In fact, Nilsen soon became convinced that if he moved home then it would stop him from killing – as getting rid of the bodies in his own home had just been too easy. Despite the frequent bonfires and terrible stink emanating from his house, his activities had not even raised the faintest of suspicions among his neighbours. Once he had moved to his new flat at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, he killed three more times before he managed to block the drains with the internal organs of his victims, which he had flushed down the toilet. When police searched his flat, they found the remains of three young men stashed in bin bags in cupboards throughout his home.
INFAMOUS ADDRESSES
Rather than dismembering their victims at home, many other infamous killers have simply stashed the bodies in their own house. John Wayne Gacy, convicted murderer of 33 men, would sometimes keep his victims for days, either under his bed or in the attic, before putting them in the crawlspace under his two-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of Chicago. Police found a total of 27 corpses hidden there and in their search for more bodies they destroyed the entire property, finding in the process a further two male victims buried in the concrete of his patio. Gacy invariably handcuffed his victims, sexually assaulted them and then strangled them, stuffing their mouths with socks or their own underwear to muffle their screams.
When serial killers are targeting drifters or picking up men or women at random, they can often get away with murder for years on end if they can stomach living in close proximity to the corpses of their victims. Theirs are invariably the addresses that we remember, such as 10 Rillington Place (Reginald Christie), 25 Cromwell Street (Fred and Rosemary West) or The Oxford Apartments (Jeffrey Dahmer).
A less-well-known killer with the same modus operandi was Frederick Bailey Deeming, who killed his entire family and then buried them under the floorboards in his living room in August 1891. Indeed, using a false name, Bailey had rented the house – in Rainhill, near Liverpool – expressly for that purpose. He waited until his family was asleep and then, having knocked his four children and wife, Marie, unconscious with the blunt end of an axe, he slit their throats.
After burying them under the floor, he left the house – indeed, he left the country, travelling to Australia, where he soon married 27-year-old Emily Mather. He then did exactly the same thing to her. Authorities were alerted to Mather’s body when the owner of the house noticed a strong smell coming from beneath the floorboards while showing a prospective tenant his property. A journalist in Liverpool traced Deeming’s previous home and, on learning that Deeming’s family had suddenly disappeared, persuaded the authorities to dig up the floorboards, uncovering the remains of his first wife and children. Deeming was caught and arrested in March 1892 in Perth, Australia, and was hanged two months later.
YOUR VERY OWN HELL HOLE
American serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett (known more commonly under the pseudonym HH Holmes) famously built his very own murder hotel in 1893, specifically designed so that he could entice, kill and then dispose of his victims all on the premises. Holmes started building the hotel in 1888 so that it would be ready for the Chicago World Fair, where he planned to lure young women to their deaths. The World Fair also provided him with cover, as he believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the women would not be missed among the millions of guests flocking to Chicago each day to attend the fair. He later confessed to 27 murders, but is suspected of killing at least 50 women.
Holmes designed the layout of the hotel himself, ensuring that not one contractor stayed on long enough to realise that they were actually building an enormous murder machine on a busy street corner in Chicago. So that builders were unaware of the wider context of the building, and to save money at the same time, Holmes simply refused to pay them, telling them that their work wasn’t up to scratch, and contracted new ones.
Holmes kept his apartment on the third floor, guests stayed on the second floor and on the first floor he built shops. Below that was a basement with a walk-in vault and ostensibly a kiln designed for producing sheet glass. But the kiln was actually a crematorium, where Holmes could turn a body into ash in a matter of minutes. Also in the basement, Holmes kept an acid vat in which police would later find eight human ribs, pits filled with quicklime and a bloodstained dissecting table.
Another killer to purposefully go about creating his very own hell hole was Gary Heidnik. Over a four-month period, beginning in November 1986, Heidnik kidnapped six women from the streets of Philadelphia and chained them to water pipes in his basement. There, he brutally raped and tortured them at his leisure. After weeks of abuse, his first captive, Sandra Lindsay, was handcuffed to a beam and left hanging there for days. When she died, Heidnik dragged her upstairs and dismembered her with a power saw. He then blended parts of her flesh in the blender and mixed it up with ‘Alpo’ brand dog food. He fed this hideous concoction to his dogs and then made his five remaining ‘slaves’ eat it too; he put the limbs in the freezer and labelled them ‘dog food’.
Heidnik was able to kill another of his ‘sex slaves’, Deborah Dudley, before he was finally arrested thanks to the resourcefulness of Josefina Rivera. Rivera, his second kidnap victim, managed to gain Heidnik’s confidence over a period of time, to the extent that he agreed to let her go as long as she promised to come back with a new ‘slave’. Once free, she told horrified police of her ordeal; they immediately went to his house and, on seeing the dungeon below, arrested him. Heidnik, an investment whiz who had made a small fortune on the stock market, went for an insanity plea during his trial to avoid the death sentence. The jury didn’t buy it, though, and Heidnik was sentenced to death on 3 July 1988. He was finally put to death 11 years later.
BODILESS MURDERS
When a killer manages to make a body disappear completely, the case is called a ‘Bodiless’ murder by police officials. These are notoriously tough cases to crack and investigators must be absolutely convinced that a crime has been committed before bringing any charges against a possible suspect. The problem is that there is always a very real possibility that the police have got it wrong and that the victim will later show up somewhere unscathed.
This happened quite recently in Queensland, Australia. In April 2003, Natasha Ryan, who was believed to have been abducted and murdered by a serial killer, was found to be alive and well and living in her boyfriend’s house just a few blocks from her parents’ home. She had been hiding there for almost five years and had failed to appear even when her family had held a memorial service in her honour. Ryan, who was 14 when she had disappeared, had run off to go and live with her boyfriend, who was eight years her senior and, afraid that her parents would disapprove of the relationship, had remained in hiding ever since. She was found halfway through her supposed ‘murderer’s’ trial after an anonymous tip-off.
But often foul play is most certainly involved and thankfully police don’t need a body to secure a murder conviction. The first successful conviction in a ‘bodiless’ murder case in the UK was that of James Camb. Camb murdered Eileen Isabella Ronnie Gibson on 18 October 1947 onboard a ship, and then stuffed her body out of a porthole and into the ocean. Camb claimed that Gibson had suddenly died during sex and that he had thrown the body overboard in a panic. However, scratches on his arm as well as traces of blood and urine on Gibson’s bed pointed to an attempted rape, during which Camb had strangled Gibson to death. It took the jury 40 minutes to find Gibson guilty of first-degree murder.
All the same, without a body, justice can be a long time in coming for killers who manage by their own ingenuity to make a body disappear. Plastic surgeon Dr Robert Bierenbaum managed to get away with murder for almost 15 years because there was no body to serve as evidence of his crime.
According to Bierenbaum, on 7 July 1985, his wife had walked out of their Manhattan apartment after a violent argument and had never come back. Neighbours later testified that the couple often argued; as police dug further, they discovered that the couple’s marriage was on e
xtremely rocky ground and had been for some time. Not only had Gail Bierenbaum been seeing several other men behind her husband’s back, she had also been planning to leave him for many months. There were even some bizarre reports (which were never actually confirmed) that Dr Bierenbaum had at one point attempted to flush his wife’s cat down the toilet because he was jealous of the attention she paid it and had started choking his wife just because he had caught her smoking a cigarette.
Police suspicions were aroused almost immediately because on the day Gail Bierenbaum had gone missing her husband, a qualified pilot, had taken a two-hour flight in a rented Cessna 172 aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean – something he had failed to tell police about when first questioned. He had also tried to alter the flight log. Police believed that his wife had never left the apartment at all – or, at least, not alive. Instead, during the argument he had choked her to death. He had then dismembered her body, put it in a large duffel bag and dumped it into the sea.
Because the body had never been recovered, Dr Robert Bierenbaum remained a free man for the next 15 years, during which time he started a new family and began a successful plastic surgery practice in Las Vegas and North Dakota. However, the prosecution team was able to convince the court that Gail Bierenbaum had no reason to kill herself or simply make herself vanish off the face of the earth. They were also able to prove that her husband had a motive and the opportunity to kill his wife and dispose of the body. In October 2000, Dr Robert Bierenbaum was finally found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in jail.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BLOODY PACKAGES
Be careful before opening that slightly damp package delivered unexpectedly on your doorstep. You might be in for a very nasty surprise.
Confronted with the problem of how to remove a whole body from a house without alerting the neighbours, many killers in the past have taken the corpse piecemeal through the front door and then disposed of it all over town. For the person who has the bad luck to actually come across one of these packages, it can be a very traumatic and nasty surprise; what’s more, it can often prove an almost impossible task for the police to identify the body.
Perhaps the most infamous bloody parcel case in the UK is that of the Brighton Trunk Murder, which for a while earned Brighton the name ‘The Queen of Slaughtering Places’ – a twist on its much older nickname, ‘The Queen of Watering Places’.
On 17 June 1934, a stationmaster noticed a bad smell coming from a trunk at Brighton railway station; when he opened it, he found the torso of a woman wrapped in brown paper. Other train stations were alerted and three days later police found another foul-smelling parcel, this one wrapped inside a suitcase at King’s Cross station. The case contained the body’s legs and feet, but the head and arms were never located. All police were able to discover was that the body belonged to a pregnant woman of around 25 years of age.
This wasn’t the first time that a body had been put in a trunk and left at a London train station, though. On 6 May 1927, retired army sergeant John Robinson murdered prostitute Minnie Bonati, dismembered her body, wrapped it into five parcels and put the body in a large black trunk. He then hailed a cab and deposited the trunk at Charing Cross station at the left luggage office.
Two days later, an attendant noticed a strong smell coming from the trunk and alerted Scotland Yard. Because the trunk had been so heavy, Robinson had enlisted the help of a taxi driver to help him carry it to his taxi and the driver had remembered picking him up and taking him to Charing Cross station. Robinson immediately confessed when he was picked up by policemen. ‘I want to tell you all about it,’ he told them. ‘I done it and cut her up.’
Robinson was hanged at Pentonville jail on 12 August 1927.
Both of these cases are quite well known. A far less familiar case (in fact, this is the first account of it ever to appear in English) is the story of the Barrancas Ripper, who only killed one woman, but still managed to cause a city-wide panic when he left a number of neatly wrapped parcels filled with his handiwork all over Buenos Aires in the very hot summer of 1955.
The first person unlucky enough to spot one of his parcels was priest Juan Andrés Smolen, who saw a large, rather oddly shaped package in a ditch as he was leaving a train station. Something about the parcel bothered him, though he was never able to say exactly why. It looked like… well, just to be sure he went back to the station, found a policeman and asked him to come with him and have a closer look. When the policeman bent over and undid the string he immediately recoiled: inside the parcel, and carefully wrapped up in brown paper, was a woman’s torso.
Six days later, a housewife was on her way to the park with her two children when she spotted a parcel that had been dumped in a ditch at the side of the road. She immediately covered her children’s eyes and told them to look the other way while she went running for help; she was sure she had seen what appeared to be a foot sticking out of the paper wrapping. Again, the foot had been quite carefully wrapped up in brown paper and lying next to it police found a human thigh.
That same afternoon, a sailor on guard duty in Buenos Aires harbour heard a scream from a member of a ship’s crew. When he rushed over, he saw that the crewman was pointing wildly at the water. There, among a pile of newspapers, was a human hand. When police went out to have a closer look, they found a thigh as well as a bundle of papers containing a hand, two arms and a severed human head.
The Argentine press had a field day. The body had been cut up with a pretty steady hand, it seemed, and quite expertly too. At the same time, every single scrap of clothing had been removed, along with the woman’s fingertips, making it impossible to identify the body. The press postulated wildly that they were dealing with a mad surgeon or perhaps a butcher and were soon making comparisons between the recent discoveries and the past activities of Jack the Ripper. More bodies, the press hinted, were imminent.
By February 1955, no less than a hundred police officers were working full-time on the case and trying to identify the body. The problem was, they had next to nothing to go on. All police were actually able to say for sure was that the torso belonged to a woman in her early twenties and the only real lead they had was a very recent surgical scar just below her collarbone.
Acting on the only lead they had, detectives sent photos of the scar to every hospital in Buenos Aires in the hope that a local surgeon might recognise his own handiwork. The scar was fresh, so the operation was recent. Perhaps they might get lucky. To begin with, nobody came forward. Indeed, it soon began to seem so hopeless that a district judge decided to try a very different tack altogether and ordered that the head be put on display at the local morgue. That way, all of those who had reported missing female relatives could go and try to identify it.
On 1 March, the morgue doors opened. Thirty-nine women and 11 men waited grimly to see the head. Nobody recognised it. Then, on the second day, police finally got the break that they needed. A surgeon had finally recognised the scar on the back of the torso as bearing his handiwork and remembered that he had performed an operation of that type only recently. The woman, he remembered, had been hit by a truck. She had been lucky, though, and only suffered a fractured collarbone.
From hospital records, police were able to obtain the exact date of the operation and the name of the woman. The surgeon was then shown photos of the woman’s head, to see if he recognised her. He did. The woman he had performed the operation on was called Alcira Methyger. She had been 28 years old, worked as a maid and lived in Buenos Aires.
Police immediately went to talk with her employers, a wealthy family who lived on Chacabuco Street in the capital. They told them that after her accident Methyger had spent the summer working for the family in their holiday home in the coastal resort town of Mar del Plata, but during that time she had received numerous telegrams from one of her many suitors, a 38-year-old travelling salesman called Jorge Burgos. Just before the summer was about to end, Methyger announced to her emplo
yers that she was quitting for good and that she was leaving for Buenos Aires on the next train. They hadn’t heard from her since.
Next, police went to talk to Alcira’s sister. Had she seen Alcira since she had got back to Buenos Aires? Her sister said that she had not. She did know, though, that Alcira had left her job and that she had come back to Buenos Aires to see Burgos, but she had not seen her or talked to her since then. When she had gone looking for her in Buenos Aires at Burgos’s apartment, where Alcira told her she would be staying, Burgos had told her that Alcira had won a considerable sum of money on the roulette wheel while in Mar del Plata. She had used the money, he had told her, to buy a bus ticket north to the city of Cordoba, where she planned to settle down.
By this time, police were convinced that Burgos was their man and on 2 March they went to arrest him at his home. But Burgos had just taken the train to Mar del Plata, where he apparently had some important business to attend to, and his family didn’t know when he would return. A patrol car raced out of the city and managed to get to the next station just in time to intercept the train en route as it approached Mar del Plata. They found Burgos sitting alone in a cabin and when they searched him they found that he was carrying Methyger’s diary, along with a few scraps of her clothing. He immediately confessed to the crime. In fact, as one of the detectives in the case later recalled, he seemed relieved that it was all over.
Burgos was from a middle-class family and lived with his parents and younger sister in an affluent neighbourhood called Barrancas in Buenos Aires (hence the popular nickname for the crime). Apparently, he spent much of his free time reading detective novels. He had graduated from high school, had studied several languages, was proficient in English and French and had been a well-behaved student. One policeman later remembered the moment that Burgos had been brought into the station for questioning. Every policeman in the station came to have a good look at the ‘Butcher of Barrancas’, one of the most famous murderers in Argentina’s history: ‘He was sitting there trembling like a little boy with his eyes shut and his teeth shut tight together,’ the policeman later recalled. ‘I was sent to keep watch over him as the police were afraid that he might kill himself. Police from all over came over to catch a glimpse of this curious example of a caged man. I suddenly felt sorry for him. He touched my arm lightly. A tear ran down his cheek. Burgos whispered to me, “Mum and Dad… they were so happy. Look now. What a mess.”’
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 17
