A week later, on Feb. 24, 2011, he was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
He never spoke publicly about his crimes.
“Everyone wants to know why,” said Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Dennis Cimpl at the time of his sentencing. “Unfortunately, Mr. Ellis has the right not to tell us.”
After spending a few months first at the Dodge Correctional Institute in Waupun, then at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel, he was transferred to a maximum custody unit at the South Dakota State Penitentiary.
He died in a South Dakota hospital on Dec. 2, 2013, of natural causes, taking with him a wealth of secrets.
“Why he wanted to kill these women, it’ll go with him to his grave here. He would have been an interesting person if he would have decided to sit down like Bundy at the last minute if he knew he was dying and clear his soul, but nothing,” detective Spingola said after his death. “I just wonder about the other cases that he was mentioned in. There's at least five, maybe seven more that he's a good suspect in that we'll probably never know.”
Conclusion
So, is it the Wisconsin winters that drive men to madness, or is it entirely a coincidence that two of the most bizarre, horrifying and heinous serial killers are from the same part of the country?
It seems so unlikely.
But still, Steven Avery – a man who was falsely imprisoned for 18 years for a rape he didn’t commit, later winning $36 million from Manitowoc County for his time in prison – later lured Teresa Halbach to his home to take pictures of a car he was selling, only to rape and murder her, burning her body to hide the evidence and enlisting his nephew to assist.
He claimed that evidence was planted, but Halbach’s teeth and fragments of her bones were found in his fire pit, making that an impossibility.
Avery could have spent the rest of his life drinking tropical drinks with umbrellas on a beach in the Bahamas, but instead, he’s back behind bars.
Clearly, something isn’t right in America’s Dairyland.
What it is, however, only those who live there can know for sure.
True Crime By Evil Killers
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Books table of contents
Arnold Sodeman: The True Story of the Schoolgirl Strangler
Edmund Kemper: The True Story of the Co-ed Killer
Charles Ray Hatcher: The True Story of Crazy Charlie’s Killing Spree
Cary Stayner: The True Story of The Yosemite Park Killer
Serial Killers: The Colombian Monsters
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Arnold Sodeman:
The True Story of The Schoolgirl Strangler
by Jack Rosewood
Historical Serial Killers and Murderers
True Crime by Evil Killers
Volume 1
Copyright © 2015 by Wiq Media
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Introduction
Captured in the 1930s before the words psychopath and pedophile were part of common vernacular, notorious serial killer Arnold Sodeman murdered four young girls with little thought of remorse. Without guilt, the evil serial killer strangled them to death with their own clothing and left their small bodies alone in the Australian brush, earning himself a chilling position in the annals of Australian crime.
The first victim in his child murder spree, 12-year-old Mena Griffiths, showed signs of having been sexually assaulted, although the man who would become known as The School-girl Strangler denied the assault, and blamed the killing of both Griffiths and the other girls on his inability to control himself after he’d been drinking.
The horrific story of this true-life murderer – a tale of mental illness, childhood abuse, brain damage and alcoholic blackouts – is true crime as it’s most terrible, and ranks among the worst child murders in world history.
After his arrest, Sodeman calmly confessed, saying that when intoxicated, he became overcome by thoughts of revenge, and like a real-life Jekyll and Hyde, transformed from doting husband and family man into a barbarian who strangled four little girls.
He chose children and teens, he said, because he could lure them away much easier, but the cold-blooded killer really didn’t seem to recognize the abhorrence of taking a child’s life.
Experts now say the handsome but strange Sodeman would likely have been unfit to stand trial for his crimes, given his family’s extensive background of mental illness, but in the 1930s, the serial killer’s biography was a tale that left Australia stunned.
Contents
Arnold Sodeman: The True Story of The Schoolgirl Strangler
Chapter 1: The childhood of a serial killer
Chapter 2:
A family devastated
A gruesome discovery
Chapter 3: Hazel Wilson - A second victim
A futile search
Zeroing in on a suspect
Another deadly blackout
Chapter 4:
An enemy in disguise
A killer’s chilling move
Again, the wrong suspect
Chapter 5:
Chapter 6:
Finally, a connection
A previous crime averted
Chapter 7:
Victims honored
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9: Sodeman asks wife for forgiveness
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11:
Appeals exhausted
The aftermath
Chapter 1: The childhood of a serial killer
Arnold Sodeman wasn’t necessarily born to kill, but his early childhood suggested that trouble was likely brewing.
Born in 1899 in Victoria, Australia, to Karl and Violet Sodeman, he a brutal, abusive man who ended his days in Mont Park Mental Hospital, she a woman who suffered regular bouts of amnesia, Sodeman’s genetic history was awash in mental illness.
His older male family members were equally troubled. His grandfather, Ernest Wilhelm Sodeman, died in Kew Mental Hospital, while his grandfather’s brother died in a German asylum.
Too, his great-grandfather and great-grandfather’s brother also suffered from mental illness, suggesting a long genetic history of problems.
Given his background and his childhood living conditions, Sodeman’s future was quite bleak. He tried to escape, and at age 16, enlisted in the Australian Army. He was discovered, however, before he was able to begin training camp, and returned home.
Two years later, he was sent to a reformatory prison for larceny at age 18, and after his release, was charged with armed robbery as well as wounding the station manager at Surrey Hills railway station in Victory, which netted him three more years in prison, this time doing hard labor.
“I had a pistol and shot him,” Sodeman later told police when recounting the story. “He was badly wounded. I had been drinking that afternoon. I got three years and the indeterminate.”
Although he escaped at some point during his term, he was subsequently captured, and another 12 months of hard labor was added to his sentence.
After his release, he settled down in Melbourne, and later in Gippsland, a large rural region of southern Australia that includes a section that borders the Indian Ocean. There he worked various laboring jobs until he married Bernice Pope. The two had a daughter, Joan, who was born in 1928. The marriage was considered happy by family and friends, despite bouts of depression and drunkenness on the part of Sodeman.
But given his family history of questionable brain function, combined with alcoholism and a severe brain inju
ry suffered when he fell from a horse, it comes as no surprise to contemporary members of the psychiatry field that Sodeman eventually rejected his near-idyllic married life and turned to crime, this time escalating well past his previous criminal activity.
Chapter 2: Mena Griffiths - The first victim
On Nov. 9, 1930, after spending much of the day drinking at the Orrong Hotel in Armadale, a suburb of Melbourne, Sodeman – who later told police “I got properly filled up” while at the hotel - abducted 12-year-old school girl Mena Griffiths when she was playing with two of her sisters and another friend from school at the nearby Fawkner Park playground.
He had been watching the children play while drinking at the bar, and apparently choose the girl who would become his first victim from his seat at the bar.
In order to isolate Griffiths, he gave her sisters and friend money and sent them to a nearby shop to buy candy, telling Griffiths that he had a different errand for her to run.
When they asked Mena where she was going, she said “on a message,” and she and Sodeman left the park.
By the time Mena’s young companions returned to the playground, there was no sign of either her or the man who had given them the money for candy.
Sodeman told police after he and Griffiths left the park, he gave her money for food when she complained of being hungry, and she went into a shop and bought herself some fish and chips.
Then, Mena’s hunger satiated, they boarded a bus for Ormond. There, they walked along the street for a while, and when they passed a house that Sodeman noticed was empty, he took her inside through an open back door.
“As soon as we got in I seized her by the throat. I then let her go and she fell on the ground,” he told police. “Looking down on her my memory came back and I said, ‘my God, she's dead. I've killed her.’ I stood there wondering what I could do and I must have remembered or read of something being about tying people up.”
“So I stripped her, bound her and gagged her with her own clothing, and dragged her into the bathroom and left her,” Sodeman told police.
He then returned home to his wife and daughter.
Two days later, her body was discovered in an abandoned building. She had been stripped, bounded and gagged with her own clothing, sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
(Sodeman later denied having raped the girl – “If I had sexual intercourse with her, I have no recollection of it,” he said - but police reported evidence of a sexual assault. She was, however, the only victim of sexual assault on Sodeman’s victim list.)
A family devastated
Griffiths came from a family of 12 children, according to newspaper reports, and she and her family had just moved a week before to a home near the park. They had moved to their new neighborhood so her unemployed father and one of her brothers could find work. Mena and her four younger sisters had been attending the nearby Punt Road School.
Her sister Joyce, 8, who had been at the park when Mena was abducted, said the man who had sent them to buy candy had been wearing a blue suit and a bowler hat, and she had already seen him several times at the park, even though they had only lived in the neighborhood for such a short while.
When she and her younger sister Daphne, 6, arrived at home without their sister, they told their mother what had happened, and Mr. Griffiths and Mena’s 18-year-old brother William immediately ran to the park to look for her. When their search turned up no sign of the young girl, they went to police.
According to newspaper reports, Mr. Griffiths and William “remained up all night in the hope of hearing news of the missing child, and with the remaining members of the family were almost distracted when dawn came and she had not been found.”
A gruesome discovery
As the family sat at home, anxiously waiting for Mena to come through the door or for the police to deliver news of her whereabouts, Mena’s body was discovered, completely by chance. Two teenage boys on the way to check on the status of a bird’s nest in hopes of selling the young offspring were distracted on their quest when they noticed a broken tradesman’s cupboard on the porch of an abandoned house. The cupboard was a place where deliveries could be left protected in case of inclement weather, and they decided to investigate the damaged piece.
“I was curious,” 18-year-old Harold Brockwell told the Melbourne Argus, “and knowing the house to be empty I crawled through the smashed doors of the cupboard beneath the lowest shelf into the kitchen.”
His companion, 17-year-old John Brand, followed right behind him.
“We went into the passage but had not taken two steps when we were horrified to see the body of a little girl, stretched out on the floor of the bathroom, the door of which was open.”
The two boys immediately ran to the police station, and after a short police investigation, Mena’s brother, William, was called in to identify his sister’s body.
When questioned by police, a neighbor reported hearing a car turning around outside, and police took note of the tread of new tires in the dirt outside. Because police connected the vehicle to the crime, and no one had seen Sodeman and Mena enter the empty house, the investigation took a wrong turn early on.
Police arrested a truck driver named Robert McMahon, who was positively identified by Mena’s younger sister, a month later, and he was set to stand trial. A lack of evidence, however, led to McMahon’s release about two and a half months after his initial arrest.
It’s likely the truck driver would have been released from jail eventually anyway, because while McMahon was still behind bars, Sodeman struck a second time.
Chapter 3: Hazel Wilson - A second victim
In the first minutes of January 10, 1931, just two months after his first murder, Sodeman abducted Adeline Hazel Wilson, a 16-year-old girl whom he encountered while walking past her house just after midnight.
Witnesses said they had seen her between 10 p.m. and midnight, standing outside her home smoking a cigarette with a young male friend, but by 10 minutes after 12 a.m., she was gone.
Her father, Frederick Wilson, was the initial suspect in the case.
The man, according to witnesses including his family, had a violent temper, and had once broken down a locked door with an axe to get to his wife.
“The father threatened the girl, and she feared him,” said one witness.
But Frederick Wilson’s defense was quick to point out that Hazel often stayed out late, and sometimes didn’t return home, so any discipline from her father was warranted given her age.
“If her father had not chastised her, he would not have been doing his duty as a parent,” his attorney said. “She was misbehaving herself, staying out late at night and going out with men.”
According to reports, there has been a lot of communication between the family and police in the five years prior to Hazel’s disappearance. Not only had she reported threats from her father and brothers, including one threat from her father with a razor, her parents had also visited the police station, asking the constable if he could prevent their daughter from being out so late at night.
One witness said that Hazel had told her brothers she would rather commit suicide than spend any more time living under her father’s roof, according to the Melbourne Argus, while another said that years earlier, Frederick Wilson had told him that because Hazel suffered from tuberculosis, her treatment had been expensive, and “it would have been better if she had died at birth.”
A futile search
Still, the family was concerned when there was no sign of Hazel after midnight on that January morning, especially when her father Frederick found one of her shoes lying on the side of the road outside their home.
The find led Hazel’s brother Frank to report Hazel’s disappearance to the police, and then visit the home of Hazel’s friend, Lucy Hogan, where she often went on those nights when she didn’t return home.
On his return, Frank “found the tracks where they had dragged her along the footpath,” and reported his fi
nding to police. Detectives, however, were unable to find them.
“Frank Wilson then said that many people had walked along the footpath and must have tramped them out,” the lead detective said.
The police put out appeals for the young man who had been seen smoking with Hazel to come forward and “assist with their inquiries,” and even offered a reward for information leading to his identification, but their efforts came to nothing.
Wilson’s body was discovered the next day in a nearby vacant lot.
Zeroing in on a suspect
In an attempt perhaps to coerce a confession from Frederick Wilson, a detective told him, “We have evidence that some person, in a fit of temper, not meaning to kill Hazel, caught her by the throat and choked her. This was done in a house and then the body was tied up and taken to the allotment.”
After an intense investigation and an interrogation during which detectives accused Frederick Wilson of lying about killing his daughter – “It was bad enough to lose my little girl,” he later said – he was eventually cleared after Hazel’s mother, Sarah, said that she had looked out her bedroom window at about midnight and seen a man walking past the house carrying a package, and Hazel’s brother, Frank, said he had seen drag marks on the path between their home and the empty lot where Hazel’s body was eventually found.
Another deadly blackout
When Sodeman eventually confessed to police years later, he told them what happened the day he encountered Wilson outside her home near the Glenhuntly railway station. Again, he had been drinking heavily when he ran into the girl.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 23