Dick Turpin
Like the hero-villains of the Wild West and of the Australian bush, the highwayman Dick Turpin, still familiar until a few years ago to every British schoolboy, belongs as much to folk-myth as to history.
Turpin belongs as much to folk-myth as to history
The real Dick Turpin was born in Essex in 1705, the son of a farmer, and was given enough education for him to be able, much later, to pass himself off as a gentleman. Apprenticed to a butcher, by the age of 21 he had his own shop, which he stocked with sheep and oxen stolen from his neighbours. He was spotted, unfortunately, during one of his raids. So he took to the road; became briefly a smuggler and then joined the famous Essex Gang, which specialized in breaking and entering.
The exploits of the members of the Essex Gang were widely written up in the London newspapers at the time. They were violent, knowledgeable about valuables and not above the occasional rape or two in the line of duty. A large reward was put on their heads, and two of them were arrested and hanged in chains. Turpin, who’d only escaped by jumping out of a window, went on the run, hooked up with another highwayman, and began a notorious career robbing travellers and coaches on the roads in and out of London.
Bounty-hunters went after him to no avail. He even appeared from time to time in the City of London. Then, by accident, he shot his partner in a scuffle with a constable and though he continued his hold-up career on his own for a while, he decided, when the bounty on his head doubled, to quit the south of England and ride northward.
In Welton in Yorkshire – though he was widely accepted as a gentleman – he still made a living stealing horses and some of his old habits proved ingrained. One day he blithely shot a cock belonging to his landlord; when one of those present complained, he said if the man would just stand still while he loaded his pistol, he would take pleasure in shooting him too.
A complaint was made. Turpin was arrested and imprisoned in York Castle where his true identity was discovered. He was condemned to death. And it was then that the legend of Turpin – the ‘gentleman of the road’ – was born. For this (in reality) squat, pocked and swarthy man bought new shoes and a suit before his execution. He gave a vast sum of money to five poor men to follow him to the gallows as mourners and bowed to spectators from the cart that took him to the scaffold,
‘with an air of the most astonishing indifference and intrepidity.’
Once there, he chatted to his executioner for half an hour before jumping off the ladder, with the noose around his neck, of his own accord.
In death, Turpin was transmuted into the archetypal free man, a rebel-hero riding his great horse Black Bess into a fictional sunset. He became a central figure in Harrison Ainsworth’s immensely popular novel Rookwood, and every pub between the two cities seemed to have a memento of his record-breaking – and almost mythical – ride between London and York. Still, who cared? As a later biographer of Turpin wrote:
‘Fiction is far stronger and greater than truth!’
Fred and Rosemary West
Rose West was short, bespectacled and plump. She looked harmless; and when she went on trial in Gloucester, England in October 1995 on ten counts of murder, she maintained that harmless was exactly what she was. Her husband, Fred West, she said, had killed the two children and eight women involved without her knowledge – he had confessed as much and had insisted that she herself had played no part. Yes, he had hanged himself in a prison cell before coming to trial – and that was unfortunate. But she herself was totally innocent.
Fred West hanged himself in prison before going to trial
Rose West claimed her husband had committed the murders
In the absence of any eye-witnesses to the crimes, this made the evidence of a woman called Janet Leach especially important. For Leach had been Fred West’s ‘appropriate adult,’ a volunteer assigned to accompany him as a companion during his interviews with the police. She’d visited him many times after he’d been arrested, and she told a different story. For Fred West, out of the interview-room, had told her that it was Rose who’d done the killings and that there were other people involved, including Rose’s father and not all the killings had taken place at 25 Cromwell Street, with its one-woman brothel and torture chamber. There was also a deserted farmhouse…
At this point in her testimony, Janet Leach broke down. She became ill – a natural reaction, as anyone who has read an account of the Wests’ known crimes will well appreciate. For they were monsters, sexual sadists and predators, who picked up lost souls and raped and tortured them, and didn’t even stop at their own daughters.
Fred West was born in 1941, into a family of farm-labourers in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle; Rose twelve years later, in Northam. Both seem to have been obsessed with sex from an early age. By the time Rose met Fred, when she was 15, she’d had affairs with several older men; had a history of putting out to truckers at a café where she worked and may have had an incestuous relationship with her own father. As for twenty-seven-year-old Fred, he’d been arrested for having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl; had a history of rape and assault and had already killed a girlfriend who’d made a nuisance of herself by becoming pregnant.
They soon began to live together, first in a caravan with Fred’s daughter and stepdaughter, and then, after Rose got pregnant, in a Gloucester flat. Daughter Heather was born in 1970 – but three kids soon proved too much. So they murdered the step-daughter, and when her mother came looking for her, she was last seen getting into Fred’s car…
By this time they were both heavily into pornography, bondage and sado-masochistic sex. Fred acted as Rose’s pimp, then watched, photographed and filmed her with her clients. In 1972, when Rose became pregnant again, this time with daughter Mae, they got married and moved to larger premises in Gloucester, at 25 Cromwell Street. It was here that the deadly sex-games reached a new pitch of intensity and the killings began in earnest.
They could have been stopped. If the social services, for example, had ever bothered to examine why eight-year-old Heather had been kept from school, they might have found out that she’d been held down by her mother while her father raped her. If the court had listened properly to the evidence of a seventeen-year-old, who’d been assaulted, tied up and raped by the pair of them, then it might have done more than fine them £50. And if a mother calling at number 25 in search of her missing daughter – only to be told by Rose that she’d moved away – had gone on to ask Rose why on earth, then, was she wearing the daughter’s slippers, she could perhaps have brought an end to the couple’s murderous activities.
As it was, over the next twenty years – as Fred constantly expanded and ‘improved’ the house and garden, and Rose had five more children, two of them by West Indians – they used their older daughters as sex slaves and had regular sex sessions with any woman they could find, willing or unwilling. Some were lodgers, some were drifters and hitchhikers – and those who didn’t like it were simply killed after prolonged torture. Daughter Heather was killed because she wanted to leave home and Anna Marie only made it away from the house because she was pregnant with her father’s child. It turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, and she was ultimately aborted.
Many believe the full horror of West’s crimes are still to be uncovered
In 1992, however, the net began to close in. A schoolgirl told a friend of hers that she’d been raped by Fred with the help of Rose, and the friend went to the police. They were arrested, and though the trial collapsed when the schoolgirl refused to give evidence, the police by then had recovered huge quantities of pornographic material from Number 25. They’d also interviewed Anna Marie, who’d told them about her rape and her years of sexual abuse, and they’d heard about the disappearance of Heather, who was rumoured to have been buried under the patio.
After months of persistence by a woman detective called Helen Savage, a police digging-team moved in.
It found nine bodies in all, buried under paving-stones i
n the garden, and under the cement floors of the cellar and the kitchen extension. Some bore evidence of torture. Fred, then Rose, were arrested; and based on information Fred gave, police later found the bodies of his first wife, her daughter and the girlfriend Fred had killed before he met Rose. The two women had been buried in fields near Fred’s home village of Much Marcle; Charmaine, in the back garden of Fred and Rose’s previous flat.
When her case came to trial after Fred had hanged himself, Rose West was found guilty on ten charges of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. But Janet Leach’s testimony still reverberates. For she claimed that Fred had told her: ‘The police don’t know the half of it.’
And what about the ‘deserted farmhouse’ he mentioned? The murders Rose was charged with came in three distinct periods: 1973–75, 1978–79 and then a long gap till Heather’s death in 1987. It seems unlikely – from such precedents as there are – that the mass murders simply stopped. It seems unlikely too that there weren’t accomplices. Perhaps some day the full story of Fred and Rose West will be uncovered.
Stephen Griffiths
A psychology graduate and PhD student in Applied Criminal Justice Studies, Stephen Griffiths is destined to be remembered as ‘The Crossbow Cannibal’. The gruesome moniker didn’t come from the popular press, but from the man himself. On 28 May 2010, he stood in a packed magistrates’ court and boldly gave the name in place of his own. The declaration was met with gasps from a crowd that had no idea what it was he had done with the three women he was accused of murdering.
Stephen Shaun Griffiths was born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire on 24 December 1969. A neighbour recalls that as a child the boy liked killing and dismembering birds: ‘It looked as if he was enjoying what he was doing. He wasn’t dissecting them bit by bit, he was ripping them apart.’
When Griffiths was still very young, his parents split up. He moved with his mother, sister and brother to the nearby city of Wakefield. There he attended the exclusive Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, the alma mater of serial killer John George Haigh, ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’.
Griffiths was often in trouble with the law. At the age of 17, he slashed a supermarket manager with a knife when he was stopped for shoplifting. Griffiths received a three-year sentence for that attack, some of which was spent at a high-security mental hospital.
Griffiths managed to earn a degree in psychology from Leeds University. He was accepted at the University of Bradford, where he began work on an academic thesis, ‘Homicide in an Industrial City’, comparing modern murder techniques in Bradford to those of the 19th century. Griffiths incorporated some of his research in ‘The Skeleton and the Jaguar’, a website he established that focused largely on serial killers.
Griffiths had developed a taste for human flesh
Griffiths was arrested numerous times for domestic violence. In 2008, local librarians reported him for borrowing books on human dismemberment. However, it’s more than likely that the true number of women murdered by Stephen Griffiths will never be known. Ultimately, he would admit to just three, the first being 43-year-old sex trade worker and heroin addict Susan Rushworth.
On April 26 2010, another prostitute, 31-year-old Shelley Armitage, disappeared from downtown Bradford. Two days passed before she was reported missing.
Less than a month later, on 21 May, a Friday, Suzanne Blamires also vanished. Blamires accompanied Griffiths to his flat, most likely willingly, but then she tried to leave. Security cameras captured her sudden end. Grainy footage shows Blamires fleeing Griffiths’ flat with the PhD student in pursuit. He knocks her unconscious, and leaves her lying in the corridor. Moments later, he returns with a crossbow, aims and shoots a bolt through her head. Before dragging the woman back into his apartment, he raises his crossbow to the camera in triumph. Moments later, Griffiths returns with a drink, apparently toasting the death.
The first person to view these images was the building caretaker. He called the police – but not before first selling the story to a tabloid newspaper.
The first body was discovered by a member of the public in the River Aire. The corpse was cut into at least 81 separate pieces. Police recovered a black suitcase containing the instruments Griffiths had used to carry out the dissection prior to consuming several pounds of flesh. Identification came without the need for DNA testing – Blamires’ head, complete with crossbow bolt, was found in a rucksack. At some point Griffiths had also embedded a knife in her skull.
Griffiths gradually opened up about the murders, providing police with macabre details. He described his flat’s bathtub as a ‘slaughterhouse’, saying that it was there that his victims were dismembered. He used power tools on the first two bodies, boiling the parts he ate in a pot. Blamires was cut up by hand, and her flesh was eaten raw.
Griffiths had filmed his second victim’s death on his mobile phone, which he then left on a train. The device was bought and sold twice before police managed to track it down. The footage it held was described by one veteran detective as the most disturbing he’d ever viewed. Armitage is shown naked and bound with the words ‘My Sex Slave’ spray-painted in black on her back. Griffiths can be heard saying: ‘I am Ven Pariah, I am the Bloodbath Artist. Here’s a model who is assisting me.’
Only Susan Rushworth was spared the indignity of having her death caught on camera. Investigators believe that she was killed with a hammer.
On 21 December 2010, three days before his 41st birthday, Griffiths pleaded guilty to all three murders and was given a life sentence.
Australia
Jack Donohoe
The Irish bushranger Jack Donohoe was probably twenty-four years old in 1830, when he was killed by police and a volunteer posse at Bringelly, near Campbelltown outside Sydney. But his memory still endures, kept alive through a popular ballad with hundreds of different variants which lasts down to this day. He became through the ballad the symbol of resistance both to the old convict system and to the British colonial yoke. He is, if you like, both the Jesse James of Australia and, via the heady distillation of the ballad’s lyrics, the first standard-bearer of Australian independence.
Sentenced to transportation in Dublin in 1823 at the age of 17, ‘Bold’ Jack Donohoe was a short, blond, freckle-faced man who, after he arrived in Sydney, seems to have found nothing much but trouble. Having survived the long sea-voyage, he was handed over to a settler in Parramatta, but soon misbehaved: he was sentenced to a stint in a punishment gang to teach him a lesson. Having survived this, he was reassigned, but he took off instead into the bush. In the words of the ballad:
‘He’d scarcely served twelve months in chains upon the Australian shore,
When he took to the highway as he had done before:
He went with Jacky Underwood, and Webber and Walmsley too,
These were the true companions of bold Jack Donohoe.’
Donohoe’s gang, to stay alive, held up the carts that travelled, carrying produce to and from the Sydney settlement, along the Windsor Road. He and two of his henchmen were soon caught and condemned to death. The other two were hanged. But Donohoe, while being returned from court to the condemned cell, made a run for it – further contributing to his reputation:
‘As Donohoe made his escape, to the bush he went straightway.
The people they were all afraid to travel by night or day,
For every day in the newspapers they brought out something new,
Concerning that bold bushranger they called Jack Donohoe.’
After stealing horses from settlers, a new Donohoe gang began to roam through a huge swath of territory, holding up travellers, thieving from farms and selling off whatever booty they got to whoever would have it. Back in Sydney, he became a stick with which the newspapers could beat the despised Governor’s head. He had armed soldiers and mounted cavalry, they said,
‘but the bushranging gentry seem to carry on their pranks without molestation.’
They even began to lionize Donohoe himself, whom they
praised not only for his dress and sense of style, but also for his Pimpernel quality.
‘Donohoe, the notorious bushranger,’ announced the Australian,
‘…is said to have been seen by a party well acquainted with his person, in Sydney, enjoying, not more than a couple of days ago… a ginger-beer bottle.’
The Governor was finally forced to act. The price on Donohoe’s head was raised and more police and volunteers were sent into the field. Finally, at Bringelly, they caught up with him:
‘As he and his companions rode out one afternoon,
Not thinking that the pangs of death would overtake them soon,
To their surprise the Horse-Police rode smartly into view,
And in double-quick time they did advance to take Jack Donohoe.’
Before it was all over, according to the ballad, Donohoe shouted out his defiance, saying that he’d never be an Englishman’s slave. He killed nine men with nine bullets before being shot himself through the heart and asking, with his dying breath, all convicts to pray for him. The truth is, of course, more mundane. He did not kill nine men; he screamed nothing much but obscenities; and he was shot in the head by a trooper called Muggleston. But it didn’t matter. For ‘Bold’ Jack Donohoe was already passing into legend. When his body was laid out in the Sydney morgue, the Colony’s distinguished Surveyor-General came in to draw his portrait; and a Sydney shopkeeper produced a line of clay pipes, featuring his head with a bullet-hole at the temple. They sold out fast.
100 Most Infamous Criminals Page 21