The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes

by Odell, Robin

  BTK = Bind, Torture And Kill

  It sometimes takes a long time for justice to catch up with the ingenuity of the criminal mind. In the case of the BTK murderer, it would take thirty years.

  During the 1970s a series of brutal killings created waves of fear in Wichita, Kansas. On 15 January 1974, while Joseph Otero was away from home, a murderer entered his house and strangled his wife and nine-year-old son. When Otero returned, he too was strangled, and in the basement, hung from a pike, was his eleven-year-old daughter.

  When a man falsely confessed to the murders and the news was published in the Wichita Eagle, the paper received an anonymous telephone call from a man directing them to a book in the local library. Inside the book was a letter revealing details of the Otero murders that were known only to the police. Cryptic messages taunting the police and media were a feature of this killer’s modus operandi.

  During the next three years, other victims were killed in their homes in the Wichita area. A feature of the murders was that they stopped for a while and then began again with the same cat-and-mouse tactics. The killer gave himself a label, “BTK”, meaning “bind, torture, kill”. In one letter to the media he asked, “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?”

  When the messages stopped in 1980 and there was a lull in the violence, people cautiously began to wonder if the murders had ended. But, then, in 2004, the messages began again and the Wichita Eagle received a letter and photographs of a young woman who had been killed in 1986.

  After three decades of murder and messages, the breakthrough came when one of the messages was sent on a computer disk. This was traced to a Lutheran Church in Wichita and suspicion fell on sixty-year-old Rader who was its president. A search of his home turned up files and photographs relating to some of the BTK victims and his DNA matched traces of semen found at some of the crime scenes. He was arrested in February 2004 and confessed to ten murders.

  He said that he was driven by sexual fantasies and although he did not sexually assault his victims, he masturbated over their bodies. Rader had received a college education, held a regular job, helped the local Scouts and was an active church member. His job as a dogcatcher and enforcer of local byelaws gave him legitimate access to private premises. He was married with children, cared for his mother and seemed to be a regular family guy.

  Rader was brought to trial in June 2005 when the enormity of his secret life was laid bare. In one of his messages to the media he had written, “I can’t stop it so the monster goes on and it hurts me as well as society.” He told the court how he trawled for victims and went out equipped with a “hit kit” which included ropes and housebreaking implements. He readily confessed to ten murders knowing that he would not face the death penalty if judged guilty because his crimes were committed before Kansas changed its law on capital punishment.

  In August 2005, Denis Rader, the BTK murderer who had eluded capture for thirty years, finally faced punishment. He was given ten consecutive life sentences, totalling 175 years.

  Playing Card Killer

  A Spanish serial killer left his trademark playing card on the corpses of his victims. This trait, not surprisingly, won him the title of “The Playing Card Killer”.

  His first victim was Carlos Martin, a cleaner at Madrid’s Barajas airport in 2003. His second victim was a twenty-eight-year-old man whom he shot dead as he waited for a night bus in the city centre. A playing card, the ace of cups (hearts), was left beside the body.

  Ten days later Eduardo Salas, a student from Ecuador, was shot at pointblank range in a deserted street late at night. He survived his head wounds and in due course was able to give a brief description of his attacker. He described him as Spanish, aged about twenty-five and a tall man. A playing card, the two of cups, had been left at the scene of the shooting.

  On 19 March 2003, the killer struck again, this time killing a man and seriously wounding his female companion. The couple were Romanian immigrants, who were shot in the back of the head and left for dead in the outskirts of Madrid. Playing cards were left at the scene of the shooting; three of cups for the injured woman and four of cups for the dead man.

  Police believed the killer had timed his attack to coincide with a fireworks display in the city following a Champions League football game. The gunman had also been careful to pick up three spent cartridge cases. There were no witnesses and he disappeared without trace. The killer’s modus operandi seemed to be that he kept in the shadows and appeared from behind his victims to shoot them in the back of the head. The attacks seemed to be random.

  Madrid was reeling from the night-time shootings at a time when the city had experienced thirty lethal stabbings and shootings in the space of three months. A hundred and fifty police officers had been assigned to the hunt for the “Playing Card Killer”.

  Relief came in July 2003 when the killer surrendered to the police. He was twenty-six-year-old Alfredo Galan, a former soldier who had served with peacekeeping forces in the Balkans. He was reported to have told police that he wanted to know what it felt like to kill. Although he made a confession to the killings he later retracted it. He then tried to implicate others in the shootings, claiming he had sold them the gun that became the murder weapon.

  Galan was tried for murder in March 2005 and the man whom psychiatrists labelled a “Human Predator” showed no remorse. According to police statements, he asked his victims to kneel before he shot them as he believed politeness was important. Galan was convicted of six murders and three attempted murders for which he received prison sentences totalling 142 years. His sentences will run concurrently, however, and under Spanish law he will serve no more than twenty years.

  The Chessboard Murders

  Nicknamed, “The Chessboard Murderer”, the aim of the Russian serial killer, Alexander Pichushkin, appeared to be to outdo his country’s most infamous killer in modern times, Andrei Chikatilo.

  Chikatilo was convicted in 1902 of killing fifty-two people but his compatriot wanted to go for sixty-four, one for each square on his chessboard. Pichushkin, a supermarket worker, played chess under the trees at Bitsevsky Park in the southern part of Moscow. He targeted mostly elderly men and fellow chess players, starting to kill them off in 2000. He later bragged, “For me life without murder is like life without food for you.”

  His method was to entice his victims into a quiet part of the sprawling park and attack them from behind. Some of his victims were strangled and others were bludgeoned with a hammer. Their corpses were thrown into a sewage pit. Pichushkin’s trail of death came to light in June 2006 with the discovery of the body of thirty-six-year-old Marina Moskalyova, a fellow supermarket worker. The dead woman had left a note in her apartment giving the name and telephone number of the man she was meeting. The police had incriminating CCTV footage that showed her in Pichushkin’s company.

  Having first tried denial, Pichushkin then boasted of killing sixty-three times with the ambition of making it sixty-four. Of his first murder he said, “It is like first love – it’s unforgettable.” He demanded that he should be charged with all the murders to which he had confessed. But the police were not able to find evidence to confirm his claim. They discovered forty bodies in a sewage pit, added to which were three victims who had been attacked but survived. A survivor identified him. One of his ploys was to ask his intended victim to join him in a drink of vodka to toast the memory of his dead dog. Once they were drunk and incapable, he killed them and it was an easy matter to throw the body into the pit.

  Pichushkin was put on trial in Moscow in September 2007. He was charged with forty-eight murders and three attempted murders. Measured by his own standards this fell short both of the sixty-three killings he claimed and also the fifty-two murders committed by Chikatilo. He continued to delay matters by demanding a jury trial, unusual proceedings in Russia. On 29 October 2007 Pichushkin was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Asked if he understood the sen
tence, he replied, “I’m not deaf . . .” The thirty-three-year-old serial killer was destined to serve his term doing hard labour in a penal colony. Whether prison facilities include chessboards can only be speculated upon.

  Tiger Woman

  In the manner beloved of American newspaper coverage of crime in the 1930s, Winnie Ruth Judd came to be called “The Tiger Woman”.

  Winnie worked in a medical clinic in Phoenix, Arizona and, although married to Dr William Judd, she shared an apartment with a colleague, Agnes Le Roi and was friendly with another girl, Hedvig Samuelson.

  Screams were heard coming from the apartment on 16 October 1931 and noises that might have been gunshots. Agnes Le Roi did not turn up for work the next morning and Winnie was late. Later that day Winnie arranged for a delivery company to call at the apartment to move a heavy trunk.

  On 18 October, she travelled by train to Los Angeles and arrived with two trunks. She sought help from a porter to load her baggage into a car. While doing this, the porter noticed a dark fluid dripping from one of the trunks. He asked Winnie what was inside. She evaded the question and promptly drove off leaving the trunks behind. On closer examination, one trunk was found to contain the body of Agnes Le Roi and the other the dismembered corpse of Hedvig Samuelson.

  Following a plea from her husband, Winnie gave herself up on 23 October. She surrendered to Los Angeles police at a funeral parlour. A letter she had written to her husband amounted to a confession. In it she claimed to have killed the two women in self-defence using a handgun and a bread-knife.

  “The Tiger Woman” was put on trial for murder. She claimed to have had an accomplice, a Phoenix businessman, who helped her to cut up the bodies. Winnie’s family members made much of the mental instability that they claimed ran in the family. Winnie played her part in this by shouting out in court that she wanted to throw herself out of the window.

  Winnie Judd was sentenced to death but her histrionics won her a reprieve. The Governor of Arizona granted a stay of execution and ordered a sanity hearing. The result was that the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and Winnie was admitted to the State Hospital for the Insane.

  She proved to be a resourceful, and at times, elusive prisoner. She contrived to make a dummy to simulate her sleeping presence in her cell bed and escaped. After a brief period of freedom, she returned to the State Hospital. Her next attempt involved obtaining a key and she let herself out. This too failed and in 1952 she tried again, and, spectacularly, once more in 1962 when she remained free for six years, living with a couple in California for whom she worked as a babysitter. In all, she absconded seven times.

  Legal efforts seeking her extradition to California failed and she was sent back to Arizona, having been declared sane and fit to be imprisoned once more. Finally, in December 1971, her sentence was commuted and she regained her freedom to live in California. “The Tiger Woman” lived out her remaining days in the Sunshine State until the age of ninety-three. She died at Stockton, California, in October 1998.

  Les Diaboliques

  Twenty-eight-year-old Christine Papin and her twenty-one-year-old sister, Lea, worked as domestic servants in the home of a lawyer, René Lancelin, in Le Mans, France. On 2 February 1933, Lancelin arrived home from his office expecting to collect his wife and daughter and take them out to dinner. When he failed to get a response to his knock on the front door, he used a street telephone to call his wife but, again, there was no reply.

  Returning to the house, Lancelin noticed that all the lights were out except for the attic room where the maids slept. He tried another vigorous knock on the front door and when that failed, he suspected something was wrong and called the police.

  Officers arrived and broke in to the house. On the first floor landing they found the bodies of Madame Lancelin and her daughter. They had been grossly mutilated and the carpet and stairs were thick with blood. The two women had been bludgeoned, slashed and stabbed. Their faces had been disfigured and the eyes gouged out.

  Moving to the top of the house, officers found the door to the maids’ room locked. They broke the door open and found the Papin sisters naked and huddled together in a single bed. Christine made an immediate confession and her account of what had taken place went a long way to securing her conviction, and that of her sister, for murder.

  The story was one of a trivial incident leading to an appalling reaction. She explained that her sister had damaged the electric iron and been fined for her clumsiness by Madame Lancelin. When the iron was next used, it blew the lighting fuse and Christine reported it was not possible to do the ironing. Believing that the Lancelins’ daughter was going to strike her, she got in the first blow by leaping on her and scratching at her eyes. Lea joined in by attacking Madame Lancelin.

  Taken by surprise, mother and daughter lay on the floor while Christine went down to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a knife and “. . . with these,” she said, “we attacked our mistresses.” She added that she did not plan the crime or feel any hatred towards her victims.

  The Papin sisters or “Les Diaboliques” as they were referred to in the press, were committed for trial at Le Mans against a background of intense public interest. It appeared that the two sisters were rather dull girls who did menial work in a household where they were generally well treated. But there was a strong undercurrent of petty criticism that was often delivered in written notes sent to the offenders by Madame Lancelin. Constant rebukes created feelings of persecution and the storm finally broke with the blown fuse.

  A defence of insanity was put forward, but in a remarkably short trial, the jury rejected it. The Papins were found guilty and Christine, judged to be the instigator of the murders, was sentenced to death while Lea was to be imprisoned for ten years. In due course, Christine was reprieved and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. She died four years after the murders in a mental institution.

  The Polish Borgia

  When Tillie Klimek developed the gift of prophesy the Polish community in which she lived in Chicago was suitably impressed. Steeped in superstitious beliefs, they marvelled at her powers, especially when she correctly forecast the death of her husband.

  Tillie Mitkiewitz spent over twenty years of her married life slaving for her husband who had an aversion to work. When he died as she had predicted in January 1914, her friends stood in awe of her precognition while she collected the insurance money.

  Within a month Tillie remarried and her new husband, John Ruskowski, was also the subject of her fatal predictions. In April 1920, she married a third time and was so certain of her forecast that she bought a coffin and stored it in the basement. Her prophesy was duly fulfilled when Frank Kutczyk was placed in the coffin which was so conveniently to hand.

  Tillie’s fourth husband was Anton Klimek, hitherto a healthy man, but who fell ill after the marriage. He complained of numbness in his legs but told friends that his wife was doing everything she could to help him. Tillie was nursing Anton at home and feeding him bowls of stew as his health continued to decline.

  When Anton’s brother insisted on calling a doctor, the physician suspected poisoning. This was confirmed in hospital when tests proved positive for arsenic. Suspicion fell on Tillie and, when questioned, neighbours were very forthcoming about her predictions and the unfortunate deaths of her previous husbands. In the nick of time, Tillie was arrested, while Anton survived after his stomach was pumped. Analysis of the stew confirmed the presence of arsenic. She confessed to poisoning him although she denied killing her former husbands. She said that one of her favourite meals was stew and explained the ease with which rat poison could be stirred into the mixture.

  Tried for murder in March 1922 Tillie milked the publicity for all it was worth. The “Polish Borgia” as she was called in the newspapers seemed oblivious of the charges against her. Her confession was backed up by the evidence of poisoning in her exhumed husbands and led to her conviction. She declared in court that she would never
stand on the gallows and her wish was granted when she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Tillie Klimek was suspected of procuring the deaths of several other people in addition to her husbands, no doubt using a combination of her stew-making abilities and powers of prophesy. She died in 1936 at the age of seventy-one in Illinois’ Women’s Prison.

  The Terminator

  Nicknamed “The Terminator”, Anatoly Onoprienko killed fifty-two people, ten of whom were children. The Ukranian serial killer boasted, “There is no better killer in the world than me.”

  Onoprienko was raised in an orphanage and his friends thought of him as quiet and generous. Some of them received gifts from the proceeds of robberies committed after the murders. Inevitably, doubts were raised about his sanity. He talked of being forced to kill and of being influenced by unknown powers and sinister forces.

  On Christmas Eve 1995 the former sailor and forestry worker broke into a forester’s home at Garmarnia. He killed the entire family with a sawn-off shotgun and set fire to their house. There followed a similar attack the next week when he wiped out a family at Bratkovychi, another massacre at Enerhodar and then a return to Bratkovychi. In less than a month, Onoprienko had destroyed four families, totalling twenty victims who were slaughtered by gun, knife and axe.

  His reign of terror ended when a massive police manhunt located him at his girlfriend’s house near Lviv. He seemed to have led an apparently normal life in between his orgies of killing, and shared some of the violence with an accomplice, Serge Rogozin. He was arrested after trying to shoot his way past the police.

  During various interviews, Onoprienko showed not the slightest remorse, rather he gloried in what he had done. He compared his methods to an animal watching a sheep, commenting that he saw it as “a kind of experiment”. He readily confessed to forty murders committed over a four-month period in 1995/96 and asked for another twelve, committed in 1989, to be taken into account.