Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers)

by Rodney Castleden

  In 1993 another Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, refused to refer the Bridgewater case back to the Court of Appeal. In 1994, the High Court ordered Michael Howard to release the documents considered by his predecessor in order to see the evidence on which an appeal had been turned down. The High Court took the view that vital evidence had been ignored, evidence that could lead to the convictions being overturned. Gradually public concern over the unsafe – and probably unjust – convictions grew.

  The police had clearly ignored key forensic evidence found at the crime scene: an unaccounted-for set of fingerprints found on Carl Bridgewater’s bicycle. The murderer had picked the bicycle up and thrown it into a nearby waste silo. This crucial new evidence should have led to a new trial, but the Home Secretary decided not to send the case back. Eventually in 1996 he gave way and the case was referred back.

  Further new evidence emerged that the discredited police officer who had taken Molloy’s statement, together with another officer, had fabricated and forged a confession from Vincent Hickey, which they had then used to force the confession from Molloy. No fingerprints were found, other than the fingerprints on the bicycle, and not even those were produced. No murder weapon was ever found. The only evidence to support the convictions were the statements that were produced by forgery, deception, bullying and – there is no other word for it – torture. Molloy was subjected to days of violent interrogation during which his teeth were broken and was repeatedly hit in the face and round the head. He was given food that had been heavily salted and denied liquids; in desperation, he had had to drink from a toilet. He was kept away from a lawyer for ten days; once he had access to a lawyer, he retracted the ‘confession’ extorted under duress. Molloy said that he had not made the confession at all. The discredited police officer had dictated the confession while the other officer wrote it down; Molloy had been in a state of physical and psychological trauma after days of maltreatment when he signed. On this evidence, the Court of Appeal immediately overturned the verdict; the forensic evidence, statements and admissions on which the first trial had been based were seriously contaminated.

  Michael Hickey, Vincent Hickey and James Robinson had been in prison for eighteen years before their convictions were overturned. Patrick Molloy died in prison. The real house-breaker at Yew Tree Farm – the real murderer of Carl Bridgewater – has never been brought to justice.

  Michael Helgos and JonBenet

  ‘the Boulder City Pageant Queen’

  It was on Christmas night in 1996 that a couple in Boulder City found that their daughter was missing from her bedroom. John and Patsy Ramsey were frantic when they found a hand-written ransom note left for them on the stairs. It began, ‘Mr Ramsey, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We do respect your business but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our possession . . . You will draw $118,000 from your account . . .’

  Minutes later Patsy Ramsey called the police, who arrived within a few minutes. From the beginning the police suspected that the Ramseys themselves were responsible for the disappearance of JonBenet Ramesy. Their suspicions were confirmed when they asked John Ramsey to search the house and he found his daughter’s body in a small cellar. By the time the little girl’s body was removed from the house a few hours later, the Boulder Police had made up their minds about the Ramseys’ guilt. Almost immediately there was a leak from the police to the local media of a few ‘facts’ about the case, including the ‘fact’ that there was no evidence of a break-in and no possibility that anyone outside the house could have got in. This disinformation was clearly aimed against the Ramseys and intended to signal to the people of Boulder that the Ramseys must be guilty. Another leak to the press involved the discovery of child pornography and evidence of child sex abuse at the Ramsey house. Another leak included the idea that Patsy had killed her daughter in a fit of temper over JonBenet’s bedwetting and concocted the kidnap story to avoid detection.

  A police interrogation tape shows a policeman outlining the police hypothesis. Patsy listens, shaking her head in anger and disbelief and saying very emphatically, ‘You’re on the wrong path, buddy’. The police officer tells her there is ‘trace evidence, scientific evidence’ connecting Patsy to the murder. This infuriates Patsy, who knows perfectly well that this cannot possibly be true, because she knows she didn’t commit the murder. She tells the officer that her daughter was the most precious thing she had and that her life has been hell ever since she died. She erupts: ‘Quit screwing around asking me questions and find the person who did this!’

  The police were implacable. A move was made to indict the Ramseys, but the indictment was dropped because it was found that the case did not hold up. Much of the alleged evidence was spurious and untrue. There was, for instance, no evidence whatever of child pornography or child abuse at the Ramsey house. Police photos taken on the day of the crime showed clear evidence of a break-in at the cellar window. The post mortem evidence showed that JonBenet was not killed by a single blow to the head, which was necessary to fit the police hypothesis, but had a died a more complicated and tortured death. She had been immobilized with a stun gun, sexually assaulted, strangled, and finally hit over the head. That did not fit the case the police had been trying to build against Mrs Ramsey. So the indictment had to be dropped ‘for lack of evidence’.

  In fact, as far as the Ramseys were concerned, they had been found guilty and condemned by the leaks and the consequent media frenzy. As far as the people of Boulder were concerned, the Ramseys were guilty. The unfortunate couple and their eleven year old son had their lives totally wrecked. Not only had they lost JonBenet, a pretty little girl who had won beauty contests, they now stood to lose everything else too.

  But a few people continued to have faith in the Ramseys. A television documentary drew attention to the evidence from the crime scene pointing clearly to a break-in, and suggested that the abductors may indeed have intended to take the child outside through the window where they broke in, but for some reason decided not to abduct her but to kill her there. The ransom note certainly implies a change of mind – or perhaps that more than one person was involved in the attack and the two (or more) men had different motives. The documentary led to a new investigation co-ordinated through the District Attorney’s office, though on limited funds.

  The new investigators were concerned that there were several other suspects who had not been pursued by the police in 1996, simply because they had decided the Ramseys were guilty. There had been no routine house-to-house search of the neighbourhood, for the same reason. There had been two men living close by, both with criminal records, who moved away straight after the murder; there were also two paedophiles in the area who were not checked out. The police had decided on John and Patsy Ramsey, but there was plenty of evidence pointing elsewhere.

  There were two small spots of blood on JonBenet’s clothing. One of the bloodspots contained her DNA, but also traces of some DNA belonging to someone else. There was similar ‘alien’ DNA under one of her fingernails. The ‘alien’ DNA was not Patsy Ramsey’s or John Ramsey’s, but someone else’s. The DNA from the second blood spot was from the same stranger, a white male. These blood samples were available in 1996 but the implications were not followed through. The investigators tried to match the stranger’s DNA through the US national DNA database, but there was a strong possibility that the killer was a first offender, or at any rate had never been caught.

  The investigators found a dozen new suspects, and one of those became the prime suspect. The investigators gave a press conference in which they gave the impression that they now knew who they were looking for and that the net was closing in on him. They hoped that this pressure might push the suspect into coming out into the open. It had an immediate and melodramatic effect that they could not have foreseen.

  John Kennedy, a mechanic living in Boulder, went to the police to tell them that he thought he knew th
e killer. It was a man called Michael Helgos, who had committed suicide the day after the press conference. Kennedy thought the timing of Helgos’s suicide was significant. He also knew that Helgos was a bizarre, deranged, violent man who took pleasure from shooting cats and speculated what it would be like to crack a human skull. Michael Helgos had also said in the period just before the murder that he was going to make a lot of money, which could have been a reference to the ransom he was hoping to get from the Ramseys.

  In fact, shortly after the murder, the police had been informed about Helgos. Home videos were found showing him playing with a very young girl. A neighbour had returned home to find him naked with her daughter. He had a video collection containing some very violent scenes, but it also included a Disney film in which a very young girl is shown being woken up by Santa Claus; was this a scenario Helgos wanted to re-enact, and the mainspring of the decision to wake little JonBenet up on Christmas night?

  Helgos had several stun guns, one of which was of the type used on JonBenet. Two footprints were found in the Ramsey house. One was a HITEC trainer. Helgos owned a matching pair.

  But there were peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Helgos too. The fatal shot was fired through a pillow. Why would Helgos have wanted to muffle the shot? It would not have mattered to him, when dead, whether anyone heard the shot. But perhaps it was not suicide at all; perhaps someone else shot Helgos. The bullet passed through his chest from left to right, which is a very odd wound for a right-handed man to inflict on himself, especially given that most people committing suicide with a gun shoot themselves in the head. Given that the ransom note mentions ‘we’ and there were two different footprints in the Ramsey house, it begins to look as if two people were involved in the killing. Michael Helgos was one. Who was the other? Was Helgos sufficiently unnerved after the press conference for his associate to fear that he would give them both away and could not afford to let him live? It begins to look that way.

  The associate’s name is known to the investigators (though not to me!) and they even know where he lives.

  As Patsy Ramsey feared, the man or men who attacked her daughter went on to attack again. In an affluent part of Boulder, nine months after the Ramsey murder, a girl of about the same age as JonBenet and who even went to the same dance studio as JonBenet was attacked in her own home. Her parents found an intruder in the house who presumably got in while they were out. The parents went to bed, and then some time later the intruder went into the little girl’s room, put his hand over her mouth, called her by her name and sexually assaulted her. Luckily the mother was a light sleeper and woke up, sensing something was wrong. She went into her daughter’s room and saw the intruder, who ran past her and jumped out of the window and off the roof to get away. He was dressed completely in black. Michael Helgos is known to have liked dressing completely in black and stalking people at night. This attack is very likely indeed to be linked to the Ramsey case, though the Boulder police denied any connection. The later investigators discovered that although the second attack was known, in full detail, to the police, they had taken no action on it.

  The case seems to be tantalizingly close to a conclusion. One of the major suspects, Michael Helgos, is dead, probably killed by his even more dangerous associate. David Williams, one of the detectives involved, says the killer could be taken into custody. They have his DNA. ‘It’s a travesty that it isn’t happening.’ It would take perhaps six detectives six months to solve the crime. But the District Attorney’s office does not have unlimited funds and the case may have to be closed before the final solution is reached.

  Meanwhile, the Ramsey family have had to endure the horrible bereavement inflicted on them by total strangers, the loss of JonBenet; they have also had to endure a painful hostile interrogation by the authorities; they have been vilified in the press; they have been assumed to be guilty by their neighbours. They have been forced to move away and make a new home for themselves – in Charlevoix in Michigan – where they live in poverty. Their lives have been destroyed.

  Francisco Arce Montes

  and the French youth hostel murder

  In the summer of 1996, a party of forty students and five teachers from Launceston College in Cornwall stayed at a youth hostel in the village of Pleine-Fougères in Brittany. One night, 17 August, the teachers ordered lights out towards midnight and, some time in the small hours of the following morning, an intruder entered the building, probably through a door that had been left unlocked.

  He crept upstairs to the girls’ dormitory and picked Caroline Dickinson, apparently at random. He put his hand over her mouth, raped her and suffocated her with a pad of cotton wool to stop her from making any noise. None of her friends woke up fully to witness what happened, though some remembered half-waking to hear groaning, which they took little notice of assuming it was one of the girls having a dream.

  Caroline’s death was only discovered at 8 o’clock, when one of her friends tried to wake her and found she was cold. Teachers were called, and they frantically tried to revive her. Ambulance workers were called, but she was already dead, and had been dead for hours.

  By the time the death was discovered, the murderer had escaped. He may by that time have been many miles away. The French put fifty police on the case, and showed a real determination to solve the case quickly. It seemed to pay off because within days they had a result. A convicted rapist called Patrice Pade confessed to killing Caroline and the hunt was over. The examining magistrate, Gerard Zaug, was convinced that Patrice Pade, a vagrant in his forties with a long history of rape and violence towards women, was the killer. Zaug held a new conference in which he identified the killer.

  A week later, the results of the DNA tests on traces of semen found on Caroline’s body emerged, and they decisively proved that Pade was not the killer. The examining magistrate had got it wrong, but he did back down immediately. For one thing, Pade’s description of the interior of the youth hostel was so accurate that Zaug was convinced he must have been there. He demanded more tests and argued that Pade could have been an accomplice to the killer, whose identity for the time being remained unknown. But it was clear to others that Patrice Pade had confessed to a crime he had not committed. People do sometimes confess because they want attention, but it may be that because he had an appropriate criminal record he was put under pressure to confess.

  On 7 August, 1996, Patrice Pade was released and the inquiry had to begin all over again. All the teachers, hostel staff and the boys on the trip were DNA tested, but none provided a match, so all of them were cleared of suspicion. As the months and years passed various leads emerged, but none leading to an arrest and conviction.

  The strongest lead was a very similar attack 25 miles away from Pleine-Fougères. This attack, another nocturnal attack on an English girl, happened only hours before the attack on Caroline. It seemed very likely that this earlier attack and the attack on Caroline were committed by the same man. Unfortunately there were no leads on the man involved in the earlier attack either and a definite link could not be made. There was speculation that Caroline might have been the victim of a serial killer, which made it all the more urgent that he should be found and arrested.

  The net was widened. DNA tests were carried out on four hundred men aged between fifteen and sixty in the Pleine-Fougères area. There were still no matches. The examining magistrate’s conduct of the affair was strongly criticized by Caroline’s parents, John and Sue Dickinson, among others, and before the end of 1996 he had been taken off the case. The Dickinsons welcomed his replacement, Judge Reynaud Van Ruymbeke, and approved of his early efforts to move the case forwards.

  In February 1998 Van Ruymbeke issued a photofit picture of his prime suspect, a man who had been seen in the village just before the murder. The photofit showed an alarming-looking individual with long dishevelled hair, sunken eyes and a cruel mouth; it was like a sketch of an ape-man. The picture was circulated widely in France and the UK.
In December 1999, police had an anonymous tip-off from a man who worked on a building site near Pleine-Fougères. He said one of his work-mates looked rather like the photofit picture and had been acting suspiciously during the days before the murder.

  But by this stage Reynaud Van Ruymbeke had decided to leave the case to take up another job.

  The years passed and the trail, such as it was, had gone cold. It began to look as if Caroline Dickinson’s killer would never be caught. The breakthrough that led to a conviction happened as a result of a hunch by a US Immigration Officer called Tommy Ontko. He worked for the Immigration Department at Detroit airport. In one afternoon he did what the French police, Interpol and Special Branch had failed to do in five years. Tommy Ontko stopped work halfway through a busy day at work, and called at the British Airways desk to get a copy of the Sunday Times. He usually did not eat lunch, but liked instead to read a British paper with a doughnut and some coffee. He read the story about the hunt for Caroline’s killer. For the first time Francisco Montes was being named as a suspect and the news story gave his approximate age.

  Tommy Ontko speculated that after the time that had gone by Montes could easily have gone to America to ‘disappear’. So, Tommy tapped the name Montes into the immigration service database, and found five possible matches. He needed an accurate date of birth to get an exact match, so he phoned the police in Rennes in Brittany. The French police assumed he was English and brushed him off with a number for the British Consul, Ronald Frankel. It was just a mistake, but for Ontko it was a lucky break. Frankel was excited by the possibility of a breakthrough as he had been closely associated with the case from the time of the murder, having visited the murder scene and tried to comfort the Dickinson family. It was Frankel’s keenness to get the case solved that took the investigation the next significant step forward. Tommy Ontko asked Frankel if he could get the date of birth he needed. Frankel said he could. A relative of Frankel’s was a translator for the French judiciary and, as it happened, was in a car travelling with the detective and investigating magistrate who leading the Dickinson investigation. Mrs Frankel found the translator’s mobile phone number and Ontko rang it. They pulled the car over to the roadside and read him Montes’s date of birth along with lots of other information from the file.