by Odell, Robin
Scripps was tried in Singapore in November 1995 for the murder of Gerard Lowe. He admitted killing the South African but claimed he did so out of anger when the man who was his room-mate made a homosexual advance. After he murdered Lowe with hammer blows to the head, he used his victim’s credit card to draw cash and, among other purchases, bought a ticket to a symphony concert.
The “Tourist from Hell” was found guilty and sentenced to death. Scripps appealed against the sentence but then withdrew it. In February he instructed his lawyer not to appeal for clemency. He said he was “impatient” for the execution to proceed and was angry that the legal formalities were so protracted. On 19 April 1996, his wish was granted when he was hanged at Changi Prison, the first Briton to be executed for murder in Singapore.
The Poisoner From Windy Nook
After the fourth unexpected death with which she had been associated, sixty-six-year-old Mary Wilson joked with the undertaker and suggested he might quote her a wholesale price for funerals.
Red-haired Mary Wilson lived at Windy Nook, near Felling in County Durham, in the UK. In her younger days, she had been in service to a local family and married the son. An avid reader of popular romantic magazines, she also yearned for money.
Growing tired of her husband after forty-three years of marriage she had taken a lover, a man who lodged with her employer. Within a few months, both he and her husband died, seemingly of natural causes. The doctor who examined them suspected nothing sinister. They were elderly and the fact that the two deaths had occurred close together merited no more than passing comment. Mary Wilson benefited from the deaths to the tune of less than fifty pounds.
In 1957, she met a retired estate agent, seventy-five-year-old Oliver Leonard, whom she persuaded to move in with her. They were married in September and, two weeks later, Leonard became ill with breathing problems and died. Again, nothing unusual was suspected and Mary collected another fifty pounds.
Her next move was to approach Ernest Wilson, a retired engineer, who was looking for a housekeeper. In no time at all, Mary was hired, moved in with Wilson and marriage followed. At the wedding reception, she joked with the caterer about saving any leftover cakes as “they will come in handy for the funeral”. Two weeks later Ernest Wilson was dead, supposedly of cardiac failure.
When the undertaker called to measure his body for a coffin, Mary, still in jocular mood, said that as she had put so much work his way, he might consider giving her a wholesale price.
Post-mortem examinations were carried out on both Leonard and Wilson. In neither case was death from natural causes confirmed. What was found was that both had died of phosphorus poisoning. Mary Wilson was charged with murder.
At her trial, prosecution expert witnesses expressed the view that rat or beetle poison containing phosphorus had been administered, most likely in tea. Countering this was a suggestion that the two men had been taking pills to stimulate their sex drive, which had the effect of hastening their demise. This produced laughter in court.
Mary Wilson came to trial in 1958 at a time when the death penalty had been revised under the provisions of the Homicide Act, 1957. The death sentence was retained in five classes of capital murder and in cases where a person had twice committed murder. She did not give evidence and the jury returned guilty verdicts. She avoided a death sentence on account of her age and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She died in prison four years later.
Following her trial, inquests were carried out on the death of her former husband and that of her one-time lover. In both cases, phosphorus poisoning was confirmed as the cause of death, thereby bringing the Poisoner from Windy Nook’s tally of victims to four.
CHAPTER 9
Contract and Conspiracy
The idea of contract murders originated in the US during the 1930s in the gangland world of Murder Inc. When the mob bosses wanted to eliminate someone who was a threat or a rival, or who had simply outlived their usefulness, a contract was issued to a middleman or broker who hired the hit man. This arrangement meant that the puppet master was completely insulated from the eventual killing. Murder management of this kind ensured that very few gangland killings were ever solved.
The concept of the contracted or hired killer readily translated into the general domain, especially for those with wealth and power. If the gangland bosses could hire people to do their killing for them, why not others who saw murder as a convenient way of solving problems and eliminating those who stood in their way?
Dr Karl Menninger, the eminent US psychiatrist, put it succinctly in the context of capital punishment when he wrote that if the state can justify hiring someone to do its killing why shouldn’t powerful people do the same?
The hired killer is usually a person who is a stranger to his targeted victim and operates to a preconceived plan dispassionately and with ruthless efficiency. The victim, perceiving no threat or danger, is caught off-guard. The killer strikes, is meticulous about not leaving traces and disappears.
In what might be called the domestic sector, as opposed to the world of organized crime, the desire to eliminate an unwanted wife, husband or lover may reach a point where hiring a contract killer is seen as a favourable option. Among the advantages are that the hirer keeps their hands clean and may feel this lessens the guilt. In such plans, the middleman is often dispensed with and the contract agreed directly between procurer and operator. The exchange of the necessary co-ordinates to identify the victim and a down-payment are all that is required. This strategy, though, can lead to bungled results as Elizabeth Duncan discovered in 1958 when she hired two young men to kill her daughter-in-law. The plot began to unravel when she defaulted on payment.
Payment was not a problem for billionaire property developer, Hisham Talaat Mousafa, who wished to dispose of his girlfriend. He paid $2 million to one of his employees in 2008 to kill his former lover. The scheme foundered on the inexperience of the hitman and a trial which led directly to his pay-master.
Hired killers acting as part of a conspiracy acquire greater protection. Where a powerful organization, such as a government, is involved, the contract comes with benefits. Organization and planning resources are there to ensure a successful outcome. The unsolved murder of Georgi Markov in London in 1978 was achieved by a combination of sophisticated technique and toxic agent. Echoes of his death were apparent in the fatal poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, again in London, in 2006, using Polonium 210 as the lethal agent. In both cases, dissidents of East European regimes were eliminated by means that indicated the kind of expertise and resources only available to governments.
The same criteria applied to the unsolved killing of the popular British broadcaster, Jill Dando, in 1999. She was gunned down on her own doorstep with a single custom-made bullet in an execution-style killing. Her murder suggested sophisticated planning beyond the scope of a mere stalker. There is a likelihood that all these murders will remain unsolved as the high-level conspirators enjoy the same protection as Murder Inc.
Conspiracy and cover-up go together, as alleged in the Vatican murder in 1998 when the commander of the Swiss Guard was shot dead. A similar fate awaited Dr Gerald Bull, inventor of the supergun, when he visited Belgium in 1990, and the mysterious death of God’s Banker, Roberto Calvi, in London in 1982 is blurred by ambiguity.
One reason why conspiracy theories take root is that only organizations or governments with international scope can reach out to finger their targets in distant places. Even when compelling evidence is available, as in the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, high-level denial disarms further enquiry. The truth will emerge in the jurisdiction of future generations.
Mother’s Boy
Elizabeth Duncan, to all outward purposes, was a prim, caring mother in her fifties. She doted on her son, Frank, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer. He was Mama’s little boy and she did not want him to leave home. She told him that if he married “some girl” she would get rid of her.
When Frank met attracti
ve Olga Kupezyk, who worked in Santa Barbara, California as a hospital nurse, his mother took an instant dislike to the young woman. For months, she harassed Olga with threatening telephone calls and told her, “I will kill you before you ever marry my son.” Despite this, marry they did but Frank was too scared to tell his mother. When she found out, she heightened the war of nerves to the extent that Olga was forced to change her address twice.
Duncan even paid a window-cleaner to pose as Frank and seek an annulment of the marriage. When this failed, she resumed her threatening telephone calls, pursuing Olga wherever she moved. She told her daughter-in-law, “If you don’t leave him alone, I’ll kill you.”
Following this unequivocal threat, Duncan began shopping around for a contract killer. She approached a Mexican café owner for help on the grounds that her son had given the lady legal representation to fight an immigration case. Esperanza Esquirel thought she knew “two boys” who might be able to help.
Duncan met the two young men, both in their early twenties, at the café to discuss strategy and terms. They were unemployed and willing to consider her proposition to dispose of Olga. They agreed a contract of $6,000 to kill her and Duncan warned them, “You better watch out, she’s a pretty strong girl.”
On 17 November 1958, the hired killers appeared at Olga’s apartment where they kidnapped the seven months pregnant nurse and drove out to the mountains some thirty miles from Santa Barbara. They bludgeoned her into unconsciousness and buried her, possibly alive, in a roadside culvert.
When the contract killers demanded payment, Duncan told them she had run out of funds but gave them a few hundred dollars. In the meantime, Olga was reported missing and the investigative trail soon led to Duncan. When questioned, she claimed that the Mexicans were blackmailing her and threatening her life.
The two killers, Moya and Balonado, were arrested and a confession was soon on the table. They admitted taking turns in strangling and hitting Olga with a rock for, as Duncan had predicted, the young woman put up fierce resistance. They put her body in a culvert and directed investigators where to find it. They also detailed their difficulties in extracting payment from Duncan.
Elizabeth Duncan and her two hired killers were tried for murder. They were convicted and sentenced to death. After all appeals were exhausted they died in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison on 8 August 1962. Duncan protested her innocence and her last words were, “Where is Frank?”
“Knives Have Been Sharpened”
The arrest in 2008 of forty-nine-year-old Hisham Talaat Mousafa caused a stir when he was charged in connection with the death of a popular Lebanese singer. Thirty-year-old Susanne Tamin rose to stardom in Lebanon in 1996 after she appeared on a TV talent show. But with fame came troubles after she separated from her husband/manager and became embroiled in legal disputes.
Tamin and Mousafa, who was married, became lovers but when their relationship began to fracture, she tried to escape by travelling first to London and then to Dubai. Ironically, her last hit song, was called, “Lovers”. It was in Dubai that she met her death in July 2008. Her body was found in her apartment where she had died from multiple stab wounds and a cut throat.
Investigators discovered that Tamin had been trailed to Dubai by Mohsen el-Sukkary, a former Egyptian security officer who worked at one of Mousafa’s Cairo hotels. It was claimed that El-Sukkary had followed the singer to her apartment and gained admittance by posing as a representative of the building’s owners.
Mousafa denied any involvement but was accused of participating in murder by inciting and assisting El-Sukkary. Transcripts of phone calls allegedly made by Mousafa were published in the Egyptian media, in one of which he directed El-Sukkary, “OK, let’s finish with this.” Mousafa was stripped of his immunity from prosecution as a member of the National Democratic Party and committed for trial.
Although the murder was committed in Dubai, the trial was held in Egypt, which does not permit extradition of its citizens. While in custody awaiting trial, Mousafa wrote to a Cairo newspaper complaining that he was being pursued by people who envied his success. “Knives have been sharpened,” he wrote.
The trial proved controversial when the judge imposed an order prohibiting reporting and banning the public from proceedings. This followed publication of pictures of the murder victim as she was found lying dead in her apartment.
The prosecution argued that Mousafa had paid El-Sukkary to kill his lover. Evidence supporting the charge came from CCTV footage at the crime scene and recordings of telephone conversations. There was also linking DNA evidence from the hit man’s blood-stained clothing discarded in a nearby rubbish bin.
The guilty verdict delivered by the court and pronouncement of death sentences on both men was received with shock and surprise by the Egyptian public, which had grown used to the idea that wealthy individuals could contrive to be unaccountable.
The Umbrella Murder
“I’ve got a horrible suspicion that this has got something to do with something that happened today . . .” Thus did Georgi Markov explain to his wife the illness that had struck him down. On 7 September 1978, while walking to his work at BBC Bush House in London, Markov felt a sharp jab in his right leg. Turning round, he saw a man with an umbrella who apologised in a foreign accent and hailed a taxi. Four days later Markov died at St James Hospital, Balham.
Following the incident on Waterloo Bridge, the Bulgarian broadcaster completed his shift and returned home about 10:30. In the early hours of the following morning, he experienced vomiting, had a high temperature and flu-like symptoms. By the time he reached hospital, his red cell blood count was 33,000 per ml, the highest doctors there had seen.
Markov was the victim of what became known as “The Umbrella Murder”. At the coroner’s inquest, expert evidence was given that a tiny platinum pellet measuring 1.52mm had been recovered from his leg. This was the vehicle for implanting a lethal dose of ricin, a little understood and rare poison, into his body. Experts in bacteriological warfare said that ricin, extracted from castor oil seeds, was one of the five most toxic substances known. One thousandth of a gram was enough to kill an adult.
Knowledge of Markov’s background as an anti-Communist dissident was taken into account as a possible motive for murder. Information about ricin and its toxic properties was kept by defence establishments in Britain and the US. In 1970, the World Health Organisation had warned about the dangers of ricin as a possible warfare agent. It was agreed that manufacturing the platinum pellet implanted in the victim’s leg would have required special skills. Somewhat chillingly, it was noted that a similar attack had been made on a Bulgarian defector in Paris who had survived.
The coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of unlawful killing. Meanwhile, the newspapers hummed with stories of cold-war killings and international espionage. Scotland Yard made no progress in finding the attacker and the taxi-driver who allegedly took the killer away from the scene did not respond to calls for information. The Bulgarian Embassy in London simply stated that they had no knowledge about the attacks in London and Paris.
In 1991, a story surfaced that the disgraced Bulgarian dictator, Todov Zhivkov, would be charged with Markov’s murder following the overthrow of the Communist state. There were reports that key files had gone missing and Scotland Yard officers went to Sofia to assist enquiries. The following year, a former Bulgarian general was jailed for destroying documents.
In 1993, an ex-KGB man visiting London was questioned by police. He was said to have known that the Bulgarians had requested technical assistance from the KGB in 1978. After a flurry of stories about the continuing cold-war legacy, the news died away again. In 1997 Scotland Yard said that the case was still open. The identity of Georgi Markov’s assassin remains a mystery but in June 2008 Scotland Yard detectives travelled to Bulgaria in an attempt to solve the case before Bulgaria’s thirty-year statute of limitations expired.
Polonium Trail
The death in London
of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 from a rare poison brought back memories of The Umbrella Murder carried out twenty-eight years previously.
Litvinenko, a former KGB officer, defected in 2000 and came to live in London. He was apparently working on a story about Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and critic of President Putin, who was shot dead in Moscow in October 2006. On 1 November, Litvinenko met two Russians in a London hotel and later the same day talked to an Italian academic about Politkovskaya at a sushi bar.
After this meeting, Litvinenko felt unwell and came to believe that he had been poisoned. He was taken to hospital and guards were placed outside his room. He was jaundiced, lost his hair and declined rapidly. Initial thoughts that he had been poisoned with thallium gave way to the view that he had ingested a radioactive substance. Photographs of the dying man lying in his hospital bed were published in the national press. Hours before he died on 23 November, Polonium 210 was discovered in his urine.
Toxicologists said that small amounts of Polonium 210 were to be found in the natural environment but larger amounts would be needed to create a fatal dose for a human being. This indicated a man-made source and the use of sophisticated technology. Traces of radiation were detected at Litvinenko’s home as well as at the hotel and sushi bar that he had visited. What had been viewed as an unexplained death now took a more sinister turn and there was talk of a political assassination.
Theories on the motive abounded, ranging from self-administered poison to embarrass the Russian government to an act of state terrorism to eliminate a critic. In December 2006, Scotland Yard announced that Litvinenko’s death was being treated as a murder enquiry.
Toxicologists described Polonium 210 as a designer poison pill created by nanotechnology. It is colourless, odourless and transparent. Ingestion of the poison, probably in liquid form, leads to irreparable damage to the body’s organs and bone marrow. The substance emits alpha radiation, which is not detected by airport security scanners. As the investigation proceeded, traces of Polonium 210 were found in a trail from Moscow to London, including a British Airways plane that had brought the suspected hit man to London.