The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes

by Odell, Robin

  Grand’ Terre

  The conviction of an elderly French farmer for the murder of the Drummond family in 1952 sparked off a spate of conspiracy theories.

  Sir Jack Drummond, aged sixty-one, was an internationally recognized biochemist. In the summer of 1952 he was on holiday in southern France with his wife and eleven-year-old daughter. He pulled off the road near Lurs on 4 August and camped for the night by the riverside.

  The following morning, thirty-four-year-old Gustave Dominici, who lived with his father in a nearby farm called La Grand’ Terre, discovered a girl’s body in the field. Her head had been crushed with a rifle butt and she was found some distance from the campsite where her parents lay dead from gunshot wounds.

  It appeared that Sir Jack and Lady Drummond had been shot first and that their daughter had run away, only to be caught by the murderer who clubbed her to death. The murder weapon, a US army carbine, was found nearby in the river.

  Once the identity of the murder victims was established, the local police called up reinforcements to examine the crime scene and question witnesses. The murder of an English family on a touring holiday in France quickly made it to newspaper front pages.

  Investigators suspected that the Dominici family knew more about the deaths than they were prepared to admit. Gustave had divulged that the Drummonds’ daughter was still alive when he found her but said he was too scared to fetch help. He was charged with failing to help a dying person and sent to prison.

  The Dominicis were a close-knit family. Seventy-five-year-old Gaston had nine children and nineteen grandchildren. The farm was run by Gustave and the old man tended his goats. The police were receiving mixed messages from the occupants of Grand’ Terre farm and inconsistencies began to appear in their recollection of events. It was Gustave who finally blew the whistle by declaring that his father had committed the murders.

  Eventually, the old man admitted the killings when he said he was caught spying on Lady Drummond as she undressed. Her husband appeared on the scene to deal with the “Peeping Tom ” and there was a struggle, in the course of which the Drummonds were shot dead. Dominici changed his story several times and made numerous confessions. Finally, in November 1954, he was tried for murder at Digne Asssizes and convicted on a majority verdict. He received the death sentence, which was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. In 1960, he was freed on the orders of the French President and he died in 1965.

  For many commentators, the murder of the Drummonds remained a mystery. There was a suggestion that the killings were part of a wider plot and that the Dominicis were caught up in a bigger game plan. A French historian writing about the case in 2002 put forward the theory that Sir Jack Drummond had been a spy and his presence in France soon after the ending of the Second World War involved an espionage mission related to chemical weapons. According to this account, Sir Jack Drummond had been to France on three previous occasions after the war finished and the presence of a chemical factory nearby was noted.

  A further development of the conspiracy angle emerged in 2007 with the notion that Sir Jack Drummond was drawn in to the post-war machinations of the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. One theory suggested he was spying for the British government and had planned to meet someone who would pass on secret intelligence, all in the context of cold war politics.

  Many questions about the murders remain unanswered. Local people said there were strangers in the Lurs area on the night of the shooting whose presence was unaccounted for. Also, it has been alleged that Sir Jack Drummond attended a meeting with a former French Resistance fighter two days before he was killed. Post-mortem findings on the murder victims were supposed to have indicated that two different weapons were used. And so the speculation continues.

  What is certain is that old man Gaston Dominici, cast in the role of voyeur and killer, took many secrets with him to the grave.

  CSI Stockholm

  The Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, and his wife Lisbet visited the Grand Cinema in Sveavägan in central Stockholm on the evening of 28 February 1986. They left the cinema just after 11 p.m. and were walking down the street when a man came up behind them and fired two shots at close range. Palme was fatally wounded with a shot in the back and his wife suffered a minor injury.

  Apart from the shocking death of its Prime Minister in a busy street, Sweden had to come to terms with a bungled investigation, a controversial trial and unhelpful witnesses. The police failed to secure the crime scene adequately. It took a long time for reinforcements to reach the crime scene and no road checkpoints were set up. Several witnesses, including Lisbet Palme, saw a man running down the street after the shooting.

  There was snow on the pavement at the time of the murder and it was a passer-by who, several days later, found two spent .357mm copper-tipped bullets. The type of gun that fired them was never identified and no murder weapon was ever recovered.

  The prelude to the shooting was that Palme had stood down his bodyguard detail at midday because he intended to spend the rest of the day at home. In the afternoon, he decided to take his wife to the cinema to see a comedy, The Brothers Mozart. He queued for tickets along with other Stockholm filmgoers. He and his wife left at the end of the film just after 11 p.m. and by 11.21 he was dead.

  Two theories emerged concerning the motive behind the murder. The Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) had an active group in Sweden and its members had been branded as terrorists by the government. Their leader had also been refused political asylum in the country. An alternative theory was simply that Palme had been shot at random by a disturbed individual unaware of his victim’s identity.

  Christer Pettersson, a forty-two-year-old, alcoholic, drug-user and convicted criminal fitted the random killing scenario. He had been seen in the vicinity on the night of the shooting and his alibi did not add up. He was questioned by the police and strenuously denied he was the killer. Pettersson was put under surveillance and, in December 1988, he was detained as a suspect. One witness claimed to have identified him as the man running from the scene.

  Pettersson was put on trial in Stockholm in June 1989. Much of the prosecution’s case was circumstantial. It depended heavily on the evidence of Lisbet Palme who identified Pettersson after watching a video of a police identity parade. Mrs Palme proved to be a difficult witness, initially declining to go into the witness box. In the event, she did confront the accused man and identified him. Asked if she was sure, she answered, “Yes ”.

  Four witnesses changed their pre-trial statements, weakening the prosecution case, and critics said that Mrs Palme’s evidence was worthless. Pettersson made a confident denial, “I did not kill Olof Palme,” he told the court. His declaration of innocence conformed to public opinion, for in a pre-trial poll carried out by the Swedish Institute of Opinion, only 18 per cent thought he was guilty.

  After deliberating for seventeen days, the jury delivered a guilty verdict and Pettersson was sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict did not calm public unease and doubts continued to surface.

  In October 1989, the High Court of Appeal, by a unanimous decision, overturned the conviction and Pettersson was released from Kvonoberg Prison. The police handling of the murder investigation was criticized as was the judicial process in a case where no murder weapon had been found, there was no clear motive and the identification evidence was unreliable.

  Further twists to the story emerged as time progressed. In 1991 there was a suggestion that an unnamed former French legionnaire was involved in a right-wing extremist plot to kill Palme. In 1997 came news of an alleged plot to assassinate King Carl Gustaf XVI, which had gone awry when Palme was shot by mistake. And, finally, Pettersson, who had steadfastly denied the killing, allegedly claimed in 2001 to be the murderer after all. The truth of this died with Pettersson in 2007.

  Demands With Menace

  The murder of a leading heart surgeon in Sydney in 1991 shocked Australia. It was a crime that had overtones of extortion r
elated to traffic in human organs for transplantation.

  Dr Victor Chang became an icon to Australians when he carried out life-saving surgery on a fourteen-year-old girl. He was a greatly respected figure and a pioneer in heart transplant surgery. He inaugurated a national transplant programme at a leading Sydney hospital and carried out hundreds of transplant operations with a high survival rate.

  Born in Shanghai to Australian-Chinese parents, Chang set out his ambition to be a doctor early on. Once established, he quickly made his professional mark and in the 1990s was at the peak of his career, travelling widely to carry out life-saving surgery. He lived with his British-born wife and three children in Sydney and, despite his success, kept a modest social profile.

  Early in the morning of 4 July 1991, Dr Chang left his home driving his Mercedes and heading for St Vincent’s Hospital. During his journey, he telephoned his wife and reported nothing untoward. Shortly afterwards he turned off the main road in the suburb of Mosman and drove into a side street following a minor collision with another car. Witnesses later said they saw him standing by his car apparently arguing with two young men. One of them pulled a gun and fired two shots into Dr Chang’s head before fleeing from the scene in their car.

  The murder of the fifty-four-year-old doctor led to a huge manhunt for his killers and after ten days of intensive investigation, the police arrested two suspects. They were both Malaysians; a thirty-four-year-old chef, Philip Lim Choon Tee, and forty-nine-year-old Liew Chiew Seng. Initial reaction was that the murder was related to Chinese Triad activity, a group which ran drug, gambling and prostitution in Sydney’s underworld.

  Another theory lay in Dr Chang’s well-known opposition to the trade in body organs harvested in China for transplantation into wealthy patients. He was especially vocal about the practice of taking kidneys from prisoners executed in China.

  When Lim and Seng were put on trial in Sydney in October 1992, they both pleaded guilty to murder and it seemed that their crime began as one of extortion. They apparently conspired to demand three million Australian dollars from the Chang family. Aided by a third man, Stanley No, they visited Chang’s house intending to threaten him but gave up when they saw he had company. Their plan, it was argued by the prosecution, was to abduct Dr Chang and demand money with menaces. When he refused, after they had driven him off the road on 4 July, Liew produced a gun and fired the fatal shots.

  The two men, described in court as amateur desperadoes, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mixed Media

  The written and published word have played a leading role in defining the history of crime. Printed accounts of the execution of criminals accompanied by stark illustrations of hanged felons were a source of public information throughout the nineteenth century. They also served as a reminder to the general populace that crime does not pay. As the printed word evolved and was augmented by other media, especially the visual dimension of film and television, so opportunities arose for graphic reporting of events. The new developments also brought scope for the exercise of criminal ingenuity.

  Death sometimes imitates art and such was the case when Konrad Beck contrived a murder in a locked room in his Berlin apartment. He had stolen the idea from a novel he had been reading. The mystery was solved when investigators found a copy of the book in his flat, which conveniently fell open to the page providing the solution. Krystian Bala had a different idea. He committed his murder first and then wrote a fictionalized account of it in a novel. And Snowy Rowles gleaned his ideas about disposing of his victim’s body in Australia’s outback after reading a story about a fictional crime.

  Murderers are chiefly motivated by passion or enmity and know full well who their victim will be. But where the objective is the calculated business of gain, it may be necessary to seek out victims. One of the means of doing this is by advertising. Part of Elfriede Blauensteiner’s strategy was to find elderly men to kill and fleece them of their savings by advertising for gullible companions in the newspapers. Here was an echo of an earlier example established by Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez and their exploitation of Lonely Hearts Club advertisements in 1940s America.

  Words can also entrap, for example, when a policeman lay dying from gunshot wounds in a London street and wrote the name of his killer in his notebook. Or when Ghislaine Marshal, mortally wounded in a knife attack in her flat in the south of France, scrawled her attacker’s name on a door using her own blood.

  New media present new opportunities for law enforcement. Thus wireless was used in 1910 to pinpoint the arrest of Dr Crippen and television has been successfully used to acquire public information about crimes and criminals. Programmes such as the BBC’s “Crimewatch” and 20th Century Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” have played a significant role. In the US, John List and William Hewlett, both fugitives from justice, were caught due to public responses to television appeals for information.

  One of the great debates of modern times has been about the possible effect of movie films and, later, of television, on impressionable minds and leading to criminality. In 1952, when a young man shot and killed a policeman on a warehouse roof in south London, the question asked was whether his actions were influenced by having watched a gangster film depicting gun violence.

  While sociologists debated what they saw as the issues, they were overtaken by rapid developments in the media industries. The cinema had the power to show violent images to paying audiences but television and, in due course, video, brought the culture of violence into every home. The proliferation of brutal and sadistic scenes combined with a lessening of moral inhibitions, rendered the debate virtually meaningless.

  A watershed occurred in 1971 with the cinema screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film, “A Clockwork Orange”, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess. The film, which showed disaffected young men committing gang rape, was highly controversial and accusations followed that it glamorized violence. As a result, the film was withdrawn from distribution the following year.

  While Kubrick’s film was graphic, it was simply ahead of its time and complaints about film violence have become muted as images have become more explicit. In modern cinema and television, gritty realism is everything. Films such as “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Natural Born Killers” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, entertained and horrified their audiences. They also entered the psyche of some individuals who went beyond the threshold of entertainment and into the realm of personality deviation. Thus Peter Moore explained that he killed for pleasure and lay the blame on a character in the horror film, “Friday the Thirteenth”. Similarly, incidents in the film, “Copycat” were said to have been emulated in the Zakrzewski murders in Paris in 1996.

  The internet has further extended the range of media that can be exploited by those seeking publicity and self-promotion. A particular phenomenon has been the use of the internet by mass murderers to justify their acts of destruction and promote their brand of personal beliefs. In 2007, Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed nine people after he had posted a hate-filled manifesto on YouTube. In the same year, Cho Heng Hui killed thirty-two people and sent his revenge credo to NBC news in New York. In 2008, Matti Juhani Saari killed ten people, having declared on YouTube that, “the whole of life is pain”. Between them these three killers destroyed the lives of fifty-one people.

  There is a strong literary tradition among the murdering fraternity including Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and Pierre François Lacenaire. The French murderer won over many sympathizers with his soul-baring memoirs written in his prison cell. Karl Hau wrote two books while serving his term of life imprisonment. Hirasawa, the Tokyo poisoner and Jacques Mesrine, France’s Public Enemy Number One, also wrote books detailing their lives and crimes.

  Pre-eminent among the ranks of those who have developed literary careers following convictions for killing are Dr William Minor and Stephen Wayne Anderson. Minor was judged insane in 1872 after killi
ng a man and spent thirty-eight years in an asylum where he became an acclaimed lexicographer of the English language. While Anderson, who was executed in the US in 2002 after spending twenty-two years on Death Row, was an award-winning poet and playwright. In their different ways, perhaps, both men showed that the pen is mightier than the sword, although in both cases, their weapon of choice was a handgun.

  Inspired Reader

  Death imitated art when a novelist’s ingenious murder scenario was adopted by a man who wanted to eliminate his family in order to remarry.

  Konrad Beck made a living in Berlin in the 1880s as a general dealer buying and selling second-hand goods. On a November day in 1881, appearing somewhat flustered, he approached a police officer in the street to say that he could not open the door to his apartment. The key did not work and the door seemed to be bolted on the inside.

  Beck’s concern was for his wife and five children who he believed must be inside. He was convinced something was wrong. The combined forces of the landlord and a carpenter succeeded in taking the door down and allowing access to the flat. They were greeted by the macabre spectacle of Mrs Beck hanging from a hook in the ceiling.

  The children were not in evidence so a search was made of all the rooms and cupboards. They were found in a cupboard in the hallway. The five children, ranging in age from four to twelve years, were hanging from hooks like rabbits in a butcher’s shop. They had all been strangled.

  Observant detectives noted that both Frau Beck and her children looked undernourished and were dressed in shabby threadbare clothes. By contrast, Konrad Beck appeared to be fit and healthy. The immediate interpretation of the deaths was that Frau Beck had killed her children and then hanged herself after first bolting the front door.

  Detectives decided to probe a little into the background of the Beck family. They learned from neighbours that Frau Renate Beck was always short of money and sometimes asked them for old clothes and even food. Konrad Beck spent a great deal of time away from home and when he was there he seemed to spend his time sitting around reading books.