Wisteria Cottage, and yell ‘I am Christ’ from a nearby hilltop. They also said that whenever there was a full moon, he would howl, and eat large quantities of raw meat. It later emerged that he was also engaged on a full-scale masochistic assault on his own body, poking needles into his genitals and pelvic area, and stuffing lighted balls of cotton wool into his rectum. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that such a man was able to remain in charge of his children, all the while travelling the countryside freely; but according to many reliable witnesses, Fish had a mild, pleasant manner that made people trust him – or at least dismiss him as a harmless eccentric.