Houses of Death (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  Their first son, Stephen, was born in August 1973 and a few months later they abducted 15 year-old Carol Ann Cooper. After sexually assaulting her for a time, she was strangled, dismembered and buried in the usual fashion.

  Lucy Partington, a 21 year-old student, was abducted on 27 December, 1974. She was abused in the cellar for a week and then killed, dismembered and buried. Fred was building extensions to the cellar and the house, and the bodies were finding their way into these construction projects.

  Another three young women, Theresa Siegentahaler, aged 21, Shirley Hubbard, aged 15, and Juanita Mott, aged 18, became victims of the Wests’ sadistic practices between April 1974 and April 1975, their dismembered bodies being laid to rest under the floor of the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street.

  Meanwhile, Anna Marie, Rena Costello’s daughter was still being raped repeatedly. Fred even brought friends home to have sex with her.

  An 18-year-old woman called Shirley Robinson, a former prostitute, became pregnant with Fred’s child after having relationships with both of the Wests. At the time, Rose was pregnant with the child of one of her West Indian clients and while Fred tolerated this, Rose did not like the fact that he was having a child with another woman. In the summer of 1977, Shirley was murdered and, with her unborn child, was buried in the garden – the cellar was full.

  Alison Chambers joined her in the garden in May 1977.

  Anna Marie had by now moved out and Fred shifted his attentions to his other two daughters, Heather and Mae. Two more children followed – Barry in 1980 and Rosemary Junior, not Fred’s child, in 1982. Yet another daughter, Lucyanna followed in 1983.

  In 1986, daughter Heather made the mistake of telling a friend about what her father had been doing to her. Not long after, she was buried in the garden alongside the others. It is believed that they probably carried on their abductions, but 25 Cromwell Street was now full up and it is likely that bodies were disposed of elsewhere.

  It was not until August 1992 that it all began to unravel. A girl that Fred had raped told a friend who went to the police. The pair were arrested, but, incredibly, the case against them collapsed when key witnesses withdrew their testimony. However, the police were now very interested in Fred and Rose and especially in Heather’s disappearance.

  On 24 February 1994, there was a knock at the door of 25 Cromwell Road. It was the police with a search warrant. Before too long, they were digging up bones in the garden. The next day, Fred West confessed, withdrew his confession and then confessed again.

  Charged with 12 murders, Fred hanged himself with strips of bedsheet in his cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, on New Year’s Day, 1995.

  Rose went to trial pleading innocence, but was found guilty on each of ten counts of murder. She is currently serving ten life sentences, with a minimum of 25 years, but says that she will never leave prison.

  Menendez Brothers

  722 Elm Drive, Beverly Hills, USA

  It was a warm Sunday evening in Beverly Hills. Jose and Kitty Menendez were enjoying a peaceful night in at their $4 million (£2 million), 23-room Mediterranean style mansion in Elm Drive. The maid had the night off, and the couple were dozing in front of the TV, when their two sons broke into the house brandishing shot guns. The carnage that followed turned this luxurious family home into a notorious house of death.

  As Sunday 20 August 1989 drew to a close, the warmth of the day remained. At 722 Elm Drive, a 23-room mansion that had previously been rented by rock stars such as Elton John and Prince, all was quiet. The owners, 47 year-old wealthy record company executive, Jose Menendez, and his 44 year-old blond-haired, green-eyed wife, Kitty, relaxed in the family room at the back of the house, alternately dozing and watching Roger Moore go through the motions in a video of the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me. Kitty looked younger than her years and Jose was fit and tanned from playing tennis.

  It was 10pm, but the house’s elaborate security system had not yet been switched on and the gates were open. The house was set back from the road in front of it, a thick curtain of trees and bushes surrounded by a high iron fence protecting its inhabitants from prying eyes.

  A small car pulled into the drive and stopped in front of the house. Two men in their early 20’s clambered out. While one man walked in the direction of the house, the other went round to the back of the car and took something from the boot. He then caught up on the other and the pair entered the house’s study through a set of French doors. From the study, they made their way to the family room, hearing the film’s dialogue as they approached. In the room, in which the only light was the light from the television screen, they saw Jose and Kitty.

  Jose was asleep on the brown leather sofa, sitting at the end nearest to the door through which they had entered. His feet were resting on the coffee table drawn up to the sofa. Beside his feet, on the table, lay the remnants of a berry and ice cream dessert. Kitty was stretched out, lengthwise, on the sofa, a blanket covering her body, her head resting in her husband’s lap. She, too, dozed.

  The two men each carried a 12 gauge Mossberg shotgun. One of them slowly raised his gun and fired it twice at the sleeping Jose. One round shattered the glass of the room’s French doors, the other hit him in the right arm. He barely moved before another bullet immobilized him completely. The man walked up behind him, put the barrel of the shotgun against the back of his head and blew off a chunk of his skull large enough to fit a man’s fist in the gap it left.

  Kitty woke up to the horror of feeling her husband’s blood spurting on her. She leapt up and took a couple of steps before being shot in the right leg and right arm. Collapsing between the sofa and the coffee table, she managed to get up again. Desperately trying to stay on her feet, she tried to walk but another round brought her to the ground once more. As she lay there, the attackers ruthlessly pumped more bullets into her. She was hit in the thigh, breaking her leg, the right arm and the left breast, perforating a lung. She was still alive, however, and tried to crawl away.

  The shooters had no more shotgun bullets, but they had to make sure Kitty was dead, as she would be able to recognize them if she lived. So, one of them ran back out to the car and brought back some birdshot. They re-loaded and one of them put his gun against her left cheek and pulled the trigger. A 25cm (1 in) hole was blasted through her cheek, fracturing her jaw and dislodging four of her teeth. They shot her four times in the head, altogether, three times in the face. Her left thumb was later found to have been almost severed, it seemed as if she had raised her hand to block out her view of the men trying to kill her.

  Finally, one of the men shot each of their victims in the left knee, from the back, a characteristic sign of a Mafia shooting.

  But this was no Mafia shooting, and the two men were very well known to Jose and Kitty. They were, in fact, their two sons: 21-year-old Lyle Menendez and his eighteen-year-old brother Erik.

  The boys had planned the murders meticulously. There would not be a problem with fingerprints as this was their home and their prints would be expected to be all over it. They drove to Mulholland Drive and threw the guns into a canyon and then created their alibi by going to see a Batman film. Returning to 722 Elm Drive, Lyle phoned the police, in apparent distress, telling them, incoherently, that his parents had been shot.

  At first, the police were sympathetic, and they had no reason to treat the boys as suspects. However, not long after the killings, Lyle and Erik began to spend their multi-million dollar inheritance lavishly. Just three days after the crime, for instance, they bought themselves $15,000 (£7,500) Rolex watches and it is estimated that they blew as much as $1 million (£500,000) in the ensuing six months.

  Erik was the weaker of the two boys, and, one night it all became too much for him. He confessed all to his psychiatrist. When Lyle found out, he threatened the psychiatrist. However, he need not have worried for the moment as the rule of patient-therapist confidentiality applied and the psychiatrist was unable to inform the police. Eventually,
however, he told the police what he knew and the brothers were indicted for the murder of their parents.

  The trial became one of the most sensational in American criminal history, after the judge ruled that the public interest in the case was so great that a TV camera would be allowed into the court and the trial would be shown live on American TV. America watched, spellbound, as Leslie Abramson, Erik’s defence attorney claimed that the brothers had been driven to kill their father after suffering abuse by him, including sexual abuse, throughout their lives. The brothers appeared arrogant and spoilt, smiling and waving to friends and family and smirking when they answered questions. It was as if they thought there was no way in the world they would not walk free.

  After a lengthy trial, however, it seemed as if they might be right. The juries – there was one for each brother – both failed to reach a verdict and a second trial was called.

  This time, there was no doubt. The tactics of the defence were unsuccessful and the Menendez brothers were found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, plus conspiracy to commit murder.

  On 2 July 1996, Lyle and Erik were sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. They were sent to separate prisons and have not seen or spoken to each other ever since.

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  213 Oxford Apartments, Milwaukee, USA

  When police entered 213 Oxford Apartments on 22 July 1991, they expected to settle a domestic dispute between two homosexual lovers and leave as quickly and as quietly as possible. Little did they know that the horrific scenes they would encounter in Jeffrey Dahmer's small Milwaukee apartment would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

  On 22 July 1991, two police officers spied a short black man wearing what looked like handcuffs in the vicinity of Marquette University in Milwaukee. Their first thought was that he had escaped arrest and they immediately apprehended him. His name was Tracy Edwards and he began babbling about a ‘weird dude’ who had invited him up to his apartment, put the handcuffs on him and threatened him with a knife.

  The officers thought it sounded like a lovers’ tiff, but they decided to investigate and knocked on the door of apartment 213 in the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street. It was opened by a well-groomed, good-looking, 31-year-old man with blond hair.

  He seemed very calm and rational and his apartment looked reasonably tidy, but a strange smell pervaded the place. When he went to get the key to the handcuffs from the bedroom, Edwards warned the officers that he had a knife in there, and one of the officers followed him. On his way, however, he noticed photographs lying around, depicting dismembered bodies and, bizarrely, skulls in a refrigerator. He shouted back to his colleague to cuff the blond man and arrest him. The blond man struggled as the other cop tried to put the cuffs on him, but was quickly subdued.

  The first officer decided to look in the fridge. Opening the door, he froze in horror, the blood draining from his face. A pair of eyes stared out at him from a disembodied head. ‘There’s a f---ing head in the refrigerator!’ he screamed.

  The freezer contained another three heads, wrapped tidily in plastic bags. In a wardrobe in the bedroom he found a stockpot containing decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above were two skulls. There were male genitalia, preserved in formaldehyde. There were also photographs in a filing cabinet, taken as the victims died. In one, a man’s head was shown, lying in the sink; another depicted a victim, cut neatly open from neck to groin; others showed victims, still alive, in erotic poses.

  Jeffrey Dahmer, the blond man, was born in Milwaukee in 1960, but grew up in Akron, Ohio. To begin with he was an ordinary, happy little boy. As he grew older, however, he became tense and extremely shy. He would collect dead animals and strip the flesh from them.

  In his late teenage years, he seemed completely unmotivated. Instead of thinking about girls and a future career, he was locked into a gruesome fantasy world of death and dismemberment. By now he was drinking a lot and was considered a loner and an alcoholic by classmates.

  When Dahmer was almost eighteen his parents divorced, and it was around this time that he committed his first murder. He invited Steven Hicks, an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker back to his house, and hit him over the head with a barbell, because he ‘didn’t want him to leave’. He cut up Hicks’s body and buried it in the woods behind his house.

  In January 1979, having dropped out of university, Jeffrey joined the army. As with university, however, his drinking made life impossible and, after a couple of years in Germany, he was given an early discharge. He moved in with his grandmother back in Milwaukee.

  A string of offences followed – drunkenness, disorderly conduct and then indecent exposure and child molesting; he was reported to have masturbated in front of two boys. He persuaded the judge that he had, in fact, just been urinating, and was put on probation for a year.

  Dahmer had, by this time, already killed his second victim, Steven Toumi, who he met in a gay bar and killed in a hotel room in September 1987. He stuffed his body into a large suitcase, took it to the basement of his grandmother’s house, had sex with it and masturbated over it before dismembering it and disposing of it in the rubbish.

  His third victim was fourteen-year-old Native American, Jamie Doxtator. The fourth was Richard Guerro, in March 1988.

  He moved into his own apartment in September 1988 and the next day he picked up a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy, Saravane Sinthasomphone, who agreed to pose for photographs for $50.00 (£25.00). By grim coincidence, he was the older brother of a boy Dahmer would kill in 1991.

  He did not kill Saravane but, when the boy returned home, his parents realized he had been drugged, and Dahmer was arrested for sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, claiming he had thought the boy was older. Even as he awaited sentencing however, he struck again, killing Anthony Sears, a handsome black model. Dahmer boiled his skull to remove the skin and painted it grey.

  In court, he put on the kind of manipulative performance only a psychopath can, and he got away with five years’ probation. He was also ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’, which meant he went to work during the day and returned to jail at night. He was released after just ten months and went to live with his grandmother, before moving into his rooms in the Oxford apartments in May 1990.

  Exactly a year later, a naked fourteen-year-old Laotian, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering in Dahmer’s neighbourhood. The boy was incoherent, having already been drugged by Dahmer. When the police arrived, they took the boy back to the flat where Dahmer calmly told them that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and that they had had a drunken argument. The police handed the boy over to Dahmer, noting a strange smell in the apartment. A few hours later, Konerak was dead.

  From September 1987 to July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 16 men, ranging in age from 14 to 31. He would pick up his victim at a gay bar, lure him back to his grandmother’s basement or his flat to pose for photographs and then would offer him a drugged drink, strangle him, masturbate on the body or even have sex with it. He would then cut the corpse up and dispose of it. He took photographs throughout and sometimes boiled the skull, to remove the flesh, keeping it and other body parts as mementos. He began experimenting with various chemical methods to dispose of the flesh and bones. The residue would be poured down a drain or flushed down the toilet. He often preserved the genitals in formaldehyde.

  He also ate some of the flesh of his victims, claiming that, by doing so, they would come alive in him again. He experimented with seasoning and meat tenderizers.

  Before they died, he sometimes tried to perform a kind of lobotomy on his victims. After drugging them, he would drill a hole in their skulls and inject muriatic acid into their brains. He was trying to create a functioning zombie-like creature that he could exercise ultimate control over. Needless to say, most died during this procedure.

  Although, at his trial, his counsel tried to prove he was insane, he was found guilty, receiving
15 life sentences, a total of 957 years in prison.

  On the morning of 28 November 1994, at Columbia Correctional Institute in Wisconsin, another inmate smashed Dahmer’s skull with a blunt instrument (accounts differ as to what weapon was actually used). He died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.

  David Koresh

  Mount Carmel, Waco, Texas, USA

  The entrance to the notorious Mount Carmel ranch is now protected by a home-made barrier, and handwritten signs indicate that entry is at the visitors own risk due to broken glass and other potential hazards littering the site. The media and government agents may have left the area, but scars left by the Waco assault, siege and subsequent fire, can still be seen on the landscape.

  David Koresh was born Vernon David Howell in 1959, in Houston, Texas, to a 14 year-old single mother and a father who did not hang around for long. An abusive stepfather helped to complete the picture and round off the manipulative psychopath who would become David Koresh, messianic leader of the Branch Davidian cult, and a radical spin-off from the Seventh Day Adventists. At school, the children called him ‘Mister Retardo’ because of his learning difficulties, but, nonetheless, by the age of 12, he had learned the New Testament by heart.

  Howell joined the Branch Davidians in the early 1980s, after moving to its headquarters at a ranch renamed the Mount Carmel Centre, near Waco. Handsome but aggressive, he soon harboured ambitions to be its leader. To this end, he entered into a sexual relationship with sect leader, Lois Roden, then in her late 60s. By 1983, he was claiming to have the gift of prophecy.