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

by Marlowe, John

  Though a romance developed quickly between Cuchet and the man she knew as Raymond Diard, the couple hit at least one rough patch. When this occurred, the distraught woman’s family accompanied her to meet with the suitor at his villa. Finding he wasn’t at home, Cuchet’s brother-in-law took the opportunity to investigate the suave Diard. He searched the villa and came across a chest containing letters from other women. The family was outraged, but not so Cuchet herself.

  She severed ties with her relatives, and with André moved into Diard’s villa.

  In January 1915, the three relocated to a villa in Vernouillet, after which the mother and son were never seen again. It is thought that their bodies were incinerated in their new home. Shortly after the Cuchets disappeared, Landru opened a bank account with 5,000 francs, an amount he claimed he had inherited from his late father. He also presented his estranged wife with a gold watch that had once belonged to Jeanne Cuchet.

  Another lady, Thérèse Laborde-Line, vanished in July 1915. A wealthy Argentine widow, she and Landru had set up house in a lovely new villa shortly before her disappearance. He later returned to collect her furniture.

  In May, two months earlier, as M. Fréymet, Landru had placed a newspaper advertisement in Paris’ Le Journal: ‘Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.’

  Nearly everything about the advertisement was a lie: Landru was not a widower, he had four children, he had no income and he had no contact with anything that could be described as ‘good society’. Even his age was a lie – Landru was in his forty-sixth year. However, while it wasn’t true that he desired matrimony, he was most certainly interested in meeting a widow. And he met many.

  In August 1915, a 51-year-old widow named Marie Angelique Desirée Pelletier disappeared. She was soon followed by a Mme Héon, Mme Buisson, Mme Collomb, Mme Jaume and Mme Pascal.

  Two victims stand out from the rest. The first, Andrée Babelay, was a 19-year-old servant girl who had no money. Why Landru killed her remains a mystery. It may be that she somehow discovered his secret.

  The second, Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, was not a widow. That said, she did have money. In fact, she had become something of a celebrity during the war as an entertainer for the troops known as ‘La Belle Mythese’.

  Marchadier vanished without trace at about the time of the Armistice.

  With ‘La Belle Mythese’, Landru had claimed his eleventh murder victim, and still no one suspected him of any wrongdoing.

  The end of Landru’s killing came about through an unrelated death. Late in 1918, the son of Mme Buisson died. The family attempted to reach the mother, care of a M. Fremiet in Gambais, with whom, it was thought, she had run off. They heard back from the mayor that the town had no M. Fremiet. He suggested that the family might wish to contact the family of Mme Collomb, another woman who was believed to have gone missing in Gambais.

  Clearly Landru sensed that, after all these years, a net was slowly closing. He left Gambais for good, moving in with his 27-year-old mistress in Paris. The authorities arrived to find his villa unoccupied.

  However, the family of Mme Buisson was not so easily defeated. For months, Buisson’s sister haunted the streets of the Parisian neighbourhood in which she had once been introduced to the mysterious M. Fremiet. On 12 April 1919, her dedication paid off when she spotted her sister’s suitor entering a porcelain shop. Finally, the authorities managed to catch up with Landru. When arrested, he was found to be carrying a notebook containing names and details of 283 women, including nearly all of the widows who had gone missing.

  Despite the discovery of the notebook, police were unable to charge Landru with anything more than embezzlement. Simply put, there were no bodies. The properties surrounding his villas in Gambais and Vernouillet were dug up, but revealed nothing more than the bones of two dogs. Landru admitted to strangling both at the request of the owner, Marie-Thérèse Marchadier.

  A furnace Landru had installed shortly after moving into the Gambais villa provided the damning evidence.

  It had sat there completely ignored for much of the investigation, until neighbours remembered the black smoke and noxious fumes that had on occasion spewed out of the villa’s chimney. The bones and teeth found behind the iron door of the furnace finally provided the evidence needed to proceed in charging Landru with 11 counts of murder.

  His trial began on 7 November 1921. Arrogant and impudent, Landru’s demeanour in no way supported his defence. He admitted nothing and argued that the prosecution had proved his innocence in claiming him to be a sane man. Despite this, the victims’ families and members of the jury presented the court with a petition requesting mercy. This was ignored and on 30 November 1921, Landru was sentenced to death.

  On 25 February 1922, he kneeled beneath the blade of a guillotine and was executed.

  In 1947, 25 years after the end of Henri Landru, his life was resurrected as the inspiration for the main character of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. Played by the actor, Verdoux is a banker who, after having been dismissed, supports his family by marrying and murdering wealthy widows.

  In 1963, the murderer returned to the screen in a more direct form, a feature film centred on his crimes entitled Landru. Directed by Claude Chabrol, the movie occasioned a lawsuit from an elderly woman named Fernande Segret – the Parisian mistress to whom Landru had fled in 1918. Upset by her portrayal in the film, she sought 200,000 francs in damages. She was awarded 10,000 francs in 1965. Three years later, the 74-year-old woman committed suicide in a very dramatic fashion by jumping into the moat of the Château de Flers in Orne. She left behind a note reading: ‘I still love him, but I am suffering too greatly. I am going to kill myself.’

  FRITZ HAARMANN

  Fritz Haarmann recognized the social unrest, hyperinflation and food shortages experienced by Germany in the years after the First World War and used them to his advantage. He preyed on runaways and male prostitutes. Convicted of having murdered 24 boys and young men, it is more likely that he killed over 50. Together with his live-in lover, he sold the clothing and meagre belongings of his victims in a public market. But that was not the only profit Haarmann made from his killings; he also sold their flesh as steak on the black market. During his time, Haarmann was known by many names, including the Vampire of Hanover and the Werewolf of Hanover; but history has settled on the most appropriate: The Butcher of Hanover.

  Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born on 25 October 1879 in Hanover. It might be said that during his early life he was something of a stereotype. The youngest of six children, he was coddled by his mother and disliked by his father. The young Fritz loved to play with dolls, and avoided more masculine pastimes. Although he shunned team sports, he was athletic and excelled in gymnastics. He was attracted to the feminine, while demonstrating abhorrence for the masculine.

  As a young man, one of his brothers was arrested and sentenced for a sexual assault. As a teenager, Haarmann himself got in trouble with the law after molesting a number of children. At the age of 18, after a thorough examination, he was sent to an asylum. It wasn’t long before he managed to escape. Haarmann fled to Switzerland, but by the age of 21 had returned to Hanover. Within months he had married and impregnated a woman named Erna Loewart. However, before the birth, Haarmann had again moved on, deserting his wife to join the army. His role as a soldier proved to be as brief as had been the role of husband. Deemed unsuitable for service, Haarmann was soon back living with the father he so detested. What followed was a period consisting of smuggling, thievery and a variety of sexual offences. Over the next decade, one in three years was spent in prison.

  Exactly when he began killing is unknown. The first known incident connecting Haarmann with murder occurred in September 1918, when police burst into his apartment. They were looking for a young runaway named Friedel Roth. What they found instead was Haarmann in bed with a young boy. Although he was arr
ested and sentenced to nine months in prison, Haarmann likely thought that being caught molesting the boy had been a lucky break. In dealing with the paedophiliac crime, the authorities neglected the initial purpose of their visit: the investigation of Friedel Roth’s disappearance. Had they bothered to search Haarmann’s room, the police would have discovered the runaway boy’s severed head wrapped in newspaper behind the stove.

  The threat of imprisonment appears to have had no effect on Haarmann. As he awaited sentencing, he returned to the streets, parks and squares of Hanover, looking to have sex with boys and young men. His favourite hunting spot, however, was the city’s main railway station. It had always been a fertile territory, made even more so by the economic upheavals of the First World War and its aftermath. During one visit, sometime around his 40th birthday in the autumn of 1919, Haarmann was approached by a young male prostitute named Hans Grans. It would not be fair to say that Grans was everything Haarmann was not, but there certainly was a contrast. The middle-aged Haarmann was a pleasant-enough-looking man. Average in height, with a round face described as friendly-looking, he wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd. Grans, on the other hand, was remarkably handsome, with the chiselled blond features that would later come to be idealized and exploited by the Nazis. Although Grans was less than half Haarmann’s age, the two soon became constant lovers and close friends.

  In March 1920, Haarmann finally began the nine-month sentence stemming from the police raid that had taken place 19 months earlier. Grans spent the remainder of the year roaming about Germany, supporting himself through thievery and prostitution. The two were reunited on Christmas Day and soon thereafter moved into an apartment together. They appeared as two respectable, well-dressed men, all the while stealing laundry from clothes lines. Their ill-gotten gains were sold in the market across from the station in which they had first met. Haarmann further contributed to the household finances through a disability pension. While the state may have considered him unable to work, Haarmann found employment with the local police. This man, whom the authorities had sent to prison the previous year, became one of their most valuable informers – Haarmann appeared to have no hesitation when it came to turning people in. As hyperinflation and economic collapse caused turmoil in the lives of their neighbours, Haarmann and Grans managed to maintain a comfortable, if modest, lifestyle in their little one-room Neuestrasse apartment.

  Whether Grans knew of his partner’s 1918 murder of Friedel Roth is a matter of speculation. What is certain is that by early 1923, the prostitute knew his partner to be a murderer. In February, Haarmann detained two boys in his favourite train station. The less attractive of the pair he dismissed. The other, Fritz Franke, was made to accompany Haarmann to his home. When Grans arrived home later in the day, the body of the dead boy was lying in the room.

  From this point, the murders continued at a frequent and steady pace. Haarmann’s method had little variation and was extremely effective. On some occasions he would pick up boys by offering employment or a place to stay. Other incidents would begin with Haarmann approaching his victims with the claim that he was a police officer. The latter pretence was used so frequently, and with such effect, that at least one guard at the station thought Haarmann was a police detective.

  Sexual frenzy

  The boys would then be taken to the Neuestrasse apartment where Haarmann would kill them by biting through their throats in a moment of sexual frenzy.

  As he preyed on runaways, it was quite some time before the authorities began to suspect that something untoward was taking place. It wasn’t until 17 May 1924, when a skull was found by children playing along the Leine, that the fate of missing children and young men began to become apparent. Within a month, three more skulls had been discovered along the riverbank. Autopsies indicated that they belonged to young males ranging in age from 12 to 20 years. Following the discovery of a sack filled with human bones, the Leine was dammed and the riverbed inspected by police and municipal workers. Over 500 body parts were found.

  Haarmann, like the whole city of Hanover, was well aware of the investigation. Although he was on the police payroll as an informer, he was among the suspects. In fact, he was investigated in May and again in June – but still he continued to kill. His last known murder took place in June 1924. The victim was a young man named Erich de Vries, whom he had picked up at the train station with an offer of cigarettes.

  As many of the disappeared had last been seen at the train station, the site became a focus of the investigation. In June, two of the youngest members of the force were sent by train from Berlin to Hanover. By pretending to be homeless, it was hoped that they would come into contact with the killer.

  The luck that had six years earlier prevented the discovery of Friedel Roth’s severed head returned to Haarmann. At the station, the murderer met with a 15-year-old boy named Karl Fromm, who had once stayed with Haarmann and Grans. Irritated by the boy’s attitude, Haarmann sought to make things difficult by claiming to railway police that the boy was travelling under false papers. Fromm turned the tables on his former host by charging that he had been molested during his stay at the Neuestrasse apartment. As the young police officers waited in the train station, hoping to be approached by the killer, Haarmann was arrested.

  As he was still a suspect in the disappearances, police took the opportunity to search Haarmann and Grans’ apartment. There they found clothing belonging to many of the missing and murdered boys. While Haarmann admitted to having sex with several of the missing boys, he maintained that he’d had nothing to do with their disappearances. He insisted that the items of clothing, which numbered in the hundreds, were just a part of his business as a dealer in used clothes. Gradually, however, evidence from other quarters was being gathered. Among those connecting the clothing dealer to the murders was a boy named Fritz Kahlmeyer who identified Haarmann as the police officer who had accompanied him and his friend to a local circus on the evening of the latter’s disappearance.

  After weeks of interrogation, with evidence mounting, Haarmann confessed.

  On 8 July 1924, 15 days after Haarmann’s arrest, police took Grans into custody.

  The subsequent trial, beginning on 8 December 1924, was as spectacular as it was bizarre. Haarmann conducted his own defence in a casual manner, as if oblivious to the seriousness of the charges. Smiling, he told little jokes, smoked a cigar and complained about the number of women in the courtroom. As always, Grans appeared in stark contrast. Charged with two counts of murder, he was serious and intense. The two men turned on each other, the bitterness escalating after Haarmann accused his former lover of taking part in certain murders. When the trial drew to an end nine days later, both men received death sentences.

  What followed was a twist worthy of de Maupassant. While working one day, a messenger came across a letter lying on a Hanover street. Addressed and ultimately delivered to Albert Grans, the father of Hans, the letter was a lengthy and detailed confession from Fritz Haarmann in which he, the Butcher of Hanover, revealed that he had framed his former lover. After his father passed the letter on to the authorities, Grans was retried and received a sentence of 12 years.

  On 15 April 1925, Haarmann was beheaded. His life and crimes were adapted to the screen in the 1973 Ulli Lommel film Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (The Tenderness of the Wolves). In 1995, Haarmann’s story returned to the screen in Der Totmacher (The Deathmaker). Starring Götz George, the script often uses the Butcher’s own words as recorded in the files of Erich Schultze, one of the psychiatric experts who interviewed Haarmann during his last days.

  But what of Hans Grans? After his release from prison he returned to Hanover, where it seems he probably lived out the rest of his life. He is known to have been living in the city as late as the 1970s.

  EARLE NELSON

  In Edgar Allan Poe’s classic 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, detective C. Auguste Dupin is baffled by the strangulation of two women in what appears to be an inacc
essible room off a street in Paris. His conclusion? The deaths were suffered at the hands of an orang-utan, the escaped pet of a French sailor. Earle Nelson’s victims were also women – at least 20, murdered in both the United States and Canada. Like Poe’s orang-utan, Nelson killed with his hands. Such was his strength that he earned the moniker ‘The Gorilla Man’.

  It cannot be said that Earle Leonard Nelson ever really knew his mother and father; both died of syphilis within 18 months of his birth on 12 May 1897. He was raised by his widowed grandmother in San Francisco, the city in which he was born. A devout Pentecostalist, Jennie Nelson was described as a distant woman. Most of her time and energy was spent in a constant struggle to maintain a household which included Earle and two of her own children. Nelson picked up on his grandmother’s religious devotion, developing something of an obsession with the Bible. This did nothing to prevent him stealing from shopkeepers or behaving badly at school. He was expelled for the first time at the age of 7.

  Four years later, Nelson suffered a horrific accident which some speculate may have contributed to his actions later in life. Riding a bicycle, he passed in front of a streetcar and was hit. He landed on his head, creating a wound that left him unconscious. It wasn’t until ten days later that he was able to leave his bed.

  Always a poor student, at 14 years of age Nelson left school for good. During the same year, his grandmother died and he went to live with his Aunt Lillian and her husband. He began to work, but seemed incapable of maintaining employment. Often he would simply wander away from a job, never to return. Although his aunt would later say that he was like a child in this respect, Nelson soon adopted some very adult habits. When he was 15 years old, he began to drink heavily and frequent the brothels of the city’s Barbary Coast district. He would go out on binges for days – even weeks – at a time. These disappearances, Nelson explained to his aunt and uncle, were simply a result of his looking for work. Indeed, he always managed to contribute financially to the household. However, in the spring of 1915, a partial explanation for their nephew’s absences was revealed when Nelson was caught after burgling a cabin in northern California. At 18, he was sentenced to two years at San Quentin Prison.