The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases

by Marlowe, John

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  Given that his only murder conviction came after he had attempted to pin the crime on another, it seems rather extraordinary that during this time Cream embarked on a similar campaign. Shortly after the murder of Nellie Donworth, he mailed two pseudonymous letters in which he accused Frederick Smith of W. H. Smith and Son of the murder. During his brief return to Canada he had printed a circular, warning patrons of London’s Metropole Hotel that the murderer was employed at the hotel. Four weeks after the deaths of Marsh and Shrivell, the Deputy Coroner George Percival received a letter from a ‘William H. Murray’ in which it was claimed that Dr Walter Harper of St Thomas’s Hospital was responsible for the murders. That same day, Walter Harper’s father, Dr Joseph Harper, received an extortion letter in which the same claim was repeated. Detectives at Scotland Yard were quick to recognize that the same hand was behind all these documents, but were unable to determine the writer’s identity. Their curiosity was raised further after two prominent Londoners received extortion letters in which one ‘M. Malone’ claimed to have evidence that each had carried out the murder of Matilda Clover – the victim whose death had been ruled accidental.

  The beginning of the end for Cream came in April 1892 when, quite by chance, he befriended an expatriate American named John Haynes. As a former New York City detective, Haynes had taken an interest in Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, whose murders had occurred only a few nights earlier. As he discussed the case with Cream, Haynes was taken aback by the depth of information the doctor possessed. It seemed to the former detective that the doctor knew details that had not been reported. What was more, Cream linked the murders with those of two other women, Matilda Clover and Lou Harvey, whose names meant nothing to Haynes. After he had passed on this information to a friend at Scotland Yard, the body of Matilda Clover was exhumed. While they were still gathering evidence, on 3 June 1892, the London constabulary arrested Cream on suspicion of blackmail. Cream appeared at the inquest into Matilda Clover’s death, obliged to listen to the damning testimony. Among the witnesses was Lou Harvey, who, until the moment she entered the courtroom, Cream had thought he’d killed. The inquest concluded that Cream had intentionally administered a lethal dose of strychnine to Matilda Clover. The same witnesses were called by the prosecution during the subsequent criminal trial. No one spoke in Cream’s defence. It took the jury only ten minutes to deliver their verdict.

  But what of Cream’s final words: ‘I am Jack...’? It must first be said that there is some debate as to whether they were ever actually uttered, though his executioner, James Billington, swore it as fact. Assuming Cream did make the statement – and that what he had meant to say is ‘I am Jack the Ripper’ – is it at all possible that the Canadian doctor was the Ripper? At first glance, the answer must be negative. During the latter half of 1888, at which time Jack the Ripper committed his murders, Cream was serving the seventh year of his life sentence at Joliet State Penitentiary, across the Atlantic. Supporters of the theory that Cream was Jack the Ripper claim that corruption was such that the doctor left the institution years before receiving his official pardon. Another more complicated theory argues that Cream had a double who sat in the prison while Cream roamed the streets of London’s East End.

  Perhaps the best explanation for Cream’s words can be found in his considerable ego. Might it have been such that Cream desired to claim the most notorious crimes of the day as his own?

  JOSEPH VACHER

  Joseph Vacher murdered and mutilated a total of 11 people, more than twice the number butchered by Jack the Ripper. Yet Vacher appears condemned to spend eternity standing in the shadow of his English contemporary. Even his nickname, the French Ripper, owes its existence to the Whitechapel killer and in his native France, he is known as ‘Jack l’éventreur français’.

  Joseph Vacher explained his crimes by arguing that they were all the result of a crazed dog that had bitten him at the age of 8. His madness, he claimed, stemmed from rabies. Vacher added that medicine given to him by the village herbalist had had no effect other than to make him irritable and brutal, forever changing his character. Assuming Vacher’s account of the dog to be true, it adds to a very small body of knowledge concerning the serial killer’s childhood. We do know that he was born on 16 November 1869, in Isère, a department in the Rhône-Alpes region of France. He was the last of 15 children in a family of peasant farmers. His twin brother, the 14th in the family, choked to death when he was just one month old.

  It is has been put forth that at 15 years of age Vacher may have committed his first murder. The victim, a 10-year-old boy, was raped and killed. In 1878, Vacher began studies with the Marist Brothers, but was returned home when it was discovered that he was having sexual relations with some of his fellow students. The following year, Vacher was convicted of having attempted to rape a young male farmhand. Whatever the sentence, it could not have been great – by that autumn he’d found employment as a server at a brewery in Grenoble. One account says that it was during this time that Vacher caught venereal disease from a prostitute. According to the story, the resulting infection forced the removal of a testicle.

  It has also been claimed that he fell in with a group of anarchists. It is an unlikely association as in 1890, at the age of 21, Vacher enlisted in the French army. He was sent to the ancient city of Besançon, near the border with Switzerland. There he fell in love with a young servant girl, Louise Barrand, who considered him an object to be mocked.

  Vacher the soldier developed a reputation as a brutal drillmaster. Although made a non-commissioned officer, he came to believe that his military service was not being properly recognized and, in both protest and desperation, attempted to slit his throat. Despite the suicide attempt, he remained with the army and was again promoted.

  In June 1893, he proposed marriage to Louise. The offer was met with laughter and he attempted to kill the servant girl, but his gun misfired. Before he could be apprehended, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. Although Vacher survived, the bullet remained lodged in his skull. The damage caused paralysis on the right side of his face; his right eye was also affected. It is also thought that Vacher did himself permanent brain damage, leading to headaches and overall mental instability.

  Vacher was committed to an asylum in Dôle. There he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoia and hallucinations, and after six months, he was transferred to the Saint-Robert asylum in Isère. On April Fool’s Day, 1894, he was considered cured and was discharged. Homeless and lacking the faculties required for work, Vacher wandered seemingly without aim throughout the countryside of south-eastern France.

  Witnesses described him as a filthy, deformed figure; his injured eye seemed to be always discharging pus. Owing to the paralysis in his face, he had difficulty communicating.

  For three years he drifted, begging and stealing in order to survive. He was also raping, murdering and mutilating men and women along his path. Vacher committed nearly all his murders by first cutting the throats of his victims. Afterwards he would slice open their torsos. Many of Vacher’s victims were shepherds and shepherdesses; most were adolescents. His weapons were cleavers, scissors and knives – whatever happened to be at hand.

  His actions soon drew the attention of authorities, who dubbed their elusive killer ‘L’Éventreur du Sud-Est’ – ‘The Ripper of the South-East’.

  In 1895, he was almost caught when he was spotted by a gendarme walking near a recently murdered shepherd boy. When called upon to produce identification, Vacher handed over his discharge papers. The gendarme remarked that he had once served in the very same regiment. When he asked whether Vacher had seen any suspicious characters, the murderer replied that he had seen a man running across the fields about a mile away. The gendarme then set off in pursuit.

  The killing came to an end in early August 1897 when Vacher happened upon a woman outside Lyon who was gathering wood. He attacked, but was immediately set upon by his intended victim’s hu
sband and sons. Vacher was arrested.

  Although the authorities were convinced that Vacher was L’Éventreur du Sud-Est, they had neither witnesses nor evidence. Their big break came from Vacher himself, who one day, without explanation, chose to confess all his crimes.

  He was, he argued, not responsible for his actions, owing to the dog that had given him rabies as a child. Vacher was convinced that his blood had been poisoned. It was because of this condition, Vacher claimed, that he felt an urge to drink blood from the necks of his victims. Hatred had also played a role in his murders – hatred brought on by those who found his deformed face unsightly.

  Vacher was tried with what appears to have been undue haste. He was examined by a team of doctors who determined that the memory of the accused was clear. The fact that he had fled the scene of each murder was, they claimed, an indication that he was fully cognizant of the difference between right and wrong. Among those who examined Vacher was Alexandre Lacassagne, a professor of forensic medicine at the Université de Lyon. He later wrote a book, Vacher l’éventreur et les crimes sadiques, in which he drew comparisons between the serial killer and figures like Gilles de Rais and Jack the Ripper.

  On 28 October 1898, after a trial which lasted two days, Vacher was sentenced to death. Two months later, on New Year’s Eve, he was guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse, not far from where he had performed his military service.

  DOCTOR H. H. HOLMES

  It is not correct, as is often claimed, that H. H. Holmes was America’s first serial killer; both the Bloody Benders (a Kansas family of serial killers) and the Servant Girl Annihilator preceded him. He did, however, kill more people than the Servant Girl Annihilator and all the members of the Bender family put together. The claim that Holmes was the most prolific American serial killer of all time remains an issue of some debate.

  The man who history remembers as H. H. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett on 16 May 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Nearly a century and a half later, the town numbers barely more than 3,000 inhabitants. It is perhaps most famous as having served as a model for Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, the setting for the 1956 novel of the same name.

  Holmes grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive alcoholic father at its head. School provided only a partial escape. While an intelligent and handsome boy, he was also a frequent victim of bullying. He once claimed that, as a child, he had been forced by his classmates to touch a human skeleton. It was an event that appeared to haunt him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he sought to become a medical doctor and developed a fascination with anatomy. As an adolescent, this interest found expression in his killing and dismembering of stray animals.

  At 16, he graduated from school and managed to get teaching positions – first in Gilmanton and later in nearby Alton, New Hampshire. It was there that he met Clara Lovering. The ardour between them was such that the two eloped. However, in marriage that same passion quickly dissipated and he soon abandoned his wife.

  Still intent on a career in medicine, he attended the University of Vermont. It was, however, too small for his liking. In September 1882, he enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which held what was considered to be one of the country’s leading medical schools. Two years later, he graduated with what are best described as lacklustre grades.

  After graduation, Mudgett adopted as his name the more distinguished sounding Henry Howard Holmes. He took up a position as prescription clerk in a pharmacy owned by a terminally ill doctor named Holton. He endeared himself to Holton’s wife and customers. When the good doctor passed away, Holmes offered to buy the pharmacy, promising the newly made widow $100 a month. After signing over the deed, Mrs Holton subsequently disappeared; Holmes claimed she had settled with relatives in California.

  Under Holmes, the pharmacy thrived in the growing Englewood neighbourhood of Chicago. In 1887, he married Myrta Z. Belknap, a stunning young woman whom he had met during a business trip to Minneapolis. She remained unaware that Holmes had been married before – and that he had not obtained a divorce. In their third year of marriage, Myrta bore a daughter named Lucy. By this time she had already returned to the home of her parents. Though Holmes would never seek a divorce, the union was all but over.

  Using the pharmacy as his base, Holmes continued to engage in a number of questionable business ventures he had begun several years before. However, his most notable achievement was the construction of a block-long, three-storey building on the site across the street from his pharmacy. Built over a three-year period, ‘The Castle’, as the locals dubbed it, included a ground floor which Holmes rented out to various shopkeepers. The upper two storeys Holmes kept for himself. A huge space, it was a confusing maze of over a hundred windowless rooms, secret passageways, false floors and stairways that led to nowhere. Some doors could only be opened from the outside, while others opened to reveal nothing but a brick wall. During construction, Holmes repeatedly changed contractors, ensuring that no one understood the design of the building or had any idea as to its ultimate purpose.

  Beginning shortly after the completion of the Castle, and for the three years that followed, Holmes murdered dozens of women. Some he tortured in soundproof chambers fitted with gas lines that enabled him to asphyxiate his victims. The corpses were sent down a secret chute to the Castle’s basement. There, Holmes would dissect them, just as he had the animals he killed in his adolescence. They would be stripped of flesh and sold as skeleton models to medical schools. Some bodies were cremated or thrown in pits of lime and acid.

  One of the first to die was Julia Connor, the wife of a jeweller to whom Holmes had rented a shop. After she came to Holmes with the news that she was pregnant with his child, the doctor murdered Julia and her daughter, Pearl.

  Holmes saw great opportunity in Chicago’s upcoming 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and made several modifications to the second storey of the Castle, transforming it into the World’s Fair Hotel. The first guests arrived in the spring of 1893. Some returned home, others did not. With the high volume of guests, Holmes could be selective in choosing his victims. The fact that so many people were coming to the fair without any place to stay ensured that his activities went unnoticed.

  One of those who remained alive was Georgiana Yorke, who became Holmes’ third wife in January 1894. She believed Holmes to be a very wealthy man, with property in Texas and Europe. Indeed, he appeared to be quite prosperous. However, his debts had begun to catch up with him.

  After having been confronted by his creditors, he came up with a scheme which involved a man named Benjamin Pietzel. As a carpenter, Pietzel had worked on the Castle. Exactly how much he knew of Holmes’ activities is a matter of some debate. What is certain is that Pietzel agreed to fake his own death in order to collect a large insurance claim. In the end, Holmes simply killed the man and kept all the money for himself. He then made off with three of Pietzel’s children.

  On 17 November 1894, having been on the road for nearly two years, Holmes was arrested in Boston. Initially, he was suspected of nothing more than fraud. However, an insurance agent’s diligence in attempting to track down the three Pietzel children revealed that they had been killed in the cities of Indianapolis and Toronto. This news encouraged the police in Chicago to investigate Holmes’ Castle. On 20 July 1895, all was revealed. The police spent a month investigating what some now called ‘the Murder Castle’ before, on 19 August, it was consumed by a fire of mysterious origin.

  Exactly how many poor souls Holmes murdered is a mystery. The number has typically been estimated as being between 20 and 100. The authorities put the murder count at 27, committed in Chicago, Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Toronto. The police in Chicago noted that many of the bodies in the basement of the Castle had been dissected and burnt to such an extent that it was difficult to determine precisely how many bodies it contained. At his trial, Holmes confessed to 27 murders.

  Holmes was led to the gallows on the morning of 7 May 1896. As
he watched the preparations for his hanging, he is reported to have said, ‘Take your time; don’t bungle it.’ However, despite the hangman’s care, Holmes died an agonizing death. For ten minutes after the trapdoor was sprung, his body twitched. He was officially pronounced dead after he had been hanging for 15 minutes.

  A NEW CENTURY OF VIOLENCE

  The early part of the 20th century saw war fought on a previously unimaginable scale in the air and in trenches. Chemical warfare was employed, civilians became targets, and stories of horrific atrocities were spread as propaganda. By the end of the fighting, more than nine million civilians and soldiers had been killed. Perhaps it was contagious. As if a reflection of the war, incidents of psychopathic killing rapidly increased.

  BÉLA KISS

  Béla Kiss was one of the most loved and respected men in the small Hungarian town of Cinkota. When he left to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, many townsfolk prayed for his safe return.

  Kiss had lived in Cinkota, a part of present-day Budapest, since 1900. A handsome blue-eyed, blond-haired 23-year-old, married to a beautiful woman named Marie, his arrival in the town had not gone unnoticed. Kiss and his wife rented a house on the outskirts of town, from which he practised as a tinsmith. He’d taught himself the trade and, in fact, had had no formal schooling whatsoever. The impressive and expansive knowledge he possessed in the areas of art, literature, history and astronomy was the result of years of independent study. Among the inhabitants of Cinkota, he was considered a highly educated young man. Kiss was also known for his generosity; though dedicated and hard-working, he was famous locally for the wonderful parties he would hold at the local hotel.