The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (29 page)

Carl Wanderer, a man of German extraction, fought with American troops in Europe during the First World War. He returned home to Chicago in 1919 as a second lieutenant and was welcomed as a hero. Soon after his return, he married and the newlyweds went to live in the bride’s family home until they could afford their own place.

On 21 June 1920, after returning home from an evening at the cinema, they were startled by a man in the shadows who warned them not to turn on the entry light. Suddenly, there were shots and Mrs Wanderer, who was several months pregnant, collapsed and died later from her wounds. Her husband shot and killed the stranger using his service revolver.

The dead man, “The Ragged Stranger”, as he came to be called, was a down-and-out with just over three dollars in his pocket. Curiously, he was armed with a .45 Colt service revolver. While the public sympathized with Wanderer over the tragic loss of his wife, probing questions were being asked elsewhere.

The editor of
The Herald Examiner
thought it odd that the stranger, who was virtually penniless, should own a revolver costing at least ten dollars. It was less remarkable that Wanderer should be armed; he was, after all, an ex-officer and continued to carry his service weapon. Curiosity led to further investigation and the serial numbers on both weapons were checked. It seemed that the revolver used by “The Ragged Stranger” had been sold to a man who passed it on to Carl Wanderer’s cousin and, subsequently, it was loaned to Wanderer himself.

The police lost no time in questioning Wanderer and searching his apartment. They found photographs of him posing with different girls and torn fragments of a letter written to one of them two weeks before his wife died. He expressed loving sentiments to a sixteen-year-old girl to whom he had proposed marriage.

Wanderer confessed to both killings. His scheme was to dupe an unfortunate whom he supplied with a gun to play
the part of a hold-up man. Wanderer would then grapple with him and overcome him to win his wife’s admiration. He found a down-and-out serviceman who was willing to accept this mission in return for a down payment of five dollars. With his wife tragically killed in a hold-up, Wanderer would be free to marry his teenage girlfriend.

The hero turned villain was tried for the murder of his wife and, to general astonishment, was given a prison sentence of twenty years. A campaign followed, demanding that he be tried for murdering the stranger. This commanded considerable public support and, at a second trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

One of the reasons Wanderer gave for the killing his wife was that he felt threatened by her pregnancy. He claimed that he was a secret homosexual. He was hanged on 19 March 1921 at Chicago’s Cook County jail after giving a rendering of “Old Pal, Why Don’t You Answer Me?”

The Laughing Killer

In December 1935, Ada Franch Rice, a wealthy fifty-eight-year-old, made the acquaintance of Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz in San Francisco. He was a ladies’ man and used his youthful charm to escape with Ada to her cottage in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

When Ada disappeared from her usual haunts, she was reported missing. Then, in February the following year, the police picked up a man whom they suspected of having stolen a car. This was twenty-nine-year-old Selz who it seemed was very flush with money, despite being unemployed. Enquiries revealed that he had been cashing cheques in Ada Rice’s name.

Under relentless police questioning over a period of several days, Selz cracked and made a confession. He said Ada’s death had been an accident, the victim of a bizarre nocturnal encounter. His story was that one night, on entering the cottage in the mountains, he was surprised by an intruder. He grabbed a fire iron and lashed out in the darkness. When he
put a light on he realized the intruder had escaped and he had accidentally killed Ada. He buried her body nearby.

Selz, with a team of police investigators and newsmen, went to a remote ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains and pointed out where Ada was buried. As men with spades exhumed the body, Selz laughed and joked with the newsmen. “If you guys want a sensation,” he said, “try hauling a corpse around in a car with the hoot owls hooting at night.” At this point, he danced around the grave laughing like a man possessed. His final piece of repartee was to declare, “I’m going to Hollywood when I get through here.”

In fact, he went on trial in March 1936 was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Still laughing, he was taken to Chino State Prison from which he managed to escape in 1945. He was recaptured in Calgary, Canada, where he had joined up in the Canadian Military. Returned to the US, he was imprisoned at San Luis Obispo and, once again, contrived to escape.

Selz maintained his jocular approach to life, whether it was in or out of prison. In one of many petitions to the authorities he claimed that he had been put under duress when originally arrested in 1936 by being denied food while under questioning. This caused him to hallucinate and accounted for his weird behaviour.

“The Laughing Killer” gained parole in 1966 but was soon in trouble again over welfare fraud.

Düsseldorf Doubles Killer

Werner Boost was a sex murderer who preyed on courting couples in cars because they made him “see red”. His technique, aided by an accomplice, was to kill, rob and rape in his campaign against what he called the curse of “sex horrors”.

Thirty-one-year-old Werner Boost was the illegitimate son of an East German peasant family. In 1950, he moved to Düsseldorf where he was convicted of plundering metal from graveyards. He next began to wage a kind of vendetta against couples he saw sitting together in cars. This earned him his eventual title of the “Düsseldorf Doubles Killer”.

His first attack was committed on 17 January 1953 when he shot dead a lawyer in his stationary car. He and his companion, Franz Lorbach, then beat up and robbed the passenger in the car. The next attack came in November 1955 when a young couple disappeared from a bar in the city and were later found dead in their car in a water-filled gravel pit.

In February 1956, another couple were reported missing and were later found in a village outside the city. They had been beaten and burned. A few months later, a courting couple in woods near Düsseldorf fought off two armed attackers and, in the following week, a forest ranger in the same area spotted a man shadowing a courting couple. The forester, who was armed, apprehended Werner Boost who put up no resistance.

The criminal investigation that followed achieved a breakthrough when Franz Lorbach made a confession. He told investigators that he had lived in fear of Boost who completely dominated him. They had experimented with drugs and injections of truth serum. Boost lived in a fantasy world, even manufacturing liquid cyanide with the intention of filling toy balloons with lethal gas to release into the cars of courting couples.

Boost was charged with murder and forensic ballistics showed that his gun had killed the lawyer shot in 1953. The investigation was then extended to cover a series of murders that had occurred in 1946 in Lower Saxony at a time when Boost was known to be living in the area. The enquiry was lengthy and it would be three years before Boost was finally judged and sentenced. He was given life imprisonment and his accomplice, Franz Lorbach, was jailed for six years.

Perhaps inevitably, the “Düsseldorf Doubles Killer” would be compared with the city’s other infamous murderer, Peter Kürten, the so-called “Monster of Düsseldorf”. Separated by a world war and the suspension of the death penalty in Germany, Boost lived while Kürten went to the guillotine.

Frying Pan Murder

A wealthy optometrist was found dead in his home with head wounds resulting from a domestic dispute with his wife. When
the full story emerged, it appeared he had been beaten to death with a frying pan. What followed was naturally reported as “The Frying Pan Murder”.

Dr John Bradford had built up a successful optical laboratory in Melbourne, Florida. He was widely respected and regarded as a man of mild temperament. He had been married to Priscilla for twenty-five years but the marriage came under strain when Priscilla became a strong advocate of the Women’s Liberation Movement. She spent her time with two friends of similar outlook, Joyce Cummings and Janice Gould, and all three were avowed men-haters.

Early in 1980, Bradford began telling people that he feared for his life. Referring to Priscilla and her cohorts, he said, “I think they plan to kill me.” On 28 March, police were called to the Bradfords’ home where Dr Bradford lay on the kitchen floor battered to death. His wife explained that there had been a quarrel when her husband violently attacked her and she was forced to fight back in self-defence. She had been assisted by Cummings and Gould who, still in their swimming costumes, had come in from the pool when they heard the commotion.

This scenario was viewed with some suspicion, especially in view of John Bradford’s well-documented fears. His body was cremated with what some regarded as indecent haste and the police continued their enquiries by questioning his family and colleagues. His laboratory staff suspected Priscilla’s account of what had happened and her story was completely undermined by her daughter who had been present when her stepfather died. The teenage girl broke down when questioned and revealed the full horror of what was undoubtedly a murder.

Priscilla, aided and abetted by Cummings and Gould, had hatched a murder plot at a meeting in a Burger King restaurant. After other methods, including poison, shooting and cutting the car’s brake hoses had either failed or been discounted, they opted to ambush Bradford at home in a staged domestic dispute.

On the day of the murder, with preparations calculated to a fine degree, Priscilla had her two henchwomen slap her about to produce a few bruises to authenticate the story of being assaulted by her husband. Cummings and Gould put on swimming costumes so they could more easily remove the blood that they rightly expected to flow. Priscilla’s teenage daughter was told to take a shower so that she would not hear her stepfather’s screams.

John Bradford stepped into a carefully prepared trap. When he entered the kitchen, he was felled with blows from a frying pan, which broke in the process, and other bludgeoning instruments including a kitchen stool and golf clubs. With Bradford on the verge of death, Priscilla called the police and told her daughter to start crying when they arrived. “I want real tears,” she said.

The deadly trio of Priscilla, Cummings and Gould were charged with murder. The dead man’s stepdaughter was granted immunity from prosecution as a state witness. In August 1980, having declared that she did not want to hear her daughter’s testimony in court, Priscilla pleaded guilty to murdering her husband. All three women were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Thus “The Frying Pan Murder”, a bizarre crime committed out of misplaced hatred and planned with ruthless efficiency, came to a conclusion with Priscilla still breathing defiance.

Bodies In The Barrel

An enquiry into missing persons in South Australia in 1999 led police to a disused building in Snowtown. There they made grim discoveries of what amounted to a murder factory where bodies had been dismembered and stored in barrels.

On 21 May 1999, investigators entered the vault of a disused bank and found decomposing human remains filling six large plastic barrels. There were eight bodies in the bank vault and two more were buried in a nearby backyard. Pathologists found evidence of death by strangulation and believed the killings had occurred between 1995 and 1999. Also unearthed at the crime scene were handcuffs, knives and rubber gloves. There was evidence that some of the victims had been tortured.

Exceptional forensic and police investigation established the identity of all the victims and led to the arrest of four murder suspects. Robert Wagner, John Bunting, Mark Haydon and James Vlassakis were arrested and charged with murder. In a sensational case that gripped Australia, it turned out that the victims were all friends and relatives of the four men.

Bunting and Wagner were known for their hatred of homosexuals, paedophiles and the disabled, having a view that “They need to be killed”. Recordings made of the tortures inflicted on the victims were recovered from the bank vault. Victims were also compelled to repeat phrases on tape before they were killed so that their voices could be replayed later to maintain the pretence that they were still alive.

Vlassakis, aged nineteen at the time of the murders, admitted partial guilt and agreed to give evidence against the others. On 20 June 2001, he pleaded guilty to four murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for twenty-six years.

Bunting and Wagner went on trial in Adelaide in October 2002. In what the press described as the “Bodies in the Barrel” or the “Slice and Dice” case, the public, already shocked, were in for a courtroom account of torture, mutilation and cannibalism. The accused men pleaded not guilty.

Bunting was depicted as the ringleader of the gang of four who preyed on friends and neighbours with the intention of stealing from them. Theft turned to hatred and violence and they tortured and killed ten men and two women. Bunting had written down the agenda; “The routine of confession had to be got through. The grovelling . . . the screaming for mercy . . . the smashed teeth . . .”

Court proceedings were suspended at one point when a juror could not face the horror of what was being recounted. A description, made public after the trial, of an act of cannibalism on the part of Wagner was not for the squeamish. A piece of flesh was cut from the body of their last victim who had been strangled, and Wagner cooked it in a frying pan.

The trial, which lasted for eleven months, delivered its verdicts on 8 September 2003. Bunting was convicted of eleven counts of murder and Wagner of seven. Both men
were sentenced to life imprisonment. In May 2005, their appeals against sentence were dismissed. The fourth man, Mark Haydon, was convicted of five counts of assisting in the commission of the crimes.