The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The killer, who plainly savoured their discomfort, played a grisly game with his pursuers, dumping the bags filled with body parts in places with chillingly evocative names. The first bags, containing 12 neatly-severed parts of an indeterminate number of arms and legs, were found on 22 March 1997 on the banks of the Fleuve Trouille—the River Jitters—a canal bordering Mons and neighbouring Cuesmes.

  Two days later, a limbless upper torso was found on the banks of a tributary of the Fleuve Haine—River Hate—next to a road called Chemin de l’Inquietude—the Path of Worry. The limbs had been severed in the same way as those of another torso found floating in the Haine the previous July. The police have established that it was the work of the same killer.

  The gendarmerie began an intensive search of Mons, using helicopter, sniffer dogs and infra-red equipment. Then on 12 April another two bags were found in a lay-by on the Rue du Depot—Deposit Road. A week later another was found on the Rue St Symphorien—Symphorien was a Christian martyr who was beheaded in AD 200—at a place called La Poudrière—the Powderkeg—near Havré.

  The killer left numerous clues which allowed a team of specialist psychiatrists to compile a profile. He is thought to be an intelligent, methodical, calculating and obsessive man, who takes pleasure in the ritualistic dismemberment of his victims and the careful distribution of their remains. Detectives believe that there might be a perverse religious motive for the killings. Mons is an ancient religious town with connections to a number of saints associated with decapitation.

  A stone head of St John the Baptist can be found over the door of the oldest inn in Mons, which dates back to 1776. The inn was built by a monk, a member of the Catholic Brotherhood of St John the Beheaded. The order was established in the Middle Ages to escort condemned men to the scaffold. It still exists today. The head looks out over the Rue de la Clef—Road of the Key—a fact that investigators feel could be significant, given the clues the killer is volunteering. It may also be significant that relics of the decapitated St Symphorien are kept in a nearby church.

  Two of the three victims whose names are known disappeared on a Sunday, and the third may also have done so, though no one seems to have noticed that she was missing.

  “We have not ruled out that he is a member of a satanic sect,” said Didier Van Reusel of the public prosecutor’s department. “The treatment of the bodies is very methodical, which is often the case with Satanists involved in ritualistic killings.”

  A song about the Butcher of Mons called “Bowels of Murder” appears on Lovecraftian Dark, the second album of the heavy-metal band Dawn of Relic.

  It was initially thought that the killer was a surgeon or a butcher, due to the precision of the dissection. But further investigation revealed that the killer had not dismembered the bodies by hand. He ran his victims through an automatic sawing machine with several circular blades at 12-inch intervals—the kind of machine normally used for slicing chopping logs into planks. The severed limbs were exactly one foot long.

  “There are not that many places you can carry out that operation, with the blood and the smell,” said Van Reusel. “And there are not that many people who own a machine like that.”

  The killer appears to have chosen his victims from a group of transients, who congregate around Mons station and the string of cheap bars opposite. One of the victims was 43-year-old transexual Martine Bohn, a retired prostitute who had worked out of the bars. Having lost contact with her family years before, she disappeared on Sunday 21 July 1996 and it was her torso found floating in the Haine. Her breasts had been sliced off. It is thought that the killer may have been angry at discovering she was not a real woman.

  A second victim was 33-year-old Jacqueline Leclercq, a mother-of-four who had separated from her husband. After losing custody of her children, she drifted into the station scene. She had disappeared on Sunday 23 January 1997.

  A third victim was 21-year-old Nathalie Godart, who lived in a bedsit in Mons. Her young son had been taken into care. No one had reported her missing. The staff at the Intercity, the Metropole and the Café de la Gare, the bars opposite the station, knew her well.

  “She was promiscuous, but not a prostitute,” said one bar owner.

  The police are aware that the killer is playing a complex game with them. Tests indicate some of the first bags found on the bank of the Trouille had lain there undiscovered for months. They were only discovered only when the last bag dumped there hung conspicuously on a tree, drawing attention to it. The remains they contained were between one week and two years old which indicated that the killer had access to an industrial refrigeration unit.

  The killer plainly enjoyed the publicity their discovery brought and he became more audacious. Succeeding bags were placed in highly visible places, with evocative names, at a time when the police search was already fully underway.

  Psychiatrists believe the perpetrator relishes not just the killing but also the handling of the corpse. Each of the body parts found had been wrapped individually in its own white plastic bag which is then knotted tightly at the top. These white bags are then placed in the larger grey bags. Each grey bin liner has been tied tightly in the same fashion, and the top of the knot then snipped off with scissors—“very neatly, very precisely, the work of an obsessive,” said Van Reusel.

  One man was questioned, but was released. He has since left Mons, and is no longer a suspect. All the authorities could do was await the next piece of the puzzle and keep Rue des Sinistres, or Sentier des Morts under surveillance.

  The Butcher of Belize

  In May 2006, Channel Five, a local television network in Belize, offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a paedophile serial killer who abused and killed at least five schoolgirls during a 16-month binge.

  The first victim was 13-year-old Sherilee Nicholas, who disappeared in September 1998. A month later authorities found a body partially submerged in a ditch of water beside a feeder road near Mile 13 on the Western Highway. The body suffered more than 40 knife wounds and showed signs of rape. Investigators believe the girl tried to fight off her attacker. The child’s mother identified the body, but no clues could be found to identify the killer.

  Soon after, 9-year-old Jay Blades disappeared. Then, in the northern town of Corozal, 13-year-old Rebecca Gilharry was found raped and strangled. Another child’s body was found in northern Belize and another girl was raped, beaten with a rock and left to die in the southern town of Dangriga. She lived to tell her tale to the police.

  Fears grew in Belize City when 12-year-old Jackie Fern Malic vanished on 22 March 1999. Jackie’s sister told police that a family friend, 40-year-old mechanic Mike Williams, had offered to take the two girls for a ride before school, but they turned him down. Police questioned Williams and released him, only to arrest him later. Two days after she had disappeared, Jackie Malic’s body was found on a side road, a few miles away from where Sherilee Nicholas’s body was found. She had multiple stab wounds to the face, buttock, knee and upper left arm, and one of her arms had been severed. The coroner drew attention to the many similarities between the two deaths.

  On the day of Jackie’s funeral, children lined the streets with signs demanding that the killer be caught. A Children’s Summit was convened and, in a phone-in programme on the radio, a little boy asked Prime Minister Said Musa: “Why are there special police to protect the tourists, but not the children?”

  A week later, the curfew was imposed. No one under 17 was allowed out between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Wardens were stationed at all schools to monitor children and watch for suspicious characters. Parents began walking their children to school. This was quite a readjustment for the citizens of Belize. With a population of just 200,000, the quiet central American country had long been relatively free of sex crimes and murder. But with Williams now in jail charged in Jackie Malic’s death everyone thought the nightmare was over.

  In June, a child’s skull and a few bon
e fragments were found along the Western Highway, near where the other victims had been located. It was assumed that Jay Blades been found at last. But next to the body was Sherilee Nicholas’s school bags. Fearing an error in identification, authorities exhumed Sherilee’s body against her mother’s wishes.

  Meanwhile, in June, 10-year-old Karen Cruz disappeared from her home in Orange Walk, just north of Belize City, while her mother was on the front veranda. Her body was found the next day near her home. Newspapers reported suspicions regarding her uncle 38-year-old Antonio Baeza, who lived next door, and suggested he had been stalking the child. Baeza was arrested and charged with murder. But still the killings did not stop.

  At the end of the month, nine-year-old Erica Wills went missing. Her body was found three weeks later. She too had been butchered. Found behind a quarry near Gracie Rock, a village 20 miles west of Belize City, her bones had been picked clean by vultures, but her mother recognized her daughter’s hair band and her Tweety Bird ring, and was able to identify the body. A thousand people turned out in Belize City late Monday for a candlelight vigil in memory of the victims and Williams was then released.

  Then on 15 February 14-year-old Noemi Hernandez disappeared after her grandmother sent her to collect rent money from a tenant. Nine days later her mutilated remains were fished out of the water near the mouth of the Belize River by a Belize Defence Force Maritime Wing patrol boat. She was found headless and her entire left arm was missing. Like the other victims, she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed repeatedly. The similarities between the murders were very striking and lead police to believe it may have been the work of a serial killer, now dubbed Jack the Butcher. As this is the first case of serial killing to hit Belize, the police lacked the experience to deal with the situation and called on Scotland Yard and the FBI for help. It was hoped that Channel 5’s reward might help bring the culprit to justice.

  The Boy Killers of Brazil

  A Brazilian man accused of killing 42 boys in a series of macabre Satanic murders was sentenced to 20 years and eight months in jail on 25 October 2006 for one of the killings. Forty-one-year-old Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was found guilty of killing 15-year-old Jonathan Silva Vieira who disappeared in northern Brazil in December 2003. The bicycle mechanic still faces numerous other charges of murder killings and sexual abuse. The police in the Amazonian states of Maranhao and Para maintain that Chagas has confessed.

  However, human rights groups following the case were reluctant to accept the police’s version of events and expressed reservations over the tactics used to secure Chagas’ confession. They also questioned previous police work and the future of three people already jailed or awaiting trial for carrying out some of the killings.

  “We’ve been questioning the police’s work on this for 13 years, so we are naturally still a little suspicious,” said Nelma Pereira da Silva, head of a local children’s rights group who took the case to the Organization of American States in Washington. “We need to wait and see if this is for real.”

  The police believe that Chagas performed black magic rituals before killing some of the boys. He sexually abused his victims and, in some cases cut off their genitals, before decapitating them and burying the bodies.

  During the trial, Jonathan’s mother, Rita de Silva, told the court her son had said he was going to pick fruit with Chagas on the day he went missing.

  “The monster tried to help out the mothers of the children he killed because he was looking for victims,” she said.

  She said she had shown Chagas a photograph of her son after he disappeared, and the killer laughed and told her he had not seen him.

  “It seemed like he was laughing at my suffering,” she said.

  The trial was held in the auditorium of a club in Sao Jose de Ribamar, 1,400 miles north-east of Rio de Janeiro, because the courtroom was not big enough to hold the hundreds of victims’ relatives.

  Prosecutors say they charged Chagas with Jonathan Silva Vieira’s murder first because it was the case in which they had the most evidence.

  Chagas was arrested in April 2004 after neighbours complained of a stench coming from his ramshackle house on the outskirts of the Maranhao state capital of Sao Luis. Officers secured a search warrant and dug up a dirt floor to find two skeletons. One was identified as a four-year-old boy named Daniel and the other of a child Chagas said was called Diego. Daniel’s father recognized scraps of clothing as a T-shirt he was wearing when he disappeared in February 2003.

  According to police, Chagas quickly confessed to the killings and those of at least 18 other young boys. The methods he used were similar to those used in the spate of murders that ravaged Maranhao and the neighbouring state of Para between 1989 and 2003. The police said that Chagas lived in both states at the times the killings took place.

  The series of killings shocked even Brazil, where violence is common and the murder rate is one of the world’s highest. Reports that Chagas sexually assaulted the boys and then castrated them added to the outrage, as did allegations that some of the earlier killings that took place in Para between 1989 and 1993 were related to a satanic cult. Such things are not uncommon in Brazil.

  On 27 November 1998, Brazilian police arrested six members of the United Pentecostal Church of Brazil, who had beaten and kicked to death six people, including three children, purportedly so that the perpetrators would be taken to heaven “after wiping out the enemies of God”. The cult practiced their bizarre rituals on a remote rubber plantation where men, women and children were subjected to vicious ritual beatings. Among those arrested was Francisco Bezerra de Moraes, aka Toto, who was believed to be the leader of the 30-member sect.

  The killings began two weeks before the arrests when Bezerra announced during a sermon that he could hear “voices from Jesus Christ” telling him that the former pastor of the group and all his followers must be punished. Bezerra, his wife and two other men then began beating, whipping and kicking other worshippers. For the next several days “disciplinary” torture continued in nearby shacks.

  “Each day began with a ceremony venerating of Toto’s wife,” said a survivor. “Then came the torture.”

  Torture were accompanied by prayers and chants of “Out, Satan!” Among the dead were two brothers aged three and four, who were allegedly killed by their father, and another 13-year-old boy. The mother of the dead brothers was also murdered. The former pastor of the sect escaped and raised the alarm. When police arrived, they discovered the bodies of the dead out in the open, decomposing, torn apart and being eaten by animals.

  Then in August 2003, five men went on trial in the Brazilian city of Belem accused of sexually mutilating and murdering young boys in Altamira, a town in the Amazon. They were said to be members of a satanic cult who murdered and mutilated for ten years before being caught. One of the five, Valentina Andrade, was the leader of an occult sect based in Argentina and two were doctors.

  Chagas originally told police he did not remember attacking the boys or castrating his victims because his memory was erased at the moment of the killing. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to the murder charge. In mitigation he and other witnesses, including his sister, testified that he had been abused as a child by his grandmother and a man named Carlito. Chagas told the court that when he murdered Jonathan Silva Viera, he felt a pent-up rage stemming from those childhood experiences.

  “I was seeing Carlito in front of me,” he said.

  The killings were so brutal and the inaction of the local police so shocking that the Organization of American States launched a campaign to pressure local authorities into more rigorously investigating the cases. Several foreign and Brazilian human rights groups also petitioned the federal government to intervene in the investigation.

  As result, the police in the northern state of Maranhao announced that Francisco das Chagas confessed to the mass killing of 18 boys around Sao Luis from 1991 to 2003. They believe the bicycle mechanic may have killed three others
during the same period. Police in neighbouring Para state want to question him concerning the whereabouts of 10 youngsters who were either killed or disappeared there.

  In spite of the concerns from human rights groups, the state’s attorney general said the detailed evidence provided by Chagas showed “strong signs” he was responsible, based on his own confessions. But there are concerns. The Organization of American States criticized the state government for failing to cooperate with their inquiry. Children’s rights activitist Pereira da Silva said her organization would focus its attentions on identifying the officers responsible for the imprisonment of Roberio Ribeiro Cruz, who was sentenced to 19 years after supposedly admitting to killing an 11-year old in 1998, and the arrest of two others who are awaiting trial for the slaying of another child in 1996.

  According to the police Chagas has now confessed to the killings of 30 boys in Maranhao state and 12 others in Para state between 1991 and 2003, but then retracted his confession again. If convicted of all murders, Chagas would be Brazil’s most prolific serial killer. However, most people involved in the case have their doubts that he is guilty of all the murders he is charged with and are concerned that other child killers are at large.

  Brazil’s Killer Beach

  Brazilian police said they are hunting another serial killer who has tied up, raped and repeatedly stabbed four women before dumping their bodies in a field close to a motorway. Sergeant Marcelo de Jesus Bispo said officers found the four corpses in Itabuna in the northeastern state of Bahia, 282 miles south of the beach resort of Salvador.