The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (12 page)

Vickers had a succession of lovers and, in March 1976, he met Pamela Collison who worked as a researcher in London at the House of Commons. They were deeply attracted to each other and wanted to share their lives. Margaret, frequently sick, stayed at home in Gosforth, but her health gradually declined to the point where in February 1979, she was admitted to hospital.

Doctors were vexed by the cause of her illness and her condition continued to deteriorate. On 13 June, she had a major heart attack and died the following day, just short of her seventeenth wedding anniversary. Cause of death was attributed to aplastic anaemia, a disease which destroys the bone marrow. Margaret Vickers was buried in an unmarked grave.

Dr Vickers was now free to make plans to marry Pamela Collison and the couple set a date for their wedding. Then, within a few short months, their relationship cooled off and
the wedding plans were cancelled. On 1 May 1980, Collison made some startling revelations to detectives at Barnet police station in north London.

She told them of her suspicions that Dr Vickers had killed his wife. She explained how he had used her to pick up prescriptions from a pharmacy in London on a regular basis prior to his wife’s death. Detectives headed north to interview Vickers who readily admitted giving the anti-cancer drug, CCNU, to his late wife to treat a brain tumour. He also admitted his affair with Pamela Collison.

CCNU was a product of pharmaceutical research in the USA used as an effective treatment for some cancers. It was not generally available in the UK except through a pharmacy in London. Dr Vickers wrote regular prescriptions for the drug to treat his wife and asked Pamela Collison to pick up the capsules. In order to minimise the appearance of overdosing his patient, he wrote out prescriptions for nonexistent patients.

Vickers and Collison were arrested on 8 October 1980 and charged with murder. They were tried at Teesside Crown Court a year later. Both denied committing murder and the court proceedings provided a colourful public spectacle. The newspaper headlines told the story; “Surgeon committed professional suicide”; “Vickers renewed liaison a day after wife buried”; “This relentless, blackmailing Boadicea”; and “The surgeon who killed wife for ambition’s sake”.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Boreham, reminded the jury that “The charge is murder, not adultery. This is a court of law, not morals.” On 20 November 1981, the jury cleared Pamela Collison of the charges and found Dr Vickers guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. An appeal was turned down in 1983 and his case came to the Court of Appeal again in 1994 on the basis of new medical evidence purporting to show that Margaret Vickers did not die from the administration of drugs but from mental illness. The appeal was turned down and the original conviction upheld.

A Bad Man From Egypt

Dentist Dr Warren Waite worked for a company in South Africa before returning to the US in 1914. The following year, he married the daughter of John E. Peck who had made his money in the timber business. Peck funded a fashionable Manhattan apartment for the couple and also made them a monthly allowance. It seemed that Dr Waite grew less interested in his profession and chose to spend his time socializing. One of the doctor’s sidelines was research on germ culture.

In January 1916 he invited his mother-in-law to come and stay with them in New York. While there, she contracted a sudden illness and died. The Peck family was shocked and recalled how kind and considerate Waite had been to his mother-in-law. After his wife was cremated, grieving John Peck went to New York to spend some time with his daughter and son-in-law. Within a few weeks he too was dead, apparently of kidney disease.

The family declined Waite’s insistence on cremation and took Mr Peck’s body back to Grand Rapids for burial. Following an autopsy and the discovery of arsenic in the dead man, suspicion was aroused and all eyes focussed on Dr Waite who was now a potential beneficiary of the Pecks’ fortune.

During their searches, police found an atomizer that Waite had used to treat Mr and Mrs Peck; it was laden with anthrax and typhoid germs. At first, Waite tried to laugh off this discovery but when suspicion mounted, he attempted to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills. His next ploy was to feign insanity with garbled accounts of being possessed. By way of explanation, he said, “A bad man from Egypt dwells in my body. He makes me do bad things. He struggles for possession of my soul.”

In due course, he confessed to a string of fraudulent claims about his professional qualifications and, worse, to his designs on Peck’s fortune. He admitted doctoring Mrs Peck’s food with germs and spraying her throat with bacteria, commenting that it took just ten days to take effect. He adopted the same procedure with his father-in-law but the old man proved fairly
resilient so he had to consider other means. When arsenic failed, he suffocated his victim. Asked why he wanted to kill his in-laws, he replied quite simply, “It was for the money.”

Waite was put on trial in May 1916 and pleaded not guilty. He played to the gallery with his smiling, matter-of-fact delivery of the facts about his bacteriological assault on Mr and Mrs Peck. If the members of the jury were amused they did not show it and took twenty minutes to find him guilty. He greeted the verdict with a sigh and the comment, “What a relief.” He was sentenced to death and sent to Sing Sing pending appeal.

The Court of Appeal confirmed his sentence in April 1917 and on 1 May he was strapped into the electric chair. Looking around at the apparatus that would end his time on earth, he was reported to have said, “Is this all there is to it?”

Just For Fun

Killing to ease the stress of a bad day was part of the strategy adopted by care assistants Catherine Wood and Gwendoline Graham at the Alpine Manor Nursing Home in Walter, Michigan in the US. To make their game more fun, they selected their elderly victims in a sequence whereby the first letter of their names spelled out the word, M.U.R.D.E.R.

The plan had to be abandoned when some of the designated victims put up too great a struggle and disrupted the sequence. But Wood and Graham carried on killing anyway, “just for fun”, as Graham put it later.

Wood and Graham were lesbian lovers and while they both received satisfactory job reviews, their nursing home colleagues had suspicions about their behaviour. For one thing, the pair liked to boast about the callous way they treated some of the patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in their care, which included taking souvenirs such as trinkets and ornaments. Colleagues were not sure how seriously to take things they were told.

After a series of eight deaths at the nursing home, some of these boasts landed on fertile ground. Wood’s ex-husband
heard stories about patients being suffocated and, after months of indecision, eventually went to the police. The two women were arrested in December 1988 and charged with murder.

It seemed that Wood and Graham had made a lovers’ pact that they would be bound together for eternity, bonded by their knowledge of the secret killings. But Wood, who was led by Graham’s strong personality, turned against her partner and offered to testify in court.

Wood told her ex-husband in August 1987 that she and Graham had killed six patients chosen for their frailty. “You wouldn’t believe the things we’ve done,” she told him. Their strategy in the nursing home was for Graham to suffocate the victim with their bedclothes while Wood kept a lookout.

The bodies of two of the patients who had died, one of them aged ninety-eight, were exhumed and subjected to postmortem examination. The original cause of death from natural causes was changed to asphyxia by suffocation. This was based less on medical evidence than the insistence of the police that the deaths were not natural.

Wood and Graham were put on trial at Grand Rapids in 1989. Some of Graham’s friends and former colleagues testified that she had freely discussed the murders she had committed. The general reaction was disbelief or the feeling that the claims were a sick joke. Wood said of her partner, “She was always happy when one of the patients died.” Wood also said she feared that if she were not stopped, Graham might turn to killing babies.

Wood was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty to forty years imprisonment while Graham, found guilty of six murders, was sentenced to life with no hope of parole.

Oral Hygiene

“Oral hygiene” was the code name for murder used by nursing auxiliaries at an Austrian hospital in the 1980s. The term signified killing by pouring water into the lungs of the victim and blocking the throat with the tongue. Waltraud Wagner was
implicated in the deaths of thirty-nine elderly patients using this and other means at the Lainz General Hospital in Vienna.

Wagner was a nursing auxiliary who worked the night shift on wards that housed mostly geriatric patients. Over a seven-year period a hundred patients died in the hospital, many of them at the hands of Wagner and her three cohorts, Irene Leidolf, Stephenie Mayer and Maria Gruber.

Against a background in which patients were frequently argumentative and ungrateful, Wagner was overheard openly discussing with her colleagues methods of disposing of them. “Sending a patient down to the cellar” was code for a death sentence to be meted out and signified that the victim would end up in the mortuary.

This conversation had been noted by a detective who was posing as a patient in one of the hospital wards tended by Wagner where there had been many deaths. With suspicion mounting, a doctor confronted Wagner over an unprescribed dose of insulin given to a woman patient. She denied it, but the doctor’s suspicions were confirmed at post-mortem.

Wagner was arrested in April 1989. She broke down under questioning and confessed to killing ten patients. She went on trial in March 1991 in proceedings that aroused huge public interest. There appeared to be no gain to the perpetrators in killing the elderly people apart from being rid of them as inconvenient nuisances. In court, Wagner offered the excuse that she was relieving her patients of pain.

The trial provoked public consternation about the way the sick and elderly were cared for. Recrimination followed about the lack of supervision and procedural failures. Shocked by the turn of events, some had likened the procession of death to the atrocities of Auschwitz. In the media there were lurid stories about witchcraft and sex on hospital wards.

Also brought into the discussion was the status of the nursing auxiliaries who were low-paid and overworked, and faced daily demands from patients who were often fractious and hostile. In some quarters, Wagner and her assistants were regarded as scapegoats for an incompetent system that was attempting to cover up the wider issues.

But for the persistence of a suspicious doctor, the killings might have gone on longer. The four defendants were found guilty: Wagner of fifteen murders, seventeen attempted murders and two instances of causing bodily harm, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Her accomplices were found guilty on various counts of murder and attempted murder, and received commensurate sentences.

CHAPTER 4

On Demand and by Request

Willingness to commit the ultimate crime as a test of love and obedience has its roots in control patterns of behaviour. Murder on demand usually involves a dominant male figure directing a woman to kill at his bidding as an act of slavish devotion.

When Jacques Algarron instructed his lover to kill her child as a sacr ifice, he did so from a mind-set steeped in Nitzschean philosophy. This involved the subjugation of women, especially if it empowered the man. The elevation of evil to a higher plane of thinking was part of this outlook and strength of will was paramount.

Similar but less well articulated thoughts guided Felix Roques when he demanded that his lover kill her husband as an act of obedience, even to the extent of acknowledging her task in writing. The same principle was shown to operate in the family context when David Brown cajoled his daughter into killing her stepmother with the infamous rejoinder that she would do it if she really loved him.

The peculiar talent of the control freak is the ability to bend others to his will. Thus, when Dr Yves Evenou decided to eliminate his wife, he enlisted a dull-witted woman who became his slave and carried out his murderous bidding. The master thereby exerted his dominance in keeping with Nietzschean concepts of male superiority.

Murder by request, on the other hand, is less about gender domination and more about opportunity. When Marthinus Roussouw admitted killing his employer, it was on the basis that Baron Dieter von Schauroth had requested him to do it. The dead man was a diamond dealer who had taken out heavy life insurance and, allegedly, handed his bodyguard a revolver and money with instructions to kill him. It was possible that von Schauroth, in the realization that his business dealings were under scrutiny, took out life insurance to provide his family with financial security, while he opted for oblivion. Roussouw’s obedience to his employer’s instructions did not absolve him from responsibility, however, and he was tried, convicted and, eventually, hanged for murder.

Armin Meiwes advertised on the internet for volunteers willing to be killed and eaten. His request found a respondent who was duly consumed in a cannibalistic feast. Despite the willing cooperation of his victim, Meiwes too was convicted of murder. A harsher fate awaited a young Eskimo tribesman called Aligoomiak who answered a request from a relative to eliminate a rival in a tribal love affair. Pursued across thousands of miles of Canada’s frozen north, the Eskimo hunter was put to death by the hangman, proving that killing at someone else’s request is still murder.

Ritual Murder

A young, unmarried mother, Denise Labbé, aged twenty, had a two-and-half-year-old daughter resulting from a previous affair. She took a job as a secretary at the National Institute of Statistics at Rennes in France and became involved in the social side of student life. In May 1954, she met twenty-four-year-old Jacques Algarron who was an officer cadet at the prestigious Saint-Cyr military school.