Houses of Death (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  Nonetheless, he was formally charged with the murders in December 1981. The main piece of evidence was a bloody palm-print belonging to him that was found on the rail of Launius’s bed. However, the jury bought Holmes’s assertion that he had been forced to watch the carnage at gunpoint and he was acquitted. When he refused to testify before a Los Angeles County Grand Jury however, he went to jail, for 110 days. There, he claimed his warders would watch him as he showered, amazed at his physical peculiarity. Holmes died of AIDS in 1988, not long after marrying his second wife, the porn star, Misty Dawn.

  A few months after Holmes’s death, Eddie Nash and his bodyguard, Gregory DeWitt Diles, were charged with the Wonderland murders. The sensation of this case was the prosecution’s star witness, Scott Thorson, boyfriend of the piano-playing mega-celebrity, Liberace. Thorson said he had been present on the night Nash had threatened Holmes. He described how Nash had thrown Holmes against the wall and threatened him.

  The jury could not come to a verdict and, at a retrial the following year, Nash was acquitted.

  Finally, in 2001, after being hounded by the authorities for years, Nash confessed. Then 72 years old, and not a well man, he faced charges of racketeering as well as the Wonderland killings. He had already been acquitted of the murder charges and the best the prosecution could do was charge him with conspiracy to murder. He went to prison for only 37 months.

  John Holmes had been concerned as he approached death that someone would snip off his famous penis. He instructed his wife to inspect his body before it was cremated to ensure it was intact. She reported that everything was as it should be.

  Waverly Hills Sanatorium

  Louisville, Kentucky, USA

  Many people who entered Waverly Hills Sanatorium left via the 'body chute', a tunnel with a motorized rail and cable system set up to transport disease-ridden corpses away from the wards and down to the railway tracks as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The Waverly was regarded as the place to come for the treatment of tuberculosis, but during these primitive times, some of the experiments practised on patients, in the name of medical research, left a lot to be desired.

  It is believed to be one of the most paranormally active locations in the entire world, and no wonder, for it is estimated that up to 63,000 people have died there during the last 100 years.

  It started out innocently enough when, in 1883, Major Thomas Hays purchased some land on which to build a home for his family. As the house was far from the nearest school, Major Hays decided to open his own one-room schoolhouse. The teacher named it Waverly School and the major, liking the name, called his property Waverly Hills.

  The low valley and swampland, in which Louisville is located, provided the perfect breeding ground for the disease known as the ‘White Death’, the dreaded, deadly and infectious killer, tuberculosis, that ravaged the US during the early years of its history. Louisville had the highest death rate from tuberculosis in the US and it badly needed hospitals in which to care for the sick. In 1924, $11 million was raised to build a Tuberculosis hospital. Waverly Hills Hospital opened its doors in 1926.

  Waverly Hills was, at the time, the most advanced hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis in the country, but treatment was still fairly primitive. Nutritious food, rest and fresh air were considered the best treatments, but they were fighting a losing battle – at the height of the epidemic, patients were dying at the rate of one an hour.

  It was not only the patients who died. Doctors and nurses also lost their lives treating patients or trying to find a cure. They carried out experiments, some barbaric and some effective. They would expose the lungs to ultraviolet light in ‘sun rooms’ in an effort to prevent the spread of bacteria. Or patients were placed in the open air on roofs or terraces, regardless of the weather, to take in air and be exposed to sunlight. There are pictures of patients who are dying, covered in snow.

  There were more invasive experiments. Balloons would be inserted surgically into the lungs and filled with air to try to expand the lungs. Hydrotherapy was tried and resulted in the deaths of patients from pneumonia. In one procedure, the chest of the patient was opened and muscle and ribs were removed to allow the lungs more room in which to expand. Needless to say, this was often carried out when all else had failed. Fewer than 5% of patients undergoing this operation survived.

  The huge numbers of dead left Waverly Hills through a corridor known as the ‘body chute’, a tunnel that led from the hospital down to a railway line at the bottom of the hill on which the hospital stood. It had a motorized rail and cable system by means of which bodies were lowered down one side of the tunnel. On the other were steps leading back up to the hospital. The tunnel was totally enclosed so that patients could not see how many bodies were leaving the institution.

  In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young, graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, discovered streptomycin, and tuberculosis was finally beaten. As numbers of victims fell, Waverly Hills became redundant, closing in 1961 and reopening as Woodhaven Geriatrics Sanatorium, in 1962.

  Its new guise did not lessen the horrors of the place, however, and rumours of mistreatment and bizarre experiments persisted over the years, as they did in many such institutions. In those days, electroshock therapy was a widely used treatment for the mentally ill, often resulting in tragic losses.

  Finally, in 1982, the state of Kentucky had had enough of the patient abuse, and Woodhaven was closed down. The land and the building and its contents were auctioned off.

  The bizarre history of this eerie place was far from over, however. It changed hands a number of times over the next 18 years. One of the owners bought it with the intention of tearing the buildings down and, on the hill they occupied, to build the world’s largest statue of Jesus Christ. Having demolished all the buildings apart from the main hospital, he was stopped only by an injunction from tearing that down. Waverly Hills was finally registered on the National Historic Register’s list of endangered buildings and could not be demolished. The owner then tried to make it fall down, inviting vandals in to smash windows, toilets, sinks and doors. He then dug around the foundations, sometimes to a depth of 30 feet to try to bring it down, but the old building withstood his attacks.

  Waverly Hills, the ultimate house of death, is now a ramshackle ruin, but it is a major destination for ghost hunters. Stories abound of ghostly happenings – a little girl who plays hide and seek with trespassers, a little boy who plays with a ball, rooms lighting up even though the place has had no power for decades. Doors slam, disembodied voices plead with visitors to go away, a hearse has been seen delivering coffins, an old woman is often seen running from the front entrance with blood pouring from her wrists, screaming, ‘Help me! Somebody save me!’

  At Waverly Hills, 63,000 ghosts are ready to give visitors a chilly welcome.

  Gambino Mafia Family

  The Gemini Lounge, Brooklyn, USA

  The Gemini lounge in Brooklyn, New York, was a 'chop house' for the Gambino mafia family from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. Contracts were lured there with the promise of wine, women and song, only to be shot, stabbed and dismembered in the apartment upstairs. Today the space that was left by the Gemini Lounge has been filled by A shop-front church called Flatlands Church - a house of the mob has become a house of God.

  Phil’s Bar, later known as the Gemini Lounge, occupied the front half of a two-storey building located on a street corner in Flatlands, Brooklyn. In 1965, Roy DeMeo, who had been using it anyway to do business – loan-sharking, fencing stolen goods – bought into the bar.

  DeMeo had been born in the neighbourhood, in 1940, to hard-working Italian immigrants who had come to New York to escape the grinding poverty of southern Italy. Young Roy had started learning early. His neighbour was Mafia boss Joe Profaci, and Profaci’s sons taught him all there was to know about loan-sharking. By seventeen, it was a full-time occupation for him and he had no qualms about using a little ‘persuasion’ to make his borrowers
pay up in time. As he got older, he married and prospered. He finally gave up his day job at a local supermarket and became a professional criminal.

  DeMeo had been on the edges of the Lucchese Crime Family for a number of years when he made the acquaintance of Anthony ‘Nino’ Gaggi, a lieutenant in the Gambino family. By now, he was into car theft and trafficking drugs – dealing cocaine out of the Gemini Lounge – and had surrounded himself with a bunch of social misfits and killers. Among these were Harvey ‘Chris’ Rosenberg, a friend who had been dealing drugs using funds provided by the young DeMeo; Joey ‘Dracula’ Gugliemo, DeMeo’s cousin, a pornographer and killer whose strange practices with the blood of victims in the rooms behind the Gemini Lounge earned him his chilling nickname; Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, who were known as the Gemini Twins because they were inseparable and could always be found in the Gemini Lounge, and Joey’s younger brother, Patrick Testa.

  DeMeo was a late developer in the area of murder; he was 32 when he carried out his first, killing his colleague, Chris Rothenberg, outside a diner after Nino Gaggi had claimed he was about to cooperate with the police. DeMeo pumped two bullets into Rothenberg’s head in an alleyway.

  Other killings followed. Andrei Katz, who ran a car bodyshop in Flatlands, was also suspected of being an informer. He was lured to an apartment by a woman, abducted by DeMeo’s men and taken to the meat department of a local supermarket, where he was dismembered by DeMeo and Joey Testa, who had both been apprenticed as butchers in their youth. He was decapitated and his head was crushed in a machine used for compacting cardboard. On another occasion, he and Gaggi flew to Florida to kill George Byrum who had been involved in a robbery at Gaggi’s house. They shot him in DeMeo’s hotel room, but fled, leaving the body in the bath, its head half sawn off.

  By 1978, DeMeo was claiming to have committed 100 murders, and he let it be known that he and his crew were open to contracts. They carried out several for as little as $5,000 (£2,500). Some were even done for free – ‘personal favour’, he would say.

  The preferred method was to lure the intended victim to the Gemini Lounge and ply him with booze. When he was sufficiently relaxed, he would be enticed through the side door and into the apartment that abutted the building at the back with a game of poker, some easy women or, perhaps, a nice meal.

  Once there, someone would approach him from behind, carrying a gun fitted with a silencer in one hand. In the other hand he held a towel. He would fire a bullet into the victim’s head, but moved swiftly to wrap the towel around the wound in order to stop the flow of blood and the resulting mess. Then, an accomplice would stab the victim through the heart with a sharp knife, ensuring that he severed arteries and prevented blood from being pumped around the body and eventually out of the head wound.

  Reassured that their victim was dead, the Gemini Crew would then undress him and carry him into the bathroom. There, they would hang him upside down over the bath to let all the blood drain out of his body. The body was then carried into the living room and placed on a large pool liner. At that point, DeMeo and Joey Testa’s butchery skills again came in handy, as the body was dismembered and all the parts were sealed in separate bags which were then placed in boxes and sent to the Fountain Avenue Dump, in Brooklyn, never to be seen again. It became known as the Gemini Method.

  Fred & Rose West

  25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, England

  The now-famous pictures taken by journalists of the police search at 25 Cromwell Street will be forever emblazoned on British memories. They serve as a stark reminder of what can happen when society turns its back on a family in trouble. A total of 12 young women were raped, tortured and eventually killed by Fred and Rose West, including two of their own daughters. It is incredible to think that nobody noticed these young women vanishing, one by one, from 25 Cromwell Street.

  It was an ordinary three-storey house situated near the centre of the attractive cathedral city of Gloucester. But 25 Cromwell Street was no ordinary house. It was a house where young women came to stay or visit and were never seen again, a house where even its young occupants were not safe from the voracious and depraved sexual appetites of its two owners – Fred and Rosemary West.

  Fred and Rose were made for each other, both coming from dysfunctional, poor and possibly abusive backgrounds. Fred claimed, although it was never proven, that his father had sexually assaulted his own daughters, and Fred grew up with the attitude that girls and women were on this earth for one reason only – to satisfy his sexual needs. Rose was the daughter of a mother who suffered from severe depression and a father who was a schizophrenic, a violent and predatory domestic tyrant who demanded total obedience and used extreme violence to obtain it. He was also said to molest young girls and unsubstantiated reports suggest he indulged in an incestuous relationship with his overweight and backward daughter, Rose.

  By the time Fred and Rose met, he had been involved in petty crime and had got a 13-year-old girl, a friend of the family, pregnant. He was thrown out of the family house but escaped with a non-custodial sentence.

  Fred fell for a young Scottish girl, Rena Costello, an occasional prostitute, who was pregnant with the child of an Asian bus driver. The two moved to Scotland where they married, and baby Charmaine was born. She was followed in 1964 by a child by Fred – Anna Marie. Fred earned a living driving an ice cream van, a job that drew countless young girls into his circle. When he accidentally ran over and killed a young boy, however, the couple moved back to Gloucester, accompanied by a woman called Anna McFall, whom they had befriended.

  Fred found work in a local slaughterhouse, a job that would, chillingly, be useful to him later. By this time, his relationship with Rena was beginning to fall apart, and she returned to Scotland, without the children, returning in July 1966. Fred was now living in a caravan with McFall. His sexual appetite, however, was undiminished and it is not entirely coincidental that around this time in Gloucester there were eight sexual assaults committed by a man resembling Fred.

  Anna McFall was pregnant with Fred’s baby and keen for Fred to divorce Rena and marry her. Instead, Fred killed her, dismembering her body and cutting off her fingers and toes, which he buried separately, a signature feature of many of his murders. Rena moved back in with him and went to work on the streets. Fred, meanwhile, was unashamedly assaulting her daughter Charmaine in front of her.

  Mary Bastholme was an attractive 15-year-old, who was on her way to play Monopoly at a friend’s house when she disappeared in January 1968. Fred abducted her from the bus stop where she was waiting, leaving only a few pieces of the game behind, scattered on the pavement. Abducting girls from bus stops would later become one of Fred’s favourite pastimes.

  On 29 November 1968, Fred was working as a bakery delivery driver. That day he met the woman who was to become his partner in some of the most horrific crimes Britain has ever seen, 15-year-old Rosemary Letts.

  Some months later, aged sixteen, Rose Letts left home and moved in with West, taking care of the children while he went to prison for theft. In 1970, she gave birth to Fred’s daughter, Heather.

  Rose was now looking after three children on her own while Fred was incarcerated, and her treatment of them – especially of the two who were not hers – was appalling. In the summer of 1971, she murdered Rena’s child, Charmaine, explaining her disappearance by telling people that Rena had come back and taken the child away. Fred was in jail at the time, but when he came home, he buried Charmaine’s body under the kitchen floor of the house in which they were living, in Midland Road.

  Fred and Rose now had an even greater bond between them – murder.

  Of course, there was always the chance that Rena would come looking for her child, and she did, in August 1971. Fred took care of the problem by strangling Rena. He dismembered her, again cutting off the fingers and toes, and buried her locally.

  Following the birth of another child, Mae, Fred and Rose married, in June 1972. They then moved their growing f
amily into a larger house. It was semi-detached with a garage and a cellar which might come in useful for Rose’s prostitution business, or, as Fred jokingly told a neighbor, as a soundproof torture chamber. It was big enough to allow them to take in lodgers to pay the rent on the property. The address was 25 Cromwell Street.

  The first visitor to the cellar was Anna Marie, Fred’s child with Anna McFall, who was raped by her father, while being held down by Rose. She was told that it was to enable her to learn how to satisfy a husband when she eventually married. The rapes became routine and she was threatened with beatings if she told anyone.

  Attractive 17 year-old Caroline Owens became nanny to the Wests in late 1972, after Fred had picked her up. Trying to leave after both Fred and Rose had tried to seduce her, she was stripped and raped by them. When her mother saw the bruises on her daughter’s body, she called the police. Once again, however, the courts were lenient and Fred and Rose escaped with a fine.

  Before too long, however, they killed again when another woman moved in to look after the children. Lynda Gough was murdered, dismembered and buried under the floor of the garage. Again, she was buried without her fingers and toes.