100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  He could, from that description, be any man at all – that was what was so frightening. He could even be a policeman himself – which might explain why he’d proved so elusive. This idea began to take hold when he struck yet again in the early hours of a late-June morning, shooting through the windscreen of a car in Queens and wounding another young couple. All the police could do in response to the gathering panic was once more to beef up foot-patrols in anticipation of the anniversary of his first murder a year before.

  Nothing happened, though, on the night of July 29th 1977; and when he did strike again, it wasn’t in his usual hunting-ground at all – but in Brooklyn. In the early hours of July 31st, he fired through the windshield at a pair of young lovers sitting in their car near the sea-front at Coney Island. The woman died in hospital; the man recovered, but was blinded.

  This time, though, the ‘Son of Sam’ had made a mistake. For a woman out walking her dog at about the same time not far away saw two policemen ticketing a car parked near a fire hydrant and then, a few minutes later, a young man jumping into the car and driving off. As it happened only one car, a Ford Galaxie, was ticketed that night for parking at a hydrant – and it was registered to a David Berkowitz in Yonkers.

  When approached the next day by the police officer in charge of the search, Berkowitz instantly recognized him from the TV, and said,

  ‘Inspector Dowd? You finally got me.’

  As a figure of nightmare, Berkowitz was something of a let-down: an overweight loner with a moronic smile who lived in squalor, was pathologically shy of women and probably still a virgin. He later said he heard demons urging him to kill, among them a 6,000-year-old man who had taken over the body of a dog he had shot. On the walls of his apartment he’d scrawled a series of demonic slogans:

  ‘In this hole lives the wicked king’; ‘Kill for my Master’; and ‘I turn children into killers’.

  Berkowitz was judged sane, and was sentenced to a total of 365 years in prison. His apartment became a place of pilgrimage for a ghoulish fan-club; and he himself has since made a great deal of money from articles, a book and the film rights to his life.

  Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono

  Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono were cousins – and in their way opposites. Still, they made a good team. For Buono was all macho, a street-tough, hanging out with hookers and forever parading his Italian connections, while Bianchi was a lot more subtle and plausible. He read books on psychology, applied to join the LA Police, and even rode in patrol cars with cops who – though they didn’t know it – were out there looking for him. He was also, no doubt, keeping an eye at the time on exactly how the cops approached people on the street. For it was almost certainly Bianchi who persuaded the women they killed that he and his cousin were undercover cops – and sweet-talked them into their car.

  Bianchi, who’d been raised by foster parents in the east, arrived in Glendale, California in 1977, to stay with cousin Buono, who ran an upholstery business out of his garage. In October of that year the first victim of a killer who came to be called the ‘Hillside Strangler’ was found near Chevy Chase Drive; and within two weeks there was another, this time dumped among the gravestones of Forest Lawn Cemetery. Both women were naked, and the body of the second had been carefully washed – apart from the marks of ropes tied round her wrists, ankles and neck, there were no clues at all.

  By the middle of December, seven more bodies had been found, all women and young girls between the ages of 12 and 28. Most, though not all, had been part-time prostitutes. They were naked and most had been tied up, raped and sodomized before they’d been strangled and then carefully washed. All of them had been dumped in places where they could be easily found, often close to police precinct-houses – as if the ‘Strangler’ were making fun of the cops’ inability to find him.

  There was one more killing, in February 1978, when the body of yet another young woman was found, this time in the trunk of a car. But then they stopped. It was only much later that the police discovered that all ten bodies had been placed in a rough circle round Angelo Buono’s house.

  They discovered it because almost a year later, in January 1979, Bianchi, who’d moved to Bellingham, Washington because of the mess in Buono’s house, raped and strangled two co-eds and made the mistake of shoving their bodies into the trunk of one of the coeds’ car. They were found relatively quickly, and Bianchi had been seen with one of them. He was brought in for questioning.

  Bianchi played a game with the police – he was working as a security guard and had made another application to join the force in Bellingham. At first he was charm itself and denied everything. But then little by little he began to drop hints about the existence of several Kenneth Bianchis inside him, one of whom might have committed the murders. He had black-outs, he said; he couldn’t remember things he’d done; perhaps a secret interior murderer had done them.

  In the end he was charged with the murder of the two Bellingham students; at this point he calmly offered a deal. He would plead guilty, he said, and finger his Californian cousin as the real ‘Hillside Strangler,’ if he could avoid the death penalty in Washington and serve time in a California prison instead. The authorities agreed, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Once Bianchi had been shipped to California, though, it turned out there was a problem – one which Bianchi himself may well have anticipated. For, guilty or not, he’d fooled Washington psychiatrists into declaring him insane – and as such, of course, he couldn’t give evidence against Buono. It later transpired that he’d made a close study of Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, books about multiple personalities; and had almost certainly duped psychiatrists into believing he’d been successfully hypnotized when revealing details about his own.

  Buono did in the end come to trial. But, without Bianchi, it was a long and extremely difficult case, since Buono, before his arrest, had cleared his apartment of every trace of evidence except for a single eyelash that belonged to one of their victims. In the end his conviction probably hinged on the evidence of a woman who identified him and Bianchi as the two ‘detectives’ who’d stopped her on a Hollywood street and demanded to see her ID. She was the daughter of the actor Peter Lorre, and Bianchi later admitted that he’d seen a picture of her father next to the ID in her wallet and had decided to let her go.

  After two years of trial and more than 400 witnesses, Buono was finally sentenced to life without possibility of parole, and died of a heart attack in his prison cell in 2002. Bianchi was ordered back to Walla Walla Prison in Washington, where his first possible parole date is 2005.

  Billy the Kid

  Billy the Kid, later to become one of the great legends of the West, was born Henry McCarty in a slum tenement in New York on November 23rd 1859. At the age of three, he moved with his parents to Caffeyville, Kansas, where his father died. His mother soon moved on, this time to Colorado, and married a miner and prospector who took them to the raw boom town of Silver City, New Mexico, where his mother opened a boarding-house.

  Billy the Kid has been glamorized in countless films

  His mother died when Billy was 14 or 15; and soon afterwards, on the run from a charge of petty theft in New Mexico, he killed a bully in Arizona. From then on he took the name of William Bonney; and back in New Mexico, became a cowboy working on the ranch of an Englishman called John Henry Tunstall.

  Tunstall, along with cattle baron John Chisum, had decided to take on the power of a group of crooked rancher-businessmen called ‘The House’ who had turned Lincoln County into their own political and economic fiefdom. He was assassinated by The House on February 17th 1878. But his gun-carrying cowhands, led by teenage Billy, stayed loyal to his cause; and what became known as the Lincoln County War raged through the territory for the next four months, culminating in a five-day-long battle in the single street of Lincoln, New Mexico in July. Tunstall’s men were eventually routed, with many killed, but Billy made the first of what was to become a series
of legendary escapes.

  At this point he did his best to become a law-abiding citizen. But New Mexico governor Lew Wallace – who later wrote the best-selling novel Ben Hur – renegued on a deal he’d made offering Billy a pardon in return for his testimony against two vicious killers; and John Chisum, who was notoriously mean, refused him the back-pay he’d earned for his part in the war, perhaps because of Billy’s liaison with his niece.

  Billy had no alternative, then, but to become a full-time cowboy outlaw. With other veterans of the war he took to rustling in Lincoln County and beyond. This soon brought down on him the forces of big-money: a new alliance of town businessmen, cattlemen and professionals, mostly from White Oaks and Roswell. Billy, however, was liked by, and had wide support from, ordinary townspeople and smallholders; and when his onetime friend Pat Garrett, a former buffalo hunter, was put up as sheriff of Lincoln, he backed another nominee to run against him.

  The rest, as they say, is history. Pat Garrett won, broke up the gang and arrested Billy, who was tried and condemned for homicide during the Lincoln County War. With no pardon available from the Governor, he killed two guards and escaped. By now made famous by newspapers and dime-store novels, he was tracked down by Garrett and a range-detective called John Poe to Fort Sumner on the Pecos River; and gunned down at night there by a single bullet from Garrett’s gun.

  It’s not quite history, of course. For a year after his death, an itinerant newsman called Ash Upson wrote a 25 cent pamphlet for Pat Garrett called Saga of Billy the Kid and years later he ghosted another work for Garrett, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. In both books, the literate and likeable Billy was transmuted into a psychopath: a deadly shot and a multiple murder, all for the greater glory of Garrett and the so-called forces of law and order. When he was killed, Billy the Kid was 21.

  Lizzie Borden

  Lizzie Borden, so the old rhyme goes, took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. The truth is, though, that the number of whacks which despatched Abbey Borden and her rich husband Andrew in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892, numbered nineteen and ten respectively – and daughter Lizzie, much to the delight of the courtroom which tried her, was finally acquitted.

  Lizzie Borden ‘gave her mother forty whacks’

  But was she really guilty? She certainly had a motive. For Abbey was in fact thirty-two-year-old Lizzie’s stepmother, and she resented her deeply, particularly after her father, usually very tight with his money, bought Abbey’s sister a house and gave the deeds to his wife. Lizzie was also given to what her family had come to call ‘funny turns’. One day, for example, she announced to her father that Abbey’s bedroom had been ransacked by a burglar. He reported it to the police, who soon established that Lizzie had done the ransacking herself.

  As for her father, whom she loved, the repressed spinster may even have had a motive for his murder too, apart from his meanness with money and the fact that, with both him and her stepmother dead, she would finally inherit it. For three months before his death in August, when outhouses in the garden were twice broken into, he’d convinced himself that whoever was responsible had been after Lizzie’s pet pigeons. So he’d decapitated them – yes, with an axe.

  Suffice it to say that at about 9.30 am on August 4th, while dusting the spare room, Abbey Borden was struck from behind with an axe and then brutally hacked at even after she was dead. There were only two people in the house at the time, Lizzie and the maid Bridget who was cleaning the downstairs windows. Slightly less than an hour and a half later, Andrew Borden returned, to be told by his daughter that his wife was out. A few minutes later, after Bridget had gone upstairs to her room in the attic, he too was struck down while dozing on a settee in the living-room.

  It was Lizzie who ‘found’ the body of her father, and the neighbours she immediately called in found the body of his wife upstairs. They did their best to comfort her. But she seemed curiously calm, and she was happy enough to talk to the police as soon as they arrived. Trouble was that, both then and subsequently, she began giving conflicting accounts of her whereabouts during the morning; and it wasn’t long before the police, who found a recently cleaned axehead in the basement, came to regard her as the chief suspect. Only the day before the murders she’d tried to buy prussic acid in Fall River, they discovered, and when that had failed, she’d told a neighbour she was worried that her father had made many potentially vengeful enemies, because of his brusque manner.

  After the inquest she was arrested – and vilified as a murderess in the newspapers. But by the time her trial took place in New Bedford in 1893, the tide had begun to turn. Bridget and her sister played down her hatred of her step-mother; and though Bridget confessed that Lizzie had burned one of her dresses on the day after her parents’ funeral, she said that there had been no bloodstains on it. Lizzie herself was demure and ladylike in the dock – she even fainted halfway through the proceedings. And in the end the jury agreed with her lawyer, an ex-governor of the State, that she could not be both a lady and a fiend.

  After the trial, now rich, she returned to Fall River and bought a large house, in which she died alone in 1927. Bridget the maid returned to Ireland – with, it’s said, a good deal of money from poor Andrew Borden’s coffers. There’s since been a suggestion that Lizzie became a killer during one of her ‘funny turns’ – caused by temporal-lobe epilepsy.

  Jerry Brudos

  Jerry Brudos, thirty years old, was a Portland, Oregon electrician and amateur photographer, married, with two children. He was quietly-spoken and apparently gentle; and he spent the evening with his co-ed date talking quietly to her in the lounge of her college dormitory. But somewhere nearby there was a serial killer on the loose and when he said to her that she ‘ought to feel sad’ for the girls who’d been killed, she thought it sufficiently odd to mention it to the police. It didn’t mean much, she agreed, and she nearly didn’t. But if she hadn’t, then the police – and Brudos’s wife – might never have found out what he got up to in the studio in his basement garage.

  In 1968, three young Oregon women vanished into thin air and it wasn’t until March 1969 that one of them – her body too decomposed for the cause of death to be established – was washed up in a creek. Within a month, two more women had disappeared. But this time they were found relatively quickly, floating in the Long Tom River. Both had been raped and strangled, stripped of bra and panties and weighed down by bits of metal from a car.

  There were no clues at all to the identity of the killer. But the police had begun to think that he might just possibly be a transvestite. For in April, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl had fought off an attack by a man who tried to force her into his car and two other girls had seen a suspicious man dressed up as a woman in a car park nearby.

  It was at this point that the police received the tip-off from the Oregon State co-ed and followed the small thread of her lead back to electrician Jerry Brudos, who turned out, from their records, to be a very strange man indeed. For he’d been arrested for stealing women’s underwear and for trying to force a young girl at knifepoint to take off her clothes. He’d been caught near the State University women’s dormitory, carrying stolen underwear and wearing a bra and panties.

  It was enough for them to search Brudos’s house, where they quickly found samples of the type of knots and wire used to tie the weights to the bodies found in the Long Tom River. But this was nothing to what they found in the garage: a souvenir picture of a dead woman hanging from a hook there, with Brudos’s face caught reflected in a mirror beneath.

  Brudos was arrested and soon confessed to four murders, as well as an obsession with women’s underwear and high-heeled shoes. His first victim had been a young door-to-door saleswoman, whom he’d taken to his studio, raped and strangled. Then he’d taken her clothes off and used her as a dummy, fitting her with different bras, panties and shoes from his collection. Finally he’d cut off her left foot, slipped i
t into a stiletto and stored it in a locked freezer. The rest of her he threw into the Willamette River.

  He’d done more or less the same with his next three victims, except that he’d photographed one of them during the fitting session. He’d also cut off one breast of his second victim, and both breasts of the third. The fourth he had given electric shocks to, just to see if her dead body would twitch.

  Brudos was charged with three of these four murders, and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment.

  Ted Bundy

  Everyone liked Theodore Bundy. Even the judge at his Miami trial in July 1979 took to him. After sentencing Bundy to death, he said:

  ‘Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely. It’s a tragedy to this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. . .’

  Even the judge liked Ted Bundy, a ‘charming and personable young man’

  But Bundy’s good looks and intelligence were murderous. For between January 1974 and January 1978, when he was finally arrested in Pensacola, Florida, he brutalized and killed perhaps as many as thirty-six girls and young women in four states.

  The first of these states was Washington, where the disappearances began in the Seattle area at the beginning of 1974. One after another, within six months, seven young women vanished, seemingly into thin air. One of them had been abducted from a rented room; another had left a bar with a man at two in the morning. But the others had simply been out for a walk or on their way somewhere: a cinema or a concert or home. Except for bloodstains in the rented room, they left no trace at all.