by Odell, Robin
Eckert had grown up in the town of Plauen, which at the time was in East Germany. As a child he was fascinated by his sister’s toys and, particularly, by a doll with long hair. He practised strangling the doll and playing with her hair. This was an experiment which he turned into reality in 1974 when he fantasized over a schoolgirl and strangled her in a crime that remained unsolved for another thirty years.
A search of Eckert’s flat following his arrest revealed a collection of photographs depicting some of his murder victims with ropes around their necks. There were also notes describing some of the murders and, under the bed, a life-size rubber doll decorated with hair and trophies taken from his victims.
Apart from serving six years in prison for attempted murder, he joined the estimated thirty serial killers believed to be active throughout Europe. The E45 highway running from Austria south to Italy was a killing ground where over forty women had been murdered. Prostitutes, along with migrant workers, were successfully targeted by Eckert as being lone, vulnerable women with no fixed address and few family or friends to worry about them when they went missing.
For thirty years, Eckert got away with murder. He confessed to six killings, which was raised to thirteen following police investigations, and there are possibly more. While justice finally caught up with him, Eckert avoided a trial appearance by taking his own life. While awaiting trial at Hof, he hanged himself in his prison cell on 1 July 2007, on his forty-eighth birthday.
Procedural Delay
When a British Royal Navy officer was murdered in New Zealand in 1847, a local man was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. Only a procedural delay saved him from imminent execution and during that time he was shown to be innocent.
Lieutenant Robert Snow, based at North Shore, Auckland, was in charge of the naval magazine and stores depot at Devonport. He lived locally in a traditional Maori dwelling. On 23 October 1847 in the early hours of the morning, a seaman on board HMS Dido at anchor in the harbour reported a blaze on the foreshore.
A cutter and crew were despatched to investigate and found Snow’s house on fire. Alert crew members noticed Maori canoes leaving the scene. Once the fire had been extinguished, a search of the remains revealed the bodies of Snow and his wife and daughter. They had been killed with knives and axes.
A naval raiding party rounded up a number of Maoris for questioning. The New Zealander reported that there was little doubt the murders had been committed by natives. It was noted that Lieutenant Snow had been involved in disagreements with Maoris who he accused of stealing his crops. Relationships between the Maoris and the authorities became strained and there was talk of war.
Further investigation of the murders led to the arrest of Thomas Duder, a signalman at Mount Victoria. He protested his innocence and, on the basis of very little evidence, he was tried and convicted. The sentence was death by hanging and he was held in custody while the necessary authority to carry out the execution was awaited from London.
During this delay the true facts behind the murders were revealed by chance. A couple brawling in the street at Devonport on a Sunday morning attracted the attention of the police. A man known only as Burns had stabbed his female companion, Margaret Reardon, and then attempted to take his own life. Both survived and information began to emerge about Burns, who was an ex-convict from Sydney.
Enquiries showed that he had been employed by a local Maori chief and, together, they hatched a plan to rob Lieutenant Snow of his monthly salary which he received on specified dates from the Auckland Treasury. Burns involved Reardon and the couple went to Snow’s house on the pretext of warning him about trouble brewing among the Maoris. They attacked and killed the Snow family and set fire to the house.
When the murderers fell out, Reardon threatened to inform on Burns. A confession followed and they acknowledged carrying out other murders. In the wake of this development, Thomas Duder was released and Burns and Reardon were sent for trial. Found guilty, Burns was condemned to death while Reardon was sentenced to penal servitude for life.
Burns was taken to the scene of the crime after being publicly paraded in a horse-drawn cart sitting on his own coffin. On 27 June 1848, he was hanged on the same spot that the Snow family met their deaths. Thomas Duder, an innocent man spared by a trick of fate, went on to prosper in Devonport’s business life and a street in the town was named after him.
“Accidental” Murder
The conviction of David Greenwood for “The Button and Badge Murder” in 1918 seemed an open-and-shut case, but a recent review of the evidence suggests that he was an innocent victim of the system.
Sixteen-year-old Nellie Trew was reported missing from home by her father on 9 February 1918. The next morning, the girl’s body was found close by Eltham Common in southeast London. She had been raped and strangled. Detectives examining the crime scene found a military badge and a button near the body. The badge depicted the tiger motif of the Leicestershire Regiment and the button had a piece of wire attached to it.
Illustrations of the button and badge featured in newspaper reports of the murder. As a result of this publicity, a man who worked at a factory in London’s Oxford Street, spoke to a colleague who usually wore such a badge. He observed that David Greenwood was no longer wearing it. Greenwood’s explanation to his workmate was that he had sold it, but he took his friend’s advice and reported the fact to the police.
Twenty-one-year-old Greenwood lived in Eltham, a short distance from the spot where Nellie Trew had been found dead. When questioned and shown the badge found near the body, he admitted it was his but explained that he had sold it to a man he met on a tram. Police officers noted that the overcoat Greenwood was wearing had no buttons and that it had a tear as if a button had been torn off. When it was established that the wire attached to the crime scene button was the same as that used in the factory where he worked, suspicion against him hardened.
Greenwood had served his country in the First World War trenches and been injured by an exploding shell when he was buried alive. He was invalided out of the army in June 1917, and was subject to fainting fits and with a weak heart. When discharged from hospital, he took a job as a metal worker.
Charged with the rape and murder of Nellie Trew, he was sent for trial at the Old Bailey in April 1918. The evidence against him was circumstantial. He claimed to have spent the evening of 9 February at the YMCA in Woolwich. Much hinged on the condition of the overcoat, which he had acquired as part of his discharge entitlement. It was established that he had been seen wearing the coat fully buttoned up four days after the murder.
In his defence, it was argued that in view of his physical weakness resulting from his war injury, he would not have been capable of overcoming a strong young woman. This view was supported by Sir Bernard Spilsbury who appeared as an expert witness at the trial. Nevertheless, the jury returned a guilty verdict with a recommendation to mercy in view of the ex-soldier’s service to his country. Greenwood spoke from the dock, declaring his innocence, before Mr Justice Atkin sentenced him to death.
An appeal against sentence was refused and it was left to the Home Secretary to consider a reprieve. There was considerable public disquiet about the verdict and a reprieve from execution was granted. In return for his life, Greenwood was given a sentence of penal servitude.
A new slant on the case emerged in 2007 in a book about Sir Bernard Spilsbury by Andrew Rose. During his researches, the author discovered that a man who had been committed to a mental institution in April 1918 confessed to having murdered Nellie Trew. At the time, Albert Lytton was an apprentice at Vickers in Erith where he worked the night shift and frequented Woolwich on Saturday nights. He suffered a mental breakdown and because of his violent behaviour spent most of the rest of his life in mental institutions. He admitted going out with Nellie and “accidentally” murdering her. He said he got blood on his trousers and lost one of the buttons. His mother gave his army greatcoat away. These admissions were made three yea
rs after the murder.
Following a sustained campaign to have Greenwood released, the former soldier regained his freedom in 1933, after serving fifteen years in prison. It would take another seventy-three years to establish his innocence.
CHAPTER 6
Final Journeys
The final journey made by many condemned murderers is to their place of execution. It may only be a few short steps from the death cell to the scaffold, gas chamber, electric chair or other designated place of judicial extermination. Historically, those who have made such journeys have done so with equanimity, stoicism, terror, defiance and even humour. And while most have been guilty of the crimes for which they paid the ultimate penalty, some were innocent victims of flawed justice or flagrant prejudice.
Whether administered as a deterrent or as retribution, the manner and procedure of executions exhibit some of the most bizarre aspects of society’s efforts to deal with those who transgress. The concept of a life for a life has a long and tortuous history, and executions are wrapped in public spectacle, bungled methods and rituals that may seem more reprehensible than the crimes for which they are the punishment.
Methods of execution in the twentieth century had odd national characteristics. The English preferred hanging, the French retained the guillotine, while the Spanish favoured garrotting. In the US, attempts to introduce new technology with the aim of making the process more humane have led to the introduction of the electric chair, the gas chamber and lethal injection, each with its own quirks and failings.
While many countries have rejected capital punishment in favour of long prison sentences, those that have retained it have yet to find a procedure that is both humane and foolproof. Worldwide, there were 2,390 judicial executions in 2008, more than half of which were carried out in China. The United States called a moratorium on the death penalty in 1967 as a response to public concern over the twelve years it took before the death sentence passed on Caryl Chessman was carried out. The Supreme Court lifted the ruling in 1976 and capital punishment was adopted in thirty-six states. In 2007, there were forty-two executions in the US, which is fewer than in previous years. In Europe, most countries have abolished capital punishment, with the possible exception of a penalty for treason at times of war.
In the present century, the debate about procedure continues to be waged in the US. During an execution in Florida in 2006, a fifty-five-year-old Death Row inmate had taken thirty minutes to die, after the administration of the prescribed cocktail of three lethal drugs. Following a challenge as to the constitutional legality of lethal injection, the Supreme Court called a moratorium on this form of execution but decided in 2008 that the method was not a “cruel and unusual punishment”.
As in many aspects of crime and punishment, the grim, gruesome and ugly feature side-by-side with practices that reduce proceedings to a farce. Gallows humour is not without foundation as William Shakespeare observed in his line in Twelfth Night that, “many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage”. And a Scottish judge is credited with the remark about a convicted felon that he would be “none the worse for a good hanging”.
The final journey made by Jack Alderman, whose crime was that he murdered his wife, took thirty-three years. That was the length of time spent on Death Row in Georgia, USA, before being executed in 2008. Appeal procedures by condemned murderers often mean extended time spent on Death Row in the hope of gaining a reprieve, while others, once sentenced, simply want to face the end quickly.
Steven Judy was one of those who walked willingly to the electric chair in 1981, refusing all attempts to seek a stay of execution. By contrast, John Spenkelink exploited every legal loophole available to him during the five years he spent on Death Row. He gained three reprieves but eventually died in the chair. He had some bitter things to say about capital punishment, which he believed was meted out disproportionately to people from poor backgrounds.
In some cases, death alone was not deemed sufficient punishment and judgment decreed that executed felons should forfeit their corpses to the surgeons for dissection. This was the ultimate fate of fourteen-year-old John Any Bird Bell in 1831 and, earlier in the same century, the body of Sylvester Colson, a mutineer convicted in Boston, USA, was subjected to galvanic experiments for no apparent good reason apart from dubious scientific curiosity.
William Kemmler was a pioneer of sorts, being the first person to be despatched in the newly invented electric chair in 1890. His death by “manufactured lightning” at Auburn Prison, New York, was one of many bungled executions using electricity. Things had not changed a great deal forty-six years later when Albert Fish, an odious child murderer, was seated in “Old Sparky” at Sing Sing and precipitated a short-circuit in the apparatus.
Stories with a happy ending are rarely the outcome of these final journeys. But John Lee, famous as “The Man They Could Not Hang”, survived three attempts to kill him in 1884. Another remarkable survivor was Anne Greene who was hanged at Oxford in 1650 and her body placed in a coffin ready for the undertaker. She startled all present by defying the rope and, apparently, rising from the dead.
The last laugh on the final journey surely belongs to Kenneth Neu who joked his way through his trial for murder in 1935. He kept up his entertaining ways while in the condemned cell and declared that he was as fit as a fiddle and ready to hang.
Gallows humour aside, it seems strange that the human ingenuity which can put a man on the moon and devise an internet cannot produce a humane and reliable method of judicially terminating life. Perhaps the simple solution is the obvious one, to abolish capital punishment worldwide as an out-dated and unworthy practice. The central proposition that killing people is the way to teach them it is wrong to kill seems an untenable paradox.
“I’ve Lived My Hell”
“For one time in my life I get something I want”, was twenty-four-year-old Steven Judy’s comment when he faced death in the electric chair. He declined to make any last-minute appeal against execution and resisted attempts by groups opposing the death penalty to halt proceedings.
Judy’s short life had been a violent one. At the age of thirteen he raped a woman and attacked her with a knife and axe. He was confined to a mental institution and was classed as a sexual psychopath. After his release, he embarked on a life of crime which, according to his own account, included numerous rapes, armed robbery and burglary.
His criminal career ended in April 1979 after he killed a young mother and her three children. Twenty-three-year-old Terry Lee Chasteen was driving her children to the baby minder in Indianapolis when another driver flagged her down, indicating there was something wrong with her car. She pulled over and the man offered to help her. He pretended the car was not safe to drive and offered to give the family a lift. Driving off the interstate highway, Steven Judy raped and strangled the mother in front of her terrified children who he later drowned in a nearby river.
Judy was quickly caught and put on trial for murder in Indianapolis. Aware of his violent impulses, he told the jury, “You’d better put me to death. Because next time it might be one of you or your daughter.” The jury responded by convicting him and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.
Judy issued many statements from his prison cell, but none of them contained anything approaching remorse. He said, “I’m not sorry for the things I’ve done because I’ve lived my life the only way I knew how . . .” One of his lawyers found redeeming features in his personality and described him as likeable and intelligent.
His execution was scheduled for 9 March 1981, and it marked the first time a person had been put to death in Indiana for twenty years. Despite Judy’s welcoming words regarding his own demise, numerous groups were fighting hard to gain clemency on his behalf. And a fellow prisoner asked the Supreme Court to halt Judy’s execution on the grounds that if it went ahead it would endanger his own appeal.
Protesters outside Indiana State Prison staged a candle-lit vigil on the eve of execution. Some of the
m carried placards declaring, “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong.” None of this had any effect on the man in the death cell. He was reminded that he could still gain a stay of execution if he changed his mind. He told reporters that he was looking forward to the execution to give him release. “I’ve lived my hell,” he said, indicating that death was what he wanted.
His wish was granted when 2,200 volts surged through his body on 9 March 1981 and he became the sixtieth person to die in Indiana’s electric chair.
Six Minutes To Die
Having spent five years on Death Row, during which he was granted three reprieves, John Spenkelink became the first man for twelve years to be executed in the USA against his wishes. The execution at Starke Prison, Florida in 1979 proved controversial, requiring three separate charges of 2,000 volts to kill the prisoner who took six minutes to die.
Spenkelink was a drifter who had been in and out of prison most of his life. While on parole in 1973, he encountered a hitch-hiker who, he claimed, forced him into a sexual act at gunpoint. The two men shared a room at the Ponce de Leon hotel in Tallahassee, Florida, and it was here that Spenkelink shot the hitch-hiker in the back of the head.
Following his conviction for murder and sentence of death, Spenkelink exercised every channel of appeal open to him during the time he spent on Death Row. Finally, on 25 May 1979, the Supreme Court authorized his execution to take place.
There were reports that angry inmates at Starke Prison rattled their metal mugs against their cell doors in a noisy protest at what was about to happen. Spenkelink was taken in manacles to the death chamber containing the electric chair. The executioner was apparently a volunteer, drawn from the prison staff.