The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (37 page)

After deliberating for seventeen days, the jury delivered a guilty verdict and Pettersson was sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict did not calm public unease and doubts continued to surface.

In October 1989, the High Court of Appeal, by a unanimous decision, overturned the conviction and Pettersson was released from Kvonoberg Prison. The police handling of the murder investigation was criticized as was the judicial process
in a case where no murder weapon had been found, there was no clear motive and the identification evidence was unreliable.

Further twists to the story emerged as time progressed. In 1991 there was a suggestion that an unnamed former French legionnaire was involved in a right-wing extremist plot to kill Palme. In 1997 came news of an alleged plot to assassinate King Carl Gustaf XVI, which had gone awry when Palme was shot by mistake. And, finally, Pettersson, who had steadfastly denied the killing, allegedly claimed in 2001 to be the murderer after all. The truth of this died with Pettersson in 2007.

Demands With Menace

The murder of a leading heart surgeon in Sydney in 1991 shocked Australia. It was a crime that had overtones of extortion related to traffic in human organs for transplantation.

Dr Victor Chang became an icon to Australians when he carried out life-saving surgery on a fourteen-year-old girl. He was a greatly respected figure and a pioneer in heart transplant surgery. He inaugurated a national transplant programme at a leading Sydney hospital and carried out hundreds of transplant operations with a high survival rate.

Born in Shanghai to Australian-Chinese parents, Chang set out his ambition to be a doctor early on. Once established, he quickly made his professional mark and in the 1990s was at the peak of his career, travelling widely to carry out life-saving surgery. He lived with his British-born wife and three children in Sydney and, despite his success, kept a modest social profile.

Early in the morning of 4 July 1991, Dr Chang left his home driving his Mercedes and heading for St Vincent’s Hospital. During his journey, he telephoned his wife and reported nothing untoward. Shortly afterwards he turned off the main road in the suburb of Mosman and drove into a side street following a minor collision with another car. Witnesses later said they saw him standing by his car apparently arguing with two young men. One of them pulled a gun and fired two shots into Dr Chang’s head before fleeing from the scene in their car.

The murder of the fifty-four-year-old doctor led to a huge manhunt for his killers and after ten days of intensive investigation, the police arrested two suspects. They were both Malaysians; a thirty-four-year-old chef, Philip Lim Choon Tee, and forty-nine-year-old Liew Chiew Seng. Initial reaction was that the murder was related to Chinese Triad activity, a group which ran drug, gambling and prostitution in Sydney’s underworld.

Another theory lay in Dr Chang’s well-known opposition to the trade in body organs harvested in China for transplantation into wealthy patients. He was especially vocal about the practice of taking kidneys from prisoners executed in China.

When Lim and Seng were put on trial in Sydney in October 1992, they both pleaded guilty to murder and it seemed that their crime began as one of extortion. They apparently conspired to demand three million Australian dollars from the Chang family. Aided by a third man, Stanley No, they visited Chang’s house intending to threaten him but gave up when they saw he had company. Their plan, it was argued by the prosecution, was to abduct Dr Chang and demand money with menaces. When he refused, after they had driven him off the road on 4 July, Liew produced a gun and fired the fatal shots.

The two men, described in court as amateur desperadoes, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

CHAPTER 10

Mixed Media

The written and published word have played a leading role in defining the history of crime. Printed accounts of the execution of criminals accompanied by stark illustrations of hanged felons were a source of public information throughout the nineteenth century. They also served as a reminder to the general populace that crime does not pay. As the printed word evolved and was augmented by other media, especially the visual dimension of film and television, so opportunities arose for graphic reporting of events. The new developments also brought scope for the exercise of criminal ingenuity.

Death sometimes imitates art and such was the case when Konrad Beck contrived a murder in a locked room in his Berlin apartment. He had stolen the idea from a novel he had been reading. The mystery was solved when investigators found a copy of the book in his flat, which conveniently fell open to the page providing the solution. Krystian Bala had a different idea. He committed his murder first and then wrote a fictionalized account of it in a novel. And Snowy Rowles gleaned his ideas about disposing of his victim’s body in Australia’s outback after reading a story about a fictional crime.

Murderers are chiefly motivated by passion or enmity and know full well who their victim will be. But where the objective is the calculated business of gain, it may be necessary to seek out victims. One of the means of doing this is by advertising. Part of Elfriede Blauensteiner’s strategy was to find elderly men to kill and fleece them of their savings by advertising for gullible companions in the newspapers. Here was an echo of an earlier example established by Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez and their exploitation of Lonely Hearts Club advertisements in 1940s America.

Words can also entrap, for example, when a policeman lay dying from gunshot wounds in a London street and wrote the name of his killer in his notebook. Or when Ghislaine Marshal, mortally wounded in a knife attack in her flat in the south of France, scrawled her attacker’s name on a door using her own blood.

New media present new opportunities for law enforcement. Thus wireless was used in 1910 to pinpoint the arrest of Dr Crippen and television has been successfully used to acquire public information about crimes and criminals. Programmes such as the BBC’s “Crimewatch” and 20th Century Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” have played a significant role. In the US, John List and William Hewlett, both fugitives from justice, were caught due to public responses to television appeals for information.

One of the great debates of modern times has been about the possible effect of movie films and, later, of television, on impressionable minds and leading to criminality. In 1952, when a young man shot and killed a policeman on a warehouse roof in south London, the question asked was whether his actions were influenced by having watched a gangster film depicting gun violence.

While sociologists debated what they saw as the issues, they were overtaken by rapid developments in the media industries. The cinema had the power to show violent images to paying audiences but television and, in due course, video, brought the culture of violence into every home. The proliferation of brutal and sadistic scenes combined with a lessening of moral inhibitions, rendered the debate virtually meaningless.

A watershed occurred in 1971 with the cinema screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film, “A Clockwork Orange”, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess. The film, which showed disaffected young men committing gang rape, was highly controversial and accusations followed that it glamorized violence. As a result, the film was withdrawn from distribution the following year.

While Kubrick’s film was graphic, it was simply ahead of its time and complaints about film violence have become muted as images have become more explicit. In modern cinema and television, gritty realism is everything. Films such as “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Natural Born Killers” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, entertained and horrified their audiences. They also entered the psyche of some individuals who went beyond the threshold of entertainment and into the realm of personality deviation. Thus Peter Moore explained that he killed for pleasure and lay the blame on a character in the horror film, “Friday the Thirteenth”. Similarly, incidents in the film, “Copycat” were said to have been emulated in the Zakrzewski murders in Paris in 1996.

The internet has further extended the range of media that can be exploited by those seeking publicity and self-promotion. A particular phenomenon has been the use of the internet by mass murderers to justify their acts of destruction and promote their brand of personal beliefs. In 2007, Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed nine people after he had posted a hate-filled manifesto on YouTube. In the same year, Cho Heng Hui killed thirty-two people and sent his revenge credo to NBC news in New York. In 2008, Matti Juhani Saari killed ten people, having declared on YouTube that, “the whole of life is pain”. Between them these three killers destroyed the lives of fifty-one people.

There is a strong literary tradition among the murdering fraternity including Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and Pierre François Lacenaire. The French murderer won over many sympathizers with his soul-baring memoirs written in his prison cell. Karl Hau wrote two books while serving his term of life imprisonment. Hirasawa, the Tokyo poisoner and Jacques Mesrine, France’s Public Enemy Number One, also wrote books detailing their lives and crimes.

Pre-eminent among the ranks of those who have developed literary careers following convictions for killing are Dr William Minor and Stephen Wayne Anderson. Minor was judged insane in 1872 after killing a man and spent thirty-eight years in an asylum where he became an acclaimed lexicographer of the English language. While Anderson, who was executed in the US in 2002 after spending twenty-two years on Death Row, was an award-winning poet and playwright. In their different ways, perhaps, both men showed that the pen is mightier than the sword, although in both cases, their weapon of choice was a handgun.

Inspired Reader

Death imitated art when a novelist’s ingenious murder scenario was adopted by a man who wanted to eliminate his family in order to remarry.

Konrad Beck made a living in Berlin in the 1880s as a general dealer buying and selling second-hand goods. On a November day in 1881, appearing somewhat flustered, he approached a police officer in the street to say that he could not open the door to his apartment. The key did not work and the door seemed to be bolted on the inside.

Beck’s concern was for his wife and five children who he believed must be inside. He was convinced something was wrong. The combined forces of the landlord and a carpenter succeeded in taking the door down and allowing access to the flat. They were greeted by the macabre spectacle of Mrs Beck hanging from a hook in the ceiling.

The children were not in evidence so a search was made of all the rooms and cupboards. They were found in a cupboard in the hallway. The five children, ranging in age from four to twelve years, were hanging from hooks like rabbits in a butcher’s shop. They had all been strangled.

Observant detectives noted that both Frau Beck and her children looked undernourished and were dressed in shabby threadbare clothes. By contrast, Konrad Beck appeared to be fit and healthy. The immediate interpretation of the deaths was that Frau Beck had killed her children and then hanged herself after first bolting the front door.

Detectives decided to probe a little into the background of the Beck family. They learned from neighbours that Frau Renate Beck was always short of money and sometimes asked them for old clothes and even food. Konrad Beck spent a great deal of time away from home and when he was there he seemed to spend his time sitting around reading books.

Further enquiries established that Beck was spending a lot of time with another woman and helping her pay the rent. This went some way to explaining why he kept his own family short of food and clothing. But mysteries remained and one of these
was that the door had been bolted on the inside. The obvious answer was that Renate Beck had secured the door to prevent any intrusion while she killed her children.

The door bolt was found to be exceptionally well-oiled and moved freely when operated. While detectives found that curious, they made further searches of the apartment and looked at the titles of some of Beck’s books. They flipped through the pages of the volumes in the hope that they might find letters or other documents. When a book called
Nena Sahib
by John Ratcliffe was taken from the shelf, the pages fell open at a particular spot.

There, detectives found the solution to the conundrum of the bolted door in a story explaining the death of a man in a room secured from the inside. In the fictional account, a small hole was found in the doorframe next to the bolt, making it possible to pass a wire through and operate the bolt from the outside.

No doubt with some excitement, detectives investigating the deaths of the Beck family members took a close look at the doorframe. They found a tiny hole blocked with wax that made it possible with a wire or loop of some kind to slide the bolt across from the outside.

Confronted with these revelations, Konrad Beck confessed that his lover had insisted on marriage and as he could not bear to lose her, he eliminated his own family. Beck was tried for murder and found guilty by a unanimous verdict. The forty-year-old reader of detective stories who wanted to please his lover paid with his life. He was executed on 4 December 1881.

Novel Twist

The body of Dariusz Janiszewski, a thirty-five-year-old businessman, was discovered by fishermen in the River Odva in Warsaw in December 2000. He had been missing for over a month and his corpse bore clear evidence of having been beaten and tortured.

Scene of crime investigators noted that the dead man had been trussed up with a single piece of rope in such a way that
he might have strangled himself. Pathologists were not certain if he had died in this way or whether he had drowned.

The enquiry into Janiszewski’s brutal death made little headway and it was closed in May 2001. The case remained closed for five years until the publication of a novel called
Amok
written by a pulp fiction author, Krystian Bala, when the contents came to the attention of the policeman leading the murder enquiry. The book’s storyline concerned a group of sadists discussing a murder, the details of which were practically identical to that of Janiszewski.