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

by Greig, Charlotte

  Head In A Box

  Carol had hitch-hiked all the way down to Red Bluff on the day she had left Eugene, back in 1977, and she only had another fifty miles to go when a blue Dodge Colt pulled over with a young family inside. She climbed in without hesitation, but however clean-cut the young couple and their baby appeared to be, she began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. The Hooker family seemed amiable enough, but deep down she felt something was wrong. When they stopped at a gas station she very nearly did not get back in the car, but when she did they were so nice to her she felt ashamed of herself. Then they made a detour to look at some ice caves. When they pulled off the road the man held a knife to her throat, and asked her if she was going to do whatever he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carol, desperately afraid. One word: yes. It destroyed her life, but it also saved it. She was then bound, blindfolded, and gagged. The man took a heavy soundproofed plywood box and fastened it to her head, which nearly suffocated her. Then she could feel them putting her into a sleeping bag.

  Daily Torture

  When they got her back to their home she was kept in a large wooden box in the cellar, although Hooker would often take her out to torture her, or leave her dangling by her wrists from the ceiling. At other times she would be left in the box for days on end, with a bedpan. Initially she was fed a single meal every other day, but when her health began to seriously deteriorate Hooker and his wife began to feed her once a day. Hooker made her sign a contract which appeared to give their master-slave relationship some legal status. He told her she was registered with the Slave Company, who saw everything, and who would kill Carol’s family if she ever ran away. Over the years, Carol’s mind gave way and she came to believe it all.

  After that, Carol’s life got marginally easier. She was given handiwork to perform in a cage under the stairs. She was allowed out into the yard on weekends (neighbours believed she was a nanny). She was allowed to go jogging and to write home, albeit letters that were heavily censored. Janice Hooker took her out for a night’s drinking, and Cameron Hooker escorted her for that single visit home, from whence she returned, for another three and a half years in captivity. Their hold on her was total.

  The Jealous Wife

  Jealousy was the key to Carol’s freedom. Cameron had begun to have sex with Carol, and his wife was jealous. She confessed to her pastor, and he phoned the police. When the police came, she showed them the remains of an earlier victim who had not been as pliant as Carol, and who had been shot in the belly.

  Janice Hooker plea bargained and was set free. Cameron Hooker was sentenced to life imprisonment. Even at the trial it was a close run thing, with the victim showing no signs of hostility towards her former captor of seven years. Some say it was only the physical scars of her torture that swung the jury, but whatever the truth, after so many years of horrifying cruelty, justice was finally done.

  The Yorkshire Ripper

  Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was a hen-pecked husband who had difficulty in getting or maintaining an erection. He only had sex with one of his thirteen female victims, and on the night he was caught – January 2nd 1981 – he was again having difficulties with a prostitute called Ava Reivers, who would have become his fourteenth. Impotence, in fact, may have driven him to murder in the first place; and killing may have been his sinister way of finding its solution and cure. For at some time in the late-1960s, he’d been publicly humiliated by a prostitute for his inadequacy. So he took his revenge: he began to rape them, not with his penis, but with a knife, a hammer, a sharpened screwdriver – any tool that came to hand.

  The first mutilated body was found on playing fields in Leeds on October 30th 1975; the second, less than three months later, in an alleyway nearby. Thirteen months after that a third victim was discovered, stabbed to death, in the same general area, though this time in a suburban park. Though the police took action in all three cases – and the name ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was coined in a national newspaper – the respectable folk of the city were not particularly concerned. For all three women, however brutally murdered, had been streetwalkers, sinners, and the killings had been centered on the red-light district of Chapeltown.

  With the next two killings, though, the respectable folk of Yorkshire learned to fear. For the Ripper now moved around and might attack any woman. On 24 April 1977, he killed a fourth prostitute in another Yorkshire city, Bradford; and then, back in Leeds again, an ordinary sixteen-year-old who was involved in nothing more sinister than walking home after an evening out dancing.

  With this fifth murder, especially, the people of Yorkshire, indeed of the whole country, began to wake up. The police were inundated with telephone calls, tips, information, supposition – and began to sink under the burden. By this time they had only two pieces of information that firmly linked the murders together: the savagery of the killer’s attacks and identical shoeprints that had been found near the bodies of two of the victims. But then, when with the next two attacks really important clues were offered, they clearly failed to see them.

  The first, again in Bradford, was on another prostitute who, this time, was savagely beaten but not killed, as if the Ripper had been interrupted. When she recovered from surgery, she told police that her attacker had been blond and had driven a white Ford Cortina. The second was much further afield, in Manchester in Lancashire; and the victim, again a prostitute, had actually been attacked and mutilated twice, the second time eight days after her death. The police, who found her body a day after the second attack, also found her handbag nearby; and in it was a brand-new £5 note, which turned out to have been issued by a bank in Shipley, Yorkshire. It had formed part of the payroll at the engineering and haulage works where Peter Sutcliffe worked as a truck-driver.

  The friendly, unassuming Sutcliffe was interviewed – he was actually interviewed eight times in all during the enquiry. But, though he drove a Ford Cortina, he was not blond, so he was on this occasion eliminated. Apparently the police didn’t pay much attention to the handwritten placard this neatly-dressed, diffident man had put up in the cab of his truck:

  ‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep.’

  Sutcliffe seems to have been unfazed by this, his first brush with the law. In short order after this, he battered and mutilated three more prostitutes, in Bradford, Huddersfield and again Manchester; and then killed a nineteen-year-old building-society clerk as she took a short cut through a park in Halifax. Whatever suspicions the police might have had of him were, in any case, soon dismissed. For the investigating squad at this point received an audio-tape with a taunting message from ‘the Ripper,’ which seemed to contain inside information about the crimes. But the accent ‘the Ripper’ spoke in wasn’t from Yorkshire, as Sutcliffe’s was. It was Geordie, said phoneticists – i.e. from the area around Newcastle.

  The whole investigation, then, went off at a highly-publicised tangent; and Sutcliffe was free to strike again. In September 1978, he killed a nineteen-year-old university student in the centre of Bradford; and the following August, a respectable forty-seven-year-old civil servant on her way home from the Department of Education in Pudsey. He went on to attack, first a doctor in Leeds and then a sixteen-year-old girl in Huddersfield – though both survived, the first because he seems to have changed his mind and stopped, and the second, because her screams brought people running and scared him away. His final onslaught came more than a year later when a twenty-year old student at Leeds University got off a bus in a middle-class suburb and started walking towards her hall of residence. Sutcliffe got out of his car and beat her about the head with a hammer, before dragging her across the road into some bushes. He undressed her and stabbed her repeatedly, once straight through the eye, with a sharpened screwdriver because —

  ‘she seemed to be staring at me’

  — he said later.

  He was finally picked up in S
heffield on January 2nd 1981, while sitting in his car with Ava Reivers in a well-known trysting-place for prostitutes and their johns. Police stopped by for a routine check, and wondered why Reivers’ client’s car seemed to have false number plates. Sutcliffe did his best to get rid of the weapons in the back of the car, but both he and Reivers were taken back to a police-station and the weapons were later recovered. After a while, the man who’d given his name as Peter Williams confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper.

  There’s been endless speculation about what drove Peter Sutcliffe to murder. Was it because of his worship of his mother and his shyness with girls as a boy? Or because of the time he spent as a young man working first in a graveyard and then in a morgue? Or was it because of the prostitute who’d mocked him in public or the wife who continually nagged him? Was the whole killing spree triggered by his discovery in 1972 that his adored mother was only too human after all – and had long been having a love affair?

  Whatever the cause or the trigger, though, Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on each count, with the recommendation that he not be released for at least thirty years.

  The man with the Geordie accent who sent the police the hoax tape – and caused indirectly the deaths of three women – was tracked down 20 years later. In 2005 John Humble was arrested after DNA evidence tied him to the envelopes. He confessed to perverting the course of justice in 2006 and was jailed for eight years.