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

by Greig, Charlotte

  As it emerged, from an early age both Michael and his older brother, Tommy, had been extremely disturbed, difficult children. In all, there were seven Skakel children, and there were numerous family problems throughout their childhood. Rushton Skakel had left his children to their own devices, and the older ones among them regularly drank and smoked pot. On the night of Martha’s murder, Tommy and Michael had been drinking heavily in front of their younger brothers and sisters, and their tutor Kenneth Littleton. Martha and her friends had visited, and she and Tommy had begun to make amorous advances towards each other.

  What also transpired was that, after the murder, police initially investigated Tommy as a suspect. He took two lie detector tests, one of which he failed, and one of which he passed. However, after this, his father Rushton refused to make Tommy available for further investigation. The fact that the police accepted this, and ceased their enquiry, had attracted criticism at the time. However, it later became clear that the police were following up the wrong suspect. It was Michael, not Tommy, who killed Martha, in a fit of jealousy because she appeared to prefer his older brother.

  The results of the grand jury investigation were made public on 19 January 2000. Skakel was then arrested on a charge of murder, and brought to trial two years later, on 4 May 2002.

  The jury took a total of four days to reach a verdict, but when they did they found Michael Skakel guilty of murder. He was sentenced to a term of life imprisonment.

  The Murder of the Heiress

  The case of Helen Brach, the heiress who mysteriously disappeared in 1975, is one of the most surprising in United States legal history. With no witnesses, no body, and no leads for police to follow up, the investigation went cold shortly after her death – even though, clearly, someone had killed her for her money.

  Then, in a surprise twist, the case was warmed up many years later, and the man responsible for her murder finally brought to justice. Chillingly, however, it was the fact that the heiress left so much money sitting in the bank, rather than that she herself was missed, that had prompted a re-investigation of the case.

  The Hat-Check Girl And The Millionaire

  Helen Brach was born Helen Vorhees, and came from a working-class Midwestern family in Ohio. She lived most of her life in workaday circumstances, without much money and was working as a hat-check girl when she met her millionaire husband-to-be, Frank Brach. Frank was the son of Emil Brach, an immigrant who had come up with a new method for making caramel, and had founded a massively successful candy empire, E.J. Brach and Sons. His son Frank proved an astute businessman, and subsequently had made millions for the company since then.

  When Frank and Helen met, Frank was in the midst of a messy divorce. Not long after he divorced, he and Helen were married. The couple had no children – Helen was forty by the time she married, for the second time, and had no children by her first brief marriage. When Frank retired, the Brachs divided their time between their home in Chicago and a rented property in Palm Beach, Florida. Helen was generous with her new-found wealth, particularly with respect to her family, and bought her mother and brother new houses to live in. However, she did not flaunt her money or parade it in high society, as many other women in the same position would have done.

  In many ways, she remained a down-to-earth Midwesterner, who was careful not to spend too much on unnecessary fripperies.

  Helen and Frank Brach lived comfortably, and uneventfully, for twenty years, until Frank died in 1970, at the age of seventy-nine. This left Helen with a fortune of twenty million dollars. Typically, she continued to live quietly, keeping in touch with her friends and family by phone, and caring for her pet animals. Her two dogs, named Candy and Sugar, became devoted companions, and she went to great lengths to make sure that they were properly looked after. In a rare show of extravagance, when the dogs died, she had them buried in an expensive pink marble grave. Her love of animals also led her to give money to charities, such as the Chicago Zoo.

  The Shady Horse Dealer

  Although not interested in the glitzy parties of Chicago’s rich elite, Helen did take an interest in racing, and after Frank died, expressed a wish to own some horses. She got to know Richard Bailey, the owner of a stables and country club. He was a charming, good-looking man but he had a reputation for shady dealing. He also had a reputation as a ladies’ man of the worst kind: he would wine and dine rich old women, particularly widows, and extract money from them by asking them to buy his horses, most of which cost considerably less than he sold them for. He also often asked the women for a temporary loan which he never paid back. He stopped at nothing to gain their confidence: he would pretend to fall in love with them, have sex with them, even propose marriage, although he already had a wife. He made a specialty of choosing women who were ill, lonely, and even dying. There were more than a few elderly ladies who were smitten by his charms, so he made a good living, but those who knew how he operated despised him.

  When Richard Bailey met Helen Brach, he must have thought he had hit pay dirt. Brach was considerably richer than any of his previous conquests, and obviously lonely. She enjoyed his company, and entrusted him with choosing her new racehorses for her. He began by selling her three horses, all of which were worth much less than she paid for them. However, with Brach, it seems, he bit off more than he could chew. She was not stupid, and although she lived in a very private way, her fortune made her a powerful, well-known figure in Chicago society. Once she realized that Bailey was conning her, she threatened to expose his actions and report him to the police. Exactly what passed between them then, no one will ever know, but the outcome was that Bailey plotted to have her murdered.

  The Heiress Vanishes

  On 17 February 1977, Helen Brach went for a check-up at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. This was the last time a reliable witness saw her alive. Then, according to her houseman, John Matlick, she flew to O’Hare Airport, where he picked her up. However, there is no record of her buying a plane ticket for the flight. For the next few days, while she prepared to go to Florida, no one heard from her, which was unusual for a woman who liked to chat daily to friends and family on the phone. Matlick then claims that he drove her to the airport for her flight to Florida, but that she did not have any luggage or a flight reservation, which again did not tally with the normal habits of this well-organized woman. Two weeks later, not having heard any more from her, Matlick reported her missing. So did another person – her brother, Charles Vorhees.

  Suspicion immediately fell on Matlick and Vorhees, both of whom stood to gain from Brach’s will. The pair admitted that they had destroyed her diary, which might have yielded valuable information about the days leading up to her disappearance, but said that she had asked them to do this should anything ever happen to her. Both their stories appeared questionable, but the police did not manage to find enough evidence to charge either of them, and dropped the case. Without a body, or any concrete information that could lead to finding out what had happened, the investigation began to dry up. Nobody seemed to care very much what had happened to Helen Brach, and her disappearance was soon forgotten. Yet her money – of course – was not, and it was the investigation into her accounts that finally brought the truth to light.

  Everett Moore, Helen Brach’s accountant, was a trustworthy man with an intimate knowledge of his client’s day-to-day spending habits. He wanted to administrate Helen’s estate, but the Continental Illinois Bank also felt it had a claim to this position. In the end, the court appointed an outside guardian, John Menk, to preside over the investigation. However, Menk did not get very far: Vorhees and Bailey both refused to talk, and since this was not a criminal investigation, there was no way that Menk could make them.

  A Lucky Break

  In 1984, almost ten years after her disappearance, Helen Brach was declared dead. Her estate was divided between the Helen Brach Foundation, Charles Vorhees and John Matlick. A meticulous accounting process began, presided over by Moore, and it w
as found that Matlick had embezzled thousands of dollars out of the estate after Brach had disappeared. In September 1993, Matlick was ordered to pay the estate back. Further investigations into the estate’s accounts showed that Bailey had also defrauded Brach, and this time, once his name came up, the law did not let him go.

  In 1989, an investigation had begun into the horse-racing business in Chicago, and in the process, Richard Bailey’s name had come up. His frauds over selling the horses to Helen Brach soon became known to the investigators, and the case was taken up by Assistant US Attorney Steven Miller. His approach, he announced, was to ‘follow the money and solve the murder’. By a lucky break, he and his team found a veterinarian, Dr Ross Hugi, who had had dealings with Richard Bailey, helping him in his scams. Through Hugi, they found out about an infamous Chicago family, known as ‘The Jayne Gang’, who had been running organized crime in the horse business since the 1930s. Their leader was Silas Jayne, who was widely feared throughout the business as a man who would stop at nothing, including murder – he had even been responsible for the killing of his own brother. And one of Jayne’s associates turned out to be none other than Helen Brach’s erstwhile friend and horse dealer: Richard Bailey.

  The Right Man Brought To Justice

  This was an extraordinary twist to the Brach case that no one could have foreseen. Quite separately, Bailey’s name had come up in another investigation. For the next five years, Miller and his team worked day and night to make the evidence against Bailey stick in the Brach case. Finally, in 1994, they were able to bring Bailey to court, charged with soliciting the murder of Helen Brach.

  Initially, Bailey did not appear unduly troubled by the charge, since there was so little concrete evidence in the case against him. But gradually, as the list of elderly women whom he had defrauded was read out in court, his innocence began to appear more and more questionable. Witnesses also took the stand to testify that he was a violent person, as well as a con man.

  Miller then built a case to show that Bailey had had a strong motive for killing Brach, because she – unlike all the others – had stood up to him and threatened to report his crimes to the police so that he would be put behind bars for the rest of his life.

  And that, in the end, was exactly what happened. Bailey was convicted, and is currently serving his sentence in prison. Not only this, but in the process, a massive insurance fraud in the horse business was uncovered, and a string of crimes dating back to 1955, including homicide and arson, were solved.

  Thus it was that a case that went cold for almost twenty years finally resulted in the conviction of a notorious, cold-blooded killer and swindler who mistakenly thought that he could get away with murder.

  Murder on the Moors

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley did everything they could to co-opt Hindley’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law David Smith. For he was promising raw material: he’d been in trouble with the law from the age of 11 and he liked to drink. So they fed him booze and the books of the Marquis de Sade. They took him out onto the moors for target-practice shooting; and Brady continually dropped hints to him there: about murder, and the photography and burial of bodies.

  Then, in October 1965, they decided finally to pull him in. The twenty-three-year-old Hindley used a pretext to get Smith late at night to the house where she and Brady lived on a public-housing estate in Manchester; and then she pushed him into the living room as soon as she heard Brady starting to attack Edward Evans, a young man they’d picked up earlier in the evening, with an axe. Smith, confused by drink, was a terrified witness to his eventual murder. But Brady and Hindley wanted more. So they passed him the axe, and told him that, with his fingerprints now on it, he was far too involved to be able to retreat. He was forced to help in trussing up the body and cleaning the blood from the floor, furniture and walls.

  By the time he left, Smith’d been persuaded to bring round a pram the next day to move the body to Brady’s car. But when he went home, he told his horrified wife what had happened; and the next day, shaking with fear, and armed with a knife and a screwdriver, he went to a telephone box to call the police.

  The young victim’s body was still in the house; and first Brady, then Hindley were arrested. But then, little by little, as the police searched both the house and Brady’s car, the full extent of their murderous exploits emerged. For in the house was a collection of books on Nazism, sadism and torture – as well as dozens of photographs of Brady and Hindley on the moors. Three sheets of paper discovered in the car seemed to contain instructions about how to bury a body; and in a notebook kept by Brady, amid a list of seemingly random and made-up names, there was one that stood out: that of John Kilbride. Kilbride was a schoolboy who’d disappeared two years before; and the police became convinced that Brady and Hindley had killed the twelve-year-old and buried him on the moors.

  Worse, though, was to come. For, while the police were digging up the moors, looking for Kilbride’s body, a careful search of the books in the house produced a hidden left-luggage ticket for two suitcases which – once retrieved – were found to contain ammunition, coshes, pornographic books, photographs and a number of tapes. One collection of photographs proved to be pornographic pictures of a gagged, naked child: of ten-year-old Leslie Ann Downey, who’d disappeared thirteen months after Kilbride. One of the tapes contained, buried amongst Christmas music, a live sixteen-minute recording of her rape, torture and murder.

  The bodies of both Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey were found on the moors; and the tape was played, to the horror of all those present – indeed of the entire country – at the subsequent trial of Brady and Hindley. Both pleaded not guilty. They had given the police no co-operation at all. But there could be no doubt of their guilt; and the strong suspicion remains that they also killed two other children, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, who disappeared in 1963 and 1964 respectively.

  For the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey, Ian Brady was given three life sentences; Myra Hindley two, with an extra seven years for ‘receiving, comforting and harbouring.’ Later denied both appeal and release, she died in prison in late-2002. Brady – easily the more sinister figure of the two – is still alive behind bars.

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – the Moors Murderers. Brady pleaded not guilty but was given three life sentences.

  A Murdered Teenager

  On the evening of 21 March 1962 Mr and Mrs Miller returned home to find that their 15-year-old daughter Marilyn had disappeared without a trace. Police searched the area and within hours found the girl’s body face down in a reservoir behind the house. They also found footprints and tyre tracks on the dirt road nearby, together with a pair of discarded workman’s gloves and a belt. No one in the neighbourhood had seen or heard anything unusual, although one of Marilyn’s school friends remembered seeing a black and turquoise 1953 model Plymouth parked near the Miller house earlier that night.

  The car was later found abandoned and inside was a pair of boots which matched the footprints on the dirt road. The boots were a lucky break for the detectives because they had been repaired using the heel from another pair of boots, which meant they produced a unique set of prints. Even better, the tyre was found to have a flaw which created highly distinctive tracks that matched the impressions found at the scene.

  All the police had to do was trace the owner of the vehicle and they would have an open-and-shut case. Or so they thought.

  The vehicle was registered to a local dairy worker, Booker T. Hillery Jnr, who had recently been released from prison where he had been serving time for rape. He was immediately arrested and charged with murder. During the course of the investigation the gloves were also identified as belonging to Hillery, which seemed to tie up the case for the prosecution and leave no room for reasonable doubt.

  Hillery was convicted and sentenced to death. But the authorities had reckoned without Hillery’s dogged determination to forestall the inevitable and an ironic twist of fate.
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br />   Through a succession of appeals Hillery managed to keep delaying the execution until 1974 when the US Supreme Court decided to abolish the death penalty. It was later reinstated but by then it was too late: Hillery’s life sentence could not be revoked. Clearly Hillery was a shrewd and cunning killer whose sense of self-preservation outweighed any feelings of remorse.

  The Retrial

  In 1978, not content with escaping the electric chair, Hillery successfully filed for a retrial on the grounds that African-Americans had been deliberately excluded from serving on the Grand Jury in Kings County in 1962. It was a clever ploy because if Hillery could force a retrial he might be able to sow sufficient doubt to secure his release. Time had strengthened his hand. Of the original 24 witnesses, 21 were dead, and the forensic evidence could be disputed on the grounds that the tyre and boot tracks only proved that Hillery was in the vicinity of the Miller house. There was no irrefutable proof that he was actually inside their home. The date for a second trail was set and prosecutors had to present a convincing case or be prepared to drop the charge and see Hillery walk free – perhaps even sue the state for wrongful imprisonment. It was then that they had a lucky break.

  But just before the case came to court, investigators discovered that a resourceful detective had asked Marilyn’s mother to hoover her daughter’s bedroom on the night of the murder in case there were microscopic trace elements which could prove vital in the case. These had miraculously survived in the police archive, and now this bag of dust and dirt was put under the microscope. It was found to contain tiny blue spherical paint particles of the kind produced by a spray can. Normally, when paint is sprayed on a flat surface, the particles flatten out, but these were round because they had been sprayed onto fabric. In fact, minute traces of cotton could be seen sticking to the paint.