The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (27 page)

There was a significant four-year break in the series of killings between 1974 and 1978. When the murders resumed, a victim of sexual assault in 1974 recognized characteristics in the new wave of attacks that matched his own experience. He had identified his attacker at the time as William Bonin who subsequently served a term in prison. In light of this
information, police put Bonin under surveillance and arrested him on 11 June 1980.

Under questioning, Bonin admitted the killings and named several accomplices. Two nineteen-year-old youths turned States Evidence in return for lenient sentencing, while a third committed suicide in custody.

Bonin was put on trial in November 1981 when the court heard the full horror of his murderous activities. In all, he confessed to twenty-one murders during a reign of terror in which the bodies turned up at regular intervals. His trademark was strangulation, using his victim’s T-shirt twisted to form a ligature around the neck. After he had finished his assault, in the words of the prosecutor, the bodies “were thrown like garbage along the streets and freeways”.

The term “serial killer” had not yet entered the vocabulary when Bonin stood trial. Only later would it be realized that one of the characteristics that such killers shared was a troubled childhood. Bonin had been abused as a child and spent time in prison and mental institutions. After a period of service in Vietnam, he took work as a truck driver and set out on his murderous career.

He was found guilty of fourteen murders and sentenced to death. Bonin spent thirteen years on Death Row while appeal procedures were heard. He was reported as admitting that he would have carried on killing if he had not been captured. On 24 February 1996, he was put to death by lethal injection, only the third person to be executed in California since the death penalty was re-introduced in the state in 1977.

Relatives of some of Bonin’s victims were pictured in press reports celebrating his death by drinking champagne. The mother of a fifteen-year-old boy murdered by Bonin hoped he would “. . . burn in hell”.

The M50 Killer

Marie Wilks was travelling home to Warndon in Worcester in the UK on 18 June 1988 when she lost her way and ended up on the M50 in Gloucestershire. Then her car broke down and
she stopped on the hard shoulder. Leaving her eleven-year-old sister and her thirteen-month-old baby in the car, she walked 500 yards to the nearest emergency telephone.

Twenty-two-year-old Marie was seven months pregnant. She had been to the Forest of Dean for the day to visit her husband who was taking part in a Territorial Army exercise. When the operator at the emergency call centre spoke to her, he heard a man’s voice and the conversation went dead. The operator called the police who arrived to find Marie missing, the telephone handset dangling on its cord and two distressed children standing on the hard shoulder.

Marie was found two days later about two and a half miles away. Her body had been rolled down the motorway embankment. She had sustained a stab wound to her throat that severed the jugular vein, her jaw was fractured and there was bruising to the face.

The search began immediately for the “M50 Killer” and the police were particularly keen to talk to a man who several witnesses had seen pull over on to the hard shoulder at about the time Marie Wilks was telephoning for help. The man was described as in his twenties, sharp featured with distinctive blond crew-cut hair. He had been standing near his silver coloured car, which appeared to have broken down. An artist’s impression of the man was circulated to the media.

There was no evidence that the victim had been sexually assaulted; the attack seemed motiveless. Scores of police officers searched for the murder weapon and a reconstruction of the murder was staged in the hope of stimulating responses from motorists using the M50 on the evening Marie met her death. The enquiry team received massive support from the public and over 400 callers telephoned about the artist’s impression of the man wanted for questioning.

As a result of all this publicity, police made an arrest on 26 June. Thirty-six-year-old Eddie Browning was apprehended at the nightclub in South Wales where he worked as a bouncer. A former soldier in the Welsh Guards, Browning was married and had a young daughter. He had a reputation as being a bruiser and had served a prison sentence in the
1980s for aggravated burglary. His first marriage ended because he was violent and he had rowed with his second wife on the night of the murder. He got drunk, stormed out of the house and drove off with the intention of visiting a friend in Scotland.

Browning was tried for murder at Shrewsbury Crown Court in November 1989. Prosecutors painted a picture of a man with an aggressive streak who easily resorted to violence and bullying. After the argument with his wife, he left in a rage and, as Mr Justice Turner, put it, “you determined to reap violence when you spotted a lone, defenceless woman using the telephone by the side of the motorway.’’

The defence argued that the killing was not premeditated and that Browning had acted impulsively. The jury’s unanimous guilty verdict was greeted with cheers and applause in the public gallery. Sentencing him, the judge said Browning remained “a dangerous man” and he would recommend that he be jailed for life and serve a minimum of twenty-five years. Reflecting the public response to the brutal killing of a vulnerable young woman the
Daily Express
ran the headline, “Cheers at life for M50 killer”.

BTK = Bind, Torture And Kill

It sometimes takes a long time for justice to catch up with the ingenuity of the criminal mind. In the case of the BTK murderer, it would take thirty years.

During the 1970s a series of brutal killings created waves of fear in Wichita, Kansas. On 15 January 1974, while Joseph Otero was away from home, a murderer entered his house and strangled his wife and nine-year-old son. When Otero returned, he too was strangled, and in the basement, hung from a pike, was his eleven-year-old daughter.

When a man falsely confessed to the murders and the news was published in the
Wichita Eagle
, the paper received an anonymous telephone call from a man directing them to a book in the local library. Inside the book was a letter revealing details of the Otero murders that were known only to the
police. Cryptic messages taunting the police and media were a feature of this killer’s modus operandi.

During the next three years, other victims were killed in their homes in the Wichita area. A feature of the murders was that they stopped for a while and then began again with the same cat-and-mouse tactics. The killer gave himself a label, “BTK”, meaning “bind, torture, kill”. In one letter to the media he asked, “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?”

When the messages stopped in 1980 and there was a lull in the violence, people cautiously began to wonder if the murders had ended. But, then, in 2004, the messages began again and the
Wichita Eagle
received a letter and photographs of a young woman who had been killed in 1986.

After three decades of murder and messages, the breakthrough came when one of the messages was sent on a computer disk. This was traced to a Lutheran Church in Wichita and suspicion fell on sixty-year-old Rader who was its president. A search of his home turned up files and photographs relating to some of the BTK victims and his DNA matched traces of semen found at some of the crime scenes. He was arrested in February 2004 and confessed to ten murders.

He said that he was driven by sexual fantasies and although he did not sexually assault his victims, he masturbated over their bodies. Rader had received a college education, held a regular job, helped the local Scouts and was an active church member. His job as a dogcatcher and enforcer of local byelaws gave him legitimate access to private premises. He was married with children, cared for his mother and seemed to be a regular family guy.

Rader was brought to trial in June 2005 when the enormity of his secret life was laid bare. In one of his messages to the media he had written, “I can’t stop it so the monster goes on and it hurts me as well as society.” He told the court how he trawled for victims and went out equipped with a “hit kit” which included ropes and housebreaking implements. He readily confessed to ten murders knowing that he would not face the death penalty if judged guilty because his crimes
were committed before Kansas changed its law on capital punishment.

In August 2005, Denis Rader, the BTK murderer who had eluded capture for thirty years, finally faced punishment. He was given ten consecutive life sentences, totalling 175 years.

Playing Card Killer

A Spanish serial killer left his trademark playing card on the corpses of his victims. This trait, not surprisingly, won him the title of “The Playing Card Killer”.

His first victim was Carlos Martin, a cleaner at Madrid’s Barajas airport in 2003. His second victim was a twenty-eight-year-old man whom he shot dead as he waited for a night bus in the city centre. A playing card, the ace of cups (hearts), was left beside the body.

Ten days later Eduardo Salas, a student from Ecuador, was shot at pointblank range in a deserted street late at night. He survived his head wounds and in due course was able to give a brief description of his attacker. He described him as Spanish, aged about twenty-five and a tall man. A playing card, the two of cups, had been left at the scene of the shooting.

On 19 March 2003, the killer struck again, this time killing a man and seriously wounding his female companion. The couple were Romanian immigrants, who were shot in the back of the head and left for dead in the outskirts of Madrid. Playing cards were left at the scene of the shooting; three of cups for the injured woman and four of cups for the dead man.

Police believed the killer had timed his attack to coincide with a fireworks display in the city following a Champions League football game. The gunman had also been careful to pick up three spent cartridge cases. There were no witnesses and he disappeared without trace. The killer’s modus operandi seemed to be that he kept in the shadows and appeared from behind his victims to shoot them in the back of the head. The attacks seemed to be random.

Madrid was reeling from the night-time shootings at a time when the city had experienced thirty lethal stabbings and
shootings in the space of three months. A hundred and fifty police officers had been assigned to the hunt for the “Playing Card Killer”.

Relief came in July 2003 when the killer surrendered to the police. He was twenty-six-year-old Alfredo Galan, a former soldier who had served with peacekeeping forces in the Balkans. He was reported to have told police that he wanted to know what it felt like to kill. Although he made a confession to the killings he later retracted it. He then tried to implicate others in the shootings, claiming he had sold them the gun that became the murder weapon.

Galan was tried for murder in March 2005 and the man whom psychiatrists labelled a “Human Predator” showed no remorse. According to police statements, he asked his victims to kneel before he shot them as he believed politeness was important. Galan was convicted of six murders and three attempted murders for which he received prison sentences totalling 142 years. His sentences will run concurrently, however, and under Spanish law he will serve no more than twenty years.

The Chessboard Murders

Nicknamed, “The Chessboard Murderer”, the aim of the Russian serial killer, Alexander Pichushkin, appeared to be to outdo his country’s most infamous killer in modern times, Andrei Chikatilo.

Chikatilo was convicted in 1902 of killing fifty-two people but his compatriot wanted to go for sixty-four, one for each square on his chessboard. Pichushkin, a supermarket worker, played chess under the trees at Bitsevsky Park in the southern part of Moscow. He targeted mostly elderly men and fellow chess players, starting to kill them off in 2000. He later bragged, “For me life without murder is like life without food for you.”

His method was to entice his victims into a quiet part of the sprawling park and attack them from behind. Some of his victims were strangled and others were bludgeoned with a hammer. Their corpses were thrown into a sewage pit. Pichushkin’s
trail of death came to light in June 2006 with the discovery of the body of thirty-six-year-old Marina Moskalyova, a fellow supermarket worker. The dead woman had left a note in her apartment giving the name and telephone number of the man she was meeting. The police had incriminating CCTV footage that showed her in Pichushkin’s company.

Having first tried denial, Pichushkin then boasted of killing sixty-three times with the ambition of making it sixty-four. Of his first murder he said, “It is like first love – it’s unforgettable.” He demanded that he should be charged with all the murders to which he had confessed. But the police were not able to find evidence to confirm his claim. They discovered forty bodies in a sewage pit, added to which were three victims who had been attacked but survived. A survivor identified him. One of his ploys was to ask his intended victim to join him in a drink of vodka to toast the memory of his dead dog. Once they were drunk and incapable, he killed them and it was an easy matter to throw the body into the pit.

Pichushkin was put on trial in Moscow in September 2007. He was charged with forty-eight murders and three attempted murders. Measured by his own standards this fell short both of the sixty-three killings he claimed and also the fifty-two murders committed by Chikatilo. He continued to delay matters by demanding a jury trial, unusual proceedings in Russia. On 29 October 2007 Pichushkin was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Asked if he understood the sentence, he replied, “I’m not deaf . . .” The thirty-three-year-old serial killer was destined to serve his term doing hard labour in a penal colony. Whether prison facilities include chessboards can only be speculated upon.

Tiger Woman

In the manner beloved of American newspaper coverage of crime in the 1930s, Winnie Ruth Judd came to be called “The Tiger Woman”.