The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes

by Odell, Robin

  The new information stimulated fresh police enquiries and led to thirty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Gafoor. He worked in Cardiff as a security guard. He lived in a rented apartment and was described as “a loner and a bit tormented”. On 4 July 2003 at Cardiff Crown Court, Gafoor admitted killing Lynette White. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and legal history was made.

  Caught On TV

  Before disappearing into anonymity for eighteen years, the murderer of five family members in the US left a written confession acknowledging his guilt and apologising for leaving his mother’s body in the attic, saying, “she was too heavy to move”.

  John List was viewed by all who knew him as a mild-mannered man and a regular churchgoer. His career consisted of taking jobs with impressive titles but offering little satisfaction. In 1965 he took a position with the First National Bank of Jersey City on the strength of which he bought an expensive house in Westfield. He had pushed his commitments beyond the limits of his salary and was soon in financial difficulties.

  In less than a year he was out of the job but kept the bad news from his wife and family. For six months he kept up the daily pretence of going to the office until he found a new job. Then he told his wife, who was ill with a degenerative brain disease, that he had moved on but kept quiet about the much reduced salary.

  In his neighbourhood, List was regarded as a slightly quaint figure. He was a very private person who was never seen without a jacket and tie, whether it was winter or summer. He taught at the local Sunday School and was co-leader of the cub-scouts pack. He was regarded as being too heavy-handed with discipline.

  Mired in debt and with obligations that he could not fulfil, List decided to lighten his burden by disposing of his family and starting a new life somewhere else. On 9 November 1971, he shot dead his wife, daughter and two sons and his eighty-four-year-old mother at their home in Westfield and promptly disappeared. The bullet-ridden bodies of his victims were found three weeks later. He had left behind a letter of confession in which he wrote, “I know that what has been done is wrong . . .”

  He went west to Denver, Colorado, where he changed his name to Robert Clark and took work as a kitchen night-shift cook. He remarried in 1985 and moved to Brandermill, Virginia, where he found work as an accountant. He told his new wife that her predecessor had died of a brain tumour.

  Having enjoyed eighteen years of anonymity and begun a new life, John List probably thought he had put all his troubles behind him. When Fox Television’s America’s Most Wanted programme featured the List killings in New Jersey and described the fugitive, public curiosity was stirred. A viewer called the programme’s hotline to report that a man answering List’s description was living in Brandermill.

  The knock on Robert Clark’s door came on 1 June 1989 when the FBI came visiting. Once his fingerprints had been taken, his true identity was undeniable and John List, fugitive from justice, was taken into custody. He was extradited to New Jersey where he stood trial in April 1990.

  After listening to the evidence for seven days, the trial jury found John List guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree. There being no death penalty in New Jersey, he was given five consecutive life sentences.

  Fugitive From Justice

  Ira Einhorn was a notorious fugitive from justice who defied attempts to secure his return to the US to answer a murder charge. He remained on the run for twenty-five years before finally appearing on trial.

  Einhorn was a recognized figure in the 1960s counter culture movement in Philadelphia and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. His ideas about saving the planet were widely listened to and he impressed those he met with his encyclopaedic knowledge. He was an imposing figure with a powerful debating style and a high opinion of his own abilities. He styled himself as “The Unicorn”.

  In 1972, Einhorn met Holly Maddux, a young Texas girl, and began a passionate affair with her. They lived together in his apartment in Philadelphia and, according to those who knew the couple, the relationship was sometimes strained. In 1977 they went to Europe on holiday together but returned separately.

  In September 1977, Holly disappeared. Answering her parents’ concern, Einhorn said she left the apartment on 11 September to go shopping but did not return. Weeks went by with no news of Holly and she was reported missing.

  During their enquiries into Holly’s disappearance, investigators learned that Einhorn had a reputation for ill-treating his girlfriends, although no charges were brought. They also discovered that Einhorn had asked two friends to help him move a trunk that he wanted to dump in the Schuylkill River. The task proved impossible because the trunk was too large to fit in the friends’ car.

  Detectives arrived at Einhorn’s apartment on 28 March 1979 armed with a search warrant. In a closet they found a trunk containing the mummified remains of Holly Maddux. Protesting his ignorance regarding the contents of the trunk and claiming that he had been set up by intelligence agents, Einhorn was arrested and charged with murder.

  Before he could be committed for trial, “The Unicorn” jumped bail and fled from the US. He was reported to be in Ireland where he was protected by the lack of an extradition treaty. In 1993 a Philadelphia court convicted him of murder in his absence and, by 1997, he had moved to France. In 2001 he lost his appeal against extradition and he was ordered to be returned to the US. Einhorn’s reaction to this decision was to attempt suicide and cast blame for his predicament on the French Prime Minister. Despite appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, he was finally sent back to Philadelphia.

  He appeared on trial for the murder of Holly Maddux in October 2002. One of the conditions of his extradition from France was that he would not have to face the death penalty. He was scornful of the charge against him and repeated his earlier defence that he had been framed by the CIA because of the knowledge he possessed about their mind control programme. He was disrespectful of the family of Holly Maddux who had won a civil suit preventing him from profiting by publishing accounts of the case. In court, the prosecutor read from one of Einhorn’s poems relating how he had choked a lover who has deserted him. “In such violence, there may be freedom,” he had written. “The Unicorn”, who had avoided justice for so long, was finally found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Babes In The Woods

  At Easter time 1970, Susan Blatchford, aged eleven, and Garry Hanlon, aged twelve, disappeared after they had been out playing together near their home in Enfield, north London. They promised to be back in an hour for their evening meal. When they had not returned by 8.00 p.m. the alarm was raised.

  A full-scale search was mounted for the missing children and days turned into weeks. Epping Forest was the focus for search teams involving 600 police, frogmen, tracker dogs and helicopters. Over 5,000 acres of woodland were searched and 15,000 people were questioned.

  Then, on 17 June 1970, a man walking his dog in Epping Forest discovered the missing children. Their bodies were huddled together in dense undergrowth at a spot on the edge of the forest. The hot weather during the summer had speeded-up decomposition, making it impossible to recover any forensic evidence. There was a suggestion that the youngsters had died of exposure. The manner of their discovery prompted the press to call them “The Babes in the Wood”.

  The coroner recorded an open verdict and there the case rested until the investigation into the children’s deaths was re-opened in 1996. Ronald Jebson, a sixty-one-year-old convicted sex offender, currently serving a prison sentence was questioned about events in 1970. He admitted being involved and, in August 1998, made a full confession.

  Jebson was an adopted child who grew up to be a loner. He served in the army on two separate occasions, going absent without leave on his second spell in uniform. He became dependent on alcohol and amphetamines and spent much of his life in prison, serving various sentences for sex offences involving children.

  In December 1968 Jebson was jailed for two years for an indecen
t assault on a six-year-old boy. He was released in March 1970 and a month later, Susan Blatchford and Gary Hanlon, went missing. In April of that year, he assaulted a boy and his conviction earned him five years in prison. He was released in August 1973 when he then raped and strangled an eight-year-old girl. That crime placed him in prison for a long sentence.

  Jebson was described by the police as a “highly dangerous, fixated and sadistic paedophile”. He confided to a prison psychiatrist, “If I get a few drinks and poppers, nothing would stop me.”

  Tried at the Old Bailey in May 2000, Jebson pleaded guilty to “The Babes in the Wood” murders and was given two life sentences. The judge described him as “a truly wicked and perverted man”. Thus, after a delay of thirty years, justice was finally served.

  Killer With No Name

  Eighteen-year-old Rita Sawyer spent the evening of 4 September 1970 with her boyfriend in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. When they parted, she met someone else in the town and went missing. Her body was found the next day at Harbury Windmill, a local beauty spot close to her home. The young woman, who was three months pregnant, had been stabbed repeatedly and her body dumped in a hedge.

  Witnesses recalled seeing a Ford Zephyr car in the vicinity where she was found. Traces of semen found on the body would ultimately prove the key to the identity of her murderer. In an investigation lasting four months, Warwickshire Police took hundreds of statements and questioned many people but the search for Rita’s killer ground to a halt.

  Then in 1999, taking advantage of developments in the world of forensic science, and particularly in DNA testing, Warwickshire Police re-opened their investigation. All the original scene of crime evidence had been carefully stored and this was handed to the Forensic Science Service.

  Examiners confirmed that there were semen traces on clothing enabling them to search for a DNA match on the national database. A police spokesman was confident that the review of evidence that had provided a DNA profile would enable the killer to be identified.

  In August 1999, Warwickshire Police announced that the mystery of Rita Sawyer’s death had been solved. A DNA match had been found with a man from Leamington Spa who had been interviewed in 1970 but was not considered a suspect.

  The name of the man, who would have been in his twenties at the time of the murder, was not made public. He had died in 1989 and the view was taken that no purpose would be served by publicly identifying him. Warwickshire Police were entirely satisfied that they had got their man twenty-nine years after he committed murder.

  The long arm of forensic investigation had proved its worth but the murderer took his knowledge of a secret crime with him to the grave.

  “. . . A Man Who Sits And Thinks”

  The farming community of Fort Fairfield in New England, USA, was shocked by the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old boy on 26 December 1964. Cyrus Everett, a newspaper delivery boy, left home soon after 5.00 p.m. to start his round but did not return. Local searches failed to locate him and he remained on the missing persons register.

  Two months later, the community was hit by a second tragedy when a twenty-four-year-old local girl who worked as a waitress was found murdered. When Donna March failed to turn up for work at the Plymouth Hotel on 24 February 1965, her brother went to the apartment into which she had recently moved. He found her lying dead on the sofa with a towel wrapped around her head. She had been beaten with sufficient force to fracture her skull.

  On 9 May 1965, three youngsters playing in an area called Chaney’s Grove discovered Cyrus Everett’s partially decomposed body. In a tragic irony, he was found in the exact location predicted weeks earlier by a medium using extra sensory techniques.

  Fort Fairfield was rife with rumours about the two deaths and there was much gossip, some of it malicious, suggesting that a local politician was responsible. There was, though, a curious connection between the two cases. The last house on Cyrus Everett’s delivery round belonged to Philip Adams who was well known to the police. It was an apartment in this same house that Donna March had rented a few days before she died, and it was the place where her body was found.

  Philip Adams was questioned by detectives but there was no follow-up action. Donna’s murder remained unsolved and some local citizens were unhappy at the outcome of investigations into the paperboy’s death. Because his body was badly decomposed, examiners decided that a precise cause of death could not be determined. Dissatisfied with this outcome, a prominent citizen in the town hired a private investigator. He arranged for an exhumation and a second post-mortem was carried out. On this occasion, the examiner found a skull fracture which made murder a likely cause of death.

  Donna’s death was investigated as a murder and it was found that the twice-divorced young woman dated airmen from the nearby Fort Loring Air Base. One of her dates, a Lieutenant, was known to have argued with her about her promiscuity. He had no alibi for the time Donna was killed and was arrested. He appeared on trial for murder but the evidence against him was so weak that an acquittal was the only possible outcome.

  And there the twin tragedies of Fort Fairfield rested until 1984 when the editor of the local newspaper was sent a poem in the mail. Written anonymously, the scribe said, “. . . I know a man who sits and thinks, at the happening a score years ago. The clue to which is buried, where only he knows.”

  The poem was traced to Philip Adams who, at the time was serving a prison sentence at Somers Correctional Institution. He had been convicted of attacking a ten-year-old boy and had other convictions for sex offences. It seems that Adams voluntarily committed himself to a mental institution in February 1965 and was released six days before Donna March was killed.

  At the age of forty-two, Adams was sent for trial in January 1985. Evidence given by his brother amounted to a confession. He revealed that on the night of the murder, he had visited Donna with the intention of borrowing money. He found her asleep and, after searching the apartment, killed her, covering her head to hide the wounds he had inflicted.

  So, after twenty years, justice was served when Adams was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. There was no mention of Cyrus Everett other than a cryptic line in Adams’ poem about “two unsound corpses”.

  Murder In Paradise

  Norfolk Island, situated in the Pacific Ocean 1,000 miles from eastern Australia, is a place with a small population and a long history. It is home to 1,800 residents and its attractive beaches and beautiful scenery attract many tourists.

  The calm of this peaceful place was disrupted on 31 March 2002 when a young woman was murdered. Janelle Patton, a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant manager, had gone out walking on Easter Sunday and went missing. Later that day her body was found wrapped up in a sheet of black plastic. She had sustained several stab wounds and lacerations and her skull was fractured. Cuts to her hands were testimony to the vigour with which she had tried to defend herself against a frenzied knife attack.

  There had not been a murder on this island paradise for 150 years. A former penal colony, it had been settled in 1856 by descendents of the HMS Bounty mutineers. It was a community where people worked together and enjoyed the benefits of nature. Although it was on Australian territory, Norfolk Island had its own immigration control. The passport of every visitor was checked so that the make-up of the population, both resident and visiting, totalling 2,771 people, on the day of the murder was known.

  Detectives from Canberra arrived to begin a murder investigation. A mass fingerprinting exercise was undertaken to include everyone between the ages of fifteen and seventy. In a small community, everyone had an opinion and gossip featured prominently. Janelle Patton came from Sydney and had worked on the Island for just over two years. She was regarded by some as a confrontational person who had been involved in rows with some of the locals. Many residents thought they knew who her killer was and names of suspects were given to detectives.

  In an enquiry that lasted four years, suspicion settled on a
New Zealander, a twenty-eight-year-old chef, Glenn McNeill, who had since returned to his home in Nelson. Following a preliminary hearing in May 2004, McNeill was ordered to stand trial for murder.

  He appeared before the Island’s Supreme Court in March 2007, the first murder trial there for 150 years. There was some difficulty in finding twelve impartial jurors. Nearly two-thirds of the hundred people on the jury pool were excused. Some either knew the victim or the defendant and others had made up their minds about who was guilty.

  The prosecution set out the case that McNeill had accidentally struck Janelle Patton with his car and, in a panic, put her body in the boot. When the injured woman showed signs of recovering, he silenced her with stab wounds inflicted with a fish knife. McNeill made a confession to the police but later retracted it. Key evidence was that McNeill’s fingerprints were found on the plastic sheeting used to wrap the victim’s body. Other incriminating forensic traces linking him to the killing were found at his flat and in his car. On 9 March 2007, the jury found McNeill guilty of murder and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 May 2008, he lost his appeal against the sentence.

  Too Clever By Half

  Fifteen-year-old Vicky Hamilton was reported missing from her home in Bathgate, Edinburgh, on 11 February 1991. Ten days later, her purse was discovered near the city’s rail station. The girl’s background led the police to believe she was a runaway and there were indications that she thought she was pregnant. Thousands of statements were taken and many hours of fruitless enquiries were recorded, yet Vicky’s disappearance remained a mystery.

  In November 2006, the enquiry into Vicky’s disappearance was re-opened and five months later came the first glimmer of hope in the investigation. Peter Tobin, a sixty-year-old itinerant handyman, was arrested in connection with the murder of a Polish girl in Glasgow, Angelika Kluk, whose body had been found hidden under the floorboards of St Patrick’s Church.