World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds

by Greig, Charlotte

  We will probably never know the truth of any of this. But then that’s in the nature of our knowledge of the Cosa Nostra. It exists in the shadows, and only very occasionally does it come out into the light, through the confessions of pentiti, via wiretaps, at trials. The rest is silence, discretion. As Tommaso Buscetta, the highest-ranked of all the pentiti, said:

  ‘In my ambience no-one asks direct questions, but your interlocutor, when he considers it necessary, makes you understand, with a nod of the head, with a smile. . . even simply by his silence.’

  Added to this is the fact that the family bosses and the members of the New York and Sicilian Commissions are far, far removed from the actual commitment of any crime. They live at the top of a pyramid: outwardly respectable businessmen – sometimes, it is true, with no visible source of income, but sometimes with an income that, on the surface at any rate, seems quite legitimate. Rosario Spatola in Sicily, for example, had made millions of dollars from construction alone. He was said to be the fifth-highest payer of taxes in the whole of Italy.

  Silence, remoteness, wisdom, power: were – and are – the watchwords that govern the behaviour of the senior ranks of Cosa Nostra. They were – and are – the law: a law that was regularly broken, however, by the head of one of New York’s five families: Joe Bananas.

  Death or Glory

  There was something desperate, death-or-glory, about John Dillinger. For his big-time career as America’s most wanted criminal lasted, in fact, little more than a year. He came out of prison in May 1933 after a nine-year stretch, and by July the following year he was dead, gunned down outside a cinema in Chicago. In that short space of time he robbed untold numbers of banks, broke into police armouries, escaped from prison twice, and survived at least six different shoot-outs. If he hadn’t existed, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation – which made its reputation out of his death – would have had to invent him.

  John Herbert Dillinger was born into a religious Indianapolis Quaker family in 1902, and moved with it to Mooresville, Indiana eighteen years later. In 1923, after an unhappy love-affair, he joined the navy. But he deserted soon after, married a local girl and then, in September 1924, was sent down for nine years for assault while attempting to rob a grocer. He seems to have come out of prison nine years later as a man with a mission. For within a month, he’d robbed an Illinois factory official; and within two, he’d committed his first bank robbery. At this point he gathered a gang together, among them ‘Baby Face Nelson’ Gillis, and together they went on a spree, robbing banks all over the Midwestern states and killing anyone who stood in their way.

  There were occasional hiccups. In July 1933, Dillinger was arrested for his part in a Bluffton, Ohio bank heist. But three of the gang posed as prison officials and soon got him out – the spree went on. They moved from rural banks to the big city: they robbed the First National Bank in East Chicago, and escaped with $20,000, killing a policeman on the way. And though Dillinger was again arrested – this time in Tucson, Arizona for possession of stolen banknotes and guns – this did little to cramp his style: legend has it that he carved himself a wooden gun, held up officials with it and bluffed his way out the joint.

  The only other thing he did wrong on this occasion was to steal a car from a sheriff and drive it across the state line. This was enough to involve J. Edgar Hoover’s Feds, who then played him up to the newspapers as a deranged killer even as they tried to track him down. Dillinger, in fact, had a reputation as a courteous man, particularly to women and children. So he resented the publicity, and did his best to avoid it. He tried to disguise himself via facial surgery – and he even had his finger ends shaved off to evade fingerprint identification.

  In April 1934, a tip-off led the government men – or G-men, as George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly seems to have been the first to call them – to a hide-out at a lodge in Little Bohemia, Wisconsin. The Feds, though, shot at the wrong car during a night-time raid, and Dillinger escaped, leaving a dead G-man behind him. Gradually, however, the net closed in. Rewards for Dillinger’s arrest were by now on offer from several states, and there’d even been a special appropriation voted by Congress to add to the pot.

  In July 1934, then, a friend of Dillinger’s, a brothel-keeper called Anna Sage, came to claim it; and on the 22nd, by previous arrangement, she went with him to the Biograph Cinema in Chicago.

  As they came out after the show, a half-hearted attempt was made to arrest him. He resisted and was shot dead. J. Edgar Hoover, who was on hand to grab the limelight cast by his Public Enemy Number One, later described Dillinger

  ‘as a cheap, boastful, selfish,

  tight-fisted plug-ugly.’

  It’s worth remembering that it was this same J. Edgar Hoover who announced that the Mafia – a much more difficult target than Dillinger – simply did not exist in America.

  Dr Death’s Prescriptions

  With a total of over 200 suspected murders to his name, Harold Shipman is the most prolific serial killer of modern times. His grisly tally of victims puts him well ahead of Pedro Lopez, the ‘monster of the Andes’, who was convicted of fifty-seven murders in 1980. Lopez claimed to have killed many more, but the exact number of deaths was never verified. Until Shipman’s crimes came to light, Lopez had the dubious distinction of topping the serial killer league; at present, however, it is a British family doctor, rather than a penniless Colombian vagrant, who has become the world’s number one murderer.

  Mother’s Favourite

  The sorry tale begins in 1946, when Harold Frederick Shipman was born into a working-class family in Nottingham. Known as Fred, the boy had an unusual childhood. He had a brother and sister, but it was clear that he was his mother’s favourite. She felt that Fred was destined for great things, and taught him that he was superior to his contemporaries, even though he was not especially clever and had to work hard to achieve academic success. During his schooldays, he formed few friendships with other children, a situation that was exacerbated when his mother became seriously ill with lung cancer. The young Shipman took on the role of carer to his mother, spending time with her after school waiting for visits from the family doctor, who would inject her with morphine to relieve her from pain. It is possible that the stress of this experience during his formative years may have pushed him into mental illness, causing him to re-enact the role of carer and doctor in the macabre fashion that he later did.

  By the time Shipman was seventeen, his mother had died of cancer, after a long and painful illness. He enrolled at medical school, despite having to resit his entry exams. Although he was good at sport, he made little effort to make friends. However, at this time he met and married his future wife Primrose; the pair went on to have four children, as Shipman began his career as a doctor in general practice. To many, he seemed kind and pleasant, but colleagues complained of his superior attitude and rudeness. Then he began to suffer from blackouts, which he attributed to epilepsy. However, disturbing evidence emerged that he was in fact taking large amounts of pethidine, on the pretext of prescribing the drug to patients. He was dismissed from the practice but, surprisingly, within two years he was once again working as a doctor, this time in a different town.

  Pillar Of The Community

  In his new job, the hard-working Shipman soon earned the respect of his colleagues and patients. However, it was during his time at Hyde, over a twenty-four-year period, that he is estimated to have killed at least 236 patients. His status as a pillar of the community, not to mention his kindly bedside manner, for many years masked the fact that the death toll among Shipman’s patients was astoundingly high.

  Over the years a number of people, including relatives of the deceased and local undertakers, had raised concerns about the deaths of Shipman’s patients. Many patients died suddenly, often with no previous record of terminal illness; and they were usually found sitting in a chair, fully clothed, rather than in bed. The police had been alerted and had examined the doctor’s records,
but nothing was found. It later became clear that Shipman had falsified patient records, but at this stage the doctor’s calm air of authority was still protecting him against closer scrutiny.

  Then Shipman made a fateful mistake. In 1998 Kathleen Grundy, a healthy, active eighty-one-year-old ex-mayor with a reputation for community service, died suddenly at home. Shipman was called and pronounced her dead; he also said that a post-mortem was unnecessary, since he had paid her a visit shortly before her death. When her funeral was over, her daughter Angela Woodruff received a badly typed copy of Mrs Grundy’s will leaving Shipman a large sum of money. A solicitor herself, Mrs Woodruff knew immediately that this was a fake. She contacted the police, who took the unusual step of exhuming Mrs Grundy’s body. They found that she had been administered a lethal dose of morphine.

  Surprisingly, in murdering Mrs Grundy, Shipman had made little effort to cover his tracks: either to forge the will carefully or to kill his victim with a less easily traceable drug. Whether this was through sheer arrogance and stupidity, or through a latent desire to be discovered, no one knows. However, once the true nature of Mrs Grundy’s death was uncovered, more graves were opened, and more murders came to light.

  During his trial, Shipman showed no remorse for the fifteen murders he was accused of. There were known to be others, but these alone were more than enough to ensure a life sentence. He was contemptuous of the police and the court, and continued to protest his innocence to the end. He was convicted of the murders and imprisoned. Four years later, without warning, he hanged himself in his prison cell.

  Today, the case of Harold Shipman remains mystifying: there was no sexual motive in his killings and, until the end, no profit motive. His murders did not fit the usual pattern of a serial killer. In most cases, his victims seem to have died in comfort, at peace. It may be, as several commentators have pointed out, that he enjoyed the sense of having control over life and death, and that over the years he became addicted to this sense of power.

  What is clear is that, in finally taking his own life, Harold Shipman ensured ultimate control: that no one would ever fully understand why he did what he did.

  Doctor Double Cross

  When 33-year-old Ohio paramedic Michelle Baker became pregnant, her live-in lover, soft-spoken and charming medical resident Maynard Muntzing, seemed genuinely delighted and offered to celebrate with a dream wedding on a tropical island paradise. But unbeknown to Michelle, Dr Muntzing secretly entertained hopes of being reunited with his former lover Tammy Erwin, and saw the baby as a hindrance to his love life. Nevertheless the couple flew to the island as planned, where Muntzing invented an excuse for postponing the ceremony. Michelle then began to suffer severe cramps and some light bleeding which she attributed to food poisoning or a local bug. On her return to Ohio she consulted her own doctor, who reassured her that nothing was amiss.

  Michelle was initially delighted when Muntzing purchased a luxury home in which to raise his new family. But the cramps and bleeding continued, causing the expectant mother considerable anxiety. She then happened to hear a record request on her local radio station for a listener named Maynard whose voice was eerily familiar. Maynard was supposedly on vacation in Columbus at the time! Her curiosity aroused, Michelle drove to Tammy’s home where she found her fiancé and his ex-girlfriend together.

  A confrontation ensued, but Michelle was persuaded that the amorous doctor was committed to her and the baby and that his affection for Tammy was in the past. However, the nausea, cramps and bleeding continued, forcing Michelle to conclude she was being poisoned. She managed to smuggle a drink Maynard had made her to the police, whereupon it was proven to contain cytotec, a drug used to treat stomach ulcers which was expressly forbidden for pregnant women since it was likely to cause an abortion. But as detectives pointed out, there was no proof that Dr Muntzing had put it there; Michelle could have put it in her own drink to discredit her two-timing lover.

  It was only when Michelle returned with a video she had made showing Dr Muntzing putting something in her drink that the police were forced to test her story. They too set up a secret camera in her kitchen which they monitored from the garage and thus they were witness to Muntzing mixing one of his mysterious cocktails while Michelle was out of the room.

  They immediately rushed into the house and arrested Muntzing. The drink was analyzed and found to contain yet more cytotec. More vials of the drug were found in his car. Muntzing was charged with the attempted murder of an unborn baby, but the case never came to court. Unfortunately the poisoning had affected Michelle’s health and just weeks before the trial she gave birth to a stillborn child.

  Maynard cut a deal and spent five years in jail in addition to losing his medical license. His sentence might have been longer and he might still be there today had it not been for the fact that no cytotec was found in the placenta after the birth and Michelle’s failing health meant that she was not able to take the witness stand during what might have been a lengthy trial.

  Double Homicide

  The case of Linda Leon and Esteban Martinez is a shocking one. It was a double homicide, in which the couple were tortured and murdered in front of their young children. The aftermath was no less shocking: Leon and Martinez made their living as drug dealers, which meant that few in their circle were willing to come forward with information. Nobody seemed to care very much about the fate of a couple of drug dealers, even where their children were involved.

  It was not until a determined detective named Wendell Stradford picked up the case that the investigation began to move. He believed that, however the victims earned their money, the perpetrators of the crime needed to be brought to justice. Leon and Martinez had been brutally murdered in the most horrific way, and their young children callously left alone with their mutilated, bleeding bodies. By the time Stradford began work, the case had been on the files of the New York City Police Department for a long time, and had gone completely cold, but he was determined to catch up with the culprits.

  Stabbed In The Ear

  It was in the run-up to Christmas of 1996 that a 911 operator received a call from a six-year-old boy telling her that someone had killed his mother and father. At first, he was too upset to give the address, but the operator was eventually able to wheedle it out of him, and police officers were immediately sent there. Once at the apartment, they found a scene that was as heartbreaking as it was appalling: the dead parents were lying on the floor, bound with duct tape, their bodies covered in blood, with the children trying to nestle in against them.

  When the officers spoke to the children, little by little the story began to emerge: that their mother Linda Leon, twenty-three, and their father, Esteban Martinez, twenty-nine, had had a visit from four people, two men and two women. While the women had sat with the children, the men had taken their parents to another room, and repeatedly stabbed them before shooting them dead.

  Just Another Statistic

  Although this was a double homicide, and the evidence showed that the perpetrators had been sadistic killers, the case was allowed to go cold. The annual rate of homicides in New York City is high, especially among those involved in drug dealing. Leon and Martinez soon became just another statistic on the files of a crime-ridden city, despite the fact that murderers were still on the loose and out there somewhere, waiting to torture and kill the next drug dealers that crossed them.

  It was not until 1998 that the case reached the Cold Case Squad at New York City’s Police Department and some action began to be taken. Detectives found out that the Drug Enforcement Agency had been on the tail of Martinez, who was a cocaine dealer, and thought that he had probably been killed by members of a Colombian drug cartel. The investigation into this dragged on until Detective Wendell Stradford noticed that the name Robert Mitchell kept cropping up. He noticed that one of the children had referred to a ‘Tio Rob’, Uncle Rob, who often visited the house. Stradford tracked down Mitchell, and an associate named Tavon Blackmon. When Bl
ackmon was picked up by police, he admitted that he knew Mitchell. According to his story, Mitchell had boasted to him that he had ‘smoked’ a guy and his wife in New York. He had gone round to their apartment with his girlfriend Keisha Washington, her twin brother Kevin, and Kevin’s girlfriend Nisey. They had stolen a kilo and a half of cocaine and crack from Martinez, and had also made off with thousands of dollars, which Mitchell had used to buy himself an expensive new car.

  In 2001, the detectives on the case managed to track down Keisha Washington, who by now had split up with Mitchell and was living in Baltimore. Under the guise of helping her to find Mitchell and gain child support from him, they interviewed her. She spoke of a terrible incident that had estranged her from her brother Kevin, ‘Something I can never make up for’, as she called it. Now a born-again Christian, Washington was attempting to make a new start in life, away from Mitchell and his influence.