The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The body of Roxana Jamileth Molina was discovered two weeks later in a dingy hotel room on the western edge of Guatemalan capital. She had been strangled. On 6 March, the owner of a hotel nearby led police to the remains of another strangled unidentified prostitute.

  Four days later, the killer’s fourth victim was found in downtown Guatemala City. On the woman’s body, etched on her back in flowery handwriting, was written: “Death to all the dogs. Seven down, three to go.” More had plainly died. Then on 29 March, the body of a fifth strangled prostitute was found in Huehuetenango, 80 miles northwest of Guatemala City.

  For once, they put officers on the streets at all hours, warning prostitutes and passing out computer-generated composites of the man they suspect was behind the killings. The pictures was compiled from witnesses who said they had seen the suspect enter various hotels with prostitutes who were later found murdered. The killer was depicted as a short, olive-skinned, 35-year-old man with sunken brown eyes and closely cropped black hair. The police said he had a Salvadorean accent and uses the last name Blanco.

  “Everyone is scared,” said Rosa, a prostitute who charges $5 a trick to support her two children. “They all say, ‘I wonder if the next man I go with could be this killer.’ What we do is dangerous . . . this killer is hunting us.”

  Even so, the prostitutes refuse to co-operate with the police. Although prostitution is not illegal in Guatemala, they have as much to fear from the police as their clients.

  At one time, Enio Rivera, the director of Guatemala’s national police force, claimed that the authorities were so close to an arrest that the suspect left the country.

  “We’re afraid our suspect has fled to El Salvador,” Rivera told reporters in April 2001. “We have been in close contact with authorities there because we are convinced this man will kill again.”

  He said that police did not know for sure how many women the serial killer had slain but that authorities in neighbouring El Salvador were ready to blame the same suspect for the murder of a prostitute there that March. Rivera also said the killer had used his red marker to mark his victims with the letters MS, the initials of the gang “Mara Salvatrucha”.

  “If he returns to Guatemala, the prostitutes are the ones in danger,” police spokesman Faustino Sanchez said. “If we are going to catch this delinquent, we will have to do it with their help.”

  It was only after this serial killer got away that murder statistics were compiled by sex and the number of women being killed became apparent. Human-rights workers, who are regularly subjected to death threats and intimidation, say blaming the murder of women on gang violence is a deliberate oversimplification of the problem. Women are not only being “killed like flies” because they are considered of no worth, they say, but also they are being used as pawns in power struggles between competing organized crime networks.

  This problem, it seems, has been going on for millennia. In the rainforests to the north of modern-day Guatemala City, in the country’s northern rainforest, archaeologists recently entering a long-sealed Mayan crypt found the remains of two women. One was pregnant. They were arranged in a ritual fashion, making it clear that they had been sacrificed as part of a power struggle between rival Mayan cities.

  An attempt by the UN to set up a commission with powers to investigate and prosecute the country’s “hidden powers”, which they hope would serve as a model for other countries recovering from civil was, was dismissed by the Guatemalan authorities as “unconstitutional”. A debate began about how the terms of the commission can be amended to make it acceptable. But as the talking continues, so does the killing.

  On just one day in June 2006, 12-year-old Hilda Macario was eviscerated with a machete while resisting rape – Hilda survived, but was shunned by her community because of the stigma attached to sexual violence – and 21-year-old Priscilla de Villatoro was stabbed to death by her boyfriend for refusing to have an abortion.

  “Women here are dying worse than animals,” says Andrea Barrios of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights. “When the municipality announced this summer that it was launching a campaign to exterminate stray dogs, the public took to the streets in protest and it was stopped. But there is a great deal of indifference towards the murder of women, because a picture has been painted that those who die somehow deserve what they get.”

  Hilda Morales, the lawyer heading a network of women’s groups formed as the problem has escalated: “Neither the police nor the government are taking this seriously. Yet what we are observing is pure hatred against women in the way they are killed, raped, tortured and mutilated.”

  The situation is unlikely to change, she says, unless international pressure is brought to bear. Meanwhile the murder figures, not just of women, but also of political dissidents, male and female, continue to soar.

  “Despite these cruel figures,” says Guatemala’s President Oscar Berger, “I am optimistic. We have reformed the police and we have more radio patrols.”

  No one is holding their breath.

  Iran’s Spider Killings

  A new gang of serial killers are at large in Mashhad, one of Iran’s holiest cities. They have been strangling the local prostitutes and drug users and dumping them into local streets and canals. Newspapers have dubbed these slayings “the spider killings” because of the way the women were found wrapped in their black chadors.

  The first body was found on a roadside in July 2000. The dead woman was 30-year-old Afsaneh, a convicted drug user and suspected “truck woman” – a prostitute who services truck drivers and delivery men. The following week, two more prostitutes were found strangled with their own headscarves. In both their scarves were tied with two knots on the right side of the neck.

  Five months later, three more women were killed. The police then formally acknowledged a link between the killings and set up a special task force. It was thought the killings could be the work of religious vigilantes; the reform-minded parliament in Tehran ordered an inquiry. The authorities were especially sensitive about the killings because they occurred in Mashhad – the name literally means Place of Martyrdom. Iran’s second biggest city, it is one of the most sacred sites for Iran’s Shiite Muslims, drawing more than 100,000 pilgrims a year to the burial and shrine of the caliph Harun ar-Rashid and Ali ar-Rida, the eighth Shiite imam. But right next to the shrine there is an area inhabited by prostitutes and drug addicts. The drugs come from Afghanistan which is just a two-hour drive away and the general poverty of the city is fuelled by the 200,000 refugees who fled there from Afghanistan.

  On 1 April 2001, following the parliamentary inquiry, the local investigative team was replaced with a special squad from Tehran. Within two weeks, three more prostitutes were dead, suggesting that the killings had a political motive.

  On 27 July 2001, 39-year-old Saeed Hanei, a married man and father of three, was arrested. He confessed to the murder of 16 of 19 dead prostitutes in Mashhad over the past 12 months. He claimed to have been doing God’s work. After he had despatched 12 women, the drought that had been gripping the region lifted. The rains, he said, were a sign that God approved of what he was doing, so he killed four more.

  A volunteer in the Iran–Iraq war during the 1980s, Hanei declared that he was not a murderer, but rather that the deaths were a “continuation of the war effort”. He was an “anti-streetwoman activist” who was only doing God’s will by ridding Iran of moral corruption. He believed the spider killings were acts of piety, saying that when the drought ended: “I realized God looked favourably upon me, that He had taken notice of my work.”

  He said he wanted to “clean his neighbourhood”, adding: “I would have killed 150 if I hadn’t been arrested.”

  Hanei would lure prostitutes to his apartment in late afternoon while his wife was out of the house, posing as a customer and often strangling them with their own scarves.

  “Fourteen of 16 victims were junkies,” Hanei claimed, “and two or three of them had drugs on them.�
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  Indeed, all but one had convictions for drug offences or prostitution. All forms of prostitution have been banned in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it has become more common in recent years. Hanei said that he began his murderous campaign after his wife was mistaken for a prostitute by a taxi driver. At first he went out looking for men who were soliciting prostitutes, but got beaten up, so he turned to killing the prostitutes instead.

  Hanei’s slaughter of street drew support from religious extremists and the conservative press.

  “Who is to be judged?” wrote the newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?”

  Friends at the Mashhad bazaar said: “He did the right thing. He should have continued.”

  And the hard-line paramilitary group Ansar-e Hizbollah warned that declining morality among women could lead to more such killings.

  “It is likely that what happened in Mashhad and Kerman could be repeated in Tehran,” it said in its weekly publication.

  However, within a few weeks of his arrest Hanei was charged with having “improper relationships” with his victims before strangling them, though Hanaei claimed that intelligence officers subjected him to psychological torture to force him to confess to adultery. As a result Hanei was charged with 13 counts of having sexual relations with married women as well as the 16 murders.

  At his trial, Hanei insisted that the women he murdered were a “waste of blood” – a concept in Iran’s Islamic code that meant the victims deserved to die. As families of the victims looked on, Hanei said it was his religious duty to cleanse society of corrupt elements.

  This was of little comfort to ten-year-old Sahar and eight-year-old Sara, the children of Hanei’s 14th victim. They recalled how their mother Firoozeh left home at about 5.30 p.m. one day to buy opium.

  “We were all waiting for her but she never came home,” said Sahar.

  Hanei was sentenced to death, but he was shocked and angry when the moment came for his hanging in April 2003. Unlike at his highly publicized trial, there were no cameras at his public hanging to record how he screamed in protest, baffled that his ideological allies never came to his rescue.

  “Even until the last second before his execution, Hanei thought someone in the government would come to save him,” said young Iranian film-maker Maziar Bahari, who made the documentary And Along Came a Spider about Hanei.

  Hanei’s most vehement defender is his own 14-year-old son, Ali, who said his father was “a great man” who was cleansing the Islamic republic of the “corrupt of the Earth”.

  “If they kill him tomorrow, dozens will replace him,” Ali said before the execution. “Since his arrest, 10 or 20 people have asked me to continue what my Dad was doing. I say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’”

  He was right. Police now fear that a gang of “spider killers” is now at work.

  Ireland’s Dublin Death-Dealer

  In October 1998, the Irish Garda set up a six-man squad to track down a suspected serial killer responsible for the deaths of six young women aged between 17 and 26 who disappeared in the historic Leinster region of Ireland to the south of Dublin. Known as Operation Trace, it had come up with no leads by 2001 and was slimmed down to a staff of two.

  Information about the six missing women and other cases the team had looked at were put into the Canadian Violent Crime Linkage System and every detail was fed into a serial killer profile system set up in the British National Crime Faculty in Bramshill College, Lancashire, England. The geographic profiling developed by the Canadian Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo was also employed there. But in October 2006 a detective took the files to the FBI academy at Quantico to be analyzed by the bureau’s computer program ViCLAS – Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System. The FBI’s profilers would also run them though their specialist computer systems.

  The bureau was also provided with information on suspects on suspects, such as Robert Howard from County Laois, who raped and killed at least one young woman in London, but had been cleared for the murder of 15-year-old schoolgirl Arlene Arkinson, who went missing after attending a disco at Bundorn in County Donegal with friends in August 1994. She was last seen in a car driven by Howard. She has never been seen again, but the defence argued that the prosecution had to show that she was dead and painted her as a troubled teenager who talked of running away. After more than 21 hours of deliberation over six days, the jury acquitted Howard. The court was never told of his previous conviction in England and there have been allegations that his activities were covered up by the security forces.

  The Garda say that Operation Trace established that no single suspect could have been responsible for all six disappearances, but that in three cases the possibility of a serial killer exists and they are still appealing for any information from the public.

  “They’re still out there,” said a spokesman. “There are still people who know and who are covering for the perpetrators.”

  But definite leads have been rare. In September 2005, the Garda arrested the chief suspect in the disappearance of Fiona Sinnott, along with another man and three women. The arrests were made after fresh information about the possible location of her body came to light. None of those held was charged but the Garda excavated a field near Killinick in County Wexford. Nothing was found.

  Fiona Sinnott was from Bridegtown, County Wexford, and has been missing presumed dead since 9 February 1998. She was last seen leaving the Butler’s pub in Broadway near Rosslare at closing time with her former boyfriend and the father of her baby daughter, Sean Carroll. Their daughter, Emma, was 11 months old at the time.

  Carroll has told the Garda that he spent the night at Sinnott’s cottage in Ballycushlane, County Wexford, and that she was there next morning when he left.

  In July 2005 two sites in the Mulrankin area, near her family home in Bridgetown, were excavated by the Garda after a clairvoyant contacted the Sinnott family. Again nothing was found.

  “The one thing that marks the killer out is his ability to get rid of the body – which usually leaves us with no forensics, DNA or MO,” says Brian McCarthy, a veteran private eye who has been on the trail for nearly ten years, on and off.

  McCarthy was hired by the family of missing 26-year-old Irish-American student Annie McCarrick, who was studying literature in Dublin. He suspects that the man who was responsible for the disappearance of McCarrick, who went missing after visiting Johnny Fox’s pub in Glencullen in the Dublin Hills on 3 March 1993, was also involved the cases of at least two other missing women – Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard. All three were of a similar age and were last seen on their own, and they all went missing in an area less than 30 miles in diameter covering counties Kildare, Wicklow and Dublin. But that it as far as the evidence takes him.

  Eighteen-year-old Deirdre Jacob was last seen on 28 July 1998, walking to home to Roseberry, Newbridge in County Kildare. She was a trainee schoolteacher and described as a very balanced person – not the type of person who would disappear voluntarily.

  Beautician Jo Jo Dullard, aged 21, vanished on 9 November 1995 after making a call from a public phone box in Moone, County Kildare. She had phoned a friend to say she intended to hitch-hike from there to her home in Callan, County Kilkenny after missing the last bus. She hung up, saying a lift had arrived. Around that time a woman answering Jo Jo’s description was seen leaning in the back door of a dark-coloured Toyota Carinatype car. The car and its driver have never been traced.

  “There is linkage there, but no physical evidence – not even a piece of clothing,” says McCarthy.

  The serial killer theory was scoffed at when the Garda originally began investigating the disappearance of McCarrick back in March 1993. However, her father John McCarrick was a retired policeman. When he went to a Garda station to report his daughter missing he was shocked. The officer who dealt with him did not have a notepad, so he wrote the details on the back of his hand.

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bsp; Far from content with this approach, McCarrick pulled strings back in the US. Eventually, the American ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and Vice-President Al Gore lobbied the Irish government on behalf of the McCarrick family, prompting one of the largest missing persons investigations in Irish history. Meanwhile the McCarricks offered a $150,000 reward for information.

  Five years after Annie McCarrick disappeared, Operation Trace was set up at Naas Garda Station. Soon they identified seven other missing people who fitted a similar disturbing pattern. They were young women, all from Leinster, of a similar age, leading busy, seemingly happy lives until they vanished without trace. They were not victims of suicide, accidents or organized crime. But the most troubling feature of all was that, as they were assumed to be dead, no trace of their bodies had ever been found.

  “The facts speak for themselves,” says retired detective inspector Gerry O’Carroll. “For decades we had virtually no missing women; now we have up to ten in a relatively small area around the east coast, with various common threads. I believe these women were victims of one or two serial killers working together.”

  O’Carroll has looked at the missing women’s cases as part of his investigation of the 1999 slaying of 17-year-old Dun Laoghaire schoolgirl Raonaid Murray. He became convinced that the suspected murders of Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jacob, Jo Jo Dullard and Fiona Sinnot were linked to those of 26-year-old part-time model Fiona Pender and 17-year-old Ciara Breen.

  Fiona Pender, from Tullamore, County Offaly, was seven-and-a-half months pregnant when she disappeared on the evening of 23 August 1996. She was last seen leaving the flat she shared with her boyfriend in Church Street in the town. She had spent the previous day, shopping for baby clothes and was in good spirits, while Ciara Breen disappeared from her home in Batchelors Walk, Dundalk, in the early hours of 13 February 1997, taking no possessions with her.