100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  ‘Grand job, that last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear from me, with my funny little game… Next time I shall clip the ears off and send them to the police just for jolly.’

  It was signed:

  ‘Jack the Ripper.’

  Five days later, he struck again – twice. The first victim was ‘Long Liz’ Stride, whose body, its throat cut, was discovered on the night of September 30th by the secretary of a Jewish Working Men’s Club whose arrival in a pony trap seems to have disturbed the Ripper. For apart from a nick on one ear, the still-warm corpse was unmutilated. Unsatisfied, the Ripper went on to find another to kill. Just forty-five minutes later – and fifteen minutes’ walk away – the body of Catherine Eddowes, a prostitute in her 40s, was found. Hers was the most mutilated so far. For her entrails had been pulled out through a large gash running from her breastbone to her abdomen; part of one of her kidneys had been removed and her ears had been cut off. A trail of blood led to a ripped fragment of her apron, above which had been written in chalk:

  ‘The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’

  The crimes of the Ripper were luridly reported in the national press

  The Whitechapel Murders appalled the public

  By this time 600 police and plain-clothes detectives had been deployed in the area, alongside amateur vigilantes, and rumours were rife. The Ripper was a foreign seaman, a Jewish butcher, someone who habitually carried a black bag; and there were attacks on anyone who fitted this description. He could even be – for how else could he so successfully avoid apprehension? – a policeman run mad. There was plenty of time now for speculation. For the Ripper didn’t move again for more than a month – and when he did, it was the worst murder of all. His victim was twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Kelly; and her body, when it was found in the wretched hovel she rented, was unrecognizable: there was blood and pieces of flesh all over the floor. The man who found her later said:

  An artist charts the people and events of the Ripper’s crimes

  ‘I shall be haunted by [the sight of it] for the rest of my life.’

  This time, though, there was a clue. For Mary Jane had last been seen in the company of a well-dressed man, slim and wearing a moustache. This fitted in with other possible sightings and could be added to the only other evidence the police now had: that the killer was left-handed, probably young – and he might be a doctor for he showed knowledge of human dissection.

  After this last murder, though, the trail went completely cold. For the Ripper never killed again. The inquest on Mary Jane Kelly was summarily closed and investigations were called off, suggesting to some that Scotland Yard had come into possession of some very special information, never disclosed. This has left the problem of the Ripper’s identity wide open to every sort of speculation. The finger has been variously pointed – among many others – at a homicidal Russian doctor, a woman-hating Polish tradesman, the painter Walter Sickert, the Queen’s surgeon and even her grandson, Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence. The theory in this last case is that Albert had an illegitimate child by a Roman Catholic shopgirl who was also an artist’s model. Mary Jane Kelly had acted as midwife at the birth, and she and all the friends she’d gossiped to were forcibly silenced, on the direct orders of the Prime Minister of the day, Lord Salisbury.

  The probable truth is that the Ripper was a man called Montagu John Druitt, a failed barrister who had both medical connections and a history of insanity in his family. He’d become a teacher, and had subsequently disappeared from his school in Blackheath. A few weeks after the death of Mary Jane Kelly – when the killings stopped – his body was found floating in the river.

  The Kray Twins

  The Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, were probably the nearest London ever came to producing an indigenous Mafia. On the surface they were legitimate businessmen, the owners of clubs and restaurants haunted by the fashionable rich. But in reality they were racketeers and murderers, protected from prosecution by their reputation for extreme violence.

  They were born in the London’s East End in 1933 – and soon had a reputation as fighters. Both became professional boxers and, after a brief stint in the army, bouncers at a Covent Garden nightclub. It was then that they started in the protection business, using levels of intimidation that were, to say the least, unusual for their time. Their cousin Ronald Hart later said of them:

  ‘I saw beatings that were unnecessary even by underworld standards and witnessed people slashed with a razor just for the hell of it.’

  In 1956, Ronnie Kray was imprisoned for his part in a beating and stabbing in a packed East End pub, and judged insane. But three years later he was released from his mental hospital, and the twins were back in business, cutting a secret swath of violence through the British capital while being romanticized in the British press – along with people like actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp – as East-End-boys-made-good. When they were arrested in 1965 for demanding money with menaces, a member of the British aristocracy actually stood up in the House of Lords and asked why they were being held for so long without trial. They were ultimately acquitted.

  The Krays were, and still are, immensely popular figures

  The Krays with their elder brother Charlie

  Reggie and Ronnie have become cultural icons

  In the same year, Ronnie committed his first known murder: of the chief lieutenant of the twins’ main rivals for criminal power in London, brothers Eddie and Charles Richardson. George Cornell was shot in the head in another crowded East-End pub. But not a single witness was prepared to come forward to testify against Ronnie to police. When Reggie heard the news of what his twin, known as ‘the Colonel,’ had been up to, he said:

  ‘Well, Ronnie does some funny things.’

  Ronnie, though, was exultant at having got away with the killing and having sent out a message that he was above the law.

  ‘He was very proud…’

  said Hart,

  ‘and was constantly getting at Reggie and asking him when he was going to do his murder.’

  Two years later Reggie chose his mark, a small-time criminal called Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who was said to have bad-mouthed the twins. Reggie had McVitie ‘escorted’ from a Hackney jazz club to a nearby basement, where Reggie stabbed him to death as his brother shouted him on.

  In 1969, after a long undercover investigation, the Krays and their henchmen were finally brought to justice, charged with these two murders and with a third: that of an escaped convict called Frank Mitchell, nicknamed the Mad Axe-Man. Though Mitchell’s murder was never proved, both twins were given life sentences, with a recommendation that they serve at least thirty years. Their elder brother Charlie, who’d helped to get rid of McVitie’s body, was sentenced to ten years.

  In 1979, while still in prison, Ronnie was once more declared insane and sent to a mental hospital. But the myth of the Krays as East-End-boys-made-good – men who never forgot a good turn and loved their old neighbourhood and their mother – continued to cling to them. A feature film was made about their lives – in that, too, they resembled the American Mafia. When they died, five years apart, there were massive turn-outs at their East-End funerals.

  Lord Lucan

  Richard John Bingham was an arrogant man, a snob. He was a bully-boy, a gambler and risk-taker with an inflated opinion of his own abilities. But he was also Lord Lucan, the seventh earl of that name, and there were all too many parasites around him ready to confirm his sense of his own importance. If he hadn’t been Lord Lucan, he might not have committed murder; and if he had, he would have been long forgotten. As it is, almost thirty years after he disappeared, ‘Lucky’ Lucan sticks in the public memory as a symbol of something rotten in the state of Britain – giving off, for all that, the faintest whiff of glamour.

  He may, of course, have simply been mad on the night he killed his children’s nanny in November 1974. Certainly he�
�d been losing heavily at London’s gambling-tables; he was now seriously in debt. And certainly he had a pathological hatred of his wife, from whom he’d separated the previous year, losing custody in the process of his children. He’d contended to his cronies that she was insane and at the root of all his current problems. He’d had her watched and followed.

  Be that as it may, the facts are these: on the night of November 7th 1974, Lord Lucan’s estranged wife Veronica stumbled into a pub opposite her house in London’s Belgravia, soaked to the skin, distraught, without shoes and bleeding from a wound in the head. Between sobs, she blurted out an incoherent story about how she’d just escaped from a murderer in her house.

  ‘My children, my children,’

  she said;

  ‘he’s murdered the nanny.’

  The police were immediately called; on entering the house, they found the body of the nanny, Sandra Rivett, battered to death and stuffed into a canvas bag in the basement. ‘Lucky’ Lucan had apparently let himself into the house, meaning to kill his wife, and had hit out in the dark at the first woman he saw there with a length of lead piping. Then, realising his mistake, he’d taken her body down to the basement. In the meantime, Veronica Bingham came downstairs to see what had happened to the nanny, and she in turn was attacked.

  Her story was that her husband then confessed to killing the nanny by mistake – she was the same height and build as she was. She never explained, however, why this confession seems to have taken all of forty minutes: the time that elapsed before she ran out for help. Lucan, for his part, had a different story. In a telephone call he made that night to a friend, and then to another friend he later visited outside London, he said that he’d come across an intruder who’d been attacking his wife. Then he completely disappeared.

  His passport and the clothes he’d intended to wear that night for a dinner with friends at a gambling club were later found at the house he’d been living in. His car was found near the south coast. No trace of him has ever since been found, though reports that he’d been spotted, in South Africa, Australia, Ireland, the Caribbean and elsewhere, soon began arriving. He is now presumed dead – indeed his son has now succeeded him to the Lucan title. But the rumours – of rich, aristocratic friends who smuggled ‘Lucky’ Lucan out of the country and still support him – persist.

  Dennis Nilsen

  In February 1983 an engineer was called to a house in north London to investigate a blocked drain. He soon found the cause: backed-up human flesh. The owner of one of the apartments in the building – a tall, bespectacled civil servant called Dennis Nilsen – had been flushing the remains of his victims down the lavatory.

  But not by any means all of them. For police found in his flat two severed heads and a skull that had been boiled down to the bone, as well as half a male torso and various human parts in the cupboards. They hadn’t been kept there for any other reason than Nilsen, living right at the top of the house, had had a problem with disposal. If he hadn’t had to move in 1981 from the garden flat he’d previously occupied, where more human bones were later found, he’d probably have gone undetected. For there he’d had options: he’d been able to bury the bones of his dead after crushing their skulls with a garden roller or else burn them on garden fires, with a tyre tossed on top to disguise the smell. At his new address, after dissecting his three victims, he’d had to put out the larger bones for the garbagemen – and use the lavatory for the rest.

  Nilsen, a lonely homosexual, confessed all this more or less immediately, and pointed the police to his previous apartment, where they found 13 kilos worth of human bones, all that remained of his twelve earlier victims. The fifteen dead had all been homosexuals or drifters whom Nilsen had picked up, brought back to his apartment and then strangled while they were asleep or insensible from drink. He didn’t, he said, have sex with their corpses or eat their flesh:

  ‘I’m an egg-and-bacon man myself,’

  he later said indignantly. His motive seems to have been simply that he wanted company. His first victim had been killed on December 30th 1978, because he’d had a miserable Christmas and wanted someone to share New Year’s with him,

  ‘even if it was only a body.’

  In October 1983, he was convicted on six charges of murder and two of attempted murder and sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment. During the course of the trial, it became clear that the police had earlier failed to charge him when two separate complaints had been made against him by men he had attacked. They’d also ignored the three carrier-bags full of human flesh found by a microbiologist not far from Nilsen’s garden apartment.

  Dennis Nilsen claimed he was an ‘egg-and-bacon man’

  Nilsen apparently killed because he was lonely and wanted company

  Nilsen was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 4th 1983.

  William Palmer

  William Palmer, born in Rugeley, Staffordshire in 1825, was only ever tried for a single crime, the death of a racehorse-owner called John Parsons Cook – and for that he was publicly hanged. But there’s evidence that he killed at least fifteen other people – reason enough for him to be known ever since as The Prince of Poisoners.

  Palmer was in his way a throwback, a rake, the sort of man who might have thrived in the Regency period. But he came of age in the much primmer times of Queen Victoria, when middle-class morality ruled. Palmer didn’t fit in. Wine, women and gambling were no longer approved of – which is why he became so notorious.

  The son of a sawyer – and with a legacy from his dead father which was never quite enough – he seems to have begun stealing at an early age to support the lifestyle he craved. He was sacked for it from his apprenticeship to a Liverpool chemist, and there was more trouble of the same sort when he moved on to study with a surgeon. There was also some suspicion that he was beginning to use his knowledge of toxicology in an inappropriate way. When he was 21, a drinking contest he was having with a man he’d cuckolded came to an abrupt end when his rival suddenly died after just two glasses of brandy.

  After qualifying as a doctor in London – and running up debts – he set up a medical practice in his home town and got married to a young woman whose mother was rich and who had an income of her own. But it still wasn’t enough to feed his gambling habit, and a number of Palmer’s relatives and associates started to die suspiciously. An uncle given to drink died in a drinking bout with him. His mother-in-law passed away ten days after arriving to visit her daughter; and the wife of another uncle fell sick while paying a visit – though she survived after refusing to take the pills he offered as a cure. These were duly followed into the Palmer home by two racing associates to whom he owed money – and who didn’t long survive their dinner.

  Palmer was able to steer clear of suspicion in this string of murders for three reasons: first, because almost nothing was known outside London at the time about the detection of poisons; second, because he was regarded as a ‘gentleman’ who would never stoop so low; and third, because he had an elderly doctor in tow, who was only too happy to defer to Palmer’s knowledge of medicine. He duly wrote on the death certificates whatever Palmer said: English cholera or apoplexy.

  In January 1854, Palmer took out a skein of insurance policies on his wife’s life and in September, after a terrible run of luck at the track – which included betting heavily on a horse of his own – he with some reluctance killed her. The following year, he did the same with his brother’s life, though this time the insurance companies refused to pay up after he was dead – and said that if he chose to take the case to court, they’d have him investigated for murder.

  With his creditors now roaring at his back, he tried the same trick one last time, and killed fellow rake John Parsons Cook after he’d had a big win on a horse of his at Shrewsbury Races. Palmer stole his betting slips and cashed them in; he forged a cheque in his name and he also had the cheek to make a £4,000 claim on his estate. Cook’s stepfather became suspicious and had some of the dead
man’s organs sent to London for analysis. The coroner subsequently recorded a verdict of wilful murder.

  By this time Palmer had been arrested for debt on a charge brought by one of his creditors. Now he was sent to Stafford Prison to await the exhumation of his wife’s and brother’s corpses. The whole of England was abuzz with news of his crimes; and a special Act of Parliament was passed to have him brought to London for trial. The courtroom there was packed and thousands of copies of the transcripts were sold, most of it full of the medical jargon of conflicting experts. For though it was by now known that Palmer had bought strychnine at the time of Cook’s death, no trace of it was ever found in his body. The experts gave different reasons for this – and Palmer wouldn’t help. All he ever said on the subject was:

  ‘I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.’

  It didn’t matter. He was sentenced to death and hanged in front of Stafford Jail on June 14th 1856, with an audience of almost 30,000 people, some in expensive reserved seats. By that time it had been remembered that all of Palmer’s children but one had died young of convulsions – and so had at least two of his bastards.

  Michael Ryan

  In 1987, Michael Ryan was 27 years old – and a patchily employed farm labourer in Hungerford, west of London. He was ill-educated, morose. His only real passion in life was for guns. He was a member of the local rifle and pistol club where he’d show off his marksmanship and boast to anyone who would listen about his collection of guns – which he kept, fully licensed, in the house he shared with his mother.