The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (28 page)

Winnie worked in a medical clinic in Phoenix, Arizona and, although married to Dr William Judd, she shared an apartment
with a colleague, Agnes Le Roi and was friendly with another girl, Hedvig Samuelson.

Screams were heard coming from the apartment on 16 October 1931 and noises that might have been gunshots. Agnes Le Roi did not turn up for work the next morning and Winnie was late. Later that day Winnie arranged for a delivery company to call at the apartment to move a heavy trunk.

On 18 October, she travelled by train to Los Angeles and arrived with two trunks. She sought help from a porter to load her baggage into a car. While doing this, the porter noticed a dark fluid dripping from one of the trunks. He asked Winnie what was inside. She evaded the question and promptly drove off leaving the trunks behind. On closer examination, one trunk was found to contain the body of Agnes Le Roi and the other the dismembered corpse of Hedvig Samuelson.

Following a plea from her husband, Winnie gave herself up on 23 October. She surrendered to Los Angeles police at a funeral parlour. A letter she had written to her husband amounted to a confession. In it she claimed to have killed the two women in self-defence using a handgun and a bread-knife.

“The Tiger Woman” was put on trial for murder. She claimed to have had an accomplice, a Phoenix businessman, who helped her to cut up the bodies. Winnie’s family members made much of the mental instability that they claimed ran in the family. Winnie played her part in this by shouting out in court that she wanted to throw herself out of the window.

Winnie Judd was sentenced to death but her histrionics won her a reprieve. The Governor of Arizona granted a stay of execution and ordered a sanity hearing. The result was that the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and Winnie was admitted to the State Hospital for the Insane.

She proved to be a resourceful, and at times, elusive prisoner. She contrived to make a dummy to simulate her sleeping presence in her cell bed and escaped. After a brief period of freedom, she returned to the State Hospital. Her next attempt involved obtaining a key and she let herself out. This too failed and in 1952 she tried again, and, spectacularly, once more in 1962 when she remained free for six years, living with a couple
in California for whom she worked as a babysitter. In all, she absconded seven times.

Legal efforts seeking her extradition to California failed and she was sent back to Arizona, having been declared sane and fit to be imprisoned once more. Finally, in December 1971, her sentence was commuted and she regained her freedom to live in California. “The Tiger Woman” lived out her remaining days in the Sunshine State until the age of ninety-three. She died at Stockton, California, in October 1998.

Les Diaboliques

Twenty-eight-year-old Christine Papin and her twenty-one-year-old sister, Lea, worked as domestic servants in the home of a lawyer, René Lancelin, in Le Mans, France. On 2 February 1933, Lancelin arrived home from his office expecting to collect his wife and daughter and take them out to dinner. When he failed to get a response to his knock on the front door, he used a street telephone to call his wife but, again, there was no reply.

Returning to the house, Lancelin noticed that all the lights were out except for the attic room where the maids slept. He tried another vigorous knock on the front door and when that failed, he suspected something was wrong and called the police.

Officers arrived and broke in to the house. On the first floor landing they found the bodies of Madame Lancelin and her daughter. They had been grossly mutilated and the carpet and stairs were thick with blood. The two women had been bludgeoned, slashed and stabbed. Their faces had been disfigured and the eyes gouged out.

Moving to the top of the house, officers found the door to the maids’ room locked. They broke the door open and found the Papin sisters naked and huddled together in a single bed. Christine made an immediate confession and her account of what had taken place went a long way to securing her conviction, and that of her sister, for murder.

The story was one of a trivial incident leading to an appalling reaction. She explained that her sister had damaged
the electric iron and been fined for her clumsiness by Madame Lancelin. When the iron was next used, it blew the lighting fuse and Christine reported it was not possible to do the ironing. Believing that the Lancelins’ daughter was going to strike her, she got in the first blow by leaping on her and scratching at her eyes. Lea joined in by attacking Madame Lancelin.

Taken by surprise, mother and daughter lay on the floor while Christine went down to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a knife and “. . . with these,” she said, “we attacked our mistresses.” She added that she did not plan the crime or feel any hatred towards her victims.

The Papin sisters or “Les Diaboliques” as they were referred to in the press, were committed for trial at Le Mans against a background of intense public interest. It appeared that the two sisters were rather dull girls who did menial work in a household where they were generally well treated. But there was a strong undercurrent of petty criticism that was often delivered in written notes sent to the offenders by Madame Lancelin. Constant rebukes created feelings of persecution and the storm finally broke with the blown fuse.

A defence of insanity was put forward, but in a remarkably short trial, the jury rejected it. The Papins were found guilty and Christine, judged to be the instigator of the murders, was sentenced to death while Lea was to be imprisoned for ten years. In due course, Christine was reprieved and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. She died four years after the murders in a mental institution.

The Polish Borgia

When Tillie Klimek developed the gift of prophesy the Polish community in which she lived in Chicago was suitably impressed. Steeped in superstitious beliefs, they marvelled at her powers, especially when she correctly forecast the death of her husband.

Tillie Mitkiewitz spent over twenty years of her married life slaving for her husband who had an aversion to work. When he died as she had predicted in January 1914, her friends stood
in awe of her precognition while she collected the insurance money.

Within a month Tillie remarried and her new husband, John Ruskowski, was also the subject of her fatal predictions. In April 1920, she married a third time and was so certain of her forecast that she bought a coffin and stored it in the basement. Her prophesy was duly fulfilled when Frank Kutczyk was placed in the coffin which was so conveniently to hand.

Tillie’s fourth husband was Anton Klimek, hitherto a healthy man, but who fell ill after the marriage. He complained of numbness in his legs but told friends that his wife was doing everything she could to help him. Tillie was nursing Anton at home and feeding him bowls of stew as his health continued to decline.

When Anton’s brother insisted on calling a doctor, the physician suspected poisoning. This was confirmed in hospital when tests proved positive for arsenic. Suspicion fell on Tillie and, when questioned, neighbours were very forthcoming about her predictions and the unfortunate deaths of her previous husbands. In the nick of time, Tillie was arrested, while Anton survived after his stomach was pumped. Analysis of the stew confirmed the presence of arsenic. She confessed to poisoning him although she denied killing her former husbands. She said that one of her favourite meals was stew and explained the ease with which rat poison could be stirred into the mixture.

Tried for murder in March 1922 Tillie milked the publicity for all it was worth. The “Polish Borgia” as she was called in the newspapers seemed oblivious of the charges against her. Her confession was backed up by the evidence of poisoning in her exhumed husbands and led to her conviction. She declared in court that she would never stand on the gallows and her wish was granted when she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Tillie Klimek was suspected of procuring the deaths of several other people in addition to her husbands, no doubt using a combination of her stew-making abilities and powers of prophesy. She died in 1936 at the age of seventy-one in Illinois’ Women’s Prison.

The Terminator

Nicknamed “The Terminator”, Anatoly Onoprienko killed fifty-two people, ten of whom were children. The Ukranian serial killer boasted, “There is no better killer in the world than me.”

Onoprienko was raised in an orphanage and his friends thought of him as quiet and generous. Some of them received gifts from the proceeds of robberies committed after the murders. Inevitably, doubts were raised about his sanity. He talked of being forced to kill and of being influenced by unknown powers and sinister forces.

On Christmas Eve 1995 the former sailor and forestry worker broke into a forester’s home at Garmarnia. He killed the entire family with a sawn-off shotgun and set fire to their house. There followed a similar attack the next week when he wiped out a family at Bratkovychi, another massacre at Enerhodar and then a return to Bratkovychi. In less than a month, Onoprienko had destroyed four families, totalling twenty victims who were slaughtered by gun, knife and axe.

His reign of terror ended when a massive police manhunt located him at his girlfriend’s house near Lviv. He seemed to have led an apparently normal life in between his orgies of killing, and shared some of the violence with an accomplice, Serge Rogozin. He was arrested after trying to shoot his way past the police.

During various interviews, Onoprienko showed not the slightest remorse, rather he gloried in what he had done. He compared his methods to an animal watching a sheep, commenting that he saw it as “a kind of experiment”. He readily confessed to forty murders committed over a four-month period in 1995/96 and asked for another twelve, committed in 1989, to be taken into account.

Onoprienko was brought to trial in March 1999. Throughout the proceedings, he sat calmly in a metal cage in the courtroom at Zhytomyr, west of Kiev. This protected him from the threat of physical violence from enraged members of the public, many of whom demanded that he be tortured
before being executed. The trial only came about after one of the judges made an appeal for extra funds in order to stage the proceedings.

Onoprienko’s lawyer said his client fully admitted his guilt and the opinion of prosecution psychologists that he was sane was accepted. Although it was noted that he had spent time in a mental hospital before his arrest and had been treated for schizophrenia, at that time he was not thought to be a danger to the public. Defence counsel pleaded for leniency, arguing that the defendant as a child had been deprived of motherly love and lacked the care needed by a growing young person.

His confession placed him in the same hall of infamy as Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called “Rostov Ripper” who also killed fifty-two people. At the age of thirty-nine, Onoprienko was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His accomplice, Sergei Rogozin, was sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment.

The Death Maker

Rudolf Pleil was a former German soldier and policeman who claimed to have raped and killed fifty women in the aftermath of the Second World War. He described himself as “der beste Totmacher” (the best death maker) and, while in prison, wrote a parody of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf,
consisting of a record of his sex murders, which he signed, “Rudolf Pleil, death maker (retired)”.

Pleil’s victims were female refugees crossing from East to West Germany. In his role as a police officer, he offered to escort them once they had crossed the border at which point he raped, robbed and killed them. He used various murder weapons, including knives, axes and hammers to kill and mutilate his victims. One of the women he attacked survived to tell the tale.

Charged with nine murders, Pleil appeared on trial at Brunswick in November 1950. He immediately took issue with the judge over the number of victims, claiming there were twenty-five, as if his honour was at stake. Twenty-six-year-old Pleil gave his evidence in a matter-of-fact manner, saying that his lust for murder had started when he was a boy and he tortured and killed a cat. He recorded his first murder of a human being in March 1946. He continually interrupted proceedings when the number of his murders was referred to. He insisted there were twenty-five victims and described in detail how he had raped and killed them. He reminded the court that he was the “best death maker”.

In his version of
Mein Kampf,
Pleil stated that he wanted to be a professional executioner and had offered his services to the Russians. He related the satisfaction he gained by seeing a train carrying concentration camp inmates at the end of the war. Individuals who had died during the journey were transferred to a special wagon. Pleil described this grim spectacle as “my finest sexual experience”.

A psychologist offered an explanation for Pleil’s extraordinary behaviour, which he believed was related to his failure to have normal sexual intercourse. Appearing on trial with him were two accomplices accused of helping him commit some of the killings. Again Pleil was argumentative, saying that he broke with one of his helpers because he wanted to decapitate one of the victims. It seemed that Pleil decided this was going too far. In any case, he asserted his own right to kill because “it is dictated by my most innermost feelings”.

After nineteen days of listening to the gruesome details of Pleil’s murderous activities, the judge found him and his fellow defendants guilty. The judge described the trio as beasts and sounded a note of regret that the law in Germany would not allow him to apply the death penalty. Pleil’s reaction was that he would not live behind bars for the remainder of his life. The man who was credited with saying, “Every man has his passion. Some prefer whist, I prefer killing people”, hanged himself in his prison cell in February 1958.

Ragged Stranger

A war hero persuaded a stranger and a down-and-out to threaten him and his wife so that he could overpower the would-be assailant and, thereby, win his wife’s admiration. The
result, however, was that his wife and the stranger were shot dead.