The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes

by Odell, Robin

  Weeks before these women disappeared, Brown had told a friend, “You will hear of me. I am going to be famous.” Brown was a known sex offender who had been identified by various rape victims over ten or more years. He had been convicted of rape at Preston, his home town, in 1989.

  When he was questioned by the police, Brown admitted knowing Xiao Mei Guo, with whom he had regular sex. A search of his flat at Rotherhithe in southeast London turned up receipts for an assortment of equipment bought at a DIY store. This included a saw, rubber gloves, plastic sheeting and cleaning materials.

  From the state of the flat, with its stripped walls and recently taken-up carpet, it was clear that a clean-up operation was under way. Traces of blood were found on the walls and ceiling and there was evidence of bloodstains in the bath.

  Books found in Brown’s flat included accounts of activities of serial killers such as Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Dennis Nilsen. Police believed Brown wanted to emulate Jack the Ripper, which was why he chose Whitechapel as his killing ground. If he killed women in that area, he knew the link to the Ripper would inevitably be made and he would gain the notoriety he was looking for. Detectives believed he had only just started his killing spree.

  Brown was sent for trial at the Old Bailey in September 2008. The prosecution said that his victims lived on the edge of society and represented soft targets for a man who thought their disappearance from the streets would not be noted. On 3 October, Brown was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Police believed that Brown might have killed before and unsolved cases were being reviewed. The man who wanted to be compared with the serial killer who terrorized Whitechapel in 1888 was granted his wish with a newspaper headline that read, “Killer wanted to be Jack the Ripper”.

  “You Next!”

  When Margaret Backhouse started her car on 9 April 1984, there was an explosion and, although severely injured, she survived. An investigation found that a pipe bomb loaded with shotgun pellets had been hidden under the driver’s seat and wired up to the car’s ignition.

  The explosion occurred at the farm in Widden Hill in the Cotswolds in the UK where Graham and Margaret Backhouse lived. Backhouse told the police that he had found a sheep’s head on his land with a note reading, “You next.” He had also complained about receiving threatening telephone calls. The police advised him to tighten up his security and make sure he kept his vehicles locked. An alarm was installed in his home, which was linked to the police station.

  On 30 April, the alarm sounded and police arrived at Widden Hill where they found the body of Colyn Bedale-Taylor in the farmhouse. He had been shot twice in the chest with a shotgun. Graham Backhouse was found lying on the floor of the study with knife wounds to his face and chest. His wife was still in hospital recovering from the injuries caused by the car explosion.

  Colyn Bedale-Taylor, aged sixty-three, was a retired engineer and neighbour of the Backhouses. According to Graham Backhouse, his neighbour had confessed to planting the bomb and he shot him when Bedale-Taylor attacked him with a knife.

  The forensic evidence did not add up. For a start, Bedale-Taylor would surely have dropped the knife when he was shot. Secondly, the knife had his initials, CBT, scratched into its surface but this was uncharacteristic because none of the many tools used by Bedale-Taylor, a keen furniture restorer, was similarly marked. The indications were that the knife had been placed in his hand.

  Enquiries revealed that Graham Backhouse was in financial difficulties and needed £100,000 to pay off his debts and secure his business. Significantly, he had taken out two life insurance policies on his wife, equivalent to that amount.

  Backhouse was arrested and charged with the murder of Bedale-Taylor and the attempted murder of his wife. He was tried at Bristol Crown Court in February 1985 where the prosecution made its case that he had hatched a plot to kill his wife to claim on the insurance and to put the blame on his neighbour. Backhouse denied attempting to murder his wife and claimed he killed his neighbour in self-defence.

  Forensic evidence made it clear from an examination of bloodstains at the scene of the killing that the knife had been put into the hand of the dead man. The inference was that Backhouse had used the knife to slash his own face in a simulated attack. The self-inflicted scars were evident on his face when he appeared in court.

  Backhouse had worked out his murderous scheme early in 1984, beginning with the stories about threats to his life. This was a prelude to the bomb planted in his wife’s car which he would claim was intended for him. Once that part of the scheme unravelled, he decided to make a scapegoat of his neighbour inviting him to his home for coffee and a chat. He literally had his victim in his sights when he produced a shotgun and killed him.

  Apparently, Graham Backhouse had ambitions to write detective stories but that was another plot that failed. The trial jury found him guilty of both charges on a majority verdict. Mr Justice Stuart-Smith told him, “You are a devious and wicked man” as he sentenced the would-be writer to life imprisonment.

  Enough Rope

  An amateur filmmaker, who fixated on images of young women in dire predicaments, enticed a girl into his studio where she was hanged while the camera recorded her death agonies.

  Forty-nine-year-old Geoffrey Jones lived in Hall Green, Birmingham in the UK. He made films with grisly content, featuring young women in distress, lying under the wheels of a bus or about to be crushed by a train. The girls wore tight, form-fitting clothes and acted as suitably terror-stricken maidens. The films were viewed at private showings and distributed through a video network.

  Jones advertised for models by means of cards displayed in newsagents’ shop windows. In April 1985, he placed an ad reading, “Wanted – Young Lady for part-time modelling. Experience not necessary.” Contact details were included. Seventeen-year-old Marion Terry was unemployed after leaving school and thought the ad offered a money-earning opportunity. The going rate was £2 an hour.

  Marion went to Jones’ house where he had an upstairs room fitted out as a studio. He had written the script for a film to be called “Enough Rope”, the central feature of which was the death of a young woman by hanging. Marion was to be cast in that role.

  What happened next would be the subject of a later reconstruction, but Jones appeared at a friend’s home and told her he had taken an overdose of aspirin tablets to kill himself. He mentioned that there was a dead body in his house.

  The full details of the filming session that took place in Geoffrey Jones’s studio emerged at his trial for murder at Birmingham Crown Court in April 1986. The prosecutor gave a graphic reconstruction of the way in which Marion Terry had met her death.

  Jones explained what he wanted, indicating a noose hanging from the ceiling of the studio, underneath which was a chair. When Marion was directed to stand on the chair and place the noose around her neck, she rebelled. He forced her to comply and then pulled the chair away. As she dangled from the ceiling, the camera recorded the event.

  It was argued on Jones’ behalf that the mock hanging went tragically wrong and Marion died by accident. His attempts to resuscitate her failed and, in a state of distress, he went to a friend’s house where he explained what had happened. The prosecutor dismissed this account, maintaining that Jones was sexually inadequate and derived pleasure from visualizing young women in life-threatening situations. His ultimate fantasy was to hang a young girl.

  Jones was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He made no response when asked if he had anything to say. One of the mysteries is what happened to the film that Jones was making. Detectives believed that he did record his victim’s dying moments on film but it was never recovered.

  Natural Selector

  In a tragedy reminiscent of the Dunblane and Columbine massacres, eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen went on a killing spree in a school in Finland. On the morning of 7 November 2007, he shot dead eight students and the head tea
cher before turning the gun on himself.

  A witness to the tragedy at Jokela High School in a small town near Helsinki said that Auvinen moved systematically down the school corridors, opening doors and firing at the occupants of classrooms. He appeared to be acting without emotion. “He was not laughing: his face was a blank,” said a fellow student.

  Hours before the killings, Auvinen had posted a video on YouTube with the title, “Sturmgeist 89” (Stormspirit). It showed him pointing a handgun at the screen and was accompanied by a “manifesto” in which he described himself as a “natural selector”. He declared, “I will eliminate all who I see as unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.” He added, “I am so full of hate and I love it.”

  The eighteen-year-old student had joined a gun club in Helsinki earlier in the year and used his membership to obtain a gun licence and then bought a handgun and ammunition. During the shooting tragedy, he fired his .22 weapon sixty-six times and had hundreds of rounds of ammunition with him.

  Comparisons were made with the massacre at Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 and the Columbine school killings in Colorado in 1999. More specifically, attention was drawn to the shooting earlier in 2007 at Virginia Tech in the US when Cho Heng Hui killed thirty-two students. Attention was drawn to Finland’s murder rate, which at twenty-eight per 100,000 is the highest in Western Europe, and also to its gun ownership. In a country of 5.3 million, there are fifty-six privately-owned firearms for every 100 citizens.

  Pekka-Eric Auvinen was described as a solitary youth with few friends who was lonely and angry. He came from a comfortable home and in his manifesto said, “Don’t blame anyone else for my actions . . . Don’t blame my parents or my friends . . .” It appeared that the young man had been influenced by the Columbine massacre and was committed to controversial ecological views in which not all human beings were deemed fit to survive.

  Act Of Revenge

  Just after 7 a.m. on 18 April 2007, shots were heard in a dormitory at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, USA. Two students were found dead and there was a trail of bloody footprints in the corridor but no apparent gunman.

  At 9.40 a.m. a reign of terror was unleashed on students in another building on the campus. A gunman wielding two handguns went from classroom to classroom firing at students attending lectures. Panic ensued as students tried to escape through windows or tended their injured colleagues. The gunman fired repeatedly, discharging 200 shots and re-loading his weapons, without uttering a word. Finally, with thirty-two dead, including both students and teachers, the gunman put one of the weapons to his head and killed himself.

  Between the two shooting phases, twenty-three-year-old Cho Heng Hui mailed a video package to NBC News in New York. It contained his chilling manifesto in which he declared he would kill himself but he was going to take others with him.

  Cho was a student at Virginia Tech where he shared a room with five others. His behaviour had been the subject of concern since 2005. One of his lecturers raised concerns about his obsession with violence and unwillingness to communicate. He rarely spoke and, when he did, it was often in whispers. He shunned contact and seemed angry and depressed.

  Cho had been born in South Korea and moved to the US with his parents in 1992. His father ran a dry-cleaning business and he attended the local school where, apparently, he was bullied. He studied English at Virginia Tech where tutors worried about the violence underlying his plays and essays. In one of his plays, he described the wishes of three students to kill a sadistic teacher.

  In his manifesto, he ranted about the evils of materialism and the snobbery and debauchery of his fellow students. He planned his revenge carefully. In February, he bought a Walther P22 pistol and the following month he acquired a Glock semi-automatic. These were the weapons that he used to such devastating effect.

  The 25,000 students and 10,000 staff at Virginia Tech were shocked at the tragedy that had unfolded on their campus. The wider American public were equally appalled and minds immediately went back to the Columbine massacre in 1999 when two teenagers shot dead thirteen people. American gun ownership was again re-examined with the customary analysis of statistics; 200 million guns in private ownership, 300,000 gun-related assaults annually and around 30,000 deaths.

  Commenting on Cho Heng Hui, Boston-based criminologist Jack Levin said his acts were revenge against people he believed were persecuting him.

  “. . . Life Is War . . .”

  Finland experienced its second classroom massacre in less than a year when a trainee chef opened fire on his classmates in September 2008, killing ten of them.

  Twenty-two-year-old Matti Juhani Saari turned up at the school in Kauhajoki on the morning of 23 September carrying a bag which contained a handgun, ammunition and explosives. Pulling a balaclava over his head, he produced a .22 pistol and entered a classroom where students were sitting an examination. Calmly and without warning, he began firing, moving from room to room. In the space of an hour and a half, he shot dead ten students, fatally wounded another and set off numerous fire-bombs. At around 12.30, he put the gun to his head and killed himself.

  In an eerie reminder of the classroom massacre carried out in November 2007 by Pekka-Eric Auvinen (see here), Saari had posted a video on YouTube showing him at a shooting range, pointing a weapon at the camera and saying, “You will die next.” He added that his hobbies were computers, guns, sex and beer and had commented that the “whole of life is war and whole life is pain”.

  It transpired that Saari had been questioned by the police about his video but he was not detained and was permitted to keep his .22 calibre pistol for which he had a gun licence. He had broken no laws. The next day, he took eleven lives, including his own.

  As before, the shocked people of Finland questioned their country’s gun culture. Youngsters from the age of fifteen years have the right to seek a firearms permit providing they have their parents’ permission. Hunting and target shooting are national pastimes and Finland has one of the highest levels of gun ownership in the world.

  People who knew Saari described him as “. . . one of us – quiet but not a hermit”. Police believed he had been planning his day of violence for several weeks, posting videos showing him firing a handgun.

  Sociologists looked for deeper meaning and referred to the tendency of some parents to leave their children on their own. While this breeds self-sufficiency, it may also encourage an excess of individualism. It has been suggested that where young men become over-introspective, they have a tendency to turn to violence rather than discussion. Saari’s obsession with song lyrics such as “. . . you will fight alone in your personal war”, suggests a degree of fatalism.

  In the wake of the fatal shootings, Finland’s interior minister promised to give police greater powers to question applications for gun licences. Meanwhile, the shocked community of Kauhajoki received a visit from their Prime Minister on 24 September to share a national day of mourning. He told reporters that he was very critical of gun ownership.

  A Man Of Many Words

  Dr William C. Minor was a wealthy American Civil War surgeon who came to London in 1871 on a cultural visit. It was a visit that was to end in tragedy, for in the early hours of 17 February 1872, Minor shot dead a man he believed was an intruder.

  George Merrett worked at a Lambeth brewery and was on his way to work when he was pursued in the street by a gunman who shot and killed him. The gunman did not flee. He was still holding his smoking revolver when the police arrived. Dr Minor explained that it was an accident; he had shot the wrong person after someone broke into his room.

  William Chester Minor was an American citizen holding medical qualifications and a commission in the US Army. He was a cultured man who had a liking for the seamier side of life, frequenting bars, music halls and brothels. It was also discovered that he had a history of mental illness and had been diagnosed in the US as suffering from monomania. He spent some time in an asylum and, on his release, took passage t
o England.

  At his trial in April 1872 for the murder of George Merrett, his defence was one of insanity. The judge applied the McNaghten Rules and the judgment was that thirty-two-year-old Dr Minor was innocent of murder although he had unquestionably killed a man. He was sentenced to be detained at the Asylum for the Criminally Insane at Broadmoor.

  The prisoner was allowed to buy books and his cell soon turned into a library. Feeling deep remorse for his act of violence that had widowed a mother and six children, he contacted Eliza Merrett through the US Embassy. She accepted his sincerity and asked if she could see him. It was unprecedented for a prisoner to be allowed a visit from a relative of his victim. But permission was granted and Eliza offered to obtain books for him.

  Then, an event occurred which completely changed Minor’s life in prison. He responded to a call he had read from the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, Dr James Murray, for contributions to this great editorial task. In 1880 Minor wrote to the editor offering his services and, over the next thirty years, he read countless books and refined tens of thousands of contributions to the dictionary.

  All Murray knew about his most diligent contributor was that he lived in Crowthorne, Berkshire. When he first visited in January 1891 he was astonished to find that Minor was confined to an asylum. The two men became friends and as Minor’s health began to fade, Murray campaigned for him to be repatriated. Winston Churchill, Home Secretary, granted this request in 1910. Thus, after thirty-eight years at Broadmoor, Minor returned to the USA where he died, aged eighty-five, on 26 March 1920.

  The full story of the murderer who turned lexicographer was told by Simon Winchester in his bestselling book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, published in 1998.