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

by Greig, Charlotte

  Seven months later, John thought his luck had turned when a prisoner informed him that a new inmate was boasting that he had intentionally killed a young girl for the fun of it in John’s neighbourhood on the night in question. The driver was Eric Edgar Cooke, a psychopath who had been sentenced to death for a series of brutal murders. The police took Cooke to identify where he had run Rosemary down, but he pointed out the wrong place and so John’s appeal was turned down. Cooke again confessed to Rosemary’s murder on the day of his execution, but it was not sufficient to free John Button. Button was released after five years in 1968 for good behaviour.

  Freedom Is Not Enough

  Free, but unable to live with the stigma of being labelled a convicted killer, John determined to clear his name. He found an unlikely ally in Estelle Blackburn, a female journalist who had been dating his brother. She was able to access files that had been closed to John and to interview people who would not talk to him about the case.

  Estelle discovered that Cooke had confessed to six hit-and-run murders, but that this information had not been introduced at John’s appeal. Convinced that John was innocent, Estelle enlisted the help of W. R. ‘Rusty’ Haight, an expert in the new forensic science of Pedestrian Crash Reconstruction, which Rusty liked to describe as ‘common sense mixed with basic physics’.

  Using a properly weighted and articulated bio-medical dummy suspended from a fishing line, which broke on impact, and a lightweight French Simca identical to John’s car, Haight proved that the damage to the car was inconsistent with the injuries sustained by the victim.

  Rosemary had been hit at 48km/h (30mph), which leaves distinctive markings on the vehicle as the body folds around the front of the car with the head impacting on the bonnet to leave a noticeable dent. John’s car did not have this damage when the police impounded it. Furthermore, Haight managed to obtain a 1963 Holden which was the car Cooke had driven when he claimed to have killed the six women. When the dummy was hit by the Holden it landed on its back in the position John claimed to have found Rosemary in, whereas when the Simca hit it the dummy landed on its face.

  But one last question needed to be answered before the new evidence could be admitted in an appeal. Cooke’s car had a plastic visor to shield the driver from glare and the police had always maintained that if Cooke had killed Rosemary the visor would have been damaged.

  After various experiments, Haight was able to demonstrate that the flexibility of the plastic visor meant that it snapped back into shape after the impact.

  Armed with this compelling evidence and Estelle Blackburn’s best-selling book on the case, Button’s lawyers were able to argue successfully that the original prosecution case was fatally flawed.

  It was not until 2000 that John Button was finally exonerated of the manslaughter of Rosemary Anderson having, in his words, been ‘imprisoned by the injustice of the whole affair’ for the previous 37 years.

  The Hitch-Hiker Killings

  Ed Kemper, whose parents separated when he was seven, grew up troubled and sadistic. He tortured animals; he once cut the hands and feet off his sister’s doll. But with people he was painfully shy. When his sister teased him about secretly wanting to kiss his teacher, he said:

  ‘If I kissed her, I’d have to kill her first.’

  And this is precisely what the adult Ed Kemper – 6 feet 9 inches tall and weighing almost 300 pounds – did. But first there was a teenage prelude. For in 1962, when he was 13, he ran away from the mother he hated to join his father – and his father promptly sent him back. Unwanted by either, he was despatched to live with his grandparents on a ranch in California; and two years later he shot them both dead. He was, in other words, a serial time-bomb which had already begun to go off.

  After five years in a hospital for the criminally insane, he was released into the care of his mother, who was then living in Santa Cruz. It was a bitter household. But Kemper got a job as a labourer, and finally bought himself a car. He began to pick up hitch-hikers.

  On May 7th 1972, he picked up two women students from Fresno State College, Anita Luchese and Mary Anne Pesce, held them at gunpoint and drove them out to a wooded canyon. He stabbed them both to death and raped their corpses, before taking the bodies back home in the trunk of his car. Upstairs in his room, he took off their heads with his hunting knife – nicknamed ‘the General’ – had sex again with their corpses and then dissected them. He buried what was left in the mountains.

  Four months later, on September 14th, he picked up a fifteen-year-old high-school student, and again drove her, at gunpoint, up into the mountains. He taped her mouth and suffocated her by sticking his fingers up her nostrils. Then, as earlier, he raped her, took her home and cut off her head, had sex with her again and dismembered her. His mother noticed nothing unusual as he took her remains out to the car in garbage bags for disposal.

  After another four-month interval, in January 1973, he struck again, and again his victim was a student, this time at Cabrillo College. Claudia Schall was shot on a quiet road near Freedom, California, dumped into the trunk and then hidden in a closet in Kemper’s bedroom. The following morning, after his mother had gone to work, he violated her corpse and then cut it up with an axe in the shower.

  He took the various parts of Schall’s body to Carmel and threw them over the cliffs into the sea. Amazingly some parts were later found and identified.

  A month later, he picked up two more students – after a particularly vicious row with his mother. He shot them both in the head and drove their bodies back, only to find that his mother was still home. Unable to wait, he decapitated both bodies in the trunk; and the next morning, after his mother had gone, took the headless corpses upstairs and had sex with at least one of them. Then, after cutting off the hands of one of the students and getting rid of both heads, he dumped the bodies in Eden Canyon.

  Kemper’s killings can be seen to have been caused – at least in part – by his hatred of his mother; and on Easter Day, 1973, he went to the source: he killed her in her bedroom with a hammer and cut off her head with ‘the General.’

  Then he invited one of his mother’s woman friends, Sara Hallett, to dinner, knocked her unconscious, strangled, decapitated and had sex with her. The next morning, after sleeping in his mother’s bed, he took the money from Mrs Hallett’s handbag and drove off in her car, expecting the police to be after him.

  In the end, when nothing happened, he gave himself up, after finally persuading the police that he really was the so-called ‘Co-Ed Killer.’ Now there could be no doubt. He’d cut out his mother’s larynx, he said, and tossed it into the garbage,

  ‘because it seemed appropriate after she had bitched me so much.’

  Kemper was found sane; and despite his request to be executed, was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In custody, he was later asked what he thought when he saw a pretty girl across the street: ‘One side of me says, “I’d like to talk to her, date her.” The other side of me says, “I wonder how her head would look on a stick.”’

  Ed Kemper picked up hitch-hikers before brutally slaying them.

  House of Horrors

  Gary Heidnik was two when his quarrelsome, alcoholic parents split up. His mother took custody of him and his new-born brother Terry, but soon found she could not cope and handed them back to their father. When Gary persistently wet his bed his father beat him and hung the sheets out of the window to show the neighbours. A fall from a tree gave the boy a slightly misshapen head, earning him the nickname ‘football head’, and generally adding to his misery.

  Like Ed Kemper, whose story offers so many points of comparison, Gary Heidnik was a clever boy who never found a way of putting his intelligence to positive use. He did well at his military academy, and joined the regular army at the age of eighteen, in 1961. Despite devoting rather too much energy to loan sharking, he actually seemed to be making a career of the military, until a random neurological test earned him an immediate
discharge. The ‘schizoid personality disorder’ diagnosis earned him a disability pension for life, but seems to have taken away his main reason for living.

  Heidnik settled in Philadelphia and drifted from job to job. He qualified as a nurse but was fired for sub-standard performance, got work as a psychiatric nurse and was fired for his bad attitude. Neither father nor mother wanted much to do with him, and he spent his twenties in and out of mental institutions. His mother committed suicide in 1970 after learning she had cancer, and Gary reportedly attempted the same act as many as thirteen times.

  In 1971 he gave new meaning to the phrase ‘living in a world of his own’ – creating his own church, the United Church of the Ministers of God. There was only ever one minister – Bishop Heidnik – and the core members of his small congregation were mentally handicapped African-American women from a nearby institution. Bingo and loan sharking paid the Bishop’s salary, and the congregation fulfilled his sexual needs, often en masse. He used some of the money to play the stock exchange, and proved himself either smart or lucky – by 1977 he had accumulated over $35,000. He invested this with Merrill Lynch, and saw it rise to almost $500,000 over the next decade. Since his church was registered as a charity he paid virtually no tax.

  Early in 1978 Heidnik’s mentally handicapped girlfriend gave birth to his child, but nothing much changed in the Bishop’s lifestyle. In May he broke his girlfriend’s sister out of a mental institution and hid her away in his basement. When police came looking for the woman, they found she had endured a regime of beatings and sexual abuse. Heidnik received a three-to-seven year sentence for unlawful imprisonment and deviant sex. During his time in the state penitentiary he again attempted suicide on several occasions, once by swallowing a lightbulb.

  He re-emerged, aged forty, in April 1983. His child had been put in a home, but his material wealth had continued to grow in his absence, allowing him to purchase the property at 3520 North Marshall Street which would come to be known as the ‘House of Horrors’. The group sex sessions with black women resumed, but Heidnik decided he also wanted a Filipino wife. A visit to a matrimonial agency and several plausible letters served one up. Betty Disto arrived, married him, and then discovered that she had to share a bed with his congregation. When she protested, he beat her. After three months of that, she fled.

  It would appear that all these people running away from him was becoming really irritating. A plan began forming in his mind, a plan for a Heidnik Utopia, one world from which escape would not be possible. On 26 November 1986 he started to gather its population, picking up black prostitute Josefina Rivera and bringing her home. She thought she was being paid for a few minutes’ sex, but found herself shackled to a sewerage pipe in Heidnik’s basement, watching him digging a hole in the earth floor. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told the terrified woman – the hole was for punishment, not burial. And she would not be alone for long: the basement was big enough for ten women, and the plan was that each of them would bear him a child. Later that day she managed to get the boards off a window and scream for help, but only Heidnik came. He beat her, threw her in the punishment hole, and left her with full volume rock music for twenty-seven hours.

  Three days after abducting Rivera, he kidnapped an old girlfriend, Sandy Lindsay. Several years earlier she had aborted his baby, and Heidnik had neither forgotten nor forgiven. Through December the two women were kept in steadily deteriorating conditions. There were no washing or toilet facilities, and their initial diet of oatmeal and bread was soon replaced by dog-food sandwiches. Both women were subject to daily beatings and rapes from Heidnik, and were often forced to beat each other. Real or imagined protests were punished by a spell in the earthen hole, crammed in a space only four feet square, under a plywood lid and its sandbag weight.

  Between 22 December and 19 January Heidnik lured three more African-American women – Lisa Thomas, Deborah Dudley and Jacqueline Askins. The rapes and beatings continued, but the higher population encouraged a new command structure, and Heidnik elevated Josefina Rivera to ‘trusty’ status. In return for fewer punishments and the odd meal out, she helped him keep the others in order. She later claimed that she had no choice if she wanted to live, but some of the others thought she went further than she needed to.

  Death

  Towards the end of January, Sandy Lindsay was hung by the hands from the ceiling as a punishment for trying to escape. Heidnik left her there for a week, then seemed surprised when she died of exhaustion. Her death brought no amelioration of his regime though. On the contrary, it grew harsher. Not long after Lindsay’s body was taken upstairs, the house resounded to the whine of a power saw. And then a sickly smell drifted down to the basement, a smell the women soon recognized in their daily ‘dog-food’ sandwiches. Anxious to leave no doubt, Heidnik took Dudley upstairs and showed her Lindsay’s severed head in a pot on the stove. They were being fed the rest of her, he said. He had apparently got the idea from the movie Eating Raoul.

  On 18 February he experimented with a new type of punishment. He crammed all but Rivera in the hole, filled it with water, and used bare wires to give them electric shocks. Dudley died. Around the same time he pierced all but Rivera’s eardrums with a screwdriver. The aim was to prevent them discussing any rescue attempt.

  Rivera was with him when he buried Dudley in a New Jersey park on 22 March, and when he picked up his last victim, Agnes Adams, on the following day. On 24 March, Rivera warned him that Adams’ family might go to the police if she simply disappeared; a single visit would set their minds at rest.

  It worked. He left her at the corner where, four months earlier, he had picked her up. Rivera went straight to the police, who were eventually convinced by the shackle-marks on her ankles. Investigating officers forced their way into 3520 North Marshall Street at 4.30 the following morning, arrested the startled Heidnik and brought an end to his prisoners’ dreadful ordeal.

  In the fridge the startled police found a severed human fore-arm and around 24 pounds of neatly packaged human meat.

  The story soon got out, and Heidnik was beaten up by other prisoners within hours of his arrest. His father told reporters ‘I hope to hell they hang him, and you can quote me on that. I’ll even pull the rope.’

  He neglected to add how hard he had tried to infect both his sons with his own virulent racism. ‘A black life,’ he had apparently often told them, ‘has no value’.

  The defence plea of insanity was torpedoed by the judge’s refusal to admit Heidnik’s record of mental illness as evidence. With no other context for judgement, the jury went by the crimes and opted for death. After eleven years on Pennsylvania’s death row, Heidnik was finally executed by lethal injection in July 1999.

  Gary Heidnik, who was executed by lethal injection in July 1999.

  I Am Your Flesh

  Armin Meiwes was born in 1962. His parents owned a rambling manor house outside Rotenburg in central Germany, and it was here that he grew up, lived his adult life, and committed the acts for which he is now notorious.

  His father, who left when Meiwes was only eight, had ignored him when he was still around. The boy’s mother, on the other hand, was incapable of letting him alone, and her suffocating attentions made him an object of ridicule at school. Not surprisingly, Meiwes retreated into a fantasy world, inventing an imaginary brother named Franky. His plans for this brother, however, did not include the usual brotherly relations. Meiwes dreamt of binding Franky to himself in perpetuity by the simple act of consuming him. This fantasy, he told a packed courtroom years later, had developed in the years after his father’s departure. ‘And in the end I fulfilled it,’ he concluded.

  In 1981 Meiwes joined the army, but he continued to live at home, and took his mother with him on troop outings. At the end of the 1980s she became bed-ridden, and he left the army to train as a computer technician and look after her.

  Her death in 1999 set him free to pursue his fantasy. Hoping for like-minded guests, he set about renovatin
g the rather dilapidated family home. Included in the make-over was a new ‘slaughter room’, complete with cage, meat-hook and pulley. By day he went to work, by night he trawled the internet for others who shared his cannibalistic fantasies. He spoke to more than two hundred of them on chatlines, and several came to visit after he posted the ad: ‘Gay male seeks hunks 18–30 to slaughter.’ Some allowed him to hoist them up on the hook and mark up the choicest cuts on their bodies with a pen. None, however, was actually willing to be eaten.

  Towards the end of 2000, a 43 year-old microchip engineer named Bernd-Jurgen Brandes replied to Meiwes’ advertisement using the pseudonym ‘Cator’, and over the next few months they communicated by email. Brandes said he was willing to fill the role Meiwes had marked out for Franky. ‘There is absolutely no way back for me,’ he wrote, ‘only forwards, through your teeth’.

  In March 2001 Brandes wrote a will leaving everything to his unknowing gay partner, had it notarized, and took the train westwards. According to Meiwes, Brandes met him at the station with the words: ‘I am your Cator, I am your flesh’.

  Back at the house, they stripped off and discussed what they were about to do. After Brandes had consumed twenty sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps to dull the expected pain, Meiwes removed his new friend’s penis and testicles with a kitchen knife. This, like everything else which happened that evening, was faithfully recorded on his camcorder.