The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (51 page)

CHAPTER 12

Mysteries of the Missing

Thousands of people go missing every year. The reasons are many and varied including loss of memory, mental aberration, illness or a desire for anonymity. Happily, only a fraction of those who disappear do so permanently. The great majority are found or reappear of their own volition. But some will have encountered foul play, either turning up dead or never being discovered.

People who go missing from a conventional home environment are quickly reported. But some individuals, such as prostitutes and others who follow a lone existence, are particularly at risk from serial killers and their disappearance may go unreported. Some of British killer Fred West’s victims were young women who had disappeared twenty years before their buried remains were found. The UK Missing Persons Bureau was set up in 1994 to co-ordinate information. Statistics show that the largest group of missing persons are young people under the age of eighteen.

Among the mysterious high-profile disappearances in the UK that are unsolved are Lord Lucan, wanted for murder in 1974; Victor Grayson, a former Socialist M P, who vanished in 1920, and Suzy Lamplugh, the young estate agent who went missing, presumed murdered, in 1986. Others achieve resolution through confession or chance discovery. James Camb, for instance, admitted pushing the body of Gay Gibson through a ship porthole and out into the ocean in 1948. She was never seen again and he was punished as her murderer. Jim Lowell disposed of his victim’s body in a shallow grave in rural Maine, USA, in 1870, but her remains resurfaced three years later to haunt him.

Max Haines, the veteran Canadian crime writer, has commented to the effect that murderers cannot just put the corpse out with the rubbish and walk away. As discussed earlier in Chapter Two: “Parts and Parcels” (page
here
), one solution open to the murderer is to dismember the victim’s body and dispose of it piecemeal. This is a tedious procedure calling for stamina and determination, whereas the easy option is to leave the corpse where it falls and make good an escape. While this may be an appealing strategy, it is one which usually provides crime scene investigators with a wealth of forensic evidence. Transfer of contact traces and telltale fingerprints and DNA are inherently dangerous to the perpetrator.

Consequently, some murderers opt for a form of disposal that is intended to make sure the victim simply vanishes. An out-of-sight, out-of-mind policy, this is often based on the misconception that no body means no murder. But, as generations of criminals have discovered to their cost, that is not the case. John Haigh, the infamous “acid bath murderer” in the late 1940s, made that fatal calculation and paid for it on the gallows.

Earth, fire and water are consuming elements that offer possible disposal routes for unwanted corpses. But each has it drawbacks. Shallow graves may be visible to the trained eye or be unearthed by animals, and water has an inconvenient habit of giving up its dead. Fire is not necessarily all-consuming as the French murderers, Dr Marcel Petiot and Henri Landru, discovered when combustion residues revealed charred bones and teeth. Martin Ryan, though, with his access to an industrial incinerator, boasted that he knew how to dispose of a body. No traces of his missing wife’s body were found in 1990 despite intensive sieving of the incinerator’s ashes.

Some murderers have an urge to keep their victims close to hand. Dennis Nilsen, who killed fifteen young men in London in the late 1970s, buried some remains in his back garden but kept others under the floorboards. Using a similar strategy in the 1950s, John Christie, the killer at 10 Rillington Place, walled up some of his victims in the kitchen.

The combination of time and chance can produce surprises. It was forty-two years after she went missing in 1919 that Mamie Stewart’s body was found by cavers in an airshaft in the Gower Peninsula, Wales. While her murderer was identified, he escaped retribution by dying a natural death.

Ingenious methods have been employed by murderers to remove the mortal remains of their victims’ existence. Everything has been tried, from cannibalism to feeding body parts to animals. The Hosein Brothers in 1968 fed the remains of their kidnap victim to the pigs at Rook’s Farm in Herefordshire. No traces were ever found and the brothers’ conviction was proof that murder does not require the evidence of a body. Equally effective, but unproven, was the disposal of Urban Napoleon Stanger who disappeared from London’s East End in 1831 never to be seen again. It was widely believed that his fate was to be turned into meat pies.

Lost At Sea

A ship’s steward was convicted of murdering a passenger and pushing the body out of a porthole and into the sea. Although it was a suspicious death with no body, it led to a life sentence.

Twenty-one-year-old Gay Gibson, an actress, boarded the liner,
Durban Castle
, at Cape Town on 10 October 1947. She joined a number of mostly elderly first-class passengers for the voyage to England.

A week later, when the liner was sailing off the coast of West Africa, Gay Gibson was reported missing from her cabin. She was presumed to have gone overboard. The captain turned round and made a search. When this proved unsuccessful in locating the young woman, he resumed his course to England.

Ship’s officers examined the cabin occupied by the missing passenger. The porthole was open and it was noted that the bed sheets were crumpled and stained. It was also noted that, during the early hours of 18 October, the cabin call-button had been pushed. The call was answered by James Camb, a deck steward. It was forbidden for crew members to fraternize with passengers and Camb denied entering Gibson’s cabin. He was examined by the ship’s doctor and scratches were evident on his forearms. Camb was relieved of his duties and handed over to the police when the ship docked in Southampton.

After changing his story several times, Camb admitted that
he had been in Gibson’s cabin. He claimed she consented to having sex and, during intercourse, she had a seizure. When his attempts to revive her failed and believing that she was dead, he pushed her body out of the porthole.

Camb was charged with murder and appeared on trial at Winchester Assizes in March 1948. The prosecution case against him was that he had raped and strangled the young woman before throwing her out of the porthole. With no body, much of the evidence was necessarily circumstantial. He repeated his claim that they had consensual sex and that he panicked when she appeared to be dead.

The jury returned with a verdict of guilty after forty-five minutes. Asked if he had anything to say, Camb reminded the court that he had pleaded not guilty, “. . . and I repeat that statement now.” Mr Justice Hilbery then pronounced sentence of death by hanging. While Parliament was debating the abolition of capital punishment, executions were suspended. Camb was reprieved and given a life sentence. He was released on parole in 1959 and, in 1971, served a term of imprisonment following a conviction for sexual offences. He was released in 1978 and died the following year.

While there was no doubt that Camb had pushed Gay Gibson’s body through the cabin porthole and into the sea, it was not certain that he had murdered her. An alternative explanation of her death is that she suffered heart failure during vigorous sexual intercourse. However, it is rare for a twenty-one-year-old to die of heart failure during sex. In the 1940s, well before the age of permissiveness, this was not an argument that could be thoroughly aired in court.

“Don’t Murder Me!”

A mother’s dream about the circumstances of her missing daughter’s murder turned into reality three years later. The people of Lewiston, Maine in the US, had several reasons for remembering the events which occurred on the weekend of 11 and 12 June 1870. The circus came to town, the Central Hall burned down and Lizzie Lowell disappeared.

Jim and Lizzie Lowell were married but lived apart, following a domestic upset. Jim was a teamster and Lizzie worked as live-in help at the home of Mrs Sophronia Blood. After supper on 12 June, Jim called for Lizzie to take her out on a summer’s evening drive.

When Lizzie had not returned by 10 p.m., Mrs Blood assumed that she was staying the night with her husband. The next morning, she saw Jim and he told her that he had returned Lizzie to her home the previous evening. He added that she had probably gone off with some “damned circus fellow”. And, there Lizzie’s disappearance rested until her mother, Sarah Burton, turned up in Lewiston. She confronted Jim Lowell who repeated his story that Lizzie had gone off with another man. Sarah Burton’s next call was to speak with Mrs Blood who showed her two letters supposedly written by Lizzie and received two weeks after she went missing.

Sarah Burton returned home and related to a friend a dream that she’d had around the time her daughter went missing. In her dream, she saw Jim and Lizzie together and then Lizzie was on the ground with her husband threatening her and she was pleading, “Don’t murder me.” The following morning, Sarah Burton made a written record of her dream, little knowing the important part it would play in subsequent events.

In 1872, Jim Lowell re-married and went to live in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Then, in the following year, a farmer clearing a plot of land he had bought near Lewiston, made a discovery. He stumbled across a shallow grave containing a skeleton. The remains were headless but the clothing, which was still intact, identified them as Lizzie Lowell.

A coroner’s enquiry returned a verdict of murder against a person or persons unknown. Two days later, Jim Lowell was arrested and charged with murder. On the day he returned to Lewiston, the local newspaper published the text of the dream that Sarah Burton had recorded three years previously. This resulted in a surge of public hostility towards Jim Lowell.

He was put on trial and faced largely circumstantial evidence. It was sufficient to persuade the jury to return a guilty verdict and Lowell was convicted of first-degree murder. Sentence of
death followed, but the legal statutes of Maine required a year to pass before the sentence was carried out. Time passed and the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.

Turning Up The Heat

What might have been a perfect murder, involving the complete destruction of the victim’s body in a hospital incinerator, unravelled when the murderer lost his nerve.

Lynda Ryan was reported missing from her home in Barry, South Wales, by her sister on 6 July 1990. Her husband, Martin Ryan, said he saw her on 28 June in the company of two men at a pub in Barry. He told police he believed Lynda was having an affair and he went to the pub to reason with her. He implored her to return home with him but she declined. That was the last time he saw her.

Ryan had a history of convictions for minor offences but he appeared genuinely upset at his wife’s disappearance. This was borne out by a search of their home which turned up a letter he had written to Lynda expressing his love for her and asking for a chance to make up their differences.

Police enquiries led them to one of the men who had been in the pub. He readily admitted having had a sexual liaison with Lynda Ryan and related the incident in which she was confronted by her husband. He slapped her and began shouting. Detectives learned from Lynda’s employer, a department store in Barry, that she had called in sick on 29 June. A subsequent call was received from Martin Ryan asking if his wife had reported for work.

At this point, Martin Ryan disappeared, thereby prompting detectives to take a closer look at his background. He worked as a porter at Llandough Hospital in Barry where his duties included operating the hospital incinerator. This piece of equipment became the focus of attention when it was reported that the hospital had been permeated by an unpleasant smell emanating from the incinerator. Suspicions began to build as a result of a 999 call made on the night Lynda Ryan went missing. Residents next to the hospital heard screams coming
from the grounds at about midnight. The police responded but nothing unusual was found.

The search was now on to find Martin Ryan who had been sighted in Manchester, Oxford and London. He was located at a pub but avoided capture by leaping out of a window as a result of which he broke his ankle. He was admitted to hospital for treatment under a false name.

Meanwhile, the ashes in the Barry hospital incinerator were sifted for possible human remains but without success. On 9 August, having returned to Cardiff, Ryan decided to surrender to the police and was charged with murdering his wife, even though her body had not been found. He was put on trial at Cardiff Crown Court in April 1991.

The prosecution case was that he believed Lynda was having an affair and confronted her at the pub. He went home and took a knife from the kitchen and returned to the pub where Lynda agreed to leave with him. They drove to Llandough Hospital where they had an argument and he stabbed her. He then pushed her body into the incinerator which he stoked with extra fuel to increase the burning temperature. A witness who knew Ryan recalled how he had once bragged that he knew how to dispose of a body if the need arose.

In Ryan’s defence, an expert witness testified that he was in a depressed state as a result of the breakdown of his marriage and personality failings which impaired his sense of responsibility. The jury took the view that Ryan was fully accountable for his actions and found him guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Murder By Accident

A murder without a body was solved by DNA evidence that came to light two years after the victim’s disappearance. Her body was never found but her lover was successfully prosecuted for her murder.

Thirty-year-old Anne Marie Fahey worked as scheduling secretary for Thomas Carper, Governor of Delaware. She was last in her office at Wilmington on 27 June 1996. When
she failed to make contact with her friends and family, they became concerned about her safety.