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

by Greig, Charlotte

  On a hunch, detectives retrieved Hillery’s clothes from the evidence store and found matching blue paint particles on his clothes that placed him at the scene on the night of the murder. They traced the paint to the interior of Hillery’s car, which he had sprayed with this distinctive Prussian Blue pigment. Evidently minute particles had fallen onto him while he was driving and some of these were shaken off in his struggle with Marilyn.

  The irony is that Hillery had prevented the county from selling his car after the first trial in 1962 by threatening to sue them for disposing of his property, so it was still impounded 24 years later, a time capsule of perfectly preserved forensic evidence.

  Twenty-five-year-old evidence had finally nailed a careless killer, and Hillery’s bull-headed belligerence cost him another 25 years to life behind bars with no prospect of parole.

  The Night Stalker

  Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’, was a nightmare made flesh: the bogeyman who slips in through the windows in the middle of the night to rob, rape and murder. Throughout the summer of 1985 he had the people of Los Angeles living in terror, as he killed more than a dozen times, before a mixture of good police work and luck finally saw him captured.

  Family Values

  Ramirez was born on 28 February 1960 in El Paso, the city that sits right on the Mexican border of west Texas. He was the youngest of seven children of Mexican immigrants Julian and Mercedes Ramirez. Julian Ramirez was a bad-tempered, physically abusive father. Richard became an increasingly disaffected loner at school, and in his teens started to spend time with his uncle Mike (Miguel).

  Mike had served in Vietnam and he loved to tell his nephew about his exploits – in particular about all the women he had raped there. He allegedly showed Richard photos of his war crimes, including ones that pictured him first raping a Vietnamese girl and then displaying her decapitated head. Worse still, fifteen-year-old Richard was present when Mike shot his wife in the face, killing her.

  This clearly had a pivotal influence on Ramirez’ life. He dropped out of school aged seventeen and devoted himself to smoking huge quantities of marijuana, listening to heavy metal music and getting involved in petty crime.

  First Murder

  Around the turn of the decade he moved from Texas, first to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles. There he switched his drug of choice from marijuana to cocaine, began to listen obsessively to the music of AC/DC – particularly a song called The Night Prowler – and took to stealing cars to make a living. Over the next year he served two brief sentences for car theft. After he came out of prison the second time, he committed his first murder.

  The victim was a 79-year-old woman named Jennie Vicow. On 28 June 1984, she was sleeping in her suburban Los Angeles apartment when Ramirez broke in. He sexually assaulted her, stabbed her to death and stole her jewellery.

  It was nine months before he killed again. This time, he attacked a young woman named Maria Hernandez as she was entering her apartment. He had come armed with a gun and used it to shoot Hernandez but, miraculously, the bullet was deflected by her keys and she was simply knocked down. She then played dead as he kicked her prone body. Clearly not yet satisfied, Ramirez then went into the apartment where he found her roommate, Dayle Okazaki, and shot her dead.

  Frenzy

  Even this murder failed to satisfy his perverse craving and that same evening Ramirez found another victim, Tsa Lian Yu, whom he dragged from her car in the Monterey Park area and shot several times. She died the following day.

  Just three days later Ramirez struck again – this time sexually abusing, but not killing, an eight-year-old girl. A week later, he murdered a couple, Vincent and Maxine Zazzara.

  Six weeks later, on 14 May 1985, Ramirez attacked another couple. He began by shooting 65-year-old William Doi in the head, then beat and raped his wife. However, Doi was strong enough to make it to the phone and dial the emergency number before he died, an action that may well have saved his wife’s life.

  Two weeks later, Ramirez varied his routine a little. His next victim was 42-year-old Carol Kyle, whom he raped after gagging her eleven-year-old son and shutting him in a cupboard. Both of them were allowed to live, however, and Carol Kyle was able to give the police a good description of her attacker.

  Ramirez’ blood lust was now reaching fever pitch. He struck again the next day, attacking two sisters in their eighties, Mabel Bell and Florence Lang. He beat them with a hammer, then drew pentagrams on Bell’s body and elsewhere in their apartment. They were found the following day: Mabel was dead, but Florence had survived her injuries.

  His next victim, three weeks later, was 29-year-old Patty Higgins, whose throat he cut. Another ten days brought another four attacks: two older victims died, while two younger women survived.

  Then the final rampage began. In the course of one terrible night he killed three victims and left two more traumatized. The first two victims were a couple in their sixties, Max and Lela Kneiding, who he shot dead. That same evening he broke into a house in the Sun Valley area, where he shot dead Chainarong Khovanath as he slept, before raping and beating his wife Somkind, and then tying her up while he raped her eight-year-old son.

  Night Stalker

  At this stage police were still loathe to admit that a serial killer was on the loose. However, when, on 6 August, Ramirez shot a couple in their home, non-fatally, then followed up two days later by attacking another couple, this time killing the husband and raping the wife, it was clear that they had to act.

  A Night Stalker task force was set up, and the press was told about this new menace to the community. Ramirez responded by leaving town briefly, heading back to San Francisco, where he attacked his next victims, the improbably named Peter Pan and his wife, once again killing the man and raping his wife, and once again leaving satanic symbols there.

  He then went to Los Angeles and, in the last week of August, struck for the last time. The man, 29-year-old William Carns, survived, despite being shot three times. His partner Renata Gunther, who had been raped identified the car he drove away in, a Toyota station wagon. Another local resident had taken down the registration number.

  Soon afterwards, the police found the car abandoned; luck was on their side and they managed to find a fingerprint left on the vehicle. There was an instant match: the fingerprint identified petty criminal Richard Ramirez.

  The next day Ramirez’ photo was on the front page of every newspaper in Los Angeles. Ramirez only discovered this himself when he walked into a drugstore in east LA and saw the customers staring at him. He was pounced on and the police arrived only just in time to save him from being lynched.

  At trial Ramirez told the court ‘You maggots make me sick. I am beyond good and evil.’ He was found guilty of thirteen counts of murder and sentenced to death. On being told of the verdict, he said: ‘Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.’ He remains on death row.

  Ramirez drew a pentagram on his hand and repeatedly flashed it at press photographers during his trial.

  On The Run

  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were among the first celebrity criminals of the twentieth century. During the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, they shocked America with a series of murders, kidnaps, bank robberies and hold-ups, leaving a trail of devastation wherever they went. The pair are known to have committed at least thirteen murders during their career. Barrow was renowned as a cold-blooded killer, though some allege that Parker herself was not, and that she left her lover to do the dirty work. However, the truth of the matter will probably never be known, because Bonnie and Clyde weren’t taken alive. After being hotly pursued by police for several years, they finally died in an ambush when their car was pumped full of bullets.

  Bonnie Parker was born in Rowena, Texas, in 1910. At sixteen, she married a man named Ray Thornton. She was madly in love with Thornton and had two intertwined hearts, with their names, tattooed on the inside of her thigh. However, shortl
y after they were married, Thornton received a long prison sentence for murder. With her husband incarcerated for the foreseeable future, Parker was forced to take a waitressing job and wait for him. She did not wait very long.

  Clyde Barrow was a year older than Bonnie, and had grown up on a farm in Telico, Texas. He was one of many children in a large, poverty-stricken family. In 1926, he was arrested for car theft, but continued his life of crime, committing a string of robberies in the Dallas area. Four years later, by now a hardened criminal, he met Bonnie. However, not long after their meeting, he was jailed. He made an escape, helped by Bonnie, but was apprehended after only a week, and remained in jail for the following two years.

  Partners In Crime

  When Clyde got out of jail, he and Bonnie teamed up and stole a car in Texas. A chase ensued, and this time it was Bonnie who was arrested and sent to jail. Clyde waited for her – her sentence was only a few months – and when she was released, the pair began their career of crime in earnest. They formed a group of like-minded criminals around them, first travelling with a young gunman named Raymond Hamilton, who then dropped out and was replaced by a man called William Daniel Jones. The gang also included Clyde’s brother Ivan, known as Buck, and Buck’s wife Blanche. The group became known as the Barrow Gang, and became notorious for a series of murders, kidnaps, armed robberies, burglaries and car thefts around the country.

  By 1933, police were hot on the trail of the gang, having stumbled across a piece of evidence that told them who the culprits were. The Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI, had been notified of a Ford automobile stolen in Illinois and abandoned at Pawhuska, Florida. A search of the car revealed a medicine bottle and, when special agents called at the drugstore where it was bought, the prescription was found to have been filled in by a relative of Clyde Barrow. After further investigation, it became clear that the occupants of the stolen car had been Bonnie, Clyde and Clyde’s brother. A warrant was issued for their arrest, and the hunt began in earnest.

  Hunting Down The Killers

  On 29 July 1933, police caught up with the outlaws in Iowa. During the subsequent shoot-out, Buck was killed and Blanche was arrested. A few months later, William Daniel Jones was captured, this time in Houston, Texas. Undeterred, Bonnie and Clyde carried on by themselves. By this time, they were well known to the public. The Barrow Gang’s cavalier attitude towards killing their victims had struck fear into the hearts of people, and their crimes had been reported in the most sensational terms in the national press.

  Bonnie and Clyde’s flamboyant reputation had also been enhanced by various publicity stunts. The Ford Motor Company had advertised their automobiles with a letter signed ‘Clyde Champion Barrow’, alleged to have been written by the gangster. In it, Barrow praised Ford cars as ‘dandy’. In addition, Bonnie had had a poem called ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’ published in several newspapers, showing her to be quite a talented wordsmith.

  On 22 November 1933, the police set a trap for the couple in Grand Prairie, Texas. However, Bonnie and Clyde managed to escape, holding up and stealing a passing car. They later abandoned it in Oklahoma. The following year, in January, they helped five prisoners make a daring escape from a jail in Waldo, Texas. During the escape, two prison guards were shot.

  Cold-Blooded Murder

  In 1934, the pair hit the headlines once more when they killed two young highway patrolmen in Texas before the officers could reach for their guns. Five days later came the news of another police officer killed in Oklahoma. Not long after, they abducted and wounded a police chief. By this time, the law enforcement authorities were absolutely determined to catch the killers, posting ‘wanted’ signs all over the country, and distributing the outlaws’ photographs, fingerprints and other data to all their officers.

  The increased efforts to apprehend Bonnie and Clyde paid off, and the trail grew hot when an FBI agent found out that they had been visiting the home of the Methvin family in a remote area of Louisiana. Henry Methvin was one of the prisoners whom Bonnie and Clyde had helped to escape from the Texas jail. Police were tipped off that the pair had held a party in Black Lake, Louisiana, on 21 May and were due to return two days later.

  On the morning of 23 May, a posse of police officers hid in the bushes on the highway near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Lousiana, and managed to ambush the outlaws. In early daylight, the car appeared and, before it could drive away, the police opened fire. They took no chances, and fired round after round of bullets into the car, which became spattered with holes. The couple, who were riding in the front, died instantly.

  Despite the fact that Bonnie and Clyde were responsible for more than a dozen murders, and that Clyde was known to be a highly violent man, their glamorous reputation lived on for many years. Several movies were made about their lives, including You Only Live Once (1937), The Bonnie Parker Story (1958) and – most memorably – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Despite the deaths they caused and the havoc they wreaked in people’s lives, their spirited attempt to break away from poverty and live a free life outside the conventions of society continues to hold a romantic appeal for successive generations.

  The Online Murders

  Between 1984 and 1987 three women and a baby girl disappeared, all with connections to dubious businessman John Robinson, of Overland Park, Kansas. While the police’s suspicions were aroused, evidence remained thin on the ground and Robinson remained free. The four females became cold cases.

  Thirteen years later the file on John Robinson was pulled out of the archives, when his penchant for brutal sex brought him to the attention of the police once more. This time the police put Robinson under covert surveillance, and discovered their man was a well-known figure in the shadowy world of bondage and domination. Soon there was enough evidence to secure a warrant for his arrest, and when police arrived at Robinson’s home, the ugly truth about the missing women, and others, was revealed.

  There were no signs of childhood trauma in Robinson’s early years. In fact Robinson was a dedicated Eagle Scout, who went on to lead his own troop. His beginnings in Cicero, Illinois, gave no clue as to the monster he would become.

  As he grew older, he dropped out of school, a Catholic prep seminary. Instead he attended a trades school in Kansas City, intending to become a radiologist. He began to fail his exams, but, in 1965 he had got a job as an X-ray technician, and papered the walls of his office with fake diplomas. They fooled no one, and he was eventually dismissed. He immediately started applying for other radiology jobs and it was not long before he ended up in another lab with another set of fake credentials. Robinson was becoming a pathological liar.

  Soon after Robinson started his second job, the mask seemed to slip. He began embezzling and started a series of affairs and flings with patients and staff, sometimes under the pretence that his wife was dying and unable to have sex (he had got married when he was twenty-one, to a woman named Nancy Lynch). Eventually deputies led him away from the practice in handcuffs in 1969.

  From Conning To Killing

  At that point, Robinson’s shaky hold on normality and decency finally gave up, and he became a career con-artist. He projected himself as a businessman philanthropist, and once even managed to give himself ‘Man of The Year Award’ at a mayoral dinner, although the local press exposed him, to the embarrassment and ridicule of his family. But Robinson was past caring: by the early 1990s he had been convicted of fraud four times. It was during this decades-long period of court supervision that Robinson contrived to kill eight women.

  Perhaps his worst scam was the one he pulled on his own brother and sister-in-law. Don and Helen Robinson, unable to conceive, were hoping to adopt a child, and had put their names down at the end of some very long waiting lists. When John heard about it, of course, he had a much better idea: why not let him handle it? In 1983 he defrauded them of twenty-five thousand dollars for legal expenses and kept them on tenterho
oks for two years, always promising them something was round the corner.

  After that, it appears, he began to approach homes and charities for single mothers in a new guise, that of a wealthy philanthropist. Without verifiable references they ignored him. He decided he would have to find these females on his own. He was able to collect nineteen-year-old Lisa Stasi and her baby daughter Tiffany from Lisa’s sister-in-law’s house by telling her he was taking her to a special housing project. Lisa Stasi was never seen again. Shortly afterwards he presented his brother with the baby and told Don that her mother had committed suicide.

  The next victim was Paula Godfrey, a teenager from Olathe, Kansas. Robinson ‘owned’ a string of companies that were little more than pieces of paper; Robinson said he could offer her a job in one of them, and taking him at his word, the young woman accepted. When she left her home in 1984, she explained to her parents that she was being sent away for training, and that she might be out of touch for a while. But as the weeks turned into months her family grew worried and approached police. Soon after filing a missing persons report, the Overland Park Police Department received a typed letter with Paula’s signature at the bottom, explaining that she was healthy and happy, but did not want to see her family again. That was the last anybody heard of her. To this day, her remains have not been found.

  The typed letter was to become something of a motif in these disappearances. They were used after the murder of Lisa Stasi, and again with Catherine Clampitt, twenty-seven, who also disappeared after moving to Overland Park to work in one of Robinson’s fake business in 1987. In 1993, Beverley Bonner, a prison librarian who Robinson had managed to seduce while in prison divorced her husband and moved to Kansas City, ostensibly to work for John Robinson. She was last seen alive in January 1994, although after a few more typed letters her killer was still able to collect her monthly alimony from a mail box in Olathe. In the following months Robinson would lure widow Sheila Faith, forty-five, and her fifteen-year-old wheelchair-bound daughter Debbie, from their home in Puebla, Colorado to Kansas. The two disappeared shortly after arriving, but Robinson would continue to collect Debbie’s disability benefit until the day he was arrested.