The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (23 page)

This legend had been inscribed by Ricky Kasso who, together with his friends, was now urgently sought by the police. He and Jimmy Troiano were found sleeping in their car near the Northport Yacht Club on 4 July. Kasso pulled a knife when questioned by police. He was quickly overpowered and taken into custody, along with Troiano. The story that came out was that Kasso and Gary Lauwers were involved in a long-running feud over the alleged theft of some “angel dust”. In a statement, Kasso admitted killing Lauwers while Troiano held him down. After signing the statement, he endorsed it with the words, “Gary Lauwers deserved everything I gave him”.

Ricky Kasso invited trouble. At school, he was known as the “Acid King”. He regularly took drugs and dealt in them. His first encounter with the law was in 1980 over stolen property and his drug-taking came to the attention of his parents. He befriended Jimmy Troiano who also used drugs and got into trouble over housebreaking offences.

Kasso’s spare time was taken up with drug-enhanced reading of books on satanism in the quiet surroundings of Aztakea Woods. Both Kasso and Troiano got into trouble with the school authorities and, at different times, ended up in care for detoxification. They met with their friends at the gazebo in the woods and discussed the alleged theft of “Angel Dust”. “Nobody steals from the Acid King,” said Kasso, and a plot was hatched to make Lauwers pay. In April 1984, five members of the group drove to Amityville to see the house made famous by Ronald De Feo when he killed his family there. In a satanic ritual, they resolved that Lauwers should be killed.

Kasso had said that he would take his own life rather than go to prison. The seventeen-year-old satanist was as good as his word. Late on the day that he was arrested, he hanged himself in his police cell.

Lap-Dog Killer

Charles Riley lived in Terra Linda, near San Francisco, and attended high school there. He was an overweight teenager frequently mocked by his fellow students because of his size, lack of confidence and inability to acquire a girlfriend. The nineteen-year-old found compensation in collecting guns and he became a competent marksman. He also dealt in drugs, which earned him status.

Riley thought his luck had changed when he met Marlene Olive in 1974. She was aged fifteen at the time, precocious, a drug-user and interested in the occult. Riley fell for her in a big way and, to his pleasure and surprise, she agreed to date him. What ensued was no ordinary relationship between two young people but one in which Riley became her lapdog who was eager to do her bidding.

Marlene persuaded Riley to diet and reduce his weight and introduced him to her brand of mystic beliefs. An adopted child who had recently moved to California with her parents, she liked consorting with wayward boys and took drugs. She gave her parents a hard time and there was a bust-up when she stole her mother’s credit card. Things went from bad to worse and she talked openly about the hatred she felt for her mother.

By this time, Riley was completely under Marlene’s influence; she controlled him emotionally and sexually. For his part, he was pleased to have a girlfriend even though she subjected him to group sex and other erotic fantasies.

Riley thought Marlene was bluffing when she talked about killing her parents but she was making plans. The crisis point came after the unhappy pair were arrested for shoplifting and faced juvenile court. Marlene’s parents tried to control her behaviour with sanctions and opposed the idea of her marrying Riley. Thwarted at every turn, Marlene asked Riley to kill her mother. On 21 June she said to him, “Get your gun. We’ve got to kill the bitch today.”

Fuelled with drugs, Riley appeared at Marlene’s house. She told him that she was going out with her father and while they were away, he was to kill her mother. Armed with a claw hammer, he approached Naomi Olive while she was sleeping and smashed her head in. For good measure, he also stabbed her. Jim Olive returned with his daughter who held back while Riley produced a pistol and emptied it into her father’s body.

Riley and Marlene moved the bodies to a public barbecue area where they burned them. Having cleaned up the house, Marlene hit the shopping malls with her mother’s credit card. After a week the police were informed that Naomi and Jim Olive appeared to be missing. Enquiries soon focussed on Marlene and Riley. He was very forthcoming, admitting he killed the couple because Marlene told him to. Marlene deserted Riley in his hour of need by shifting all blame on to him. As a juvenile, she was sent to a youth authority home, while Riley, now aged twenty-one, was put on trial. He was convicted on two counts
of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. The sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment.

Initiation Rite

Two men walking in Salcey Forest, Northamptonshire, in the UK at Easter 1983 discovered two bodies lying in a shallow grave covered with leaves. The remains had been reduced to skeletons and had clearly been there some time. Dental records established their identities as Deborah Fallon and her fiancé, David Cox. Pathologists thought the deaths had occurred about a year previously.

Enquiries led to the Hell’s Angels and to Michael Bardell, self-styled president of Lucifer’s Outlaws, and Stephen Parkinson, described as his sergeant-at-arms. Fallon and Cox attended a meeting of the group in Northampton where Bardell said that, in order to impress the higher echelons of the movement, “. . . the chapter would have to prove themselves”.

The young couple were earmarked for sacrifice and they were lured into the woods. Nineteen-year-old Fallon was handcuffed to a tree and strangled and Cox was subjected to a frenzied knife attack. Attempts to bury the bodies failed because the killers’ spade broke. Bardell took colour photographs at the murder scene as proof of their actions.

Bardell and Parkinson were tried for murder at Nor thampton Crown Court in March 1984. The prosecution presented what was described as a terrifying and bizarre case. It hinged on the desire of the newly-formed Hell’s Angels chapter called Lucifer’s Outlaws to prove itself. The members began to build up an armoury of weapons and organized initiation ceremonies.

A witness said Bardell mentioned that one of the members had talked about where the armoury was stored. Shortly afterwards, he reported that Deborah Fallon and David Cox had been killed. In court, Bardell and Parkinson denied the killings. Bardell offered an alibi while Parkinson did not give evidence.

Questioned by the police, Parkinson admitted that they were both involved with the killing. He claimed that he was acting under duress and feared for his safety. In his summing-up Mr Justice Jupp said he was satisfied that Parkinson was under the influence of Bardell, although that did not excuse him.

The judge told the defendants, “You have been found guilty of two murders which were quite appalling. They were done entirely in cold blood . . . were planned and . . . carried out with appalling determination.” He also believed an element of torture was involved in the way David Cox was murdered. The jury sentenced each man to life imprisonment with concurrent jail terms for conspiracy to murder.

God And The Devil

A shoe repairer by trade, Joseph Kallinger believed he could correct his obsessive urges by fitting wedges inside his footwear. By this means, he hoped to adjust the angle of his feet to harmonize with his brain.

Kallinger was a man with strange behaviour patterns. Initially, he was simply eccentric, filling his house in Philadelphia with all manner of junk which he thought would come in useful. In 1967, he moved to another house when his shoe-repairing business prospered and, at this time, he began to hallucinate, believing he received commands both from God and the Devil.

Fearing that he might be spied on, Kallinger started turning his home into a fortress. He put bars over the windows and kept vigil at night to fend off any intruders. In 1969, he moved to another house which he converted into a secret refuge. With the help of his family, he dug a twenty-foot hole in the basement. It was in this cellar that he began torturing his children by inflicting burns on them. In 1972, he received psychiatric counselling and returned to his family.

Throughout the 1970s, Kallinger hallucinated regularly. He believed God wanted him “to kill with a butcher’s knife every man, woman and child and infant on the face of the earth”. He began by enlisting the help of his twelve-year-old son to carry out robberies and theft but his urges soon gave way to murder.

On 7 July 1974, father and son abducted a boy from a recreation centre in Philadelphia, taking him to a disused factory where he was sexually mutilated and murdered. On 28 July, Kallinger took his fourteen-year-old son to the flooded basement of a derelict building. With his other son in attendance, he drowned Joey and reported him missing. Police suspicions hardened as soon as they heard that Kallinger had taken out $69,000 life insurance on the dead boy.

Charges were not proved and father and son continued to commit a series of break-ins, terrorizing house owners but not harming them. This changed on 8 January 1975 when the pair entered a house in Leonia, New Jersey, and tied up the occupants. Unsure what to do, they took a twenty-year-old woman and directed her to mutilate one of the male captives. When she refused, they killed her in a frenzy of stabbing.

The Kallingers were arrested nine days later and charged with kidnapping, robbery and assault. Joe was also charged with murder, while his son was sent for rehabilitation as a delinquent. Kallinger senior was tried for the lesser offences in September 1975 and despite claims that he was mentally incompetent, was convicted and sentenced to thirty years.

He was tried for murder in 1976, by which time his mind had descended into satanic fantasies. In court, he foamed at the mouth and chanted in an incomprehensible language. Defence experts said he was “totally crazy and psychotic”. The jury inclined to the prosecution’s view that he was an anti-social personality but not insane. He was found guilty and sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment.

Flora Rheta Schreiber, a professor of criminal justice wrote a book about Kallinger, called
The Shoemaker
. She explored his early behaviour, his history of being abused and descent into sadism and murder.

Seeking Forgiveness

Jean-Claude Romand was a fantasist who pretended to be a busy doctor, attending meetings and medical conferences while in reality, he killed time sitting in cafés and hotel rooms. Rather than admit his secret life, he turned to murder.

A fire at the home of the Romand family in the French village of Prèvissin, near the Swiss border, on 11 January 1993 claimed three lives. Florence Romand and her two children died in the blaze and the only survivor was her husband, Jean-Claude.

Investigators discovered that the victims had not died in the fire; Mme Romand had been bludgeoned and her two children shot. Further drama ensued when a relative set out to inform Romand’s parents of the tragedy, only to find the elderly couple dead in their house. They had been shot.

Suspicion focussed on “Dr” Jean-Claude Romand who was recovering from a coma after swallowing twenty Nembutal capsules. Although everyone thought he was a doctor working for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, he was a professional sham leading a double life. There was no Dr Romand listed in the medical directories and enquiries showed that while he had studied medicine at Lyon, he did not qualify.

Romand’s story was that an intruder had killed his family and set fire to the house. During examination by psychiatrists, more details emerged of his incredible secret life. He made a practice of embezzling money from his friends and family to provide him with an income. He kept up a daily charade of taking his children to school before, supposedly, driving to his office at WHO headquarters, and returning home in the evening. He filled his days by hanging around in cafés and at filling stations. His more refined pretences involved attendance at medical conferences in other countries while he spent his time watching television in hotel rooms. On his return, he provided detailed accounts of his professional activities and even contrived to feign tiredness and jet lag.

“Dr” Romand’s secret life started to unravel in 1992. A woman friend who had allowed him to invest some of her money asked to have it returned. He was already in difficult straits financially and his solution involved buying a silencer for the rifle he had borrowed from his father. He used this weapon to kill his wife and children and then his parents.

Around New Year 1993, he arranged to meet the woman to whom he owed money and attacked her with tear gas and a stun gun. She survived the assault, which he tried to explain away as the result of an alleged terminal illness. He walked away from this encounter, returned to his home, where his family lay dead, and set it on fire.

Romand denied the crimes at first but then made a confession. He was thought to have a narcissistic personality that prevented him distinguishing fantasy from reality. Rather than own up to all his pretences, he chose to kill his family. At his trial for murder he asked his dead family to forgive him. “I ask your forgiveness,” he said, “Forgiveness for having destroyed your lives, forgiveness of having never told the truth.” The bogus doctor was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Angels Of Death

The Italian city of Verona acquired a reputation in the 1970s as the country’s drug capital and a centre of right-wing extremism. Between 1977 and 1984, a string of grisly murders made the headlines.

A gypsy was burned to death in his caravan, followed by the murders of a homosexual, a prostitute, a hitchhiker and a priest. The victims were variously clubbed with a hammer, attacked with an axe or stabbed. The killing of a priest at Trento was particularly gruesome; a nail had been driven through his head and fixed to it was a wooden crucifix. There were also murders in public places, including the burning down of a pornographic cinema resulting in five deaths and a fire at a disco in which one person died and forty were injured.