The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...) Read online

  The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

  ( The Mammoth Book of ... )

  Nigel Cawthorne

  Reason to be afraid—over 50 unsolved cases of serial murder. Fact: murderers and serial killers do not always get caught. Behind every headline of a newsworthy conviction lie other cases of vicious murderers who got away, and who remain somewhere among us. Here in one giant volume are more than 50 of the most serious serial killings and other murder cases that continue to remain unsolved.

  The cases covered in this alarming book include: Argentina’s crazed highway killer, responsible for mutilating and killing at least five people since 1997 and dumping their bodies along remote highways The Green River Killer, who has claimed at least 49 lives in the Seattle-Tacoma area South Africa’s “Phoenix Strangler,” suspected of killing 20 women The Twin Cities Killer, responsible for more than 30 murders on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where the victims were mostly prostitutes Costa Rica’s elusive “El Psicópata” (The Psychopath), thought to have murdered at least 19 people in this small, quiet Central American country “The Monster of Florence,” responsible for a series of 15 sexual slayings just outside Florence, where all the victims were courting couples.

  NIGEL CAWTHORNE is the author of The World’s Greatest Serial Killers, and Killers: The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Times, as well as numerous other books. His writing has appeared in over a hundred and fifty newspapers, magazines and partworks—from the Sun to the Financial Times, and from Flatbush Life to The New York Trib. He lives in London.

  Nigel Cawthorne

  The Mammoth Book of

  KILLERS AT LARGE

  Introduction

  There are serial killers everywhere. They inhabit our nightmares. Some have long careers. It took detectives 15 years to track down Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer who was responsible for the murder of at least 49 women in Washington State. Having passed a polygraph test in 1984, he was arrested in 2001 after DNA evidence linked him to his victims. He plea-bargained his way out of a death sentence and was sentenced to 49 life terms with no possibility of parole.

  Dennis Rader—the BTK “Bind Torture Kill” Strangler—murdered ten in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. He was only caught in 2005 after he began taunting the authorities in a series of letters to the Wichita Eagle. Eventually he was persuaded to send in his writings on floppy disk. Forensic examination of the disk revealed it had previously been used by the Christ Lutheran Church, along with the name Dennis. A quick Internet search revealed that Rader was president of the church council. He showed no remorse and was given ten consecutive life terms, requiring that the 61-year-old Rader serves at least 175 years before being eligible for parole. He is held in solitary confinement.

  Fred and Rosemary West went on a killing spree that lasted 37 years. He was charged with 11 murders, though boasted he had killed many more before he hanged himself in his cell in 1995. Rosemary West was found guilty of ten murders and sentenced to life with a recommendation from the judge that she never be released.

  Dr Harold Shipman killed more than 250 over his 30-year career, though the true number will never be known. After being convicted on 15 sample charges—and sentenced to 15 life terms—he committed suicide in jail without confessing or explaining his crimes. Prolific American serial killer Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have killed over 3,000 people in a career that might have lasted for 32 years. A more likely number is 350—among the victims was his own mother, whom he killed in 1960. Released in 1975, he went on the rampage with fellow serial killer Otis Toole until they were arrested in 1983. Toole died from cirrhosis of the liver in prison in Florida while serving six life sentences. George W. Bush agreed to the commutation of Lucas’s death sentence—the only time he did so while Governor of Texas—and Lucas died of heart failure in jail in March 2001.

  While these killers were eventually caught, there are plenty who have not been caught. The FBI estimate that there are between 35 to 50 serial killers at large in the United States. Other estimates put the number of killers closer to 500. In either case officials expect these numbers to continue their dramatic rise. As long ago as 1984 the FBI Behavioral Unit study of serial murder said that serial killing had reached “an almost epidemic proportion”. It is believed that presently there are up to 6,000 people a year dying in the hands of a serial killer in the US alone.

  Until recently serial killing has been thought of as a North American activity, though the British have struggled to produce some notably colourful cases. But now serial killing seems to be on the rise across the globe. Serial killing has become part of the national landscape in South Africa and the former Soviet Union. Even historically peaceful places such as Costa Rica and Belize now have their own serial killer.

  Although it was once thought of as the province of predominantly brooding white loners, black men now join in, along with family men and those generally regarded as the life and soul of the party. Myra Hindley, Rosemary West and Aileen Wuornos have shown that even women are joining in.

  But the Mammoth Book of Killers at Large concentrates on those killers who have not yet been caught. Many are current killers who might, at this very moment, be out stalking their victims. Others are less active, while some criminologists believe that serial killers only stop because they are dead or in jail. But Dennis Rader was dormant for 14 years before his boastfulness got the better of him. During that time he was a family man, a pillar of the community and an elected official. Other killers, once an area gets too hot for them, simply move on.

  In some cases, the killer has been cleared by a court and is thus at large to kill again. In others, a man who is plainly not guilty has been railroaded by the system, while the real perpetrator goes free. And sometimes a culprit has been jailed for a series of killings, then blamed for others he has not been convicted of, or even charged with, that may well be the work of another. It is always tempting for a police department to clear its books by attributing numerous unsolved crimes to a fall guy who has already been convicted of something else.

  I have also included some historic cases for completeness. True, Jack the Ripper can no longer be alive. But he was never caught or even convincingly identified. He is of enduring interest. New theories about him emerge regularly and he intersects interestingly with other, more up-to-date, cases.

  PART I

  American Psychos

  Perhaps because murder is the stock in trade of the Hollywood thrillers, America seems to have cornered the market in coldhearted killing. The United States has a history of violence that goes back to the foundation of the colonies there. Before Australia became Britain’s penal colony, British felons could expect to be transported to North America to work on the plantations there.

  Among them were numerous murderers who had escaped the hangman by taking “benefit of clergy”. If a criminal could claim to the authorities that he was a clergyman, he would be handed over to be tried by the ecclesiastical courts which could not impose the death sentence. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, to demonstrate that you were a clergyman, all you had to do was show that you were literate. And to do that, all you had to do was read aloud the 51st Psalm. This became known as the “neck verse” and illiterate ne’er-do-wells simply memorized it.

  Other murderers turned up in the New World voluntarily. If you had killed in the old country, the easiest way to escape justice was to jump on a ship heading westwards. The law was hardly likely to find you if you put the North Atlantic between you and the courts. In America you could change your name and begin a new life—even kill again if y
ou were so inclined. There were plenty of opportunities to make a career in homicide in the Indian wars and the lawless streets of the Wild West. And by the time gangsters began massacring each other during the Prohibition era, murder had become an American institution.

  Because of the transient nature of American society, it is easy for a killer to up sticks and move on once one city or state gets too hot for them. And the victims are often transients too. If a person killed has no family or friends, the authorities are under little pressure to find out who murdered them. In the cases presented here, in a chilling number of instances, the victim could not be identified. No missing person report had been filed on anyone answering their description—so, presumably, no one missed them. If the police cannot identify the victim and cannot find out anything about them from those who knew them, finding the culprit is an all but impossible task and the killers are left at large.

  As in so many other things, America leads the world in modern murder. Usually Jack the Ripper is thought to be the first serial killer—that is, the story of his killings came out as a serial, episode after episode, in the newspapers. But it is not true. Three years before Jack began killing ladies of the night in Whitechapel, an unidentified person began murdering a series of African-American servant girls in Austin, Texas—finishing his spree with two white society ladies, before he disappeared forever. As he was never caught, he is, like Jack the Ripper, technically still at large. Indeed he may even be the same man. One suspect in the Austin, Texas servant-girl murders jumped on a ship shortly afterwards, only to turn up in Whitechapel three years later where he was named in the Ripper investigation.

  In America, it seems, you can get away with murder. For the killer at large, America is the land of opportunity. For those who enjoy killing, there are always plenty more potential victims out there. This is the dark side of the American dream. Indeed, thanks to cheap paperbacks, penny-dreadfuls and Hollywood, a nation heaving with uncaught killers has become the American nightmare.

  Ann Arbor Hospital Homicides

  Over six weeks during July and August 1975, 27 patients at the Michigan Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, suffered respiratory failure that left them unable to breathe without mechanical assistance. Records showed that cardiopulmonary arrests rocketed to four times their usual rate. Some patients were struck by this life-threatening condition more than once. Eleven died. An analysis of the hospital’s records found no changes in the type of patient in the hospital that could account for this dramatic upsurge. So many breathing failures could not be accidental, and patients and staff quickly figured that a medical serial killer was on the loose.

  There were obvious clues; no tell-tale needle punctures or other marks on the patients’ bodies. But a pharmacological investigation revealed that at least 18 of the victims including nine of those who died—had been given Pavulon, the trade name of the drug pancuronium bromide. This is a synthetic version of curare, the lethal plant alkaloid used by South American Indians to tip poison arrows and darts. Anaesthesiologists sometimes administer Pavulon as a muscle relaxant during abdominal surgery. However hospital records showed that none of the victims had been prescribed the drug.

  The FBI were called in and agents discovered that most of the breathing failures had occurred in the intensive-care unit during the afternoon shift. All of the victims were fed intravenously, but the drug could not have been added to the drip. In solution, Pavulon would have been too dilute to work. The FBI concluded that, to administer a lethal dose, the IV solution would have had to have been disconnected and the drug pumped directly down the feeding tubes.

  Checking the work rosters, detectives found that two nurses from the Philippines, 29-year-old Filipina Narciso and 31-year old Leonora Perez, were on duty in the intensive-care unit during the afternoon shifts when the trouble occurred. Subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, the women denied responsibility for the deaths.

  However, one of them was implicated by a survivor. During the investigation, New York psychiatrist Dr Herbert Spiegel hypnotized the survivors while FBI agents questioned them. Under hypnosis, 61-year-old retired auto worker Richard Neely, who was being treated for cancer of the bladder, remembered experiencing unexpected breathing difficulties and calling out to an Asian nurse. But, instead of tending to him, she was frightened by his cry and fled. Later, he picked out one of the Filipino suspects from photographs of the hospital’s nurses.

  Although Federal authorities could come up with no motive for the crimes and psychological tests showed their behaviour patterns to be “normal”, the two nurses were indicted. Fearing that Neely and other witnesses did not have long to live, the authorities moved the case speedily to trial. In a hearing that lasted three months, the prosecution introduced 89 witnesses and took testimony from 17 acknowledged experts. The medical testimony left little doubt that many of the patients had received a muscle relaxant without prescription. However, the testimony of the lay witnesses that sought to prove that the two nurses were always present when respiration failures occurred was seen as both “inconsistent” and “confusing”. A proper epidemiological study was not introduced, and the prosecution was prohibited from introducing evidence concerning any respiratory arrests not in the original indictment. After 13 days of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. On 13 July 1977, they found the nurses guilty of five counts of murder, ten counts of poisoning and conspiracy to commit murder. But the case went to appeal in February 1978 and the convictions were overturned.

  In the closing argument at the trial, the prosecutor had asked: “What are the odds, ladies and gentlemen, what is the chance, what is the probability that these defendants have engaged in these activities and that all these factors that are incriminating could exist and the defendants would still nevertheless be innocent?” This argument, the appeal court held, was a “most egregious error” as it invited the jury “to engage in a speculative combination of the charges”, while the court instructed them that “each charge, and the evidence pertaining to it must be considered separately. You may not consider evidence introduced as to one count in arriving at a verdict on any other count.”

  This meant that the prosecution could not use the unusually high incidence of cardiopulmonary arrest to suggest that criminal misconduct was taking place and that the incidence of it on their shifts did not mean that the two nurses were responsible. Although the prosecution was give permission for a retrial, they dropped the case. No new suspects have been named, so the killers are still at large.

  Atlanta’s Child Killers

  Atlanta, Georgia lived through a reign of terror from 1979 to 1981 when 29 African-American youths were killed. In 1982, Wayne Williams, himself black, was sentenced to life imprisonment for two of the slayings. After his conviction, the authorities blamed him for the other 22 deaths—though he was never charged for them—and the cases were closed. The other cases were reassigned to individual homicide investigations and remain unsolved to this day. However, there are now serious doubts that Wayne Williams had anything to do with the murders.

  Heading those who believe in Williams’ innocence is Louis Graham, the police chief of DeKalb County, which covers eastern Atlanta where some of the killings took place. In 2005, he took the extraordinary step of reopening five of the “Atlanta Child Murder” cases—those of ten-year-old Aaron Wyche, whose body was found on 24 June 1980; 11-year-old Patrick Baltazar, found 13 February 1981; 13-year-old Curtis Walker, found 6 March 1981; 15-year-old Joseph Bell, found 19 April 1981; and 17-yearold William Barrett, found 12 May 1981.

  Chief Graham hopes his cold-case squad can either confirm or dismiss his gut feeling that Williams is innocent. Although Graham’s renewed interest in the Williams case was sparked in December 2004, shortly after he became DeKalb County’s new police chief, he has long held the view that Williams was not guilty. During the original murder spree, he was an assistant police chief in neighbouring Fulton County where most of the murders took place
. He also worked on the task force that investigated the killings of the 29 victims—mostly male, in the age range of eight to 27.

  Graham’s wife taught at the Frederick Douglass High School, which Williams attended, and he met him as a young man. The veteran cop’s assessment was that Williams, the only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, was a spoiled, brash kid, but saw no harm in him and certainly could not see him as a serial killer.

  “To me, he’s just not the kind that would do something like this,” said Graham.

  When the serial killing task force narrowed its focus on the diminutive, bespectacled Williams, Graham began to have deep misgivings. How could such a puny wimp overpower so many people—some of whom were bigger than him, he wondered. And how come Williams had never been seen?

  “He wasn’t that smart,” said Graham.

  A college dropout, Williams still lived at home with his parents who doted on him. He had few other friends.

  DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, who was the first Atlanta detective to search the Williams’ home, concurred, claiming that most people who knew about the case believed that Williams was not guilty. But the pressure to make an arrest was enormous. State Representative Tyrone Brooks remembered George Bush Snr, then Vice President, coming to Atlanta and telling the local authorities that if they could not catch someone, the Feds would happily take over. Pressure was also applied by Georgia’s Governor George Busbee.

  Representative Brooks also believes that Williams is innocent. He knew Williams as a youth and sometimes helped to get leading lights of the civil rights movement to appear on the radio show that Williams broadcast from a station in his garage as a teenager. It was funded by his parents.