100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  Forty-five minutes in, when the plane was at 10,000 feet over Washington’s Cascade Mountains, a few miles from the border with Oregon, he jumped. The flight crew noticed a sudden drop in air pressure. The rear door under the tail had been opened: the only evidence Cooper’d left behind him, when they went to take a look, was a missing parachute and what remained of the parachute-cord of one of the others – he’d presumably used it to lash his attaché-case and the bag with the money in it to his body.

  It was a rough night, with high winds, rain and sleet. The pursuing aircraft saw nothing; and many doubt that Cooper could have made it to the ground without injury. But though the authorities searched the area for five days, and in the spring sent in the army to search for another three weeks, no trace of Cooper, dead or alive, was found. Fortune-hunters over the years that followed had no better luck. In fact the only people who profited – apart from Cooper himself, perhaps – were the makers of ‘D.B. Cooper’ T-shirts, which became a national fad, and the people of Ariel, Washington, who launched a hugely popular annual D.B. Cooper party, at which he still fails to show up.

  Only one trace of Cooper, in fact, was ever found, when more than seven years after the hijacking an eight-year-old boy, playing beside the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon, found three bundles of old $20 bills, amounting in all to $6,000. The serial numbers matched those on the twenties that had been handed over by the FBI. What happened to the rest of the money, no one knows. What happened to D.B. Cooper? In a sense it doesn’t matter. For Cooper – whoever he was – has become an American legend.

  Dean Corll

  Some crime investigations go backwards, not forwards – and this was the case with Dean Corll. For by the time Houston police found him, on the morning of August 8th 1973, Corll was already dead, with three frightened teenagers on the scene. What the police had to do was find out why, to look back into the past that had brought the thirty-four-year-old Corll and the teenagers together – and the past proved very scary indeed.

  At first it seemed like a glue-sniffing-and-sex party that had got seriously out of hand, mostly because one of the teenagers, Wayne Hedley, had brought along a girl – and Dean Corll, a homosexual, didn’t like girls one bit. When Hedley recovered consciousness after their first big hit of glue, he’d found himself tied up and handcuffed, with a furious Corll standing over him holding a gun and threatening to kill them all. After pleading for his life, Hedley was finally released, on one condition: that he now rape and kill the unconscious girl while Corll did the same with the other boy.

  The boy was stripped naked and handcuffed to a specially-made plywood board. Corll then repeatedly sodomised him. Hedley, though, lying on top of the girl, couldn’t get an erection – and he soon wanted out. He begged to be allowed to go, but Corll refused. So he picked up the gun as Corll continued to taunt him, and finally pulled the trigger.

  Not nice, but not very complicated, it seemed – until that is, Hedley admitted under questioning not only that he’d often procured boys for Corll, but also that Corll had boasted that morning of killing a number of them and ‘burying them in the boatshed.’

  The boatshed turned out to be a boathouse-stall in southwest Houston; and when the police started digging, they turned up the first of what proved to be seventeen corpses. Later Hedley took them to two other sites, and a further ten were found – but not even that was the real total of victims, Hedley said four were still out there, missing.

  It was clear enough by now that Hedley was deeply involved, and so was another kid, David Brooks, who’d introduced Hedley to Corll. They’d both procured victims for Corll and had both taken part in their murders. The pattern, first set in 1970, seemed to have remained the same from the start: either Hedley or Brooks – or both – would bring back children or teenagers to Corll’s house for glue-sniffing. Then, when they were unconscious, they’d be tied to the board, sometimes two at a time, and used, first for sex, then for torture, then for murder. One of the bodies found had bite-marks on the genitals; another had had them cut off altogether. The youngest victim was nine.

  Corll was said to have never grown up

  Who exactly Dean Corll was was at first something of a mystery. He worked for the Houston Lighting and Power Company; and on the evidence of photographs, which often showed him holding toy animals, he looked like a man who had never completely grown up. This turned out to more or less true: raised in Indiana and Vidor, Texas, he was a mummy’s boy. Because of illness, he spent much of his youth at home; and her succession of bad marriages meant that she was his only constant as he was being raised. He even helped her out when she started a candy-making business at home for extra money. Candy is, of course, dandy, as Dorothy Parker wrote: it makes you popular with other children – and it’s interesting that Corll picked up his first procurer, David Brooks, outside a school with an offer of candy.

  Both Brooks and Hedley were sentenced to life imprisonment. The telephone call that Hedley made to the police on that morning in August had done him no good at all.

  Juan Corona

  Juan Corona arrived in the United States from Mexico as a migrant labourer some time in the 1950s. By the beginning of the 70s, married and with four little girls, he was a labour contractor in California’s Sacramento Valley, organizing gangs of drifters and casual workers to pick peaches in the area around Yuba City. He was a religious man and well-liked. But he was also – if the juries at his two trials were right – a brutal multiple murderer.

  The first body was found by the police on May 19th 1971, when a Japanese-American farmer complained that a trench had been dug in his orchard without his permission and then, later, filled in. Buried in it was the body of a hobo who’d been stabbed in the chest and slashed about the head with a machete. There was evidence that he’d had homosexual intercourse some time before his death.

  Juan Corona was a well-liked family man

  Three days later, a tractor driver on the nearby Sullivan ranch, where Corona housed his crews in a dormitory, found another patch of disturbed earth and again the police were called. This time they found the body of an elderly man – and not far away, seven more graves, each of them containing a body. The victims, all male, had been stabbed and slashed about the head, and had died at some time over the previous two months. Their shirts had been yanked up to cover their faces; their trousers were either missing or had been pulled down round their ankles. There were clear signs, the police said, of ‘homosexual activity’.

  In one of the graves, there were also two scraps of paper: receipts for meat signed ‘Juan V. Corona’. Furthermore, one of the victims had been last seen getting into Corona’s pickup truck. As the police continued to search the Sullivan ranch, the thirty-seven-year-old was arrested on suspicion of murder.

  Corona was alleged to have murdered 25 men

  In all, over a seventeen-day period, twenty-five bodies were found – and in the grave of the last one was further evidence of Corona’s involvement, in the shape of two of his bank-deposit slips. He was tried for the murder of all twenty-five, and found guilty, despite the fact that the evidence was entirely circumstantial – and despite the fact, too, that the only man in Corona’s family who was both homosexual and had a record for assault with a machete was his half-brother Natividad. In 1970, Natividad had been sued for $250,000 in damages by a young Mexican found in his café slashed about the head in a way similar to the dead men – and he’d lost.

  Corona appealed for a retrial, and in 1978 he was granted it, on the grounds that his attorney had given him an inadequate defence. (He had not even raised, for example, the issue of insanity, though Corona, in the 1960s, had suffered from a mental illness, diagnosed at the time as schizophrenia.) The second trial, though, ended the same way as the first, largely because of the evidence of a Mexican consular official who’d visited Corona in prison in 1978. He reported that Corona had told him:

  ‘Yes, I did it. But I’m a sick man and can’t be judged by the standards
of other men.’

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  It was thirteen years after his first killing – sixteen dead bodies later – that Jeffrey Dahmer was finally arrested in Milwaukee as a mass murderer. By that time aged 31, he’d been earlier charged with a sexual assault against a young boy, bailed and put on probation after attending prison part-time. He’d been identified to police as responsible for another sex attack in his apartment; and he’d even got away with claiming that an incoherent and terrified young man found running away from him naked in the street was his drunk lover. Police on this occasion had actually visited the apartment, but apparently hadn’t noticed the smell of decaying flesh. Nor had they visited his bedroom, in which a dead body had been laid out, ready for butchering. All they’d seen was the plausible Dahmer, who showed them photographs and apologized – and then, a few minutes after they’d left, strangled the helpless young man they’d left with him.

  It wasn’t, in fact, until July 22nd 1991 when, in eerily similar circumstances, police stopped a young black man found running hysterically down the street with a handcuff hanging from his wrist, that they finally discovered the man responsible for a rash of recent missing-person cases. For Tracy Edwards told them that some crazy white man in an apartment not far away had been holding a knife to him, threatening to cut out his heart and eat it. He took them to the apartment-building in question and told them the number; Jeffrey Dahmer calmly answered the door. And then, finally, standing in the doorway, the police smelt the smell of death…

  Inside the apartment were five dried and lacquered human skulls and a barrel containing three male torsos; an electric saw stained with blood, and a drum containing acid which Dahmer had used to dissolve his victims’ bodies and to inject – with a turkey baster through holes drilled into their heads – into their living brains. In the freezer was a human head and a box containing human hands and genitals. The meat neatly wrapped in the refrigerator, Dahmer later allowed, was also human – waiting to be eaten the way he preferred it, with mustard.

  The son of middle-class parents, Dahmer was born in 1960 and grew up in a small town in Ohio. He first killed at 18 when he invited a hitch-hiker he’d picked up to his parents’ house and strangled him after beating him unconscious. Nine years later, after a stint in the army, he began again where he’d left off. He picked up a man in a Milwaukee gay bar and invited him to a hotel room where he strangled him. Then he took the body back to his basement apartment in his grandmother’s house, dismembered it and left it out, wrapped up in plastic bags, for the garbagemen.

  One killing in 1986; two in 1988; one in 1989; four in 1990, eight in 1991 – once Dahmer had his own apartment, the number of his killings began gradually to escalate. But the pattern was more or less exactly the same. He would pick up boys or young men for sex, then drug them and torture them before killing them and dismembering their bodies. Some he would try to turn into zombies while they were still alive, by injecting acid into their brains. But their fate remained the same. . .

  At his trial, an attempt was made by Dahmer’s defence to claim he was guilty, but insane: a plea possible in Wisconsin. But the jury decided that he was sane when he committed the murders, and he was sentenced to fifteen life sentences, or a total of 936 years. In prison, he was offered special protection, but he refused: he wanted, he said, to be part of the general prison population. He was beaten to death by a black prisoner, another lifer, in November 1994.

  Dahmer was one of the world’s most notorious killers

  Geza de Kaplany

  Dr. Geza de Kaplany was a refugee from Hungary who worked in the early-1960s as an anaethesiologist at a hospital in San Jose, California. But he never really fitted in. He was snobbish and vain; he had almost no American friends; he spent most of his leisure time, such as it was, in San Jose’s Hungarian community. It was there that he met and then ardently wooed the beautiful woman who was to become his wife. But a few weeks after they were married in August 1962, he carefully and systematically destroyed her beauty – using every medical trick he knew to keep her alive as he mutilated and disfigured her.

  Hajna de Kaplany, as she became, was a model and ex-beauty queen, a catch for any man. But her husband, within a few days of the marriage, had a problem: he was impotent. He soon became obsessed with the idea that it was her fault: she was having affairs behind his back with half the men in their apartment building. This in turn – according to his mad, self-centred logic – was the fault of her beauty and allure. Without them, other men would not be drawn to her and he could have her all to himself.

  On the morning of August 28th 1962, the de Kaplanys’ neighbours heard the sound of screams buried beneath the vast noise of a stereo blasting out from the de Kaplanys’ apartment. They hammered on the walls, doors and windows to no effect. Then they called the police. When the police arrived, they too banged on the front door. Suddenly the music stopped, and the door opened, to reveal Geza de Kaplany sweating and grinning like a crazy man, dressed only in underwear and wearing rubber gloves on his hands. He said he had to go back to work, and the police followed him in.

  In the bedroom, they found Hajna de Kaplany naked, spreadeagled on the bed and tied at wrists and ankles to the bedposts. She’d been appallingly disfigured and mutilated. There were bottles of nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric acid on the bedside bureau. Her face had been obliterated; and her breasts and genitals had been savagely slashed. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics burned their hands wherever they touched her body. For de Karpany had made small incisions all over his wife and had then seen which acid caused the most pain. He’d been at it for several days.

  As her mother sat beside Hajna’s bed in the intensive care unit, praying that she would not die, her son-in-law calmly told the police that he’d been extremely methodical. He’d bought the stereo and installed several speakers. He’d also had a manicure so that he wouldn’t puncture the rubber gloves while handling the acids he brought from the hospital. Then while Hajna slept, he’d pinioned her, stripped her and tied her up. After the stereo had been turned up full blast, he’d held up a piece of paper in front of her on which he’d written the words:

  ‘If you want to live – do not shout; do what I tell you or else you will die.’

  She did die – after thirty-three days of agony; and Geza de Kaplany was charged with her murder. At his trial, he said he hadn’t intended to kill her, just to make her less attractive. But when he was shown pictures of her brutalized body, he went berserk, shouting:

  ‘I am a doctor! I loved her! If I did this – and I must have done this – then I am guilty!’

  He was given life imprisonment, but for reasons that have never been clear, he was classified as a ‘special interest prisoner,’ and was released, well before his first official parole date, in 1975. The reason that was given at the time was that he was urgently needed ‘as a cardiac specialist’ at a Taiwan missionary hospital. De Kaplany was not a cardiac specialist. But nevertheless he was in effect smuggled out of the country in one of the most flagrant abuses of the parole system in California ever seen. He relocated to Munich and remarried. Over the course of more than twenty years, he became a naturalized German citizen, thereby precluding the possibility of extradition for the parole violation.

  Albert DeSalvo

  Albert DeSalvo was oversexed, everyone agreed. His lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, wrote that he was,

  ‘without doubt, the victim of one of the most crushing sexual drives that psychiatric science has ever encountered.’

  His wife said he demanded sex up to a dozen times a day; and a psychiatrist from his army days in Germany explained why she complained:

  ‘He made excessive demands on her… she did not want to submit to his kind of kissing which was extensive as far as the body was concerned.’

  If it hadn’t been for this monumental sexual appetite of his, everything might have gone well for Boston handyman DeSalvo. For he was, to all appearances, a clean-living individual. He nei
ther smoked nor drank. He was a sportsman – he’d been middleweight boxing champion of the US Army. His hair was always neatly swept back and he prided himself on his freshly laundered white shirts. But the need for sex kept getting him into trouble. In Germany, it was the officers’ wives; at Fort Dix, it was a nine-year-old girl he was alleged to have molested. And in Boston, after he’d been honourably discharged and had moved back to his native state, it was all the gullible pretty women who wanted to be models.

  In 1958, Albert DeSalvo began to be known in police circles as the ‘Measuring Man’. An unknown man, posing as a talent scout for a modelling agency, had started smooth-talking his way into women’s apartments and cajoling them into having their measurements taken. He wouldn’t attack them, but he would touch, even caress them, whenever and wherever he could. Then he’d leave, saying that a senior executive of the agency would soon be in touch. When this didn’t happen, some of the women complained – but not all, said De Salvo later. Many of them were willing to pre-pay, with sex, for their future careers.

  He was finally caught in March 1960, when he was arrested, almost by accident, as a suspected burglar. Even though he soon confessed, the police took it for granted that the ‘Measuring Man’ act was simply a device for entering apartments and houses he intended later to rob. In fact, he was only convicted – and duly recorded – as a ‘breaker and enterer’: a fact that the police, indeed the entire population of Boston, were later to regret.