100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  Gary Ridgway

  On July 15th 1982, two boys riding their bicycles around Kent, Washington peered into the waters of the picturesque Green River. There, caught on a snag, was the body of a woman, naked but for a pair of jeans wrapped tightly around her neck. It was the body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, the first official victim of a terrifying sexual predator who became known as the Green River Killer.

  Gary Ridgway was born in 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The middle child in a family of three boys, he struggled at school and his childhood was marked by his domineering and violent mother. At the age of 13, he was still a bed-wetter. His father drove a city bus and regularly voiced his vehement disapproval of the prostitutes who worked along his route – an attitude his son Gary was also to adopt.

  By 1980, Ridgway had already clocked up two failed marriages and had begun to frequent prostitutes along the very strip his father used to drive. He was arrested on soliciting charges on a number of occasions, and was once accused of having tried to choke a prostitute.

  In July and August 1982, five females aged between 16 and 31 were found in or near the mouth of the Green River. Most were prostitutes; all had been raped and strangled to death. The police wasted no time in linking the deaths and pronouncing them the work of a serial killer. By April 1983, the body count had risen to 20.

  That summer, a dozen or so more women disappeared. Under mounting pressure, and inundated with tips, the police team solicited advice from all quarters, including serial killer Ted Bundy, who from his prison cell helped to form a profile of the Green River Killer.

  It was all to no avail. Months, then years, passed, with more women meeting brutal deaths. Ridgway, one of numerous individuals of interest to the police, was twice given polygraph tests, in 1984 and 1986. He passed both. In 1987, his house was searched and a DNA sample taken. After police searched his locker at work, co-workers joked that he was ‘Green River Gary’. No one gave any serious thought to the notion that he might be the serial killer.

  By 1986, the killing seemed to have stopped. Bodies were still being found, but the victims had died several years earlier. By 1991, the police unit investigating the case had been reduced to a single person. The case was all but dormant. But new DNA testing methods led to a breakthrough in 2001. A connection was made between semen found on the bodies of several of the victims, and the DNA taken from Ridgway in 1987. He was arrested and charged with the murders of Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills and Carol Ann Christensen, four of the women whose bodies had been found with his DNA.

  On 5th November 2003, Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to the aggravated first-degree murder of 48 women. His plea was part of a bargain to spare him the death penalty. He also agreed to cooperate in locating the remains of his victims.

  Ridgway claimed that all of his victims had been killed in and around the Seattle area, though he disposed of some of them elsewhere in an attempt to confuse police. He also admitted to occasionally contaminating the dump sites with gum, cigarettes and written materials that belonged to others, to throw investigators off the scent. He confessed to killing 44 women between 1982 and 1984, but claimed to have killed only four thereafter – in 1986, 1987, 1990 and 1998.

  Ridgway was given 48 life sentences. Since sentencing, he has confessed to yet more murders – a total of 71, although some speculate the true figure is closer to 150. It was a price, he claimed, worth paying for the betterment of society:

  ‘I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight. I wanted to kill as many women that I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.’

  Charles Schmid

  In November 1965, a nineteen-year-old from Tucson, Arizona called Richard Bruns flew to stay with his grandmother in Columbus, Ohio, and went to the local police. He said he had information about murders that had taken place in Tucson, and was worried for his girlfriend whom he’d had to leave behind there and who knew the murderer well. The name of the killer whom he wanted arrested was Charles Schmid.

  Schmid, known as Smitty, was a rich kid of twenty-three, whose parents owned a nursing-home and had given him a cottage of his own at the bottom of their garden. He was also short – and bothered by it. At high-school, he’d been a gymnast – he’d even won a state championship. But now he wore high-heeled boots, which he stuffed with paper to make himself look even taller. The fact that this made him walk somewhat bizarrely he explained by saying he’d been crippled by Mafia hoods. This was fairly typical of Smitty, who felt inadequate with people of his own age, but who attracted local teenagers with his fantasies. He even got them to join his so-called sex club.

  The first girl to disappear, on May 31st 1964, was fifteen-year-old Alleen Rowe, whose mother found her ‘out on a date’ when she got back late at night. She never returned, and her mother was later to remember a conversation she’d had with her daughter. Alleen had talked about being invited to join a sex club. ‘You’ve got to be in, or you’re a nobody,’ she’d said.

  Then, fifteen months later, the two daughters of a Tucson doctor, Gretchen and Wendy Fritz, 17 and 13 respectively, also disappeared – followed a few weeks later by a fifteen-year-old called Sandra Highes, who failed one day to return from school. Though the police did what they could, and talked to everyone who knew them, they failed to turn up any evidence.

  The fact is that the fascinated teenagers who’d gathered around Schmid weren’t talking, either to their parents or to the police, though it was more or less common knowledge among them that he’d killed at least Alleen Rowe. With a girlfriend he’d put to work in his parents’ nursing home and a teenager called John Saunders, he’d inveigled Alleen out of her mother’s house and had driven her off into the desert, where the two men had raped her, beaten her head in with rocks and buried her in a shallow grave. As for the doctor’s daughters, the elder one, Gretchen, had been Smitty’s girlfriend, but had become too possessive, so he’d strangled them both at the cottage and had then dumped their bodies outside town.

  The reason that Richard Bruns knew this was because Schmid had boasted to him about it and he had called what he thought was Schmid’s bluff. ‘Show me!’ So Schmid had driven him to where he’d left the bodies, and had then forced Bruns to help him bury them.

  Even before Bruns’s testimony, though, the police had begun to believe that Schmid had to be involved. For in a bizarre episode he’d been arrested on the beach at San Diego, California, interviewing girls in bikinis while posing as an FBI officer.

  The story he’d given was equally odd: he said he’d been helping a couple of ‘Mafia heavies’ – who’d been hired by the Fritz family – in their investigations into the disappearance of Gretchen and Wendy.

  Bruns, now back in Tucson, led the police out to what remained of the two girls; Smitty, John Saunders and the girlfriend, Mary French, were all arrested. As the case unfolded in court, parents were horrified at what their sons and daughters had got up to. There was talk of teenage prostitution-rings and orgies fuelled by drugs and booze, and Smitty later boasted about teaching a string of teenage paramours ‘a hundred different ways to make love.’

  Tried for the murder of Alleen Rowe, Mary French, who’d stayed in the car while Alleen was raped and killed, was sentenced to four to five years in prison; John Saunders, to life; and Charles Schmid, to death – commuted later to life after the banning of capital punishment. For the killing of the Fritz sisters, he received an extra fifty-five years.

  His days of fantasizing, though, were not yet quite over. For in November 1972, he escaped from Arizona State Prison, along with another three-time killer, Raymond Hudgens. The two men held four people hostage on a ranch near Tempe, and then decided to separate. They were both picked up a few days later.

  ‘Dutch’ Schulz

  ‘Dutch’ Schulz wasn’t Dutch at all – he was German, and his last name wasn’t Schulz – it was Flegenheimer. His father kept a saloon and livery-stable in what was known as Jewish Harlem, but deserted his family in
1916, and that was enough for son Arthur. After coming out of jail at the age of 16, from an 18-month stretch for burglary, he borrowed the name of a legendary member of the old Frog Hollow Gang, and got down to business.

  A chorus girl once said that he looked like Bing Crosby with his face bashed in. Dutch certainly was no beauty – but then he didn’t have to be. For by the mid 20s, after riding shotgun on Arnold Rothstein’s liquor-trucks, he’d put together the toughest gang in New York. They ran protection for some of the toniest uptown restaurants. They were into slot machines and the numbers racket; liquor, restaurants, labour unions, gambling, and fixing any horse-race or boxing-match they could. By the beginning of the 30s, Dutch – who had a reputation for miserliness – was said to be making $20 million a year.

  He didn’t get to the top by any subtlety. He simply beat up or got rid of anyone who stood in his way. He out-muscled his competition – he arrived in the numbers racket, for example, by simply calling a meeting, laying his .45 on the table and saying, ‘I’m your partner.’ When ‘Legs’ Diamond had to get out of New York after killing a drunk, Dutch took over his liquor trucks; and then, when Legs objected, had him killed.

  He avoided arrest in the usual way, by paying off the police and providing campaign funds and votes to all the politicians who mattered – particularly district attorney William Copeland Dodge. But a noose of prosecutions gradually settled round his neck. He beat the rap on a tax-evasion charge in Syracuse in 1933, but in 1935 he faced another, this time put together by special prosecutor Thomas Dewey. His lawyers eventually succeeded in having the trial moved to a little upstate town, but the consensus was, in Lucky Luciano’s words, that ‘the loudmouth is never coming back.’

  Dutch, though, spent months in tiny Malone, New York, before the trial, schmoozing the inhabitants, dressing modestly and even converting to Catholicism in the town’s little church. When he got off, he told reporters: ‘This tough world ain’t no place for dunces. And you can tell all those smart guys in New York that the Dutchman is no dunce.’

  The ‘smart guys in New York,’ though, didn’t want the Dutchman on their turf any more. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent a message warning him not to come back, and started literally breaking up his gambling empire – he had himself photographed on barges taking a sledgehammer to Dutch’s slot-machines. Thomas Dewey started preparing another case, this time against his restaurant rackets and his operation began to leak at the seams as other mobsters moved in on it.

  He was exiled to Newark, New Jersey, where he set up his headquarters in a restaurant called the Palace Chop House. Then, sometime in late autumn 1935 – after having to kill one of his own lieutenants for conspiring with Luciano – he called a meeting of the Syndicate and demanded the assassination of Thomas Dewey. The Syndicate refused: it was far too high-profile. He said, fine, he’d kill Dewey himself – and so signed his own death warrant. In October, with his lieutenants, he was gunned down in the Palace Chop House by assassins from Murder Incorporated. He was 33.

  ‘Bugsy’ Siegel

  Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was there right at the beginning of the new-look New York Mafia. He was in the jail-cell where ‘Lucky’ Luciano first got together with Meyer Lansky. He was one of the four gunmen who murdered Giuseppe Masseria; and one of the four ‘internal-revenue agents’ who were in at the kill of Salvatore Maranzano, the ruthless would-be Capo di Tutti Capi of the city’s underworld. He was also appointed to the board of the Unione Siciliana, one of the first attempts at a commission to guide the power of the Mafia nationwide. He may not have understood much about the politics – he started out as a small-time car-thief and driver of booze-trucks, after all – and he left that sort of thing, in any case, to Luciano and Lansky. But he knew all the right people; he was presentable; and in 1935, he must have seemed the ideal choice to spearhead the New York families’ expansion of operations to the West Coast.

  Bugsy Siegel is commonly credited with creating the foundations of Las Vegas as it is today

  A rather unglamorous end for the glamour boy of the Mafia

  Teaming up in southern California with a local mob led by Jack Dragna, Siegel ran drugs and operated a string of gambling-clubs and offshore casino-ships on behalf of his New York bosses both before and during the War. With the help of his pal, actor George Raft – and with his rough edges smoothed off by a divorced millionairess called Countess Dorothy Di Frasso – he was at ease in the best Hollywood circles. He was on first-name terms with people like Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper – and a magnet to every starlet. He fitted right in. As he said,

  ‘Class, that’s the thing that counts in life. Without class and style, a man’s a bum; he might just as well be dead.’

  Gambling and stars: it was this combination that was to lead to Siegel’s one major contribution to Mafia history. For in 1945, he suggested to his bosses the idea of building a casino and hotel in the Nevada desert at a place called Las Vegas. He put up $3 million, and the Commission soon organised a loan to match his investment. The place, he said, would be called The Flamingo – a name suggested by his girlfriend Virginia Hill– and there’d be a grand opening, with all of Hollywood’s royalty there.

  Word soon got back to the centre, though, that money was disappearing during The Flamingo’s building, some of it salted away abroad, and a decision was taken at an informal meeting of bosses in Havana, Cuba that Siegel would have to repay with interest the East-Coast Mafia investment as soon as the hotel-casino opened. Trouble was, the grand opening that Siegel had planned turned out a disaster. Bad weather kept planes grounded at LA airport; the stars never showed. In two weeks, The Flamingo was closed after losing $100,000.

  ‘Bugsy’ couldn’t pay, and his old friends in New York could no longer protect him. It was a matter of business; an example had to be set. So on the night of June 20th 1947, Siegel was gunned down as he sat in the living-room of Virginia Hill’s Los Angeles house on North Linden Drive. The final bullet, the ‘calling card,’ was fired into his left eye. Just five people went to his funeral.

  Richard Speck

  In a nurses’ hostel in Chicago in the early hours of July 14th 1966, Richard Speck was responsible for what was later called ‘the most bestial rampage in the city’s history.’ If he hadn’t been so bad at counting and so expert at tying knots, the good-looking twenty-four-year-old sailor might never have been caught.

  Just before midnight on July 13th, a twenty-three-year-old nurse called Corazon Amurao opened her door to find a strange man wearing a dark jacket and trousers and smelling of alcohol pointing a gun at her. He forced her at gunpoint into another room where three other nurses were sleeping. Soon nine nurses were gathered together and herded into a bedroom, where the unknown man cut bed sheets into strips with a knife as they lay on the floor, and then bound and gagged them. He said that he wouldn’t harm them, he only wanted money, but when that had all been collected, he sat on the bed looking at them, fingering his knife.

  Then, one by one, he took seven of them out of the room to various parts of the building and knifed or strangled them to death. For the last one – or so he thought – he reserved special treatment: he raped and sodomised her where she lay for twenty-five minutes before killing her.

  He’d forgotten, however, about Corazon Amurao, who’d hidden herself during one of his absences under a bunk bed. After he’d left and when she thought it finally safe to move, she managed to get outside to a balcony and scream for help.

  When the police arrived, they found mutilated corpses, mayhem, bedrooms awash with blood. But they also had a witness who could give them a description. The killer, she said, was pock-marked; had a tattoo on his arm with the words ‘Born to raise hell’; and had talked about needing money to get to New Orleans. This – together with the square knots he’d used to tie up his victims – immediately suggested to the police that he might be a seaman. And half a block away was the hiring hall of the National Maritime Union.

  Richard Spec
k went on a ‘bestial rampage’

  They soon discovered that a man answering to Ms. Amurao’s description had visited the hiring hall enquiring about a ship to New Orleans, and had filled out an application form in the name of Richard E. Speck. There was a photograph and a contact number, which turned out to belong to Speck’s sister. With a positive ID from Corazon Amurao in hand, they called Speck’s sister with the offer of a job. But though Speck himself called back within half an hour, he never turned up for the ‘interview’. So detectives started scouring sailors’ haunts – hotels, flophouses and bars – across the city.

  They quickly came across Speck’s tracks: a hotel where he’d picked up two prostitutes on the night after the murders; another he’d checked out from half an hour before they came. He was finally arrested only after they’d named him as their chief suspect and released his description and photograph to the media. For a surgeon at Cook County Hospital, examining an emergency patient who’d been admitted after slashing his wrists, remembered a tattoo he’d read about in his newspaper that day.

  Speck on trial – he was found guilty of first-degree murder

  Richard Speck was tried and sentenced – first to death, then after commutation to several centuries in prison – for first-degree murder. The seaman – who’d regularly worked the ore-barges in the Great Lakes – had a record of violence towards women and may have killed several times before the attack on the hostel. For there had been a rash of unsolved murders in Benton Harbor, Michigan earlier that year when Speck was in the area, and another in Monmouth, Illinois, where he’d gone on to stay with his brother. On July 2nd 1966, five days after he’d been let go from an ore-boat in Indiana Harbor, three girls who’d been swimming not far away had disappeared.