Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Back then, Tobin dressed like Bible John, in a conservative suit. Under normal circumstances both of these killers were polite, even chivalrous. Both Tobin and Bible John sexually assaulted and strangled their victims, using their clothing as gags or ligatures. Gang violence was prevalent in Glasgow at the time of the Bible John killings. He would have been searched on his way into a dance hall, so he would not have been able to carry a knife.

  Professor David Wilson, an expert on serial killers, points out that Bible John was not the type of murderer who would quit while he was still at large, and Tobin was uncharacteristically old to have started killing at the age of 44, if Vicky Hamilton was his first victim.

  Among the collection of women’s jewellery found in Tobin’s former home was a cap badge from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, the regiment Helen Puttock’s husband belonged to.

  There are other murders that Tobin is thought to have been responsible for. He was a regular visitor to the Norfolk coast and, as part of Operation Anagram, the Norfolk Constabulary began to re-examine the case of April Fabb who had disappeared on 8 April 1969. The 13-year-old was cycling the mile-and-a-half from Metton, near Cromer, to Roughton to deliver a packet of cigarettes to her brother-in-law. Her blue-and-white bicycle was found by the side of the road, but she was nowhere to be seen. It is thought that Tobin was in the area at the time. In 2010, a well nearby was excavated but it did not produce any fresh leads.

  Eighteen-year-old Jackie Ansell Lamb was hitchhiking from London to Manchester on 8 March 1970 when she went missing. A woman answering her description was seen getting into a car at Keele Services between 4.00pm and 5.00pm. A farmer found her body in a wood near Knutsford, Cheshire, six days later. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Tobin used the M1 on his numerous trips between Scotland and southern England.

  On 10 March 1970, 18-year-old insurance clerk Susan Long disappeared after leaving the Gala Ballroom in Norwich and heading home to Aylsham nine miles away. On the way, she was raped and strangled. Her body was found the next morning in a lovers’ lane dumped in the street near her home, like the victims of Bible John.

  In October 1970, 24-year-old teacher Barbara Mayo went missing after leaving her home in London to go hitchhiking. Her half-naked body was found six days later by walkers in a wood at Hardwick Hall, a National Trust stately home near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, less than a mile from the M1. She had been raped, punched around the head and strangled with a length of flex.

  During Operation Anagram, the Norwich police also reinvestigated the case of a headless woman’s body found at the side of the road in Cockley Cley, near Swaffham, in 1974. She was wearing a frilly, pink Marks and Spencer’s nightdress and was bound in a way similar to Dinah McNicol. The body was wrapped in brown plastic sheeting bearing the initials ‘NCR’. The Scottish company National Cash Register only made six sheets of this between 1962 and 1968; Tobin had been in Glasgow at the time. He had also used plastic sheeting to wrap the bodies of Vicky Hamilton and Angelika Kluk. The police even disinterred the headless woman’s body but no further connection to Tobin could be established.

  A few days after the discovery of the headless corpse, 21-year-old Pamela Exall went missing from the Dinglea Campsite in Snettisham, 20 miles from Cockley Cley.

  Thirteen-year-old Genette Tate, fourteen-year-old Susanne Lawrence and twenty-two-year-old Jessie Earl were all killed in a two-year period from 1978–80 after Tobin’s second marriage broke up. Genette had been abducted from her paper round. As in the case of April Fabb, her bicycle was found but no trace of her body has ever come to light. Her father said she bore a striking resemblance to Dinah McNicol.

  Less than a year later, in July 1979, Suzanne Lawrence left her sister’s home in Harold Hill to make her way home to nearby Romford. She never arrived. On his journeys between the south coast and Norfolk, Tobin would have travelled through Harold Hill.

  Art student Jessie Earl went missing from her bedsit in Eastbourne in 1980. Her body was found on Beachy Head nine years later. Her wrists had been tied with her bra, as Vicky Hamilton’s had been. During Operation Anagram, the police visited her parents’ home to see if they could collect some DNA evidence that might link her to Tobin, who was living just 25 miles away in Brighton when she went missing. He moved back to Glasgow soon afterwards. After his known killings, he regularly put some distance between him and the scenes of the crimes.

  Fourteen-year-old Patsy Morris disappeared in London in 1980. Her body was discovered hidden in undergrowth on Hounslow Heath in mid-summer. Her father, George Morris, believes that she might have been one of Tobin’s victims. ‘As soon as I read about the other girl’s body being found in his backyard, something inside me clicked,’ he said.

  In 1981, the body of 16-year-old Pamela Hastie was found in Rannoch Woods in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, the town where Tobin had been born. She had been raped and strangled. A local man served 21 years for her murder, but the case against him was quashed in 2007 and the police began investigating Tobin for the offence. Ten years earlier, the naked body of 37-year-old mother-of-two, Dorothea Meechan, had been found in Renfrew. Her clothes and handbag were missing and beside the body was a note that said, ‘Mr Polis, I have killed that woman in cold blood. Bible John.’ Richard ‘The Snake’ Coubrough spent 34 years in jail for strangling her. He was freed in 2005, but the case was still in front of the Court of Criminal Appeal when he died. The police also investigated Tobin for the murder.

  The bodies of nine-year-old Nicola Fellows and her playmate, ten-year-old Karen Hadaway, were found in Wild Park on the outskirts of Brighton in October 1986. Both had been raped and strangled. Twenty-year-old Russell Bishop was charged, and a jury eventually took just two hours to find him not guilty. Tobin was living in Brighton at the time.

  In 1988, 18-year-old Louise Kay had been out clubbing in Eastbourne on the night she disappeared. She drove a girlfriend home in her dad’s Ford Fiesta, dropping her off at 4.30am. She said she intended to drive back to her parents’ house, which was just outside the town. However, neither Louise nor the car have been seen since. Tobin was working in a hotel in Eastbourne at the time of her disappearance.

  The half-naked body of 16-year-old prostitute Natalie Pearman was found at Ringland Hills, near Norwich, in November 1992. She was found strangled after disappearing from the red-light district of Norwich. The case was briefly linked to Steve Wright, who was convicted of the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006. Her killer has never been found. Again, Tobin frequented the area.

  On 23 December 1992, 14-year-old Johanna Young left home to go to the local fish-and-chip shop in Watton. Her semi-naked body was found on Boxing Day in a waterlogged pit near Wayland Wood, just eight miles from where the headless woman had been found in 1974. She had a fractured skull, but had still been alive when her assailant dumped her and she drowned.

  When Sussex Police heard of Tobin’s frenzied knife attack on Angelika Kluk in 2006, they began investigating any connection he might have had to the death of 35-year-old mother-of-three Jennifer Kiely, who had been stabbed 16 times. Her body was found in a beach shelter in Eastbourne where the killer had tried to burn it.

  While the police have not been able to establish that Tobin was responsible for any of these murders – and he is not saying – Profession Wilson and Joe Jackson remain convinced that he was Bible John.

  8

  A HEAD IN THE FLOWER BED

  Ed Kemper is one of a number of American murderers who have earned the sobriquet ‘The Co-Ed Killer’. After killing his grandparents when he was just 15, he went on to kill and dismember six female hitch-hikers in the Santa Cruz area of California. His usual method of disposal was to dump their remains in remote rural areas, but he buried the head of 19-year-old Cindy Schall in his mother’s back garden, joking that his mother ‘always wanted people to look up to her’. Later, he killed his mother, too, along with one of her friends, then turned himself in to the authorities.


  Edmund Emil Kemper III was born in Burbank, California, on 18 December 1948. He was the second child of Edmund Emil Kemper Jr and his wife Clarnell. He had two sisters – Susan was six years older than him and Allyn two years younger. Both his parents were big. His father was 6ft 8in tall and his mother was over 6ft. Ed grew up to be a giant – 6ft 9in tall, and weighing over 20 stone.

  Dad worked as an electrician, but he had been a hero in the Second World War, serving in a special forces unit in Europe. He loved to collect guns and other weapons, and Ed hero-worshipped him.

  Ed’s parents did not get on. After a series of heated arguments and trial separations, they split for good in 1957. Clarnell and the children went to live in Montana, where she worked in a bank. But Ed missed his dad and became emotional and clingy. Fearing he might become a homosexual, his mother tried toughening him up by putting him to bed in the basement with a heavy table over the trapdoor, the only way out. This continued for eight months, until his father came by for a visit and put a stop to it, but things barely improved. He complained that his mother was ‘an alcoholic and constantly bitched and screamed at me’.

  When he was just nine, he buried the family’s cat alive in the back garden. The reason was, he later said, because it had transferred its affections to his two sisters and he had killed it ‘to make it mine’. It was the beginning of a grisly career. Later, he dug it up, cut off its head and stuck it on the end of a stick. He kept this gruesome relic in his bedroom and prayed to it. A year later, on a visit to New York, he tried to jump off the top of the Empire State Building, but was restrained by an aunt.

  Already he was having fantasies about murdering people – sometimes all together, otherwise one at a time. His fantasy victims were mostly women and he dreamt of carrying their bodies off as trophies that he could love and cherish.

  His little sister Allyn was upset at his habit of cutting up her dolls. In school, he was an outcast. He would annoy the other kids by sitting and staring at them. Although he was a big child, he was branded a weakling and a coward, and excluded from their games.

  He was alienated further in 1961 when his father remarried, acquiring a stepson who was two years older; his mother also remarried the following year. Soon after, Ed was accused of shooting a classmate’s dog, further enhancing his status as a pariah. Then he killed the family’s new cat with a machete because he thought it was ignoring him.

  Plainly, Ed was disturbed and his mother sent him back to southern California to live with his father. But his stepmother found his brooding silences and icy stare unsettling so, at Christmas, his father took Ed to live with his own parents on their isolated farm at North Fork, high in California’s Sierra Mountains. It was not a good move.

  His grandparents were well meaning. Grandpaps Edmund gave Ed a rifle to shoot rabbits and gophers on the ranch, but he was dull company and perhaps a little senile. Grandma Maud wrote and illustrated children’s books, but she reminded him of his mother, always bossing him about. She did not seem to trust him and always reminded him that he should be grateful that they were looking after him.

  ‘My grandmother thought she had more balls than any man and was constantly emasculating me and my grandfather to prove it,’ said Kemper. ‘I couldn’t please her. It was like being in jail. I became a walking time bomb and I finally blew. It was like that the second time, with my mother.’

  Kemper remembered one incident when his grandmother went on a shopping trip to Fresno, leaving him at home alone. She had her husband’s .45 automatic with her in her purse because she was afraid Ed might play around with it in her absence.

  ‘I saw her big black pocketbook bulging as she went out the door and I said to myself, “Why, that old bitch, she’s taking the gun with her, because she doesn’t trust me, even though I promised I wouldn’t touch it,”’ he later recalled.

  He said he looked in his grandfather’s bureau drawer and, he said, ‘Sure enough, the gun was gone from its usual place. I toyed with the idea of calling the chief of police in Fresno and telling him, “There’s a little old lady walking around town with a .45 in her purse and she’s planning a hold-up …” and then give him my grandmother’s description. How do you suppose she would have talked herself out of that?’

  When Ed was 15, he went to visit his mother in Montana, returning to his grandparent’s ranch early in August. Soon afterwards, he was sitting in the kitchen with his grandmother, who was checking the proofs of her latest book. His icy stare made her tetchy, so he took his gun to go out and shoot something. She called after him, telling him not to shoot any birds. Ed turned and shot her twice in the back of the head.

  He was dragging her body into the bedroom when he heard his grandfather’s car pulling up outside. The old man had been into town to buy groceries. Ed watched as he got out of the car. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, took aim and killed him with a single shot. He put the old man’s body in the garage and hosed down the yard.

  It was only then that he realised he was in trouble, so he phoned his mother and asked her what to do. She told him to phone the local sheriff. He did what he was told, telling the officer he had killed the old lady because ‘I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma’. He had then shot his grandfather so that he would never have to know that his wife was dead. Besides, he might have been angry with him.

  Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Kemper did not have to stand trial and, on 6 December 1964, just a few days shy of his 16th birthday, he was sent to the Atascadero State Hospital, a secure facility for the criminally insane. Strictly speaking, he should not have been there; the hospital was for adults. But there was nowhere else to put him. Nevertheless, he got on well there. By nature, he was quiet and peaceable. He was also highly intelligent and became a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce there. Later, at his trial, he wore his pin with pride. And, by the age of 19, he had worked his way up to being head of the psychological testing lab.

  Working directly under the hospital’s chief psychologist, he picked up the language and theory of psychology, even – ironically – helping develop the ‘Overt Hostility Scale’. But that was not all he learned. Atascadero specialised in treating sex offenders and Kemper went to group therapy sessions with rapists. They had all been caught because their victims had informed on them. It was better, he figured, not to leave the victims alive.

  Ed had never thought there was anything wrong with him. But having learned the ins and outs of the system, he realised that it was best that he convinced the doctors he had been ill, but was better now. It worked. After four years, the psychologists at the hospital thought that he was well on the way to be cured, provided he stayed away from his mother who, they believed, had a borderline personality disorder.

  Kemper was 20 when he was released into a halfway house. Although he had been out of circulation for less than five years, the world around him had changed radically. He was still steeped in the Second World War values of his father and the conservative ethos of law and order. Now people his age were taking on the police in civil rights and anti-war demonstrations.

  ‘When I got out on the street, it was like being on a strange planet,’ he said. ‘People my age were not talking the same language. I had been living with people older than I was for so long that I was an old fogey.’ Particular contempt was reserved for hippies. They were seen as low class and immoral, particularly the long-haired young girls he saw hitching rides with strangers.

  He complained that he did not get help from any parole officer to support his reintegration into society. Instead, after three months in the halfway house and against the advice of the psychologists, he was released into the custody of his mother. She was now working as an administrative assistant at the University of California at Santa Cruz and he went to live with her in the nearby town of Aptos. They did not get on any better than they had before. She was, he said, a ‘big, ugly, awkward woman who was 6ft tall and she was always trying to get me to go out with girls who w
ere just like her … friends of hers from the campus.’ He preferred petite girls.

  Kemper thought that she was a vindictive, argumentative harridan. This was not how her colleagues saw her. At the university she was well liked, but Kemper complained she had a divided personality. ‘She was Mrs Wonderful up on the campus, had everything under control,’ he said. ‘When she comes home, she lets everything down and she’s just a pure bitch; busts her butt being super nice at work and comes home at night and is a shit.’

  He resented the way she had thrown out his father, whom he idolised. Since then, she had remarried and divorced twice more.

  His relationship with his father was little better. ‘He didn’t want me around, because I upset his second wife,’ said Kemper. ‘Before I went to Atascadero, my presence gave her migraine headaches; when I came out, she was going to have a heart attack if I came around.’

  At least his mother was prepared to take him in, despite everything. ‘She loved me in her way and, despite all the violent screaming and yelling arguments we had, I loved her, too,’ he said. ‘But she had to manage your life … and interfere in your personal affairs.’

  She wanted her son to go to college and get a degree. He preferred to hang out at local bars, particularly one called the Jury Room which was frequented by off-duty cops. He applied to join the force, but was rejected because of his size. He was just too big.

  Instead, he got a job manning a stop-go sign for a state road-works gang. With his wages, he bought a motorbike, but soon crashed it, injuring his head. With the insurance payout, he bought a 1969 two-door sedan, a Ford Galaxie.

  Now he was earning money, he moved out from his mother’s house and shared a rented flat with a friend in Alameda, near San Francisco. In his spare time, he cruised the California highways, picking up female hitch-hikers and learning to make himself pleasant and agreeable.