The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  And so the killings went on and on, even as the police manhunt escalated into the largest criminal investigation in England’s history. By August 1979 police said that almost 200,000 people had been searched, and more than 22,000 statements were in the files.

  Meanwhile, forensic scientists had attacked the authenticity of both the letters and the tape, in which police put so much store. They discovered that everything mentioned in the letters had been printed in the press and so was available to the public. Furthermore, the very similarity of the letters to those of the original Jack the Ripper indicated a hoax.

  Nevertheless, police higher-ups doggedly stuck to their belief in the authenticity of the letters and the tape, and their stubbornness once again impeded the investigation. In January 1980, the police, still tracking the five-pound note, had narrowed the companies involved to three, one of which, T. & W. H. Clark Ltd. of Carol Road, Shipley, employed the Ripper, who was interrogated for a second time. On that very day, he was wearing boots which could have incriminated him because Dr. Gee had discovered the footprint of a boot at the scene of the Josephine Whittaker killing, and they could have been compared. But once again his lack of the odd accent of the voice on the tape led police to dismiss him as a real suspect.

  In November 1980 a college student, Jacqueline Hill, was murdered, and on January 2, 1981, the Ripper went out on another killing mission. This time, worried about police surveillance of the red-light areas in Leeds and nearby towns, he drove to an automobile scrapyard, stole some license plates, and taped them over the plates of his own Rover. Then he drove to Sheffield, about thirty miles from Leeds, and cruised the seedy area of the city. There he picked up a young black woman (whose name was not revealed by police) and drove her to a private road of a large estate. But while he attempted to have sex with her in the front seat, a police car cruising the area drove up.

  The police checked the license plates by radio and immediately discovered they belonged to a Skoda, not a Rover. The Ripper was in trouble, yet once again he pressed his luck. Persuading the police that he wanted to “take a pee,” he secreted his weapons—the ball-peen hammer and the single-bladed knife—on his person and hid them behind a small fuel storage tank on the estate. This left only a small wood-handled knife to dispose of, which he did at the police station in a cistern.

  Under interrogation, the cunning Ripper offered a plausible explanation for the stolen plates. He was due in court on a drunk-driving charge in a week and his insurance had just lapsed, so he had hoped to disguise his car with false plates. But good detective work finally came to the fore, aided by forensic science. Police discovered that the young man had been interrogated no fewer than five times in connection with the investigation of the five-pound note and were suspicious. They went back to the place where they had arrested the Ripper and found the hammer and the knife, which fit the descriptions of the weapons that Dr. Gee had provided. Furthermore, his foot size measured at the police station was the same as the boot mark found at the scene of Josephine Whittaker’s death.

  Meanwhile, in addition to the weapons recovered in the bushes, screwdrivers which also matched the wounds analyzed by Dr. Gee were found in the Ripper’s house. As a detective later put it, “We knew the killer’s boot size because the Ripper had left footprints in pools of blood; we knew the various types of cars the killer had driven because of tire tracks found at the murder sites; we knew the Ripper’s blood type based on semen tests; we knew his weapons, and his connection to the five-pound note.”

  Confronted with the incriminating evidence, the Ripper finally lost his composure and confessed. “I am the Yorkshire Ripper,” he said, and a whole nation breathed a sigh of relief.

  Who was the monster, the “Yorkshire Ripper?” He was Peter William Sutcliffe, a man of thirty-five, described by police as “average-looking,” who came from a highly respectable family whose financial fortunes had run downhill. Sutcliffe worked as a truck driver with the T. & W. H. Clark Company (accounting for the machine oil found in the wounds on the body of one of the victims). He also sang regularly in the choir at church and was, by all accounts, a happily married man.

  Probably no one will ever know the motives for the original Jack the Ripper’s killing rampage, but we do know the Yorkshire Ripper’s motive. It seems the slaughter of thirteen women was precipitated by anger over a prostitute by whom he was “ripped off” for the grand sum of ten pounds. Or so he told police in his initial interrogation. He later pleaded insanity at his trial, but was convicted of the murder of thirteen people and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  It was a victory for police who, duped at first by an inaccurate description and a fraudulent tape and letters, finally captured the Ripper through thorough surveillance procedures. It was an even greater victory for forensic science. While the identity of Jack the Ripper may forever remain a mystery, the forensic evidence collected against the Yorkshire Ripper left him no alternative but to confess.

  THE DANGLING MAN

  The Case of Roberto Calvi, “the Vatican Banker”

  1

  Anthony Huntley trod briskly across Blackfriars Bridge in London at 7 A.M. on June 18, 1982, on his way to work as a postal clerk at the Daily Express, enjoying the early-morning breeze that slipped north along the Thames. Idly, he glanced down at the river, and stopped. It seemed impossible to believe, but he was looking at the top of the head of a man. What’s more, the man was suspended by the neck with an orange nylon rope tied to a makeshift iron scaffolding near the stone embankment of the river.

  Perhaps it is a comment on our video age that Huntley did not immediately shout for police. Instead, as he later testified, he was aware that motion pictures were constantly being filmed around London and thought the hanging figure might be a prop for a Hitchcock-style thriller. But when he arrived at his office and told a fellow worker of the grim sight, a telephone call quickly went to Scotland Yard.

  Soon a boat bearing London’s River Police nudged the bottom rungs of the iron scaffolding, rocking in the slight swells. Dangling there was a sixtyish man dressed in an expensive suit, with his shoes and ankles under water and a rope around his neck. The police swiftly cut him down, placed him on the deck of the boat and examined him for identification. The first things they discovered were stones stuffed into the pockets of his suit, and a brick tucked into the front of his trousers. Elsewhere in his pockets were $15,000 in various currencies, and a soggy Italian passport.

  The name listed in the passport was Gian Roberto Calvini, who had entered the country a few days earlier. A check with Italian authorities revealed that no such passport had ever been issued. But the forged name itself was a clue, because it was so close to the real name of a man the Italian police were looking for.

  A day after the death, shock waves rolled through the financial centers of every continent as a Scotland Yard official stood in front of a mass of reporters and announced the real identity of the dangling man: Roberto Calvi. The millionaire known as the “Vatican banker,” who guided the Catholic Church in its vast investments and was the respected financial counselor to His Holiness, the Pope, had ended his life dangling above the Thames.

  Why? And had he hanged himself, or was it murder?

  2

  Roberto Calvi was born in the northern-Italian industrial city of Milan in 1920, the same year his future mentor, Michele Sindona, was being ushered into life in Patti, Sicily. Calvi’s father, Giacomo, was a man of some distinction. One of the first graduates of Milan’s Bocconi University, which specialized in economics, he was recruited by the largest banking institution in Milan, the Banca Commerciale Italiana. Eventually he became joint manager of the bank, a middle-level executive position.

  As a child Roberto lived in the wealthiest area of the city and attended private schools, where he proved adept at languages, not only classical Latin and Greek but also French and German. He was remembered by classmates as a shy, reserved boy, but, like many such youngsters, he proved rebellious
. His father invited Roberto to go to Bocconi University to follow in his footsteps as a banker. Instead, Roberto in 1939 joined the Army. An angry father saw his son enroll in Pinerola, a training school for cavalry officers.

  It is fair to acknowledge that this future banker, who would someday become best remembered as a plump corpse under a London bridge, was a war hero when young. From 1941 to 1943 he fought with honor in the Russian campaign, the most bitter of World War II, enduring subzero winters and massive battles in a hostile land. Then he returned to fight for his own country in the mountains of Italy against the Allied troops.

  When the war was over, Calvi’s father procured him a clerk’s job in a branch of the Banca Commerciale in southern Italy. Then an opening occurred in the Banca Ambrosiana in Milan, and, through his father’s influence, Calvi was hired as a junior officer. Banca Ambrosiana was known as a “Catholic” bank, founded before the turn of the century with the help of the Vatican, and still closely connected to the Church. In fact, Ambrosiana was referred to as “the priests’ bank.”

  Calvi had shown bravery in the war; now he revealed talent as a banker. He soon caught the eye of his superiors, and was promoted time and again to ever higher positions. The turning point in his career came in 1960 when he created the country’s first mutual fund, Interitalia, and then engineered the purchase of Banca del Battordo, which was to become one of the largest banks in Switzerland. By 1965, Calvi was given the title of central manager of the bank, one of its top positions.

  But traditionally the office of bank chairman was reserved for a man with important connections. Calvi, son of a midlevel banker, had none in the upper echelons of the establishment. His road to the top of his profession was apparently blocked forever—until he was discovered by another banker on the rise, Michele Sindona, from Sicily.

  Unlike Calvi, Michele Sindona had contacts, of all sorts, and thus had risen both farther and faster in the banking world. His power base, it was said, was founded on two mighty institutions, the Mafia and the Catholic Church.

  Sindona began his career as a lawyer in Sicily, then moved to Milan, arriving with a letter of introduction from a bishop in Sicily to a Vatican official, Giovanni Battista Montini, who took a liking to the young Sicilian. When Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) was appointed Archbishop of Milan, Sindona’s status in Milan rose sharply. Soon he was buying and selling properties and became rich. Among his investments was the Banca Priola, a small bank in Milan which almost immediately became large because it began receiving deposits from the Vatican’s own bank, the Istituto per le Opere de Religione (IOR). Banca Priola was shortly followed by the acquisition of a second bank, Banca Unione—both of them, of course, closely connected to the Vatican.

  By this time Sindona had been appointed a Vatican financial adviser. But he was a man always under a cloud. Newspapers reported that he had never given up his ties to the Mafia from his native Sicily, and by now he was also involved with another shadowy underworld. He belonged to a secret lodge called Propaganda Due, P-2, headed by a sinister figure, Licio Gelli.

  P-2 had been founded in the 1800s with the birth of the secret society known as the Carbonari. While its rituals were similar to Masonic practices, Carbonari membership included not only Freemasons but Mafiosi, military officers and politicians. Its initiation ceremony threatened “certain and violent death” for any member who violated the society’s secrets. This code of omertà was enforced by the Mafiosi in its ranks.

  By the 1970s Licio Gelli, the grandmaster of P-2, had developed it into the most powerful political organization in Italy. Important Italian generals, judges and businessmen became members, forming a state within a state which controlled the country. Sindona sponsored Roberto Calvi as a member of P-2, and, from the moment he joined, his rise to the top accelerated, and he became the chairman of the respected Banca Ambrosiana.

  Sindona, however, soon overextended himself by purchasing the Franklin National Bank in the United States and buying other companies in Europe, mostly with loans. When a worldwide recession hit because of the OPEC-inspired oil shortage, and interest rates soared, money was made tight, and Sindona’s whole empire collapsed. When U.S. auditors moved in to examine his books, they found evidence of fraudulent money transactions, and Sindona was indicted.

  With Sindona facing a prison term, Calvi now took his place as the Vatican’s chief financial adviser, and for a while he had better luck than his erstwhile mentor. He expanded his own bank by creating foreign branches, with the Vatican bank, IOR, as his partner. A tight-lipped man with reputed “eyes of ice,” he now became Italy’s most powerful banker, the natural inheritor of all of Sindona’s power bases—the Church, the Mafia, and P-2, the secret guild.

  But then Calvi reached too far, and the fate that was to end in London began to draw near. He contrived a grand scheme, worthy of his genius, to milk his own bank. Anonymously, he created phantom companies overseas which borrowed money from his bank’s foreign branches. Soon hundreds of millions of dollars were lent by the foreign branches to the ghost companies, loans which could never be repaid because the money disappeared. Interestingly, it would be revealed later that the Vatican, under Calvi’s guidance, was made a partner in many of these ghost companies, and eventually it had to repay more than $200 million to Banca Ambrosiana’s shareholders.

  Rumors of the ghost-company swindle filtered through Italy’s financial community, but there the all-powerful P-2 protected Roberto Calvi from judicial inquiries—for a price. As a return for this protection, Ambrosiana had to make large and questionable “loans” to P-2 members.

  Then, in 1981, disaster struck from an unexpected direction. Investigators looking into Michele Sindona’s Mafia connections were led to the address of Licio Gelli, the P-2 leader, in Rome. In the safe in Gelli’s home police found thirty-two sealed envelopes filled with incriminating documents which recorded bribes by P-2 to judges, politicians and industrialists. The revelation created one of the greatest scandals in Italian history. The fact that many cabinet members, as well as the head of every branch of the armed services, were members of this secret group rocked the nation.

  Included in P-2’s files was one labeled “Roberto Calvi,” detailing how Gelli had manipulated judicial authorities to protect the banker, and it was that lead which eventually climaxed in the unmasking of Calvi’s ghost-company swindle. In May 1981 Calvi was indicted for embezzling tens of millions of dollars, which had subsequently disappeared. Eventually the total would be established at no less than $400 million, and the Vatican’s share amounted to only half. Where was the rest of the money?

  Calvi was arrested and held without bail, but he shocked his interrogators by claiming innocence. The swindle hadn’t been his creation at all; instead he had been used by someone else as a front for the scheme. He was just a tool, he said, for the people who were really behind the fraud. But he was too frightened to reveal the identity of those people.

  All Italy seethed with speculation. Was it the Sicilian Mafia that controlled Calvi’s bank all along, or the sinister P-2? Or, a question usually asked in hushed tones, was it certain parties in the Holy See who had defrauded not only the bank but the Vatican itself?

  Calvi stayed mum about his knowledge of the secret powers behind him, but events were closing in on him, and one night in prison he apparently attempted suicide. His lawyer reported that Calvi had taken an overdose of barbiturates and cut his wrists in his cell, but, as always in Calvi’s life, there was controversy. The prison director swore that the suicide attempt had been a fake intended to evoke sympathy, and that Calvi’s wrists hadn’t been slashed.

  On July 20, 1981, Roberto Calvi was found guilty of illegally exporting millions of dollars to his ghost companies, and was sentenced to four years in prison and a $10-million fine. Then he was released on bail, pending his appeal against conviction.

  3

  Roberto Calvi obviously feared for his life. On June 10, 1982, he jumped bail and fled from Italy. Using a
false passport, he flew to Trieste in the private plane of Flavio Carboni, a wheeler-dealer with reputed Mafia connections, who brought along Silvano Vittor, a small-time smuggler, ostensibly to act as a bodyguard for Calvi. Arriving in London after intermediate stops both in Trieste and in Austria, Calvi checked into the Chelsea Cloisters, a hotel tenanted mostly by students, a far drop from the luxury hotels that Calvi had been used to throughout his career as an eminent banker. Carboni, meanwhile, arrived at Heathrow Airport with two beautiful young Austrian girls, Manuela and Michaela Kleinszig, the first said to be his mistress, the other Vittor’s girlfriend. All three registered in the classier Hilton Hotel, while Vittor roomed with Calvi in Chelsea.

  Carboni claims that he saw Calvi on their first night in London, and that Calvi complained only about his hotel room, which he thought was too small. But later that night, in telephone calls to his daughter and his wife, Calvi expressed only one real concern, fear for his life and the lives of his family. He ordered his daughter to fly at once to her brother’s house in Washington, where his wife had already fled and where she would be protected. To his wife he expressed an even more ominous worry: “I don’t trust the people I’m with anymore.”

  On the night of June 17, according to Flavio Carboni’s later testimony, he arrived at the Chelsea Cloisters and called Calvi’s room. He wanted Calvi to join him and the Kleinszig sisters for dinner. Vittor, the bodyguard, in his testimony, said that Calvi did not want to join the others for dinner, so he went along instead.