Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions

by Wensley Clarkson

  ‘They were saying, “We did it. We did it. We blew the sucker away.”’

  Within days, the gang of three assassins had been rounded up. Then Diana Bogdanoff returned from a trip to visit relatives in Washington state and found a team of detectives waiting for her at Santa Barbara Airport. But she continued to stick rigidly to her story that she was innocent of any involvement in her husband’s death.

  Then cops had a big break when Diana’s first husband came forward and revealed that when the couple had divorced in 1980, she told him: ‘You’re lucky you’re still alive. I tried to hire two men to kill you.’ It then emerged that Diana Bogdanoff had been addicted to the idea of killing lovers and husbands for years. Was Phillip Bogdanoff the first time she’d really gone through with her murderous plans? Armed with that evidence the police arrested Diana Bogdanoff and charged her with first-degree murder.

  In March 1991, at the Santa Barbara County Superior Court, Stephanie pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 15-year-to-life sentence. Boyfriend Brian Stafford pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and got 33 years after agreeing to testify against Diana Bogdanoff. Ricky Rogers entered a plea of no contest to one charge of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to no more than ten years in jail because he did not pull the trigger.

  In May 1991, Diana Bogdanoff’s second trial (her first one was abandoned as a mistrial because the jury couldn’t agree a verdict) was held at the same courthouse. It took jurors just two hours to find her guilty of first-degree murder. She was also found guilty of planning the murder for financial gain and lying in wait for the killing to take place. Under those ‘special circumstances’ she was given an automatic life sentence without parole.

  Chapter Eighteen:

  SHOPPING FOR LOVE

  Their eyes met across a crowded supermarket. At first, Cecilia Salazar did not even notice the look of lust from her work colleague. A few hours later, their hands brushed as they both busily restacked the shelves after closing time. Again, Cecilia Salazar had no idea of the effect she was having on her workmate.

  Next day, Cecilia’s secret admirer tried to catch a glimpse of her curvaceous figure at every opportunity. When the 42-year-old mother-of-two leaned down to pick up some tins of beans that had fallen on the supermarket floor, she looked up to find her co-worker, 23-year-old Maria Serrato, standing over her with both hands on her hips. The younger woman had a glazed look in her eyes – and she couldn’t stop staring at Cecilia.

  Maria wanted to turn her passionate fantasies about Cecilia into reality. She couldn’t get Cecilia out of her mind and longed to be locked in an embrace with her. Maria Serrato was a striking-looking woman with long, flowing dark hair that was as thick as the black loom of the night. Her sparkling, dark, saucer-shaped eyes were constantly snapping around, searching for the love she never got as a child. Cecilia was precisely the opposite. She looked younger than her years and was a much softer, gentler woman with a motherly disposition. But all that made Maria even more attracted to her. Maybe she would provide a shoulder for her to cry on in times of need.

  Back in that Los Angeles supermarket, the manager was just closing up the store when Maria noticed Cecilia slipping into the storeroom at the back of the shop to get changed before going home to her husband and children. Maria headed swiftly and silently after her. Seconds later, she entered the dark and shadowy storage room.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Cecilia called out when she heard the door creak open.

  ‘It’s only me,’ replied Maria.

  Cecilia relaxed. She was worried it might have been that lecherous assistant manager who’d tried to maul her a few months earlier at the staff Christmas party. Through the shadows, Maria studied the outline of Cecilia’s body as she stood there in a pair of pantyhose and bra while changing into a dress. Maria moved towards her.

  ‘Maria, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ replied the younger woman, who was just inches from Cecilia by this stage.

  Maria looked deep into Cecilia’s eyes before reaching out and stroking the back of her neck. Then she pulled the older woman towards her and their lips met. Soon their tongues were slurping hungrily into each other’s mouths. Then Maria started trailing her mouth downwards.

  After they’d made love, Cecilia told a friend that the lust between her and Maria was like no other sexual encounter she’d ever experienced in her life. When she finally got home later that evening to the apartment in nearby Burbank that she shared with her husband and two children, she was physically and emotionally drained. Her mind kept flashing back to the scene in that storeroom. She couldn’t seem to shake free of those vivid scenes of lust and passion.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked her husband, Jose, who worked long hours in a factory to help pay for the family’s modest existence.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Cecilia. But he knew she was lying.

  Next evening, Cecilia and Maria couldn’t continue their passionate affair in the storeroom because some of the other workers were also staying late to stack shelves. Maria was irritated that she couldn’t seduce her older lover once again. She had been thinking about their sexual encounter virtually every minute of that day.

  That evening, as Cecilia walked towards the supermarket exit, Maria ran after her, desperate for one longing kiss just to seal their love for one another. Cecilia pulled away as Maria grabbed her by the hair and tried to kiss her fully on the lips, too besotted to care who might see them.

  Across the street, Jose Salazar was waiting in his car to pick his wife up. He watched in horror as his wife turned away from the younger woman and immediately realised that his instincts about his wife having a lover were correct – except that she was having an affair with another woman.

  Cecilia and Jose sat in silence on the drive home. Jose, 37, was too shocked to say anything. This was the ultimate insult to his macho, Mexican pride. How could she want another woman? What had driven her into the arms of another female? It was sick and twisted and he was appalled. Then he decided he must act fast to save his marriage so he brought up the subject at dinner that night.

  ‘I saw her with you.’

  Cecilia tried to ignore the remark at first. But the wall of silence between them only confirmed her husband’s worst fears.

  ‘Have you made love to her?’

  She nodded her head and broke down in tears. She knew the hurt must have been unbearable for him, but she had to unload her guilt to someone.

  ‘I couldn’t help it. I’m so sorry. I really am.’

  And Cecilia meant every word she said. If anyone had ever suggested she’d have sex with another woman she would have laughed in their face. But Jose’s priority was to guarantee that his wife would never sleep with another woman again.

  ‘I want you to stay away from her. Never let her near you again. D’you understand?’

  Cecilia nodded and solemnly promised to do as her husband wished. She had no intention of risking the break-up of her family. She just wished she could turn the clock back and wipe out the memories of those encounters with Maria forever.

  Next day in the supermarket, Cecilia avoided going near Maria for most of the morning. But she could feel the younger woman’s eyes on her wherever she went in that supermarket. Eventually, Maria cornered Cecilia just before lunch break. Cecilia tried to tell her calmly that they could not see each other again.

  But Maria snapped, ‘I want you to myself. You are mine. Not his.’ Clearly her obsession was not going to be that easy to ignore.

  Cecilia ignored the remark and turned to walk away.

  ‘You will be all mine one day,’ screamed Maria.

  Cecilia prayed that her lover would go away.

  For the following week, Cecilia tried her hardest to avoid any contact with Maria. She went home in her supermarket uniform so she didn’t have to visit that storeroom where their affair had started. She even resisted the temptation to look in Maria’s direction whenever she appeared at one end of the super
market while they were restacking shelves.

  Then early one morning, Cecilia was up a ladder against a high shelf when Maria stopped below her and let her hand stroke the top of her lover’s thigh. Cecilia looked down and snapped, ‘Stop it, Maria. It’s all over.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I want you to myself. I need you.’

  Cecilia sighed with anxiety and ignored Maria’s outburst, she was beginning to realise that the younger woman would be very difficult to shake off. But she could never have guessed what lengths Maria was prepared to go to in order to have her to herself.

  The two 15-year-old boys had been expert shots since the age of 12, thanks to their school-less lives on the mean streets of north Hollywood. So they weren’t that surprised when Maria Serrato contacted them through a friend of her sister’s.

  ‘I want you to hit this guy. He’s gotta die. If he doesn’t, then I ain’t payin’ you a cent.’

  The two youths looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘One hundred dollars.’

  ‘You kiddin’ me?’ said one of the teenagers.

  ‘Take it or leave it.’ Maria snapped. After ten minutes of haggling, the boys were convinced by Maria that it would be an easy hit, so they might as well do it for a hundred measly bucks.

  A few days later, Maria picked the two boys up from their homes and drove them to Cecilia’s apartment, parked up her truck and waited. After a few minutes, she spotted the unmistakable shape of the woman she wanted to make passionate love to emerge from the apartment and get into her own car to collect her husband from work.

  ‘That’s her. Now just wait here for her to return with her husband and hit him when they pull up.’ There was a quiver in Maria’s voice, but it wasn’t nerves that were causing it. She just couldn’t wait to make love to Cecilia again. I’ll soon have you to myself, she thought. So Maria dropped the two boys outside the apartment block and drove around the corner to a spot where she could see everything, but would not be observed by them.

  Jose Salazar was in a pretty good mood when his wife picked him up from work that evening. They seemed much happier than they had been for years. Strangely, the emotional upheaval of that affair with Maria had cleared the air between them. Now they were actually communicating together and even enjoying a rejuvenated sex life. Cecilia sometimes felt pangs of guilt about the whole business – especially since Maria’s expert seduction of her had actually helped improve her sexual technique with her husband.

  Neither Jose nor Cecilia noticed the two teenagers loitering on the worn-out patch of grass in front of their apartment block as they parked up that evening. And they certainly didn’t see the semi-automatic .32-calibre gun hidden under one of their shirts. It was Cecilia who eventually saw them first approaching. But by the time they started pumping bullets into her husband, it was too late. The glazed look on the faces of those kids showed absolutely no emotion. They’d just earned themselves $100. They neither knew nor cared who their victim was.

  Fifty yards away, Maria Serrato watched with cool satisfaction as Jose Salazar’s body twitched and jerked when the bullets rained down on him. The boys came running around the corner and ripped open the passenger door to her truck. The threesome then sped away into the busy streets filled with commuters trying to get home after a hard day’s work.

  ‘How ’bout a bonus?’ asked one of the kids hopefully as Maria carefully negotiated the queues of traffic on to the nearby motorway.

  ‘No way. We made a deal.’

  She handed over the $100 in crisp $20 notes. The boys didn’t bother counting it. They could see it was the right amount.

  That night, Maria lay awake in her apartment for hours. She couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d soon be making warm, passionate love to Cecilia once again. She fantasised about all the things they would do to each other. She longed to have Cecilia there in the bed next to her – but at least she would not have to wait much longer.

  A few weeks later, Cecilia returned to her job in the supermarket following her husband’s brutal murder. She had no choice but to go back to work because someone had to feed the kids and pay the bills. And her lover Maria couldn’t keep away from her. Within minutes, she trapped Cecilia in a quiet corridor and tried to push her against a wall to kiss her. Cecilia rejected her because her love for her husband had grown even more now that that he was dead.

  When Maria told her proudly that she’d hired those boys to kill Jose, Cecilia was appalled. That lunchtime, she went to the detective investigating her husband’s murder and informed them that Maria had commissioned the hit on her husband.

  On 9 March 1993, Maria Serrato was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The two schoolboys – not named because they were only 15 – were sentenced to youth authority until they turned 25 because they were too young to be given any heavier punishment.

  ‘This is the most bizarre murder case I have ever been involved in,’ said investigator Detective David Gabriel, of Burbank police, in Southern California. ‘Never in all my years as a cop did I ever expect to be investigating such a killing. Mrs Salazar has admitted she had an affair with Serrato but she is now trying to put this whole nightmare behind her. She was sitting there in that truck when those boys pumped their bullets into her husband. It is something she will never ever be able to forget. Mrs Salazar has now moved to a secret address to try and put the pain and anguish of those awful events behind her.’

  The two 15-year-olds arrested for the hit on Jose Salazar were freed less than two years later after serving their sentences in youth authority detention centres in northern California. They were paroled for good behaviour. Prison insiders said that the two boys were ‘treated like heroes’ because of the seriousness of their crime. ‘They were considered tough guys compared with most of the other kids because of the severity of the case,’ said one source.

  As Detective Gabriel added, ‘Those kids were under age and that’s the law even if it might seem like a light sentence.’

  SOME OF BRITAIN’S MOST INFAMOUS HITS IN RECENT YEARS

  1. Martin Cahill – aka ‘The General’ – was gunned down by a professional shootist on 19 August 1993 in his Renault 5 in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh. Just to ensure he had succeeded, the hitman fired five shots straight into notorious gangster Cahill with a .357 Magnum. Cahill had double-crossed other criminals and the IRA, so it was no surprise there was a bullet with his name on it.

  2. Charlie Wilson. In 1990, the Great Train Robber was rubbed out by the pool of his £250,000 Marbella hacienda by Danny Roff. The hitman was himself on the run after escaping with associate Billy Edmonds from a British prison while serving 13 years for armed robbery. Wilson had double-crossed a big London syndicate during an illicit drugs deal.

  3. Pat Tate, Craig Rolfe and Tony Tucker were shot dead in their Range Rover in an Essex field in December 1995. Their demise marked the end of one of the most notorious drug gangs in Britain, believed to be the one that supplied the ecstasy which killed tragic Essex teenager Leah Betts. Two men were later jailed for life for carrying out the killings.

  4. Pete McNeil was shot at point-blank range by a motorcyclist outside his red-brick modern detached home in Hampshire on 10 February 1998. Millionaire-gangster-turned-police-informant McNeil – alias James Lawton – had been the supergrass in a $70 million cocaine heist that had connections with the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia.

  5. Keith Hedley was killed by alleged bandits on his yacht The Karenyann in Corfu in September 1996. Kent-based Hedley, 56, was a suspected money launderer who was mown down by the so-called pirates when he tried to stop them stealing his dinghy.

  6. Kevin Whitaker was a drug dealer killed by Pat Tate (see above) in the autumn of 1995, when he was forced to snort large quantities of a substance called Ketamine. Vets use Ketamine to tranquillise horses before castration but it is also used as a narcotic and is known in the underworld as ‘Special K’. Whita
ker’s killers went on to pierce his groin with a syringe and pumped a deadly concoction of poison into his blood. They then dumped his body in a ditch near Basildon, Essex.

  7. John Marchall was found shot dead in his black Range Rover in Sydenham, south London, in May 1996. Marchall, 34, also knew notorious ecstasy dealer Tate. Tattooed Marchall had earlier vanished from his £250,000 home at Little Burstead, Essex, after telling his family he was going to meet ‘business contacts’.

  8. Donald Urquart was shot in a London street in 1992. Urquart was a well-known London money launderer. It transpired that the gun used to kill him was supplied by a policeman-turned-gun-dealer, who later committed suicide. Urquart had been accused by other criminals of swindling them out of money during a huge, multi-million-pound money laundering scam.

  9. Tommy Roche was killed in almost identical circumstances to those of the man he often ‘minded’, Donald Urquart. Roche, 42, was shot three times after stopping in a lay-by near Heathrow Airport on 21 June 1993. As a teenager, Roche had even worked for the Krays. He was a suspected police informant.

  10. Nick Whiting was stabbed nine times and then shot twice with a 9mm pistol in 1990. Surveyors carrying out preliminary work for a new theme park at Rainham Marshes, Essex, stumbled upon Whiting’s body hidden in undergrowth. He’d handled much of the gold stolen from the notorious Brinks-Mat robbery in the mid-Eighties.