In the summer of that year, there were more disappearances, including two in one day from a Washington lakeside resort. But there were also, for the first time, clues. For a good-looking young man with his arm in a sling – and introducing himself as Ted – had been going around the resort asking young women if they could help him load a sailboat onto the roof of his car – and one of the disappeared had been seen going off with him. The scattered remains of both women – and of yet another unknown victim – were found by hunters a few miles away two months later.
Bundy always protested his innocence, right up to his execution
A massive manhunt began, producing huge numbers of calls from the public and more than 2,000 potential suspects – among them, thanks to a woman’s call, Theodore (Ted) Bundy. But by that time he’d moved to Salt Lake City in Utah to study law; it was there that the disappearances resumed. There were three in October 1974; one the teenage daughter of a local police chief, who was later found – raped, strangled and buried – in the Wassatch Mountains. Then, at the beginning of November, one of his Salt Lake City victims – whom ‘a good-looking man’ posing as a police officer had lured into his car and had then attacked with a crowbar – managed to escape and to give a description to the police.
Bundy was lucky this time for she failed to recognise him in a photograph the police later showed her. But after one last abduction and murder in Salt Lake City, he from then on began to operate only out-of-state, over the border in Colorado. Between January and July, five more young women disappeared, though this time two of the bodies were discovered quickly. One, with her jeans pulled down, had been beaten to death with a rock. The other had been raped and then bludgeoned.
Bundy, in the end, was picked up by accident, as a possible burglary suspect. But police at the scene found a crowbar, an ice-pick and a ski-mask in his trunk; and in his apartment, maps and brochures of Colorado. Hairs from the interior of the car were found to match those of the police-chief’s dead daughter. He was extradited to Colorado to stand trial, but then he escaped – twice. The first time he was quickly found hiding out in the mountains. But the second time it took police more than forty days to catch him, and by then – this time in Florida – another three young women were dead, one of them with teeth marks on her body; three others had been savagely beaten.
The subsequent trial did little to uncover Bundy’s reasons for killing – for the sheer viciousness and voracity of his sexual attacks. But in an interview with a detective after his arrest, he remarked,
‘Sometimes I feel like a vampire,’
and later, on Death Row, though never confessing to the murders, he speculated to two writers about an early career as a Peeping Tom and a massive consumer of pornography. He also talked about an ‘entity’ inside him that drove him to rape and murder…
It was the marks of his teeth – so experts confirmed – on a Tallahassee student’s body that finally undid Bundy. After numerous, lengthy appeals, he was electrocuted on January 24th 1989, still protesting his innocence.
Al Capone
Prohibition, which came into force in the United States in 1920, was a monumental act of political stupidity. For it was never backed by the ordinary man and woman in the street, and it was they, who by exercising what they saw as their right to go on drinking, handed power to the rum-runners and those who controlled them: men like Al Capone. They voted them, in effect, into office as a sort of underground government. Capone, at his height in the Chicago area, was known as the ‘Mayor of Crook County’.
Alfonso Caponi was born in 1899 in New York and grew up into a resourceful small-time hood, working in the rackets and as a bouncer in a Brooklyn brothel – where a knife-fight gave him his nickname: ‘Scarface.’ In New York, if he’d stayed there, he might never have amounted to much. But in 1920, when on the run from the police, he got an invitation from a distant relative of his family’s to join him in Chicago.
The relative was Johnny Torrio, the ambitious chief lieutenant of an old-style Mafia boss called ‘Diamond Jim’ Colosimo, who controlled most of the brothels in the city. After the passing of the Volstead Act that brought in Prohibition, Torrio had tried to persuade Colosimo to go into the liquor business, but Colosimo’d wanted no part of it. So now Torrio made his move. He despatched Capone, his new personal bodyguard, to Colosimo’s restaurant-headquarters one night, and Capone gunned him down.
Torrio, with Capone as his right hand, took over Colosimo’s brothels and moved heavily into bootlegging. This brought them into direct competition with the mainly Irish gang of ‘Deanie’ O’Bannion, a genial ex-choirboy and ex-journalist who served only the finest liquor and ran his business from the city’s most fashionable flower-shop. But for a while both sides held their hand. Then in November 1924, in revenge for a trick which got Torrio a police record (and eventually nine months in jail), O’Bannion was killed by three of Torrio’s men in his shop, after they’d arrived asking for a funeral wreath.
Capone was a ruthless and ambitious gangster
The death of O’Bannion, who was buried in high style, triggered an all-out war for control of the liquor trade in Chicago, with Torrio and Capone pitted against O’Bannion’s lieutenants and heirs, Hymie Weiss and ‘Bugs’ Moran, and also against the four brothers of the Sicilian Genna family. The going soon got too hot for Johnny Torrio, who in 1925 retired to Naples, taking $50 million, it’s said, with him. But Capone was made of sterner – and more cunning – stuff. He gradually eliminated the Genna family and, as he did so, he bought politicians and judges, journalists and police brass, until he was in effect in control, not only of all enforcement agencies and public opinion, but also of City Hall. He made massive donations to the campaigns of Chicago Mayor ‘Big Bill’ Thompson and he held court to all comers in fifty rooms on two floors of the downtown Metropole Hotel.
In 1929, having already got rid of Hymie Weiss, he was finally ready to move against his last surviving enemy, ‘Bugs’ Moran. Word was passed to Moran that a consignment of hijacked booze could be picked up at a garage on North Clark Street on St. Valentine’s Day, but soon after his people arrived, so did Capone’s torpedoes, two of them in police uniform. Six of Moran’s men died in what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, along with an unfortunate optometrist who liked hanging out with hoods; Moran himself only escaped because he was late for the appointment. As for Capone, he was on holiday that day in Biscayne Bay, Florida and at the actual time of the slaughter at the SMC Cartage Company garage, was on the phone to the Miami DA.
Capone in jovial mood
The St Valentine’s Day Massacre, said to have been carried out on Capone’s orders
In the end Capone was brought to book, not by the cops, but by the internal revenue service. In 1931, he was tried for tax evasion and sentenced to jail for eleven years. By the time he came out eight years later, the Mafia had moved on, had become more sophisticated; and he himself was not only old hat but half mad from tertiary syphilis. He died in his bed eight years later on his Florida estate. ‘Bugs’ Moran outlived him by ten years.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy, whose parents were both British Mormons, was born George Leroy Parker in Beaver, Utah in the spring of 1865. As a teenager, he hung out with a cowboy called Mike Cassidy at a ranch his mother was working on; he began calling himself George Cassidy after getting in trouble with the law at 18. A few years later, after joining a cattle-drive, he robbed his first bank at Telluride, Colorado on June 24th 1889, perhaps in company with a twenty-one-year old Pennsylvanian called Harry Longabaugh – already known to the law as the Sundance Kid.
At the age of about 18, looking for adventure, Longabaugh had travelled with relatives by covered wagon to Colorado; his first nickname-cum-alias had been Kid Chicago. But in 1888, he’d been arrested for rustling near Sundance, Wyoming and forever after he was known as the Sundance Kid. As for Butch, he seems to have worked briefly as a butcher in Rock Springs between ba
nk- and railroad-heists – and the name stuck.
Butch was a charmer; the Kid, more aloof; both were accomplished escape artists. They each served just one prison stretch, the Kid after the 1888 rustling, and Butch in 1894 for – of all things – stealing a horse. For a while they went their separate ways. The Kid seems to have worked solo. But that was not Butch’s way: when he came out of Laramie State Penitentiary after a two-year sentence, he formed a gang which soon became famous as the Wild Bunch. He and a shifting membership, which included Elzy Lay and Harry ‘Kid Curry’ Logan, went after banks and mine payrolls – and between jobs holed up, first in Robbers’ Roost, Utah and then in the more celebrated Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, a hideaway that had been used by Jesse and Frank James, among others.
It was at Hole-in-the-Wall that Butch and the Kid seem to have joined forces again. In 1899 and 1900, with a series of brilliantly planned hold-ups – beginning with a train robbery at Wilcox, Wyoming which netted between thirty- and sixty-thousand dollars – they became both celebrities and very much wanted men. At some point Butch tried to make a deal with both the law and the Union Pacific Railroad – his freedom in return for future good conduct. But when negotiations broke down, the Wild Bunch promptly struck again: they held up another train in Tipton, Wyoming in August 1900, followed swiftly by a bank hold-up in Winnemucca, Nevada, which yielded another $32,000.
To celebrate, the Bunch went south, to Fort Worth, Texas – and made the big mistake of having a group photograph taken there. For detectives from the Wells Fargo Company and the Pinkerton Agency soon seized on it and had it published both all over the country and as far away, ultimately, as Britain and Tahiti. Bounty hunters pursued them, and to escape the heat, Butch, the Kid and the Kid’s lover Etta Place, made their way, first to New York – where the Kid bought Etta a Tiffany watch – and then by steamer to Argentina.
They bought a ranch in Cholilo; Etta and the Kid went back twice to the US on visits. But then they began to run out of money and in March 1906 they started holding up banks again, first in San Luis Province and then in Bahia Blanca. In 1907, they robbed a train in Bolivia and then, swinging back into Argentina, another bank. Etta went back to the States and disappeared, and finally so did Butch and the Kid – either into death or oblivion.
The usual version of the story is that Butch and the Kid were cornered by the military in San Vicente, southern Bolivia, after holding up a mine payroll. There was a furious gun-battle; the Kid was fatally wounded and Butch, with his last two bullets, shot, first the Kid, then himself. Butch’s sister, though, swore that he paid a visit to his family in Utah in 1925 and that he died twelve years later somewhere in the northwest of the United States. There are also rumours that the Kid joined Etta in Mexico City and died there in 1957. A mining boss, with whom they were friendly, had deliberately misidentified the bodies.
Mark David Chapman
Mark David Chapman wanted to be John Lennon. He collected Beatles records; he’d played in a band; he’d even married an older Japanese woman, just like his hero. But when it finally dawned on him he couldn’t be John Lennon, he first attempted suicide, and then he decided that Lennon himself couldn’t be John Lennon either.
At the beginning of December 1980, Chapman flew to New York, determined, he said later,
‘to go out in a blaze of glory.’
If he couldn’t get near John Lennon, he said, he’d shoot himself in the head on top of the Statue of Liberty, because ‘no one had killed themselves there before.’ But Lennon proved all too accessible. He regularly signed autographs for fans outside his home in the Dakota Building in Manhattan; Chapman joined them there on the morning of December 8th, holding up a copy of Lennon’s Double Fantasy album for his signature.
Mark David Chapman – ‘clearly not a sane man’
He might have left it at that, he later said. But he didn’t. For that night, when Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono got back from a recording session, Chapman, who’d waited for hours, calmly walked up to them as they were getting out of their limousine and fired five bullets from a Charter Arms .38 into Lennon’s body. Then he simply waited on the sidewalk, holding his signed album and reading a copy of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, until the police arrived.
At preliminary court hearings and at the eventual trial, the prosecution described the murder as a ‘deliberate, premeditated execution,’ pointing out that Chapman had not only stalked Lennon before killing him, but also had previous convictions for armed robbery, kidnapping and drugs offences. The defence painted Chapman as someone with an ‘incurable disease’ who had committed a ‘monstrously irrational crime’ – he was clearly ‘not a sane man.’ What neither side seemed to recognize was that in killing John Lennon, Chapman had actually solved the central problem of his life. For he had not only eliminated a role-model it had proved impossible to live up to, he had also made sure that his own name would be from now on inextricably linked to his hero’s.
When asked to say something in his defence, Chapman simply read out a passage from Catcher in the Rye. He was given a sentence of twenty years to life and recommended for psychiatric treatment. A year later, when visited by a British journalist, he was still reading Catcher in the Rye.
Caryl Chessman
Caryl Chessman was famous, not for his life, but for his death. When he finally went to the gas chamber in 1960, after twelve years on San Quentin’s Death Row, editorials all over Europe denounced his execution as ‘appalling’ and ‘monstrous.’ There were violent demonstrations in front of American embassies in Portugal, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela and a cry of condemnation from public figures worldwide. In life, Chessman might have been a violent petty criminal. But in death – and in his preparation for it – his name was amongst the best-known on the planet.
Part of the reason for the outcry was that, so far as was known, Chessman had never killed anyone. Yes, he’d been a criminal from his teens: he’d served time for robbery and escape. But the crimes that had taken him to Death Row were acts of what were called, in the prim language of the times, ‘sexual perversion,’ forced on two young women he abducted from their cars in the hills above Hollywood in January 1948. The two victims provoked enormous sympathy, of course: one was a married polio sufferer who’d only recently come out of hospital; and the second, a teenager, was later consigned to a mental asylum as irredeemably troubled – she was still there when Chessman was executed.
The evidence, for its part, was more or less watertight. But Chessman had the whole law book thrown at him. He was convicted on seventeen charges in all, including two under what was known in California as the ‘little Lindbergh Law,’ which covered ‘kidnapping with intent to rob with bodily harm’. It was these that carried the death penalty.
For twelve years, from 1948 onwards, Chessman literally fought for his life – it became his career. He wrote a novel and three other books about his experiences – one of which, Cell 2455 Death Row, became a best-seller. With money from royalties and with the prison library as his basic resource, he launched suit after suit in state and federal courts, attempting to show that he’d been denied due process. The California attorney-general disagreed. But, though Chessman’s execution-date was seven times set, he was reprieved seven times by judges in different jurisdictions, including the US Supreme Court.
By the time of his seventh reprieve, Chessman had become famous, a hero, a totem of anti-American sentiment across the globe; and he even played a part, to some degree, in affairs of state. For his eighth reprieve – ten hours before he was again due to die in February 1960 – was granted on the grounds that President Eisenhower would have to face hostile demonstrations on an official visit to Uruguay if he were executed.
It’s hard now to imagine the crescendo of outrage that slowly built up around Chessman’s case. Telegrams poured in from across the world: from Belgium’s Queen Mother; from parliamentarians, Quakers, veterans, private individuals – at least one of whom offered to take Chessman’s place
in the gas chamber. Two million Brazilians signed a petition; even the Vatican newspaper launched a withering attack. Cowed by all this, the governor of California called his legislators together in a special session to consider the outlawing of the death penalty, and even released a long letter from Chessman, in which he’d said he’d be willing to die in return for its abolition.
It wasn’t to be. There was no ninth reprieve, and Chessman was gassed to death, in front of sixty witnesses, on May 2nd 1960. In a statement released after his death, he said:
‘In my lifetime I was guilty of many crimes, but not those for which my life was taken.’
He added:
‘Now that the state has had its vengeance, I should like to ask the world to consider what has been gained.’
D.B. Cooper
‘Dan Cooper,’ said the man in the black raincoat when asked his name by the ticket agent. It was the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, and he was buying a seat on a flight between Portland and Seattle. He looked like a regular businessman – short-haired, neat, close-shaven, well-spoken – but whoever he was he turned out in the end to be anything but. For once the Boeing 727 had taken off, Dan Cooper – or D.B. Cooper, as he came to be known from mistaken early newspaper reports – handed a flight attendant a note, saying:
‘I have a bomb. Tell your captain I am taking charge of the plane.’
He opened his attaché-case, and showed her what appeared to be wired-up sticks of dynamite.
The note listed his demands: $200,000 in cash and four parachutes; these were got ready for him in Seattle where he had the plane land. The other passengers were then released; and the plane, now tailed by five military aircraft and a helicopter, took off for Reno, Nevada. D.B. Cooper was alone during the flight in the passenger-cabin.
100 Most Infamous Criminals Page 8