100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  With Wayne Williams in custody, though, they did at least have a suspect; and, quite suddenly, they had witnesses who said they’d seen Williams with both the men found in the river. Others came forward to say that he’d tried to have sex with them, and one of these linked him to yet another victim The police then re-examined a number of the dead and found on eight others not only dog-hairs, but also fabric and carpet fibres that matched those in Williams’s bedroom.

  Williams was only tried for the murders of the two men found in the river. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, but it was reinforced when the judge reluctantly allowed evidence from the other murders to be admitted. Gradually a picture of Williams was formed: the son of two schoolteachers who had grown up gifted and indulged, he had turned into a man obsessed with the idea of success – he worked on the fringes of show business. He also seemed to hate black people, even though he handed out leaflets offering black youths between the ages of eleven and twenty-one help with their musical careers.

  Wayne Williams was found guilty on both counts of murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Though many believed he was a scapegoat – and had been railroaded by the police – the murders of young blacks in Atlanta stopped with his imprisonment.

  Aileen Wuornos

  Everything was against Aileen Wuornos, right from the beginning. Her father deserted her mother before she was born and her mother ran off from Rochester, Michigan not long afterwards, leaving her and her elder brother in charge of her grandparents, both of whom were drunks. Her grandfather beat both his wife and them; he allowed no friends in the house and wouldn’t even let them open the curtains. Malnourished and unable to concentrate in school, the children took to lighting fires with firelighter for amusement, and at the age of six, Aileen’s face was badly burned, scarred for life. By the time she reached puberty, she was already putting out to boys for food and drink, uppers, anything she could get. At thirteen she was raped by a friend of her grandparents. At fourteen, she was pregnant – and the child, she said, could have been anybody’s: the rapist’s, her grandfather’s, even her brother’s. The baby, a son, was put up for adoption immediately after birth.

  Then, when her grandmother died of cancer in 1971, she and her brother were thrown out of their grandfather’s house and became wards of court. She dropped out of school and took up prostitution, while her brother robbed stores to feed an increasing drugs habit. Soon after her grandfather committed suicide in 1976, her brother died of throat cancer. He was only 21, a year older than she.

  Wuornos’ killing spree ended when police identified her fingerprints on stolen goods

  As if all this wasn’t enough, even her own genes seemed to be against her. For, quite apart from the cancers, the drinking and the suicide, the father she never met turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and a convicted paedophile. After spending time in mental hospitals for sodomizing children as young as ten, he hanged himself in a prison cell.

  She had a couple of chances to go straight, it’s true. She was picked up while hitch-hiking by an older man, who became besotted with her and married her, and she also got $10,000 from a life-insurance policy her brother had taken out. But the husband she abused and beat, and she used the insurance money to buy a fancy car, which she promptly crashed. So she was soon back on the road as a hitchhiking hooker, hanging out with bikers, and getting regularly arrested: for cheque forgery, breaches of the peace, car-theft, gun-theft and holding up a convenience store. For the latter, she did a year in jail, and when she came out, she tried to commit suicide.

  Then, though, in 1986, Aileen, by now known as Lee, met twenty-two-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Moore in a Daytona Beach gay bar and she turned out to be the love of her life – all the love that she’d never had. They rented an apartment together; they worked at motels and bars while Aileen turned tricks on the side. Her looks, though, weren’t getting any better – and at some point Aileen decided that Ty shouldn’t have to work any more: she, after all, was Ty’s ‘husband.’ That’s when she started to kill.

  Beginning at the end of 1989, there was a string of deaths that soon had police baffled. All were men; some were found naked; and they’d all been killed by the same small-calibre gun. They included a trucker, a rodeo worker, a heavy-machine-operator, even a child-abuse investigator. A sixty-year-old missionary had disappeared.

  There was only one clue to the killer’s identity. For shortly before the missionary’s car was identified as having been involved in an accident, two women were seen hurt, walking away. The police released sketches to the press and Ty and Lee were identified by several people. By now, Lee had also pawned the possessions of many of her victims, and she’d left her finger- or thumb-prints – as per Florida law – on the pawn-shop receipts. Once the police identified what she’d pawned as belonging to the victims, it was only a matter of time.

  There was one final betrayal. Ty, to save herself, went to the Florida police, and then, via a taped call to Aileen after she’d been arrested, persuaded her to confess. She did, but she said that every one of her victims had beaten and raped her. She wasn’t believed. In two trials, first for one of the murders, and then for another three, she was condemned to death, even though her defence had tried to present her as terminally damaged, with a borderline personality disorder.

  Almost immediately, her story was told in a made-for-TV movie. Feminist writers defended her; an Aileen Wuornos Defence Group was set up. However, in 1999, she admitted that the claims she had made about beatings and rape had been entirely made up. But she also said that the police had delayed five months before arresting her, because they were negotiating a movie deal with Hollywood producers who were desperate for the real-life story of a female serial killer. There is perhaps some truth in this. In his 2003 documentary The Selling of a Serial Killer, Nick Broomfield claims that there was a meeting to discuss exclusive rights to the police investigation a month before she was arrested.

  On Death Row, Wuornos seems to have had a religious conversion. She said:

  ‘I believe I am totally saved and forgiven by Jesus Christ,’

  and added that there were angels waiting for her on the other side. She was executed in late 2002.

  Britain

  Brady and Hindley – the Moors Murderers

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley did everything they could to co-opt Hindley’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law David Smith. For he was promising raw material: he’d been in trouble with the law from the age of 11 and he liked to drink. So they fed him booze and the books of the Marquis de Sade. They took him out onto the moors for target-practice shooting and Brady continually dropped hints to him there: about murder, and the photography and burial of bodies.

  Then, in October 1965, they decided finally to pull him in. The twenty-three-year-old Hindley used a pretext to get Smith late at night to the house where she and Brady lived on a public-housing estate in Manchester; and then she pushed him into the living room as soon as she heard Brady starting to attack Edward Evans, a young man they’d picked up earlier in the evening, with an axe. Smith, confused by drink, was a terrified witness to his eventual murder. But Brady and Hindley wanted more. So they passed him the axe, and told him that, with his fingerprints now on it, he was far too involved to be able to retreat. He was forced to help in trussing up the body and cleaning the blood from the floor, furniture and walls.

  Brady pleaded not guilty but was given three life sentences

  By the time he left, Smith had been persuaded to bring round a pram the next day to move the body to Brady’s car. But when he went home, he told his horrified wife what had happened and the next day, shaking with fear, and armed with a knife and a screwdriver, he went to a telephone box to call the police.

  The young victim’s body was still in the house; and first Brady, then Hindley were arrested. But then, little by little, as the police searched both the house and Brady’s car, the full extent of t
heir murderous exploits emerged. For in the house was a collection of books on Nazism, sadism and torture – as well as dozens of photographs of Brady and Hindley on the moors. Three sheets of paper discovered in the car seemed to contain instructions about how to bury a body, and in a notebook kept by Brady, amid a list of seemingly random and made-up names, there was one that stood out: that of John Kilbride. Kilbride was a schoolboy who’d disappeared two years before; the police became convinced that Brady and Hindley had killed the twelve-year-old and buried him on the moors.

  Worse, though, was to come. For, while the police were digging up the moors, looking for Kilbride’s body, a careful search of the books in the house produced a hidden left-luggage ticket for two suitcases which – once retrieved – were found to contain ammunition, coshes, pornographic books, photographs and a number of tapes. One collection of photographs proved to be pornographic pictures of a gagged, naked child: of ten-year-old Leslie Ann Downey, who’d disappeared thirteen months after Kilbride. One of the tapes contained, buried amongst Christmas music, a live sixteen-minute recording of her rape, torture and murder.

  The bodies of both Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey were found on the moors; and the tape was played, to the horror of all those present – indeed of the entire country – at the subsequent trial of Brady and Hindley. Both pleaded not guilty. They had given the police no co-operation at all. But there could be no doubt of their guilt, and the strong suspicion remains that they also killed two other children, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, who disappeared in 1963 and 1964 respectively.

  For the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey, Ian Brady was given three life sentences; Myra Hindley two, with an extra seven years for ‘receiving, comforting and harbouring’. Later denied both appeal and release, she died in prison in late 2002. Brady – easily the more sinister figure of the two – is still alive behind bars.

  William Burke and William Hare

  William Burke and William Hare will always remain linked, like Laurel and Hardy or (for British readers) Marks and Spencer. Alone, living in Edinburgh in the late 1820s, they were nothing: just a labourer and the keeper of a disreputable boarding house. But together they were Burke and Hare, the most famous body-snatchers of them all – even though they ended up differently. For Hare, who turned King’s Evidence and was a witness at Burke’s trial, died later in London, after living under an assumed name; and Burke went the way of their joint victims. After he was hanged, his body was dissected at a public lecture by the Professor of Surgery at Edinburgh University, and his skeleton can still be seen today in the University’s Anatomical Museum.

  It was in 1827 that the pair first met, when Burke, who’d been working on the building of the Union Canal, moved to Edinburgh with a woman called Helen Dougal. As fellow Irishmen, Burke and Hare had much in common; and when one of Hare’s lodgers, an old army veteran, died – and Hare had it in mind to sell his body to an anatomist – who better to help carry it off to the house of the celebrated anatomist Dr. Robert Knox than his new friend William Burke?

  Until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, every dead person, by law, was required to have a Christian burial. So it was extremely difficult for practising anatomists and their students to get hold of the necessary raw material, except from so-called body-snatchers, who dug up newly-buried corpses from churchyards. Otherwise the bodies of executed criminals were the best they could get. Knox, then, was delighted to accept the body from Burke and Hare, with few questions asked, and he paid more than seven and a half pounds for it. He also said that he’d take any more they might be able to get their hands on, with over ten pounds to be paid for a really fresh specimen in good condition.

  Burke and Hare, thrilled by their windfall, spotted a gap in the market and, like good capitalists, soon filled it. They began to lure travellers, usually to Hare’s boarding house, and ply them with drink. Once befuddled, they simply smothered them. At least fifteen people went the same way, at prices ranging from eight to fourteen pounds, until a couple who’d been staying with Burke and Helen Dougal one day spotted the body of a woman hidden under a pile of straw. They went to the police with what they’d seen.

  Burke, after turncoat Hare gave evidence against him, was hanged on January 28th 1829 – and the others disappeared, Hare to London and Helen Dougal, it’s said, to Australia. Dr. Knox’s house on Surgeon’s Square was invaded by a mob – two of the victims had been well-known on the city’s streets – and his University lectures were constantly interrupted by heckling. In the end he left Edinburgh and, unable to get another university position, ended his days as an obscure general practitioner in east London.

  John Christie

  In 1949, John Christie, then 51, and a resident of 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill in London, gave evidence at the Old Bailey against his upstairs neighbour Timothy Evans, who was on trial for murdering his baby daughter. The judge congratulated Christie on the clarity of his testimony, and Evans, a semi-literate truck-driver, was duly hanged. It was taken for granted that he had also killed his wife Beryl Evans, whose body had been found in a wash-house at the property. In fact, he’d earlier said as much when giving himself up.

  John Christie made 10 Rillington Place an infamous location

  Christie with his wife, who was later found buried under the floorboards

  Four years later, though, in March 1953, a man named Beresford Brown, who had sublet John Christie’s apartment from him a few days before, found by accident a kitchencupboard door that had been papered over. He opened it and saw the naked back of a partly-mummified woman. He called the police, who quickly found two other women, hidden behind the first, carefully stuffed into the cupboard upright. There was another body, which turned out to be that of Christie’s wife, buried beneath the dining-room floor. Two more female skeletons were later found in the garden, as well as a human femur propping up a fence.

  The four women in the house – three young prostitutes and Christie’s wife – had all been killed well after Evans’s execution. So a warrant was immediately put out for Christie’s arrest; he was recognized and taken in a week later as he stood quietly on Putney Bridge. He was confused and exhausted. But he quickly confessed to the murder of all six women, and later to that of Beryl Evans, though not that of her baby daughter.

  When arrested, Christie confessed to the murder of six women

  Little by little it emerged that Christie, who had been beaten as a child and then mocked by girls in his teens, was largely impotent with living women. So beginning in 1943, he started killing them, inviting them to the house when his wife was away, and then gassing and strangling them before having sex with their corpses. In December 1952 he finally disposed of his wife as an inconvenience; he was then free to kill when he chose. His last three victims died over a period of a few days.

  Did Christie kill Beryl Evans? And if so, why did Timothy Evans say he himself had killed her when he gave himself up in Wales? The answer is that Beryl had been pregnant and Evans had told Christie that they wanted an abortion. Christie had offered to do it himself while Evans was at work. Then he persuaded Evans that Beryl had died during the operation and that if he didn’t make a run for it, he, Evans, would be held responsible. He offered to have the Evans’ daughter adopted by friends.

  Before he was tried, Evans, who was mentally subnormal, had withdrawn his confession and had told this version of events to police, but he hadn’t been believed. And after Christie was hanged on July 15th 1953, a campaign began to have the young truck-driver posthumously pardoned. Finally, thirteen years later, a full enquiry was set up, headed by a High Court judge, who announced that, though Evans had probably murdered his wife, he had probably not murdered his daughter, the case for which he’d actually been tried. He was given his pardon. But though 10 Rillington Place, along with the rest of the street, has long since been torn down, a strong sense of injustice done lingers…

  Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen

  Dr. H
awley Harvey, later Peter, Crippen is one of the most famous – and most reviled – murderers of the 20th century. Yet he was a small, slight man, intelligent, dignified, eternally polite and anxious for the welfare of those around him. With his gold-rimmed spectacles, sandy whiskers and shy expression, he was, in fact, more mouse than monster. His problem was his wife.

  Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan in 1862, and studied for medical degrees in Cleveland, London and New York. Around 1890, his first wife died, leaving him a widower; three years later, when working in a practice in Brooklyn, he fell in love with one of his patients, a 17-year-old with ambitions to be an opera singer, called Cora Turner. She was overweight; her real name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki – she was the boisterous, loose daughter of a Russian-Polish immigrant. But none of this mattered to Crippen. He first paid for her singing lessons, and then he married her.

  In 1900, by now consultant physician to a mail-order medicine company, Crippen was transferred to London to become manager of the firm’s head office and Cora came to join him. On arrival in London, though, she decided to change her name once again – this time to Belle Elmore – and to try out her voice in the city’s music halls. She soon became a success and acquired many friends and admirers. She bleached her hair; became a leading light in the Music Hall Ladies Guild; and entertained the first of what were to be many lovers. Increasingly contemptuous of her husband, whom she regarded as an embarrassment, she forced him first to move to a grand house in north London that he could ill afford, and then to act as a general dogsbody to the ‘lodgers’ she soon moved in.