Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  By the age of fourteen, encouraged by her mother, Karla had become a prostitute and life became a whirlwind of drugs, men and concert tours as she followed her groupie mother from tour to tour.

  When Karla was sixteen she met and married a mechanic by the name of Stephen Griffith. Although externally the marriage seemed to work well, underneath Karla wasn’t happy and felt restricted by the confines of marriage. She decided to leave her husband and resorted to her old trade as a prostitute, which she felt offered the freedom she was so used to.

  Shortly after leaving Griffith, Karla, now twenty-three, was introduced to thirty-seven-year-old Danny Garrett. Danny became a close friend; not only did he allow her to continue her chosen ‘career’ but he also supported her drug addiction. They lived together in a small brick house in Houston, Texas, and in June 1983 they decided to throw a party for Karla’s older sister, Kari Ann.

  The party became infused with drugs, drink, music and sex, and soon reached fever pitch. Karla at one point sat talking to her friend Shawn, who was going through a bad time with her biker husband, Jerry Lynn Dean. Shawn was angry; she had arrived at the party with a broken nose and split lip, following a violent argument with her husband. As the party progressed and the drugs and alcohol took hold, Karla’s anger rose and she told her friend that she should get her revenge.

  Danny had to leave the party half way through the evening because he had a job working in a local bar. Karla drove him to work and promised to pick him up again at around 2.00 a.m. When Karla arrived back at the party she found Shawn in an even worse state, crying openly about her husband, whom she claimed she still loved desperately despite the constant beatings. Karla, who had never liked Jerry Lynn, had quite openly had several arguments with him in the past, leading to him banning his wife from ever seeing Karla again. Shawn had ignored him which had made the whole situation even more volatile.

  revenge

  Karla left the party just before 2.00 a.m. with a man named Jimmy Leibrant, who said he would accompany her to pick up Danny. When Danny got into the car, Karla was still angry and told him about the state that Shawn had got herself into over Jerry Lynn. Danny said he had an idea and he suggested that they steal his motorbike, which was the ultimate insult to a biker. The other two agreed that it would be sweet revenge and decided to go and find Jerry Lynn.

  First they called back at the party to see if Shawn could tell them where her husband was likely to be. She told them that he would most probably be sound asleep at that time of night having smoked a few joints. When they told her about their plan to steal his bike, she thought it was a good idea and wished them luck. Before they left the house Danny grabbed a shotgun, which he kept concealed underneath the sofa, and gave Jimmy a .38 which he had in the glove compartment of his car. He told Jimmy and Karla that it was a good idea to carry weapons because they were about to go into a neighbourhood that was renowned for trouble.

  When the trio arrived at Jerry Lynn’s house they found it in darkness. Danny told Jimmy to wait outside while he and Karla cased the joint to see how easy it would be to steal the bike. Danny managed to open the front door without too much trouble and they walked into the hall trying to adjust to the dark. They could smell petrol and realised that they had found the bike, as Danny put his hand on the cold stainless steel of the handlebars. They stood quietly to see if they had disturbed Jerry Lynn when they had forced the door, but when they heard nothing, Danny took a torch out of his pocket and shone it onto the gleaming Harley Davidson.

  Karla was disappointed to see that Jerry Lynn had taken the bike to pieces and so it would be impossible to simply wheel it out and ride it away. Just as they were considering what to do next, a shaft of light came from a door to the side of them and a voice bellowed, ‘Who the hell is out there?’

  Karla froze and clenched her hands into tight fists. Danny, on the other hand, had already reacted to the situation by grabbing a hammer out of the toolbox in the hall. Holding the hammer aloft he ran into the bedroom and Karla could see by the shadow against the wall that Danny was striking Jerry Lynn, who had managed to get half out of bed. Karla stood in the doorway and felt a thrill go through her loins at the sight of so much blood, as Danny hit his victim time and time again over the head.

  Karla was sorry that she couldn’t take part in the action, she would have liked to have taken out her own revenge on Jerry Lynn. Just as she had accepted the fact that she would only be a spectator, she spotted a female figure cowering under the covers. Karla felt the anger rise, knowing that not only had he beaten Shawn up but he was cheating on her as well. She ran back into the hall and grabbed the first thing that she saw – a pickaxe.

  This time it was Danny who stood and watched as his girlfriend swung the axe over the body of the quivering girl. ‘Let her have it!’ Danny yelled and Karla brought the axe down over her body, suppressing the scream that was about to come out of her mouth.

  Soon the killing became a game, as Danny threw a blanket over Karla and told her to try and strike while she was blindfolded. She got more and more excited as she could hear the squish of the blood as the axe hit the body of the girl, who was later named as Deborah Thornton.

  proud of their actions

  Back at the party Danny and Karla quite openly bragged about what they had done and by the morning it had become a sort of blur. They hadn’t bothered to try and cover their tracks; they were so blinded by drugs and drink they simply felt they had killed two worthless individuals.

  When the landlord discovered the two mutilated bodies he immediately called the police. It didn’t take the brain of a genius to work out who had carried out the act – word had spread fast. Added to the fact that their fingerprints were all over the handle of the axe which was embedded in Thornton’s chest. When they interviewed Jimmy Leibrant, he agreed to turn state’s evidence in return for his freedom.

  It was a cut and dried case and both Danny and Karla were found guilty and given the death penalty. Danny died in prison of liver disease shortly after hearing his conviction, cheating the system out of getting its justice. Karla, on the other hand, had to endure a waiting game as she appealed time and time again against the death penalty.

  After fourteen years in prison and becoming a born-again Christian, Karla Faye Tucker lost her last appeal. On February 3, 1998, she was taken from death row at a prison in Gatesville, Texas, and flown to Huntsville which was eighty miles north of Houston. Karla was given a lethal injection at 6.01 p.m. after a final meal of banana, peach and salad.

  Sue Basso

  The crime committed by Suzanne Basso was made even more horrendous by the fact that her victim was a good-natured, retarded man by the name of Buddy Musso. She lured this happy, but simple man into her web and treated him in such a way that by the time his body was found he was barely identifiable as a human being.

  in search of love

  Buddy was a gentle-hearted man who craved love and companionship but somehow it had eluded him for more than two decades – that is until he met Sue Basso. The couple met in early 1997 at a church bazaar near his home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Sue was just visiting the town from her home in Houston and Buddy found her easy to talk to. Buddy was smitten and asked if he could keep in touch when Sue returned home. He waited excitedly for the phone to ring and told his friends and family about his ‘new love’.

  Although Buddy’s friends were pleased for him, they were also worried due to his diminished mental capacity. They wondered why a woman would want a relationship with a man who had the intellectual level of an eight-year-old boy. Buddy worked at a local grocery store as a bagger and lived in a warden-assisted home in Cliffside Park. The other residents in the home were very protective of their friend, due to the fact that he had a very affectionate nature and became very attached to people in his desperate search for love.

  Buddy loved to dress as a cowboy and could often be heard singing western songs in his slightly off-key way. He had the ability to make people
laugh and nearly always wore a bright smile on his face. Buddy had married when he was a young man but his wife had died tragically of cancer in 1980, just two years after giving birth to their son, Tony. This experience had left Buddy even more insecure and his friends doubted Sue Basso’s motives when she asked him to move to Houston to be with her. Sue was exceptionally overweight and at forty-four years old, was fifteen years Buddy’s senior.

  Paying no heed to his friends’ warnings, Buddy started to pack his things and prepared to move to Sue’s home in Jacinto City, Texas. He bought an inexpensive engagement ring using his social security cheque, said goodbye to all of his friends and boarded a Greyhound bus on June 14, 1998.

  love at a price

  When Buddy arrived in Houston, his buxom woman greeted him warmly and led him off to her house – a place that would offer no love, only pain.

  Ten weeks after Buddy left New Jersey, a jogger noticed a body lying in a ditch close to Jacinto City. He called the police who were appalled at the state of the body – it had numerous cigarette burns, contusions and a fractured skull. In fact they had to look closely to make sure that it was in fact a human being. The corpse bore no sign of identification, and it appeared as though it had been cleaned up and dressed in fresh clothing before being dumped in the ditch.

  A few hours after the discovery of the body, the police were compiling a list of details to start their investigation, when an obese woman waddled into the station. She gave her name as Sue Basso and said she would like to report that a simple-minded man by the name of Buddy Musso had gone missing from her house. The body found in the ditch was quickly identified as being that of Buddy and a seven-page autopsy report revealed that he had in fact died the most horrendous death. Due to the amount of injuries found on his body, it was apparent that he had been tortured for days, possibly even weeks, before he finally died from a blow to the head.

  THE MISFITS

  Sue Basso lived a strange existence with a house full of people who could only be described as misfits. One of her housemates was her own son, James O’Malley, who had a fixation with anything to do with the army and wore full military regalia both day and night. James accompanied his mother to identify the body as their missing friend and it was his lack of reaction that gave the police reason to be suspicious. When Sue looked into the ditch she broke down into a false hysteria, while James just stood there expressionless as if he knew exactly what he was about to see.

  Aware that Sue was the dominant force, the police took James to one side and asked whether he knew what had happened to Buddy. Without even stopping to think, he replied, ‘Yeah, we killed him’. The ‘we’ he was referring to were Sue Basso, himself, fifty-five-year-old Bernice Ahrens Miller, Miller’s son and daughter, twenty-five-year-old Craig and twenty-two-year-old Hope, and finally, Hope’s fiancé twenty-eight-year-old Terence Singleton.

  Once back at the police station James sung like a bird and gave full details of exactly what had taken place. He explained that the fatal blow to Buddy had happened at Bernice Miller’s flat in Houston. They had forced Buddy to kneel down on a child’s play mat for several days because he had accidentally broken a toy. He was beaten severely which caused him to soil himself, and then he was beaten even more for making a mess. Not only had he been constantly beaten, but they had burned him with cigarettes, scrubbed his body with a wire brush and dumped him in a bath full of bleach and kitchen cleaner. When they had eventually sapped the last bit of life out of his body, they re-dressed him and dumped him in a ditch in Galena Park.

  James eventually led the police to a dustbin where they had dumped Buddy’s bloodstained clothing, towels, a child’s mat and a pair of rubber gloves. Inside the house the police had to hold their hands over their faces as the stench brought bile to their throats. There was dog, cat and ferret faeces everywhere and also a soiled mattress where Buddy had been forced to sleep on the floor. There was junk everywhere, plastic bags full of old clothing, a computer, but more significantly, they found a $15,000 life insurance policy taken out on Buddy Musso. An additional clause to the policy boosted the payout to $60,000 if death was from a violent cause. In a drawer the police discovered a will signed by Buddy and witnessed by Sue and three of her friends, naming Buddy as the sole heir to his property. A copy of the will was dated 1997, but the original document file was found to have been created on the computer just twelve days before Buddy’s death. The computer also contained a restraining order, that barred Musso’s family from getting in touch with him, leaving Sue and her ‘family’ to carry out their regime of torture. The police also found evidence that Buddy had been turning his social security cheque over to Sue each month, so it became quite evident that Buddy Musso had been killed for monetary gain.

  With so much evidence to hand the police were able to arrest all six of the suspects and charge them with the murder of Buddy Musso.

  the trial

  Throughout the trial Sue Basso sat unkempt and morose, demanding that she be led into the court in a wheelchair, faking temporary paralysis. As each of the suspects stood in the witness box, they made it clear that Sue was the primary culprit. Even her own daughter, Christianna Hardy, painted a black figure of her mother. She described a miserable childhood that was marred by sexual and physical abuse, something which Sue herself had been subjected to as a young girl. James was treated even worse and was forced to have a sexual relationship with his mother. He was often locked in the house for days on end, and forced to eat scraps of food off the floor like an animal.

  The prosecutor said of Sue Basso: ‘I’ve seen a bunch of evil in my job as a prosecutor, but she exhibits so many different demonic traits that it’s hard to see her as anything but an evil-minded person.’

  Sue Basso received the death penalty for her part in the murder of Buddy, while her associates were given maximum jail sentences. Hope Ahrens was the only one of the six killers who has a realistic chance of parole, having been sentenced to twenty years.

  Sue Basso now lives on death row with eight other condemned women at the Mountain View Unit Prison in Gatesville. She will not be missed when her execution day finally arrives, as even her daughter is counting the days. When they announced the death penalty, Christianna cried tears of joy and said, ‘She was never a mother. She doesn’t have any mothering instincts. She threw us away and left us out there to fend for ourselves. Now, let her do a little fending for herself.’ The description of a truly fiendish killer.

  Celeste Beard

  Celeste Beard was married to millionaire business tycoon Steven Beard and life should have been idyllic and free from care. Steven Beard had made his money as the co-owner of a local television station, and was a rich, powerful and well-liked member of the community. To friends and family theirs was a fairytale marriage, but the Beards’ world was turned upside down in the early hours of the morning on October 2, 1999.

  Steven woke with excruciating pain in his stomach and put it down to a recent hernia operation. However, when he looked down at the bed sheets they were soaked in blood and as he peered under the covers he was horrified to see a mess of innards where his stomach should have been.

  Steven was alone in his room, as Celeste and her twin daughters from a previous marriage were sleeping in another wing of the large mansion. He managed to reach the phone and dial the emergency services, who struggled to understand exactly what had happened. Steven told the operator that he was in awful pain and that he needed an ambulance. When he tried to describe what was wrong he said, ‘My guts just jumped out of my stomach.’ When asked how it happened, he simply replied, ‘It just happened. I woke up. I just woke up.’

  The operator, who could not make head nor tail of the conversation, decided to send an ambulance and the police, having ascertained where the caller lived. She decided to keep him talking until the ambulance arrived, but when they got there they found the house in complete darkness and all the doors and windows shut tight. The police peered through the windows and even
tually saw Steven lying on a bed. As they hadn’t managed to rouse anyone by ringing the front doorbell, they decided to break in via a patio door.

  When the paramedic studied the wound he surmised, like Steven himself, that the hernia incision had probably burst open. It wasn’t until they lifted him onto a stretcher that the Deputy Sheriff, Russell Thompson, noticed something lying on the bedroom floor. It was the shell casing from a 20-gauge shotgun which had only recently been fired. All of a sudden the emergency had taken on a completely new perspective.

  Steven was flown to Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, Texas by a medical helicopter, while his wife and two daughters, who had been woken by all the fuss, were driven to the hospital by police car. At the hospital the twins’ boyfriends arrived and the five of them sat and waited, with Celeste pleading with the doctors, ‘Please don’t let him die.’

  Back at the house the police were proceeding cautiously, with guns at the ready, searching thoroughly from room to room. The bathroom was in a terrible state and clothing had been pulled out of the drawers and laid scattered on the floor. Although Steven’s wallet was missing, strangely the remainder of the couple’s valuables had been left undisturbed. The police were suspicious as they had seen enough burglaries to realise that this looked as though it had been done deliberately.