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

by Greig, Charlotte

  Screams And Gunshots

  Washington gave detectives enough information to know that they were, at last, on the right track. They interviewed her again, and found out more. She told them how Mitchell had persuaded her to visit Esteban Martinez and his family, saying that Martinez was causing him to lose money. Her role was to look after the children while Mitchell discussed the matter with Martinez. They met up with Kevin and Nisey, and all went over to the apartment, where she and Nisey sat on the bed in the children’s bedroom watching television with them. The children constantly asked for their parents and cried when Robert and Kevin came in, roughly told them to shut up, and searched for money.

  Then the real nightmare started, as the children began to hear their mother screaming.

  Kevin was stabbing her in the ear, trying to get her to say where the drugs and money were hidden. Next there were gunshots, and the children became frantic. The women held them down, covering their mouths, and waited until the men were ready to go. The four adults left, leaving the children running out of the room, screaming and crying, with their dead parents lying on the floor.

  After this interview, the police let Keisha Washington go, but only after taking fingerprints from her. They later found that her fingerprints matched those lifted from a soda can at the scene of the crime. They also managed to identify the fourth suspect in the killing: ‘Nisey’ was Denise Henderson, a thirty-four-year-old woman from Baltimore.

  An Ugly Knife

  The police now concentrated their efforts on tracking down Kevin Washington. When the police caught up with him, he tried to blame the murders on Robert Mitchell, claiming that Mitchell had only said they were going to rob the couple, take the drugs and the money, and then leave. However, according to him, when they got to the apartment, Robert pulled a gun on Esteban. Kevin then admitted that the women bound Linda and Esteban with duct tape, and that he had tried to cut Linda’s neck with what he called ‘a wood knife’. However, it had a serrated edge and would not cut – as one of the children had described it, ‘that bad man had a ugly knife’. This, Washington seemed to feel, was some kind of defence for his behaviour. He then reported that Mitchell had shot both Esteban and Linda dead. After that, the four had set off back to Maryland, where Mitchell had disposed of the gun in an empty lot.

  Shopping For Christmas

  Police now had enough evidence to arrest Kevin Washington and charge him with second-degree murder and robbery. While he was awaiting trial, they went after Denise Henderson, who gave them more information. She described how they had all put gloves on as they went up the stairs to the Martinez apartment. This seemed to point quite clearly to the fact that the crime was premeditated. When they got inside the apartment, she and Keisha were told to wait in the bedroom with the children. The women rifled through Linda’s belongings, trying to placate the children as they did so. There were sounds of screaming and gunshots from the next room, and then the men ran in and told them all to leave. When Henderson left, she saw a body on the floor, but just jumped over it on the way out.

  The police arrested and charged Keisha Washington and Denise Henderson. Along with Kevin Washington, they now had three of the four murderers. But Mitchell proved harder to get hold of. In the end, the police had to conduct night-time raids on the house of his mother and his girlfriend in an effort to catch him, but he was not there on either occasion. In the end, it was only by pretending that they had come to protect Mitchell’s family from violent drug runners that they managed to find out where he was, in an apartment on the other side of town. When they raided the apartment, they found Mitchell cowering under a bed wearing nothing but his underpants.

  ‘Uncle’ Robert

  Mitchell was arrested, and when police interviewed him, he told a different story. He said that he had gone over to the Martinez apartment with the intention of getting back money that he felt was owed to him. Esteban had been living the high life at his expense, he explained, cutting drugs with other substances, which made it hard for Mitchell to sell them. He had only wanted to get what was owing to him from Martinez, whom he referred to as ‘Tony’. Mitchell blamed Kevin for initiating the violence, and said that he had had nothing to do with it. By the time he heard the gunshots, he was already outside the apartment. He claimed that he only found out about Linda and Esteban’s death later, and was angry because he knew the children could identify him as ‘Tio Rob’; they had never met any of the others before, so he was afraid he would be held responsible for the murders, which he swore he did not commit.

  When the four cases came before the courts, the women plea bargained. In exchange for agreeing to testify at the trials of the men, they got six- to twelve-year sentences, which included the time they had already served, having been held in police custody during this time.

  At Kevin Washington’s trial, his twin sister Keisha testified against him, and the Martinez children, now aged thirteen, twelve, and ten were brought back from the Dominican Republic to attend the proceedings. As the trial went on, it emerged that, on that fateful day, Esteban had been shot first, so as to frighten Linda into handing over money and drugs hidden in the apartment. But, even after having done so, she was still shot.

  Kevin Washington denied the charge against him, but the jury did not believe him, and on 26 March 2004, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree robbery. The judge sentenced him to seventy-five years in prison. He showed no remorse for the crimes, and continued to maintain his innocence.

  Today, Robert Mitchell is currently awaiting trial. At his arraignment, he pleaded not guilty to murder. Mitchell blames Kevin Washington for the murders, just as Washington blamed him, but it seems unlikely that he will be believed. After all, the investigation only took off when the eldest of the Martinez children, then aged six, identified ‘Tio Robert’ as the man who had visited his parents and then proceeded to torture and kill them. And when the boy takes the stand again to testify, now no longer a six-year-old but a young teenager, he will no doubt remember more about that fateful day when his parents, Linda Leon and Esteban Martinez, were decorating the family’s apartment for Christmas and Tio Robert came to call.

  The Düsseldorf Vampire

  Peter Kürten had the sort of childhood from which few escape unscathed. Kürten Sr had a habit of raping both wife and daughter, and Peter’s older brothers spent much of their time in jail. As a nine-year-old he was befriended by the municipal rat-catcher, who enjoyed torturing and sexually abusing animals in front of him. The young Kürten found these experiences stimulating in ways which he could not begin to express or understand. As he got older, he came up with his own twists, stabbing sheep and tearing the heads off swans to drink their blood. It was a taste he would never lose.

  In his late teens he attacked two girls, nearly killing one of them. Although he was soon convicted, he received only a four-year prison sentence. In later years, he would remember the days spent fantasizing in his cell about all the crimes he would one day commit. Arson came high on the list, because he found it to be so sexually satisfying. Poisoning children with arsenic was another idea he found appealing. Kürten got intense enjoyment out of inflicting pain.

  It seems unlikely that he reached the age of thirty without killing anyone, but his first known murder was committed in 1913. He described his rape and killing of a ten-year-old innkeeper’s daughter with detailed relish at his trial seventeen years later, noting that the public horror and indignation ‘did me good’. When the First World War broke out the following year, he was called up, but allegedly deserted on his first day of service. If so, one wonders how he avoided being shot when arrested for yet another arson offence. Instead, he spent a few more years in jail. He was a well-behaved prisoner; however, when he volunteered to help with the laying out of dead prisoners his offer was, unfortunately, accepted.

  Kürten did not look like a sadistic vampire. He was fastidious about his appearance, had perfect manners and an easy way with children. Around 192
1 it seems he almost lost himself inside this mask. He married, and treated his wife with great gentleness. He got and kept a job. It was only his half-strangled mistresses who saw the violence still simmering within.

  In 1925 his job sent him back to Düsseldorf, to where his troubles had all begun. ‘The sunset was blood-red on my return,’ he said later. ‘I considered this to be an omen symbolic of my destiny’.

  He started killing with what seemed an ever-increasing ferocity – animals, children, women and men. He clubbed them, stabbed them, strangled them with his bare hands. The police, following this trail of carnage, could see only one connecting link – the frenzied consumption of blood. The papers called the killer the ‘Düsseldorf Vampire’, and Kürten’s wife was so frightened of becoming a victim of ‘the Vampire’ that she asked her husband to escort her home from work each night.

  Early in 1930 he slashed a five-year-old girl to death, yet a few weeks later he let his last potential victim go, after checking that she did not remember his address. But the girl had tricked him, and Kürten soon realized as much.

  Kürten confessed to his wife, and persuaded her to give him up for the reward. At his trial he pleaded guilty to nine charges of murder and a host of other crimes.

  Before his execution, he told his psychiatrist that he hoped to hear, for just a second or two, the sound of blood gushing from his own neck. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be the pleasure to end all pleasures’.

  The East End Rackets

  The Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, were probably the nearest London ever came to producing an indigenous Mafia. On the surface they were legitimate businessmen, the owners of clubs and restaurants haunted by the fashionable rich. But in reality they were racketeers and murderers, protected from prosecution by their reputation for extreme violence.

  They were born in the London’s East End in 1933 – and soon had a reputation as fighters. Both became professional boxers and, after a brief stint in the army, bouncers at a Covent Garden nightclub. It was then that they started in the protection business, using levels of intimidation that were, to say the least, unusual for their time. Their cousin Ronald Hart later said of them:

  ‘I saw beatings that were unnecessary even by underworld standards and witnessed people slashed with a razor just for the hell of it.’

  In 1956, Ronnie Kray was imprisoned for his part in a beating and stabbing in a packed East End pub, and judged insane. But three years later he was released from mental hospital, and the twins were back in business, cutting a secret swathe of violence through the British capital while being romanticized in the British press – along with people like actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp – as East-End-boys-made-good.

  When they were arrested in 1965 for demanding money with menaces, a member of the British aristocracy actually stood up in the House of Lords and asked why they were being held for so long without trial. They were ultimately acquitted.

  In the same year Ronnie, who was homosexual, committed his first known murder: of the chief lieutenant of the twins’ main rivals for criminal power in London, brothers Eddie and Charles Richardson.

  George Cornell was shot in the head in another crowded East-End pub. But not a single witness was prepared to come forward. When Reggie heard the news of what his twin, known as ‘the Colonel,’ had been up to, he said:

  ‘Well, Ronnie does some funny things.’

  Ronnie, though, was exultant at having got away with the killing and having sent out a message that he was above the law.

  ‘He was very proud. . .’

  — said Hart,

  ‘and was constantly getting at Reggie and asking him when he was going to do his murder.’

  Two years later Reggie chose his mark, a small-time robber and hard man called Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who was said to have bad-mouthed the twins. Reggie had McVitie ‘escorted’ from a Hackney jazz club to a nearby basement, where Reggie stabbed him to death as his brother shouted him on.

  In 1969, after a long undercover investigation, the Krays and their henchmen were finally brought to justice, charged with these two murders and with a third: that of an escaped convict called Frank Mitchell, nicknamed the Mad Axe-Man. Though Mitchell’s murder was never proved, both twins were given life sentences, with a recommendation that they serve at least thirty years.

  Their elder brother Charlie, who’d helped to get rid of McVitie’s body, was sentenced to ten years.

  In 1979, while still in prison, Ronnie was once more declared insane and sent to a mental hospital. But the myth of the Krays as East-End-boys-made-good – men who never forgot a good turn and loved their old neighbourhood and their mother – continued to cling to them.

  A feature film was made about their lives and their careers of crime – in that, too, they resembled the American Mafia in more ways than one.

  When they died in prison, five years apart, there were massive turn-outs at their lavish East-End funerals.

  A Fatal Falling Out

  Computer-generated reconstructions are becoming a familiar feature of murder trials in the United States, but there is increasing concern that juries are accepting them as factual representations of what happened, rather than as just one possible scenario. The dangers of accepting computer-generated reconstructions as evidence was highlighted in 1991 at the trial of Californian pornographer James Mitchell.

  Forty-year-old James was on trial for the murder of his younger brother Artie. There was no denying the fact that James had killed Artie, for the five shots that had left the hard-drinking, drug-taking strip-club owner lifeless in the bedroom of his San Francisco home had been caught on tape by a 911 operator.

  The question was, had James planned the shooting, or was it committed in the heat of the moment? The distinction was critical as premeditated murder carried a mandatory life sentence in the state, whereas manslaughter would put him away for just five or six years. The pair were known to have had heated arguments that frequently resulted in an exchange of blows, but they had always managed to bury their differences before either had suffered a serious injury.

  But on the 27 February 1991 it was different and their partnership was terminated, permanently.

  At 10.15pm that night police arrived at the scene to find James pacing up and down outside the house in an excitable state, brandishing a .22 rifle and sporting a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster. Once he had been disarmed they went inside, where they discovered Artie’s body. He had been shot in the stomach, the right arm and in the right eye. Eight spent .22 shell casings were found nearby.

  Crucial Details

  At the trial the prosecution argued that the long space between shots, which could be clearly heard on the 911 tape, clearly demonstrated intent. Had it been a spontaneous shooting the shots would have been fired in quick succession.

  Based on spectrograms of the shots, forensic acoustics expert Dr Harry Hollien was able to identify where each shot on the tape occurred. From this the prosecution were able to create a computer-generated video animation of the murder in which a figure representing Artie was shown being pursued by another – his attacker.

  In court the film was accompanied by a commentary from Arizona criminalist Lucian Haag, who explained that the sequence of events had been determined by tracing the trajectory of the bullets to the impact points and reproducing any deflections in the crime lab. Haag had even gone to the trouble of buying a door like the one in the victim’s house and shooting at it so that he could measure the angle of deflection under controlled conditions.

  Such thoroughness impressed the jury, but the defence successfully argued that, with so many bullets, there were thousands of possible variations and that the video animation was only one scenario, albeit the most likely.

  The judge ruled that the video was to be treated as speculative, not definitive. It was not the job of the crime scene investigators to imagine the scene, but to present the facts and interpret the science.

  Without
a material witness to give evidence as to James Mitchell’s state of mind at the time of the shooting and testimony as to the sequence of events that led up to the fatal shooting, the jury could not be expected to find him guilty of first-degree murder. Consequently James was acquitted on the murder charge but found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail.

  The Finger of Suspicion

  Dr Sam Sheppard and his wife Marilyn were the image of the all-American couple. Dr Sam, as he was known locally, was an even-tempered young man of considerable personal charm with a profitable practice as an osteopath in Bay Village and a large executive-style home in a leafy suburb of Cleveland which the couple shared with their six-year-old son Chip. But their seemingly idyllic world was shattered when, on the night of 3 July 1954, Mrs Sheppard was found brutally beaten to death in the first-floor bedroom and her husband was accused of her murder.

  Dr Sheppard claimed to have been asleep on the living room couch when he heard Marilyn cry out. Bolting up the stairs he had been confronted by a shadowy figure who struck him over the head. When he finally recovered his senses, he stated that he heard the intruder escaping out the back door and gave chase. There in the darkness he saw the silhouette of a bushy-haired man who wheeled around and struck a second disabling blow from which he did not recover until the police arrived.

  From the moment the Coroner, Dr Samuel Gerber, was put on the case he began questioning Dr Sheppard’s version of events. To Gerber’s eyes the scene appeared to have been staged, with drawers pulled out of a bureau and neatly stacked on the floor, Dr Sheppard’s surgical bag emptied and placed in the hallway where it would catch the investigator’s eyes and a bag of valuables stashed in a bush at the bottom of the garden. Inside the bag police found the doctor’s blood-splattered self-winding watch which had stopped at 4.15am. Fingerprints had also been hastily erased, supporting the possibility that a third person had been present, but it seemed highly unlikely that an intruder could have failed to notice Dr Sheppard sleeping in the lounge and left him unmolested while he attacked his wife.