The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (36 page)

In 1972 Reed moved to East Berlin where he was welcomed and he married Renate Blume, an actress. He rented a villa at Snoeckwitz and it was in the nearby lake that he was found, apparently drowned, inside his car. The East German authorities were coy about the precise cause of death but ruled out foul play. His friends were not so sure. His manager, a Denver businesswoman, expressed the opinion that he had been murdered because he had talked about returning to the US. This would have made him a double defector and a loss to the East who saw him as a propaganda asset.

A
Sunday Times
correspondent was in Berlin at the time of Reed’s death on an assignment to interview him for the newspaper. He learned from Renate Blume-Reed that her husband had been taken into hospital on the day that he died. Doctors thought he had a viral infection; he was feeling ill and perspiring. The news was that he would be kept in hospital for a few days while tests were carried out. According to later reports, he was already dead.

Reed’s death seemed to make minimal impact on the American authorities and there were rumours that he had committed suicide. There were also suggestions of a cover-up
and no comprehensive post-mortem report was made public. Some of his friends said that the Russians were making life uncomfortable for him and he had admitted to being fearful of what might happen.

Six weeks before he died, Reed featured in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in which he defended the building of the Berlin Wall. For a short time in the late 1970s, he had worked for the East German intelligence service, STASI. No enquiries into his death were made by the US authorities and speculation remained that one of the international intelligence agencies had put out a contract on him.

Dressed Up

The mysterious death of an Australian government scientist in 1963 had many curious and unexplained features. One of these was that although his body was naked when discovered, someone had carefully arranged his clothes over it to make it appear as if he was dressed.

Two youngsters stumbled across the body of a man by a riverside path in Sydney when they were out walking on New Year’s Day. They were uncertain whether the man was drunk or dead. The police were called to the scene and quickly discovered a second body, that of a woman wearing a dress pulled up exposing her thighs.

The man was identified as Dr Gilbert Bogle and the woman as Margaret Chandler. Neither body showed any marks of violence and post-mortems revealed no signs of organic disease. Cause of death was recorded as cardiac failure.

Enquiries showed that the couple had been to a New Year’s party. Both were married and Bogle went to the party on his own, as his wife was looking after their baby. While there, he met Margaret Chandler and her husband, and when the gathering broke up at around 4 a.m., it was decided that Bogle would drive Margaret home, leaving Mr Chandler to make his own way. They drove down to Lance Cove River and parked the car at a spot about a hundred yards from where their bodies were discovered.

There was speculation that the couple were drunk and had sexual intercourse during which one of them became unconscious through asphyxia precipitated by alcoholic intoxication. This theory did not hold up too well in light of the post-mortem finding that there was no alcohol in their blood.

In view of Dr Bogle’s work as a government scientist, further speculation focussed on secret research of military importance and the angle that he had been killed by enemy agents using an undetectable poison. The inquest held in March 1963 learned that every available test had been applied to determine the precise cause of death but with no positive outcome. The coroner concluded that the deaths had resulted from acute circulatory failure with an unknown cause.

A story surfaced in 1970 that Margaret Chandler’s husband had received a number of telephone calls from an individual who told him that Bogle had been targeted by international conspirators and that Mrs Chandler was killed for no other reason than that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A more straightforward theory was that the couple had overdosed on LSD at the New Year’s party and subsequently suffered cardiac arrest. This suggestion surfaced in 1977 after Bogle’s former lover, Margaret Fowler, died. She was not allowed to give evidence at the inquest in 1963 because it was thought she would say that Bogle used LSD as an aphrodisiac. Theorists proposed that she might have followed the couple after the New Year party and tidied up the scene when she found them in compromising circumstances.

Murder Or Suicide

The mysterious death of Uwe Barschel, a prominent German politician, in a hotel room in Switzerland in 1987 resulted in a scandal at the time and the cause of death remains unresolved.

Forty-three-year-old Barschel was a high-flyer in political circles and was premier of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. He was also a controversial figure who attracted publicity including allegations of using devious methods to discredit opponents.

In September 1987, Barschel resigned his premiership as a result of allegations made against him, which he denied but for which he was due to face a parliamentary enquiry. After resigning, he took his wife for a short holiday and, on returning, travelled alone to Geneva by train.

Barschel checked in at the Beau-Rivage hotel and was found in his room twenty-four hours later. His body was discovered in the bath, fully dressed except for a jacket, and lying partly submerged but with his head above water. Post-mortem examination determined that he had a weak heart and traces of anti-depressant drugs were found in his blood. These findings led to the suggestion that he had committed suicide, although that conclusion was not officially endorsed.

The dead politician’s family believed he had been murdered. There was talk that he met two men when he arrived at Geneva railway station, one of whom was supposed to be Robert Roloff. Barschel had told his wife that this man had evidence which would clear his name. A counter suggestion was that Roloff did not exist other than as a cover masking his intention to commit suicide and giving him a reason to travel to Geneva.

Uwe Barschel’s funeral service at Lübeck Cathedral on 27 October 1987 was attended by over 2,500 people, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl. A great deal of soul-searching ensued and the prevailing public view was that he had been murdered.

The controversy over his death rumbled on with no satisfactory conclusion being reached. In April 1997, a report was published by investigators, which the media described as a “whodunit with a cast of thousands”. There were allegations about changing the course of justice and talk of a cover-up.

A new line of enquiry began to open up, suggesting that, in addition to dirty tricks in internal political affairs, Barschel was involved with international arms deals. It was alleged that he was involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Witnesses claimed to have seen a photograph of Barschel together with Colonel Oliver North and an East German Stasi agent. This was backed up by reports of trips made by Barschel to East European destinations.

What happened in the Geneva hotel room has never been fully explained and the cause of Barschel’s death has not been proved. Suggestions that there was another person present at the time of death fuelled further speculation about a killing by foreign agents.

Grand’ Terre

The conviction of an elderly French farmer for the murder of the Drummond family in 1952 sparked off a spate of conspiracy theories.

Sir Jack Drummond, aged sixty-one, was an internationally recognized biochemist. In the summer of 1952 he was on holiday in southern France with his wife and eleven-year-old daughter. He pulled off the road near Lurs on 4 August and camped for the night by the riverside.

The following morning, thirty-four-year-old Gustave Dominici, who lived with his father in a nearby farm called La Grand’ Terre, discovered a girl’s body in the field. Her head had been crushed with a rifle butt and she was found some distance from the campsite where her parents lay dead from gunshot wounds.

It appeared that Sir Jack and Lady Drummond had been shot first and that their daughter had run away, only to be caught by the murderer who clubbed her to death. The murder weapon, a US army carbine, was found nearby in the river.

Once the identity of the murder victims was established, the local police called up reinforcements to examine the crime scene and question witnesses. The murder of an English family on a touring holiday in France quickly made it to newspaper front pages.

Investigators suspected that the Dominici family knew more about the deaths than they were prepared to admit. Gustave had divulged that the Drummonds’ daughter was still alive when he found her but said he was too scared to fetch help. He was charged with failing to help a dying person and sent to prison.

The Dominicis were a close-knit family. Seventy-five-year-old Gaston had nine children and nineteen grandchildren. The farm was run by Gustave and the old man tended his goats. The police were receiving mixed messages from the occupants of Grand’ Terre farm and inconsistencies began to appear in their recollection of events. It was Gustave who finally blew the whistle by declaring that his father had committed the murders.

Eventually, the old man admitted the killings when he said he was caught spying on Lady Drummond as she undressed. Her husband appeared on the scene to deal with the “Peeping Tom ” and there was a struggle, in the course of which the Drummonds were shot dead. Dominici changed his story several times and made numerous confessions. Finally, in November 1954, he was tried for murder at Digne Asssizes and convicted on a majority verdict. He received the death sentence, which was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. In 1960, he was freed on the orders of the French President and he died in 1965.

For many commentators, the murder of the Drummonds remained a mystery. There was a suggestion that the killings were part of a wider plot and that the Dominicis were caught up in a bigger game plan. A French historian writing about the case in 2002 put forward the theory that Sir Jack Drummond had been a spy and his presence in France soon after the ending of the Second World War involved an espionage mission related to chemical weapons. According to this account, Sir Jack Drummond had been to France on three previous occasions after the war finished and the presence of a chemical factory nearby was noted.

A further development of the conspiracy angle emerged in 2007 with the notion that Sir Jack Drummond was drawn in to the post-war machinations of the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. One theory suggested he was spying for the British government and had planned to meet someone who would pass on secret intelligence, all in the context of cold war politics.

Many questions about the murders remain unanswered. Local people said there were strangers in the Lurs area on the night of the shooting whose presence was unaccounted for.
Also, it has been alleged that Sir Jack Drummond attended a meeting with a former French Resistance fighter two days before he was killed. Post-mortem findings on the murder victims were supposed to have indicated that two different weapons were used. And so the speculation continues.

What is certain is that old man Gaston Dominici, cast in the role of voyeur and killer, took many secrets with him to the grave.

CSI Stockholm

The Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, and his wife Lisbet visited the Grand Cinema in Sveavägan in central Stockholm on the evening of 28 February 1986. They left the cinema just after 11 p.m. and were walking down the street when a man came up behind them and fired two shots at close range. Palme was fatally wounded with a shot in the back and his wife suffered a minor injury.

Apart from the shocking death of its Prime Minister in a busy street, Sweden had to come to terms with a bungled investigation, a controversial trial and unhelpful witnesses. The police failed to secure the crime scene adequately. It took a long time for reinforcements to reach the crime scene and no road checkpoints were set up. Several witnesses, including Lisbet Palme, saw a man running down the street after the shooting.

There was snow on the pavement at the time of the murder and it was a passer-by who, several days later, found two spent .357mm copper-tipped bullets. The type of gun that fired them was never identified and no murder weapon was ever recovered.

The prelude to the shooting was that Palme had stood down his bodyguard detail at midday because he intended to spend the rest of the day at home. In the afternoon, he decided to take his wife to the cinema to see a comedy,
The Brothers Mozart.
He queued for tickets along with other Stockholm filmgoers. He and his wife left at the end of the film just after 11 p.m. and by 11.21 he was dead.

Two theories emerged concerning the motive behind the murder. The Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) had an active group in Sweden and its members had been branded as terrorists by the government. Their leader had also been refused political asylum in the country. An alternative theory was simply that Palme had been shot at random by a disturbed individual unaware of his victim’s identity.

Christer Pettersson, a forty-two-year-old, alcoholic, drug-user and convicted criminal fitted the random killing scenario. He had been seen in the vicinity on the night of the shooting and his alibi did not add up. He was questioned by the police and strenuously denied he was the killer. Pettersson was put under surveillance and, in December 1988, he was detained as a suspect. One witness claimed to have identified him as the man running from the scene.

Pettersson was put on trial in Stockholm in June 1989. Much of the prosecution’s case was circumstantial. It depended heavily on the evidence of Lisbet Palme who identified Pettersson after watching a video of a police identity parade. Mrs Palme proved to be a difficult witness, initially declining to go into the witness box. In the event, she did confront the accused man and identified him. Asked if she was sure, she answered, “Yes ”.

Four witnesses changed their pre-trial statements, weakening the prosecution case, and critics said that Mrs Palme’s evidence was worthless. Pettersson made a confident denial, “I did not kill Olof Palme,” he told the court. His declaration of innocence conformed to public opinion, for in a pre-trial poll carried out by the Swedish Institute of Opinion, only 18 per cent thought he was guilty.