by Odell, Robin
“The Executed Ones”
Stephen Wayne Anderson was a murderer with a passion for eating who went on to distinguish himself as a poet and playwright.
On the night of 26 May 1980 Anderson broke into a house in Bloomington, California. He was intent on robbery and cut the telephone line before checking each room of the house. The house was owned by eighty-one-year-old Elizabeth Lyman, a retired music teacher, who screamed at the presence of an intruder in her bedroom. Anderson responded by shooting her in the face.
As she lay bleeding to death, Anderson busied himself making a meal of noodles and sat down to eat it while watching television. A neighbour, sensing that something was wrong, called the police who interrupted his meal by arresting him.
Anderson was a man with form. He had been imprisoned in 1971 and 1973 on burglary charges and, while serving time in Utah State Prison, he had murdered a fellow inmate. When on the run from prison in 1979, he became involved in contract killings and at the time he killed Elizabeth Lyman, he was a fugitive from justice.
He was tried for murder in San Bernardino County and convicted on 24 July 1981. He was sentenced to die by lethal injection at San Quentin Prison. As Anderson put it later, “I was passing through California when I shot someone during a bungled burglary, and found myself a permanent resident.”
Anderson spent his time in prison constructively, writing poetry and plays, which gained wide recognition. His published work won him two Pen awards for prison writing and his Doing Time was taken as an example of the way creativity can mellow even the most callous mind.
He spent twenty-two years on Death Row and his poetry, particularly Conversations with the Dead, seemed to reflect his remorse for those he had killed, whose lives were stolen away by his actions. Anderson did not deny killing Elizabeth Lyman; “I was very wrong,” he told his trial jury.
His supporters believed that the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father had not been properly presented in court. There were also questions raised over the quality of the defence provided for him by the state. Criticism was directed at his attorney, now deceased, who was described variously as incompetent and lacking in integrity. The bigger question was whether capital prisoners received fair representation.
Writers’ groups and human rights activists fought long and hard to win clemency for Anderson but his final appeal was turned down by the Governor of California in January 2002. It seemed that the condemned man had a hearty appetite on his last day, consuming toasted sandwiches and large quantities of cottage cheese and ice cream.
One of Anderson’s poems referred to the “executed ones” whose ranks he joined at 12.30 a.m. on 29 January 2002, following death by lethal injection.
“Here You Go!”
A popular novelist was shot dead in a public park in New York by a man who believed a character in one of the writer’s novels represented a slur against his sister.
Forty-four-year-old David Graham Phillips wrote under the pen name of John Graham, and made his reputation in America with novels that exposed political corruption and attitudes towards women. He lived in New York and it was part of his daily morning routine to walk in Gramercy Park, Manhattan.
On 23 January 1911, as he took his customary stroll in the park he was suddenly confronted by a man who appeared from behind some bushes menacingly waving a pistol at him. Shouting, “Here you go!” he fired five shots at Phillips who fell dying to the ground. As passers-by gathered at the scene, the gunman put the gun to his head and exclaimed, “Here I go” before pulling the trigger. In the space of a few minutes, victim and murderer lay dead and dying together on the ground.
The novelist lay mortally wounded for several hours before dying. His final words, worthy of a novel, were, “I can fight one bullet, but not five.” One of Phillip’s best-known novels was Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, published after his death, which told the story of a country girl who resorted to prostitution and later became a successful actress. The reason he lost his life was that a character in another novel, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig, inspired a murderous impulse in one of his readers. That reader was Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a neurotic, spoiled young man of twenty-one who was from a wealthy Philadelphia family. He was a man with little inclination to work or follow a profession whose days were spent reading novels and idolizing his socialite sister.
In fact, Goldsborough was captivated by his elder sister to the point of madness. He guarded her with a neurotic jealousy, refusing to allow her to be criticised in any way, even by her father. He had a fiery temper and a reputation for throwing punches at people he thought were critical of his idol.
One of the characters in Phillips’ novel was a self-centred girl who moved in the higher flights of society. It was an unflattering portrait of a spoilt personality, which Goldsborough took as a slur against his sister. The insult, as he saw it, preyed on his mind and he decided to take revenge on the author. In a moment’s madness, a man of little substance but full of jealous hatred terminated the promising life of the writer and destroyed himself in the process.
Murder In Disguise
Greed inspired a cunning scheme to gain an inheritance but when plan A failed, plan B was murder. Wearing a disguise, the killer used a pretence to lure his victim into the shadows and shot her dead.
Karl Hau was a handsome young German who wanted to follow a career in law. He also aspired to be rich and when he met Lina Molitor in Baden-Baden in 1901 he was as much attracted to her beauty as he was to her widowed mother’s wealth. When his proposal of marriage to Lina was vetoed by her mother, the couple eloped. After Lina attempted to commit suicide, her mother relented and allowed them to marry. Mr and Mrs Hau moved to Washington DC where Karl took up his legal studies.
In October 1906, Frau Molitor, who suffered from a heart condition, received a mysterious telegram from Paris asking her to come at once as her daughter, Olga, who was visiting the city with Lina and Karl, was very ill. The old lady made hasty travel plans only to find on her arrival in Paris that Olga was perfectly well. It was not clear who had sent the telegram. Frau Molitor returned to Baden-Baden with Olga and the Haus moved on to London.
During the evening of 6 November, Frau Molitor was again the recipient of an urgent message. On this occasion she was asked to call at her local post office where an important message from Paris awaited her. She hurried down Kaiser-Wilhelm Strasse, accompanied by Olga, and when they reached a poorly lit section of the street, a shot rang out and Frau Molitor died where she fell with a bullet in her heart. Olga noticed a man in a long overcoat running down the street.
Karl Hau became the immediate focus of suspicion, especially in the knowledge that he stood to gain financially from his mother-in-law’s death. He had absconded to London but was arrested and returned to Germany. He admitted being the sender of the messages to Frau Molitor but denied killing her.
He was charged with murder but before he appeared on trial at Karlsruhe, his wife, Lina, committed suicide. Hau proved to have a murky past. He had contracted venereal disease in his teenage years while travelling around the world, and enjoyed a succession of mistresses. His lavish lifestyle meant that he was constantly in need of funds and Frau Molitor had generously provided him with an income during his legal studies in America.
Hau’s trial began on 17 July 1907 amid scenes of great public disorder in which the police had to be supported by two infantry companies. Inside the court, there was a stark reminder of the reason for the trial; on a bench stood a glass jar containing the heart of the late Frau Molitor.
Hau opted to defend himself. He admitted sending the mysterious telegram summoning his mother-in-law to Paris and indeed admitted everything else, including being dressed in disguise in Baden-Baden on the evening of the shooting. But he denied the murder. The only reason he offered for his actions was that he was secretly in love with Olga, his wife’s sister. He even managed to imply that she committed the murder.
The jury ret
urned a guilty verdict and the judge sentenced him to death. By now, public opinion had swung in his favour and troops with fixed bayonets helped to keep order outside the court. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he served seventeen years before being pardoned by the Grand Duke of Baden in 1924.
Hau wrote two books, Death Sentence and Life Sentence, which shed no light at all on his actions or predicament. A leading psychiatrist suggested that he was schizophrenic and possibly suffering mental disorientation due to his having contracted venereal disease. On 4 February 1926, he was found dying in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa near Rome. He had taken poison.
Lethal Immunity
The mass murder of twelve bank employees in 1948 by a Japanese artist has never been fully explained. Sadamichi Hirasawa would have hanged for the crime but for a Japanese law. Instead, he became a celebrity and spent the rest of his life in prison while conspiracy theories and allegations of a cover-up swirled around him.
On 26 January 1948, just before the Teikoku branch of the Imperial Bank in Tokyo closed, a man identifying himself as a health official appeared at the main entrance. He presented the acting manager with his business card, which identified him as “Dr Jiro Yamaguchi”. He explained that owing to an outbreak of dysentery in the district he had been instructed to immunize the bank staff as a preventive measure.
Sixteen employees of the bank obediently lined up to receive their medication. The doctor gave each one a pill to swallow and then distributed a number of small cups into which he dispensed a small quantity of liquid. Within seconds of drinking this potion, the bank employees collapsed where they stood. Ten died immediately, two lingered a while before dying and four survived later in hospital. “Dr Yamaguchi” escaped with over 200,000 yen in cash and cheques.
The mass killing had been accomplished using cyanide and the police quickly discovered that “Dr Yamaguchi” had carried out a dress rehearsal, aimed at perfecting his technique, a week earlier at another bank. There were no ill effects on that occasion. It also became known that a similar immunization session had been carried out at a bank the previous year administered, according to his business card, by Dr Shigeru Matsui.
Dr Matsui was a respected physician and it was believed that his business card had been fraudulently used. The Japanese custom of exchanging cards provided the key to “Dr Yamaguchi’s’’ identity. It was thought possible that Dr Matsui had met the mystery man at some point and therefore his identity would be found among the many cards retained by Dr Matsui.
By a painstaking process of elimination, the police narrowed the field to one man, fifty-year-old Sadamichi Hirasawa, an artist whom Dr Matsui remembered meeting two months before the bank murders. Survivors of the bank poisoning recalled the visiting health official as a middle-aged man with greying hair, a mole on his left cheek and a scar under his chin. Hirasawa matched this description.
Following his arrest, Hirasawa made a confession, which he later withdrew. Post-war Japan was controlled by the American Occupying Forces and it was against this background that in December 1948, Hirasawa was tried for murder, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. His execution did not proceed and, on appeal, was reduced to life imprisonment. The grounds for this decision lay in Japanese law which did not permit a citizen to participate in his own destruction and judicial hanging was a process that relied on the weight of the individual when suspended to break the spinal cord.
Hirasawa’s appeal against conviction was rejected in 1955 and he remained in Sendai Prison where he spent his time painting and writing his autobiography, My Will: The Teikoku Bank Case. He became an iconic figure in Japan, with many people believing he was innocent of the bank murders and had been made a scapegoat due to the failure of the authorities to find the real murderer.
A “Save Hirasawa Committee” was set up, calling for justice. There were claims that the Japanese and American governments had colluded to cover up wartime atrocities. In particular, links were made to military assassination squads using cyanide to eliminate enemy leaders. There was talk of experiments using human guinea pigs to test killing methods and of the agents being held under arrest after the war to protect their secrets. The real murderer responsible for the Tokyo bank killings was said to have been a Japanese officer in one of these units.
Meanwhile, Hirasawa served out his time until his death in 1987 at the age of ninety-five. During his thirty-two years on Death Row no government justice minister was prepared to authorize his execution, suggesting to his supporters that they did not believe he was guilty. The Teikoku Bank Murders remains one of Japan’s most enduring crime mysteries.
Dangerous When He Smiles
Jacques Mesrine was a scheming and ruthless career criminal who terrorized Paris with his daring bank raids in the 1970s. He earned the title of “Public Enemy Number One” and operated with style. After his arrest in 1977, he offered detectives champagne and told them he could not be held. He escaped from prison while serving a sentence for robbery, kidnap and attempted murder by scaling the walls of Santé Prison. This was one of his several high-profile escapes.
Mesrine spent his childhood in German-occupied France during the Second World War and was conscripted into the army in 1956. He served in Algeria and was decorated for bravery. Once demobilized, he found civilian life tame and resorted to crime. He started with petty crime in the 1960s but soon graduated to grand schemes.
His special skills lay in bank robberies and his technique was to strike and move on. He became an internationally sought criminal in North and South America in the late 1960s. He was imprisoned in Canada for a failed attempt to kidnap a wealthy industrialist, but as he was to do on several other occasions, he staged a sensational prison escape in 1972.
He returned to France in 1973 and continued his pattern of daring robberies. In 1978 he robbed the casino at Deauville. Wearing a disguise he held up the cashier who was astute enough to sound the alarm, which brought police officers swarming around the casino. In the resultant shoot-out, Mesrine was wounded but still made good his escape.
Wanted posters were put up around Paris bearing an image of Mesrine sporting his trademark moustache and the warning, “He is dangerous when he smiles”. He was a man of ruthless cunning with a criminally adventurous spirit. After his military service, he trained as an architect and while in prison wrote his memoirs, The Death Instinct. This account of his life detailed his various crimes, which, by his tally, included thirty-nine murders.
Mesrine’s daring antics infuriated the police. Even when he was captured, he contrived to escape and in 1978 hired a light aircraft to buzz the prison, where his girlfriend was being held, in a threatened rescue attempt. Police Commissaire Robert Broussard regarded him as the most dangerous man in France, a description he fulfilled by planning to kidnap the judge who had sentenced him to prison.
But Mesrine’s daring and taunting adventures went too far and the police finally took their revenge. On 2 November 1979, France’s most wanted man was ambushed in a Paris street as he walked to his car. Marksmen from a special antigang unit gunned him down using high velocity ammunition. The officers returned to their base and toasted their success with champagne and the congratulations of the President of France ringing in their ears.
After a criminal career in France lasting seven years, forty-three-year-old Mesrine was dead, but his demise, or the manner of it, did not meet with universal approval. For some, he was a kind of larger-than-life Robin Hood character whose raison d’être was to defy authority. More significantly, though, came claims in 2002 that Mesrine had, in effect, been assassinated when police riddled his car with bullets without offering him the chance to surrender. The police finally got their man but Mesrine, as usual, stole the headlines.
Journey To Purgatory
Having paid his debt to society for committing murder, Johann (Jack) Unterweger emerged from prison a reformed character. He used his time wisely, educating himself and training to be a writer. When he r
egained his freedom in 1990, the prison governor proclaimed that it would be difficult to find a prisoner so well prepared for freedom.
Unterweger had strangled an eighteen-year-old prostitute in Vienna in December 1974, for which he received a life sentence. He used his fifteen years behind bars to good effect, developing a talent for writing which brought him to the notice of the literary and artistic world. He wrote poetry, children’s stories and published an autobiography. The man on the inside was lionized by those on the outside who campaigned for his freedom.
Within months of walking through the prison gates a free man, he strangled a prostitute in Prague while he was in the city doing research. The next month, two prostitutes disappeared in Graz. Their bodies were discovered in January 1991. The Austrian police suspected Unterweger and took him in for questioning. He smooth-talked his way clear, denying any involvement in eight unsolved murders in Graz and Vienna.
As suspicion hardened against him, Austrian police issued a warrant for his arrest in February 1991. But, by then, he had flown to the USA via Switzerland. He planned to do research in Los Angeles on his favourite topic, the twilight world of the red-light district.
In April 1991, Irene Rodriguez travelled to Los Angeles from El Paso. Her body was found in a business car park in Hollenbeck. She had been strangled. On 19 June, the body of Shannon Exley, a prostitute, was found on vacant ground near a Scouts Centre in Los Angeles. A trio of murders was completed with the discovery of Sherri Long’s body at Malibu on 11 July. In each case, the victim had been strangled with her bra.
Detectives in LA realized they were looking for a single murderer, a conclusion supported by the evidence provided in each murder by the bra which had been formed into a strangler’s noose. Meanwhile, Unterweger was using his time attempting to interview film stars in Malibu before returning to Austria. Once again, he was questioned by the police in Vienna and, despite his denials, the evidence against him began to mount up. It was time to return to the USA.