100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  Ed Gein

  Ed Gein was a quiet, mild-mannered man who in the 1950s often babysat 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 realized 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 son, 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.

  Ed Gein lived in a ‘house of horror’

  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.

  Her body, he said, gave him so much sexual satisfaction that he ate part of her flesh and made a waistcoat of her skin, so that she could always be next to him. Once she’d been flayed, though, he needed replacements – so he took to digging in graveyards again. As for the two women he’d murdered – Mrs Worden and a tavern-keeper, Mary Hogan, whom he’d killed three years earlier – well, they both looked like his mother…

  Ed Gein was declared insane, unfit to stand trial, and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions. He died in the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1984, at the age of 77. He had been throughout, it was said, a model inmate.

  Belle Gunness

  Belle Gunness, known as ‘Belle of Indiana,’ was in fact no belle at all. By the time she got to Indiana from Chicago in about 1900, she was fat. Long gone were the days when she’d been a tightrope dancer in her native Norway. Now she weighed about 200 pounds. Yet not only did she marry for a second time in La Porte, Indiana, she slept with all the hired hands at her farm. After her second husband died, she even attracted men from Illinois, South Dakota, Wisconsin and elsewhere with offers of marriage to ‘a comely widow.’ They arrived at her farmstead with their hopes high and their money ready, with one exception: they never got out alive.

  She seems to have started her career in the insurance business – in the claiming of insurance, that is. For her first husband, Albert Sorenson, died in Chicago of an ‘enlarged heart’ on a day on which two separate policies on his life happened to overlap. A house she then bought in Austin, Illinois, soon burned down, followed by a candy-store in Chicago; even her second husband, Peter Gunness, went the same way – for $4,000-worth of insurance this time – when a meat-grinder ‘fell’ on his head from a shelf as he sat in a chair.

  In 1906, two years after Gunness’s death – and with four children, three of them adopted, to take care of – Belle found a new line of work. Taken care of sexually by a recent arrival, farm-labourer Ray Lamphere, she started advertising herself in provincial newspapers as the comely widow,

  ‘who owns [a] large farm in one of the finest districts of La Porte County, Indiana, [and who] desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman unusually well provided.’

  No triflers would be brooked, she said, and each candidate would have to visit her in person. To one of them she subsequently wrote – beneath a line saying:

  ‘When I hear your name mentioned, my heart beats in wild rapture for you… be sure and bring the three thousand dollars you are going to invest in the farm with you and, for safety’s sake, sew them up in your clothes, dearest.’

  Chloroform, strychnine and an axe, on arrival, did the rest.

  Nobody knows how many she killed. But in 1908 – after she’d sacked Lamphere and told her lawyer that she was scared that he’d take revenge – the farmhouse burned down and four charred bodies were found in the remains: three children and a headless woman who wore Belle Gunness’s rings. At first there was some doubt it was really her, since the body seemed too small for a woman of her size. But three weeks later, her false teeth were found in the ashes, and that seemed to settle the matter – even though a witness claimed to have seen Belle driving out to the farm with a woman the afternoon before the fire.

  By that time, traces of strychnine had been found in all four bodies and Lamphere had been arrested for arson and murder. (He was subsequently found guilty only of arson.) But then the brother of one of Belle’s victims arrived on the scene and encouraged the authorities to continue searching. The remains of twelve dismembered corpses were soon found buried near the farmhouse. More bones were discovered in a pit under its cement floor. As the digging went on, thousands of sightseers came out to picnic near the scene. Anyone at all who’d disappeared or left the area was widely reckoned to have been a victim of ‘Belle of Indiana’.

  A year later, in prison, Lamphere admitted to having been Gunness’s accomplice in forty-three murders; and he also said that, before returning to torch the house on the night in question, he’d driven Gunness away disguised as a man. No one knows if the story’s true, though for a long while afterwards sightings of her were recorded in the newspapers.

  Gary Heidnik

  Transplanted Clevelander Gary Heidnik was the ‘bishop’ of a one-man, tax-registered Philadephia church, the United Church of the Ministries of God – and an extremely shrewd investor. But he had a fixation for women he thought beneath him. His congregation – and his lovers – were mostly derelicts and women from a nearby home for the retarded. In December 1978, when he was tried for the kidnapping and rape of a severely brain-damaged woman he’d abducted from a home in Harrisburg, the judge said:

  ‘He appears to be easily threatened by women whom he would consider to be equal to him either intellectually or emotionally.’

  A court-appointed investigator agreed with the judge’s analysis. ‘[Heidnik] impresses me,’ he said,

  ‘as someone who sees himself as superior to others, although apparently he must involve himself with those distinctly inferior… to reinforce this… He is not only a danger to himself, but perhaps a greater danger to others in the community, especially those who he perceives as being weak and dependent.’

  He concluded – with prescience, as it turned out:

  ‘Unfortunately, it seems that he will not significantly change his aberrant behaviour pattern in the near future.’

  Heidnik, who’d served as a medical corpsman in the Army and had trained as a practical nurse outside, spent almost four and a half years in prison on the kidnapping and rape charge. But he also tried to commit suicide three times while inside – continuing a pattern of schizoidal disorder that had had him discharged from the army in 1963, and in and out of hospitals, under medication, ever since. By April 1983, though, ther
e was no longer any reason for the prison parole authority to go on holding him. So he was released, aged 39, to go back to his ‘ministry’, his investments, and what turned out to be his murderous career.

  First, he moved house, to a stand-alone building on a street of row houses in north Philadelphia; then, a year later, he married a twenty-two-year-old mail-order bride from the Philippines the day after she got off the plane from Manila. He used her as his slave; he raped and assaulted her. She escaped – but failed to press charges. So he was free to move on to his next dark fantasy: the acquisition of a harem.

  He dug a pit in his basement floor; and when he was ready, on Thanksgiving Day 1986, he picked up and took home his first victim, a part-time prostitute – half African American, half Puerto Rican – called Josephina Rivera. He choked her unconscious and then imprisoned her, naked and chained, in the basement – where he raped and sodomized and beat her daily.

  By New Year’s Day 1987, Heidnik had abducted three other black women, all of whom were subjected to exactly the same fate. The latest addition to Heidnik’s harem, twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley, was feisty, though, and fought back. So she was given special treatment: beaten up and either confined to the pit with a heavy weight on top of her or else suspended by a handcuffed wrist from the ceiling. The others were threatened with, and sometimes given, the same punishment if they stepped out of line: if they resisted the continuing rapes, for example, or complained about the dog food they were increasingly fed on.

  As the daily attacks on his four victims continued – with Heidnik now playing the radio constantly to drown their screams – the violence began steadily to escalate. He picked up a fifth victim, an eighteen-year-old prostitute, on January 18th, and immediately whipped her naked body as a taste of things to come. Less than three weeks later, he committed his first murder. After being starved and strung up to the ceiling by one wrist for several days, the retarded twenty-five-year-old Sandra Lindsay died after being cut down and kicked into the pit. Heidnik dismembered her body with a power saw, fed what he could to his dogs and to the women in the basement, and kept the rest in the freezer.

  Heidnik was by now checking his victims every day to see if they were pregnant – which was his aim. But he soon became obsessed by the idea that they could hear from below whether he was in or out. So with the exception of his first harem-member, Josephina Rivera – whom he was beginning to see as an ally – he one by one bound up their heads with duct tape and drove a screwdriver into their ears. When Deborah Dudley remained difficult, he took her upstairs to show her Sandra Lindsay’s head in a pot and her ribs in a pan on the stove, as a warning. Later, during a group torture session, he electrocuted her to death, and dumped her body in a New Jersey park.

  Gary Heidnik acquired a ‘harem’

  At this point, he forced Josephina Rivera to sign with him a joint confession to Lindsay’s murder and, with the confession in hand as an insurance policy, he began to give her more freedom. He took her with him when he got rid of the body and then out to meals in fast-food restaurants. During one of these expeditions, he even picked up another prostitute she knew and added her to the harem.

  The next day, though, saying that she needed to see her family, Rivera escaped. She went to see a former boyfriend, and together they went to the police. Within minutes the police had all the evidence they ever needed against Heidnik. He was picked up a few blocks away.

  Was Heidnik sane? At his trial, a broker gave evidence of his considerable shrewdness: at the time of his arrest, as well as owning several showy Cadillacs and a Rolls-Royce, his ‘church’ had over half a million dollars in its investment account. The jury decided that his defence’s plea of legal insanity wouldn’t wash, and convicted him of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on July 6th 1999.

  William Heirens

  William Heirens, who grew up in Chicago in the 1930s and early 40s, was a quiet, introverted boy who had an obsession with women’s underwear, which he would steal from apartments, wear and then keep in the attic at his parents’ house. So intense was this fetish of his – which seems to have begun abnormally early in life, at the age of about nine – that even climbing in through a window could soon bring him to orgasm.

  At the age of 13, after being caught breaking into a store-room, he was sent to reform school, where he’s on record as having been well-behaved, if almost unnaturally quiet. Once out, though – and enrolled at the University of Chicago at 14 – he went back to burglary; and a year later, he committed his first murders. A forty-three-year-old divorcée was found in bed at her North-Side apartment, her throat cut and with a multitude of stab wounds. The strange thing was that the body, when it was found and examined, had been washed clean with wet towels.

  A year later, a nurse who interrupted a burglar at her apartment was beaten with an iron bar and tied to a chair before Heirens left. Then, in December 1945, another murder victim was found. A maid at a residential hotel opened the door to the bathroom of a sixth-floor apartment to find its occupant, Frances Brown, slumped over the bath. She’d been shot and stabbed. On the wall over her bed had been written in lipstick:

  ‘For God’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.’

  Once again, the body of the victim, who the police believed had come out of the bathroom naked and had interrupted her attacker, had been carefully washed.

  A month afterwards, on January 7th 1946, a third body was found, this time of a six-year-old girl. At first all the police knew was that someone had kidnapped her from her apartment-bedroom and had left a note – saying ‘Burn this for her safety’ – demanding a $20,000 ransom. Then, though, when the sewers in the area were searched, first her head and then other parts of her body were found. Her unknown killer had taken her to a nearby basement, strangled and dismembered her, before washing every part of her clean.

  He was finally caught in June 1946 when a janitor called the police about a burglar he’d spotted in a North-Side apartment-building. He and one of the tenants gave chase and were fired on. But with the help of the police, William Heirens was finally overpowered and taken to a precinct-house, where he began to tell his story. He confessed to all his crimes, but said that they’d been committed by an alter ego called ‘George,’ who was too powerful for him to be able to resist, however hard he tried. While a burglary was in progress, he – i.e. ‘George’ – was at such a pitch of intensity that he erupted into violence if interrupted.

  When later examined by psychiatrists, Heirens, aged 17, was found to be sexually perverted and emotionally insensitive but not psychotic. He was, they said, a suggestible, hysterical and egocentric personality who showed not the slightest remorse. He was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment. Once convicted – as if to endorse the court’s verdict – he said that he’d made up the story of ‘George’ so that he could plead insanity. But some criminologists believe that it might be true and that Heirens really did want to get caught and end ‘George’s’ domination. Why else would he have written his famous lipstick message? And why else would he have made no efforts at all, at any of the crime-scenes, to clean up his fingerprints?

  Jesse James

  In the Civil War, Jesse James, his brother Frank and his cousin Cole Younger fought – nominally, at least – for the South. They joined Quantrill’s Raiders, led by William Clarke Quantrill, riding with him on raids into Kansas and attacks on wagon trains further south. After Quantrill was killed in Kentucky and the war ended, they simply continued his work. Still wrapped in the Confederate flag – and joined by other ex-members of the Raiders – they robbed banks by day, held up trains at night – and killed anyone who stood in their way. For sixteen years, protected by ordinary Missourians, they terrorised a vast area in and around their home state – until Jesse was shot in the back of his head while hanging a picture in his front room.

  Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri on September 5th 1
847, and walked into legend twenty-two years later, when his horse was taken and recognized in the aftermath of a bank raid in Galatin, Missouri. From that point on, newspapers and word of mouth turned him into the baddest of all bad men, not only the leader of the famous James Gang – which was probably led in fact by his elder brother Frank – but responsible for every major robbery that took place in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and beyond.

  He also acquired a reputation – probably just – for devil-may-care boldness. When in 1871 a robbery of the county office in Corydon, Iowa failed – the treasurer, who had the combination of the safe, was out at a meeting – Jesse simply walked across the street to rob the bank opposite, holding out a $100 bill and asking for change. He and the gang got away on this occasion with $15,000.

  With money like this, the James Gang could afford to be choosy about the jobs they took on – probably no more than about twenty-six over sixteen years. They committed their first train robbery in 1873, on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad near Council Bluffs, Iowa, killing the engineer, looting from the passengers and escaping with a large pile of cash from the express car. The following year, this time on the Mountain Railroad, they flagged down another train and took off with $10,000. In the aftermath of this robbery, Jesse and another Gang member kidnapped and killed a Pinkerton detective sent after them. They left his body, as a warning, at a crossing of yet another railroad company.

  Jesse James was a member of Quantrill’s Raiders in the Civil War

  In 1875 and 1876, the Gang mounted two more major train robberies, netting $55,000 and $17,000 respectively. But then they went back to robbing banks – with disastrous consequences. In July 1876, in Northfield, Minnesota, after they’d killed a cashier, the townspeople opened fire on them as they were escaping. Three of the Gang members were killed; Cole Younger and two of his brothers were surrounded and captured a few days later; and Jesse James, who’d been wounded, only escaped back to Missouri through the resourcefulness of brother Frank.