The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (20 page)

Colson’s body was connected to a powerful galvanic battery by means of wires inserted in his mouth and urethra. The report noted that, “. . . convulsive motions ensued. Applied to the eye, the organ opened and rolled wildly . . .”. Also, “. . . the leg was much agitated at every contact . . . and the toes moved briskly”. Dr Webster, whose expertise lay in chemistry and mineralogy, declared the experiment “a great success”.

Whatever the doctor may have learned it did little to assist his own criminal ambitions when he murdered fellow academic, Dr George Parkman, in 1850. Like Colson, he felt the hangman’s noose around his neck.

Manufacturing Lightning

William Kemmler’s crime was that he took an axe to Tillie Ziegler, his mistress, and ended her life. He paid for it by forfeiting his own life in the electric chair, the first murderer to be killed by this new method of electrocution. Kemmler told the witnesses gathered to observe the judicial use of electricity that he believed he was “going to a better place”. While that thought might have comforted him, the manner of his going was a woeful spectacle.

The details of Kemmler’s crime were lost in the blizzard of publicity accompanying his execution. There was a great deal of press speculation about the new method that was supposed to be more humane than hanging. The authorities debated the type of electrical supply that was to be used. Would it be Edison’s direct current (DC) or Westinghouse’s alternating
current (AC)? Meanwhile, carpenters in Auburn Prison’s workshop were building the wooden chair in which Kemmler was to spend his last moments on Earth.

The date of execution was fixed for 6 August 1890. The prison warden brought Kemmler into the execution chamber and introduced him to the assembled witnesses. Among them was a group of doctors, sitting around the chair. Kemmler gave a bow and sat down. He made a brief statement: “The newspapers have been saying a lot of things about me which were not so. I wish you all good luck in the world. I believe I am going to a better place.”

Prison officials began preparing him by buckling his arms and legs to the chair and placing the electrodes to his back and to his skull. A mask was then placed over his head and the warden said, “Goodbye William”. The executioner, waiting behind a screen, was given the signal and he pulled a switch sending 1,000 volts AC through Kemmler’s body. The surge of current lasted seventeen seconds.

To the consternation of those present, Kemmler was not dead and his body arched against the restraints that bound him to the chair. Frantic signals were given to the executioner to send another charge through the chair. This lasted for four minutes before officials decided that Kemmler was dead.

The bungled execution using the new method was universally criticized. One US newspaper declared that Kemmler would be the last man executed in such a manner. The New York
Globe
took the view that, “Manufactured lightning to take the place of the hangman’s rope for dispatching of condemned murderers cannot be said to be satisfactory.”

Implements Of Hell

Albert Fish was a house painter in New York and father of six children who acquired numerous titles as a result of his perverted sexual activities, including “The Moon Maniac”, “Inhuman Monster” and “Cannibal”.

Fish was brought up in an orphanage where he grew accustomed to the brutal regime of disciplining children
with whips and acts of sadism. He became addicted to pain, subjecting himself to flagellation and other sado-masochistic practices. He burned himself and inserted needles into his body. When there was a full moon, he would eat raw meat.

Not surprisingly, his wife left him and he was abandoned to his perverted practices. He assembled a collection of newspaper cuttings relating to cannibalism, including reports about the German mass murderer, Fritz Haarmann, convicted of twenty-seven killings in 1924.

Over a period of twenty years, Fish was believed to have molested hundreds of children. He had a family cottage in Westchester County where he took his own and neighbours’ children and encouraged them to abuse him. His life of perversity came to a crisis point in 1928. He befriended the Budd family who lived in Manhattan, New York, and took a particular interest in Grace, their twelve-year-old daughter.

On 3 June 1928, on the pretext of taking the child to a party, he took her instead to his cottage in Westchester. Grace was strangled by Fish and using what he called his “implements of hell”, a butcher’s knife, saw and cleaver, he dismembered the child’s body. Over a period of several days, he sliced pieces of flesh off the corpse and ate them in a stew with vegetables. This act of cannibalism kept him in a state of sexual fervour.

Grace Budd was reported missing by her family and her fate would have remained a mystery but for Fish’s action in writing to her family. Six years after Grace disappeared, he wrote a letter in 1934 informing her mother that he had killed her daughter. The police traced his whereabouts through the letter and he was arrested.

Fish made an extraordinary confession, admitting to six murders and a catalogue of other atrocities, the precise details of which he could not recall. The remains of Grace Budd were recovered from a shallow grave at Westchester.

His trial in March 1934 at White Plains, Westchester County, was a battle of the psychiatrists. His defence contended that he was insane, with ample evidence pointing to that conclusion. He was interested in religion and especially what he saw as the
need for purging and physical suffering. He said, “I am not insane, . . . I am just queer. I don’t understand myself.”

After protracted arguments in court, Fish was judged to be sane; he was duly found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. This meant death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. While awaiting his fate on Death Row, he professed to be looking forward to being electrocuted because that was one thrill he had not previously experienced.

On 16 January 1936, the sixty-six-year-old child molester and cannibal readily made his way to the electric chair. The first electrical charge failed, apparently short-circuited by the needles still in his body. A second charge extinguished the life of the oldest man to be electrocuted at Sing Sing.

“Amazing Grace”

The convicted killer of an elderly couple in Smyrna, Delaware, USA, was given the choice of death by hanging or by lethal injection. He chose hanging and became the first person to be executed in the state by that method for fifty years.

Billy Bailey left a work-release centre in Wilmington on 21 May 1979 and held up a liquor store. He then moved on to a farm occupied by Gilbert and Clara Lambertson, intent on stealing their pick-up truck. In the course of his theft, he killed the couple with a shotgun. Asked later why he did it, he said, “I don’t really know. I just know that I feel bad about it . . .”.

Bailey was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. During the time he spent on Death Row, the state of Delaware changed its policy on execution and in 1986 adopted the use of lethal injection. After the appeals process had been exhausted, Bailey was scheduled to be executed in January 1996 and because his original sentence had specified death by hanging, he was given the choice of the noose or injection. The gallows built to hang him in 1980 was still in place and Bailey elected to die by the rope.

Forty-nine-year-old Bailey was taken to the gallows erected in the yard of the Delaware Correctional Center shortly before midnight. The traditional hood was placed over his
head and he was attended by two hooded prison guards. He was duly hanged in a manner which his lawyer described as “medieval and barbaric” and witnessed by the children of his victims. Supporters of the death penalty had gathered outside the prison protesting that violent crime deserved violent punishment. Opponents of execution sang “Amazing Grace”.

Bailey’s execution came at a time when violent crime was on the increase in the US and coincided with a debate about the methods used. This was highlighted by Bailey’s decision to be hanged rather than die by lethal injection and by what had happened a day earlier in Virginia. A man who had been on Death Row for twenty years was subjected to lethal injection. It took those administering the fatal chemicals twenty minutes to find a vein into which to insert the needle. In light of this bungled method, death by hanging appeared to be a humane option.

Love, Loot, Lust And Loathing

The secret execution of a White South African woman in Botswana in 2001 was unusual and controversial. Mariette Bosch was hanged at 5.30 in the morning at Gaborone prison without the knowledge of her family or lawyers.

Like many South Africans, fearful of the increase in crime in their country in the 1990s, the Bosch family moved to neighbouring Botswana. They established a new life in a suburb of Gaborone where they became friendly with fellow South Africans, the Wolmarans family. Tragedy struck in 1995 when Justin Bosch was killed in a car accident. Being a good friend, Maria Wolmarans immediately came forward to support the grieving widow and her children.

Tragedy struck a second time in 1996 when Maria was found shot dead in her home. The police investigation into the shooting appeared to make little headway. Meanwhile, Mariette and the widower, Tienie Wolmarans, became close and told their children they intended to marry.

Mariette breathed new life into the stalled enquiry into Maria’s death when it became known she had borrowed a
handgun from a friend during a visit to South Africa, which she later gave to her brother-in-law for safe-keeping. She had also ordered a wedding dress. Mariette was arrested and charged with murder and, while in custody, married Tienie, whose wife she had allegedly killed.

She went on trial in Botswana in 2000. The prosecution claimed that Mariette was intent on marrying Wolmarans who had promised to divorce his wife. When that did not happen quickly enough for Mariette, she took matters into her own hands by acquiring a firearm and killing Maria. The gun retrieved from Mariette’s brother-in-law was tested and proved to be the murder weapon. The prosecution described the case as an example of “the four L’s of murder – love, loot, lust and loathing”. The trial judge described her as a wicked and despicable woman who had tried to shift the blame for the murder on to a third party. She was found guilty and sentenced to death.

In January 2001, Mariette’s appeal was heard by judges from four Commonwealth countries sitting in Botswana’s appeal court. She was represented by Desmond de Silva QC, a British barrister with an international reputation. His appeal was dismissed and in the words of Justice Isaac Aboagye, the court could not find “one moral extenuating circumstance”. The only lifeline left for her was an appeal to the President of Botswana for clemency.

When Tienie Wolmarans arrived at Gaborone prison on 30 March 2001, he was turned away and told to come back on the following Monday. When he did so, it was to learn that Mariette had been executed. She was the first woman to be hanged in Botswana for thirty years. An application for clemency was apparently being prepared and the fact that a mere two months had elapsed between rejection of her appeal and execution was distressful for her lawyers and family.

“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz”

In 1992 the State of California carried out its first execution for over twenty-five years. Events surrounding the death of a
double murderer in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison were described at the time as the nearest thing to a public execution. Forty-eight people witnessed the death of Robert Harris whose sentence was reprieved and restored four times during the last twelve hours of his life.

Harris entered the gas chamber on 21 April 1992 to be released when his third appeal was granted on the grounds that gassing violated his constitutional rights. In less than an hour, the US Supreme Court overruled this local decision and Harris was returned to the gas chamber where, after fourteen years on Death Row, he was finally executed.

Harris’s execution inflamed public opinion. While campaigners supporting capital punishment rejoiced in his death with gross displays of hatred, others railed against the barbaric practice of imposing death sentences. At the time, over 2,500 individuals were held on Death Row throughout the US.

The crime for which Harris was punished with death took place in San Diego on 5 July 1978. He decided to rob a bank and equipped himself with guns stolen from a neighbour, which he first tested in practice firings. He talked two teenagers eating hamburgers in their parked car into driving him to a remote hillside location outside of town. There he shot them dead and finished their lunch before setting off again.

Thirty-nine-year-old Harris had suffered a troubled childhood with an alcoholic mother and an abusive father. He left home at the age of fourteen, lapsed into delinquency, attempted to commit suicide and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. He became a drifter and when he killed the two youths in San Diego he had been out of prison just a few months following a conviction for manslaughter.

In many ways, he became a statistic in a country where 25,000 homicides were committed annually. The public wanted the violence curbed and some saw the restoration of the death sentence in states such as California as the answer. A poll recorded that seventy-five per cent of the population was in favour of imposing death penalties for premeditated murder.

Once on Death Row, Harris’ lawyers fought numerous appeals and secured delays in execution. Days before the due date, the California media ran stories about the impending death sentence in lurid detail. Crowds gathered outside San Quentin Prison bearing grotesque slogans about death by gassing; “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz”, referred to the method of dropping cyanide capsules into acid in the gas chamber.

Inside the prison, Robert Harris ate a last meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken and pizza washed down with a soft drink. He asked his jailers to give his fellow inmates ice cream as a treat. His troubled life thus came to an end and provided a spectacle for the pros and cons of capital punishment.