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

by Cawthorne Nigel

  He was also concerned about a leaking pipe at the house in Alexandra Road, which threatened to wash away the soil covering the suitcase. They had to return to check it was covered with earth several times. Two cousins who lived in the house were acquitted of concealing the body when their trial collapsed due to lack of evidence.

  Later, 30-year-old Mohammed Ali and 32-year-old Omar Hussain were extradited from Iraq and jailed for life at the Old Bailey for her murder. Rahmat Sulemani had to enter the witness protection programme after testifying.

  17

  NOT A ROCKERY

  Fifty-one-year-old Devon man Donald Platt was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 for the murder of his girlfriend, whose body he cut up and buried in his garden.

  Platt, a mortuary worker, strangled 39-year-old Saraya Broadhurst after they had had a row at their flat in Wright’s Lane in Torquay. He told one next-door neighbour that the hole and pile of earth was to do with a rockery he was building, although this person never saw one.

  He began living with another woman shortly after Ms Broadhurst went missing and moved out of Wright’s Lane completely in 2003. Her remains were found in the garden of the flat in 2005, having remained concealed for around four years.

  When police came to arrest him, Platt said, ‘I have been expecting you.’ He told the police that he and Ms Broadhurst had had a row after she had told him she was leaving him for a lorry driver. He grabbed her around the neck and pushed her down on the sofa. He must have grabbed her harder than he realised and panicked, he said. He told the court he was trying to stop her screaming and shouting but did not intend to kill her, or cause her really serious harm.

  ‘She started going on about leaving with a lorry driver,’ he said. ‘She jumped up off the sofa and I pushed her back on two occasions. Then she jumped up a third time and I just grabbed her. I only had my hands round her throat for a few seconds. She went quiet and slumped back on the sofa. Panic set in and I thought, “Oh my God.” I suspected she was dead. I actually put her to bed. I had suspicions that she was dead but I didn’t want to accept it. She was in bed a day and a half. I just sat on the sofa or sometimes by the bed talking to her and hoping that she would wake up or come to.’

  Platt, who had once prepared bodies for post-mortem examinations while working at Torbay Hospital, sawed up her body in the bathroom and put it in eight bags, which he buried in a makeshift grave in the garden, which was then covered with concrete.

  He told friends she had left to live in London, and collected her disability benefits for two-and-a-half years until the Department for Work and Pensions stopped the payments in October 2003.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure there was no suspicion and to make out that she was still alive. I knew once I stopped collecting the books, questions would be asked,’ he said.

  He admitted obstructing the coroner in the execution of his duty by burying the body, but denied murder. In the statement, he added that he wished he ‘could turn the clock back. I loved her and never intended for this to happen.’

  When sentencing, the judge Mr Justice Jack said, ‘It is a serious aggravating factor of the case that you dismembered her body and concealed it buried in bags. The minimum term I set is one of 121/2 years.’

  18

  HOUSE OF DEATH

  In an attempt to catch top Mexican drug smugglers Vicente Fuentes and Vicente Carrillo Leyva, the US Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security, infiltrated the Juárez cartel with an informant, a former policeman named Guillermo ‘Lalo’ Ramizez Peyro. In all, they paid him nearly $250,000.

  He immediately proved his worth, cracking a cigarette smuggling ring and fingering a US immigration official who was taking bribes. He also continued drug smuggling on the side and was caught at a Border Patrol checkpoint with 100lb of marijuana stuffed into the wheels of his pickup. America’s Drug Enforcement Agency blacklisted him, but US Immigration kept him on the payroll, even putting pressure on the Federal prosecutor to get the drug charges dropped.

  One of the ICE’s principal targets was Heriberto ‘The Engineer’ Santillán Tabares, third in command of the Juárez cartel. In August 2003, Santillán Tabares and a band of crooked Mexican police officers had gone on an eight-month crime spree in lawless Ciudad Juárez, where they began kidnapping, torturing and killing rivals and other enemies of the cartel.

  The majority of the murders took place in a house at 3633 Calle Parsonieros in a residential area of Juárez. This became known as the ‘House of Death’. The bodies were buried there, in the back garden.

  Their first victim was Mexican lawyer Fernando Reyes. Lalo admitted that he held the victim’s legs while he was being brutally strangled, suffocated and beaten with a shovel. He also made a secret recording of the incident.

  ‘It just made me sick,’ said his handler when he heard the tape. ‘I had to go to the restroom and throw up. I took the recording and I told my supervisor that I didn’t wish to be part of the case.’

  Their informant had participated in first-degree murder and they should have closed the operation down. However, the US Department of Justice were eager to proceed and the operation continued.

  Lalo’s bosses told him when they were planning fresh murders, saying they were going to have a ‘barbecue’ and he was to prepare the place. He bought duct tape to truss up the victims and quicklime to dissolve the bodies.

  Lalo was present at several killings and admitted driving two victims to the house where he knew they were going to be killed.

  On 15 January 2004, Lalo lured Santillán Tabares over the border into El Paso, where he was arrested and eventually charged with trafficking and five homicides, including that of Fernando Reyes. It was only then that the American authorities told the Mexicans about the House of Death. The Mexican Federal Agency of Investigations then began to excavate the backyard at 3633 Calle Parsonieros after two bodies were found there.

  Lalo was arrested in the USA and threatened with deportation. However, he was freed in July 2012 when the Justice Department’s immigration board ruled that he might be tortured and killed if he was returned to Mexico.

  19

  OUT WITH THE BINS

  Timothy Crook had a history of psychiatric problems. But what seems to have pushed him over the edge was an argument about the state of the bathroom in his parents’ bungalow in Thames Avenue on the Greenmeadow estate in Swindon. He smashed the place up, then insisted on repairing it, which only succeeded in cranking up the tension in the household.

  Then 44-year-old Crook lost it. He struck his 76-year-old mother at least three times with a hammer, and once as she lay bleeding to death on the floor. Then he strangled his 83-year-old father. He bundled their bodies into his father’s Nissan Micra and drove them to his home in Foxglove Way, Lincoln. There he dragged the bodies under the wheelie bins in his garden, along with a suitcase containing their clothes.

  The car was left at Newark Station where he was captured on CCTV. From there, he took at train to Peterborough. After wandering around town, he travelled to King’s Cross. Transferring to Paddington, he took a train back to Swindon.

  Four days later, his parents were reported missing when they failed to show up at a tea dance they ran. When the police arrived at their home in Swindon, Crook opened the door and said his parents had gone to Lincoln to sell his house, but he was concerned that they had not returned.

  When the Lincolnshire police checked his house, at the request of the Wiltshire Constabulary, they found the bodies of Mr and Mrs Crook. Forensic examination of the bedroom in Swindon showed that some cleaning work had been done, but traces of Mrs Crook’s blood were found splattered all over the room.

  At the time of the killings, Crook was under the care of the specialist mental health services in Wiltshire and Lincoln. Crook was then found unfit to plead due to mental illness and appeared in court via video link from Rampton Hospital, where psychiatrists diagnosed him as suffering from a delusional disor
der. It took the jury 45 minutes to find that he had killed his parents.

  20

  THE CLEVELAND STRANGLER

  On hot days, the stench on the 12200 block of Cleveland’s Imperial Avenue could be unbearable. It was the smell of something decomposing. Some thought the sewers had backed up; others, rudely, attributed the odour to Ray’s Sausage factory, one of the few businesses still flourishing in that rundown area of the city’s East Side. Zack Reed, a local councillor whose mother lived a block away, said that he called the city health department in 2007 after a resident complained of something that ‘smelt like a dead body’. Nothing was done about it.

  On 22 September 2009, Anthony Sowell invited a woman he knew back to the home he rented at 12205 Imperial to share four bottles of cheap malt liquor he had there. Sowell was a registered sex offender; in 1989 the ex-Marine had raped a woman who was three months’ pregnant. She had gone to Sowell’s home on Page Avenue voluntarily, she later told police but, when she tried to leave, he bound her hands and feet with a tie and a belt and gagged her with a rag. The victim told police, ‘He choked me real hard because my body started tingling. I thought I was going to die.’

  Sowell had moved to the crime-ridden district of East Cleveland when he had been released from prison in 2005. He lived there with his stepmother until she was hospitalised in 2007, and he often blamed the smell on her.

  As a registered sex offender, he was required to report regularly to the sheriff’s department. Officers had visited his house earlier on the day he was arrested, but did not have the power to enter. Only a few hours after their visit, Sowell and his woman companion went upstairs to a room that contained only a chair, a blanket and an extension cord. After they had had a few drinks, Sowell became angry. He punched her in the face and began choking her with the cord. As she passed out, he raped her. She managed to get away by promising not to go to the police and that she would return with $50.

  She went to the hospital the following day, then spoke to the police. Soon after, neighbours saw a naked woman fall from a second-storey window. When the casualty was taken to hospital, she was found to be under the influence of drugs and she refused to speak to the police.

  The police returned to Sowell’s home on 29 October 2009 with an arrest warrant for the alleged rape. He was not there, but this time the officers also had a search warrant. They found two bodies on the living room floor; two more bodies were found in a crawl space inside the house, another in a shallow grave in the basement and a sixth in a freshly dug grave in the back garden. A heated tent was erected over the disturbed soil, so that the forensic crews digging up the backyard could work at night. Three more bodies were then found to have been buried there. A human skull was also found inside the house, bringing the body count to 11.

  The police had come in for heavy criticism for not having caught him sooner. His victims were black and poor; most were homeless or lived alone, and had histories of drug and alcohol abuse. Because of these circumstances, their families said, the police disregarded them as missing persons’ cases.

  After he was released from prison for the earlier rape, Sowell had found work in a factory, but was laid off. In 2005, he set up an account with the fetish website Alt.com, saying that he was a ‘master’ looking for a ‘submissive’.

  At the same time, he was having a relationship with Lori Frazier, the niece of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson. She lived with him from 2005–07. During that time, he would lure other women off the street, offering them alcohol or drugs. Some were assaulted, but when they reported this to police, little was done. Others did not escape. Meanwhile, the city regularly flushed the sewers in the area. The sausage factory passed its health inspections and its workers kept the windows closed to keep out the stench.

  In December 2008, Gladys Wade waved down a police car. She was covered with blood. She told officers that Sowell had invited her in for a beer; when she had refused, he dragged her upstairs and choked her until she passed out. When she came round, she found that he had stripped her and was trying to rape her.

  She escaped – and in so doing had fallen down the stairs, breaking a glass window – and fled to a nearby restaurant and begged the customers to call 911. They told her to use the payphone outside.

  Sowell was arrested, but he maintained that he had caught Gladys trying to rob his house. The police told Wade that it was only her word against his and he was released. He would claim at least another five women before he was arrested again in 2009.

  Another victim escaped in April 2009. Forty-three-year-old Tanja Doss agreed to go to Sowell’s house for a beer. She knew he had been in prison, but did not know why. Once he got her home, he tried to strangle her. Pinning her to the floor, he told her to knock three times if she wanted to live. Otherwise, no one would miss her.

  She knocked. He released her and made her strip, but they had both drunk so much that they passed out. In the morning, he let her go. She did not report the incident to the police because of an outstanding drugs charge. Later that month, her best friend Nancy Cobbs disappeared, another of Sowell’s victims. Even then, she did not suspect Sowell until he was arrested.

  Fawcett Bess, who owned Bess Chicken and Pizza across the road from the sausage factory, had talked to a woman who said that Sowell had attacked her. Then in September 2009, he saw Sowell naked in the bushes beside her house. He was beating a naked woman. Bess called 911. The ambulance came to take the woman to hospital. The police turned up hours later, but did not even talk to Sowell who was in the house at the time.

  After the first bodies were discovered, it was another two days before Sowell was arrested. He was less than a mile away.

  Sowell was charged with 11 counts of murder, rape and kidnapping. The Cleveland police reopened the files of other women who had gone missing in the area. In the 1980s, two women’s bodies had been found in abandoned buildings on East First Street. Both had been strangled and one of them was living near Sowell on Page Avenue.

  The police were convinced that there were more bodies out there. A dumpster behind Sowell’s house was giving off a dreadful stench, and Sowell had been seen dragging large garbage bags down the street. They dug up the rest of his garden and that of the house next door.

  Sowell pleaded not guilty but was convicted of all but two charges against him. He was sentenced to death.

  21

  TINY BODIES

  The residents of a house in Villiers-au-Terte, northern France, previously owned by the parents of 45-year-old Dominique Cottrez, were digging a duck pond in the back garden when they came across two tiny bodies. The police were called; they went on to dig up the back garden of a house that was half a mile away, currently occupied by Dominique and her husband, 47-year-old local councillor Pierre-Marie, and found another eight small corpses.

  Dominique, who has two grown-up daughters, admitted smothering the children after giving birth because of a fear of doctors. Eric Vaillant, the prosecutor, said, ‘She explained that she didn’t want any more children and that she didn’t want to see a doctor to take contraceptives.’

  The killings had been going on for over 20 years and the babies had been wrapped in bin-bags before being buried in the back garden. She claimed to have acted without the knowledge of her husband who said, due his wife’s obesity, he did not even know she had been pregnant.

  ‘The sky is falling on his head, he told us,’ said prosecutor Vaillant. ‘He told us he was absolutely not aware his wife was pregnant.’

  He was freed without charge.

  The couple’s two surviving daughters, Emeline and Virginia, who both have young sons, put on an extraordinary show of support for their mother. Emeline and her two-year-old son even lived at home with her parents. ‘We never wanted for anything,’ said Emeline. ‘Mum was always there for us, she was always ready to do anything for her daughters. She was the best there is.’

  Virginia added, ‘We will be there for our mother. She is a good grandmother and we were happy
to leave our children with her. Now that this has all come out, Mum must feel relieved that she’s got nothing more to hide. It was two days ago that we learned about what happened and it’s still incomprehensible. We never noticed anything.’

  Vaillant said, ‘She has been charged with eight counts of wilfully killing minors under 15 … she admitted suffocating the babies at birth. When she became aware she was pregnant, she decided she did not want any more children, and did not go to see a doctor for contraception. Her first delivery had gone badly and there were clearly problems thereafter.’

  He said it was only through ‘sheer chance’ that the remains of two of the babies were found in the garden of the house the Cottrez family had once owned in Villers-au-Tertre, near Lille.

  While awaiting trial, Dominique Cottrez was released by the appeals court on the condition that she continued to receive psychological and psychiatric care. She told an examining magistrate that she had been a victim of incest and feared that her own father, who died in 2007, had fathered the babies.

  22

  THE FAMILY PLOT

  Neighbours grew worried when they had not seen Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès and his family for more than three weeks. Detectives who went to their house to investigate found a severed leg under the garden terrace, and then unearthed the bodies of de Ligonnès’ wife and four children, as well as those of the family’s two pet Labradors.