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

by Greig, Charlotte

  Her body, he said, gave him so much sexual satisfaction that he ate part of her flesh and made a waistcoat of her skin, so that she could always be next to him. Once she’d been flayed, though, he needed replacements – so he took to digging in graveyards. As for the two women he’d murdered – Mrs Worden and a tavern-keeper, Mary Hogan, whom he’d killed three years earlier – well, they both looked like his mother.

  Ed Gein was quickly declared to be utterly insane, unfit to stand trial, and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions. He died in the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1984, at the age of 77. He had been throughout, it was said, a model inmate.

  The Race Case

  The case of Medgar Evers is one of the most extraordinary in American legal history. After his murder in 1963, it took almost three decades for justice to be done: but eventually, by a strange twist of fate, it was done, and his name is now remembered with pride as one of the major pioneers of America’s civil rights movement.

  Political Activism

  Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi on 2 July 1925. As a young man he served in the United States army during the Second World War, and went on to enrol in business studies at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi. He was a keen student, involved with many activities, including playing team sports, singing in the college choir, taking part in the debating society, and editing the college newspaper. In fact, he was so successful that he was listed in the ‘Who’s Who’ of American colleges.

  At college, Evers met his wife, Myrlie Beasley, and the pair married in December 1951. After receiving his degree, the newly wed couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Evers was a bright, ambitious young man, who was determined to combat the racism of the Mississippi establishment so that he could follow his career path and raise his family in peace in the place where he had grown up.

  His first job after leaving college was as an insurance salesman, travelling round the South. On his travels, he saw for himself the abject poverty in which many black families lived, and was determined to do something about it. He became more active in politics, joining the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and helping to organize boycotts of gasoline stations that were refusing to allow black people to use the restroom facilities. He also helped to set up local chapters of the NAACP around the Mississippi delta.

  In 1952, in recognition of his efforts, Evers was appointed the first full-time field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. His job was to collect and disseminate information about civil rights violations. He also organized non-violent protests against segregation, for which he was imprisoned. He was badly beaten several times, but he refused to be intimidated and carried on with his political activism.

  Fresh Fingerprints On The Gun

  In 1954, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi to study law. At that time the university was segregated, but Evers cited the ruling of the Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. When his application was rejected, Evers campaigned for the desegregation of the university. In 1962, the campaign finally bore fruit when it enrolled its first black student, James Meredith. This triumph was at a cost, however: it sparked riots that left two people dead. In some quarters, Evers was blamed for inciting the violence, although he had always stated that ‘violence is not the way’ and had supported civil disobedience as a way of bringing about real change.

  On 12 June 1963, Evers pulled into his driveway after a meeting and was brutally shot as he stepped out of his car, right outside his home. When the police were called, a gun was found in the bushes nearby, covered in fresh fingerprints. After analysis, there was no doubt who they belonged to: Byron de la Beckwith, a well-known figure in the local white segregationist movement. De la Beckwith had been heard to say that he wanted to kill Evers. After the murder, de la Beckwith was immediately arrested and charged, but despite the evidence, he was never convicted.

  On two separate occasions, all-white juries failed to agree that de la Beckwith was guilty as charged. However, many years later, in 1989, new evidence came to light that the jury in both trials had been pressurized not to convict. There was also evidence of statements that de la Beckwith had made about the case, implying that he had committed the murder.

  Body Exhumed

  In 1994, a new trial commenced, during which Evers’ body had to be exhumed. It was found to be in a good enough state of preservation to corroborate the information. Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder on 5 February 1994. He appealed against the verdict, but his appeal was rejected, and he went on to serve his sentence, dying in prison in 2001.

  This was no ordinary cold case, however, in which new evidence alone resulted in a conviction. The years after Evers’ death had seen a fundamental change in attitudes in the United States, as people began to realize the injustices of racism, prompted by the campaigns of the civil rights movement and the passing of a civil rights bill that enshrined the principles of equal rights in law. Over the years, it had become clear that segregation, and the violence involved in implementing it, was no longer excusable or acceptable in modern America.

  As part of this process, the reputation of Medgar Evers grew. Immediately after his death, he was mourned nationally, and buried with honours at Arlington Cemetery. Nina Simone composed a song as a tribute to him (Mississippi Goddamn), as did Bob Dylan (Only a Pawn in their Game), which helped to establish him as a legendary figure. He became known as one of the earliest civil rights pioneers, whose courage and vision had been instrumental in kicking off the civil rights movement in the United States. Thus, pressure to convict his murderer, and to overturn the biased decisions of the past trials, also grew. In a sense, the final Medgar Evers trial, decades after his death, was not just a trial of his murderer, but of the racist attitudes that had allowed his murder to take place, and to go unpunished for so many years.

  The Rape Slayings

  Carl Panzram was a true misanthrope – a man who positively loathed his fellow human beings. His thirty-nine years on earth saw him drift from an abusive childhood to a nomadic adulthood spent in and out of a hellish prison system. In between, he took his revenge by killing at least twenty-one victims, and robbing and raping many more. When he was put to death in 1930, his last action was to spit in the hangman’s face and say: ‘Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard, I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.’

  Panzram was born on a farm in Warren, Minnesota, on 28 June 1891, one of seven children in a dirt-poor German immigrant family. Theirs was a desperately hard life that became even harder when Carl was seven years old: his father walked out one day and never came back.

  His mother and brothers struggled to keep the farm going, working from dawn till dusk in the fields. During this time, his brothers used to beat him unmercifully for no reason at all. At the age of eleven he gave them a good reason: he broke into a neighbour’s house and stole whatever he could find, including a handgun. His brothers beat him unconscious when they found out.

  Brutal Correctional Institution

  Panzram was arrested for the crime and sent to the Minnesota State Training School in 1903, aged twelve. This was a brutal institution in which he was regularly beaten and raped by the staff. Here he acquired a taste for forced gay sex and an abiding hatred of authority. In 1905 he expressed this hatred by burning part of the school down. He was not identified as the culprit, however, and was able to persuade a parole panel that year that he was a reformed character. The opposite was closer to the truth: the Carl Panzram who emerged from the school was in reality a deformed character.

  Panzram returned home for a while, went to school briefly, then left after an altercation with a teacher. He worked on his mother’s farm until, at fourteen, he jumped on a freight train and headed westwards. For the next few years he lived the life of a teenage hobo. He committed crimes and was the victim of them; he was sent to ref
orm schools and broke out of them. When he was sixteen, in 1907, he joined the army but refused to accept the discipline and was then caught trying to desert with a bundle of stolen clothing. He was dishonourably discharged and sent to the fearsome Leavenworth Prison, where he spent two hard years, breaking rocks and becoming a very strong, dangerous man. On his release, he returned to his roaming. He was arrested at various times and under various names for vagrancy, burglary, arson and robbery. The one crime he was not arrested for, but took particular pleasure in carrying out, was homosexual rape. Once he even raped a policeman who was trying to arrest him. His crimes escalated in savagery and so did his prison sentences; he served time in both Montana and Oregon.

  In 1918, Panzram escaped from Oregon State Prison, where he had been serving a sentence under the name Jefferson Baldwin. He decided to leave the north-east, where he had become very well known to the police. He changed his name to John O’Leary and headed for the east coast, where he would make the transition from robber and rapist to cold-blooded killer.

  Bait

  He began by carrying out a string of burglaries that made him enough money to buy a yacht. He would lure sailors on to the yacht, get them drunk, rape them, kill them and then dump their bodies in the sea. This went on until his boat crashed and sank, by which time he reckoned he had killed ten men. Broke once more, Panzram stowed away on a ship and ended up in Angola, Africa. He signed on with an oil company who were drilling off the coast of the Congo. While he was there, he raped and killed a twelve-year-old boy. Then he went on a crocodile hunting expedition that ended when he killed the six local guides he had hired, raped their corpses and fed them to the crocodiles.

  Captured

  Panzram retuned to the States soon after, as witnesses had seen him engage the guides. He went on to rape and murder an eleven-year-old boy, George McMahon, in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. Over the next months, he carried out two more murders and numerous robberies.

  Finally, he was captured while in the act of burgling a railway station. This was to be his toughest sentence yet: he began it in Sing Sing, but proved so unruly that he was sent on to Dannemora, an infamous establishment where he was beaten and tortured by the guards. His legs were broken and left untreated, leaving him semi-crippled and in constant pain for the rest of his life.

  On release in July 1928, Panzram immediately carried out a string of burglaries and at least one murder before being rearrested. By now he was evidently tired of life. On arrest he gave his real name for the first time and, while in prison in Washington DC, confessed to several murders of young boys. Encouraged by a prison guard with whom he struck up an unlikely friendship, he went on to write a 20,000-word account of his terrible life and crimes. This remains a remarkable document, a horrifying but unusually even-handed account of a serial killer’s inner life. Following the confessions, and amid a flurry of media interest, Panzram was tried for the most recent of his murders: the strangling of Alexander Uszacke. He was found guilty and sentenced to serve twenty-five years at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

  Following the sentence, Panzram warned the world that he would kill the first man who crossed him when he was inside. He was as good as his word. He was given work in the laundry and one day murdered his supervisor, Robert Warnke, by staving in his head with an iron bar.

  This time, Panzram was sentenced to hang. He positively welcomed the court’s verdict and claimed that now his only ambition was to die. There was nothing else that he wanted. When anti-death penalty campaigners tried to have his sentence commuted, he ungraciously wrote to them to say: ‘I wish you all had one neck and I had my hands on it.’ Shortly afterwards, on 3 September 1930, his wish to die was granted, and he was duly hanged.

  Carl Panzram was a man who positively loathed his fellow human beings.

  The Rippings in Rostov

  Andrei Chikatilo, the ‘Rostov Ripper’, killer of over fifty women, girls and boys, came to the attention of the world following his arrest in 1990, just as the Soviet Union was starting to break up. Indeed, had he been caught earlier it is more than likely that his name would have remained obscure. Soviet Russia liked to pretend that such crimes as serial murder were purely a product of the decadent West; we still do not know the full extent of criminality during the years of the communist regime.

  Hannibal Lecter

  Chikatilo was born in Yablochnoye, a village deep in the heart of rural Ukraine, on 19 October 1936. The baby was found to have water on the brain, which gave him a misshapen head and, it was later revealed, a degree of brain damage. He was also unlucky enough to be born during the period of forced collectivization imposed by Stalin, a time of terrible famine and untold suffering. According to Chikatilo’s mother, Andrei had an older brother named Stepan who was kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbours during this time. It is unclear if this was actually true – there is no record of a Stepan Chikatilo ever existing – but it was certainly a tale that succeeded in traumatizing the young Chikatilo. (Thomas Harris later borrowed this awful story to explain the pathology of his fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.) To make matters worse, the boy’s early childhood was spent during the Second World War, when the region’s misery grew even worse. His father was taken prisoner during the war, then sent to a Russian prison camp on his return.

  On leaving school, Chikatilo joined the army. He also joined the Communist Party, which was essential for any ambitious young person who wanted to succeed in Soviet Russia. On leaving the army, he worked as a telephone engineer and studied in his spare time to gain a university degree, which eventually allowed him to became a schoolteacher near his home in Rostov-on Don. At the same time he married a woman named Fayina, found for him by his sister. As it emerged later, Chikatilo had lifelong problems with impotence, but he did manage to father two children.

  False Alibi

  Chikatilo appeared to be living a regular life. By the time his darker urges began to express themselves, he was forty-two, much older than most serial killers. In 1979 he chose his first victim, a nine-year-old girl called Lenochka Zakotnova. He took her to a vacant house in the town of Shakhty, attempted to rape her, failed, and then using a knife, stabbed her to death and dumped her body into the Grushovka River. She was found there on Christmas Eve. Luckily for Chikatilo – who was questioned as a suspect in the case but was given a false alibi by his wife – a known local rapist Alexander Kravchenko was beaten into confessing to the crime and put to death.

  Nevertheless, evidence of Chikatilo’s true nature was starting to leak out and he was fired from his teaching job for molesting boys in the school dormitory. His party membership stood him in good stead, however, and he was soon given a new job as a travelling procurement officer for a factory in Shakhty. The job involved plenty of moving around the area and thus plenty of opportunity to kill. His preferred method was to approach his victims at a train or bus station and lure them into nearby woodland to kill them.

  He started in earnest in 1982 with the murder of seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko, a girl known locally for exchanging sexual favours for food and drink. Chikatilo strangled her and piled dirt into her mouth to muffle her screams. He later claimed that his first killing had upset him, but that this second one thrilled him. In June 1982 he killed his next victim, thirteen-year-old Lyuba Biryuk, cutting out her eyes, an act that became his trademark.

  Increasing Savagery

  Over the next year he killed six more times, two of the victims young men. What the killings had in common was their increasing savagery and the removal of body parts, particularly the genitals. It is believed that Chikatilo ate the parts he removed in a hideous echo of his brother’s fate, however, he himself only confessed to ‘nibbling on them’.

  The murders attracted much police concern, but the Soviet media was not permitted to publicize the existence of a maniacal killer on the loose. In the single month of August 1984, eight victims were found. The only clue the police had was that, judging by the sem
en found on the bodies of some of the more recent victims, the killer’s blood group was AB.

  Soon afterwards, in late 1984, Chikatilo was arrested at a railway station where he was importuning young girls. He was found to have a knife and a length of rope in his bag but, because his blood group was A, not AB, he was released. This discrepancy has never been explained.

  Released by the police, Chikatilo simply carried on killing. Dozens more innocents lost their lives over the next five years. In 1988, he claimed eight lives and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed nine more people. By then a new detective, Issa Kostoyev, had taken over the case.

  Kostoyev hit on a strategy of flooding the train and bus stations with detectives, and eventually the plan paid off. Immediately after murdering his final victim, twenty-year-old Svetlana Korostik, Chikatilo was spotted, perspiring heavily and apparently bloodstained, at a station. A detective took his name and, when it was realized that he had previously been a suspect, he was arrested. After ten days in custody he finally confessed to fifty-two murders, more than the police had been aware of. He was arrested and brought to trial in April 1992.

  Locked inside a cage to protect him from victims’ relatives, Chikatilo was a shaven-headed madman who ranted and raved in the courtroom. Found guilty, on 15 February 1994, he was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.