The World's Most Bizarre Murders

by James Marrison

  But why? Who was Ford really working for and what was he afraid of? Even seven years after his death, many parts of Larry Ford’s story still simply don’t add up. Ford often claimed that he had been part of the CIA’s bio-warfare research programme, but recent evidence has emerged of several trips that he made to South Africa in the 1980s, suggesting that he met the controversial Wouter Basson from South Africa. (See number four below.)

  In fact, soon after his suicide, South African military officials confirmed that Ford had worked from time to time as an ‘informal consultant’, providing advice on how their personnel could protect themselves from a biological attack. Some newspaper sources in South Africa, though, have since claimed that Ford was deeply involved in ‘Project Coast’, the apartheid government’s plan to eliminate all opposition via biological warfare.

  SIX

  Dr Sidney Gottlieb

  During the Korean War, Director of the CIA Allen Dulles had heard several reports of mind-control techniques being successfully used on American prisoners of war. According to one of the reports, the Czechs, under Russian orders, had built a hospital in North Korea in which they had housed a hundred prisoners of war and brainwashed them via the use of mind-control drugs. It suggested disturbing possibilities.

  Could Soviet scientists really erase someone’s memory and reprogramme them to kill on command? And, if so, was it possible that in the future communist scientists would be able to manufacture a drug that could make entire populations susceptible to their will? It seemed to Director Dulles that American progress in this field was woefully and dangerously inadequate. In order to catch up with the Soviets, he created a mind-control research programme called Project MKULTRA and put it under the leadership of talented chemist Sidney Gottleib, then head of the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff.

  Gottlieb was actually very skilled in the use of poisons and had in the past come up with a great many suggestions for getting rid of Cuban premier Fidel Castro, including contaminating his shoes with thallium so that his beard fell out and poisoning his cigars. During his career, Gottlieb once sent a lethal handkerchief to an Iraqi colonel in the post and in 1960 personally delivered a deadly bio-toxin in a tube of toothpaste to a CIA agent in Leopoldville in the Congo, to be used in an attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lamumba. But as head of MKULTRA, Gottleib was interested in one thing in particular and that was the possible uses of LSD, which had been discovered by accident in 1943 in Switzerland.

  While universities, hospitals, prisons and military bases took CIA money in the search for a way to break down the subconscious mind completely, Gottlieb focused on the effects of LSD on unsuspecting American citizens. In order to study its effects, Gottlieb tested it on himself and his unwitting associates in the CIA. Then, in 1953, he started using it out in the field, leaving in his wake a long trail of permanently ill patients and one suicide. The latter was Frank Olsen, a member of the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division and an expert in biological warfare. Gottlieb spiked Olsen’s Cointreau with LSD during a conference in November 1953 and then asked him how he felt. Olsen became gripped by depression and increasing paranoia over the next few days and jumped from the tenth floor of a hotel just a week later. (It is worth noting here that some historians argue it was not suicide at all and that Olsen was in fact murdered because he was about to blow the whistle on elements of the CIA’s bio-warfare programme.)

  What is known for sure is that, under Gottlieb’s orders, agents drugged homeless vagrants, mentally unbalanced individuals, drug addicts and criminals, and also dished the acid out to hookers and their clients in three CIA-sponsored brothels. They also sprayed LSD from canisters, disguised as insect repellent and deodorant, in public places such as bars and restaurants. As part of ‘Operation Midnight Climax’, hookers were also paid $100 to slip LSD Mickey Finns and then have sex with unsuspecting customers, while CIA operatives watched through one-way mirrors.

  The activities of MKULTRA remained classified until 1974, when the press finally began to report that the CIA had experimented on American citizens as test subjects. By this time it had had become painfully obvious to the CIA that none of the mind-control techniques actually worked anyway; on the recommendation of the Inspector General’s office, MKULTRA had scaled back its operations in the early 1960s, then terminated them altogether.

  Sidney Gottlieb was called before the Congressional Committee, where he confirmed that the CIA under MKULTRA had illegally drugged at least 40 American citizens without their knowledge. The true scale of MKULTRA’s activities will remain a secret, though, as many of the documents related to it were destroyed by Gottlieb himself in 1972, under orders from then CIA Director Richard Helms.

  FIVE

  Dr Ewen Cameron

  For 21 years, Scottish-born neurologist Ewen Cameron headed the Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute in Montreal, Quebec. Highly ambitious and hungry for a Nobel Prize, Cameron was ostensibly searching for a cure to schizophrenia. But in his search for a cure, he created something called ‘psychic driving’, one of the most hideous psychological techniques ever devised.

  Convinced that there had to be a way to utterly break down a person’s mind and then reprogramme it, over nine years Cameron zapped his unsuspecting patients (the majority of whom had come in for minor psychological disorders) with unprecedented, bone-breaking levels of electricity and then combined it with injections of LSD as well as the occasional lobotomy. Having been subjected to this horrific psychological technique, the vast majority of the 500 or so patients who survive today remain in permanent care.

  In his attempt to establish ‘lasting effects in a patient’s behaviour’, between sessions Cameron placed his human guinea pigs in the notorious ‘sleep room’, where they were drugged with Thorazine and Seconal. There they were made to sleep – in some cases, for up to 85 days in a row. When they awoke, they could hardly walk, frequently soiled themselves and had to be spoon-fed. Their earliest memory was invariably walking through the doors of the clinic.

  Psychic diving soon reached the attention of Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA, because if it worked it could prove very handy for manipulating foreign leaders. Starting in 1959, the CIA under MKULTRA secretly donated $69,000 a year to Cameron’s clinic, to take research beyond memory loss. In order to create desired character traits, once patients’ minds had become ‘depatterned’ speakers were placed under their pillows or football helmets with speakers attached to them were strapped to their heads. A fragment of their therapy session was then replayed for up to 22 hours a day, six days a week. Simply unable to stand it any more, many patients lost their minds completely.

  And it didn’t even work. After one test, Cameron noted grimly, ‘Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favourable results were obtained.’

  FOUR

  Dr Wouter Basson

  South African cardiologist Dr Wouter Basson headed ‘Project Coast’ – apartheid South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare programme – for ten years. After the fall of the apartheid regime, Basson stood trial for 46 charges of murder, conspiracy and drug trafficking. In court, he was accused of spearheading research into a whole array of weird ‘smart’ poisons and viruses that were aimed specifically at the black population. These included a beer poisonous to blacks only and a toxin that would make black women infertile. At the trial, it was alleged that chemists from his lab, Roodeplaat Laboratories, also produced cigarettes laced with anthrax and bottles of whisky spiked with paraoxon and even devised a scheme to poison pornographic magazines and leave them lying around enemy barracks.

  Basson was also accused of being involved in several assassination attempts on anti-apartheid leaders. These included, in once case, placing a lethal nerve poison in an activist’s underwear. According to one witness, he also supplied drugs used to knock out about 200 Marxist guerrillas
in neighbouring Namibia. Once unconscious – so the allegations went – they were hurled into the ocean from an aeroplane. The same witness claimed that Basson had once ordered that three prisoners be chained in a secluded wood and then smothered with an experimental toxic substance and left to die.

  However, in 2002 Basson was declared innocent of all charges against him by the South African Supreme Court and cleared. After his trial, Basson reiterated his innocence, claiming, ‘I did many things, but not one of them was illegal and not one of them led to the death or bodily harm of a single person… The US and Britain do all these things on a daily basis. Whatever we did is peanuts by comparison.’

  Three years later, however, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that he should face trial on charges of crimes against humanity after the State argued that the judge who had presided over the original trial, Judge Willie Hartzenberg, was biased and had refused to listen to the testimony of many key witnesses. For the moment, though, Basson is a free man and runs a cardiology practice in Cape Town and Pretoria.

  THREE

  Dr Theodore Kaczynski

  Kaczynski had a genius IQ, was fast-tracked to Harvard when he was only 16 and had shown outstanding brilliance during his post-graduate studies, where he specialised in geometric function theory. He was soon offered a teaching post at the prestigious Berkeley Faculty of Maths, but after becoming increasingly withdrawn and isolated from staff and students, Kaczynski abruptly quit in 1969 and went to live the life of a hermit in a one-room plywood shack in the wilds of Montana. The hut, which cost just over $2,000, had no running water and no electricity and Kaczynski lived off a small allowance provided for him by his parents along with the money he earned from odd jobs. After living there for some time, he had become adept at hunting, identifying edible herbs and vegetables and was in the end living off less than $400 a month.

  It was while he was living in his shack that he wrote his 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto and started building homemade bombs.

  Kaczynski had a pathological hatred of technology. With a severely warped logic – he thought that through his actions we would all be able to live happier lives, closer to nature. Kaczynski therefore targeted scientists and technology professionals during an 18-year-long reign of terror, leaving three individuals dead and 23 others maimed. He mixed his own powders and made most of the components painstakingly by hand, including the trigger mechanisms. By using everyday household materials such as wood, string and nails, and then filing away any telltale marks, his devices were impossible to trace. His precision-made bombs were packed with razor blades, metal shards and nails and were designed to withstand heavy handling; they were triggered, in most cases by opening a sealed package, lifting a lever or, in one case in 1985, opening a three-ring binder.

  In 1995, Kaczynski demanded that the New York Times, the Washington Post and Penthouse magazine print a manifesto he had drawn up, promising to stop his activities if they did so. When Kaczynski’s brother recognised some of the ramblings in the writing, he reported his suspicions to the police and Kaczynski was finally traced. When police investigated his shack, they discovered a sophisticated, ready-to-go letter bomb.

  While awaiting trial, Kaczynski was examined by a psychologist, who diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic but ruled that he was competent to stand trial. Kaczynski claims that his murders were essentially political in nature, as outlined in his manifesto, but he also kept a journal between 1969 and 1996 that points to a different story altogether. Unfortunately, the whole content of the journal has not been made public and only snippets have been released to the press as part of the psychological assessment.

  Of what is known from Kaczynski’s journals, his motivations were not political at all but revenge for being ostracised and hated at school and at university and also for being ignored by women – all of which makes him not that different to the majority of serial killers. In his journal, Kaczynski remembers the ‘gradual increasing amount of hostility I had to face from the other kids. By the time I left high school I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body.’ In 1971, before he started killing people, he wrote, ‘My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge.’

  In January 1998, two weeks after an attempted suicide in his cell, Kaczynski declared that he was the Unabomber, as part of a plea-bargain agreement with state prosecutors. The agreement allowed Kaczynski to avoid death by lethal injection in return for life without the possibility of parole. The judge sentenced him to four life sentences, to run consecutively, plus a further 30 years in jail, stating that: ‘The defendant committed unspeakable and monstrous crimes for which he shows utterly no remorse.’

  TWO

  Dr Josef Mengele

  Josef Mengele graduated in medicine from the University of Munich and went on to earn further degrees from universities in Bonn, Vienna and Frankfurt – where he studied genetics and anthropology. Of particular interest to Mengele were the theories of eugenicist Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. Verschuer’s hypothesis that the Nordic race had to be protected from weaker genetic influences had found favour with Adolf Hitler, who had ordered the sterilisation of the mentally ill in 1934 and one year later prohibited unions between Aryans and Jews as well the ‘eugenically’ unfit.

  The theory that the Nordic race was genetically superior to other races also fitted in perfectly with Mengele’s ideas of German racial superiority; he had been a fervent Nazi supporter since its beginnings, a member of the Nazi Party since 1936 and a member of the SS since 1937. The outbreak of war, however, put a temporary stop to Mengele’s academic ambitions and he spent the next three years with the Waffen SS seeing active service on the Russian front, during which time he had shown quite considerable bravery in the face of enemy fire and earned four medals.

  Injured and removed from the front, Mengele seemed quite happy with his new post at Auschwitz, which gave him the opportunity to continue with his research. He became obsessed with unlocking the genetic cause for the birth of twins: it was his belief that, if German mothers could give birth to twins, then the Third Reich would soon be populated with perfect Aryan specimens. As the trains rolled into Auschwitz, Mengele was guaranteed an endless supply of live subjects for his bizarre and brutal genetic experiments; he became the arbiter of life or death there.

  Separated from their parents and housed in special barracks (nicknamed ‘The Zoo’), twins selected for his work would receive sweets and special treatment before they were experimented on and then murdered. In attempting to create the Aryan look, Mengele injected their eyes with blue dye, causing severe pain and in some cases blindness. (Mengele had his own collection of human eyeballs, which he pinned to the wall of his office.) He also amputated limbs without anaesthetic, carried out castrations, induced incestuous pregnancies and injected patients with infectious diseases, each time meticulously noting the results. In one case he even sewed the veins of two twins together in order to create Siamese twins, and, when a one-year-old triplet fell into Mengele’s hands, he had the child cut open and autopsied while still alive.

  In all, 800 pairs of twins died a hideous death under his supervision. In addition to these unspeakable crimes, Mengele also had a sideline in dwarves and hunchbacks. After studying them, he boiled the flesh off their bones and sent them express delivery to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.

  Mengele, of course, was not the only Nazi involved in research of this kind. In all, it is estimated that the Nazi scientists murdered more than 7000 men, women and children in the course of their research. They froze their prisoners to death, gave them malaria, infected them with mustard gas, streptococcus, gas, gangrene and tetanus and secretly poisoned their food, all the while calmly noting down the results in their notebooks. Mengele’s experiments, however, remain some of the most bizarre and cruel.

  Like many Nazi mass murderers, Mengele managed to escape justice.
In 1949, using the name Helmut Gregor, he arrived in Argentina and stayed there for ten years before moving to Paraguay just before the Israeli secret service, Mossad, came to Buenos Aires and kidnapped fellow murderer Adolf Eichmann (who was tried and promptly hanged). After a very short stint in Paraguay, Mengele moved to Brazil and died there at the age of 73; he was pulled out of the sea just outside Sao Paulo. It was the height of summer and, after reminiscing about his native Germany, he had gone in to cool off. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.

  ONE

  Dr Ishii Shiro

  Brilliant army physician Ishii Shiro first shot to fame after inventing a water filter that helped bring about the end of an outbreak of meningitis in the Japanese province of Shikoku. When appearing before Emperor Hirohito to show off his new invention, Shiro urinated in it and then kindly offered it to the Emperor to drink – an offer the Emperor politely declined. So Shiro drank it himself.

  A notorious boozer, Shiro spent much of his free time chasing whores around the local geisha houses but he was ambitious, short-tempered and ruthless, and had shot through the ranks to become a major. He was also convinced that biological warfare was the way to defend and further spread the glory of the Japanese Empire and soon became the country’s foremost bacteriologist. As such, he was given the task of building and overseeing a series of secret research facilities designed to develop biological weapons.

  In order to test his pet plagues, Shiro needed human guinea pigs and during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and World War II he had access to no end of live subjects on which to experiment. As the majority died within two weeks, troops were regularly sent out to the nearest occupied village to restock. In fact, the 3,000 men under his supervision, known collectively as Unit 731, experimented on and killed 10,000 prisoners in territories it occupied during the war – mainly in its 6 sq. km facility in Pingfan, Manchuria.