The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (26 page)

Van Buuren seemed to have had an unhappy life, he had been married three times and had a record for theft and forgery. He admitted knowing Myrna and said he saw her by chance when she left her office and asked her out for a drink. He said he unloaded some of his personal problems on her and then left her in the car while he went into a nearby hotel for a drink. When he returned, the car and Myrna were gone. He searched for the vehicle and found it in a nearby car park with Myrna lying dead on the back seat. Panicking, he drove out of town and dumped the body in the culvert.

It was not a story that was likely to find many believers and so it proved when he came to trial for murder in February 1957. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Still protesting his innocence, he was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on 10 June 1957. Apart from the implausibility of van Buuren’s account of what had taken place, the most remarkable feature of the investigation was the part played by the psychic in locating the victim’s body.

A Mother’s Dream

At the end of the First World War, two ex-officers, Eric Tombe and Ernest Dyer, who were both in their twenties, formed a business partnership and started a motor business with money put up by Tombe. When this failed, they set up a second business and Dyer had grand ideas about motoring and horseracing.

After their initial failures, they ran a stud farm and racing stables called “The Welcomes” at Kenley in Surrey in the UK. Again, Tombe put up most of the money and Dyer moved into the farmhouse with his wife and children.

In April 1921, “The Welcomes” was destroyed by fire. No one was injured and Dyer was quick to lodge an insurance claim. Although the farmhouse had cost £3,000 to buy, he had insured it for four times that amount. The insurance company rejected the claim and Dyer did not pursue it further.

Dyer’s ambitions began to outstrip his assets, despite borrowing money from Eric Tombe. When he forged his business partner’s signature on a cheque, there was an argument. The relationship deteriorated rapidly and Tombe disappeared. He wrote to his parents on 17 April saying that he planned to visit them, but he never arrived.

Tombe’s parents did all they could to locate their missing son and his father, a retired clergyman, began to learn for the first time about his son’s business affairs and partnership with Eric Dyer. In due course, the Reverend Tombe visited “The Welcomes” but Dyer was not at home. Next, he made an appointment to see his son’s bank manager. He discovered that Eric Tombe had given Dyer written power of attorney. The signature was a forgery and he learned that his son’s once healthy account had been severely reduced.

By the time his double-dealing was discovered, Dyer had also disappeared. Then, on 16 November 1922 police went to a hotel in Scarborough to interview a Mr Fitzsimmons who was suspected of fraud. Fearful of arrest, Fitzsimmons put his hand in his pocket and withdrew a handgun. There was a struggle and Fitzsimmons, alias Dyer, was shot dead. His hotel room contained a wealth of incriminating evidence linking him to Eric Tombe.

The possibility of locating Tombe, now that Dyer was dead, looked remote. But then the missing man’s mother began having recurrent dreams in which she saw her son’s body lying at the bottom of a well. Extraordinary though it seemed, this phenomenon was reported to the police. It was known that there were several wells at “The Welcomes” and the police decided to inspect them. At the third attempt, they found a man’s body.

Ten months after he had disappeared, Eric Tombe’s body was recovered. He had been shot through the back of the head.
It was surmised that he had been killed by Dyer, probably after a quarrel over money, and his body thrown into the well. But for the extraordinary dreams of his mother, Tombe’s body might never have been found.

The Art Of Murder

The railway station in the French town of Perpignon and its association with painter Salvador Dali were the unlikely inspiration for two horrific murders in the 1990s.

A few days before Christmas 1997, Mokhtaria Chaib, a sociology student at Perpignon University, spent the evening with her boyfriend in his city centre apartment. She left at around 11.00 p.m. to walk to her lodgings, a short distance away. Her naked body was found the next day with hideous injuries, which included amputation of her breasts and removal of the uterus. She had been killed with stab wounds to the head.

The killing had echoes of a previous unsolved murder in September 1995 when seventeen-year-old Tatiana Andujar disappeared after taking a similar route home from Perpignon railway station. Fears that a serial killer might be at work gripped the city in June 1998 when the mutilated body of twenty-two-year-old Marie-Hélène Gonzalez, last seen in Perpignon on 16 June, was found dead near a motorway.

What linked this latest killing to that of Mokhtaria Chaib was the similarity of the injuries. Gonzalez’s head and hands had been severed, her vagina had been cut out and a number of abdominal organs had been excised. Police surgeons and pathologists noted the precision with which incisions had been made and their thoughts turned to a medical man as the possible murderer.

The strangest links were those made to the surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, who died in 1989. His association with Perpignon was well known and the square outside the railway station was named after him. He was particularly attracted to the station building, which, as railway stations go, was not especially distinctive. Indeed, he was so smitten with it that it featured in a number of his paintings. These were in his unmistakeably surreal style, but with bizarre sexual imagery.

Dali was said to loathe the sexuality of the female form and some of his paintings featured mutilated women’s bodies as well as an obsession for unattached anuses, vaginas and breasts. His painting of the railway station at Perpignon showed an act of sodomy. The particular mutilations inflicted on Chaib and Gonzalez led investigators to think the killer might be imitating Dali’s fantasies. This line of thought led to a murder suspect whose profile fitted the crimes. He was a Peruvian doctor who had practised in French hospitals but had his licence suspended. He was homosexual and known to the authorities for dealing in stolen passports and the theft of surgical instruments. He lived less than a mile from Perpignon railway station.

The doctor was arrested and questioned about the murder of Mokhtaria Chaib. There were no forensic traces linking him to the dead woman and, while he was in custody, Marie-Hélène Gonzalez was murdered. The Peruvian suspect was released and the Dali murders remain unsolved.

CHAPTER 8

Hold the Front Page!

There is nothing like a good murder story to sell newspapers. And a good story needs an eye-catching headline. The Victorians mastered this art and nowhere was the genre better demonstrated than during the 1870s in the
Illustrated Police News.
This was a popular, high-circulation newspaper and a forerunner of the modern tabloids.

The paper reported various types of criminal happenings and bizarre events with arresting headlines and, in an age before press photographs, used graphic artists’ illustrations. Headlines contained two essential elements to connect with readers’ interests. First was a reference to the nature of the crime and, all importantly, where it had taken place. This was usually preceded by an adjective to stimulate interest and convey a sense of outrage. Thus, in 1873, a “Dreadful Child Murder at Hull” was reported and, in 1876, a “Frightful Wife Murder in Bristol”.

Crime reporting in newspapers continued to hold public interest in the age of television and radio and the advent of the internet has not diminished the appetite for written accounts of violence and murder. While the visual media make their own special impact, written accounts of events retain their power to hold the public imagination because they can delve into the minutiae that satisfy curiosity.

The template successfully developed by the Victorians has been honed to perfection by modern headline writers who can encapsulate the essence of a murder in two or three words. “Death of a Monster” was one of the tabloid headlines reporting the suicide of Fred West, the mass murderer, in 1995. The Yorkshire Ripper’s justification for his crimes was reported in 1981 with the words “God Told Me To Kill Them”.

References to places remain important, echoing Victorian practices when news of “The Whitechapel Murders” in London’s East End preceded their attribution to Jack the Ripper. Thus, in modern times, “The Moors Murders” and “The Boston Strangler” will forever be associated with their location. These labels have acquired iconic status. But places need not be geographical entities; “The Bus Stop Stalker” and “Freeway Killer” also make descriptive headlines.

Any unusual facet of a murder is a godsend for crime reporters. Thus the killings perpetrated by Denis Rader, which remained unsolved for thirty years, were referred to as the “BTK Murders”. This was an abbreviated reference to his methods – Bind, Torture and Kill. By the same process, Alfredo Galan became “The Playing Card Killer” and Alexander Pichushkin, “The Chessboard Killer”.

Female murderers are often compared with ferocious stereotypes, so that Winnie Ruth Judd was referred to as “Tiger Woman” and the Papin sisters as “Les Diaboliques”. Some headlines draw inspiration from, or comparison with, historical figures and events. Tillie Klimek was dubbed “The Polish Borgia” and Anatoly Onoprienko, the Eastern European serial killer, was described by the Ukrainian press as “The Terminator”, a title with obvious Hollywood associations.

Some murderers make their own headlines, unwittingly. Rudolf Pleil, describing his activities, called himself “Der Beste Totmacher” – the death maker. Less dramatically, Carl Wanderer’s appearance earned him the label, “Ragged Stranger”. While von Braun Selz’s antics, joking with newsmen at the graveside of his victim, inevitably earned him the name, “The Laughing Killer”.

As long as newspapers are published, murder stories will continue to grab headlines, reflecting public interest in violent crime. Readers are drawn to savour the horror of bizarre deeds through front-page headlines whose writers tax their wit and imagination to produce the one-liners that sell newspapers. Thus, the revelation that Dr Harold Shipman tended to lose his patients after midday was greeted with a headline in the
Guardian
that echoed the title of one of Ernest Hemingway’s books,
Death in the Afternoon.

Bus Stop Stalker

Levi Bellfield’s ploy was to follow buses late at night and target young women as they made their way home, for which he earned the name, “The Bus Stop Stalker”.

Bellfield’s first murder victim on 5 February 2003 was nineteen-year-old Marsha McDonnell whom he stalked when she alighted from a bus at Hampton in southwest London, a short distance from her home. She was bludgeoned with a hammer and died three days later.

In May 2004 “The Bus Stop Stalker” attacked Kate Sheedy and although he ran her over with his vehicle, she survived her injuries. Then, on 19 August 2004, Bellfield killed twenty-two-year-old Amelie Delagrange, a young French woman who had been in England only three months. She took a bus home after seeing friends but got off at the wrong stop. As she walked across Twickenham Green, Bellfield attacked her with a hammer and killed her.

Vehicles known to have been driven by Bellfield were reported as having been spotted at some of the attack locations. Aided by CCTV footage and information from the public, police were able to track his presence at the attack scenes.

Thirty-nine-year-old Bellfield, a former night-club bouncer, ran a wheel-clamping firm and he had access to a variety of vehicles. He also used many aliases to cover his movements. He took an arrogant approach when questioned by police and turned his back on detectives. A picture was built up of a predatory personality with a fixation for slim blonde women. He had a history of ill-treating his girlfriends and soon his hatred of women turned into violence. People who knew him described him variously as a “caveman” who “treated women like dogs”. One acquaintance found magazines in which he had slashed the pages bearing photographs of beautiful models.

At his trial in February 2008, Bellfield behaved arrogantly in court. He made gestures to the victims’ relatives, taunting them and mouthing obscenities. He showed no remorse for his actions and declined to appear in court to hear the sentence passed on him. The man whom criminal psychologists said
was motivated by anger and erotomania was sentenced to life imprisonment. “Levi Spells Evil” was the headline in the
Sun
newspaper on 26 February 2008.

Detectives investigating the “Bus Stop Stalker” turned their attention to the unsolved murder of thirteen-year-old Amanda (Milly) Dowler who went missing on 21 March 2002 in Walton-on-Thames. Her remains were found at Yately Heath Woods in Hampshire in September. A possible link with Bellfield was made in 2005 when detectives found CCTV footage of a red Daewoo car near the place she was last seen. The car was also seen on the previous day driven by a man fitting Bellfield’s description who approached another schoolgirl. The incident was reported at the time. However, the disappearance of Milly Dowler remains an unsolved crime.

Freeway Killer

William Bonin achieved the distinction of being the first convicted murderer in California to be executed by lethal injection. San Quentin Prison dispensed with its gas chamber in 1994, following a court ruling that it was too cruel a punishment. Bonin’s last statement was to the effect that the death penalty sent the wrong message to the nation’s youth. This was not a view shared by the families of his victims.

Over an eight-year period in the 1970s, forty-one boys and young men became victims of a homosexual rape murderer who roamed the highways of southern California. The victims, whose ages ranged between twelve and nineteen, were sexually abused, tortured and, in most cases, strangled. Their naked bodies were dumped by the roadside, which earned the murderer the name “The Freeway Killer”.