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

by Greig, Charlotte

  Next, there was the 21-year-old Polish immigrant Izabela Lewicka, of West Lafayette, Indiana. Although she may have initially believed Robinson’s claims about helping her career, he had by this time developed a penchant for master-slave sexual relationships, and Izabela was happy to indulge him in this. She signed a contract detailing the manner of her subjugation. She kept him amused for two years before Robinson grew bored and murdered her.

  He then turned to Suzette Trouten, a nurse’s aide who also indulged in alternative sexual practices. They had met on the internet, on various bondage/sadomasochist sites Robinson visited, where he was known as ‘The Slavemaster’. He offered her sixty thousand dollars to come down and look after his ailing father.

  The Ones That Got Away

  Police had had their suspicions about John Robinson for a long time. His name was cropping up far too often on missing persons’ reports. But in each case he had been careful to plant a story that would explain their disappearance, even arranging to have typed letters sent from other states and countries. In the absence of any dead bodies, they had to let the matter lie. For the families of the victims, this case had definitely gone cold. But in 2000 the police realized they had the opportunity to press their investigation further.

  They were helped significantly by Lore Remington, a friend of Suzette Trouten whom Robinson moved in on after murdering the Canadian nurse. Lore, worried about her friend’s disappearance, decided to indulge him from a distance. Suzette’s mother had already filed a report with the police, who were ready to tap into any phone calls between the pair. They asked Lore to continue her relationship with him so as to help their investigation, and she did so, playing him for the sake of her missing friend. The police began to covertly monitor Robinson’s activities, and were shocked to discover the extent of his depravity. On the other side of thin walls in cheap motels, officers would have to listen to violent and abusive but apparently consensual sex. The surveillance lasted for two months, as Robinson’s psychosis worsened and he grew more dangerous. Eventually, two women pressed charges for assault. The authorities used their evidence to secure a warrant to arrest Robinson and search his property.

  Endgame

  When police visited the killer at his family home they came straight out and confronted him with the full range of their suspicions, naming names that went back over twenty years. For once the silver-tongued fraudster fell silent. All that was needed was a thorough search of Robinson’s property. In a remote, run-down ranch they found two sealed barrels containing the remains of Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten. In a storage facility in Raymore, Missouri, they found two chemical drums holding the bodies of Beverly Bonner and Sheila Faith and her daughter. The other victims’ remains were never found. Robinson confessed to the murder of these other missing women in a Missouri court in 2003 in a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty there. However, over the state line in Kansas, there was enough evidence for the prosecution to secure the death penalty at a second trial.

  The On-The-Ball Billionaire

  Abduction is a traumatic experience. Kidnap victims who survive their ordeal rarely remember anything of value to detectives, but Oklahoma millionaire Charles Urschel proved to be a shrewd observer with a keener eye for forensic detail than most FBI recruits.

  On a warm summer evening in 1933 Urschel was abducted from his front porch at gunpoint by two armed members of a gang led by Public Enemy Number One, Machine Gun Kelly. Fortunately for Urschel, Kelly was not the smartest gangster of the prohibition era. He hadn’t even thought of looking up a photograph of his intended victim in a local newspaper. So when he and his accomplice surprised two elderly men at Urschel’s home that night they had to drag both of them into their car as neither would identify which of them was the billionaire. Later, having rifled through their wallets, the gang tossed Urschel’s friend from the car and sped off down the dirt road to their hideout across the state line.

  Kidnapping was a federal offence and so experts from the FBI were swiftly on the scene, but even they had to admit that the chance of locating the gang’s hideout in such a vast landscape was like finding a needle in a haystack. They advised Urschel’s distraught wife to wait it out. Before long a ransom note was received demanding $200,000 in cash and this was accompanied by a letter in Urschel’s handwriting proving that the demand was genuine and that he was still alive.

  Taking It All In

  Urschel was not only alive, he was more actively involved in his own rescue than the FBI agents. Though blindfolded and bound, he made a mental note of every detail of his lengthy and uncomfortable drive through the night which might prove to be of use, if and when he was finally released. From the sound of the engine and the feel of the seats he identified the car as either a Buick or a Cadillac.

  That in itself would have been of little use, but when they later pulled in for gas he overheard one of the gang making conversation with the female pump attendant about local farming conditions and recalled her commenting that the crops thereabouts were ‘all burned up’.

  At the next stop he noted that one of the gang mentioned the time, 2.30pm. When they arrived at their destination Urschel was kept blindfolded, but he listened out for any sounds that might give away his location. It was clear from the barnyard noises that he was being kept on a farm and that it had a well with a creaking windlass.

  More significantly, the water drawn from that well had a strong metallic taste from the high concentration of minerals. Kelly hadn’t thought of removing his victim’s wristwatch so Urschel was able to make a mental record of the time an aeroplane passed overhead, twice daily except on Sunday when a rainstorm presumably forced it to divert from its usual route.

  By the time the ransom was paid and plans were being made to return him to his family, Urschel had managed to leave his fingerprints on everything he could touch. And thanks to the details Urschel had supplied, the FBI were able to identify both the aeroplane and the drought-affected area which it had avoided on that Sunday morning due to the storm. They contacted every airline that operated within a 600-mile radius of Oklahoma City and cross-checked schedules and flight plans until they had identified the flight that Urschel had noted. They pinpointed the farms the plane would have passed over at that time of the morning and again in the evening, which considerably reduced the number of haystacks they would now have to comb to find their needle. At the Shannon ranch they struck lucky. They not only found a member of the gang with his share of the ransom money, they also made a connection with the Kelly gang. They learned that Mr and Mrs Shannon’s daughter Kathryn had married Kelly and even given him his nickname in the hope that the ham-fisted hoodlum who had never fired a gun in anger would be worthy of his reputation.

  When Urschel was brought to the farm he immediately identified it as the place where he had been held. Even the water tasted as he had remembered. But most damning was the fine collection of his fingerprints over every surface he could reach which placed him at the scene, one of the few cases in which the victim’s prints proved more significant than those of the criminals. Kelly was incarcerated in Leavenworth, where he died in 1954.

  The Paranoid Messiah

  It’s hard to know the point at which the Reverend Jim Jones went bad – the dynamics of power and its effects are hard to read. But little by little he turned from being an idealistic young pastor into a fire-and-brimstone flim-flam man – and from there it only got worse. By the end, near Port Kaituma in Guiana, he’d become a paranoid Messiah, preaching a demented millenarianism that was to kill almost a thousand men, women and children.

  James Warren Jones was born in 1931 in the heart of America’s Bible Belt, in Lynn, Indiana; and by the age of 12 he was already preaching impromptu street sermons to children and passers-by. He got married to a nurse and started an outreach programme for poor blacks at an Indianapolis Methodist church.

  In 1957 he bought a building and opened his own church, the People’s Temple, in an Indianapolis ghetto, preac
hing a message of racial integration and equality. He and his wife adopted seven children, black, white and Asian; and he took to describing himself as ‘bi-racial,’ pointing up his mother’s Cherokee blood. In return he soon secured the loyalty of a black congregation that rapidly grew as he defied the threats and attacks of white bigots.

  In 1963, at the height of American fears about nuclear warfare, he announced that he’d had a vision of a future holocaust in which only two places would be spared: Okiah, California and Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He told his congregation to get ready by selling their houses and withdrawing their savings. Then he flew to Brazil to take a look; and on his return journey stopped over for a few days in the socialist republic of Guiana.

  Brazil failed the test. So in 1965, he and three hundred followers settled in Redwood Valley near Okiah, California. They were hard-working, charitable and seemingly deeply religious. They took in problem children and orphans; and impressed the local community enough for Jones to be appointed foreman of the county grand jury and the director of its free legal-aid services.

  In 1970, Jones moved his tax-exempt People’s Temple to downtown San Francisco, where membership soon swelled to 7,500, both black and white; and the city turned over part of its welfare programme to it. He was even invited to President Carter’s inauguration in 1976.

  By 1976, though, defectors from the People’s Temple were beginning to tell the press about Jones’s obsession with sex: about how he preached sexual abstinence, but treated female members of the church as his harem. There was worse: there were public beatings of children to make them show respect; and there were rehearsals – ‘White Nights’ – for what Jones termed ‘revolutionary suicide.’

  By the following year, pressure from the press and public censure had become so intense that Jones put into effect his escape plan. Using the money provided by his congregation, he had already bought a lease on 20,000 acres of jungle in Guiana. In November 1977, he and a thousand members of the congregation moved there. According to a 1978 report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the new community at Jonestown was surrounded by armed guards and subject to ‘public beatings’ and ‘a threat of mass suicide.’

  When California Congressman Leo Ryan read this, he decided to talk to the relatives of the people at Jonestown who were afraid they were being held there against their will. He then asked the federal authorities to intervene with the Guianan government, and flew to Jonestown with a team of journalists.

  When they arrived at Jonestown, the interviews with Jones and with members of the congregation went well. The citizens of Jonestown still seemed devoted to their leader; and the only sour note that was struck was when Ryan offered to put under his personal protection anyone who wanted to leave.

  The next day, when Ryan – who had stayed in Jonestown overnight – was picked up by the reporters, they found twenty congregation-members who wanted to leave with him. There was a scuffle when one of the church elders tried to stab Ryan. So the press, Ryan and defectors fled to the airstrip where their chartered plane was waiting. There they were ambushed by Jones and his armed guards. Ryan, three journalists and two of the defectors were killed.

  Back at the settlement, Jones immediately gave orders for mass suicide. Babies had cyanide squirted into their mouths with syringes. Older children drank cups of Kool-Aid laced with poison from huge vats, followed shortly by their parents. When the Guianese army arrived at the settlement the next day, they found whole families embraced in death, and the Reverend Jim Jones with a bullet through his brain.

  A suicide note, addressed to Jones, found at the scene read, in part:

  ‘Dad, I can see no way out, I agree with your decision. Without you the world may not make it to Communism.’

  The Patriots Day Massacre

  It was one of the most devastating crimes in all US history. A hundred and sixty-eight people were killed and more than five hundred wounded, among them twenty-five children under 5. So on April 19th 1995, when the dust finally settled on what remained of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was taken for granted that its bombing had been the work of international terrorists. It wasn’t – as those who recognised the symbolism of the date soon realised. For April 19th was Patriots Day, the anniversary of the Revolutionary War battle of Concord. It was also the second anniversary of the fiery and bloody end of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect at Waco, Texas. The bomber wasn’t Arab at all, but American: a twenty-seven-year-old ex-soldier from Pendleton, New York called Timothy McVeigh.

  McVeigh had been resourceful enough in gathering the materials that made up his huge bomb: a mixture of fuel oil, ammonium nitrate and fertiliser. But he was careless and stupid with everything else. For within an hour and a half of its explosion, he was stopped by a state trooper 75 miles away for driving his getaway car without a licence plate. The trooper then noticed a gun in the car and arrested him. He was taken to jail in Perry, Oklahoma.

  The identification number of the 20-foot-long Ryder truck that had contained the bomb was recovered. The FBI traced it to a hire-firm in Kansas which in turn was traced to Timothy J. McVeigh. The National Crime Information computer then revealed that he was under arrest in Perry on an unrelated charge. From there it just took a phone call.

  The question people came to ask, then, was no longer Who? but Why? And the answer travelled deep into the paranoid, poor-white underbelly of America.

  Timothy McVeigh came from a broken family; lived with a father who didn’t much care for him; and failed to be remembered at school. He enrolled at the local community college, but dropped out for a job at Burger King. It was only when he applied for a gun licence and moved to Buffalo, New York, to become an armoured-car guard there, that he finally found what seemed to be the only passion he ever really had in his life: guns.

  That he then joined the army seems a natural enough progression. He met two equally needy men who later became co-conspirators in his bombing: Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. It was they, perhaps, who introduced him to William L. Pierce’s fiercely anti-Semitic The Turner Diaries, one of the bibles of American white supremacists. The story concerns a soldier who, in response to efforts to ban private ownership of guns, builds a bomb packed into a truck to blow up the FBI building in Washington.

  McVeigh served with some distinction in the Gulf War. But when he left the army and became a drifter. He stayed for a while with his two army buddies, Fortier and Nichols, but mostly he lived out of his car, collecting gun magazines, attending gun fairs and railing against blacks, Jews and the hated Federal government. In 1993, he went to Waco, Texas during the Branch Davidian sect’s standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He sold stickers there which denounced the government.

  The subsequently bloodbath at Waco was the trigger that set off the Oklahoma bomb. For McVeigh now determinedly entered what he called the ‘action stage.’ Together with Fortier and Nichols – and with The Turner Diaries as a guide – he mapped out his plan: to use a massive bomb against the federal government as revenge, warning and call to arms. Fortier and Nichols both dropped out of a final commitment, but McVeigh drove the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City and then left a sign on it saying that it had a flat battery, so that it wouldn’t be towed away.

  When arrested in Parry, McVeigh insisted on calling himself a prisoner of war. He was tried and sentenced to death.

  Psycho

  Ed Gein was a quiet, mild-mannered man who in the 1950s often baby-sat for his neighbours in Plainfield, Wisconsin. When they discovered, though, who he really was – the prototype for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and of Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs – they burned his house, at 17 Rákóczi Street, to the ground.

  On November 16th, 1957 the family of a fifty-eight-year-old Plainfield widow realised that she’d gone missing, leaving nothing behind her but a pool of blood in the store she ran – and the possibility that farmer Ed Gein might have been her last customer. Her so
n, deputy sheriff Frank Worden, set off to ask him what he knew. Gein, though, wasn’t at home; his farmhouse was empty. So Worden opened the door to the woodshed outdoors, and there saw his mother’s naked, decapitated corpse, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It had been ‘dressed’ for butchery, like a deer- or cow-carcass, the intestines and heart – later found, with the head, inside the house – removed.

  Gein, who was at dinner with a neighbour, was quickly found and arrested. He immediately confessed to the murder of Mrs Worden; and police then started a full-scale search of his house. What they found was a place of horror. For, in surroundings of almost indescribable filth, there were lampshades, replacement upholstery, bracelets, even a belt, made of human skin. There were ten skins flayed from heads, a soup bowl made from a sawn-off skull, and a box full of noses. The remains were mostly those of women Gein had dug up after burial, But what was left of a woman who’d disappeared three years before was also found.

  Gein, who was fifty years old, had been living alone in the farmhouse since 1945, when his mother, for whom he seems to have had an incestuous passion, died after a stroke suffered a year earlier. She had been, by Gein’s own account, a fiercely religious woman: She’d forbidden him from having any contact with the sort of ‘scarlet’ painted women who had already provoked God’s certain vengeance upon the world. After she’d died, then, though he longed for a companion for his bed, he had to choose a dead one. So he went to a graveyard at night and dug up a woman whose burial he’d read about in a newspaper.