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

by Marlowe, John

  His release took place in April 1917, just weeks after the United States entered the First World War. Nelson enlisted under his name at birth, Earle Leonard Ferral, but soon lost interest. Mere weeks after enlisting, he went AWOL. Nelson made his way to Salt Lake City where, rather incredibly, he enlisted in the United States Navy. By May, he was in San Francisco, working as a cook at the Mare Island Naval Base. He again deserted. However, these two experiences did not prevent Nelson from enlisting for a third time. As a private in the Medical Corps, his third attempt at service lasted a total of six weeks and ended in desertion. In March 1918, he returned to the navy. This time Nelson chose not to desert, rather he simply refused to work. The next month he was placed under observation in the Mare Island Naval Hospital.

  After three weeks, as his 21st birthday approached, Nelson was transferred to the Napa State Mental Hospital.

  He escaped three times from the hospital, a feat that earned him the nickname ‘Houdini’. After the third success, instead of attempting to track him down, officials chose to simply let Nelson go.

  He returned to San Francisco and the home of his Aunt Lillian, who helped him get janitorial work at nearby St Mary’s Hospital. It was there that he met and fell in love with a maternity ward cleaning woman named Mary Martin. A 58-year-old grey-haired spinster, she must have appeared an odd match for the 22-year-old Nelson. On 15 August 1919, the couple wed. As might be anticipated, the marriage was a disaster. When not demanding sex, Nelson preferred to place his wife in the position of a maternal figure. Mary struggled to deal with these roles, while being exposed to her husband’s bizarre habits. He often went days without bathing, yet changed his clothing several times a day. Many of his outfits he made from Mary’s old dresses; invariably, the results were laughable.

  As the relationship deteriorated, affection was replaced by jealousy. The level of Nelson’s rage seemed to increase in the summer following the marriage after he fell from a tree, landing on his head. He suffered a severe concussion and was hospitalized. Two days later he fled the hospital, arriving home with a turban of gauze around his head. Mary’s brother encouraged her to divorce Nelson, but as a devout Catholic she would not hear of it. Before the end of the year, they had moved in with his Aunt Lillian. Back in the house, Nelson resumed some of his old habits, among them disappearing without explanation for days on end.

  In the spring of 1921, the couple relocated to Palo Alto, where they both found jobs cleaning and maintaining a private girls’ school. Within days, Nelson had demonstrated to all concerned that he was unbalanced. After one particularly frightening and violent scene, witnessed by the girls eating in the school dining hall, Mary asked her husband to leave their home. The next day, Nelson returned to the school and threatened his wife. He ran off before the police arrived.

  Now without a job or a home, his marriage for all intents and purposes over, Nelson was adrift. Within a few days, on 19 May 1921, he attempted to commit his first murder. The intended victim was a 12-year-old girl named Mary Summers. Nelson had gained access to the Summers’ home by pretending to be a plumber sent to fix a gas leak. Not more than a few minutes into his visit, Nelson’s hands were around the young girl’s neck. Mary Summers’ cries quickly brought her 24-year-old brother, who fought the assailant. Although he managed to flee the scene, Nelson was soon captured by police. The next month he was declared ‘dangerous to be at large’ and was sent to Napa State Mental Hospital. It was the very same facility from which he had escaped three times; the last time only two years earlier.

  Diagnosed as a psychopath, he appeared impervious to treatment. Early in his third year at the hospital, he gave warning that he would soon escape. On 23 November 1923, he did just as he’d promised, showing up in the middle of the night at his Aunt Lillian’s house. She gave her nephew some clothing and, arguing that he would be tracked down to the house, urged Nelson on his way. The aunt then called the authorities.

  Within two days of his fourth escape, Nelson had been captured and was back at the hospital. He received a further 16 months of treatment, after which he was released. The date was 13 June 1925, nearly four years to the day since he’d tried to murder Mary Summers.

  Now 29 years old, a seemingly remorseful Nelson managed to convince his wife Mary to accept him back into her life and home. Although he appeared nonviolent, she still found it difficult to deal with her husband’s eccentricities. It must therefore have seemed something of a blessing when he again began to roam. What she couldn’t have known was that these absences often brought with them death.

  The victim of Nelson’s first murder was Clara Newman, a 60-year-old spinster who operated several rooming houses in the San Francisco area. On 20 February 1926, he gained entrance to one of her houses by pretending to be a prospective renter. As she showed Nelson an attic room, he attacked, strangling the landlady and raping her corpse. Ten days later, another landlady, Laura Beal, suffered a similar fate.

  Newspapers picked up on the common features of the two murders and, on the basis of witness descriptions of the suspect, dubbed the murderer ‘The Dark Strangler’. Several months passed without incident; both police and reporters had assumed that the murderer had left the Bay area when, on 10 June, he struck again. The victim this time was Lillian St Mary, a 63-year-old widow who had begun accepting boarders in her expansive San Francisco home. Strangled then raped, her body was found lying on a bed in one of the vacant rooms.

  Two weeks later, Nelson killed and raped the proprietress of another rooming house, Ollie Russell. In doing so he had pulled a cord so tightly around her neck that it had torn through the skin, leaving the mattress bloody. Mrs Russell’s rooming house was located in Santa Barbara, 540 kilometres south of San Francisco. It soon became apparent to authorities that the Dark Strangler was on the move.

  On 16 August, Nelson murdered Mary Nisbet who, with her husband, owned a small apartment building. Two months later, the body of a youngish divorcee, Beata Whithers, was discovered stuffed into a trunk in the attic of a boarding house in Portland, Oregon. The very next day, a 59-year-old landlady named Virginia Grant was found behind the basement furnace of one of her buildings. Two days later, the body of yet another landlady, Mabel Fluke, was discovered.

  As the city of Portland recoiled in horror, some in San Francisco maintained that the Dark Strangler still walked among them. It seemed that any crime involving strangulation was being blamed on the mysterious killer. In fact, Nelson did return to San Francisco, and on 18 November murdered a housebound widow. It would be his final killing in the city of his birth.

  Six days later, Nelson was in Seattle, 1,300 kilometres to the north, where he killed a moneyed woman by the name of Florence Fithian Monks. Other murders followed: Blanche Myers of Portland, Mrs John Brerard of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Bonnie Pace of Kansas City, Missouri. Perhaps the most inhumane of all Nelson’s murders was discovered on 28 December when Marius Harpin returned from work to his Kansas City home to find both his 28-year-old wife and his 8-month-old son strangled.

  The death toll rises

  After lying low for several months, Nelson resumed his activities in April 1927, killing women in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago. By 4 June, the death toll had reached 20, including that of the infant Robert Harpin. All over the United States the authorities were hunting the man known through the popular press as the Dark Strangler, Jack the Strangler and the Gorilla Man. Nelson could not have escaped the accounts of his murders in the press. Perhaps he felt that his luck could not continue. Whatever the reason, on 8 June 1927, he decided to cross the international border north of Noyes, Minnesota, entering Canada at Emerson, Manitoba. Just outside the border town he was picked up hitch-hiking by a motorist bound for Winnipeg and by late afternoon had rented a room in the home of a woman named Katherine Hill. Uncharacteristically, Nelson let his new landlady be; instead of killing her, he spent a good 20 minutes talking about the Bible.

  Four days later, hours before the start
of what would have been her 14th birthday, the body of Lola Cowan was found beneath the bed in the room that Nelson had rented. The smell of death had led to the discovery. The girl had been dead for nearly 72 hours.

  The discovery of Lola Cowan’s body followed that of another of Nelson’s victims, a young wife and mother named Emily Patterson, who had been found the previous evening. Winnipeg police and the Manitoba provincial police were already looking for the murderer, who they suspected was the ‘Gorilla Man’ responsible for the atrocities south of the border.

  By the time the bodies had been found, the killer had left the city. No doubt Nelson thought he would be able to continue as he had for the previous 16 months. It took him only a couple of days to reach Regina, 570 kilometres to the west. He arrived before the discovery of the two bodies in Winnipeg. When it broke, on 13 June, the news was on the front page of every daily in western Canada, and was accompanied by a description that was all too accurate. Nelson made his way south, intending to flee into the United States and, on 15 June, was caught within 6 kilometres of the border. Nelson was placed in a jail at Killarney, Manitoba. There, the man who had four times escaped from the Napa State Mental Hospital succeeded in picking the two padlocks of his cell door. He managed nine more hours of freedom before being picked up.

  There would be no further escapes for the Gorilla Man. Neither his wife nor his Aunt Lillian could help him this time. Both travelled to Winnipeg, where Nelson stood trial for the murders of Lola Cowan and Emily Patterson. It was hoped that their testimonies would help bolster the argument put forward by the defence that Nelson was not sane.

  On 13 January 1928, he was hanged by Arthur Ellis, the pseudonym used by the Official Executioner for the Dominion of Canada. Appropriately, the official cause of death was recorded as ‘death by strangulation’.

  PETER KÜRTEN

  ‘Just you wait a little while,

  The nasty man in black will come.

  With his little chopper,

  He will chop you up!’

  So begins M, the first sound film by the great German director Fritz Lang. The speaker is a young girl who is playing a schoolyard game. Although she is not seen again in the film, one presumes that she remains quite safe. The same cannot be said for another character, a schoolgirl named Elsie Beckmann, who soon falls victim to a serial killer of children. The murderer is portrayed by Peter Lorre, and the character he plays, Hans Beckert, is thought to have been based on a man named Peter Kürten. Lang always denied that he’d used Kürten as a model – and it must be said that there are great differences between the two, the foremost being that Kürten’s crimes were so much more horrific than anything that had been portrayed on film.

  Born on 26 May 1883 at Müllheim, Germany, the man who has come to be called the Vampire of Düsseldorf was the third of 13 children. Raised in poverty, as a child Kürten witnessed his alcoholic father’s repeated sexual assaults on his mother and at least one of his sisters. He himself suffered through years of vicious beatings by the head of the household. Kürten turned to petty crime and several times attempted to run away from home.

  Late in life, Kürten claimed that as a child he had actually murdered two young friends while swimming in the Rhine, holding each under water until they drowned. He also claimed to have befriended a local dog-catcher, who taught him how to masturbate and torture the dogs they caught together. It is thought that during this period he also engaged in bestiality.

  In 1894, the family moved to Düsseldorf. He continued in his petty thievery and was soon serving the first of what would be a series of 27 short prison sentences. In fact, Kürten would spend most of his life incarcerated in one institution or another. While in custody he would make a point of committing minor offences in order to be placed in solitary confinement. Once alone, Kürten would dream of mass murder – he found these fantasies sexually stimulating. For a time, beginning in 1899, he lived with a masochistic prostitute who was twice his age.

  On 25 May 1913, Kürten committed his first provable murder during what would otherwise have been a routine burglary. His victim, a 13-year-old girl named Khristine Klein, was strangled and sexually assaulted. She died after Kürten cut open her throat. The next day, he sat drinking in a café across the street from the murder scene, reading descriptions in the newspaper, and eavesdropping on the conversations going on about him.

  In addition to murder and stealing, Kürten had for many years been committing acts of arson. It was the sight of destruction, including that of human life, which excited him to the point of climax. His 1921 marriage had no erotic appeal. He would later say that the union had been made for companionship alone.

  For many years, it seems that arson and quite likely rape satisfied his desires. This changed suddenly and dramatically on 8 February 1929 when he sexually assaulted and killed an 8-year-old named Rosa Ohliger. Found the next day beneath a hedge, the body of the dead girl bore 13 stab wounds. Kürten had doused the corpse with gasoline and set it alight – an act that brought him to orgasm.

  Five days later he grabbed a woman off the street and stabbed her 24 times. Incredibly, she survived the assault. Kürten found that visits to the scene of the crime would stimulate him sexually.

  The next victim, a 45-year-old mechanic, was killed on 18 February. Kürten had stabbed the man 20 times, including several times to the head.

  There followed six months of what seems to have been inactivity, during which a mentally handicapped man named Strausberg confessed to Kürten’s crimes. He was committed to an asylum.

  On 21 August, Kürten resumed his attacks in dramatic fashion, stabbing three people out walking through the Düsseldorf suburb of Lierenfeld. Two nights later, he came upon two girls, 5-year-old Gertrude Hamacher and her 14-year-old foster sister Louise Lenzen, walking home from the annual fair in the town of Flehe. Kürten asked Louise to get him some cigarettes, and sent the girl, money in hand, back to the fairground. While Louise was away, he strangled Gertrude and cut her throat. When Louise returned from the errand, she was strangled and decapitated.

  The next day, he propositioned a servant girl named Gertrude Schulte. When she replied that she’d rather die than have sex with him, Kürten stabbed her, saying ‘Die then’. Schulte survived and was able to provide an accurate description of her assailant.

  Kürten then, inexplicably, put down his knife. His next victims were both beaten to death: a young girl named Ida Reuter in September, and another servant girl, Elizabeth Dorrer, in October. Two other women were also beaten, both with a hammer, but survived.

  On 7 November, he abducted a 5-year-old girl named Gertrude Albermann. The two-day search for the missing girl came to an end after Kürten sent a detailed letter to a local newspaper in which the location of the girl’s body was revealed. She had been stabbed 35 times.

  It would prove to be Kürten’s final murder.

  More hammer attacks, none of them fatal, took place during the months of February and March 1930. Then, on 14 May, he encountered Maria Budlick, yet another servant girl. She had travelled from Köln to Düsseldorf in search of work. On the railway platform she met a man who offered to show her the way to the local hostel. As Budlick walked with the man she was reminded of newspaper stories she’d read about murders in Düsseldorf and refused to go any further. An argument ensued, only to be broken up by the arrival of another man: Peter Kürten.

  Budlick accompanied the man she thought of as her rescuer to his home, where she was fed. Kürten then led the girl into the local woods and raped her.

  Although he had been certain that Budlick would not be able to lead police to his home, within days Kürten realized he’d been wrong. Finding he was under police surveillance, he confessed all his crimes to his wife and urged her to turn him in for reward money. After some reluctance – she had proposed a suicide pact – Kürten’s wife agreed. He was arrested on 24 May.

  While in prison awaiting trial, Kürten relayed details of his life and crimes to German ps
ychologist Karl Berg. The murderer dictated vivid accounts of a total of 79 crimes, which he numbered and presented in chronological order. Berg would later use the interviews as the foundation for his 1932 book on Kürten entitled Der Sadist.

  In April 1931, Kürten was put on trial for nine murders and seven attempted murders. He pleaded not guilty, stating that his confession was only an attempt to secure a lucrative reward for his wife. However, as the trial progressed, he changed his plea to guilty and, as he had with Berg, began to talk openly and in great detail about his crimes.

  M leaves the viewer with an ambiguous ending. Hans Beckert, the Lorre character, is about to receive his sentence, but the film finishes before it is pronounced. Will Beckert be sentenced to death or will he be found insane? Peter Kürten’s fate is much more clear. Found guilty, on the morning of 2 July 1931, he was executed in Köln by guillotine. His final wish was that he might remain alive long enough to hear the blood flowing out of his severed head.

  CARL PANZRAM

  As the moment of his execution approached, when serial killer Carl Panzram was asked whether he had any last words, he is reported to have turned to his executioner and said: ‘Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!’ It was probably not much of an exaggeration.

  Much of what we know about Panzram comes from his autobiography, published 40 years after his death. It is a well-written and articulate account of his life; not at all what one would expect from someone with limited formal education. The man who would come to murder dozens was born to a Prussian immigrant couple on 28 June 1891 on a Minnesota farm near the Canadian border. He and his six siblings were raised in poverty, a situation made worse when his father deserted the family. This shameful act took place when Carl Panzram was 7 years old. A year later the boy was arrested for the very adult crime of being drunk and disorderly. He was soon committing burglary, and at the age of 11 was sent to the Minnesota State Training School, a reform institution. Panzram’s claims, made late in life, that he was beaten and sexually abused, are probably true. That he also committed his first murder there, the victim being a 12-year-old boy, has not been verified. In July 1905, he burnt one of the school’s buildings to the ground. Evidently, he wasn’t a suspect in the destruction, as he was released just a few months later.