They quickly moved in together and he introduced her to his increasingly violent brand of sex. She remained devoted to him even though he was often cruel to her, and she tolerated his need to dress in women’s clothing: men who’ve survived life with an abusive mother often feel the need to crossdress.
But even having this willing sex slave wasn’t enough for Coleman – he wanted to hurt and humiliate men, women and children just as he’d been hurt and humiliated himself.
The first murder
Alton and Debra befriended a Mrs Wheat and her nine-year-old daughter Vernita from Kenosha, introducing themselves with false names. On 29th May 1984 they took Vernita on an outing to nearby Waukegan. Her mother happily waved the trio off.
When they had the nine-year-old alone, Alton beat, raped and strangled her. (Her body wouldn’t be found until 19th June, dumped in a derelict building.) When the police began to investigate the child’s disappearance, Debra and Alton went on the run. She’d spend much of the next two months helping her lover to hold up and kidnap various victims for money or for sexual thrills, though, seated in the abduction car, she often stared blankly into space.
The second murder
On 17th June twenty-five-year-old Donna Williams, a beauty therapist residing in the town of Gary, became their next victim. Coleman and Brown asked her to show them her local church and she obligingly drove them in its direction. But they kidnapped her and Alton Coleman raped her and strangled her with her own tights. They drove around with her body in the boot, later dumping it in an abandoned Detroit house. (Despite an intensive search, her body wouldn’t be found until the following month.)
The third murder
On 18th June, the day after murdering Donna Williams, they killed again. Seven-year-old Tamika Turks and nine-year-old Annie were on their way back from the sweet shop when Debra and Alton stopped and offered them a ride home. (Most journalists have described the girls as cousins, but nine-year-old Annie was actually Tamika’s aunt.) The children had been warned not to go off with strange men but were happy to accept a lift when they saw Debra in the car.
But the couple drove to the nearby woods then bound and gagged the children. Tamika kept crying so Debra held her down and tried to suffocate her with her hand whilst Alton stamped on her face and chest. He raped her then strangled her to death with a strip of bedsheet that he’d brought from the house.
Both Debra and Alton now made nine-year-old Annie perform oral sex on them. Afterwards, Coleman raped and stabbed the child so viciously that her intestines protruded from her vagina. He beat her about the head, strangled her and believed that he’d killed her – but she revived after the couple had left and was able to identify them from police photographs.
An ongoing terror spree
The psychological peace that killing brings to the pathological mind didn’t last for very long, so the lovers varied their acts of violence. Throughout the next few weeks they would commit numerous armed robberies for money and would terrorise and rape other victims in order to feel powerful and have fun. They sometimes stayed with friends for a few days, then tied them up and beat them before fleeing the area in the victim’s car.
So far all of their victims had been black people killed or assaulted in black neighbourhoods where neither Coleman or Brown stood out from the crowd, therefore the police weren’t hunting a deadly duo. The couple remained free to kill again and again.
The fourth and fifth murders
The duo’s next victims that June were a mother and daughter. They knocked on the Temples’ door, pretending they were hitchhikers who needed a place to stay. Thirty-year-old Virginia Temple felt sorry for the weary travellers and let them in and they ate and drank together but later that night the couple beat and strangled her then raped and strangled her ten-year-old daughter Rochelle. They continued to enjoy the Temples’ hospitality, eventually leaving their bodies in the crawl space under the house.
The sixth murder
Reaching Indianapolis, they got talking to a fifteen-year-old girl called Tonnie Stewart and abducted her. She was repeatedly tortured. Alton Coleman sexually assaulted her, stabbed then strangled her. In yet another act of overkill, she was also shot twice. The couple dumped her body in a disused building then drove on towards Cincinnati.
The seventh murder
Two days later they killed again. The couple had started by targeting their own race but now they moved across racial lines in their desire for increasing stimulus or perhaps a subconscious desire to be caught. Both motives are equally valid for Alton would say that he enjoyed killing and Debra would concur that she ‘had fun out of it’ yet they were becoming increasingly underweight and malnourished through living rough.
This time they chose a middle class white couple who were selling their camper van. Harry and Marlene Waters invited the potential buyers inside, only to be violently attacked. Over the next few hours, the Cincinnati couple were beaten with a wooden candle stick, pliers, a crowbar and a knife. Marlene Waters died of her bludgeon wounds but her husband recovered – albeit permanently disabled – and was able to describe the pair to the police. Meanwhile the couple had stolen the Waters’ car and they continued their victim-hunt.
The eighth murder
They drove into a car wash and realised that they could kidnap Eugene Scott, the seventy-seven-year-old owner. The unfortunate man was stabbed repeatedly and shot four times in the head. Debra Brown would still be carrying the .38 calibre pistol when she was arrested and had ammunition for it, though there are conflicting reports over whether the weapon was loaded or not.
The destructive couple dumped Eugene Scott’s body in a ditch just outside Indianapolis and drove off in his car, returning to their favourite locale of Illinois. He would be their last victim in a pointless killing spree which lasted fifty-three days.
Arrest and trial
Luckily an Illinois resident now recognised Alton Coleman as he’d been on America’s Most Wanted. He called the police and the couple were found watching a baseball game. Tired and unkempt, they didn’t put up a struggle when arrested and taken into custody, though both gave false names.
Several trials followed. In Cincinnati in May 1985 the couple were tried separately for the murder of Marlene Waters. In court, Debra Brown said ‘I killed the bitch and I don’t give a damn.’ Strangely, she was merely given life imprisonment for this murder whilst Alton Coleman was given the death penalty.
The following year they were taken to Indiana to face trial for the murder of Tamika Turks. Debra Brown slipped the judge a note which said ‘I’m a more kind and understandable and lovable person than people think I am.’ Fortunately he judged her on her trail of carnage rather than her words, and both she and her co-killer got the death sentence. Two months later they were tried separately for Tonnie Stewart’s murder and both given the death sentence again. But an Ohio governor commuted one of Brown’s death sentences to life imprisonment in 1991 saying that she was retarded and had been under Coleman’s spell.
Moments before the Vernita Wheat trial started in January 1987, Debra signed a legal document saying that she was now Alton’s common law wife and he immediately reciprocated. He was subsequently found guilty of Vernita’s kidnapping and murder and sentenced to death.
They weren’t tried for all eight murders as prosecutors decided to concentrate on the cases with the most damning evidence and those in states which still had the death penalty.
Update
In 1997 Debra Brown launched an appeal to get her Indiana death sentence overturned. Predictably, her cause was picked up by the feminist movement who believe she murdered eight people solely because she feared her man. But she had relatives who cared for her so wasn’t completely dependent on him – and her own testimony in court suggests she enjoyed terrorising their victims, killing two of them and forcing at least one child to give her oral sex.
Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, Alton Coleman worked his way through the appeals proces
s but on 26th April 2002 he entered the execution chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He asked to speak to Debra Brown but this request was refused. One of his sisters spoke to him on the telephone as his execution neared but none of his relatives were present at the prison.
So many survivors and relatives of his victims wanted to watch him being put to death that closed-circuit television had to be installed in an ante room. But, one of the survivors who got to view his death in person was Harry Waters who was accompanied by two of his son-in-laws. Mr Waters had watched his forty-four-year-old wife being bludgeoned to death by the couple – and his own head injuries have left him permanently disabled, with fragments of bone lodged in his brain.
The witnesses watched as the forty-six-year-old serial killer was strapped down and began reciting the 23rd Psalm. At 10am the lethal cocktail of drugs was administered and at 10.13 he was pronounced dead.
Meanwhile, the nine-year-old who was beaten and sexually assaulted by Coleman & Brown still has nightmares and appalling headaches. The traumatic experiences have left her unable to trust anyone, and one of her close relatives has since attempted suicide. Anti-death-penalty supporters continue to champion Debra Brown who is currently the only woman on Death Row at the Ohio Reformatory For Women.
4 MENACE TO SOCIETY
KENNETH BIANCHI & ANGELO BUONO
Los Angeles women lived in fear after twenty-six-year-old Kenneth Bianchi moved in with his forty-four-year-old cousin Angelo Buono. Within a five month period – October 1977 to February 1978 – they would torture, sexually assault and kill ten women. Then Bianchi moved a thousand miles away and killed another two girls…
Kenneth Alessio Bianchi
Ken was born in New York on 22nd May 1951 to a teenage mother of limited intelligence and to a twenty-four-year-old father. The girl had had a very unhappy life in the juvenile care system and was a very heavy drinker. Whilst pregnant, she married a soldier who was not the father of her unborn child – and when he found out, he wanted nothing to do with the impending birth. She then set her sights on a much older man and tried to ignore her pregnancy.
Ken was a breech birth who came into the world weighing six pounds four ounces. For the first few weeks of his life his mother left him in the care of a neighbour, but the neighbour didn’t want him. She, in turn, began to hand him on to other neighbours for the day. He was fed and changed but rarely held or spoken to – and such early deprivation can affect a growing child’s brain, making it hard for him to bond with genuine carers at a later date.
By now a local childless couple called Frances and Nicholas Bianchi had become aware of the baby’s plight. Frances had had a hysterectomy (consequently at the age of thirty she went through the menopause) so was unable to have children of her own. This deeply upset her as she came from a large religious family and had been constantly told that children were ‘a gift from God’. She became a hypochondriac and called her GP so often that he refused to visit her. When a doctor suggested that she adopt, she embraced the idea with fervour, seeing this as her mission in life. She now approached Ken Bianchi’s mother, asking to privately adopt the three-month-old. The mother agreed and the papers were legally drawn up by the courts.
Frances, now in her early thirties, was very much in charge of their adopted son, as her husband Nicholas was a subdued man with a speech defect. He worked at a foundry and Frances stayed at home with little Ken.
By the time he was three years old it was clear that Ken Bianchi was deeply unhappy and afraid. He often wet the bed, had sleepless nights and went down with a case of acute laryngitis. The hospital doctors who were treating him noted that his mother was highly strung and overprotective, and found that she constantly rejected their medical advice. They suggested that she bring Ken back for allergy testing but she failed to follow through.
Ken went to kindergarten but when he fell in the playground, as small children often do, his mother kept him home for the rest of the year. She would continue to keep him at home with her whenever she could.
By the time he went to Holy Family School, Ken was still wetting his pants. His mother’s response was to spank him before he went to the bathroom in the hope that this would encourage him to expel all of his urine. She also took him from doctor to doctor, but rejected any suggestion that the problem might be psychological. When Ken was checked in for tests, she insisted on accompanying him to the bathroom even though he was old enough to go by himself. When doctors suggested that she give the child some privacy, she became semi-hysterical, declaring that she would take him to the bathroom until she no longer had the energy. Hospital staff noted that Ken was no problem in the ward until his mother came to visit, at which he made numerous health complaints. In turn, his mother would rush around the various doctors, demanding that they cure the disturbed little boy.
Frances Bianchi often brought up the fact that her adopted son dribbled from his penis – and, as a result, it was frequently examined and probed by the medical staff whilst she looked on. Eventually a clinician noted that ‘the relationship between these two must be considered pathological.’
The teachers noticed that Ken found it hard to concentrate at school. He developed various facial tics and his eyes would roll back in his head, signs of mild epilepsy or of tension. He fell from a climbing frame in the gym and cut his lip and as a result his mother sued the school. Sometimes he was bullied by other children – and after a bullying episode his mother would keep him at home for a month. She also kept him off school for fear that he’d get a sore throat.
Frances fostered two other children and whilst they were in the home Ken’s physical and mental health improved. But social services removed the children from her care and Ken’s ailments resurfaced. He was in and out of the hospital for tests after complaining of stomach and leg pains, with Frances Bianchi telling one doctor ‘He’s been whipped when he lies so he wouldn’t lie to me.’ The staff noted that Kenneth developed facial tics when talking about his mother, but he refused to say anything against her other than admitting that she shouted a lot. He said that she also shouted at his dad, who was a nice, quiet man. Unfortunately Ken hardly ever saw his father as the man had to work so hard – and when he wasn’t working he liked to bet on horses, a hobby which Mrs Bianchi despised.
Financial problems
Frances had never been happy with the part of Rochester where they lived, so when Ken was eight she and her husband bought a much more expensive house in Greece, a more upmarket suburb of Rochester. As a result, Nicholas Bianchi had to work even longer hours to make ends meet. Frances got a part-time job but the family still had money problems, and Ken quickly picked up on this. Soon the Greece School District were noting that ‘Mrs Bianchi is a very nervous person, easily upset. She needs to be calmed down.’ But little calming took place, for Ken’s mother went on to write to the school, telling them that she wanted to be informed of any injury her son suffered, however slight.
Another change of house
Within months it became clear that the family couldn’t afford the payments on the new house so they moved again and Mrs Bianchi took a job with an aircraft company. Ken was now looked after by a neighbour and for a few months he blossomed. Social services noted that his disposition became much less sombre and that his bedwetting had stopped. Unfortunately his mother gave up her job through ill health and Ken’s psychologically-induced medical problems started up again. By now doctors believed that Ken’s illnesses were the only way for him to get his feelings out in the open, to show his adoptive mother that he was hurting. They believed that, robbed of this outlet, he might became a violent boy.
Social services had been monitoring the family for some time and when Ken was eleven the Rochester Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children reported that Mrs Bianchi was ‘a deeply disturbed person’ with paranoid tendencies. In that same year, the staff at the local DePaul Clinic concluded that ‘Kenneth is a deeply hostile boy who has extremely dependent needs
which his mother fulfils. He depends upon his mother for his very survival and expends a great deal of energy keeping his hostility under control and under cover.’ The insightful doctor at the clinic also noted the boy’s loneliness and extreme anxiety. He ascertained that Ken’s mother disapproved of his friends and that he was desperate to have other people in his life.
But Ken’s unhappy home life continued. At twelve, his perfectly normal adolescent curiosity led him to leaf through a pornographic magazine – but his mother’s response was to whip him with a shower hose. Clinicians who were monitoring the case noted that she seemed to spy on him, as she told them she’d seen him pulling down a six-year-old girl’s pants.
Educational standards
Ken had an IQ of 116 which meant that he had a well above average intelligence but wouldn’t be bright enough to eventually go to university. Unfortunately he expected to get higher grades than he was actually capable of, so he often felt frustrated at school. The one subject he excelled in was creative writing – children from unhappy households are often especially creative as they disappear inside their own heads as often as possible to avoid their external reality.
A death in the family
Ken’s relationship with his father had been time-starved for many years as the man had to work so much overtime. Nevertheless he was grateful for the quiet kindness his father showed him – and when Ken was thirteen they managed to have a fishing trip together. Unfortunately, Nicholas Bianchi died a few days later at his work. Ken cried for hours when he heard the news, as did his mother, but after the funeral he rarely cried again. Social services noted that Mrs Bianchi seemed to behave provocatively in front of her teenage son, pulling down her already low-cut tops and crossing her legs suggestively. A report noted that ‘this family has been known for many years to social services in many areas of the country.’ Unfortunately no one stepped in to help the increasingly disturbed child.
Couples Who Kill Page 4