During his trial, his wife stated that she recalled her husband saying, ‘Don’t underestimate me. I’m very skilled at what I do. I studied this, I planned this, I calculated this.’
REVENGE FOR A TRAGEDY: VITALI KALOYEV
Whether architect Vitali Kaloyev had actually intended to kill air-traffic controller Peter Nielsen all along will never be known for sure, because to this day Kaloyev claims that he does not remember stabbing Nielsen to death. Instead, he insists he tracked down the air-traffic controller to his suburban home in Gloten in Zurich simply because he had wanted an apology, or at least some kind of explanation, for the death of his entire family in a plane crash in July 2002.
Danish-born Nielsen had been on duty when the Bashkirian Airlines passenger plane had crashed into a DHL cargo plane above southern Germany. Nielsen had wrongly ordered the passenger plane to descend when he should have ordered it to climb. Seventy-one people had died in the resulting crash. The majority of the victims were schoolchildren from the village of Ufa en route via Moscow to a school outing in Madrid and among the victims had been Kaloyev’s wife and two young children. Three executives of the air-traffic control company SkyGuide had been handed down 12-month suspended sentences for manslaughter, but Nielsen had never been prosecuted.
On 11 November 2003, Kaloyev received a letter in which SkyGuide offered him 60,000 Swiss francs (£29,000) for the death of his wife and a further 50,000 Swiss francs (£23,000) for the death of each of his two children, in return for his promising to make no more legal claims against the company. The way the life of his family was apparently being haggled over further infuriated Kaloyev, who decided to meet with the company director in person.
Kaloyev arrived in Zurich in February 2004 in an attempt to receive an official apology from SkyGuide’s director, Alan Rossier. As he was unable to meet with him, he travelled instead to Nielsen’s home. He arrived at the house, carrying a knife with a 14cm blade, stood in Nielsen’s front garden and waited.
When Nielsen came outside and demanded to know what he wanted, they began to argue. Kaloyev claimed later that Nielsen had refused to apologise to him. ‘He murmured something to me,’ Kaloyev later testified in court. ‘Then I showed him some pictures of my children and said, “They were my children. What would you feel if you saw your children in coffins?”… He hit me on the hand, when I was holding the envelope with the photographs of my children. I only remember that I had a very nasty feeling, as if the bodies of my children were turning in their graves.’
Kaloyev stabbed Nielsen repeatedly, threw the knife away and fled the scene, leaving Nielsen to bleed to death. He was arrested the next day and later handed down a sentence of eight years for premeditated murder, for which he only served five years and three months. On his return to Russia, Kaloyev received a hero’s welcome and was mobbed at the airport by well-wishers; the streets were lined with banners showing the killer their love and support.
CULT KILLER: RICKY RODRIGUEZ
The ‘Children of God’ was a free-love hippie Christian cult, founded by self-proclaimed prophet Ricky Berg in Huntington Beech, California, in 1968. In order to raise membership for his new group, Berg promoted a novel new Christian recruitment practice known as ‘flirty fishing’, whereby cult members would use sex in order to recruit new members. As well as bringing in cash in return for sex, many new members were persuaded to join the cult for good.
Ricky Rodriguez was one of the estimated 300 ‘love babies’ that were born as a direct consequence of flirty fishing. In fact, Rodriguez was cult royalty, being the son of Karen Zerby (Ricky Berg’s favourite consort) and a hotel waiter in Tenerife. The free-loving cult founder had no problem with the fact that the boy’s mother was having sex outside the relationship and when the boy was two years old Zerby and Berg would claim that he would one day be a prophet and deliver humanity ‘out of great sorrow and bondage’. But the boy, whom they would raise as the holy prince and saviour of the Children of God, would in later life turn crazed avenger and killer, hunting down one of the key members of the cult before turning the gun on himself.
The cult’s message of free love had for a long time had horrific connotations. Many ex-members have since claimed that the free love message extended to children and that minors were passed around among cult members for sex – a practice that extended as far as the cult leader and his consort’s own son. Rodriguez often claimed to have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the nannies who reared him and, he later said, also at the hands of his own mother.
Not only this, but, when he escaped the cult and tried to make a life of his own, he found himself hopelessly unprepared to make his way in the world. Deciding to wreak revenge on the cult that had ruined his life, he resolved to track down his mother and kill her.
His mother, though, had long disappeared without a trace. Having posted complaints about his upbringing in the family on several internet sites, and unable to discover his mother’s location, he apparently settled for murdering Angela Smith, whom he also hoped might be able to give him his mother’s address. Ex-cult member Smith had been personal secretary to David Berg for almost 20 years.
On the eve of his short-lived revenge spree against the cult, Rodriguez videotaped his confession while loading his Glock .23 handgun and later posted the video to friends, asking them to pass it on to the media. In the video, he seems pretty calm, listening to music and sitting at his kitchen table. As he drinks a beer, he debates with himself the pros and cons of different handguns. He also wields his K Bar knife, which he says is his ‘weapon of choice’, which he wants for ‘taking out scum’ and ‘taking out the fucking trash’. And, as he talks, glimpses of undisguised rage rise, with increasing frequency, to the surface.
‘Fucking animals,’ he says at one point, when talking about the abuse other children suffered at the hands of cult members. ‘I hate those fuckers. They are going to fucking get it too if I have anything to do with it… Anger does not begin to describe how I feel about these people and what they have done… It’s going to feel so fucking good… liberating.’
Then, Rodriguez starts talking about his mother. ‘I’m going to keep going until I get her or someone else gets her. Justice will be done… Maybe fate will smile on me. The God of War. The God of Revenge. Maybe they will grant me happy hunting.’
Rodriguez duly invited Angela Smith to go to dinner with him. When she arrived at his apartment in Tucson, he stabbed her three times and slit her throat with his K Bar knife. Revenge was hardly sweet for Ricky Rodriguez, though. After it was all over, he then drove across the Californian border to a small desert town and blew his brains out.
‘IT WAS THEM OR ME’: RICARDO BARREDA
On a warm, pleasant Sunday morning in November 1992, Ricardo Barreda went downstairs for breakfast. His two daughters, 26-year-old Adriana and 24-year-old Cecilia Barreda, had already eaten, as had his mother-in-law and his wife, Gladys. The impeccably neat and apparently mild-mannered dentist told his wife that he planned to do some chores around the house, such as cleaning some cobwebs from the ceiling in the hall. He was feeling pretty relaxed, he later recalled, until his wife replied, ‘Go and do that. Go and clean. Jobs for little pussies like you suit you the best. It’s the only thing you’re good for.’
Barreda was used to being talked to that way by his wife, and by the rest of his family for that matter, so he simply turned on his heel and walked out. He then started looking for a crash helmet. (The ultra-careful Barreda always wore a crash helmet if he was going to climb a ladder.) It was while he was rummaging around for it in a cupboard upstairs that he saw the shotgun. It had been in the cupboard for many years and usually he didn’t notice it. That day, for some reason, was different. The cartridges were on the floor by the side of the gun.
‘And, well, it was odd,’ he later testified. ‘I felt a force that made me take it. I was sick of their jokes, their hatred, their indifference and their lack of love towards me. I went back downstairs and started sho
oting.’
He shot his wife, Gladys, and then his youngest daughter. He then killed his mother-in-law as she came downstairs. When his eldest daughter saw the bodies lying on the floor, she screamed, ‘What have you done, you son of a bitch?’ He killed her too. It was 9.15 a.m.
In jail, Barreda remained unrepentant. ‘Seeing them on the floor and thinking that they were dead, I felt relief and a sense of liberation because justice had been done,’ he told reporters. ‘I would do it again,’ he added, ‘because it was a living hell and they were driving me crazy. It was either them or me.’
According to Barreda, his murderous rampage was an act of vengeance for years and years of mental abuse at the hands of his wife, his two daughters and his mother-in-law, who together constantly plotted against him and mocked him under his own roof. His wife, he claimed, had often threatened to kill him with the help of her two daughters. He also claimed that he had been a victim of physical as well as mental abuse.
‘Once I wanted to give one of my daughters a slap and she caused a huge commotion. She hurt my face and she hit me… My wife used to say terrible things to me, like, “You make me sick, you are nothing but a piece of shit.”… I told them once. I said, “Look, this family is sick, why not seek help?” And they said that I was the one that was making them sick. The fact is that I lived alone. My wife didn’t want to sleep with me. We did not have any sexual contact. So I had wet dreams at night. One day I called her over and I showed her the stained sheets and she just laughed at me.’
At his trial, Barreda claimed that he had been driven to an act of temporary insanity in the face of constant and systematic abuse. The judge didn’t buy it, however, and he was sentenced to a life of incarceration. He was asked to sign autographs while on trial, though, and received a warm welcome when he entered prison. And, incredible as it may sound, today Ricardo Barreda has become something of a national hero to many henpecked Latin American men.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BIZARRE BODY DISPOSAL
Body disposal at the hands of some of the most infamous killers of all time.
By utterly destroying a body, or concealing it in a place where it will never be found, many killers may have believed that they have committed the perfect murder: police are far less likely to launch an investigation if they don’t have a dead body to go on, and without a body the case is invariably categorised as a missing person’s inquiry. In their attempt to get away with murder, killers have subjected their victims’ bodies to every kind of indignity imaginable. They have buried them under the floorboards, stuffed them into freezers, thrown them from planes into oceans and crushed their bones into dust.
MURDER ON THE FARM: ROBERT PICKTON
Perhaps the most sickening way to keep a murder ‘bodiless’ was demonstrated recently by Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton. Pickton was found guilty in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder and is now serving a 25-year sentence without the possibility of parole. But Pickton, police suspect, could well be responsible for at least a further 40 disappearances.
Pickton preyed on prostitutes in the downtown eastside area of Vancouver, picking them up and bringing them back to his isolated farm in Port Coquitlam in British Colombia. There, after giving them alcohol and drugs, he strangled them. According to witness testimony at his trial, Pickton then skinned his victims on a meat hook, gutted them and then fed them to the pigs on his farm. What the pigs didn’t eat went into 45-gallon drums filled with industrial waste.
Witness for the prosecution Andrew Bellwood, who stayed on Pickton’s farm for six weeks, told jurors that Pickton had told him how he had strangled his victims and then disposed of their bodies. ‘He told me that he’d kill them and take them into the barn and bleed them and give them to the pigs,’ Mr Bellwood told sickened jurors at the killer’s trial.
When Pickton’s farm was searched in February 2002, investigators found human skulls and teeth in his freezer as well as human blood in the slaughterhouse and in the pig troughs. This led local health officials to issue a frantic warning to anyone who might have bought pork from the farmer, as the pigs could well have feasted on human remains. Luckily, though, the meat was never distributed commercially. That said, about 40 friends and neighbours of Pickton ate meat from the farm during barbecues, or were given some to take home with them to eat later.
Pickton was by no means the first killer to feed his victims to pigs. Joseph Brigand killed at least 12 homeless men and fed them to the prize-winning hogs on his California ranch. He was arrested and sent to San Quentin jail in 1902. And, as terrible as it may seem, other depraved killers in the past have shown absolutely no qualms at all about feeding their victims to animals.
Joe Ball, variously known as the ‘Bluebeard of Texas’, the ‘Butcher of Elmendorf’ and the ‘Alligator Man’, worked in a similar fashion. Born to an affluent family in Texas, Ball had money and a university degree but chose instead to spend much of his adult life bootlegging and gambling before finally opening a rowdy roadside bar called the Sociable Inn, which soon became a popular hotspot among the locals. Especially popular was the alligator pit that Ball built out back. There, he invited customers to watch as he fed the alligators live cats and dogs.
Things got really out of hand, though, once the bar doors were closed and he shut up shop for the night. Ball murdered an estimated 15 waitresses and then disposed of their bodies by feeding them, bit by bit, to his three pet alligators. If asked where his waitresses had suddenly gone, Ball would claim that they had upped sticks and gone to work elsewhere. Their relatives, though, were not convinced.
Police finally questioned Ball’s long-suffering handyman who confessed that at gunpoint he had been forced to help Ball get rid of two bodies and led the authorities to the remains of two ex-waitresses: Hazel Brown (she had been shot and then dismembered) and Minnie Gotthard (pregnant at the time, with Ball’s child). It later turned out that a neighbour, who had actually seen Ball feed one of the girls to his alligators, had been so terrified that he had fled to California and had never been seen since. In September 1938, as he was about to be arrested, Ball took a gun from a drawer in his bar and shot himself. The alligators were donated to the San Antonio zoo.
The most harrowing addition to this grisly category came only recently. In October 2007, an ex-convict was found guilty of feeding a five-year-old girl live to alligators. Harrel Franklin Braddy assaulted Shandelle Maycock, whom he had met through the local church, and choked her in a field in the Everglades. She survived the attack but Braddy, believing she was dead, drove off with Maycock’s daughter, Quatisha, who had witnessed the attack. He then left her to die in a swamp known as ‘Alligator Alley’.
Braddy was found guilty of first-degree murder and the jury voted 11 to 1 in favour of the death penalty. Circuit Judge Leonard Glick upheld the jury’s recommendation that Braddy should die by lethal injection. In his sentencing, he grimly summed up the deeds of the defendant: ‘The defendant caused this five-year-old to die, alone in the wilderness, and to be mutilated by monsters of the swamp,’ he said. ‘Adults are supposed to protect children from monsters. They are not supposed to be the monsters themselves.’
HOUSE WITH A HISTORY: DR SAMSON PERERA
In February 2004, while watching a crime documentary called Arrest and Trial on Channel Five, a couple realised with growing horror that the programme was actually about a gruesome murder that had been committed in their own house. The previous tenant had been dental biologist Dr Samson Perera, who had murdered his 13-year-old adopted daughter and then cut her into pieces. Police had found 105 pieces of flesh and bone secreted around the suburban home in Wakefield, Sheffield. Perera had hidden his victim’s remains under floorboards, in coffee pots and in the garden; a police search even revealed an entire human spine curled up at the bottom of a plant pot.
At the time of the murder, Perera had claimed that his daughter had gone home because she had been homesick and missed her native country of Sri Lanka. Bu
t, when police flew out there to meet with her birth family, they were able to confirm that she had never flown back home at all. Perera claimed that the body parts were pork before changing his story and telling police that they were in fact body parts from a cadaver he had brought back with him to experiment on at home. Police were able to prove that the parts they had found in his home did not belong to a cadaver from a lab and Perera was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 1986.
After watching the documentary, the couple immediately put the house on the market and sold it for a loss of £8,000. They then sued the previous owners for damages, though ultimately they lost their case in the Appeals Court. Lord Justice Peter Gibson summarised by saying that, while he sympathised with the couple’s case, he could not rule in their favour as the previous owners were under no legal obligation to inform the buyers about the house’s grisly past, even though he added, ‘There is the possibility parts of the victim’s body might still lie undiscovered in this house.’
LIVING WITH THE DEAD: DENNIS NILSEN
The most famous killer in this gruesome category has to be Dennis Nilsen, who disposed of his victims in his North London flat: 195 Melrose Avenue. Nilsen was reluctant to part with the bodies straight away. He would sometimes fetch them from beneath the floorboards, bath them, prop them up on his living-room sofa and talk to them or have sex with them.
When he was tired of the bodies, Nilsen, who had been a cook and a butcher while serving 11 years in the army, invariably dismembered his victims on the floor of his kitchen, boiled the heads of his victims in saucepans and then burned the bodies in bonfires at the end of the garden. He then dumped the internal organs in the rubbish or down the drains, or just over the fence for animals to eat. At the height of his killing spree, Nilsen had three bodies in his flat: one under the floorboards, another stuffed in a wardrobe and a third crammed in a cupboard under the kitchen sink.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 16
