Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  At the trial the true, horrific, sexual nature of the crimes was revealed. The pathologist disclosed that Edward Evans’s fly had been undone and he had found dog hairs around Evans’s anus. John Kilbride’s body was found with his trousers and underpants around his knees. Hindley, it seemed, got turned on by watching Brady perform homosexual acts on his victims. Later Brady let it slip that both he and Hindley had been naked during the nude photographic sessions with Lesley Ann Downey. But otherwise they refused to talk.

  They were sentenced to life. Brady did not bother to appeal. Hindley did, but her appeal was rejected. They were also refused permission to see each other, though they were allowed to write.

  Brady has shown no contrition in prison and has refused to be broken. He saw himself as a martyr in his own perverted cause. Gradually, he went insane. Hindley eventually broke down and petitioned to be released. When that was refused, a warder, who was Hindley’s lesbian lover, organised an escape attempt. It failed and Hindley was sentenced to an additional year in jail.

  She took an open university degree and gave additional information on the whereabouts of the victims’ graves in a bid for mercy. But Brady countered her every move by revealing more of her involvement in the crimes. He saw any attempt on her part to go free as disloyalty.

  ‘The weight of our crimes justifies permanent imprisonment,’ Brady told the Parole Board in 1982. ‘I will not wish to be free in 1985 or even 2005.’

  He got his wish. Though he made several attempts to starve himself Brady was still incarcerated in 2005. Hindley died in jail in 2002.

  Chapter 8

  Ted Bundy

  Name: Ted Bundy

  Nationality: American

  Born: 1946

  Number of victims: 20 killed

  Favoured method of killing: rape, strangulation

  Reign of terror: 1970s

  Final note: conducted his own defence and tried to charm the jury

  Executed: 1989

  Ted Bundy had the power to charm women. Many of them paid with their lives. He claimed his sexual impulses were so strong that there was no way that he could control them. He later maintained that during his first attacks he had to wrestle with his conscience. But soon he began to desensitise himself. He claimed not to have tortured his victims unnecessarily, but said that he had to kill them after he had raped them to prevent them identifying him.

  Bundy had been a compulsive masturbator from an early age and later became obsessed by sadistic pornography. After glimpsing a girl undressing through a window, he also became a compulsive Peeping Tom. His long-time girlfriend Meg Anders described how he would tie her up with stockings before anal sex. This sex game stopped when he almost strangled her. For years they maintained a more or less normal sexual relationship, while Bundy exercised his craving for total control with anonymous victims, whom he often strangled during the sexual act.

  His attitude to sex was often ambivalent. Although he desired the bodies of attractive young women, he would leave their vaginas stuffed with twigs and dirt and sometimes sodomise them with objects such as aerosol cans.

  Some of the bodies, though partly decomposed, had freshly-washed hair and newly-applied make-up, indicating that he had kept them for necrophilia. In only one case did he admit to deliberately terrorising his victims. He kidnapped two girls at the same time so that he could rape each of them in front of the other, before killing them.

  Bundy’s first victim was Sharon Clarke of Seattle. He had broken into her apartment while she was asleep and smashed her around the head with a metal rod. She suffered a shattered skull, but survived. She could not identify her attacker and no motivation for the attack has been given.

  Then young women began to disappear from the University of Washington campus nearby. Six disappeared within seven months. At the Lake Sammanish resort in Washington State, a number of young women reported being approached by a young man calling himself Ted. He had his arm in a sling and asked them to help get his sailing boat off his car. But in the car park they found that there was no boat on the car. Ted then said that they would have to go to his house to get it. Sensibly, most declined. Janice Ott seems to have agreed to go with him. She disappeared. A few hours later, Denise Naslund also disappeared from the same area. She had been seen in the company of a good-looking, dark-haired young man who fitted Ted Bundy’s description. The remains of Janice Ott, Denise Naslund and another unidentified young woman were later found on wasteland, where their bodies had been eaten and scattered by animals.

  Other witnesses came forward from the University of Washington, saying that they had seen a man wearing a sling and some other bodies were found, again disposed of on waste ground.

  The police had two suspects. Ex-convict Gary Taylor had been picked up by the Seattle police for abducting women under false pretences. And park attendant Warren Forrest picked up a young woman who consented to pose for him. He took her to a secluded part of the park, tied her up and stripped her naked. He taped her mouth and fired darts at her breasts. Then he raped her, strangled her and left her for dead. But she survived and identified her attacker. Both were in custody though, and the attacks continued. Bundy’s girlfriend, who was beginning to suspect something was up, called anonymously, giving his name, but it disappeared among the thousands of other leads the police had to follow up.

  Bundy began to travel further afield. On 2 October 1974 he abducted Nancy Wilcox after she left an all-night party in Salt Lake City. In Midvale on 18 October, he raped and strangled Melissa Smith, the daughter of the local police chief. Her body was found in the Wasatch Mountains. He took Laura Aimee from a Hallowe’en party in Orem, Utah. Her naked body was found at the bottom of a canyon.

  In Salt Lake City a week later, he approached a girl named Carol DaRonch. Bundy pretended to be a detective and asked her the licence number of her car. Someone had tried to break into it, he said. He asked her to accompany him to the precinct to see the suspect. She got into his car, but once they were in a quiet street he handcuffed her.

  She began to scream. He put a gun to her head. She managed to get out of the door and Bundy chased after her with a crowbar. He took a swing at her skull, but she managed to grab the bar. A car was coming down the street. Carol jumped in front of it, forcing it to stop. She jumped in and the car drove away.

  Carol gave a good description to the police, but Bundy continued undeterred. He tried to pick up a pretty young French teacher outside her high school. She declined to go with him. But Debbie Kent did. She disappeared from a school playground where a key to a pair of handcuffs was later found.

  The following January in Snowmass Village, a Colorado ski resort, Dr Raymond Gadowsky found that his fiancée, Caryn Campbell, was missing from her room. A month later, her naked body was found out in the snow. She had been raped and her skull had been smashed in. Julie Cunningham vanished from nearby Vail and the remains of Susan Rancourt and Brenda Bell were also found on Taylor Mountain.

  The body of Melanie Cooley was found only ten miles from her home. Unlike the other victims, she was still clothed, though her jeans had been undone, convincing the police that the motive was sexual.

  The Colorado attacks continued with Nancy Baird who disappeared from a petrol station and Shelley Robertson whose naked body was found down a mine shaft.

  A Salt Lake City patrol man was cruising an area of the city that had recently suffered a spate of burglaries. He noticed Bundy’s car driving slowly and indicated that he should pull over. Instead, Bundy sped off. The patrolman gave chase and caught up with him. In his car, they found maps and brochures of Colorado. Some coincided with the places girls had disappeared.

  Forensic experts found a hair in Bundy’s car that matched that of Melissa Smith. A witness also recognised Bundy from Snowmass Village. He was charged and extradited to Colorado to stand trial. However, few people could believe that such an intelligent and personable young man could be responsible for these terrible sex attacks, even though Ca
rol DaRonch picked him out of a line-up.

  Bundy was given permission to conduct his own defence. He was even allowed to use the law library to research. There he managed to give his guard the slip, jumped from a window and escaped. He was recaptured a week later.

  Bundy still protested his innocence and managed to prolong the pre-trial hearings with a number of skilful legal stalling manoeuvres. In the time he gained, he lost weight and cut a small hole under the light fitting in the ceiling of his cell. He squeezed through the one-foot-square hole he had made and got clean away.

  He travelled around America before settling in Tallahassee, Florida, a few blocks from the sorority houses of Florida State University. One evening, Nita Neary saw a man lurking in front of her sorority house. She was about to phone the police when a fellow student, Karen Chandler, staggered from her room with blood streaming from her head. She was screaming that she and her roommate, Kathy Kleiner, had just been attacked by a madman. Both Margaret Bown and Lisa Levy had been attacked sexually – Margaret had been strangled with her own pantyhose and Bundy had bitten one of Lisa’s nipples off and left teeth marks in her buttocks before beating her around the head. She died on the way to hospital. In another building, Cheryl Thomas had also been viciously attacked, but she survived.

  The police had only a sketchy description of the attacker. But Bundy had plainly got a taste for killing again. While making his getaway, he abducted 12-year-old Kimberley Leach, sexually assaulted her, strangled her, mutilated her sexual organs and dumped her body in the Suwannee River Park.

  Bundy was now short of money. He stole some credit cards and a car, and sneaked out of his apartment where he owed back rent. But the stolen car was a give-away. He was stopped by a motorcycle cop and arrested. At the police station, he admitted that he was Ted Bundy and that he was wanted by the Colorado police.

  The Florida police began to tie him in with the Tallahassee attack. When they tried to take an impression of his teeth, he went berserk. It took six men to hold his jaw open. The impression matched the teeth marks on Lisa Levy’s buttocks.

  Again Bundy conducted his own defence, skilfully using the law to prolong the court case and his personality to charm the jury. But the evidence of the teeth marks was too strong. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. On death row, Bundy made a detailed confession. He also received sacks full of post from young women whose letters dwelt on cruel and painful ways to make love. Even on death row he had not lost his charm. At 7 a.m. on 24 January 1989, Bundy went to the electric chair. He is said to have died with a smile on his face.

  Chapter 9

  The Yorkshire Ripper

  Name: Peter Sutcliffe

  Nationality: English

  Reign of terror: 1975–81

  Number of victims: 13 killed, 7 injured

  Favoured method of killing: hammer blows to the head

  Final note: had been acting on instructions from God to ‘clean the streets’ of prostitutes.

  Nearly ninety years after the notorious Jack the Ripper finished his killing spree in the East End of London, the Yorkshire Ripper picked up where he left off. In a reign of terror spanning nearly six years, the Yorkshire Ripper managed to elude the biggest police squad that has ever assembled in the UK to catch one man. By the time he was caught, 20 women had been savagely attacked, 13 brutally murdered and a whole community was virtually under siege.

  It started on 30 October 1975 when a Leeds milkman on his rounds saw a shapeless bundle in a bleak recreation ground. With Bonfire Night just a week away, he thought it was only a Guy. But he went over to investigate anyway. He found a woman sprawled on the ground, her hair matted with blood, her body exposed. Her jacket and blouse had been torn open, her bra pulled up. Her slacks had been pulled down below her knees and in her chest and stomach there were 14 stab wounds.

  The milkman didn’t see the massive wound on the back of her head that had actually caused her death. The victim had been attacked from behind. Two vicious blows had been delivered by a heavy, hammer-like implement, smashing her skull. The stab wounds were inflicted after she was dead.

  The body belonged to a 28-year-old mother of three, Wilma McCann. She regularly hitch-hiked home after nights on the town. She died just 100 yards from her home, a council house in Scott Hall Avenue. Post-mortem blood tests showed that she had consumed 12 to 14 measures of spirits on the night of her death, which would have rendered her incapable of defending herself.

  Although her clothes had been interfered with, her knickers were still in place and she had not been raped. There seemed to be no overt sexual motive for her murder. Her purse was missing. So, in the absence of any other motive, the police treated her killing as a callous by-product of robbery.

  This changed when a second killing occurred in the area of Chapeltown, the red-light district of Leeds, three months later. Not all the women who worked there were professional prostitutes. Some housewives sold sex for a little extra cash. Others, such as 42-year-old Emily Jackson, were enthusiastic amateurs who did it primarily for fun. She lived with her husband and three children in the respectable Leeds suburb of Churwell. On 20 January 1976, Emily and her husband went to the Gaiety pub on Roundhay Road, the venue for the Chapeltown irregulars and their prospective clientele. Emily left her husband in the main lounge and went hunting for business. An hour later, she was seen getting into a Land-Rover in the car park. At closing time, her husband drank up and took a taxi home alone. His wife, he thought, had found a client who wanted her for the night.

  Emily Jackson’s body was found the next morning huddled under a coat on open ground. Like Wilma McCann, her breasts were exposed and her knickers left on. Again, she had been killed by two massive blows to the head with a heavy hammer. Her neck, breasts and stomach had also been stabbed – this time over fifty times. Her back had been gouged with a Phillips screwdriver and the impression of a heavy-ribbed Wellington boot was stamped on her right thigh.

  The post-mortem indicated that Emily Jackson had had sex before the attack, not necessarily with the murderer. Once again, there seemed to be no real motive. And the killer had left only one real clue: he had size-seven shoes.

  Over a year later, on 5 February 1977, 28-year-old part-time prostitute Irene Richardson left her tawdry rooming house in Chapeltown at 11.30 p.m. to go dancing. The following morning, a jogger in Soldier’s Field, a public playing-field just a short car ride from Chapeltown, saw a body slumped on the ground and stopped to see what the matter was. It was Irene Richardson. She lay face down. Three massive blows had shattered her skull. Her skirt and tights were torn off. Her coat was draped over her buttocks and her calf-length boots had been removed from her feet and laid neatly across her thighs. Again, her neck and torso were studded with knife wounds. The post-mortem indicated that she had not had sex and had died only half an hour after leaving her lodgings.

  After the murder of Irene Richardson, the police were able to link the three cases. They were plainly the work of a serial killer and the parallel with the Jack the Ripper case quickly sprang into the public imagination. The murderer of Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson and Irene Richardson soon became known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

  The girls of Chapeltown heeded the warning. They moved in droves to Manchester, London and Glasgow. Those who could not travel so far from home began plying their trade in nearby Bradford. But the next victim, Patricia ‘Tina’ Atkinson, was a Bradford girl. She lived just around the corner from the thriving red-light district in Oak Lane. On 23 April 1977, she went to her local pub, The Carlisle, for a drink with her friends. She reeled out just before closing time. When she was not seen the next day, people assumed she was at home, sleeping it off.

  The following evening, friends dropped round and found the door to her flat unlocked. Inside, they found her dead on her bed covered with blankets. She had been attacked as she came into the flat. Four hammer blows had smashed into the back of her head. She had been flung on the bed and her clothes pulled
off. She had been stabbed in the stomach seven times and the left side of her body had been slashed to ribbons. There was a size-seven Wellington boot print on the sheet.

  The man the footprint belonged to was Peter Sutcliffe. Like Jack the Ripper before him, he seems to have been on a moral crusade to rid the streets of prostitutes.

  The eldest of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe’s six children, he was born in Bingley, a town just six miles north of Bradford. He had been a timid child and inscrutable young man, who was always regarded as being somehow different. He was small and weedy. Bullied at school, he clung to his mother’s skirts.

  His younger brothers inherited their father’s appetite for life, the opposite sex and the consumption of large quantities of beer. Peter liked none of these things. Although he took no interest in girls, he spent hours preening himself in the bathroom. He later took up body-building.

  Leaving school at 15, he took a temporary job as a grave-digger at a cemetery in Bingley. He regularly joked about having ‘thousands of people below me where I work now’. He developed a macabre sense of humour during his three years there. Once he pretended to be a corpse. He lay down on a slab, threw a shroud over himself and started making moaning noises when his workmates appeared. They called him ‘Jesus’ because of his beard.

  At his trial Sutcliffe claimed that he had heard the voice of God coming from a cross-shaped headstone while he was digging a grave. The voice told him to go out on to the streets and kill prostitutes.

  Despite Peter Sutcliffe’s youthful good looks, girls were not attracted to him. His first proper girlfriend, Sonia, was a 16-year-old schoolgirl when he met her in the Royal Standard, his local pub. He was 24. Sonia suffered the same introversion as Peter. On Sundays, they would sit in the front room, lost in their own conversation. Sonia would only speak to other members of the Sutcliffe family when it was absolutely unavoidable.