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

by Marlowe, John

  Their supposition would be questioned when, 16 days later, a 68-year-old named Nina Nichols was found dead in her apartment. As with the Latvian seamstress, Nichols had been sexually assaulted. She had been killed by a nylon stocking tied around her neck. The victim’s apartment bore signs of a burglary, but again most valuables had been left behind. Oddly the murderer appeared to have gone through Nichols’ mail and her address book.

  Later that day, the body of another woman was found in the Boston suburb of Lynn, some 25 kilometres to the north. The victim, 65-year-old Helen Blake, had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a nylon stocking. Her apartment had been ransacked.

  After the discovery of two bodies in a single day, the Boston Police Department issued a warning to all women in the area, advising them to be wary of strangers and to ensure every door was locked. All detectives in the force were transferred to the case, police holidays were postponed, and a thorough investigation of all known sex offenders was undertaken.

  However, these efforts did nothing to prevent the Boston Strangler, as he had come to be known, from striking again.

  On 19 August, a 75-year-old widow, Ida Irga, was murdered in the city’s West End. Efforts had been made to arrange the corpse to suggest an obstetrical examination; also, it faced the door so was the first thing seen upon entering. Although a pillowcase was knotted about her neck, Irga had died from manual strangulation.

  Her body lay undiscovered for two days. Before it was found, the Strangler had already murdered another woman, a 67-year-old nurse named Jane Sullivan, on the other side of the city. Her body was found in the apartment bathtub, a nylon stocking knotted around her neck. But the corpse had been lying in the August heat for ten days and was in such a state of decomposition that police were unable to determine whether or not the victim had been sexually assaulted. Nonetheless, police estimated that Ida Irga and Jane Sullivan had been murdered within 24 hours of one another.

  Many studying the Boston Strangler describe his murders as having taken place in two waves. The first begins with the 14 June 1962 murder of Anna Slesers, and ends less than ten weeks later with Jane Sullivan’s killing. What followed was more than three months of inactivity. When the Boston Strangler resumed, his preference in victims appeared to have switched from older to younger women.

  The first victim of the second wave was Sophie Clark, an attractive 20-year-old medical student, murdered just a few blocks away from what had been Anna Slesers’ apartment. She had been strangled using a nylon stocking. A half slip had also been placed around her neck. This time there was no evidence of sexual assault, perhaps due to the fact she was menstruating. Semen was found close to her body on the living room rug.

  The Strangler’s next victim, 23-year-old Patricia Bissette, was murdered on the morning of 31 December 1962. Her body was found lying face up in bed, covers drawn over her neck. When removed, they revealed that Bissette had been strangled with several stockings and a blouse, knotted and interwoven. She had also been raped.

  As the first months of 1963 passed without incident, hopes began to rise that the Strangler would never strike again. However, on 8 May, the body of 23-year-old graduate student Beverly Samans was discovered in her Boston apartment. Although two scarves and a nylon stocking had been knotted around her neck, they had played no role in her death. Rather Samans had been stabbed 17 times, including four wounds to the throat.

  There followed another quiet period. When the Strangler resumed, he appeared to have returned to his original victim type. The body of Evelyn Corbin, a 58-year-old divorcee, was found in her bed. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with two stockings tied around her neck.

  On 25 November, the date on which the body of John F. Kennedy was being interred at Arlington National Cemetery, the killer struck again. His victim, 23-year-old Joann Graff, was beaten, raped and strangled with two nylon stockings and a black leotard.

  Macabre message

  On 4 January 1964, a 19-year-old named Mary Sullivan was sexually assaulted and killed. Her body was left sitting upright in bed, dressed only in a bra and open blouse. Around Sullivan’s neck was a rope the Strangler had made consisting of a nylon stocking and two scarves. He had left a message for the authorities – a greeting card propped up against the corpse’s left foot, it read ‘Happy New Year!’

  If those attempting to catch the Boston Strangler saw anything happy in the New Year, it lay in the fact that he appeared to commit no further murders. There seemed to be no explanation for the inactivity. Then, in March 1965, they were provided with an answer when Albert DeSalvo, an inmate of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, confessed to the murders. It appeared that they had unknowingly locked up the Boston Strangler months before.

  Born 3 November 1931, Albert Henry DeSalvo had progressed from a ghastly childhood to become a career criminal. He once stated that it had been his father who had taught him how to steal. DeSalvo’s first arrest took place in November 1943, just after his 12th birthday, when he was charged with assault and battery with intent to commit robbery. He was sent to the Lyman School for Boys, the first reform school in the United States. DeSalvo’s education at Lyman did nothing to curb his criminal behaviour.

  Despite his shameful record, at the age of 17 he managed to join the United States Army. He was sent to Europe, where he met and married a German woman whom he brought back to the United States. He was then posted to Fort Hamilton, New York, and Fort Dix, New Jersey. It was while serving at the second of the two bases that DeSalvo was arrested for having molested a 9-year-old girl. He escaped prosecution only because the girl’s mother didn’t want to press charges.

  His sex drive was described as insatiable. He demanded sex from his wife six or more times a day. When she rebuffed his advances, DeSalvo would fly into a rage and accuse her of being frigid. Their relationship soured further after their first child was born with a pelvic disease. Fearing further children with birth defects, DeSalvo’s wife all but curtailed their sex life.

  When he confessed to the murders that had been attributed to the Boston Strangler, DeSalvo was in prison for a string of seemingly unrelated assaults. The last, occurring on 27 October 1964, had led directly to his arrest. On that morning, DeSalvo broke into the apartment of a sleeping 20-year-old university student. After she was awoken, DeSalvo proceeded to tie the woman up and then fondle her.

  The victim’s description led police to identify the assailant. When DeSalvo’s photograph was published in Boston area newspapers, other women identified him as the man who had assaulted them.

  DeSalvo was not a suspect in any of the strangling cases. His confession was made to fellow prisoner George Nassar, who reported it to F. Lee Bailey, his attorney. Bailey, in turn, took on DeSalvo as a client and represented him as he repeated his confession to the police. All who heard the prisoner speak were impressed by the accuracy with which he described the crime scenes. Though there were some inconsistencies, DeSalvo provided details that had not been made available to the public. To the tally of 11 murders attributed to the Strangler, DeSalvo added two others. The first victim, a 68-year-old woman named Mary Brown, had been found bludgeoned, stabbed and strangled in her home in Lawrence on 6 March 1963. The second woman, also elderly, had been so frightened that she died of a heart attack before he could strangle her.

  However, not one piece of physical evidence was found at any of the crime scenes that could substantiate his story. Despite the 2,000-page transcript of his confession, DeSalvo stood trial only for the unrelated crimes of robbery and sexual assaults. In January 1967, he was sentenced to life in prison.

  The next month he and two fellow inmates escaped from Bridgewater State Hospital, setting in motion a full-scale manhunt. DeSalvo left behind a note stating the escape was intended as a means of focusing attention on the conditions in the hospital and his own situation. He gave himself up the next day and was transferred to the maximum security Walpole State Prison.

  On 25 November 1
973, DeSalvo was found murdered in the prison infirmary. His killer (or killers) has never been identified.

  There have always been serious doubts as to whether DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. At the time of his confession, it seems all who had known him, including police officers with whom DeSalvo had long histories, believed he was incapable of committing the crimes.

  Confusing the issue was the belief among many in the police department that there was no Boston Strangler, rather that the 11 murders were committed by two or more individuals. Today, sceptics of the idea that there was a single strangler point out that the victims came from different age and ethnic groups, and that there were very different patterns to the murders. Moreover, killing by strangulation in the Boston area did not end with Mary Sullivan, the supposed final victim.

  And then, there was the matter of evidence. There was no physical evidence linking DeSalvo to any of the crime scenes. No witnesses could place him at or near any of the sites.

  Why would DeSalvo admit to these horrible crimes if he didn’t actually commit them? One theory rests on DeSalvo’s realization that he would likely be incarcerated for the rest of his life for the crimes of burglary and assault. Looking for a means with which to support his wife and children, he entered into an ill-fated scheme in which George Nassar would receive a significant reward for turning in DeSalvo as the Boston Strangler. Accordingly, the two men would have split the proceeds.

  DeSalvo once told F. Lee Bailey that he hoped to be able to provide for his family by writing a book on his crimes. He was murdered before ever being able to carry out the plan.

  RICHARD SPECK

  Richard Speck believed that he’d been born to raise hell. Indeed, as a teenager he had had those very words tattooed on his arm. It was neither a young man’s folly, nor an idle boast.

  Richard Franklin Speck was born 6 December 1941 in Kirkwood, Illinois, a small village of a few hundred people located midway between Chicago and Kansas City. The seventh of eight children, he was very close to his father, Benjamin Speck. His young life was thrown into turmoil at the age of 6 when his father died. His mother relocated with some of the children, Richard included, to Fair Park, Texas, where she married a man named Carl Lindberg. Speck watched as his mother, a religious woman with no tolerance for alcohol in the home, adapted to marriage with a drunken, violent man who had a history with the police. Speck came to hate his stepfather with the same passion he had shown in loving his father.

  In Texas, he was a poor student and demonstrated little interest in school. The eighth grade was the last he managed to complete. Before his 12th birthday he had begun to drink, as both an escape and a means of countering severe headaches brought on, most likely, by a series of head injuries.

  Entering adolescence, Speck was arrested for the first time. His offence, trespassing, would soon be joined by charges of burglary and stabbing.

  In November 1962, he married a woman named Shirley Malone. The next year, the couple had a baby daughter. But his approach to the role of father was in stark contrast to that of Benjamin Speck. Convictions on theft, cheque fraud and aggravated assault charges meant that he spent much of the marriage in prison. In January 1966, Speck’s wife filed for divorce. She would claim that on at least one occasion he had raped her at knifepoint.

  Shortly thereafter, Speck was charged with a stabbing and burglary. Incredibly, he was let go after paying a fine of ten dollars. With the support of his sister, he returned to the area of Illinois in which he had spent his early years.

  On 2 April, an elderly local woman, Mrs Virgil Harris, was attacked, bound and raped. Nine days later, a barmaid named May Kay Pierce was found dead behind Frank’s Place, Speck’s tavern of choice. He was questioned for the second crime, but became sick during the interrogation and was let go. Although he promised to return on 19 April, he never did. Local police tracked him to a hotel, but found he had run out just a few hours earlier. Left behind in Speck’s room they found a radio and jewellery belonging to Mrs Harris.

  Speck seemed to have disappeared; in actual fact he had found work on a ship on the Great Lakes. As he travelled, bodies seemed to appear in his wake. He was soon wanted for questioning about the disappearances of three females and the murders of four others.

  At approximately 11 o’clock on the evening of 14 July 1966, a student nurse named Cora Amurao answered a knocking at the door to a townhouse dormitory in South Chicago. She was met by Speck, who was holding a handgun. Grabbing her by the arm, he made his way through the townhouse threatening the women with his gun, until they’d all been gathered in one of the bedrooms. There were six of them altogether. Another student nurse, Gloria Davy, arrived home from a date and had the misfortune of stumbling into the scene.

  Speck would later claim that his original intention was simply to rob the women. Indeed, each was made to give him money from their purses. However, he was soon ripping sheets from one of the bunk beds, using the strips to tie each woman’s wrists and ankles.

  He had completed this task when another two students, Suzanne Farris and Mary Ann Jordan, arrived home. When they came upon Speck and the bound women, they tried to flee the townhouse. Speck ran after the pair. They were forced into another of the bedrooms. He stabbed Jordan three times, including once in the eye. Farris was strangled with a white nurse’s stocking and stabbed 18 times in the chest and neck. They were the first of eight women who would die.

  Although he would later claim to have been high on alcohol and drugs, Speck spent the next several hours methodically removing the women from the room, either individually or in pairs. He would take each to another bedroom, where they would be beaten, raped and stabbed. Cora Amurao managed to escape this fate by hiding under one of the beds and pressing herself as tightly as possible against the wall. Speck simply lost track of the number of women he had bound. It later came out that he had known eight women lived in the dormitory, but was unaware that there had been one visitor. That visitor happened to be Amurao.

  After Speck left the dormitory, Amurao remained hidden, not daring to come out from under the bed until five the next morning. She ran to the balcony and began screaming, ‘They’re all dead! All my friends are dead! Oh God, I’m the only one alive!’

  With a survivor on their hands, police moved quickly in identifying Speck. However, not all police officers had been alerted to the identity of the killer. Two days after the murder, the police were called to a rundown hotel to investigate a complaint that a man named Stayton had a gun in his room. Awakened by the cops, Stayton gave his name as Richard Speck and explained the gun by saying that it belonged to a prostitute he’d picked up the night before. Satisfied, the police left.

  Drunk on beer and cheap wine, Speck kept moving through the low-rent areas of Chicago, always ahead of the police. However, by 19 July his name and photograph were all over the front pages of the local newspapers. Speck bought these papers and a bottle of cheap wine, which he drank after returning to the cheap hotel room he’d rented. He then smashed the bottle and used the broken glass to slice open his wrist and inner elbow. He was discovered by the desk clerk, and taken by ambulance to Cook County Hospital. It was LeRoy Smith, the doctor who worked to save Speck’s life, who identified the killer. He had read all about the wanted man and recognized the ‘BORN TO RAISE HELL’ tattoo from a newspaper description.

  While being treated, Speck told Smith that he had committed the murders of the eight student nurses. However, it was a confession made under the influence of sedatives, and so could not be used in court. When he had recovered from his suicide attempt, Speck maintained that he had no memory of the evening in the dormitory.

  Speck’s trial began on 3 April 1967. The evidence presented appeared overwhelming. At the centre of those testifying was the survivor Cora Amurao. When asked whether she could identify the man who had murdered her friends, she rose from her seat, unlatched the witness box door, walked across the courtroom and stood pointing before Speck, saying, ‘This is the ma
n.’

  Two weeks later, when asked for their decision, it took the jury just 49 minutes to declare Speck guilty and to recommend the death penalty. Speck was sentenced to death on 5 June, a conviction that set in motion over five years of legal manoeuvrings. The penultimate decision, made on 21 November 1972, sentenced Speck to eight consecutive terms of between 50 and 150 years. The following year, this was reduced to a new statutory maximum of 300 years.

  He was incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois. Though he preferred solitary pastimes, such as stamp collecting, Speck was anything but a model prisoner. Most of his infractions involved drugs and bootleg alcohol. He sought and was denied parole on six different applications, the last being in 1990.

  Speck died of a heart attack on 5 December 1991, the day before what would have been his 50th birthday. An autopsy performed on his brain revealed gross abnormalities. However, further examination and study was curtailed after samples disappeared.

  Speck’s unclaimed body was eventually cremated. A service was held, attended only by the county coroner, a deputy, a newspaper columnist and a pastoral worker. His ashes were spread in an undisclosed location.

  The death of Richard Speck was a news story for a day or two; some media outlets provided summaries of his awful crimes. Then, just as Speck slowly began to fade from modern memory, in May 1996 a videotape surfaced. Believed to have been shot two years before his death, it features a bizarre-looking Speck with pendulous breasts, wearing blue silk panties. He is shown taking drugs and having sex. But more shocking than the visual images are Speck’s words, answers to questions posed by another inmate. He describes the process and strength required in strangling someone to death. When asked about the deaths of the eight nurses, he responds, ‘It just wasn’t their night.’