The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes

by Odell, Robin

  At the age of sixty-four, Louise Peete was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. All appeals failed and she was sent to San Quentin to await her fate. Thirteen years after her first appearance at the prison, the warden greeted her by asking, “Mrs Peete, I’m sorry to see you here again. Is there anything I can do for you?” She died in the gas chamber on 11 April 1947.

  Axe Woman

  A young married couple faked an accident to collect on the insurance. Later, Martha Marek resorted to poisoning as a way of making a living.

  She had been an orphan in Vienna at the beginning of the 1900s but her poor circumstances improved considerably when she met an elderly man who looked after her. When he died, Martha inherited his estate, which amounted to a small fortune. She married a young engineer, Emil Marek, in 1924 and they lived in style until Martha’s money ran out.

  In order to boost their flagging funds, they devised an insurance fraud. Emil took out a large accident insurance policy and soon afterwards tragedy struck when he lost a leg while chopping wood. Their pre-planned scheme was that Emil should sever his leg with the axe and claim that it was an accident. He had difficulty executing this part of the plan and had to call on his wife to finish the job.

  The couple claimed on the insurance but encountered difficulties because the doctor who examined the injured Emil said his leg showed three separate cuts in what he believed was a contrived accident. The Mareks were charged first with fraud and then bribery when it was shown that Martha had offered money to a hospital nurse to say that the doctor was responsible for the cuts on Emil’s leg.

  The couple appeared in court to answer the charges and, while the fraud case was dropped, they were convicted of bribery and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. In due course, they accepted a greatly reduced settlement from the insurance company.

  After trying their hands unsuccessfully at running a business venture, the Mareks were again in reduced circumstances. Things got even worse when Emil died of tuberculosis in 1932, followed by the death of one of their children. For Martha, it was now a matter of survival and she went to look after an elderly aunt, Susanne Lowenstein, whose demise quickly followed. Martha inherited money from her relative but, as before, her spending soon outstripped her assets. Her next move was to take in lodgers, one of whom died mysteriously. Meanwhile, Martha was busy scheming a new fraud involving paintings belonging to the late Frau Lowenstein which she claimed had been stolen.

  Her latest scheme was soon uncovered and after she was arrested, stories began to emerge that she had poisoned her lodger. Exhumation of the body proved that death had been caused by thallium poisoning. Further exhumations followed and it was shown that Susanne Lowenstein, Martha’s husband and her two children had all been poisoned.

  Martha Marek had bought thallium, an unusual poison only discovered in 1861, from a pharmacy in Vienna. She was tried for murder in 1938 at a time when Germany ruled Austria and the death penalty had been reintroduced. Despite her special pleadings of innocence, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. She was executed on 6 December 1938 when, ironically, she was beheaded with an axe.

  Case Of The Torn Glove

  Frederick and Alice Wiltshaw lived in a fourteen-room mansion at Barlaston, Staffordshire in the UK. Mr Wiltshire was a wealthy businessman and headed a pottery firm. When he returned home from work in the early evening of 16 July 1952, he found his wife lying dead in a pool of blood in the kitchen. She had been severely beaten with an ornamental poker, which lay next to the body, and also stabbed.

  Several items of value had been stolen, including a gold cigarette case and the rings from Alice Wiltshaw’s fingers. There was no sign of a forced entry and the murder could be timed fairly accurately between 5.20 p.m. when the staff left for the day and 6.30 p.m. when Mr Wiltshaw found his wife’s body. Detectives surmised that the intruder was someone who knew the household routines.

  A search of the garden produced a pair of gloves with blood on them and also a small tear on the thumb. The garden gave access to a footpath leading to the railway station at Barlaston. Curiously, Mr Wiltshaw noticed that an old raincoat he used when gardening was missing.

  Working on the theory that the murderer was someone known to the Wiltshaws, detectives learnt that their chauffeur-handyman had been dismissed earlier in the year for using one of the cars for his own purposes without permission. Twenty-nine-year-old Leslie Green had left after six months’ employment.

  Crime scene investigators believed that the murderer, whose clothes were heavily bloodstained, had taken the old raincoat to cover them up, left the house by way of the garden, dropping his gloves as he went, and headed for the railway station. It was known that Green had a girlfriend who lived in Leeds, a city that was served by trains running through Stafford. Enquiries revealed that he had stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Leeds using Mr Wiltshaw’s name and describing himself as a traveller for a pottery firm.

  With the help of the transport police, detectives found Mr Wiltshaw’s raincoat, which had turned up in the lost property office at Holyhead. The bloodstains on it were confirmed as the murder victim’s. As the net closed around Green, it was discovered that he had proposed marriage to his girlfriend, giving her rings stolen from Mrs Wiltshaw. The rings were later recovered from the place where he had hidden them when he realized the police were looking for him. In another flamboyant gesture, he had shown the stolen gold cigarette case to a colleague of his girlfriend.

  With reports in the press naming Green as the man police wished to interview, he decided to respond and presented himself for questioning by detectives. It was noted that a scar on his thumb marked exactly the tear in one of the gloves discarded by the murderer. His line was that he did not commit the murder and he claimed that the rings were given to him by two men he met in Leeds.

  Green was charged with murder and the magistrates committed him for trial. He professed his innocence throughout, but the trail of evidence he had left behind, although circumstantial, was enough to convict him. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, on 23 December 1935.

  “The Neighbour From Hell . . .”

  On Good Friday, 6 April 2007, twenty-two-year-old Krystal Hart, a mother-to-be, was shot dead on her doorstep in Battersea, south London.

  This was to be the final act in a long-running dispute with her neighbour, who lived in the flat above. Angela Brewer had made complaints about her neighbour and relations were such that both women had installed CCTV cameras to spy on each other. Court proceedings had been initiated to resolve their differences.

  The men friends of the two women had stayed above the dispute but a crisis developed over an incident involving Brewer’s companion, David Hughes, whose car was parked outside the terrace house. He took exception to Hart’s friend making a note of the registration number. There was an argument and Hughes went off to his home nearby where he armed himself before returning. What happened next was captured on CCTV. First, Hughes tried to confront Hart’s boyfriend and then he shouted “come out, you bitch”. When Krystal Hart appeared at the door, Hughes shot her twice in the head. She died instantly. The whole incident from the first act of provocation to the fatal shooting had taken less than an hour.

  Hughes, aged forty, was tried for murder at the Old Bailey in February 2008. He was a petty criminal who made a living selling drugs and stolen goods. He was besotted with fifty-three-year-old Angela Brewer and had been heard telling her that he would do anything for her. The prosecution said that Brewer was an emotional bully and her behaviour had earned her the local title of “the neighbour from hell”. Hughes assimilated Brewer’s animosity and the judge said she had made life unbearable for her neighbour by making false accusations.

  He told Hughes that he had tried to curry favour with Brewer and it was a mark of her warped personality that he took her rantings seriously. Brewer was cleared of any criminal involvement but moral issues remained. The judge sentenced Da
vid Hughes to life imprisonment for what to all intents and purposes was “a ruthless execution and a truly evil act”.

  “I Only Want Some Matches”

  At the age of twenty-six, Huibrecht Jacob de Leeuw was a popular appointee to the job of town clerk in Dewetsdorp, South Africa. He was married, ambitious and soon began to live beyond his means. When he lapsed into debt, he decided to dip into the town’s exchequer of which, as town clerk, he was the custodian.

  He kept the account book in arrears so that the true state of the town’s finances was hidden. When rumours began to circulate that de Leeuw had personal financial problems, the mayor decided it would be prudent to cast a critical eye over the accounts. He found them in disarray with many receipts missing and confronted the town clerk, accusing him of incompetence. De Leeuw’s defence was that the books were only in arrears because he was overworked. He promised to set everything straight.

  His position was perilous and he attempted to borrow money to make up the losses. This ploy failed and he was unable to fulfil his promise to rectify the accounting faults. He was given a week to put things in order or face dismissal.

  The thought of losing his job and endangering his marriage led de Leeuw to think that murdering his accusers might be the answer. He made enquiries about explosive devices using petrol and dynamite and carried out a few secret experiments.

  The day fixed for the final reckoning was 8 April 1927 when he would face Mayor von Maltitz and two members of the finance committee at a meeting in the town hall. After scrutinizing the ledgers, von Maltitz accused de Leeuw of misusing the town’s funds. The meeting then broke up to be reconvened after lunch when the town clerk would almost certainly be dismissed from his post.

  Shortly after the finance committee reconvened, there was a terrific explosion which blew the roof off the town hall and shattered every window. The mayor died instantly and his two colleagues, both badly burned, died later in hospital. Unfortunately for de Leeuw, the two fatally injured men made dying declarations implicating him in theft.

  De Leeuw had succeeded in destroying his accusers, along with the damning evidence of the account books but was now a prime murder suspect. He was sent for trial at Bloemfontein in August 1927. A town hall employee testified that he saw two cans of petrol in the town clerk’s office on the day of the explosion. And a local shopkeeper described how de Leeuw had appeared in her shop that afternoon in an agitated state saying, “I only want some matches.”

  The trial judge sitting with two assessors found the former town clerk guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. De Leeuw, who it was later shown could easily have paid off his debts, told the court, “I am prepared to go to meet my Creator.” He was hanged on 30 September 1927.

  On The Run

  Thirty-one-year-old William Hughes, a man with a violent record, was being escorted to Chesterfield magistrates’ court to answer a charge of rape. He was put in a taxi accompanied by two prison warders at Leicester Prison on 12 January 1977. When the taxi was on the motorway, despite being handcuffed, Hughes produced a knife and violently attacked one of his escorts. He managed to grab the key to his handcuffs and release himself. He told the driver to keep driving. When they reached Stone Edge, near Chatsworth Park, he ordered the driver to stop and forced him and the two injured men out of the car. He then drove away but came off the road near Beeley and collided with a wall. At this point, he took to his feet and walked out on to the moors.

  A manhunt ensued involving the police and army, aided by helicopters. They failed to capture their quarry who was now holed up in a remote cottage where he held its owners hostage. The Moran family were intimidated by Hughes’s threats of violence and an extraordinary interlude developed during which he allowed individual members to leave the cottage to shop for newspapers and cigarettes. They did not use these periods of freedom to raise the alarm because they were too fearful of what he might do.

  On 14 January 1977, he let Gill Moran out of the cottage to fetch a car intended for his getaway. She chose this moment to raise the alarm via a neighbour and returned with the car. Hughes realized what she had done and forced her into the car at knifepoint. He then drove away, having left behind a trail of death. Gill Moran was unaware that the man beside her in the car had stabbed to death her mother and father, her husband and her ten-year-old daughter.

  The police set up roadblocks and Hughes was spotted heading towards Peak Forest. After a chase he lost control of the car. Surrounded by police, he stepped out of the vehicle holding Gill Moran as hostage. He demanded they give him a car and he set off again in a police vehicle. A further chase ensued in the direction of Macclesfield. A bus was commandeered and used as a roadblock.

  When Hughes came into view, he swerved past the bus and crashed the car. He was heard shouting, “I’m going to stab her. I’m going to kill her.” Over the next forty-five minutes, officers sought to calm Hughes and tried to persuade him to leave Gill Moran in the car and they would provide him with another vehicle. He demanded a Land Rover for his getaway and such a vehicle was duly brought to the scene.

  As Hughes stepped out of the crashed car, police marksmen killed him with four shots. He was dragged away bleeding from the head and Gill Moran, who had suffered knife wounds, was released from her ordeal. Later, she would learn about the tragic deaths of her family.

  An inquiry into the murders raised many questions. The first was why the police had given up their search on the moors when Hughes was less than a mile away in the Morans’ cottage. The second was the practice of transferring a dangerous prisoner using a taxi. The Home Secretary promised that security would be tightened up. Other questions hinged on how Hughes had managed to obtain a knife and apparently had not been searched.

  The Fate Of “Daddy Samples”

  Walter Lewis Samples, a retired engineer who lived alone in Memphis, Tennessee, had been ill for a couple of days and, when his condition worsened on 21 February 1941, he asked his doctor to call round urgently. He was clearly in great pain and before he was rushed off to hospital, he mentioned that the last meal he had eaten was breakfast when he had cooked bacon and eggs and drank two glasses of milk. The milk was delivered to his doorstep as usual but he noticed that the supplier was not his regular dairy.

  Soon after admission to hospital, Samples died, and an autopsy determined that he had been poisoned with phosphorus. Analysis of the milk in the opened bottle taken from his refrigerator was also positive for the poison. The dairy that supplied the milk had impeccable bottling procedures, which ruled out accidental contamination. This left suicide or murder as the options open for investigation.

  Suicide was thought unlikely leading to the conclusion that someone wanted him out of the way and had planted the poisoned milk with the intention of killing him. A search of Samples’ bungalow provided a few surprises indicating that the military veteran had been leading a double life. A horde of photographs was found of images depicting partially clothed women and his address book was filled with telephone numbers of ladies, many of whom were married. Some of the photographs were signed by the ladies in question and dedicated to “Daddy Samples”. It seemed that the veteran had a robust sex life.

  Knowledge of this background provided the possibility that a disenchanted lover might have wanted to eliminate “Daddy Samples”. Detectives interviewed some of the ladies and formed the impression that his personal magnetism was such that they would do anything for him.

  Another line of enquiry bore fruit. Samples had been active in the property market and investigators checked court records to see if he had been involved in any litigious disputes. It seemed that he had some unresolved business with a man named Le Roy House. Enquiries showed that Mrs House had been involved romantically with Samples and a woman answering her description had been seen by neighbours at his property.

  The plot thickened when a search of Le Roy House’s property turned up several milk bottles belonging to the same Memphis dairy that supplied Samples. M
rs House, apparently unbeknown to her husband, was in possession of a will whereby Samples made her his sole beneficiary. The signature on the document was a forgery, however, and the Houses were charged with murder.

  At this point, Le Roy House confessed that he had left the bottle of poisoned milk on Samples’ doorstep and absolved his wife from any blame. Nevertheless, they were both tried and convicted of murder, each being sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. By this time, Le Roy had withdrawn his confession and, following an appeal, a new trial was granted in 1943. Mrs House caused a sensation by declaring, “My husband is innocent, I did it alone and he’s trying to protect me.” Her conviction and sentence were upheld while the charges against Le Roy were dismissed.

  Poisoned Stout

  When a poison concoction disguised in a bottle of stout was left unattended and sampled by three people, two of whom died as a result, the case illustrated the legal point that someone who attempts to murder person A, and by mischance kills B, is still guilty of murder.

  Richard Brinkley was a jobbing gardener who hit on a get-rich-quick scheme involving murder and fraud. He befriended a seventy-seven-year-old widow, Johanna Maria Louisa Blume, who lived with her granddaughter, Caroline, in a house she owned in Fulham, London.

  In December 1906, Brinkley put his cunning plan into action by making out a will whereby Mrs Blume left all her assets and property to him. On the pretext that he was collecting signatures for an outing to the seaside, he presented the widow with the paper on which was written the will and carefully folded to obscure the nature of the contents. He then persuaded her to put her signature at the bottom of the paper.

  Using the same ploy, Brinkley next procured the signatures of two witnesses. Two days later Mrs Blume died and the examining doctor attributed her death to apoplexy. A verdict of death from natural causes was recorded by the coroner.