by Ray Black
Once such victim was widow Florence Wilson, who was typical of the type of women he would woo. She met him in 1908 whilst walking along the seafront at Brighton. They had a whirlwind romance and he married her in London after first demanding she take out her life savings from the Post Office. But her honeymoon was short-lived, just a one-day visit to the White City Exhibition. George settled his new wife down on a park bench while he went off on the pretence of buying a newspaper. While Florence sat waiting for her husband to return, George had gone back to their lodgings to remove her valuables and money, and was never seen again.
Although this happened to many other women, they only lost their money and probably their faith in men. What happened to his next three ‘wives’ was far more gruesome.
WHERE IT ALL STARTED
His first victim was the thirty-three year daughter of a bank manager, Beatrice (Bessie) Mundy, in the year 1913. She met her future husband when she was out taking a walk in Clifton, Bristol, in 1910, when he introduced himself as Henry Williams, a restorer of pictures. Within days Bessie knew this was the man she wanted to marry and the wedding took place in Weymouth.
Bessie was a wealthy woman and her money was held in trust by her uncle, who was determined to protect it from Bessie’s new husband. Somehow, Smith managed to persuade Bessie to make a will in his favour, and in so doing she signed her own death warrant.
Smith visited their local ironmongers and haggled over the price of a bath, which was supposed to be a present for his new wife. He convinced Bessie that she had been having fits which she had no recollection of when she came round. Acting out the part of a very concerned husband, Smith called out the doctor on several occasions. If his little plan worked, the fits would be given as the reason for her death while taking a bath. The doctor could find very little wrong with Bessie, but he had no doubt that Smith was telling the truth and prescribed some mild tranquillizers. The doctor heard nothing for a few days and then, on July 13, 1913, received a hastily scribbled note:
‘Can you come at once? I am afraid my wife is dead.’
On arriving at the house the doctor was met by a very distressed George who immediately led him up to the bathroom where Bessie was lying completely inert in the bath that Smith had recently bought for his dear wife. She was partially submerged in the water and her face had turned blue. While pretending to be very upset, Smith told the doctor that he had been out shopping while his wife had been taking a bath. On his arrival home he had gone upstairs to see how she was getting on, only to find her dead.
Before he wrote to Bessie’s relatives telling them of the shocking news, George decided to wait until after the inquest so that it would be too late for them to ask any awkward questions. Everything went exactly as he had planned. The coroner’s jury came to the conclusion that Bessie had indeed suffered a fit whilst taking a bath and had no option but to return a verdict of death by misadventure. Bessie died leaving a large inheritance of £2,500 (about £150,000 today) to George Smith, who showed very little gratitude to the woman who had just left him a small fortune. He refused to even allow her the dignity of a private grave, and so Bessie’s body was laid to rest in a common plot. As if that wasn’t enough he even had the effrontery to return the bath to the ironmonger, saying that he no longer had any use for it, for which he received a full refund.
However, unbeknown to Smith, Bessie was to have her revenge. When she died she was holding a small piece of Castile soap in her right hand. Her fingers were clamped tightly around the fragment of soap when she was killed, and this would later prove to be a vital piece of evidence at Smith’s future murder trial. For the time being, though, he was a free man – free to kill again.
ALICE BURNHAM
George Smith did not take long before finding himself a new wife. In October, 1913, he met Alice Burnham, who was a pretty, if not a little plump, nurse of twenty-five, in Southsea. Again, using his charm, Alice not only agreed to marry George within a few days, but also had her life insured for the sum of £500 and made her will over to him.
Alice was over the moon when George suggested they take a honeymoon in Blackpool. What she didn’t know was that he needed to distance himself as far as possible from the scene of his last murder, so as not to attract too much suspicion.
One week after their wedding, on Friday, December 12, their landlady noticed that there was some water dripping from the ceiling in her kitchen. To give himself an alibi, Smith appeared downstairs and started chatting with his landlady. Next he went upstairs to the bathroom, only to discover that his wife had died whilst taking a bath.
When the doctor arrived, he found Smith tenderly holding his wife’s head above the water. But something about this worried the doctor, for he noticed that he had actually bothered to roll up his shirt sleeve – hardly the gesture of a grief-stricken husband. This was a careless mistake on the part of Smith, but at the time there didn’t seem to be any reason to suspect foul play. Again the coroner came back with the verdict – death by misadventure.
Smith, having carried off two murders successfully and accruing a nice sum of money to boot, became rather over-confident, which would eventually lead to his downfall.
MARGARET LOFTY
It was little more than a year later when Smith met Margaret Lofty in the city of Bath. Margaret was a spinster and worked as a ladies companion. She was a prime target because she had recently suffered a ‘disappointment’ in love. George, now calling himself John Lloyd, posed as a moneyed land agent. Perhaps because she was upset by her lost love, Margaret soon succumbed to the wily charms of George. A few days after meeting her new man, Margaret wrote to her sister to say that she was going to look after a lady in London for a few days. In fact, the truth of the matter was, she was preparing for a clandestine wedding.
As soon as George had talked Margaret into taking out a life insurance for £700, the couple were married and took lodgings at Highgate in London. However, Margaret did not have very long to enjoy her married life, for within thirty hours of leaving Bath, she was dead.
Their landlady was called Miss Louisa Blatch. On December 18, 1914, at around 7.30 p.m. Louisa heard the sound of splashing coming from the bathroom, followed by the sound of wet hands sliding down the side of a bath, and then a strange sigh. She was not perturbed at the time and just assumed that it was that nice Mrs. Lloyd moving around in the bath. Minutes later she heard the sound of the harmonium being played. Next she heard a knock at the front door. When she opened it it was her lodger Mr. Lloyd who claimed he had been out to buy some tomatoes for his wife, but unfortunately he had left his key behind.
Next, he went upstairs and, on entering the bathroom, cried for help. He went through the facade of trying to resuscitate his wife, whom he was positive was dead just forty-five minutes earlier.
Once again Margaret’s death was recorded as misadventure, and Smith went about the business of collecting his insurance money. He had now accrued a small fortune of £3,500 (£190,000 today) and was very probably congratulating himself, when he was approached by two policemen.
Margaret’s death had been widely publicized, and had drawn the attention of Alice Burnham’s father and the landlady of her Blackpool lodgings. When they read the newspaper articles about Margaret, they contacted the police and an investigation was started. To prove that Smith alias Williams alias Lloyd were one and the same person required unprecedented cooperation between police forces all around the country. They requested that the bodies of all three murdered women were exhumed. At the Old Bailey they produced 112 witnesses, 264 pieces of evidence including the bathtubs used in the murders. But the key piece of evidence was the fragment of Castile soap that Bessie Mundy had clasped in her hand at the time of her death. With this vital piece of evidence they could disprove the theory that she died while having a fit in the bath. If that had been the case her hands would have relaxed and consequently she would have dropped the soap.
With that problem solved the next question to be an
swered was how did Smith manage to murder his victims without any form of a struggle? One theory was that he had pulled hard on their legs forcing them out of the bath. This would have submerged the victim’s head, causing the rapid inhalation of water and subsequent drowning.
On trying to prove this theory with a willing female friend, Inspector Arthur Neil almost had disastrous results. His friend lay in the bathtub wearing just a swimsuit and, when Neil pulled sharply on her legs, her head slipped under the water before she had any time to protest. To his horror when he held up her arms he discovered they were limp and he had nearly drowned her in trying to get to the truth.
Throughout the trial Smith was prone to noisy outbursts, calling one witness a ‘lunatic’. Another time he shouted at the judge, ‘I am no murderer, though I may be a bit peculiar’.
It only took the jury thirty-five minutes to find George Smith guilty and on July 1, 1915, was sentenced to hang.
A FITTING END
George Smith was hanged on Friday 13, 1915, at Maidstone prison by hangman John Ellis. A huge crowd gathered to witness the event and, in a state of near collapse, Smith was carried across the prison yard to be held up on the scaffold.
He was certainly a pathetic figure at the end, but there was little sympathy for him, especially from his three surviving wives. After the execution, his body was formally identified, and then tossed into a pit of quicklime – a fitting end to the serial bigamist and murderer.
Whether he committed his acts through a hatred for women, or whether it was purely for monetary gain, no-one will ever really know.
The Cannibal Killer
Jeffrey Dahmer’s obsession with death started early in his childhood. From a very early age he would take dead animals and remove their skin. Next he would use chemicals to remove the flesh just leaving the skeleton. By the time he was fourteen he fantasized about killing men and having sex with their corpses.
Jeffrey was born in Bath, Ohio on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He was a normal, healthy child who was adored by his doting parents. As a toddler he was happy and playful, loving all the normal things like soft toys, wooden blocks, etc. He also had a pet dog named Frisky, who he absolutely adored. Apart from some normal childhood illnesses, Jeffrey developed into a normal little boy. So you can see from this profile that Jeffrey Dahmer was not the subject of neglect and abuse during his formative years.
The first time his parents noticed anything unusual about Jeffrey was when he was four years old. His father had swept out the remains of some small animals from underneath their house that had been killed by civets. Lionel noticed that as he gathered up the tiny animal bones, Jeff seemed oddly excited by the noise they made. He dug his small hands deep into the pile of bones. His father found it hard to dismiss it as simply a childish fascination, but instead somehow felt there was something more macabre about his behaviour.
At the age of six he required a regular operation for a hernia. For some inexplicable reason Jeffrey never seemed to fully recover from this surgery, and grew more and more inward, sitting on his own for long periods of time, with his face oddly motionless. By the time he reached first grade he had developed many fears and a complete lack of self-confidence. He seemed to need the reassurance of familiar people and places and the happy-go-lucky little toddler had now been replaced by a deeply shy, distant, almost uncommunicative little boy.
His father blamed it on the fact that they had moved from Iowa to Ohio. Lionel, as a child had also suffered from being shy and introvert, but as an adult had managed to overcome these problems. He felt that Jeffrey would get over them with time, but little did he know that his problems went far deeper.
In April of 1967 the family moved once again. Jeff seemed to adapt much better after this move and formed a close friendship with a boy named Lee. He certainly was much happier at his new school and had formed a bond with one of his teachers. As a present, he took a bowl of tadpoles into school for his new teacher. However, when he found out that the teacher had given the tadpoles to his friend Lee, Jeff sneaked into the garage where Lee now kept them and killed all the tadpoles with motor oil.
Over time his posture changed from loose-limbed, relaxed boy into a strangely rigid and tense figure. Once again he grew intensely shy and found it very difficult to interact with his fellow pupils. At home he would stay more and more in his room on his own, and was constantly lethargic. He had one friend but they drifted apart when he was fifteen. It was around this time that Jeff would go around with plastic bags gathering up the remains of animals for his own personal cemetery. He seemed to have a morbid fascination with dead creatures.
All the while Jeff became more isolated and uncommunicative from his family and indeed the rest of the human race. He certainly could never be classed as a rebellious child, in fact it was the opposite he never argued with his parents because nothing really seemed to bother him. By the time he was sixteen, Jeffrey had become an alcoholic. His fellow classmates described him as an unusual boy who always seemed to be trying to get attention. When he was eighteen his parents got a divorce and he went to live with his father and stepmother, Shari.
FANTASIES FULFILLED
Although it was apparent that Jeffrey Dahmer had fantasies about killing men and having sex with their corpses at a very early age, he didn’t actually do anything about it until June 1978.
Jeffrey had just graduated from high school when he picked up a hitchhiker by the name of Stephen Hicks. They had sex, drank some beer, but then Stephen wanted to leave. Dahmer appeared to get upset at the thought of Stephen leaving and hit him around the head with a barbell and killed him. He needed to dispose of the body and so he cut it up and put it into plastic rubbish bags, burying them in the woods just behind his house.
In 1978 his father and Shari convinced him he should try going to college. They drove him to Ohio State University, but he remained drunk for the whole of the first semester and that was the end of his college years. His parents, who were now totally frustrated with his behaviour, said that he either had to get a job or enrol in the army. He joined the army at the end of 1978 and was stationed in Germany, although after a couple of years he was discharged for perpetual drinking.
During his college and army years Jeff seemed to have kept his gruesome fantasies under control. However, on returning home he went out and dug up the body of Stephen Hicks, pounded the decomposing corpse with a sledgehammer and then scattered the remains in the woods.
Jeffrey was arrested in October 1981 for drunken and disorderly conduct, and it was then that his father felt it would be better if he went to live with his grandmother in Wisconsin. It wasn’t long before he discovered the city’s gay bars and this was where he picked up twenty-four-year-old Steven Toumi, who was to become his next victim. The two of them had been drinking heavily in one of the popular gay bar when they left to spend the night in a hotel room. Dahmer was so drunk that he was not aware that he had killed Toumi until he woke up to find Steven dead with blood on his mouth. He went out and bought a large suitcase and then stuffed the body inside. He returned to his grandmother’s house and took the body down to the basement. It was then that the really sordid and dark side of his nature came to the fore. He first had sex with the corpse, masturbated on it, and finally dismembered it and threw it in the garbage. For some reason this second murder seemed to open the floodgates and started Jeff on his killing spree.
The way Dahmer worked was to pick up young homosexual or bisexual men in the many gay bars around the city. He would either offer them money to pose for photographs or invite them back to his place to have a drink and watch videos. Having no idea that this was a wicked trap his victims would willingly accompany Jeffrey to the basement where they would fall into a drugged sleep following one or two spiked drinks. Then Dahmer would start to fulfill his fantasies. He either stabbed or strangled his victim to death before dismembering their bodies with a hacksaw.
As if that was not sick enough, Dahmer would retai
n certain parts of the dismembered bodies as a trophy, for example the heads and genitalia. But, perhaps the most nauseating aspect of his heinous acts was that he froze the biceps and other muscles which he would eat later on. The remainder of the corpse would be boiled down using chemicals and acids and then poured away down the drain.
Dahmer carried also carried out his own kind sick medical experiments. He would perform lobotomies on some of his hapless victims. He claimed later on that most of his victims died immediately, except one that is. He apparently drilled a hole into the man’s skull and poured acid into it. Dahmer said he behaved like a zombie for several days before he actually died. Dahmer was obviously an extremely sick man and was known to dabble in the occult.
While all these sordid activities were going on, Dahmer’s grandmother was totally unaware of what horrific things were taking place in her basement. She was, however, fully aware of all the noise and drunkenness of Jeff and his male friends, and eventually she asked him to move out.
And so it was on, September 25, 1988, Jeffrey Dahmer moved into his own apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee. However, the very next day he was make his first big mistake.
DAHMER’S ARREST
On September 25, 1988, Jeffrey Dahmer offered a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy $50 to pose for some photographs. When he got the boy back to his apartment, he drugged him, fondled him, but on this occasion did not become violent or indeed have sexual intercourse with him. By an amazing coincidence the boy turned out to be the older brother of Konerak Sinthasomphone, the boy Dahmer would kill in May of 1991.