by Gordon Kerr
Sunday 4 August, 2002, was a hot and sunny day in East Cambridgeshire and the people of the small town of Soham were out in their gardens enjoying the bright sunshine. The Wells family had invited some family and friends over to their house for a barbecue and everyone was having a lovely time. Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged ten, were proudly wearing new red Manchester United strips, the name of their hero, David Beckham, emblazoned on the back. They posed together for a photograph before eating. It would be the last photograph of the two little girls alive.
After dinner, Holly and Jessica asked if they could go out and buy sweets at the Soham Sports Centre, not far from the Wells house. When they failed to return and their increasingly frantic parents were unable to obtain a reply from Jessica’s mobile phone, which they knew she had taken with her, they reported the girls missing and, around midnight, a police search of the area was launched.
The search continued the next day and was joined by hundreds of local people. Posters were issued carrying pictures of the girls in the hope that someone’s memory would be jogged and some vital piece of information would lead to their discovery. David Beckham, whose name was on the shirts they were wearing, made an appeal on television for their safe return. But still there was no sign of them and, as time passed, hopes of finding them alive began to fade.
Among the witnesses who had been the last to see Holly and Jessica on the Sunday night was 29-year-old Ian Huntley, caretaker at the girls’ primary school, Soham Village College. He claimed to have seen them shortly after they had left the barbecue, walking past 5 College Close, the house he shared with his fiancée, Maxine Carr, a teaching assistant at the school.
Huntley’s house and the school where he worked were searched, in order to eliminate him as a suspect, and, although nothing was found to link him with the girls’ disappearance, police still retained some suspicions about him. He asked too many questions and seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in the case. He was even interviewed on television about it.
When, a week later, investigators returned to Soham College for a further search, they made a harrowing find – the partially burned Manchester United shirts the girls had been wearing that afternoon, and their shoes, hidden in a rubbish bin.
Huntley and Maxine Carr were arrested immediately on suspicion of murder.
The following day, 17 August, a game warden, walking near the RAF Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk made a tragic discovery, the partially burned remains of Holly and Jessica. They had died of asphyxiation before being burned.
The nation was shocked and the evidence against Huntley began to build. To begin with, he was familiar with the area in which the girls were found, as he used to go plane-spotting there. It was also not far from where his father lived.
The forensic evidence was even more damning. Fibres from his clothes, the carpets in 5 College Close and from his car were found on the girls’ shirts. His hair was also found on them. The last signal from Jessica’s mobile was traced to a location close to his house.
On 20 August, Ian Huntley was formally charged with the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and Maxine Carr was charged with assisting an offender as well as conspiring to pervert the course of justice. She had provided him with an alibi, claiming that she had been in the house with him on the Sunday evening when, she had, in fact, been hundreds of miles away in Grimsby, visiting her mother, as phone records confirmed.
The evidence presented at the trial of Huntley and Carr was overwhelming. His fingerprints were found on the bag in which the girls’ clothing had been disposed of. Huntley had been seen meticulously cleaning his red Ford Fiesta the day after the girls’ disappearance, replacing the flooring in the boot with a piece of carpet. He had changed all four tyres and tried to bribe the mechanic who carried out the work to put down a false number plate on the paperwork.
Several weeks into the trial, however, Huntley made an astonishing confession. He admitted being responsible for the girls’ deaths, but claimed that it had all been an accident. He said that they had come to his door to talk to Carr, but that Holly had a nosebleed. Taking them into the bathroom to clean Holly up, he had accidentally pushed her into the bath that was half full of water. At that point, he claimed, Jessica began to scream and, in a panic, he put his hand over her mouth to quieten her, but had suffocated her ‘accidentally’. He said he then turned round to Holly in the bath only to find that she was also dead.
He had put the girls into the back of his car and drove to Lakenheath where he removed their clothing, poured petrol over them and set fire to them.
Carr added her own confession a few days later. She said she had provided him with an alibi because she wanted to protect him. She knew that he had been accused of rape in 1998, but the case had been dropped due to lack of evidence. But, she knew he would lose his job if the case came to light. She also did not believe him capable of murder.
On 17 December, the jury found Huntley guilty of the murder of the two girls. He was given to two life sentences, while Maxine Carr was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and went to prison for three and a half years.
Virginia Tech Massacre
Virginia Tech University, Virginia, USA
Virginia Tech was founded in 1872 as Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College. Its motto is Ut Prosim, which translates as 'That I May Serve'. The only thing pupil, Seung-Hui Cho needed serving with was a compulsory commitment-order under Virginia's mental health legislation, but unfortunately that never happened. Consequently he was able to commit the bloodiest school shooting in America's History.
Seung-Hui Cho had always been an odd, strangely menacing character, even when very young. His family had long worried about him, some family members suspecting that he possibly suffered from autism. He spoke rarely and mumbled when he did. As a result, he became a victim of bullying and retreated even further into himself. Eventually, he was diagnosed with depression and selective mutism, a social anxiety disorder that prevented him from speaking. He received some therapy, but discontinued it.
When he went to Virginia Tech to study English, in 2003, his behaviour became even more erratic. He was obviously intelligent, but was an insecure loner who appeared arrogant and never removed his sunglasses, even indoors. Having taught him for only six weeks, poetry teacher Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her class in autumn 2005, after he had photographed female students’ legs under their desks and because of the violent, obscene poems he had been writing. Giovanni communicated her concerns to her department head, Lucinda Roy, who passed them to the student affairs office and the dean’s office, but, as he had made no overt threats against anyone, there was nothing they could do.
Roy made efforts to help the boy, working one-to-one with him, but became concerned with her own personal safety, to the extent that she invented a code to pass to a colleague if she felt threatened. She urged Cho to seek counselling, but he never did.
Meanwhile, Cho’s previous mental health problems were not divulged due to privacy laws.
When he arrived at Virginia Tech, Cho had found it difficult to talk to anyone, even failing to respond to greetings when he passed other students. On the class sign-in sheet, on which pupils had to write their names, he wrote only a question mark, and it was as ‘Question Mark’ that he often introduced himself to people. He became known as ‘The Question Mark Kid’.
He never seemed to do any work, attend classes or read books. A room-mate reported that he sat on a wooden rocking chair by a window staring out at the lawn for hours on end. He typed endlessly on his laptop and was once spotted riding his bike in endless circles around the dormitory car park. He was obsessed by the song Shine by rock band, Collective Soul, playing it continuously. Andy Koch, another room-mate, reported receiving repeated mobile phone calls from Cho in which he called himself ‘Question Mark’ and claimed to be Koch’s brother. He informed Koch that he had an imaginary girlfriend called Jelly, a supermodel who lived in out
er space, travelled by spaceship and knew Cho by the pet name, Spanky. On another occasion, during a holiday break, Cho called Koch and claimed to be holidaying with Russian president, Vladimir Putin. His behaviour was becoming so bizarre that Koch and other room-mates advised female students not to visit them in their room.
These concerns were exacerbated by the fact that he had been accused on several occasions of stalking female students, sending them unsolicited text messages and writing lines of Shakespeare on their doors. After his final stalking of a female student had met with no response from her, he texted Koch, ‘I might as well kill myself now’. Koch, worried for Cho’s safety, alerted the authorities.
On 13 December 2005, Cho was declared to be ‘mentally ill and in need of hospitalization’ and was temporarily detained at Carilion St Albans Behavioral Health Center in Christiansburg, Virginia, pending a commitment hearing before the Montgomery County, Virginia district court. However, the recommendation was simply that he undergo outpatient treatment for his condition and he was released. Critically, because he had not been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, he could still legally purchase firearms under Virginia law.
He purchased two guns – a .22-caliber Walther P22 semi-automatic handgun and, a month later, a 9mm semi-automatic Glock 19 handgun. Virginia law prohibited the purchase of two guns within a period of 30 days. On the morning of 16 April, he was ready to emulate his heroes, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, an event that had thrilled him.
That morning, at around 7am, Cho gained access to West Ambler Johnston hall, a residential hall at Virginia Tech that housed 894 students. It is not known how he got in there at that time as he had a pass card that only allowed him entry after 7.30 am. He proceeded to the room of a 19-year-old freshman student, Emily J Hilscher, and shot her and a senior, Ryan C Clark, dead. He then returned to his own room where he cleaned himself up, before deleting all his email correspondence and removing the hard drive from his computer. An hour later, he was seen in the vicinity of a duck pond on the campus into which, it is believed, he might have thrown the hard drive and his mobile phone. However, no trace of either has ever been found.
Meanwhile, emergency services were responding to the earlier incident. Critically, however, in decisions that were later heavily criticized, the campus authorities and police did not order a lockdown of the university buildings. Neither did they cancel that morning’s classes until the shooter was caught.
Carrying a backpack in which were chains, locks, a hammer, a knife, his two guns and almost 400 rounds of ammunition, Cho next visited the local post office, where he posted a package containing his writings and some video recordings of himself to NBC News. These would arrive at the television station the following day.
Shortly after, he arrived at Norris Hall where Engineering Science and Mechanics were taught. Inside, he chained the main doors shut, taping a message to them that a bomb would be detonated if they were tampered with. He then headed for the second floor of the building where a number of classrooms were situated.
He is said to have looked into a couple of classrooms before launching his first attack. It was an Advanced Hydrology class, taught by Professor GV Loganathan in Room 206. There were 13 students in the room and after Cho had shot dead the professor he opened fire on the terrified students, killing nine of them and wounding two.
Across the corridor, in Room 207, Christopher Bishop was teaching a German class. Cho entered the room and opened fire, killing Bishop and four more students. In Rooms 204 and 211, he continued his spree, shooting more students and teachers. He went back to some of the classrooms more than once, firing, in total, more than 174 rounds. In other classrooms, as soon as the gunfire was heard, students and teachers barricaded doors with whatever they could find.
In Room 204, Mathematics and Engineering professor and Holocaust survivor, Liviu Libresco succeeded in holding the classroom door until most of his panicked students had escaped via the windows, but Cho fired through the door killing him.
In a French class, in Room 211, teacher Jocelyne Couture-Nowak similarly attempted to block the door, ordering her students to the rear of the class. Again, she was shot through the door. A student, Henry Lee, who had tried to help her, was also killed.
When Cho was seen heading towards Room 205, a student, Zach Petkewicz, pushed a large table up against the door. After failing to gain entry and shooting several rounds through the door, Cho moved on.
Meanwhile, in Room 207, where Cho had already shot a number of people, some students barricaded the door and tended to the wounded, preventing him from re-entering the room.
By this time, 30 people, students and teachers were dead and 17 were wounded.
Outside, the police were trying to get into the building but were being prevented from doing so by the chains with which Cho had locked them. One officer succeeded in shooting off a deadbolt on a laboratory door and they entered the building. As they made for the second floor, they heard Cho’s last shot. When they found him, he had a single, self-inflicted bullet wound to the temple.
He had more than emulated the Columbine killers. The Virginia Tech massacre became the deadliest school shooting in American history.
Copyright
© 2008 Omnipress Limited
www.omnipress.co.uk
This 2008 edition published by Canary Press,
an imprint of Omnipress Limited, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission, in writing, of the publisher.
The views expressed in this book are those of the author but they are general views only, and readers are urged to consult a relevant and qualified specialist for individual advice in particular situations. Gordon Kerr and Omnipress Limited hereby exclude all liability to the extent permitted by law, for any errors or omissions in this book and for any loss, damage and expense (whether direct or indirect) suffered by a third party relying on any information contained in this book.
ISBN: 978-1-907795-22-0
Cover and internal design:
Anthony Prudente on behalf of Omnipress Limited
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Introduction
Countess Erzsébet Báthory
Eastern State Penitentiary
The Bloody Benders
Sing Sing
Lizzie Borden
H H Holmes
Newgate Prison
Lemp Mansion
Bangkwang Central Prison
Collingwood Manor Massacre
John Bodkin Adams
Washington State Penitentiary
Nazi Death Camps
Bugsy Siegel
Pentonville Prison
John Reginald Christie
Ed Gein
Holloway Prison
Alcatraz
The Manson Family
Jonestown
The Curse of Pearl Bryan
Wonderland Murders
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
Gambino Mafia Family
Fred & Rose West
Menendez Brothers
Jeffrey Dahmer
David Koresh
The Tent Jail
Thomas Hamilton
Gianni Versace
Heaven’s Gate
Luke Woodham
Gary Heidnik
Columbine Massacre
Ian Huntley
Virginia Tech Massacre
Copyright
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