The bombing had been intended to intimidate the black people of Birmingham, who at the time were the subject of constant racist attacks, so much so that the city was becoming known as ‘Bombingham’. But this proved to be one bomb too many. The people of Birmingham and America as a whole, both black and white, were outraged by this unprovoked assault on a peaceful group of citizens at prayer, and their calls for justice helped to foster the burgeoning civil rights movement of the day.
When the case came to trial, the authorities, under segregationist governor George Wallace, let the bombers off lightly, in true Southern style. However, resentment against the injustice of the incident continued to simmer, until many years later the case was reopened and the culprits finally brought to book.
The Birmingham church bombing eventually became one of the most renowned cold cases in United States legal history. As the mother of one of the victims, by that time aged eighty-two and in a wheelchair, commented when justice was done more than three decades after the event: ‘I’m very happy that justice finally came down today. I didn’t know whether it would come in my lifetime.’
Rule Of Hate
In the mid 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan was continuing its rule of hate in the South. It was a secret society dedicated to the eradication and intimidation of black people, and its members had infiltrated the top echelons of the police and judiciary. Ordinary citizens were terrified of the Klan, which often took reprisals against white people as well as black, in response to what they saw as fraternizing with the enemy. In the city of Birmingham, which had a large black population, there were constant attacks on black leaders, and the perpetrators of these crimes were left unpunished, or given ludicrously lenient fines or prison sentences. By 1963, the situation had got completely out of hand. On 15 September 1963, the congregation of the Bethel Baptist Church on 16th Street, Birmingham, assembled for Sunday worship. A group of eighty teenage girls went down to the basement with their teacher for a Sunday school class. At 10.22, the church exploded: walls collapsed, windows were blown out, and the air was filled with dust. Some survivors managed to crawl out of the rubble, but others could not move. When the rescue operation began, the mangled bodies of the four dead girls were recovered. The remnants of dynamite sticks were found under a flight of stairs leading to the basement.
A Scene Of Carnage
The bombing provoked national outrage; even Governor Wallace condemned the crime. The FBI came under intense pressure to find the culprits and a reward was advertised for information leading to the culprits. Just fifteen days after the event, three men were arrested: Robert Chambliss, John Wesley Hall, and Charles Cagle. Known as a virulent racist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, ‘Dynamite Bob’ Chambliss had been observed on the day of the bombing standing stock-still watching the scene of carnage, while others around him rushed to help the victims. Chambliss was on friendly terms with the local police force, and was widely considered to have immunity from police prosecution as a result.
To the dismay of the nation, the racist Southern courts gave the men only six-month suspended jail sentences, and fined them a thousand dollars each. The Klan were jubilant. But public pressure continued to mount, and the FBI continued their investigations, concluding that the bombing was the work of four men, all members of the same Klan group. Their names were Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton Jnr, Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Frank Cash.
FBI Cover-Up
The FBI assembled a mass of evidence against these men, but FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover suppressed the information, fearing that a prosecution would fan the flames of the civil rights movement. Hoover was obsessed with destroying the reputation of Martin Luther King, whom he regarded as a Communist agent, and knew that the truth about the Birmingham bombing would help the civil rights leader’s case. However, there were others who were more concerned that justice should be done. In 1970, the new Attorney General of Alabama, William J. Baxley, was elected, and made it his business to get to the bottom of the case, which had shocked him deeply as he was growing up.
Baxley put a great deal of effort into investigating the case, but after a few years became convinced that the only way it would be solved would be to reopen the suppressed FBI files. He threatened the FBI with exposure for withholding the information, and in 1976, the bureau finally allowed him access to the files. The following year, Robert Chambliss was brought to trial, and his niece, Elizabeth Cobbs, testified against him, along with others. Chambliss received a sentence of life imprisonment, and died in 1985, still swearing to the very end that he was innocent.
Baxley had made himself too unpopular to win an election as governor of the state. Once he was out of power, the case grew colder and colder. However, fifteen years later, in 1997 it was finally reopened. The FBI were continuing to block the investigation, but new evidence had apparently come to light – Herman Frank Cash, one of the original suspects, had died, but Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were tracked down – Cherry living in a beaten-up trailer in Texas. The pair were arrested for murder.
Murder Boasts
Blanton’s trial in 2001, over thirty years after the event, attracted national attention. The FBI had planted a bug in his apartment, and, on the tape, he was heard talking about bombing the church. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case against Cherry took longer to bring to court, because his lawyers alleged that he was mentally unfit to be tried. However, eventually, the trial took place in 2002. His ex-wife and granddaughter testified against him, and secret FBI tapes revealed that he boasted about bombing the church. Like Blanton, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison two years later.
Thus it was that the perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing were finally brought to justice in one of the oldest, coldest cases in United States legal history. In his oration at the girls’ funeral, Dr Martin Luther King had said: ‘God has a way of wringing good out of evil’. Decades after their death – and King’s assassination too – with the power of the Ku Klux Klan diminished in the South, many felt that his words had finally come true.
The Bitch of Buchenwald
In 1950, when the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ Ilse Koch was finally tried for mass-murder in a German court, she protested that she had no knowledge at all of what had gone on in the concentration-camp outside Weimar. Despite the evidence of dozens of ex-inmates, she insisted:
‘I was merely a housewife. I was busy raising my children. I never saw anything that was against humanity!’
As hundreds of people gathered outside the court shouted ‘Kill her! Kill her!’ she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Ilse Koch was born in Dresden, and by the age of 17 she was a voluptuous blue-eyed blonde: the very model of Aryan womanhood – and every potential storm-trooper’s wet dream. Enrolling in the Nazi Youth Party, she went to work in a bookshop that sold party literature and under-the-counter pornography; and she was soon having a string of affairs with SS men. Then, though, she came to the attention of SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, who selected her as the perfect mate for his then top aide, the brutish Karl Koch. Shortly after the wedding, when Koch was appointed commander of Buchenwald, she was installed in a villa near the camp, given two children, and then more or less forgotten by her husband, who was too busy staging multiple sex-orgies in Weimar to care.
Perhaps in revenge, Ilse began mounting orgies of her own, taking five or six of her husband’s officers into her bed at a time. She was perverse, sexually insatiable – and it wasn’t long after the beginning of the war that she started turning her attention to the mostly Jewish prisoners at the camp.
She first sunbathed nude outside the wire to tantalise them; then started greeting their trucks and transport trains semi-naked, fondling her breasts and shouting obscenties. If any of the incoming prisoners looked up at her, they were beaten senseless; and on one occasion, about which she filled out a report, two were clubbed to death and one had his face ground int
o the earth until he suffocated. All were executed, she wrote blithely, for ogling her.
She encouraged the guards to use the prisoners for target practice; and often took part herself. She scouted out good-looking soldiers seconded to the camp and offered them mass-orgies with her. Then, finally – perhaps jaded with mere sex – she started to collect trophies.
One day, by chance, she saw two tattooed prisoners working without their shirts. She ordered them to be killed immediately and their skins prepared and brought to her. She soon became obsessed with the possibilities of human skin, particularly if tattooed. She had lampshades made from the skin of selected prisoners for her living room, even a pair of gloves. Not content with this, she also started to experiment with prisoners’ severed heads, having them shrunk down by the dozen to grapefruit size to decorate her dining-room.
She was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg after the war by an American military court, and sentenced to life in prison, but two years later she was released, on the grounds that a crime by one German against others could not properly be considered a war crime. By the time she appeared in a German court in Augsburg, she was a bloated, raddled figure who blamed everything on her husband – who had conveniently been executed by the Nazis for embezzlement years before. She staged an epileptic fit in court, and when she heard its final judgment in her prison cell, she merely laughed. She died in prison in 1971.
Ilse Koch at the time of her trial. She eventually died in 1971.
The Black Widow Killings
Belle Gunness can lay serious claim to being the first female serial killer of modern times. She was the archetypal black widow killer, a woman who repeatedly attracted husbands and other suitors, and promptly murdered them for their money. While others, like Nannie Doss, were relatively timid murderers who would wait years for the chance to poison their latest husband, Belle was happy to despatch most of her suitors almost immediately and, if they did not care to take a drop of cyanide, she was quite willing to terminate their prospects with the blow from an axe or hammer. After all, at a strongly built 280 pounds, there were not too many men able to overpower her.
Belle Gunness may also have a second claim to fame. There are very few serial killers who have succeeded in evading the law even after being identified. The Hungarian Bela Kiss was one; Norwegian-born Belle Gunness was another.
Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset on 11 November 1859 in the Norwegian fishing village of Selbu. Her parents had a small farm there and Belle’s father also moonlighted as a conjuror. Allegedly Belle, in her youth, would appear alongside him as a tightrope walker and it is certainly true to say that she walked a tightrope for the rest of her life.
Foster Mother
In 1883 her older sister, Anna, who had emigrated to Chicago, invited Belle to join her in the United States. Belle jumped at the chance of a new life and soon arrived in Chicago. The following year she married a fellow immigrant, Mads Sorenson. They lived together happily enough for the next decade or so. They failed to conceive children but instead fostered three girls: Jennie, Myrtle and Lucy. The only dramas to strike these hard-working immigrants were the regular fires that dogged their businesses. Twice their houses burnt down and, in 1897, a confectionery store they ran also succumbed to fire. Thankfully, each time they were well insured.
Insurance also served Belle well when, on 30 July 1900, Mads Sorenson died suddenly at home, suffering from what was officially listed as heart failure, but strangely showing all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Amazingly enough, he died on the day that one life insurance policy elapsed and another one started, so his grieving widow was able to claim on both policies.
Grieving Widow
With her $8,500 windfall, Belle decided to start a new life. She moved her family to the rural town of La Porte, Indiana, a place popular with Scandinavian immigrants, and soon married again, this time to Peter Gunness, a fellow Norwegian. Sadly, this marriage was not to last as long as her first. In 1903 Peter died in a tragic accident after a sausage grinder allegedly fell on his head. If some observed that it looked as if a hammer blow might have caused the head wound, the grieving – and pregnant – widow’s tears were enough to quieten them. Once again there was an insurance payment, this time for $4,000.
Belle never married again, though not, it appears, for want of trying. She placed regular advertisements in the Norwegian language press’ lonely hearts columns. Describing herself as a comely widow, she advertised for men ready to support their amorous advances with a solid cash investment in their future lives together. She received many replies and several of these suitors actually arrived in La Porte, cash or bankbooks in hand. They would be seen for a day or two, tell their loved ones they were preparing to marry a rich widow and then they would disappear.
They were not the only people around Belle to disappear. Her foster daughter Jennie also vanished – Belle told neighbours that she had gone to a finishing school in California. Farmhands seemed to go missing on the Gunness farm on a regular basis. As far as the community as a whole was concerned, however, Belle Gunness was a model citizen who had had some very bad luck.
This view seemed to be compounded once and for all when, on 28 April 1908, Belle’s house caught fire. Fire-fighters were unable to stop the blaze in time and the bodies of two of Belle’s three children were found in the rubble, along with an adult female body assumed to be that of Belle herself – though identification was difficult as the body had been decapitated. The beheaded body was clear evidence that this was no accident but murder. The police immediately arrested an obvious suspect, local handyman Ray Lamphere, who had had an on/off relationship with Belle, but had lately fallen out with her and threatened to burn her house down.
That might have been the end of the matter if investigators had not continued digging around the site, looking for the corpse’s missing head. They did not find the head but they did find fourteen other corpses buried around the farm, mostly in the hog pen. Among those they were able to identify were two handymen, foster daughter Jennie and five of the hopeful suitors. The remainder were mostly presumed to be other unidentified suitors.
No Ordinary Widow
It was horribly clear that Belle Gunness was no ordinary widow but a vicious serial killer. More alarm bells rang when it was discovered that some of the bodies recovered from the fire had cyanide in their stomachs. Rumours immediately began to spread that the adult female corpse was not Belle. These were partially quashed a couple of weeks later, when her dental bridge and two teeth (looking suspiciously untouched by fire) were found in the rubble. Some accepted this as definitive evidence that Belle was dead. Others saw it as simply a final act of subterfuge. The prosecution of Ray Lamphere went ahead, but the jury expressed its doubts as to whether Belle was really dead by finding the handyman guilty only of arson and not of murder.
Sightings of Belle Gunness began almost immediately and continued in the ensuing years. Most of them were obviously wrong, and to this day, the true story of the United State’s first known female serial killer remains shrouded in mystery.
The Blood of Innocents
When Countess Elizabeth Bathory, aged 15, married Count Nadasdy in around 1576, it was an alliance between two of the greatest dynasties in Hungary. For Nadasdy, the master of Castle Csejthe in the Carpathians, came from a line of warriors, and Elizabeth’s family was even more distinguished: It had produced generals and governors, high princes and cardinals – her cousin was the country’s Prime Minister. Long after they’ve been forgotten, though, she will be remembered. For she was an alchemist, a bather in blood – and one of the models for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Elizabeth was beautiful, voluptuous, savage – a fine match for her twenty-one-year-old husband, the so-called ‘Black Warrior.’ But he was forever off campaigning, and she remained childless. More and more, then, she gave in to the constant cajolings of her old nurse, Ilona Joo, who was a black witch, a satanist. She began to surround herself with alc
hemists and sorcerers; and when she conceived – she eventually had four children – she may have been finally convinced of their efficacy. For when her husband died, when she was about 41, she surrendered to the black arts completely.
There had long been rumours around the castle of lesbian orgies, of the kidnappings of young peasant women, of flagellation, of torture. But one day after her husband’s death, Elizabeth Bathory slapped the face of a servant girl and drew blood; and she noticed that, where it had fallen on her hand, the skin seemed to grow smoother and more supple. She was soon convinced that bathing in and drinking the blood of young virgins would keep her young forever. Her entourage of witches and magicians – who were now calling for human sacrifice to make their magic work – agreed enthusiastically.
Elizabeth and her cronies, then, began scouring the countryside for children and young girls, who were either lured to the castle or kidnapped. They were then hung in chains in the dungeons, fattened and milked for their blood before being tortured to death and their bones used in alchemical experiments. The countess, it was said later, kept some of them alive to lick the blood from her body when she emerged from her baths, but had them, in turn brutally killed if they either failed to arouse her or showed the slightest signs of displeasure.
Peasant girls, however, failed to stay the signs of ageing; and after five years, Elizabeth decided to set up an academy for young noblewomen. Now she bathed in blue blood, the blood of her own class. But this time, inevitably, news of her depravities reached the royal court; and her cousin, the Prime Minister, was forced to investigate. A surprise raid on the castle found the Countess in mid-orgy; bodies lying strewn, drained of blood; and dozens of girls and young women – some flayed and vein-milked, some fattened like Strasburg geese awaiting their turn – in the dungeons.
World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds Page 3