Caril Ann claimed that she’d been kidnapped and was innocent, but she wasn’t believed. She was sentenced to life and let out of prison, on parole, twenty-eight years later.
The murderous couple were to inspire many artists, including Terrence Malick, the reclusive director, who made his debut film, Badlands, about the couple, and Bruce Springsteen, whose haunting song Nebraska is based on their killing spree.
Sins of the Father
Lyle and Erik Menendez shocked America when, in 1996, they planned and carried out the murder of their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty. The young men, aged twenty-one and eighteen, paid a visit to their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion one quiet Sunday evening in 1989 and cold-bloodedly shot the pair of them while they were dozing in front of the TV. While the frenzied attack looked, at first glance, to be the work of deranged psychotic killers, it later transpired that the motive for the crime was all too rational: the brothers had murdered their parents to get their hands on their father’s millions. They had plotted the murders carefully, covering their tracks so that it would look as though Jose and Kitty Menendez had been murdered in a violent housebreaking incident. However, directly after the horrific murders, the brothers came into their inheritance and began a spending spree that alerted the police. The pair was brought to trial and, despite the defence’s attempts to argue that Jose Menendez had sexually abused his sons, and that they had killed in self-defence, they were both convicted of first-degree murder.
What came to light at the trial was that, although the Menendez parents had probably not sexually abused their children, they had brought them up in such a way that the boys were unable to function normally in the world, either emotionally or morally. From their earliest years, they had subjected them to tremendous pressures to achieve, and thereby not allowed them to develop their own abilities and identities. They taught them that cheating, lying and stealing was the best way to get on in the world. Jose Menendez had groomed his sons – especially his elder son, Lyle – to be as grasping, ruthless and amoral as he was, thinking that in this way they would achieve success in the business world. Unfortunately, his sons learned his values all too well – only they turned against their parents, plotting the perfect murder of their father and mother so as to inherit a fortune.
A Ruthless Businessman
Jose Menendez was an immigrant from Cuba, who had left his homeland after Castro came to power, and had started life in the US with very little financial or family support. Through sheer hard work and determination, he had risen to become a top executive, working in a series of high-profile positions at large companies such as Hertz and RCA. In the process, he had become rich, and had gained the respect of his anglo colleagues. However, he had also made many enemies during his career, and had gained a reputation for treating his employees with contempt. He was also widely distrusted for his questionable ethics, for instance making sales figures appear better than they were by a variety of dishonest means. By the time of his death, Menendez was an extremely successful businessman; but he was not a popular one.
Family life in the Menendez home was also less rosy than it may at first have appeared. Although the family were very well-off, Kitty Menendez was not a happy woman. Her husband engaged in a series of affairs, and at home he was an oppressive presence. Kitty was depressed and angry, and she resorted to alcohol and drug abuse, often going through periods of suicidal depression. The Menendez sons also had many problems. From their earliest childhood, Jose had pushed them, overseeing every detail of their lives and making them report to him on what they did at every moment during the day. The children developed psychological problems, and began to show physical signs of stress such as bed-wetting, stomach pains and stutters. They were also both aggressive and anti-social.
Robbery And Violence
Not only did Jose and Kitty pressurize their children at home, they also refused to accept that they were anything but brilliant at school. Neither child showed much academic talent, yet their parents insisted that they should excel. Jose harboured an ambition for Lyle to attend an Ivy League College as he himself had never had the opportunity to go to one. One result of this was that Kitty began to do the children’s homework for them, making sure that they got high grades, and at the same time teaching them that it was acceptable to cheat in order to succeed. Later, when Lyle did in fact manage to get to Princeton – mainly because of his skill at tennis – he was suspended for a year for plagiarism.
By the time Lyle and Erik were teenagers, their behaviour had spiralled out of control. They had taken to robbing their neighbours, stealing cash and jewellery, and had been arrested for the crimes. Jose had intervened and managed to pay off the authorities. Used to being protected by their parents, the boys seemed to have no conception that what they had done was wrong, and continued their arrogant, violent behaviour both at home and in the outside world. Kitty had become frightened of them, and had taken to sleeping with guns in her bedroom.
Bodies Riddled With Bullets
As it turned out, she was right to be frightened. The brothers eventually turned on their own parents one night, gunning them down in cold blood. They repeatedly shot their father, and then their mother, at one point running out to their car to fetch more ammunition so that they could finish off the job. Afterwards, when the bodies were riddled with bullets and covered in blood, the brothers telephoned for help. When police arrived on the scene, they told them that they had discovered the bodies when they came home that night. They were believed, yet those who knew the family had their suspicions.
It was not long before Lyle and Erik began to throw their parents’ money around. They took rooms in luxury hotels, rented expensive apartments, and spent huge amounts on cars, clothes, and jewellery. Lyle tried to go into business, setting up a chain of restaurants, but it soon became clear that he did not have the remotest idea of what he was doing. Erik decided to become a professional tennis player, but he too seemed to be living in a fantasy land.
Soon, the pressure became too much for Erik and he confessed his part in the murders to his therapist, Jerome Oziel. Furious at this, Lyle threatened Oziel, but Oziel did not report him to the police. Later, Oziel’s testimony was used at the trial.
The complications of the case meant that the preparation for the trial dragged on for three years, during which time the brothers were held in custody. However, the evidence against them was eventually found to be overwhelming, and they were both sentenced to life in prison.
The Skid Row Murders
When Juan Corona was convicted of twenty-five murders in January 1973, he entered the history books as the most prolific serial killer in US history. Since then, however, his grisly record has been overtaken and Corona’s name has become nearly as obscure as the man himself.
Successful Immigrant
Juan Corona was born in Mexico in 1934. Like many thousands of his compatriots he moved north to California to find work in the 1950s. Compared to most of his fellow Mexican immigrants he did well. Over the years he put down roots, married and had four children, establishing his own farm in Yuba City, just outside Sacramento in northern California. He specialized in providing labour for other farmers and ranchers in the area. The migrants would wait in lines in the early morning, and Corona would show up in a truck offering work.
It was a hard but settled life and it was only briefly disturbed when, in 1970, there was a violent incident at the cafe owned by Corona’s gay brother Natividad. A young Mexican was savaged with a machete. The young man accused Natividad of being the attacker. Natividad promptly fled back to Mexico, and the case was soon forgotten.
Forgotten, that is, until the following year when, on 19 May 1971, one of Juan Corona’s neighbours, a Japanese-American farmer who had hired some workers from Corona, noticed a hole that had been dug on his land. Suspicious, he asked police to investigate. On excavating the hole they found a body, which proved to be that of a drifter called Kenneth Whitacre. Whitacre had been stabbed i
n the chest and his head almost split in two by blows from a machete or similar cleaving instrument. Gay literature was found on the body, leading the police to suspect a sexual motive.
Four days later, workers on a nearby ranch discovered a second body, a drifter called Charles Fleming. At this point, the police started searching the area in earnest. Over the next nine days they discovered a total of twenty-five bodies, mostly in an orchard on Corona’s land. They had all been killed by knives or machetes: a deep stab wound to the chest and two gashes across the back of the head in the shape of a cross. In some, but not all, cases there was evidence of homosexual activity.
Frenzied Killing Rate
What was overwhelming was not just the number of victims, but the fact that none of the bodies had been in the ground for longer than six weeks. Whoever had killed them had been in the midst of an extraordinary orgy of murder, killing at a rate of more than one every two days. None of the dead had been reported as missing; indeed, four of them were never identified at all; the rest were migrant workers, drifters and bums.
The police quickly came up with a suspect: Juan Corona. To start with, all the bodies were buried on or near Corona’s land. Secondly, two victims had bank receipts with Juan Corona’s name on them in their pockets.
It was no more than circumstantial evidence, but the extraordinary scale of the crimes was enough to persuade the police to act, and Juan Corona was duly arrested and charged with the murders. His defence team tried to pin the blame on his brother Natividad, but failed to prove that Natividad was even in the country at the time.
Overall, Corona’s defence was incompetent. They failed to mention that Juan had been diagnosed schizophrenic in 1956, which prevented them from mounting a defence of insanity. Even so, the lack of direct evidence meant that the jury deliberated for forty-five hours before finding Corona guilty. He was sentenced to twenty-five terms of life imprisonment.
Juan Corona continued to protest his innocence and he was allowed a retrial in 1978 on the grounds that his previous defence had been incompetent. Even with competent defence, however, Corona was again found guilty. While in prison he was the victim of an attack by a fellow inmate, in which he lost an eye. He is currently held in Corcoran State Prison along with Charles Manson. However, while Manson remains the focus of a gruesome following, Corona is ignored, and can be seen mumbling to himself in the prison courtyard – like his victims, another forgotten man.
Slaughter of the Innocents
In recent years, cold cases have been solved in different ways. Most often, it has been DNA profiling that has provided the concrete evidence needed to convict suspected killers, sometimes decades after the event.
In other cases, it has been dogged police work that, in the long run, has yielded results – tracking down the culprit through following up the slightest of leads, such as a name in a diary, or a watermark on an envelope. Then there are the cases where the perseverance of journalists, politicians, even friends and family, has pressurized the police and legal authorities to open the file and re-investigate the case once more.
But perhaps the most fascinating of all cold cases are the ones where witnesses have changed their minds and come forward to tell their story – people who saw or heard about a murder, but were unable or unwilling, for reasons of their own, to report it at the time; people whose consciences have continued to trouble them over the years, sometimes for decades.
In some cases, their relationship with the murderer may have changed so that they now feel free to speak: if they were once married to the murderer, they may now be divorced; if the murderer was their lover or friend, there may have been a falling out. In others, witnesses may be pressurized by the police or the law courts to tell their story; this applies especially to prisoners, who are often offered lighter sentences or other privileges if they assist the police with their enquiries. And, of course, once the culprit is safely in police custody, witnesses usually feel less frightened to speak; indeed, once the threat of retribution has been removed, they are often keen to relieve themselves of the burden of their knowledge. For it remains a fact that most people, however corrupt or depraved, consider murder – especially, as in this case, the murder of innocent children – a crime that cannot be forgotten or forgiven.
Naked, Bound Bodies
In October 1955, the brutal killing of three young boys who were on their way home from a trip to the cinema shocked the citizens of Chicago. Today, it might be thought unwise to let three ten-year-olds travel to the cinema and back by themselves in the big, bustling city of Chicago, but at that time, the area on the north-west side of the city was more or less crime-free, and it was a common enough practice to let children walk the streets on their own during the daytime. Accordingly, John and Anton Schuessler and their friend Bobby Peterson set out from their homes with their parents’ permission, to watch a matinee at the cinema in the Loop downtown. Unfortunately, they did not come straight back home after the show ended, but stayed around in town to enjoy themselves for a while.
At six o’clock that evening, they were seen in the lobby of the Garland Building at number 111, North Wabash. It was unclear why they were there. The only known link they had to the building was that Bobby Peterson had visited an eye doctor there, but that did not seem a reason for visiting the building on a Sunday.
The lobby was known at the time as a hang-out for gay men and prostitutes, and it is possible that they may have been there to meet an older boy, John Wayne Gacy. Gacy, who later became one of America’s most notorious killers of all time, was known to frequent the building at that period. He also lived not far from John and Anton’s family home. However, there is no record that the boys met up, and the theory remains speculative. Whatever the reason they went to the lobby, they did not stay for very long, and continued on their way to a bowling alley on West Montrose called the Monte Cristo.
Witnesses later reported that a man of around fifty was seen hanging around the many young boys playing in the bowling alley and eating in the restaurant. It was unclear whether the three boys spoke to the man.
After that, they hitched a ride at the intersection of Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenue. Again, this was not an uncommon practice at the time. However, by now the boys had spent the four dollars their parents had given them for the trip, and it was getting late. When they did not return by nine o’clock that night, their parents began to get worried about them, and contacted the police.
Beaten And Strangled
The police conducted a search, but could not find the three boys. It was only when a salesman stopped to eat his lunch, two days later, that he saw the bodies of three children lying in a ditch not far from the river at Robinson Woods Indian Burial Grounds. The bodies were naked, bound up, and their eyes were covered with adhesive tape. There was evidence to show that they had been beaten and strangled. The coroner pronounced that their deaths had been caused through ‘asphyxiation by suffocation’, and a murder investigation was launched.
The crime deeply shocked the police officers, who described it as the worst murder scene they had ever witnessed. When news of the murders hit the headlines, the citizens of Chicago were horrified. As the father of one of the boys remarked, ‘When you get to the point that children cannot go to the movies in the afternoon and get home safely, something is wrong with this country.’
The Case Goes Cold
The murder investigation began in Robinson Woods, with teams of officers searching the area to look for any clues such as items of clothing, footprints, or murder weapons. However, it appeared that the murderer had been very careful to cover up his traces. It was difficult to find fingerprints anywhere. Further examination of the bodies showed that they had probably been thrown from a car. Whoever had killed the boys had been an accomplished criminal, who was adept at escaping detection.
In retrospect it seems that, in the panic to find the killer, the police may have missed or misplaced vital clues. There were several different teams on the job
, some of them from the central police department, and others from suburban forces. Perhaps for this reason, nothing of any significance was turned up; as it was, lack of co-ordination between the different teams, and the general prevailing air of confusion and shock, meant that little came out of the investigation – much to the disappointment of the officers concerned, and the public at large.
Out of respect for the three young victims, the Schuessler-Peterson case, as it became known, remained open. However, as the years went by, it became clear that no initiatives were being taken to move the investigation on. It was not until 1977, however, when the police were investigating the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Brach, that new and very promising information came to light – information that was to lead, through witnesses, to the boys’ killer.
The Murderer Found
During the investigation, police talked to an informant named William Wemette who mentioned in passing that a man named Kenneth Hansen was known in some circles to have committed the murders. At the time of the murders, Hansen was twenty-two years old. He was working as a stable hand for a violent fraudster named Silas Jayne, who was notorious in the racing world as a cold-blooded killer. Jayne had actually been convicted of murdering his own brother, and had served a prison sentence for the crime.
Police investigators then talked to a number of other witnesses who, up to that time, had remained quiet about the stories involving Hansen and the three children. Apparently, Hansen had bragged to several men that he had lured the boys to his stables, telling them that he wanted to show them some special horses there. Once they were at the stables, he had sexually assaulted the boys, and had then strangled them. Shockingly, his employer Jayne had known of the killings, and had burned down the stables so as to destroy any clues. Not only that, but Jayne had actually collected insurance money on the buildings.
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