100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  Dr. Crippen is one of the most reviled murderers of the 20th century

  An artist’s impression of Crippen’s capture

  Crippen took such consolation as he could with a shy secretary at his company called Ethel Le Neve. But in 1909, he lost his job, and his wife threatened to leave him, taking their life savings with her. By the beginning of the following year, he’d had enough. On January 19th, he acquired five grains of a powerful narcotic called hyoscine from a chemist’s in New Oxford Street; and the last time his wife was seen was twelve days later, at a dinner for two retired music-hall friends at the Crippens’ home. Two days after that, as it turned out, Crippen began pawning her jewellery, and sent a letter to the Music Hall Ladies Guild, saying that she’d had to leave for America, where a relative was seriously ill. Later he announced that she’d gone to the wilds of California; that she had contracted pneumonia; and, in March – after Ethel had moved into his house – that she had died there.

  Two actors, though, who’d been touring in California returned to England and, when told, said they’d heard nothing at all about Cora’s death. Scotland Yard took an interest and Crippen was forced to concede that he’d made up the story: his wife had in fact left for America with one of her lovers. Though this seemed to satisfy the detectives, he then made his first big mistake: he panicked, settled his affairs overnight and left with Ethel the next day for Europe, after persuading her to start a new life with him in America. When the police called again, it was to find them gone. They began a thorough search of the house. What remained of his wife – rotting flesh, skin and hair – was found buried under the coal cellar.

  Unaware of the furore of horror created by this discovery in the British press, Crippen – his moustache shaved off, under an assumed name, and accompanied by Ethel, disguised as his son – took a ship from Antwerp to Quebec in Canada. But they were soon recognized by the captain who, aware of a reward, used the new invention of the wireless telegraph to send a message to his employers. Each day from then on, in fact, he sent via the same medium daily reports on the doings of the couple which were published in the British newspapers. Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard took a faster ship and arrested Dr. Crippen and ‘son’ Ethel when they reached Canadian waters.

  Huge, angry crowds greeted them when they arrived back a month later, under arrest, in England. The newspapers had done their job of transforming the pair of them into vicious killers. But Crippen always maintained that Ethel had had absolutely no knowledge of the murder, and when they were tried separately, she was acquitted. Crippen, though, was found guilty and was hanged in Pentonville Prison on November 23rd 1910. Before he died, he described Ethel as

  ‘my only comfort for the past three years. . . As I face eternity, I say that Ethel Le Neve has loved me as few women love men. . . Surely such love as hers for me will be rewarded.’

  It is not known whether she was rewarded, or indeed what became of her, though one story recounts that she ran a tea-shop in Bournemouth, under an assumed name, for forty-five years…

  Claude Duval

  Claude Duval’s epitaph called him ‘the Second Norman Conqueror’ and there’s no doubt at all that he was a 17th-century star. His biography was written by a professor of anatomy at Oxford University; he was the prototype for Macheath in John Gay’s hugely successful The Beggar’s Opera and his exploits were even noted approvingly by the famous historian Lord Macaulay. When he was finally caught in 1670, it’s said that large numbers of rich and fashionable women tried to intercede on his behalf. Perhaps taking offence, King Charles II said no. So the ladies had to make do instead with veiled visits to see his hanged body as it lay in state for several days in London’s Covent Garden.

  Duval – whose biographer says was a cardsharp and confidence-trickster as well as a highwayman – was born in Normandy in 1643, but gravitated to Paris, where he fell in with Royalist exiles waiting for the death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of the British monarchy. At the age of 17, then, he crossed the Channel to London as a footman to the Duke of Richmond. But he didn’t stay in service long. For the days of Puritan austerity were finally over: with the King setting an example, the gentry were dressing up in finery again, and taking to the roads to visit each other or to travel to their estates. It was an opportunity too good to miss.

  Duval, then became a holdup-man – but a holdup-man with a difference. For he was well-dressed, courteous and good-looking and it wasn’t long before women travellers were having daydreams about being waylaid by him. On one occasion, he’s said to have played the flute and danced with one of his pretty victims – giving up £300, a vast sum, for the privilege. On another, he gravely handed back a solid-silver bottle to a woman traveller who was feeding her baby with it.

  As his legend grew, so did his standing in the most-wanted list published in the London Gazette and the reward offered for his capture. A road was named after him in Hampstead, near the site of one of his robberies. He became a byword for daring and glamour. Then, though, in January 1670, he was finally caught – and all too prosaically. He was recognized in a London pub run by an ex-mistress of the Duke of Buckingham called The Hole in the Wall (the name, much later, of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s retreat) and he was too drunk to put up much resistance.

  Tried on six charges, he was soon condemned to death. But so popular had he become that at his hanging there were riots. His body was taken down by the crowd and carried to a tavern in St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where it lay, open to all-comers, for several days. Finally, after a long torchlit procession, Claude Duval was buried under the central aisle of St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. His epitaph began:

  ‘Here lies Du Vall: Reader, if male thou art,

  Look to thy purse; if female to thy heart.’

  Ruth Ellis

  Ruth Ellis, born in Rhyl, Wales in 1927, has the distinction of being the last woman in Britain to be hanged. Twenty-eight years old when she went to the scaffold, she was as much victim as killer.

  Men, from the beginning, were Ruth Ellis’s problem – and she theirs. Raised in Manchester – a waitress and for a while a dance-band singer – she’d fallen in love at the age of 17 with an American flyer, only for him to be killed in action in 1944. Soon after his death she bore him a son and six years later she married a dentist and had a baby daughter by him – only for him to divorce her shortly afterwards on the grounds of mental cruelty. Now with two small children to take care of, and with no qualifications except her looks, she did what she had to. She became a club-hostess and hooker. She migrated to London and there, in Carrolls Club in 1953, she met a man called David Blakely.

  Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain

  Blakely was a racing driver, a sophisticated, debonair man, but he soon became obsessed with Ruth. He offered to marry her, but she refused, and while she played him along, she also took up with one of his friends. For a year or so she managed to keep both men happy. But by 1954 Blakely had become almost insanely jealous. He started to beat her. He gave her a black eye; he broke her ankle; he also started seeing other women. But when Ruth finally threw him out as a result, he came back like a whipped dog, once more begging her to marry him. Again Ruth refused, but by now, it seemed, they were doomed to each other.

  They set up house together in Egerton Gardens in Kensington. But by now Blakely had a taste for infidelity. At the beginning of April 1955, Ruth Ellis had a miscarriage; a few days later Blakely said he had to go and see a mechanic who was building him a new car. She followed him to an apartment in Hampstead, and when she heard a woman’s laughter inside, she knocked on the door and demanded to see him. He refused, and when she began to shout, the police were called.

  Ellis with Blakely in happier times

  The next day she returned. This time she saw Blakely coming down the steps arm-in-arm with a pretty young girl. She made up her mind. On the evening of April 10th, Easter Sunday, when she found him coming out of a Hampstead p
ub called the Magdala, she took a gun out of her handbag and shot him six times. She later told the police:

  It took the jury just 14 minutes to find Ellis guilty of murder

  ‘I am guilty,’

  and added,

  ‘I am rather confused.’

  At her trial in June of the same year, she confessed:

  ‘I intended to kill him.’

  It took the jury just fourteen minutes to find her guilty. She was sentenced to death, and a month later, despite widespread protests, she was hanged. Her son, the child of the American pilot, committed suicide in 1982, following years of depression. Her daughter, in a newspaper interview a year later, said she couldn’t get out of her mind the image of the hangman,

  ‘peering through the peephole into her cell, trying to work out how much rope he should use to make sure that frail little neck was broken.’

  John Haigh

  In 1949, when he came to trial, John Haigh was headlined in the British press as the Vampire Killer. But the only evidence that he ever drank his victims’ blood was his own – part of a ploy to have himself declared insane. In fact, he killed for money.

  In 1944, as the Second World War was drawing to an end, Haigh, 34, was an independent craftsman, working part-time in a London pinball arcade owned by a man called Donald McSwann. It was McSwann who was his first victim. On some pretext, Haigh lured him down to the basement-workshop in the house he rented, and there beat him to death with a hammer. Then he dissolved his body in a vat of sulphuric acid, and poured what remained, grisly bucket by bucket, into the sewage system.

  Nobody seemed to pay any attention to McSwann’s disappearance. Haigh, who took over the pinball arcade, told his parents that their son had gone to ground in Scotland to avoid the draft; he himself went to Scotland every week to post a letter to them purporting to be from him. This worked so well that in July 1945 he sent them a further letter, asking them to visit ‘his’ dear friend, John Haigh, at his home. They did. They went downstairs to inspect the basement workshop – and followed their son into the sewers.

  Haigh, with the help of forged documents, made himself the McSwanns’ heir, the master of five houses and a great deal of money. But he was a gambler and a bad investor and within three years he was once more broke. So he searched out a new inheritance. He invited a young doctor and his wife to look at a new workshop he’d set up in Crawley in Surrey. They agreed…

  By the time a year had passed, though, the pattern had repeated itself. Once again unable to pay his bills at the London residential hotel he by now lived in, he badly needed a fresh victim – and this was when he made his first mistake. For he chose someone much too close to him: a fellow-resident of the hotel, a rich elderly widow called Olive Durand-Deacon. Mrs. Durand-Deacon, who ate her meals at the table next to him, was under the impression that Haigh was an expert in patenting inventions and she had an idea, she said, for false plastic fingernails. He charmingly invited her to his Crawley ‘factory’ to go over the details.

  John Haigh is led to court

  Haigh was dubbed the Vampire Killer by the British press

  It took several days for the acid-bath to do its work on Mrs. Durand-Deacon, and in the meantime Haigh had to go to the police, with another resident, to declare her missing. The police, from the beginning, were suspicious of him and, looking into his record, they found that he’d been imprisoned three times for fraud. So they searched the Crawley ‘factory’ and though they didn’t find Mrs. Durand-Deacon, by now reduced to a pile of sludge outside in the yard, they did find a revolver and a receipt for her coat from a cleaner’s in a nearby town. They later discovered her jewellery, which Haigh had sold to a shop a few miles away.

  When arrested and charged, Haigh blithely confessed, believing that, in the absence of his victim’s body, he could never be found guilty. But when a police search team painstakingly went through the sludge, they found part of a foot, what was left of a handbag and a well-preserved set of false teeth, which Mrs. Durand-Deacon’s dentist soon identified as hers.

  In the end, Haigh pleaded insanity. But after a trial that lasted only two days, the jury took fifteen minutes to decide that he was both sane and guilty. The judge sentenced him to death. Asked if he had anything to say, Haigh said: ‘Nothing at all.’ He was hanged at Wandsworth prison on August 6th 1949.

  Neville Heath

  In 1946, in post-war London, Neville Heath looked just like the man he claimed to be: a dashing ex-Royal-Air-Force officer, a war hero. He had fair hair and blue eyes, an air of romantic recklessness and, like a man who has successfully cheated death, he loved to party. To women hungry for men he must have seemed made to measure: an embodiment of the gallantry that had led to victory – and of the newly carefree spirit of the times.

  This nightclub Lothario, though, was not at all what he looked like. For not only was he a gigolo with a criminal record, but he also had the distinction of having been court-martialled by three separate services: by the British Air Force in 1937, the British Army in 1941, and the South African Air Force in 1945. His offences – for being absent without leave, stealing a car, issuing worthless cheques, indiscipline and wearing medals to which he wasn’t entitled and the like – all pointed in one direction: Neville Heath was a con man and poseur. He used women for money after he’d got them into his bed – as he could all too easily. But he preferred – when that palled – to beat them.

  In March 1945, after guests at a London hotel reported hearing screams, a house detective burst into a bedroom to find Heath brutally whipping a girl, naked and bound hand and foot, beneath him. Neither the hotel nor the girl wanted publicity, and within two months Heath was at it again – though this time with a more willing participant, a 32-year-old occasional film extra called Margery Gardner, known in London clubs as Ocelot Margie. In May, security in another hotel intervened late at night as she lay under Heath’s lash.

  Ocelot Margie, though, had no complaints to make. For she was a masochist, haunting the clubs in search of bondage and domination by any man she could find willing. She obviously found Heath to her taste. For a month later she arranged to meet him at a club, and then returned with him to the same hotel for a further session. She wasn’t to make it out alive.

  In the early afternoon of the follow day, a chambermaid found her naked dead body. She had been tied at the ankles and murderously whipped, and she had extensive bruising on her face and chin, as if someone had used extreme violence to keep her mouth shut. Her nipples had been almost bitten off, and something unnaturally large had been shoved into her vagina and then rotated, causing extensive bleeding.

  The police quickly issued Heath’s name and description to the press. But by this time he was in the south-coast resort town of Worthing, meeting the parents of a young woman he had earlier seduced after a promise of marriage. He quickly told her – and later her parents – his version of the murder: that he had lent his hotel room to Gardner to use for a tryst with another man and had later found her dead. He sent a letter to the police in London to the same effect, adding that he would later send on to them the murder weapon he’d found on the scene. Then he disappeared.

  Heath’s crimes caught up with him and he was hanged in October 1946

  There was huge public interest in the trial of Neville Heath

  The murder weapon, of course, never arrived. But the police still failed to issue a photograph of Heath, and so he was free on the south coast for another thirteen days, posing, rather unimaginatively, as Group Captain Rupert Brooke – the name of a famously handsome poet who died in the First World War. During that time, a young woman holidaymaker vanished after having been seen having dinner with ‘Brooke’ at his hotel; and it was suggested that the ‘Group Captain’ should contact the police with his evidence. He finally did so, but was recognized and held for questioning. In the pocket of a jacket at his hotel police later found a left-luggage ticket for a suitcase, which contained, among other things, clothes labelled with the nam
e ‘Heath,’ a woman’s scarf and a blood-stained riding-crop.

  On the evening of the day Heath was returned to London and charged, the naked body of his second victim was found in a wooded valley not far from his hotel. Her cut hands had been tied together; her throat had been slashed; and after death her body had been mutilated with a knife before being hidden in bushes. Heath, though, was never tried for this murder. He came to the Old Bailey on September 24th 1946 charged only with the murder of Margery Gardner – and he was quickly found guilty by the jury. He was hanged at London’s Pentonville Prison the following month.

  Jack the Ripper

  Now that London’s famous fogs have disappeared – and with them the gas-lamps, the brick shacks, the crammed slums, the narrow streets and blind alleyways of the city’s East End – it’s hard to imagine the hysteria and terror that swept through the area when The Whitechapel Murderer – later known as Jack the Ripper – went to work. Already in 1888 two prostitutes had been murdered. So when the body of another was found, her throat cut and her stomach horribly mutilated, on August 31st, she was immediately assumed to be the brutal killer’s third victim. And brutal he was:

  ‘Only a madman could have done this,’

  said a detective; the police surgeon agreed.

  ‘I have never seen so horrible a case,’

  he announced.

  ‘She was ripped about in a manner that only a person skilled in the use of a knife could have achieved.’

  A week later, the body of ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman was found not far away, this time disembowelled and with its uterus removed; and a fortnight after that, a letter was received by the Central News Agency in London which finally gave the killer a name. It read (in part):