by Odell, Robin
Questioned by the police, Parkinson admitted that they were both involved with the killing. He claimed that he was acting under duress and feared for his safety. In his summing-up Mr Justice Jupp said he was satisfied that Parkinson was under the influence of Bardell, although that did not excuse him.
The judge told the defendants, “You have been found guilty of two murders which were quite appalling. They were done entirely in cold blood . . . were planned and . . . carried out with appalling determination.” He also believed an element of torture was involved in the way David Cox was murdered. The jury sentenced each man to life imprisonment with concurrent jail terms for conspiracy to murder.
God And The Devil
A shoe repairer by trade, Joseph Kallinger believed he could correct his obsessive urges by fitting wedges inside his footwear. By this means, he hoped to adjust the angle of his feet to harmonize with his brain.
Kallinger was a man with strange behaviour patterns. Initially, he was simply eccentric, filling his house in Philadelphia with all manner of junk which he thought would come in useful. In 1967, he moved to another house when his shoe-repairing business prospered and, at this time, he began to hallucinate, believing he received commands both from God and the Devil.
Fearing that he might be spied on, Kallinger started turning his home into a fortress. He put bars over the windows and kept vigil at night to fend off any intruders. In 1969, he moved to another house which he converted into a secret refuge. With the help of his family, he dug a twenty-foot hole in the basement. It was in this cellar that he began torturing his children by inflicting burns on them. In 1972, he received psychiatric counselling and returned to his family.
Throughout the 1970s, Kallinger hallucinated regularly. He believed God wanted him “to kill with a butcher’s knife every man, woman and child and infant on the face of the earth”. He began by enlisting the help of his twelve-year-old son to carry out robberies and theft but his urges soon gave way to murder.
On 7 July 1974, father and son abducted a boy from a recreation centre in Philadelphia, taking him to a disused factory where he was sexually mutilated and murdered. On 28 July, Kallinger took his fourteen-year-old son to the flooded basement of a derelict building. With his other son in attendance, he drowned Joey and reported him missing. Police suspicions hardened as soon as they heard that Kallinger had taken out $69,000 life insurance on the dead boy.
Charges were not proved and father and son continued to commit a series of break-ins, terrorizing house owners but not harming them. This changed on 8 January 1975 when the pair entered a house in Leonia, New Jersey, and tied up the occupants. Unsure what to do, they took a twenty-year-old woman and directed her to mutilate one of the male captives. When she refused, they killed her in a frenzy of stabbing.
The Kallingers were arrested nine days later and charged with kidnapping, robbery and assault. Joe was also charged with murder, while his son was sent for rehabilitation as a delinquent. Kallinger senior was tried for the lesser offences in September 1975 and despite claims that he was mentally incompetent, was convicted and sentenced to thirty years.
He was tried for murder in 1976, by which time his mind had descended into satanic fantasies. In court, he foamed at the mouth and chanted in an incomprehensible language. Defence experts said he was “totally crazy and psychotic”. The jury inclined to the prosecution’s view that he was an anti-social personality but not insane. He was found guilty and sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment.
Flora Rheta Schreiber, a professor of criminal justice wrote a book about Kallinger, called The Shoemaker. She explored his early behaviour, his history of being abused and descent into sadism and murder.
Seeking Forgiveness
Jean-Claude Romand was a fantasist who pretended to be a busy doctor, attending meetings and medical conferences while in reality, he killed time sitting in cafés and hotel rooms. Rather than admit his secret life, he turned to murder.
A fire at the home of the Romand family in the French village of Prèvissin, near the Swiss border, on 11 January 1993 claimed three lives. Florence Romand and her two children died in the blaze and the only survivor was her husband, Jean-Claude.
Investigators discovered that the victims had not died in the fire; Mme Romand had been bludgeoned and her two children shot. Further drama ensued when a relative set out to inform Romand’s parents of the tragedy, only to find the elderly couple dead in their house. They had been shot.
Suspicion focussed on “Dr” Jean-Claude Romand who was recovering from a coma after swallowing twenty Nembutal capsules. Although everyone thought he was a doctor working for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, he was a professional sham leading a double life. There was no Dr Romand listed in the medical directories and enquiries showed that while he had studied medicine at Lyon, he did not qualify.
Romand’s story was that an intruder had killed his family and set fire to the house. During examination by psychiatrists, more details emerged of his incredible secret life. He made a practice of embezzling money from his friends and family to provide him with an income. He kept up a daily charade of taking his children to school before, supposedly, driving to his office at WHO headquarters, and returning home in the evening. He filled his days by hanging around in cafés and at filling stations. His more refined pretences involved attendance at medical conferences in other countries while he spent his time watching television in hotel rooms. On his return, he provided detailed accounts of his professional activities and even contrived to feign tiredness and jet lag.
“Dr” Romand’s secret life started to unravel in 1992. A woman friend who had allowed him to invest some of her money asked to have it returned. He was already in difficult straits financially and his solution involved buying a silencer for the rifle he had borrowed from his father. He used this weapon to kill his wife and children and then his parents.
Around New Year 1993, he arranged to meet the woman to whom he owed money and attacked her with tear gas and a stun gun. She survived the assault, which he tried to explain away as the result of an alleged terminal illness. He walked away from this encounter, returned to his home, where his family lay dead, and set it on fire.
Romand denied the crimes at first but then made a confession. He was thought to have a narcissistic personality that prevented him distinguishing fantasy from reality. Rather than own up to all his pretences, he chose to kill his family. At his trial for murder he asked his dead family to forgive him. “I ask your forgiveness,” he said, “Forgiveness for having destroyed your lives, forgiveness of having never told the truth.” The bogus doctor was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Angels Of Death
The Italian city of Verona acquired a reputation in the 1970s as the country’s drug capital and a centre of right-wing extremism. Between 1977 and 1984, a string of grisly murders made the headlines.
A gypsy was burned to death in his caravan, followed by the murders of a homosexual, a prostitute, a hitchhiker and a priest. The victims were variously clubbed with a hammer, attacked with an axe or stabbed. The killing of a priest at Trento was particularly gruesome; a nail had been driven through his head and fixed to it was a wooden crucifix. There were also murders in public places, including the burning down of a pornographic cinema resulting in five deaths and a fire at a disco in which one person died and forty were injured.
After each incident those responsible circulated a leaflet, with the heading, “Ludwig”, featured above Nazi insignia. The leaflets explained the reason for the latest murder and declared “We are the last of the Nazis . . . Death will come to those who betray the true god” and finished with the words, “Gott mit uns” – God is with us.
Various explanations of the reference to Ludwig were offered and the most likely was a nineteenth-century writer, Otto Ludwig, who preached that sinners should be clubbed to death.
The perpetrators of these outrages were caught red-handed in January 1984.
Two men dressed in Pierrot costumes turned up at a disco in Mantua where 400 people were dancing and began pouring petrol on to the floor. Marco Furlan, aged twenty-five, and fellow student, Wolfgang Abel, aged twenty-six, were arrested. They said their stunt at the disco was a carnival joke.
Furlan and Abel were murderers and the authors of the “Ludwig” leaflets. The two men were students at Verona University and came from professional, middle-class backgrounds. They studied during the week and spent Saturday night killing people to break up the monotony of the weekend. One of their trademarks was to leave objects at each crime that were identified in their “Ludwig” leaflets, thereby authenticating their crimes.
The two young men, described by contemporaries as highly intelligent but strange, were put on trial in Verona to face charges of killing fifteen people. In keeping with “Ludwig’s” philosophy, they targeted people who they chose to call sinners and who deserved to be eliminated. In practice, this meant some of the least advantaged members of society, like their first victim, a gypsy living in a caravan.
They were accused of acting as self-appointed “angels of death” in committing ritual murder. Furlan and Abel denied being “Ludwig” and both were judged to be “partially infirm of mind”. They were convicted of killing nine people and were sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment.
Natural Born Killers
“Cut off from reality”, “individual anarchism” and “passing ritualism”, were some of the labels offered to describe the actions of two young people which resulted in six deaths on the streets of Paris in 1994. “Natural-born killers” was another epithet directed at twenty-two-year-old Audry Maupin and Florence Rey, his nineteen-year-old girlfriend. On 4 October 1994, armed with pump-action shotguns, the couple appeared at a police compound in Porte de Pantin in Paris. They held up two gendarmes and took their side arms before climbing into a taxi and directing the driver at gunpoint to take them to Place de la Nation.
What followed were moments of deadly drama. When they reached the Cours de Vincennes, the taxi driver drove his vehicle into a police car. He ran from his cab shouting to the two officers as he went. At this point Maupin opened fire, killing both officers and the taxi driver. The couple then hijacked a Renault 5 car and made off again, pursued by a police motorcyclist. They were blockaded in the Bois de Vincennes by police cars and began a second shoot out in which a police officer was killed. When the police returned the fire, Maupin was fatally wounded. Rey comforted him before surrendering. In the course of half an hour’s violent mayhem, three police officers were killed, two taxi drivers were shot dead and Maupin also lost his life.
Maupin was a psychology student who held anarchistic and revolutionary views and Florence Rey was a first-year medical student who seemed to be in thrall to him. She told psychiatrists that she wanted to live up to Audry and impress him. They forsook their university work, acquired weapons and embarked on their own kind of revolution.
Rey was put on trial in September 1998. There was great public interest in this young woman and a desire to know what motivated her. The prosecutor said she had committed crimes that were described as gratuitous, absurd and irrational. Even though she had not fired any of the shots that killed five people, she was guilty with no extenuating circumstances.
Defence lawyers argued that Rey should not be made to pay for crimes committed by Maupin. Against this was the case made by lawyers representing the families of the three dead policemen who stressed that Rey did nothing to stop Maupin. She took an active part in the shooting and, “if she missed, it was because she was a bad shot”. The passenger in the taxi commandeered by Maupin and Rey told the court that it was the girl who threatened to kill the driver and he described how she calmly knelt down to reload the shotgun.
Rey was found guilty of armed robbery, multiple murder, manslaughter, six attempted murders, theft of police weapons, abduction and criminal conspiracy. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison, less than the term demanded by prosecutors. Inevitably, perhaps, there were references in the popular press to “Bonnie and Clyde”. The media interest in the trial had been intense but observers found it difficult to reconcile the image of the slim pale-faced girl in the dock with the uncompromisingly violent part she played in events that had claimed six lives.
A Malign Friendship
While driving home on the evening of 14 January 1994, Mohamed El-Sayed stopped his car at a “give way” sign in Bayswater, West London. A young man entered the car and threatened El-Sayed with a knife. He told him to drive on a short distance and stop. The youth then stabbed the driver in the throat and inflicted other wounds, leaving him dying behind the wheel.
Police enquiries made little headway until they received information that a student at Modes Study Centre in Oxford had confessed to murder. Nineteen-year-old Jamie Petrolini was taken to Paddington Green police station where he made a full confession, implicating his friend, Richard Elsey, and unveiling a world of fantasy heroics.
The two youths came from successful family backgrounds and they had received public school education. They met at Modes Study Centre where they formed what would later be called a “malign friendship”. Their teachers regarded the pair as immature and Petrolini, in particular, was impressionable with an ambition to prove himself.
Elsey played the role of ringmaster, telling his new friend that he was an officer in the Parachute Regiment and spinning tales about his time in the SAS. He liked to talk about “slotting”, denoting throat-cutting, a word he had picked up from reading books about SAS exploits in Iraq. One night in an Oxford pub, they became blood brothers, cutting their hands and allowing the blood to mix.
The scene was now set for Elsey to train for a mission. They gave each other fake names and officer status and tested their skills and nerve by climbing up to the jib of a tower building crane. The real test came within weeks of meeting each other when they decided to find a drug-dealer or pimp on the streets of London and kill him. This was to be Elsey’s initiation into the SAS and forty-five-year-old Mohamed El-Sayed was their random victim.
Petrolini and Elsey were tried for murder at the Old Bailey in October 1994. They opted for what is called the “cut throat” defence, each blaming the other for what had happened. Petrolini drew a picture of his friend as a manipulator who had urged him to take a man’s life. He pleaded manslaughter and diminished responsibility. Elsey said in court that he was shocked when Petrolini stabbed the car driver. He put the full blame for the killing on his friend’s shoulders, claiming he was not even in the car at the time.
Ample evidence of their weird behaviour came out in court. Petrolini, who was nineteen on the day of the murder, described opening his birthday cards on the bus as they journeyed back to Oxford. The principal of Modes Study Centre said he feared the two students were “up to no good”. Petrolini had taken to blacking his face with commando camouflage and running around Oxford at night. Elsey cut his hair short and told his friends he was going on special missions with the Paras.
At the end of the seventeen-day trial, the jury was out for five hours and returned guilty verdicts on both accused. Sentencing them to life imprisonment, Mr Justice Denison told them, “You created a world in which you both played out your fantasies. That obsession led to the brutal murder of a complete stranger . . .”
There were eerie parallels in this case with that of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924. They killed a fourteen-year-old boy to find out what it was like to be a murderer. While Petrolini and Elsey drew their fantasies from military heroics, Leopold and Loeb were obsessed with the Nietzschean philosophy of superman.
Mission Ready
“Dr Crazy”, as he was known by those who sold him weapons, lived in a fantasy world in which he was always armed and ready to go on a mission. He was obsessed with guns, kept survival gear in his vehicle and had a bomb wired up to the passenger seat. Fred Klenner, also known as Fritz, was in every sense armed and dangerous.
Fr
itz was the son of Dr Fred Klenner, an expert in vitamin therapy with a practice in Reidsville, North Carolina. It was the family’s expectation that Fritz would become a doctor but when he failed to qualify, he told his father that he had passed the examinations and, henceforth, was referred to as “Young Dr Klenner”.
He helped his father at his clinic at the weekends and in the early 1980s met Susie Newson Lynch. She was separated from her husband and, although she had custody of the children, there were legal problems about rights of access and growing bitterness between both sets of parents.
Old Dr Klenner died in 1984 and his clinic was closed down. Fritz spent his inheritance stocking up on guns and fitting out his Blazer station wagon with survival equipment and an explosive device. He was close to Susie and sympathized with her over the problems she was experiencing. Her parents were not keen about her association with Fritz whom they regarded as unbalanced. For his part, Fritz fuelled the flames of discontent by telling Susie her husband was involved in illegal activities.
Tragedy struck in July 1984 when Susie’s mother-in-law and daughter were found shot dead at their home in Prospect, Kentucky. The talk was of a gangland killing but the police investigation made little headway. In the following March, Fritz and Susie moved in together and worked on each other’s neuroses. He referred to her as his wife and, as a result, she became estranged from her family. Meanwhile, Fritz stocked up on military hardware and insisted that Susie’s two boys wore combat uniforms.
Tragedy struck again in May 1985 with a triple murder in North Carolina at the home of Susie’s grandmother. Her father, mother and grandmother were all killed in another mysterious shooting. Susie and Fritz were both questioned by the police and suspicion began to focus on Fritz when it was established he had been seen near the scene of the killings and that he was armed. Added to this was information he had imparted to a friend to the effect that he was involved in a CIA mission.