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

by Greig, Charlotte

  Clark was immediately arrested and the guns found hidden at his work. Bundy was charged with two murders: Murray and the unknown victim whose killing she confessed to having been present at. Clark was charged with six murders. At his trial he represented himself and tried to blame Bundy for everything, portraying himself as an innocent dupe.

  The jury did not believe him, and he was sentenced to the death penalty, while Bundy received life imprisonment. Ironically enough, it was Bundy who met her end first, dying in prison on 9 December 2003 at the age of sixty-one. Clark, meanwhile, continues to fight his conviction.

  The Vatican Fraud

  Martin Frankel conducted one of the most far-reaching series of frauds in the history of the US financial world. With no formal qualifications and a string of failed business ventures behind him, he managed to pose as an investment specialist and persuade several skilled, intelligent people to part with their money and involve themselves in his scams. He showed no moral scruples whatsoever, and for many years got away with his crimes. However, his insecurity and paranoia finally got the better of him, and he was eventually brought to justice when his trail of lies was uncovered.

  Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1954, Frankel’s father was a well-respected Lucas County judge, Leon Frankel. Martin was the second child of the family. He was a bright pupil at school and did well at his studies, but socially he was a misfit. After leaving high school, he went on to study at the University of Toledo, but dropped out of his course before finishing it. He had developed a crippling fear of taking tests, and was also completely unable to discipline himself to work. It seems that his early success at school had been achieved without trying very hard, and he had later become anxious about any situation in which he had to make an effort, or in which there was a chance of being seen to fail.

  After dropping out of college, Frankel began to take an interest in the world of finance. He believed that by researching and playing the securities market, he could earn a great deal of money very quickly – which, fortunately, proved to be the case. Unfortunately, however, he did not also take into account that he could also lose it just as quickly, especially if he had gained it under false pretences.

  Fear Of Failure

  Frankel took to hanging around brokerage houses, learning as much as he could about the finance business. He took a particular interest in big fraud cases, such as that of Robert Vesco, who had masterminded one of the largest swindles in US history. He met many business people, befriending a couple named John and Sonia Schulte, who owned a securities business affiliated to the New York company of Dominick & Dominick. Frankel impressed the couple with his extensive knowledge of the market and with a scheme that he said could help him predict which stocks would yield a great deal of money in future.

  Sonia Schulte persuaded her husband to take Frankel on as a consultant analyst, but it was not long before John Schulte regretted his decision. Frankel was not a good employee. He refused to conform to the company’s dress code, turning up for work in jeans rather than a suit and tie. His money-making scheme was also failing to yield any good results. One of the problems was that, although Frankel knew how to analyze the market, he did not actually have the confidence to trade. As with taking tests at school, he feared that he would be seen to fail.

  The final straw for Schulte was when Frankel posed as an agent working for the larger affiliated firm of Dominick & Dominick, a move that could have put his boss out of business. Schulte lost patience with his new employee and fired him. However, that was by no means the end of his relationship with Frankel: for, by this time, Frankel had become Sonia’s lover.

  The Vatican Fraud

  Now unemployed and living at his parents’ house, Frankel set up his own bogus investment business, which he named Winthrop Capital. He advertised in the yellow pages, and gained the trust of several clients, telling all sorts of lies to do so. However, his investments were not sound, and he lost a great deal of money on his clients’ behalf. Not deterred, he set up another business, Creative Partners Fund LP. He was joined by Sonia Schulte, who by this time had left her husband. Together, the pair set up another company, Thunor Trust, and began buying failing insurance companies, doing shady deals to fund their ever more lavish lifestyle.

  Frankel’s next, and most bizarre, scam was to mastermind a fraudulent charity scheme with links to the Vatican. Posing as a wealthy philanthropist, he set up a body called the St Francis of Assisi Foundation, and made several important contacts: with Thomas Bolan, founder of the Conservative Party of New York; and with two well-known New York priests, Peter Jacobs and Emilio Colagiovanni. It was a complicated fraud, involving the buying and selling of insurance companies with funds certified to belong to the Vatican, but the lure for all parties was a simple one: money.

  Sadomasochistic Orgies

  By 1998, Frankel’s assets were over four million dollars. He and Sonia moved to a large mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, together with Sonia’s two daughters. However, the new family home was not a happy one. Frankel began to show a greedy sexual appetite and a cruel streak, surrounding himself with young women and hosting sadomasochistic orgies in the house. Sonia soon left with her daughters. In 1997, one of the young women living in the house, who had apparently been rejected by Frankel, hanged herself there.

  By 1999, Frankel’s many nefarious dealings were finally attracting the attention of the authorities. His companies were put under state supervision, and it seemed only a matter of time before his rackets would be revealed for what they were. Frankel became extremely anxious and decided to make a run for it. He assumed several false identities and hired a private jet to fly him to Europe, taking with him millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds. He also took with him two of his girlfriends, who later baled out and were replaced as companions by an employee called Cynthia Allison. He hid out until he was finally found, along with Cynthia, in one of the most luxurious hotels in Hamburg, Germany. He was immediately arrested.

  Indicted For Fraud

  Frankel was indicted by the US federal government for frauds worth over two million dollars. The German authorities also accused him of using a false passport and smuggling diamonds into the country. He pleaded guilty to the German charges, but came up with several far-fetched excuses, including the claim that he had smuggled in the diamonds so that he could feed the poor and hungry of the world. Not surprisingly, the German courts were not impressed with this story, and at his trial Frankel received a three-year sentence. While serving out his sentence, he attempted to escape from prison, but failed. In 2002, Frankel was charged with twenty-four federal counts of fraud and racketeering in the US, and finally sentenced to more than sixteen years in prison.

  The Voodoo Killings

  One of the most horrifying cult murderers of modern times was Adolfo Constanzo. Constanzo’s speciality was ritually torturing and killing his victims: he ripped out their hearts and brains, boiled them and then ate the result. According to Constanzo’s perverted logic, this ritual slaughter – which was derived from the Santeria and Voodoo religious practices his mother had taught him as a child – was intended to ensure him success in his career as a drug dealer. As it happened, he did prosper for some years and became a rich man, but in the end he met his fate as violently as had his unfortunate victims.

  Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was born in 1962 to a teenage Cuban mother, and grew up in Puerto Rico and Miami. As a child, he served as an altar boy in the Roman Catholic religion, and also accompanied his mother on trips to Haiti to learn about Voodoo. As a teenager, he became apprenticed to a local sorcerer, and he began to practise the occult African religion of Palo Mayombe, which involves animal sacrifice. Later, as an adult, he moved to Mexico City and met the men who were to become his first followers: Martin Quintana, Jorge Montes and Omar Orea. He set up a homosexual ménage a trois with Quintana and Orea (calling one his ‘man’ and the other his ‘woman’) and began to run a profitable business cas
ting spells to bring good luck, which involved expensive ritual sacrifices of chickens, goats, snakes, zebras and even lion cubs. Many of his clients were rich drug dealers and hitmen who enjoyed the violence of Constanzo’s ‘magical’ displays. He also attracted other rich members of Mexican society, including several high-ranking, corrupt policemen, who introduced him to the city’s powerful narcotics cartels.

  At this time, Constanzo started to raid graveyards for human bones to put in his nganga or cauldron, but he did not stop at that: before long, live human beings were being sacrificed. Over twenty victims, whose mutilated bodies were found in and around Mexico City, are thought to have met their end in this way. Constanzo began to believe that his magic spells were responsible for the success of the cartels, and demanded to become a full partner with one of the most powerful families, the Calzadas. When he was rejected, seven family members disappeared; their bodies were found with fingers, toes, ears, brains and even – in one case – the spine missing.

  Not surprisingly, relations soon cooled with the Calzadas, so Constanzo made friends with a new cartel, the Hernandez brothers. He also took up with a young woman named Sara Aldrete, who became the high priestess of the cult. In 1988, he moved to Rancho Santa Elena, a house in the desert, where he carried out ever more sadistic ritual murders, sometimes of strangers, and sometimes – killing two birds with one stone, as it were – of rival drug dealers. He also used the ranch to store huge shipments of cocaine and marijuana.

  However, on 13 March 1989, he made a fatal mistake. Looking for fresh meat to put in the pot, his henchmen abducted a student, Mark Kilroy, from outside a Mexican bar and took him back to the ranch. There Constanzo brutally murdered him. This time, however, the victim was no drug runner, petty crook or local peasant; he was a young man from a respectable Texan family that was determined to bring their son’s killer to justice.

  Under pressure from Texan politicians, police initially picked up four of Constanzo’s followers, including two of the Hernandez brothers. They interrogated the men, eliciting horrifying tales of occult magic and ritual human sacrifice. Officers then raided the ranch, discovering Constanzo’s cauldron, which contained various items such as a dead black cat and a human brain. Fifteen mutilated corpses were then dug up at the ranch, one of them Mark Kilroy’s.

  Death Pact

  Constanzo meanwhile had fled to Mexico City. He was discovered only when police were called to his apartment because of a dispute taking place there. As the officers approached, Constanzo opened fire with a machine gun, but he soon realized that he was surrounded.

  He handed the gun to a follower, Alvaro de Leon, who was a professional hitman, and ordered Leon to open fire on him and his lover, Martin Quintana. By the time police reached the apartment, Constanzo and Quintana were dead, locked in a ghoulish embrace. De Leon, known as ‘El Duby’, and Sara Aldrete, Constanzo’s female companion, were immediately arrested.

  A total of fourteen cult members were charged with a range of crimes, from murder and drug running to obstructing the course of justice. Sara Aldrete, Elio Hernandez and Serafin Hernandez were convicted of multiple murders and were ordered to serve prison sentences of over sixty years each; El Duby was given a thirty-year term. The reign of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, high-society sorcerer and maniacal murderer, was over.

  The Wilderness Killings

  It sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction – a serial killer who abducted his victims, set them loose in the Alaskan wilderness, then hunted them down with knife and rifle. Robert Hansen made it a nightmare reality for the dozen or more women he plucked from the sleazy Tenderloin district of Anchorage, Alaska, between 1973 and 1983. Hansen appears to have been motivated to kill by little more than a desire to get back at the world in general, and women in particular.

  Resentment

  Born in Pocahontas, Idaho, on 13 February 1939, Hansen’s father, Christian, was a Danish immigrant who ran his own bakery. A strict disciplinarian, he soon had his son working in the bakery at all hours. This did not help Robert’s social life as a teenager; neither did the young man’s acne, or his stammer.

  After Robert left school he carried on working for his father, while also signing up for the army reserves. In 1960, he married a local girl. Shortly afterward he burnt down part of the local high school. He was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. His wife responded to discovering this unsuspected side of her new husband by divorcing him.

  New Start

  Shortly after his release from prison, Hansen remarried and in 1967, the couple decided to make a new start, and headed for America’s last frontier: Alaska. They settled in the main town of Anchorage and, for the first time, Hansen seemed to find a place where he could fit in. He had used his time in the army reserves to become an expert marksman and was now able to put these skills to use, gaining a reputation as an outdoorsman.

  Somewhere along the way, though, killing wild animals failed to fulfil Hansen’s need for revenge. The year after the last of his record-breaking animal kills, he was arrested for the attempted rape of a housewife and the actual rape of a prostitute. The rape of prostitutes not being taken too seriously, he served only six months in prison.

  According to his own confession, from 1973 onwards Hansen developed a routine whereby he would pick up prostitutes and topless dancers from Anchorage’s Tenderloin district, fly them out into the wilderness and rape them. If they submitted to his sexual whims, he let them live, taking them back to Anchorage with the threat that if they reported what had happened they would be in big trouble. He murdered those who did not comply; setting them loose in the wilderness, giving them a head start, then hunting and killing them. His activities went on unnoticed Anchorage, during the 1970s oil boom, was a wild town, where people came and went all the time.

  In 1980, however, the bodies of two young women did come to light. One has never been identified. The second was a topless dancer named Joanna Messina. Two years later the body of another topless dancer called Sherry Morrow was found by hunters near the Knik River. By now, the police suspected they were dealing with a serial killer.

  Respected Citizen

  Far from being a suspected murderer, Hansen had by now become a well-to-do respected citizen. He had his own bakery, lived in a pleasant house with his wife and two children, and even had his own small private plane.

  In June 1983, all that changed. A trucker picked up a prostitute running down the road with a pair of handcuffs trailing from one wrist. He took her to the police station, where she explained that she had been picked up by a client who had taken her to his house, raped and brutalized her, then taken her to his private plane. She had managed to escape at the last minute, and was convinced that, if she had not run, the man would certainly have killed her since he had made no attempt to hide his face. She led the police to the house and then to the light aircraft from which she had escaped. Both belonged to Robert Hansen.

  Hansen denied everything. He produced an alibi, claiming to have spent the evening in question with two friends. With no more evidence than the unsupported word of a prostitute, the police decided not to press charges.

  Three months later, another body was found, that of Paula Golding. The police task force called in FBI serial-killer expert John Douglas, and they decided to have another look at Hansen. Hansen’s friends admitted that the alibi was false. Hansen’s house was searched and the police found weapons used in the murders, plus IDs taken from the dead girls.

  Hansen made a deal whereby he would be charged with four murders, and would serve his time in a federal prison. In return for this he confessed to many other murders, for which he was never charged. He took state troopers on a tour of the wilderness, in the course of which they were able to recover eleven bodies, several of which remain unidentified.

  On 18 February 1984, Hansen was convicted of murder and sentenced to life plus 461 years.

  The Woman in a Box

  The ‘Woman In A Box’ refers t
o a case so traumatic to its victim that the media have universally protected her anonymity to this very day, twenty years after her case finally came to trial. Even today, she is referred to simply as ‘Carol Smith’ (or sometimes ‘Colleen Stan’).

  Twenty-year-old Carol was living in Eugene, Oregon, when she left one May morning in 1977 to visit her friend in Westwood, California, to wish her a happy birthday. It was a four-hundred mile trip, but this was the 1970s, and Carol shared the free-wheeling spirit of her times. She walked on down to Interstate 5 to hitch a ride with someone kind enough to give her a lift – but tragically chose the wrong car.

  After four days with no news of Carol, her friends back in Eugene rang her family, but they had not heard from her either. When they found out she had never arrived in Westwood, alarm bells started ring: Carol had always been the sort of person who kept in touch with those close to her, and now nobody knew where she was. Her friends in Eugene filed a missing persons report with the local police department.

  Miracle Return

  The first suspect was Carol’s ex-husband (Carol had married when she was seventeen), but he was easily ruled out. Time passed, still with no sign of the young woman, and hope faded. Jenise, her sister, was the first to believe that she had been murdered, and as time went by, her case grew cold.

  Then came an amazing development: more than two years after she disappeared, her sisters received a letter from her. It was full of affection, but short on detail: she had settled down somewhere with a man, ‘Michael’, and they were not to worry. She was sorry she could not be in touch more. Carol’s family breathed a sigh of relief. Three years later, they finally got to see her again. She did not divulge much about her own life, but she was visibly overjoyed at seeing her family again. They were curious, of course, about what she had really been up to all that time, but they felt that they must have somehow offended her for her to go off like that, and they did not want to risk offending her again. They did not press her on her personal life but it might have been much better if they had, because Carol’s life had turned into a living nightmare.