Extreme Evil - Taking Crime to the Next Level (True Crime)

by Ray Black

  When neighbours informed officers they had heard Nilsen moving around that night, DCI Peter Jay paid the top-floor flat a visit, waiting for the Job Centre official to arrive home. Hit by the overpowering stench on entering the apartment, the detective knew they had the culprit and immediately asked where the rest of the body was hidden. In two plastic bags in the wardrobe came the swift reply.

  After confirming the shocking truth, the police arrested Nilsen, but another surprise followed in the car journey to the station. Dennis admitted it was not just one or two bodies but fifteen or sixteen. A thorough search of both addresses took place to ascertain the true extent of this man’s evil.

  By the time he came to trial, only seven victims had been identified. He was subsequently found guilty on six counts of murder and two attempted murder, failing to persuade the jury of his diminished responsibility. Recommended to serve no less than twenty-five years in jail, Dennis Nilsen still resides at Her Majesty’s pleasure and in 2008 was informed he would breathe his last breath behind bars.

  Eladio Baule

  In a tranquil town on a Philippine island paradise a minor infraction during a local wedding turns the worst kind of ugly, when one of the guests is forced to cater for the event.

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  As police chief superintendent, Perla Bacuel rarely had to deal with violent crime in her town. Parking tickets and bar brawls were as heavy as it usually got in Narra. Situated on the south-western island of Palawan, this peaceful municipality was in fact planning to promote itself as an ecotourism destination to foreigners wishing to experience the idyllic splendour of the Philippines. The focus was to be on the golden beaches, the luxuriant waterfalls, the trekking up in the mountains and the hot springs. Instead the town has become known for the bizarre murder of one of their own.

  PROUD DAY

  For many of the locals of this small town Saturday 17 July 2004 was a day of celebration; two of the residents were to be married. Looking forward to the big day was Eladio Baule. The forty-seven-year-old father would later walk his daughter down the aisle; a proud moment for the farm labourer, indeed for all there present to cherish for the rest of their lives. However, the day would be remembered for rather different reasons.

  The facts are sketchy even several years down the line, adding an air of mystery to the tale. It appears during the wedding reception an incident took place. Deep in the hinterland, away from the main town, guests danced to music, drinks flowed, spirits were high. The day had gone by without a hitch. The moment came when Benjie Ganay, cousin to the happy father, stumbled and tripped on the dance floor accidentally touching the bottom of the bride-to-be. Eladio witnessed the faux-pas and, rather than taking the blunder as an honest mistake among merrymakers, flew into a rage.

  WHO DOES YOUR CATERING?

  The affronted father swiftly assembled a select few and conspired to teach Ganay a lesson. Eladio’s young son, Gerald, along with Sabtuary Peque and Jhunnie Buyot confronted the clumsy guest and took him by motorised tricycle away from the reception and into the nearby woods. Deep amidst the tall trees things got out of hand. In a disproportionate display of violence, they set upon their prisoner, stabbing him to death. Then Eladio’s murderous posse set fire to Ganay’s body using coconut leaves and kerosene. Still they were not done with their victim. Taking their knives to the body once more, the fiendish four carved off pieces and ate the freshly-roasted meat. When Buyot began to choke, Eladio turned to his accomplice and held him at knife point until he swallowed.

  The killer cannibals then returned to the wedding party, allegedly bringing chunks of barbecued Benjie back for the drunken guests to sample. Those who dared to snack from the buffet were completely un-aware they were tucking into a friend and relative.

  THE SECRET IS OUT

  In the days that passed the evil secret remained hidden until it all got too much for Jhunnie Buyot. Stricken with guilt and remorse, he admitted everything to a local village elder, who forced him to confess to the police.

  Agreeing to act as a prosecution witness, Buyot told Perla Bacuel and her officers the whole grisly truth, adding they had dumped the bones in a nearby creek in the hope the rains would wash them away.

  The subsequent police search took two whole days to find the blackened bones of Benjie Ganay, along with strands of hair and charred pieces of clothing. With physical evidence of the heinous crime in the hands of the authorities, Sabtuary Peque quickly surrendered to police officers and Eladio and Gerard Baule were apprehended soon after.

  It had now become impossible to keep this shocking tale of overreaction from the world’s media. Newspaper reporters and TV stations descended on the once idyllic island. Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to limit the inevitable damage to the area’s tourism, Mayor Lucena Demaala insisted the incident was not indicative of the native population.

  A number of reports focused on the indigenous tribes of many southern Philippine islands, whose histories include documented practices of canni-balism and head-hunting. This predictably fuelled speculation that such traditions are still in existence today, planting a seed of doubt in the mind of any prospective traveller planning to visit the area.

  Gary Heidnik

  With a misshapen head and a warped view on fatherhood, this sick ex-soldier held a harem of sex slaves in his basement, dishing out beatings and serving up meals made up of human flesh.

  FOOTBALL HEAD

  Born on 22 November 1943, Gary Heidnik’s subse-quent childhood mirrored many a killer’s troubled upbringing. When he was just two years old, his parents divorced and he spent the next four years in the care of his alcoholic mother. He then moved in with his father who had remarried. The new woman in his life created a hostile environment for him at home, and life for little Gary went from bad to worse.

  Not only did he have to contend with his wicked stepmother, but he also suffered the shame of being a serial bed-wetter. Adding insult to injury, his cruel father would humiliate him by hanging the urine-soaked sheets out of his bedroom window for all the neighbours to see. Such emotional abuse soon became second nature.

  Further problems came when young Gary fell out of a tree, banging his head so severely his skull became deformed. He was subsequently teased at school, where the children would call him ‘Football Head’. Yet in the face of such ridicule he excelled in class, and at the age of fourteen enrolled at the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia. However, despite good grades he was forced to leave; mental problems cited as the reason. A monster was surfacing and would soon wreak havoc on those around him.

  THE MONSTER TAKES OVER

  After leaving the academy he joined the army and proved a model soldier, training as a medic and serving as an orderly with the 46th Army Surgical Hospital in Landstuhl, West Germany. However, in August 1962 Gary visited sick bay complaining of severe headaches, blurred vision and vomiting. He was diagnosed with gastroenteritis, but doctors also identified the more worrying symptoms of a degenerative mental illness. Three months later, Gary Heidnik was honourably discharged with a full disability pension and transferred to a military hospital in Philadelphia.

  His army career over, Heidnik focused on nursing. He also indulged his considerable intellect, studying a variety of subjects at the University of Pennsylvania. Sadly, yet another blow would push him closer to the edge of darkness. On 30 May 1970, his cancer-riddled mother committed suicide, poisoning herself with Mercuric Chloride.

  Following in her footsteps, Gary began a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts: overdose, eating glass, hanging and even a head-on collision with a truck. The resultant hospital visits saw him become increasingly uncommunicative, his behaviour even stranger. Nurses spoke of how he would not allow anyone to remove his favourite leather jacket, which remained welded to him like a second skin.

  Over the next fifteen years or so, Heidnik’s mental state slowly degraded, manifesting itself in a series of violent and heinous acts. By 1978 he had attacked his brother wit
h a block of wood, shot at the face of a lodger and signed out his lover’s mentally-handicapped sister, keeping her prisoner in his home where he raped and sodomised her. Gary Heidnik was now certainly a menace to society.

  HEIDNIK’S HAREM

  Past the point of no return, the mentally ill ex-soldier snapped. On Wednesday 26 November 1986 he picked up part-time prostitute Josefina Rivera in his silver Cadillac, taking her back to his two-storey house in the heart of the Philadelphia slums. Following the sexual transaction, Heidnik handcuffed the twenty-five-year-old and dragged her downstairs into the cold, dark basement. Chaining the girl to a large pipe running along the ceiling, he then placed his head in her lap and fell asleep.

  The next morning, still reeling from her sudden imprisonment, Josefina watched her captor dig a hole in the centre of the room. As he shovelled out earth from this makeshift pit, Heidnik confessed his master plan. She was merely the first of ten women he would abduct over the coming months, vowing to make them all pregnant in a warped attempt to create a large family. To prove his intent, Heidnik then raped his prisoner.

  After a failed attempt to escape, Miss Rivera was joined by Sandra Lindsay, a mentally-handicapped black woman Heidnik had known for several years. Then came nineteen-year-old Lisa Thomas and Deborah Dudley either side of Christmas. On 18 January 1987 Jacqueline Askins was incarcerated below. Five girls now occupied the dank cellar. Heidnik now had half his harem.

  His treatment of the cellar-dwelling sex slaves grew worse with every passing week. Forced to survive on a diet of stale sandwiches and even dog food, the girls were subjected to regular bouts of torture. One day in February, Heidnik caught Sandra Lindsay attempting to move the plywood sheet that covered the pit. She was promptly handcuffed to the ceiling and left to hang there by one wrist for two whole days.

  This persecution caused her to fall seriously ill. After force-feeding her morsels of bread, Heidnik kicked her into the shallow pit, telling the others she was faking. When he lifted her out, Sandra Lindsay was dead. The others watched him drag the body upstairs. Then came the ominous sounds of a power saw as he dismembered his dead slave. The sickening stench filled every corner of the house and clung to Heidnik’s clothes. Even the neighbours noticed and called the police, but when an officer paid him a visit, he simply explained it was the result of an overcooked roast dinner.

  The truth was altogether more horrific. The smell exuded from the human rack of ribs in the oven and Sandra’s boiling head in a pot on the stove. Heidnik had even resorted to mixing the dog food with the meat picked from her bones in an industrial food processor. This mush would then be served to the captives below. It is believed Heidnik also consumed the flesh of his poor victim.

  partners in crime

  In the wake of Sandra’s death and dismemberment, Heidnik’s behaviour plummeted to new lows. Paranoid that his slaves were plotting against him, he strung three of them to the ceiling and pushed a screwdriver deep into their ears to deafen them. The one to escape such punishment was Josefina.

  The first of his collection had, over the months since her capture, become Heidnik’s favourite and this privileged position afforded special perks. She was permitted to accompany him on trips into town and given the dubious honour of sharing his bed. However, on 18th March 1987, she was called upon to assist her captor with a new level of torture.

  Believing the three slaves in the basement deserved another more terrifying ordeal, Heidnik had Josefina fill the pit with water, while he drilled air holes in the plywood cover. The tormented trio were then shoved into the makeshift well, whereupon a bare wire connected to the mains was pushed through one of the air holes. The live feed connected with the metal of Deborah Dudley’s shackles electrocuting her to death.

  Forced to sign a piece of paper attesting she had assisted in Deborah’s death, Josefina accompanied Heidnik to Pine Barrens, a desolate area outside Philadelphia, where he dumped the corpse in the woods. Down one slave, Heidnik now enlisted the help of his number one girl to acquire a replacement. On 23 March Josefina persuaded Agnes Adams, a friend from her strip club days, to come back to the house. With his sixth abduction, it now appeared Heidnik had a willing accomplice to bring his master plan to fruition.

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  Josefina had been biding her time. She knew the best way to survive was to stay on the right side of her keeper. Now, after weeks of playing the role of obedient girlfriend, she put her own plan into effect. On the day after the kidnapping of Agnes Adams, Josefina begged to see her family. Promising to bring him another slave, she got her wish.

  With a midnight rendezvous arranged at a near-by petrol station, Heidnik dropped her off. As soon as he was out of sight, Josefina sprinted to her apartment. When her boyfriend opened the door, she finally knew she was safe. At midnight, instead of his pliant partner, Heidnik met a team of armed officers, their guns raised and ready to fire.

  Less than five hours later, police turned up at 3520 North Marshall Street, Heidnik’s house of horrors. Down in the basement they found Lisa Thomas and Jacqueline Askins asleep on a mattress with the newly-abducted Agnes inside the pit.

  A visit to the kitchen revealed blackened ribs in the oven, plastic-wrapped limbs in the freezer and Sandra’s decapitated head still simmering gently on top of the stove.

  Unsurprisingly, the defence counsel at trial pleaded insanity. As Heidnik’s lawyer succinctly put it: ‘Any person who puts dog food and human remains in a food processor and calls it a gourmet meal and feeds it to others is out to lunch.’

  However, the testimonies from the surviving captives proved damning, and on 30 June 1988 the jury found Heidnik guilty of eighteen separate charges, including the murders of Sandra Lindsay and Deborah Dudley. Following a number of suicide attempts while on Death Row, the end came by lethal injection at the hands of the state executioner.

  Georg Karl Grossmann

  Considered one of the most notorious killers of the Weimar period, this sadistic butcher of Berlin lured an untold number of prostitutes and poverty-stricken women back to his apartment for sex. What they endured was beyond barbaric with many of these luckless ladies leaving in a far worse state, returning to the streets in an altogether different form.

  GROSS MAN

  Georg Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann was born on 13 December 1863. One of seven children, he grew up with his ragman father in the small Prussian town of Neuruppin on the western shore of Ruppiner See in north-east Germany. While little is known of his childhood, we do know he left school aged fourteen before leaving his home-town two years later. The young teen was drawn to Berlin, hoping to find steady work in the capital and it was here where he apprenticed at a butcher’s – a trade he would later bring into disrepute.

  Released from compulsory military service due to a hernia in 1882, Grossmann travelled around the rural areas of Pomerania and Mecklenburg picking up small labouring jobs on farms. It was during this time that he started falling foul of the law. In 1883 he spent three days in jail for begging, theft and various indecent acts. Petty crimes compared to what lay in his future. This was merely the beginning of an escalating commitment to evil.

  In 1896 Georg was found guilty of molesting a sheep in Mannheim and in the following year was convicted of sexually assaulting a twelve-year-old girl in Nuremberg. Being caught for these lewd and wicked crimes seemed not to curb their existence for in 1899 he found himself in prison yet again; this time given fifteen years hard labour for sexually abusing two young girls, one of whom suffered serious physical injury.

  DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  On his release in 1913 he returned to the capital. Grossmann was now fifty; too old to learn new, more moral tricks. With sexual deviance, violence and crime prevalent in many areas of Berlin, Grossman was able to blend into the background and continue with his evil ways. After living at various squalid addresses in the eastern part of the city, he took an apartment on Lange Strasse 88/89 in the centre of the Friedrichschain district – a
notorious den of iniquity.

  It was here in his fourth floor studio where he would begin to bring back women from the area, mainly prostitutes and single ladies down on their luck. Grossmann would lure them to his abode with promises of food, shelter and clothing, In return their benefactor demanded sex, a simple and common exchange during these hard times, but as his gluttonous lust for debauchery grew so the liaisons became all the more dangerous.

  Pretty soon Karl – as he now called himself – had become somewhat of a personality around town. He was often to be found peddling his sausages outside the Silesian train station and picking up women around the fountain at Alexanderplatz, just one block north of his home. His neighbours also could not miss the steady stream of female companions as they noisily traipsed up the stairs to his top floor flat. What they failed to spot was that many of the women never left the apartment alive.

  SIMPLY THE WURST

  With domestic violence commonplace during the Weimar era, it is still surprising the fellow residents at Lange Strasse 88/89 turned a deaf ear to the violent screams coming from behind Grossmann’s door. Even when concerns were raised at the malodorous stench emanating from within, he was able to satisfy them with fictitious tales of chicken meat gone bad.

  The truth was far more sinister. The Berliner butcher would lace his victims’ drinks with a sedative then pleasure himself with their bound and unconscious bodies. Once his sadistic fun was over he would bash in their brains and begin the process of dividing up the corpse into small parts, removing the women piecemeal from the studio in small paper packages to dump in the nearby river.