The World's Most Bizarre Murders

by James Marrison

  Bob Crane’s death will in all likelihood remain a mystery. There were many other suspects but Scotty Crane for one believes Carpenter got away with murder. ‘John Carpenter was accused of murdering my father in a Scottsdale hotel room, in June of 1978. The police told us that, in the middle of the night, John crept into my father’s room, picked up one of my father’s own camera tripods and bludgeoned my father to death. The police said that my father was asleep when he died, and that the impact was so forceful that he died instantly.

  ‘I have always gone back and forth about who murdered my father. There are plenty of suspects, as my dad didn’t practise discrimination when it came to married women or girlfriends of cops and mob bosses. In the 1970s Scottsdale was overrun with mobsters in the witness-relocation programme. The cops there will tell you that. The hard fact is that all of the roads with hard, tangible evidence lead to John Carpenter.

  ‘I did not attend John Carpenter’s trial for the murder of my father in which he was acquitted. That trial was more about John Carpenter than my father, who was already gone. Most people act as if knowing who killed my father will bring some kind of closure to me. The thing is, it won’t. It won’t bring my father back. It won’t change the history of my life and I don’t care to relive the murder through another trial. My dad is gone and nothing will change that. I prefer to think of the happier times and leave it at that.’

  Meanwhile, Crane’s legacy lives on in the strangest of places. Hogan’s Heroes is still extremely popular today – even in Germany, where it is dubbed in German. Originally called Stacheldraht und Fersengeld (‘Barbed Wire and Turning Tail’), it has since been retitled Ein Käfig voller Helden (‘A Cage of Heroes’). There are numerous websites dedicated to the show and legions of loyal fans and avid collectors of Hogan’s Heroes memorabilia. David Smith, who started one of the first Hogan’s Heroes websites, told me that he had even considered buying the apartment where Crane was murdered when it went up for auction on eBay; he says that his most valued possession is dirt taken from Crane’s grave. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what David Smith finds most compelling about the show today is the strange death and double life of its star, Bob Crane.

  Crane was certainly no saint, but Scotty argues that many of the rumours of his father’s sexual exploits are untrue. He is especially angry about allegations that his father filmed women without their consent. In an effort to set the record straight, Scotty started his own website, where for a time you could actually view the movies his father made, in order to show that the women knew that they were being recorded. The site has since received more than three million hits.

  ‘My father was a performer in every aspect of his life; his sex life included. During the trial for his murder, CNN broadcast a segment of the trial that included videotape of my father having sex. My mom just looked at me and said, “If your father could see that so many years later, people are still talking about him and that his sex life is worldwide news, he would be thrilled. I think that, if he were alive today, he’d probably be running the website himself.”’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘BAD BOB’ HANSEN AND THE HUNTERS OF HUMAN PREY

  In his free time, crack shot Robert Hansen flew out in his private plane to his hunting lodge and killed game with his high-powered .223-calibre rifle. But animals weren’t the only thing that ‘Bad Bob’ was hunting out there in the Alaskan wilderness.

  Compared to the crimes carried out by many serial killers, in some ways there is nothing particularly shocking about Robert Hansen. He wasn’t a cannibal, he wasn’t a necrophiliac and he didn’t dismember his victims or torture them to death. Yet there is one thing that puts Hansen in a league of his own and that is the sick game of cat and mouse that he devised in the Alaskan wilderness. It sounds like a somewhat unlikely premise for a film, but Hansen hunted human literally. While his victims fought for their lives in sub-zero temperatures, he would track them down and dispose of them like wild animals – for sport.

  Hansen’s hunting ground was the wilds of Alaska and his stalking ground was the then red-light district of Anchorage. At the time, Alaska was going through a huge transformation after the discovery of oil – and with the oil boom had come vice. Bars and strip clubs opened at breakneck speed; prostitution, violence and drug-related crime swiftly rose and went virtually unchecked amid three-hour happy hours, bar fights and the occasional murder. For Hansen, the conditions were perfect.

  He lived in an affluent part of town on Old Harbour Road, ran his own bakery, was married with two children and owned his own plane, which he used to go out hunting. Hansen had built himself a good, solid business out of his bakery and enjoyed a reputation as an upstanding member of his community. In fact, while the vast majority of serial killers are friendless and often socially inept, Hansen seemed to make friends easily and on one occasion was even able to convince pals to provide him with a false alibi.

  The fact that he was also an excellent shot and hunter only served to ingratiate him further in his community and for a man born and raised in Iowa he had adapted well to the rigorous life of the weekend outdoorsman. Over the years, Hansen had become something of an authority on the complex behavioural patterns and seasonal movements of big game specific to Alaska, such as Dall sheep, moose and bears, and had mastered the techniques necessary to survive in the hostile Alaskan wilderness. In fact, by the time he was finally arrested, his walls were lined with mounted trophies celebrating his most spectacular kills. But, as police were to learn, animals hadn’t been enough.

  When prostitutes suddenly began to vanish amid the nightly pandemonium on the strip, the police didn’t pay much attention. Prostitutes have a tendency to pull up sticks at short notice anyway and this was especially true of Alaska, where girls had come to make a quick buck. All the same, for years there had been rumours of ladies of the night simply disappearing and for no apparent reason.

  Then, three bodies were discovered; the victims – all prostitutes – had been shot and buried in shallow graves in remote corners of the Alaskan woods. For the girls working the strip, it was confirmation that someone had been stalking them for some time. And, when another of the girls suddenly vanished, her friends had a terrible feeling that she wouldn’t be coming back.

  Alaskan filmmaker Mary Katzke interviewed many of the prostitutes working in the area during the period of the Hansen killings and shortly after his arrest. One of the girls she talked to, Jazz, told her that one of her friends, Tiffany, had gone missing and had been found murdered and buried in the woods. ‘Later I knew something was wrong because it was payday and she didn’t get her tips envelope,’ Jazz recalled. ‘We might be late for work, or even miss it now and then, but we sure as hell don’t miss out on getting our cash. And I knew it wasn’t right she was gone on account of another reason – it was her son’s birthday. She was wearing sandals. Sandals and it was below zero. All I could think about was how she would freeze – from the feet up, since her coat only went to her knees.’

  The police remained more or less indifferent, although they did warn the local prostitutes to be on the lookout for a man offering them money to take their photograph. Meanwhile, the girls collected money between them and hired a detective to find out what had happened to their missing colleagues. The atmosphere on the strip quickly turned to one of edgy mutual distrust: ‘I suspected everyone – my friends, clients, even my boss’s friends. I had dreams I was by a river being shot,’ Jazz reflected. ‘Then they came out with a description of a suspect – saying he might want to take your picture or something. I tripped out, told the bar manager about the guy who had done that. We called the police – but the guy never showed. Every time I saw him my adrenaline would start.’

  Hansen was not a suspect, even though he had a criminal record in Alaska dating back 13 years for crimes and attacks against women. As well as having two convictions for assault and abduction, there had been numerous other complaints made against him from prostitutes working in the area. But, beca
use of his ostensibly respectable standing in the community, he remained in the clear. He might well have continued killing for several more years had it not been for the bravery and quick thinking of one prostitute.

  On the morning of 13 June 1983, Hansen approached her in his car – a green Buick. To the woman, he looked harmless enough. He was in his mid-forties, had a stutter, wore glasses and was lightly built. In fact, he seemed a bit nerdy. She was well aware that there might be a killer of prostitutes on the loose, but she accepted his offer and got in his car.

  Hansen immediately knocked her unconscious, shoved her to the floor and put an army blanket over her body. He then drove her back to his home, where he led her downstairs to the basement. On the way down, she tripped on some children’s toys, and would later remember that the basement walls were covered with hunting trophies. Hansen handcuffed her to a pole, raped her and then promptly fell asleep on the couch. While he was asleep she wet herself and, afraid that he would be angry if he saw what she had done, she used her foot to drag the blanket into the puddle to soak it up.

  When Hansen woke, he bundled her into his car and drove her to nearby Merrill airfield, where he shoved her inside his plane, warning her not to move: ‘I’d hate to have to shoot holes in the side of my plane,’ he told her. As she lay bundled in the back, she could hear him chatting affably to the airfield personnel and learned, to her horror, that he was off to his cabin in the woods.

  By the time he assaulted the young prostitute, Hansen had developed a method that enabled him to draw out and savour the deaths of the terrorised women whom he had abducted. He would fly his victims in his Super Cub plane to his hunting shack, in an area near the Knik River. It was a popular spot with fellow moose hunters, but it was also Hansen’s killing ground. Inside his shack was an iron rail suspended along the ceiling. This was where Hansen hung dead moose, and also where he tied his victims before repeatedly raping them.

  It’s unknown exactly how many times he did this, but afterwards Hansen would release his victims and give them a head start so that they could run for their lives. He would then pick up his rifle and knife and then calmly hunt them down. It was like ‘going after a trophy Dall sheep or a grizzly bear’, he said later, and referred to it as his ‘summertime project’.

  This victim, of course, had no way of knowing this, but she did know that she faced certain death if the plane ever took off, so she took the only chance she had. The plane didn’t start immediately, so Hansen had to jump out and start the propeller by hand. She rolled out, saw the highway and ran towards it, managing to stop a truck. Hansen ran after her but when he saw the truck stopping he backed off.

  Because the victim was a prostitute, however, police didn’t believe her at first – even though she was able to identify the plane and later its owner; plus, one of Hansen’s friends provided an alibi for him. Then, less than three months later, another body was found, buried like the others in a shallow grave in a remote corner of the Alaskan wilderness. Hansen’s friend was interrogated a second time and eventually confessed that he had been covering for his pal.

  This time the police sought the assistance of profiler John Douglas at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Detectives had told Douglas that Hansen was a well-known hunter and that his family had been away when the woman had been abducted. Douglas later wrote about the case in an article: ‘It gave me a cold, sick feeling in my stomach. It seemed clear to me that he was definitely the killer, but he wasn’t simply killing these women. I believed he was releasing them into the woods and then hunting them down like animals – and this proved to be the case.’

  Hansen’s home was searched, initially to no avail. Just as investigators were about to give up, though, they found a stash of ‘souvenirs’ including items of jewellery and ID cards belonging to women known to have suddenly disappeared. They also found a .223-calibre Mini-14 rifle that matched the type that had been used to kill the girls. When brought in for questioning, Hansen quickly cracked and during his two-day confession would reveal to police the extent and method of his murder binge. He had apparently got tired of the complaints made against him by prostitutes after he had brutalised and raped them and so had started to kill them instead. He had also developed a tried-and-tested method to make the prostitutes co-operate.

  ‘I scare them right off the bat,’ he told detectives. ‘I just say, “Hey, it’s your word against mine. I’m a businessman, a family man, and you’re a prostitute”… As long as they didn’t panic on me, as long as things went the way I wanted them to, it was go home and that was it.’

  Hansen really didn’t like it when prostitutes asked him for more money. In fact, that made him mad. ‘And when I get mad,’ Hansen said, ‘what happens is – I just don’t put up with it… I’d just say, “Hey, you’re a professional, you know there’s some risk to what you’re doing and if you do exactly what I say you won’t get hurt. You’re going to count this off as a bad experience and be a little bit more careful next time.”… Now don’t get me wrong. Any girl I was ever with is one who agreed to meet me for money for sex. I didn’t do nothing to decent girls. They had to approach me. She had to come out and say it – you know – that it was going to cost money.’

  Police had also found an air chart of the surrounding area in Hansen’s house. On the map were three dots, which marked the shallow graves where the bodies of three prostitutes had already been discovered. But there were 17 other dots on the map. So did the police need to go looking for 17 more bodies?

  The answer, unfortunately, was yes. Hansen had buried almost all of his victims in shallow graves by the banks of the 25-mile-long Knik River in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. To their horror, the detectives now realised that Hansen had been murdering and hunting prostitutes for ten long years.

  In all, Hansen admitted to committing 17 murders and raping 30 women; in 1984, he was sentenced to 461 years in prison. Six years later, it was revealed that Hansen had formulated a fairly elaborate plan to escape from the Lemon Creek jail where he was then being held. He had hidden air charts and other documents, which were found stashed in an air duct, and had planned to steal a plane from the nearby airfield, but the plan was foiled at the last minute after he was ratted out by a fellow inmate. As a result, Hansen was promptly transferred to the new maximum-security prison in Seward, Alaska.

  Not all of Hansen’s victims were discovered, even though he pointed out where he had buried them. And, even when they were recovered, the ground was often too hard to bury them right away.

  When it was all over, Jazz remembered visiting Tiffany’s grave. She had been one of Hansen’s last victims. ‘On Memorial Day, we went to Potter’s Field to put some white roses on her grave,’ she recalled. ‘They said once the ground thawed they’d bury her. The dirt was muddy and there wasn’t any grass there yet. I can still feel the way my heels sunk in the wet ground while we were walking around, trying to find where they put her. All there was, and it took a while to find, was a wooden stake with a strip of orange tape to mark her grave.’

  THE ZODIAC

  Hansen was not alone in his love of hunting humans for sport. In fact, his passion for human hunting is shared by one of the most infamous serial killers of all time: the Zodiac. Unfortunately, the identity of this infamous killer and the number of people he murdered will almost certainly remain a mystery. In one of the many letters he sent to the local press in California, he boasted that he had murdered 37 people (although he has an officially confirmed five kills). These letters first began on 1 August 1968, with three letters sent to three different newspapers, all of which contained a page of code. When the three parts of the code were combined and deciphered, it was evident that the self-named Zodiac was making a reference to hunting humans.

  ‘I like killing people because it is so much fun,’ the Zodiac wrote. ‘It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal. To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is even better t
han getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part is that, when I die, I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves.’

  The ‘most dangerous animal’ is widely believed by Zodiac experts to refer to a famous short story published in 1924 by Richard Connell called ‘The Most Dangerous Game’. In the story, a big-game hunter must fight for his life as he is hunted down for sport by a deranged Russian aristocrat, Count Zaroff. But Zaroff meets his match, learning too late that man is indeed the ‘Most Dangerous Game’ of all. Connell’s short story was made into a film in 1932, though the film reels had been lost at the time of the Zodiac killings and were not recovered until the 1970s.

  The prime suspect in the Zodiac murder case was Arthur Leigh Allen, who once told police that he had read the story in high school and had been fascinated by it. But Connell’s piece, a classic of the genre, was widely read in school at the time as required reading and there is absolutely no physical proof linking Allen with the killings. In truth, Allen is just one in a very long list of possible suspects.

  IVAN MILAT

  Another killer who hunted down humans for fun was Ivan Milat, Australia’s worst serial killer, who shot and stabbed his victims and then buried them in shallow graves in the Belanglo Forest south-west of Sydney.

  A keen hunter and gun nut, Milat (or ‘Tex’, as he liked to call himself) is believed to have given his victims a head-start before tracking them down and killing them in the Australian outback. Suspected of being involved in at least three other murders besides the seven he was actually convicted of, it is also thought that Milat beheaded German student Anja Habschied with a cavalry sword that he later stashed in his mother’s apartment and used an English backpacker’s head for target practice with a .22-calibre rifle.

  Milat was finally convicted thanks to the sworn testimony of Paul Onions, a British backpacker who managed to escape from an attack in 1990. Onions was a British ex-navy sailor and had been hitchhiking on the Hugh Highway when Milat stopped his truck and offered him a ride outside a petrol station. Milat introduced himself as Bill.