by Odell, Robin
Capano gave evidence on his own behalf, attacking the testimony of other witnesses, abusing the prosecutor and trying to manipulate the proceedings. The judge threatened him with “draconian sanctions” if he did not curb his outbursts.
The jury returned a guilty verdict, which was greeted with cheers outside the courtroom. In a forthright summation, Judge William Lee Swain described Capano as angry, sinister and malignant. On 17 January 1999, he was sentenced to death but this was reduced to life imprisonment by the Delaware Supreme Court in 2006. The conviction was upheld again in 2008.
Killer Landlord
Twenty-two-year-old Helen McCourt left work early on 9 February 1988 to return to her home in Billinge, near St Helens in Lancashire in the UK, to get ready for a date with her boyfriend. Her journey from Liverpool by train and bus was reconstructed and it was known that she left the bus at the stop close to her home at about 5.40 p.m. Her mother became concerned when she did not return home and, later in the evening, called the police.
Helen was regarded as a reliable, level-headed girl with no reason to absent herself from home and none of her friends could shed any light on her whereabouts. After leaving the bus near her home, her short walk took her past the George and Dragon public house. Detectives decided to question the landlord to see if he had any information that might help them.
Ian Simms proved evasive and barely co-operative in talking to detectives, who noted that he had what appeared to be scratch marks on his neck. Officers discovered that Helen McCourt had recently worked behind the bar at his pub and their interest in the landlord intensified when they learned of an incident that occurred two evenings before Helen went missing. On 7 February, one of Helen’s friends had become involved in an argument with Ian Simms and Helen had joined in. Asked about the marks on his neck, he explained that his wife had attacked him after she learned he had spent the night with his mistress. His wife denied this had happened.
While appeals were made on television for information that might help police enquiries, detectives began searching Simms’s car and property. In the boot of his car, they found a muddy spade and also a broken sapphire and opal earring, which was identified as Helen’s. The fastener belonging to the earring was found on the carpet of the bedroom used by Simms at the George and Dragon. Most significantly, a smudged bloody fingerprint was discovered on the bedroom doorframe. Simms, who admitted nothing, was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Local searches continued to turn up evidence. Bloodstained men’s clothing was found on a waste tip at Warrington and the missing girl’s bloodstained garments were retrieved from a bin liner near Irlam, together with a knotted piece of electric flex. These items provided significant trace evidence, but despite searches for possible gravesites, there was still no body.
Clinching evidence linking Simms to the missing girl came with DNA testing. Blood on Simms’s clothing matched Helen’s DNA profile using samples provided by her parents. Simms was tried for murder at Liverpool Crown Court in February 1989. He pleaded not guilty and claimed that he had been framed by someone who stole his clothes, killed Helen while he was asleep and disposed of her body. The prosecution case rested on the DNA evidence which the jury found convincing. Simms was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The body of Helen McCourt has never been found despite direct appeals made by her mother to her convicted killer.
“. . . Unremitting Malevolence”
Eighty-two-year-old Irene Silverman, widow of a multimillionaire mortgage broker, lived in an elegant town house in Manhattan, New York, that was furnished with antiques. The five-storey mansion was divided into apartments, which she let to wealthy clientele.
Silverman entertained guests to dinner on 4 July 1998, and was seen the following morning by her maid whom she asked to walk her dog. When the maid returned to the mansion, Irene Silverman was not there and she was never seen again. The police were called and their initial searches gave no indication of any struggle having taken place inside the house. Next, they questioned people who knew the missing woman, including some of her tenants.
Suspicion centred on a young man using the name, Manny Guerin, who had also disappeared. Enquiries revealed that Guerin was twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Kimes who, together with his mother, was in police custody suspected of stealing a car. Kimes and his mother, sixty-four-year-old Sante, had been arrested on the evening of 5 July.
Further enquiries revealed that Kimes, mother and son, were on the FBI’s most wanted list for questioning in connection with murder, fraud and theft in several states. The pair had a record of suspect dealings going back to the 1970s and Sante had served a three-year prison sentence in 1985 for theft and ill-treatment of Mexican immigrants.
Sante was the widow of a wealthy Californian property dealer and owned several houses. She and her son lived a life of luxury and young Kenneth had been looked after by nannies and schooled by private tutors. He had bonded very closely with his mother.
When the pair were arrested, Sante was found in possession of a forged document whereby Irene Silverman transferred ownership of her home to her. Detectives also found a 9mm handgun, hypodermic syringes and drugs in her car. What was not found was any forensic trace evidence linking the Kimes to Mrs Silverman’s disappearance nor were there any witnesses.
The pair were put on trial for murder in New York in 2000. They appeared together on the 60 Minutes television news programme during the pre-trial hearings. They held hands and whispered to each other like a couple of lovers. An investigation that had taken nearly two years revealed details of an elaborate plan to take possession of Irene Silverman’s home valued at $8 million, which involved Kenneth moving into one of her rented apartments.
With no body and practically no forensic evidence, the prosecution’s case was circumstantial. The trial lasted three months and the Kimes’ lawyer argued simply that there was no body, no witnesses and no proof of murder. Sante staged several interviews during the court proceedings, declaring her innocence and demanding to talk to reporters. The prosecutor described Sante as the brains of the operation - she gave the instructions and Kenneth carried them out.
On 19 May 2000, the jury found mother and son guilty of murdering Irene Silverman. The judge sentenced Sante to 120 years to life in prison and Kenneth to 126 years. Judge Rena Uviller described Sante as a “sociopath . . . of unremitting malevolence” and Kenneth as a “vacuous dupe” who had turned into a “remorseless predator”.
The Billionaire Boys’ Club
A dozen or so young men who met at prep school shared a dream about becoming rich. They formed a group known as the Billionaire Boys’ Club with the aim of achieving their dream. Unfortunately, the riches turned to ashes and, in due course, to murder.
This group of young men, comprising sons of a number of wealthy Los Angeles families, was led by Joe Hunt. He ran an organization that combined cult, business and social activities. With funds at their disposal, they set out to compound their riches by persuading family and friends to invest in commodities trading ventures.
By 1983, Hunt, at the age of twenty-four, was managing millions of dollars worth of funds on behalf of eighty investors. His initial success meant that he and his friends could live a lavish lifestyle. They operated from condominiums in West Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, drove expensive cars, dined in the most fashionable restaurants and, generally, assumed an arrogant disregard for anyone who might seek to curb their appetites.
These good times were achieved by running classic Ponzi or Pyramid selling schemes; keeping existing investors sweet by giving them generous returns funded with monies provided by new investors. But, by 1984, the wheels began to fall off this get-rich-quick vehicle when funds started to run short.
Matters came to a head with the disappearance of a former artist and journalist, Ronald Levin. He went missing in June 1984 having reportedly cheated Joe Hunt and his fellow Billionaire Boys out of $4 million in commissions owed to them.
Hunt
was desperate to raise money and there was speculation that he resorted to murder to do so. Forty-two-year-old Levin, reputedly a friend of Hollywood stars, was a flamboyant con man who posed in whatever professional capacity suited his purpose at the time. He lived in a luxury home and had the uncanny knack of vanishing when creditors or lawsuits loomed on the horizon.
Despite the lack of a body, Hunt was charged with killing Levin. Also implicated was James Pittman, Hunt’s bodyguard. The allegation was made that they shot Levin and buried his body in woods at Soledad Canyon, north of Los Angeles. Hunt was supposed to have boasted to his fellow club members that he had “knocked off” Ron Levin.
Joe Hunt was tried for murder at Santa Monica in February 1987. While the victim’s body had not been found, there were reports that he had been sighted after he was supposed to be dead. Hunt protested his innocence and his defence attorney argued that Levin had deliberately dropped out of view in order to escape prosecution over fraudulent business deals. Nevertheless, Hunt was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. After lengthy criminal proceedings, James Pittman pleaded guilty to being an accessory.
In a subsequent development in Hunt’s colourful life, he and three other club members, were tried for the murder of a former Iranian government official, Hedayat Eslaminia. He was the wealthy father of one of the Billionaire Boys and the charge was that he had been murdered in order to gain access to his fortune. Hunt represented himself at the trial and secured an acquittal because of a hung jury.
While Hunt was serving his prison term, filmmakers were busy making a series based on his life and two books were published featuring the Billionaire Boys’ Club. Perhaps the most significant outcome was the suggestion that the film about Hunt inspired the brothers, Lyle and Erik Menendez (see page 292) , to murder their parents for money in 1989. They shot them as they watched television in their Beverly Hills home and were found guilty in 1996 after a previous trial had ended in deadlock.
Framed?
Next to the murder in the locked room, murders without a body present some of the greatest crime mysteries. Such a case occurred in France in 1924, resulting in a controversy that remains unsolved. Guillaume Seznec was a sawmill owner with a business in Brittany and, in May 1923, he left on a trip to Paris with his friend Pierre Quemeneur, a fellow businessman and local councillor.
The pair were driving to meet a man called Boudjema Gherdi to discuss the sale of a hundred Cadillac cars left behind by the American forces after the First World War. During the journey to Paris, their car repeatedly broke down and, according to Seznec, his travelling companion decided to complete the trip by train. Quemeneur did not arrive in Paris and was never seen again.
A month after his disappearance, Quemeneur’s suitcase was found at Le Havre. Among its contents was a document in which he apparently promised to sell his land to Seznec. In 1924, Seznec was tried for murder, despite the absence of a body. The case against him was that the car dealer, Gherdi, did not exist and that Seznec had eliminated Quemeneur in order to take possession of his land. The accused man pleaded his innocence of any wrongdoing but the court found him guilty and he was sentenced to hard labour for life in the French penal colony at Guyana, South America.
Seznec was a model prisoner and at the end of the Second World War he was granted a presidential pardon. He returned to France a broken man where he died at the age of seventy-five in 1954. His family, incensed at the perceived injustice, campaigned to clear his name and pressured the judicial system to admit that a mistake had been made.
In the intervening years, a great deal of new information had become available. It was shown that Gherdi, far from being a figment of Seznec’s imagination, was a police informer. He had been working for Inspector Pierre Bonny, a man with an unenviable record. He was dismissed from the police service for falsifying evidence and, during the German occupation of France in the Second World War, joined the Gestapo. He was shot by firing squad in 1945. It was alleged that prior to execution, he confessed to helping convict an innocent man.
A former resistance worker confirmed that Gherdi collaborated with the Gestapo and in 1993, an elderly witness who had testified at Seznec’s trial in 1924 retracted her evidence, claiming she had been coerced by the police.
In 2005, Seznec’s family succeeded in gaining a retrial at which it was hoped the original verdict would be overturned. The decision was greeted with wide public approval. One of the issues was whether the police had framed Seznec in 1923 to cover up a racket involving the sale of US vehicles. Despite the new evidence and powerful arguments regarding a miscarriage of justice, the judges upheld the original ruling made eighty-two years previously. They maintained the new arguments were insufficient to overturn the guilty verdict. The mystery of the murder with no body persists and the French legal system refused to accept that a mistake had been made.
Beware The Red Chair!
A red armchair became literally a seat of murder and featured prominently in a courtroom re-enactment of the crime.
On 28 March 1944 Jeanne de Sigoyer, the twenty-five-year-old estranged wife of the self-styled Marquis de Sigoyer, visited her husband at his Paris house. She was politely received by her husband and his lover, Irène Lebeau.
Invited into the library, she sat is a solidly made red plush upholstered chair. De Sigoyer asked her if she was the mistress of a mutual friend. She replied, “I won’t tell you.” With a smile, he produced a piece of cord from his pocket and playfully placed it around her neck. His mood changed dramatically as he pulled the cord tight and braced his knee against the back of the chair to throttle his wife. She struggled but soon slumped back lifeless in the chair.
Within a few months of the murder Paris was liberated from the German occupation and de Sigoyer was denounced as a collaborator and put into prison. He was a man with pretensions and a murky background. He assumed the title of Marquis and modelled his appearance on Emperor Napoleon III. He had been certified as insane in 1938 but escaped from the asylum and went into hiding. During the war years, he returned to Paris and made a fortune on the black market.
Jeanne de Sigoyer had been reported missing and searches for her had been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, from the confines of his cell, de Sigoyer wrote a letter to Irène Lebeau intended to ensure that she kept quiet about what she knew. He told her to “beware of the red chair”. As prison correspondence was censured, this veiled threat was picked up and a search was made of de Sigoyer’s house. Under the floor of the wine cellar, they found Jeanne’s body.
As a result of these developments, Irène Lebeau came forward and made a statement in which she said she had been present when de Sigoyer murdered his wife and that he had threatened her to remain silent. De Sigoyer was tried for murder in Paris in December 1946 and the infamous red armchair occupied a prominent place as a crime exhibit.
Lebeau was charged as an accomplice and gave a graphic account of the murder. De Sigoyer challenged her story, claiming that the two women had quarrelled over their affections for him and that Irène had fatally shot his wife. He challenged the court to examine the body for the bullet. The judge ordered the corpse to be X-rayed and the trial proceeded with the defence seeking to show that it would have been impossible to strangle a person sitting in the red chair.
A re-enactment was staged in the court with a volunteer occupying the red chair to test the claim that the back of the chair was too low to permit strangulation in the manner described. The prosecution countered this by saying it was simply a matter of technique. When the result of the X-ray examination made it clear there was no bullet in the victim’s body, de Sigoyer’s fate was sealed. He was found guilty and sentenced to death while Irène was acquitted.
Change Of Ownership
Urban Napoleon Stanger came to England with his wife in the 1880s and settled in Whitechapel. He was an industrious man and was soon running a successful bakery. His wife, Elizabeth, who from all accounts was rather a plain lady with a passion for jewellery
and colourful clothing, became the subject of much rumour-mongering and the main item of gossip among friends and neighbours was that she nagged her husband.
Stanger employed a maid and an errand boy and a young apprentice called Christian Zengler. A friend who lived locally, Franz Stumm, often helped out at the bakery. Stumm was married but was rumoured to be on more than friendly terms with Mrs Stanger.
On 13 November 1881, customers noticed that Stanger was not at his shop. His wife answered enquiries, saying he had gone to Germany on urgent business. Christian Zengler mentioned that he had seen Stanger late on the night he disappeared standing outside the shop with three other men, one of whom was Stumm.
Elizabeth Stanger seemed unconcerned by her husband’s absence and, with daily assistance from Stumm, the bakery business ran smoothly enough. Stumm was obviously getting his feet under the table and he took up permanent residence. On Sundays, he was observed walking arm-in-arm with Mrs Stanger.
Events at the bakery fed the gossips and soon people were whispering that Stanger had been murdered and his corpse turned into meat pies by his wife. Crowds gathered outside the bakery; tongues wagged and fingers were pointed. Rumour reached fever pitch when the sign over the shop proclaiming its ownership by U.N. Stanger was changed to F. F. Stumm.
In April 1882, a notice was published by an enquiry agent offering a reward for information regarding the whereabouts of Mr Stanger who, as it was phrased, “had mysteriously disappeared”.
A few months later, in October, in an unexpected development, Elizabeth Stanger was arrested on fraud charges initiated by the executors of her husband’s will. It became known that he left everything to his wife but with the stipulation that she should not remarry.
She and Stumm were sent for trial on fraud charges. Mrs Stanger did her best to blacken her husband’s name and claimed that after a quarrel he left the house and she had not seen him since. She said that Stumm had been a good friend and lent them money.