by Bill Wallace
Throughout that morning no one can remember anyone entering or leaving that room and there were no unusual noises or bangs. Just after noon, however, a passing maid noticed a red stain appeared on the carpet outside the door to 1215. She could not help feeling it looked like blood and, hoping there was some other explanation, immediately contacted hotel security.
Jorge Aparicio, halfway through his day’s work, came upstairs and knocked on the door to the suite, calling out to ask if there was a problem. A voice from the other side of the door replied that there was no problem. ‘Everything is fine,’ he assured the security guard. Aparicio went away but, still curious, returned to the door ten minutes later. When he knocked this time, there was no reply. He took out his pass key, slipped it into the lock and slowly pushed the door open.
The room was a mess. The tiled floor was streaked with blood and on the floor lay a body, that of fifty-three-year-old Derek Moo Young. He lay on his back, his feet facing the door. There were six bullet holes in him. In the upstairs bedroom, Aparicio discovered another body. Derek Moo Young’s twenty-three-year-old son Duane lay at the foot of one of the beds, killed by a single bullet, fired into his head at close range, execution style.
That morning, forty-seven-year-old Krishna Maharaj had awakened at the Broward County home he had shared with his wife since moving to Florida from Britain the previous year. Maharaj who had been born into a family of thirteen in Trinidad in 1939, had risen from earning his living as a truck driver to becoming a successful importer of bananas and West Indian goods into Britain. He became a millionaire, and with a stable of one hundred racing horses and twenty-four Rolls Royces, he became something of a fixture in British high society.
He and his wife, Marita spent a few months in Florida every year, primarily to escape the vagaries of the British winter, but never one to do nothing, Maharaj had started a new career in publishing. With a business partner, he had launched a weekly newspaper, the Caribbean Times, targeted at Florida’s tight-knit Caribbean community. The first issue was published on 4 July 1986.
That October morning, Maharaj climbed into his blue Chevrolet Caprice and drove off to a meeting with a Bahamian businessman with whom he wanted to discuss overseas distribution of the newspaper. It was a meeting that he later came to believe was a trap. He had been set up and had unknowingly walked straight into it.
The meeting was for 8.30 a.m. at the DuPont Plaza. It had been arranged by Neville Butler, a writer he’d hired as a freelancer several weeks previously. Maharaj parked at the hotel and Butler was there to meet him. They took the lift up to room 1215 to wait for their appointment to arrive. Maharaj opened a bottle of soda and watched some television as he waited but no one arrived and at 10.20 a.m. he said he gave up and left for another meeting at midday with an estate agent in Margate, around thirty miles away. He was going to check out a little shopping mall that he was interested in buying. Before that, at around 11 a.m., he drew up at the printing press he owned at Fort Lauderdale. There he bumped into Tino Geddes, a writer for the newspaper. Geddes was heading for a nearby cafe for a coffee and Maharaj joined him there, ordering a beer. He spent some time chatting with Geddes before paying for their drinks and leaving. He eventually met the estate agent and his accountant, George Bell, at around 1 p.m. and after looking at the property, treated the two men to lunch at Tark’s seafood restaurant in Dania Beach. They finally went their separate ways at 3.30 p.m that afternoon.
On the evening of 16 October. Neville Bauer, a City of Miami homicide detective took a call from a man claiming to have seen two people shot dead in a Miami hotel room that day. He named the murderer as Krishna Maharaj, added that he could be found at a Denny’s close to Miami International Airport and hung up. Butler found another officer, Lieutenant John Buhrmeister and the two men headed for the diner, situated at LeJeune Road and NW 25th Street. They walked into the restaurant, and Buhrmeister slid into the booth next to Krishna Maharaj. He stuck a gun into Maharaj’s side and told him to get up slowly from the table.
Three months later, Krishna Maharaj was charged with the murders of Derek Moo Young and his son.
At his trial, the prosecution based its case largely on the testimony of the only eyewitness, Neville Butler and it emerged that it had been Butler who had phoned the police later that day. Maharaj had known Derek Moo Young for more than twenty years and the two had been business partners since 1984, even at one point living next door to one another in Broward County. There had been a very public falling-out, however, a dispute over a property deal and only a month before the murders, Maharaj had filed a civil suit against the other man for the recovery of $424,000 he claimed he owed him. Butler claimed that Maharaj had insisted on settling matters face to face and for that reason he had been asked to set up the meeting.
Butler said that when Moo Young arrived, Maharaj was hiding behind the bathroom door with a gun. He leapt out and an argument ensued in the course of which he pumped half a dozen bullets into the Jamaican. Maharaj then ordered Butler to tie up Duane Moo Young, but the young man escaped and ran upstairs. Maharaj ran after him and shot him, even though he had known him since he had been a toddler and Duane called him ‘Uncle’. According to Butler, he was marched at gunpoint to Maharaj’s car and the two sat there for the next three hours awaiting the arrival of the police at the hotel.
Of course, Maharaj had never denied being in the room and it was littered with his fingerprints. The bullets and casings that were found on the floor came from a 9mm Smith and Wesson Model 39 gun. Maharaj owned just that make and model of weapon.
It seemed pretty clear, but there were numerous inconsistencies. Butler initially said that he had booked the room, but later told police that Maharaj had done it. He admitted lying about when Maharaj actually appeared in the room. At first he said he arrived after the Moo Youngs and then he gave them the version where Maharaj was waiting for them behind the bathroom door. Critically, he failed a polygraph and a lie detector test, while Maharaj passed several.
Police also fell down on the investigation. For instance, they failed to run a simple test to check whether Butler had fired a gun that morning and his clothing was never checked even though it was claimed that he had been wearing blood-soaked clothes and had changed them before making a statement.
The entire story did not add up. Why would Krishna Maharaj commit a double murder, spare the life of the only witness to it and then hold him at gunpoint for hours afterwards, only a short distance from the murder scene, before letting him walk away to inform the authorities?
Tino Geddes was the state’s other main witness. He had initially provided an alibi for Maharaj, but not long before the trial had changed his story, claiming that Maharaj had been talking about his plan to murder Derek Moo Young. He said that on that day Maharaj told him to tell anyone who asked that he had been with him that morning. He became frightened when he realised what Maharaj was asking him to do.
Interestingly, Geddes was, at the time, facing charges for illegally bringing ammunition into Jamaica from the United States. The prosecution attorneys in the Maharaj case flew to Jamaica and testified on his behalf at his trial and helped him to escape jail time.
Maharaj was let down by his counsel who for some reason failed to call witnesses who were able to place him in Fort Lauderdale at the time of the murders. Many of them have since died or cannot be located. To the astonished delight of the prosecution team, the defence part of the trial consisted simply of the words ‘the defence rests.’
The Moo Youngs were presented as ordinary hard-working Jamaicans living off a modest income. Documents discovered since the trial suggest other-wise, however. Million dollar life insurance policies and loans of $1.5 billion have led to speculation that they were involved in money-laundering or drug trafficking. It has been noted that there were a large number of people in South Florida at the time who had reasons to want to kill them, amongst whom is Adam Hosein, a Trinidadian who at the time owned a garage in Broward County.
He closely resembled Maharaj and had even used this resemblance on occasion to gain access to horse races. He was an associate of Derek Moo Young and owed him a considerable sum of money. He placed a call to room 1215 on the day of the murders. Adam Hosein was never even questioned by police about the murders.
Colombian importer/exporter Jaime Maijas, who originated from Medellin, the drug capital of South America, was renting room 1214 at the DuPont Plaza that day. He was linked to Hosein but was questioned only cursorily and ruled out as a suspect. There is little doubt, however, that Derek Moo Young and his son were the victims of an assassination by a Medellin drug cartel
In his trial, the jury took just three hours to convict Krishna Maharaj. He was sentenced to death and spent fifteen years on death row exhausting the appeals process before his sentence was commuted to life in 2002 due to violations in due process at his trial.
In his six-by-nine-foot cell at Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown, Florida, Krishna Maharaj, now seventy, his fortune long gone on legal fees, continues to protest his innocence.
Karl Chamberlain
Karl Chamberlain’s last meal request was extra-ordinary and easily the biggest of any that had been ordered up to that time by any of the four hundred and five inmates executed in Texas since the state recommenced carrying out the death penalty in 1982. He ordered a fresh fruit tray, fresh orange slices, apples, sliced watermelon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe, peaches, plums, grapes, strawberries; a fresh vegetable tray with carrot sticks, celery, two sliced tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber slices, olives, sweet pickles and any other fresh vegetables; slices of cheese and lunchmeat, served with a bowl of ranch dressing, two deviled eggs; six jalapenos stuffed with cheese, breaded and fried; a chef salad, ranch dressing on the side; a plate of onion rings, ketchup and hot sauce on the side; one half-pound of French fries, covered with melted, shredded cheese, salsa, jalapenos and ranch dressing on the side; a bacon double cheeseburger, smothered with grilled onions, three to four slices of cheese and mayonnaise with garlic and onion powder mixed in; two pieces of fried chicken, breasts preferred, or substitute two thighs and two legs; one bean and cheese quesadilla, salsa and jalapeno to the side with sour cream or guacamole if possible; a three-egg omelet with grilled onions, mushrooms, ham and lots of cheese. Ketchup to the side; two barbecue pork rolls; pitcher of orange juice (only a little ice) and a pitcher of milk to wash his enormous meal down.
Chamberlain, thirty-seven, was executed by Texas’s preferred method, lethal injection, on 11 June 2008 in Huntsville, Texas for raping and murdering thirty-year-old Felecia Prechtl in her apartment.
That day, 2 August 1991, Felecia had arranged for her brother and his girlfriend to babysit her five-year-old son so that she could go out with friends in the evening. At about six in the evening they had taken the boy to go to the grocery store while she got ready to go out. Returning to the apartment shortly after, they noticed that the bathroom door was closed and her clothes were still in the hallway. They thought she must be still getting ready but when they had heard nothing for a while and she had not emerged, her brother opened the bathroom door and went in. He found his sister lying face down, her jeans and underwear pulled down around her knees and her ankles and hands bound by duct tape. She wore nothing on the top half of her body and around her head was a pool of blood.
An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. The trajectory of the bullet as it entered her head suggested that when she was shot she must have been seated on the toilet or possibly kneeling on the floor, indicating an execution-style killing. A .30 calibre bullet was found and when they checked her to establish whether she had been raped, they discovered sperm in her anal cavity. There was a roll of duct tape at the scene and from the duct tape that had been used to tie her up, they were able to lift fingerprints. Unfortunately, when these were submitted to the police criminal database, there were no matches.
As part of their door-to-door enquiries, a neigh-bour, Karl Chamberlain, was questioned but he denied knowing anything about the murder and neither he nor anyone else was arrested.
For five years, the case remained unsolved but in 1996, someone diligently decided to run another check on the prints from the duct tape. Karl Chamberlain’s name popped up as a potential match. His fingerprints had been taken after he was involved in an attempted robbery in Houston on 17 July 1996. He was subsequently arrested for the murder of Felecia Prechtl.
Chamberlain confessed. He claimed to have been drinking heavily on the day of the murder and had gone to her apartment to borrow some sugar but when she answered the door, he noticed that she wasn’t wearing much. She gave him the sugar and asked him to leave. He took the sugar back to his apartment but as he was preparing to take his dogs out for a walk, decided to go back down to hers again. This time he took with him the roll of duct tape and his .30 calibre rifle. He claimed that she had consented to have anal intercourse with him but an argument ensued when she threatened to tell his wife. He lost his temper, he said, and shot her. Afterwards, he took his dogs for a walk. The rifle, he told them, was at his father’s house. He gave a sample of his DNA and it matched the sperm that they had discovered that night back in 1991.
It was an open and shut case and Chamberlain was found guilty in June 1997 and sentenced to death. The sentence was confirmed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in June 1999. Subsequent appeals were all denied.
While wishing that his lawyers and the jury had paid a little more attention to the fact that in the five years following the murder he had managed to stay out of trouble, he did show regret for what he did that night. ‘My greatest regret,’ he said, ‘is going down there and not killing myself. I had kind of like a slip into delusion. It makes absolutely no sense…It was like I lost all control.’
There had been a hiatus in executions from September 2007 when the Supreme Court had questioned the legality of lethal injection as a method of execution. Chamberlain gained a brief stay while the point was argued once again, claiming that this method violated his rights under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States because it represented cruel and unjust punishment. The appeal on this basis was overturned, however, and the execution was scheduled for 11 June.
On the day of his execution, after twelve years on Death Row, Chamberlain was permitted to spend four hours with his family and friends before being transported to Huntsville Prison where Texas’s execution chamber is situated. He then spent the afternoon in a holding cell from which he was able to make phone calls, speak with a spiritual advisor and eat as much of that enormous last meal as he could.
The last words of the now thirty-seven-year-old killer, Karl Chamberlain, were as dignified as they were poignant. ‘I want you all to know I love you with all my heart,’ he said. ‘I want to thank you for being here. We are here to honour the life of Felicia Prechtl, a woman I didn’t even know, and celebrate my death. I am so terribly sorry. I wish I could die more than once.’ As the drugs were pumped into his veins, he said, ‘I love you. God have mercy on us all.’ He was smiling and with that smile still on his face, he started to add, ‘Please do not hate anybody because…’ He slipped into unconsciousness and nine minutes later he was pronounced dead.
PART FOUR: WOMEN ON DEATH ROW
Ruth Snyder
They called her ‘Ruthless Ruth’ and Barbara Stanwyck would smoulder through her story in the 1944 Oscar-nominated Hollywood blockbuster, Double Indemnity. But it was a grim photograph that would commit her to posterity, the photograph of the decade that was the 1920s. It depicted Ruth Snyder, seated on the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York on 12 January 1928, at the moment the current was switched on, the first woman to be executed in this way since Martha M. Place in 1899.
The photograph was cunningly snapped by photographer Tom Howard who was posing as a writer for the New York Daily News but had a miniature camera strapped to his left ankle, the shutter release button concealed inside his ja
cket. At the critical moment, Howard simply hoisted his trouser leg up and pushed the button. Later that day, the front page trumpeted the execution with the word ‘DEAD!’ and beneath it the stark black and white photograph of the condemned woman with a hood over her head and the electrodes ready to pulse 2,000 volts of electricity through her body. It is one of the most memorable images of the twentieth century.
It was a sordid murder, one that was described by one crime writer as a ‘cheap crime involving cheap people.’ Celebrated newspaper reporter and author, Damon Runyon called it the ‘Dum-Bell’ murder, because it was so dumb.
In 1925, thirty-two-year-old Ruth Snyder was a bored Long Island housewife whose husband Albert was art editor of the magazine Boating. When Albert was at work, Ruth began to enjoy the attentions of a thirty-four-year-old corset salesman, Judd Gray. The two did not, at first sight, seem that well suited. Ruth was tall, blonde and good-looking while Gray was short and insignificant, with a cleft chin and thick glasses. The two had first met when they were having lunch in the same restaurant in New York and soon they were involved in a torrid affair, often rendezvousing at the Snyder home while Ruth and Albert’s nine-year-old daughter, Lorraine, was at school. On other occasions, they would book a room in a hotel and the little girl would be told to wait in the lobby while they made love upstairs.
Ruth was bored with her husband and whatever passion there had once been between them was long gone. She wanted out of the marriage but realised there was only one way to do that and enjoy life to the full. They would have to get rid of Albert. She started to feed her lover with bits of information about her husband abusing her and suggested to him that he would have to be killed. Gray was against the idea, but Ruth was persistent, cajoling, begging and teasing him toward the point where he would agree. Finally, he capitulated and they decided to go through with it on Saturday 19 March 1927.