The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (58 page)

The two students met in 1959 at Berkeley but their attraction began to founder when Abdullah took exception to Sonja’s love of dancing and some of the clothes that she wore. But the main bone of contention was his jealous nature and suspicion that she was seeing other men.

They quarrelled and Abdullah’s demands became more insistent. He made a diary entry on 6 April 1960 in which he wrote, “Tonight I tried to kill myself but Sonja put herself between my knife and my throat.” He threatened to kill her if she saw another man.

Two weeks later, he threatened her directly and Sonja reported the incident to the police. He was ordered to leave the University. Sonja took a vacation job working for a while as a waitress in Berkeley. Then she chanced to meet Abdullah but declined his invitation to go with him to his apartment.

Two days later, on 13 July 1960, Abdullah obtained a .38 revolver and prepared some typewritten notes. He wrote, “In the name of God, beneficient and merciful, I have stolen a pistol to kill my beloved and myself” and ended, “Pray for me . . . I have done wrong, but forgive me . . .” Then he met Sonja and asked to talk with her. He told her he loved her before firing two shots into her head at close range, fatally wounding her. The next shot he fired into his own head.

Abdullah survived his bullet wound, although he lost the sight of an eye. His intention to kill Sonja was clear and when he came to trial for murder, he pleaded innocence by reason of insanity. He was tried with the man who had sold him the murder weapon in the knowledge that it was to be used to kill Sonja.

Abdullah was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. This was later commuted to life imprisonment. The man who provided the murder weapon was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Feral Thuggery

On an August evening in 2007 a group of teenagers gathered at the entrance to Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancashire, UK. They had been drinking cider and other alcoholic drinks.

At about midnight, twenty-year-old Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, aged twenty-one, both students, went into the park. Their appearance excited the teenagers because they were dressed as Goths and this seemed to be a stimulus for what happened next.

The young couple, who were simply enjoying each other’s company, were set upon in a violent, completely unprovoked attack by five teenagers. Maltby was thrown to the ground and the gang took running kicks at him until he was senseless. Sophie Lancaster attempted to protect her boyfriend, cradling him as he lay unconscious on the ground. She then became the target of a vicious sustained assault that left her bloodied and beaten. Witnesses later said that they kicked her head like a football.

Sophie Lancaster died two weeks later in hospital; Robert Maltby survived but with permanent injuries. Paramedics called to the scene were appalled at the injuries caused by this orgy of violence. The gang members responsible boasted to their friends, that they had “. . . done sommat good . . . you wanna see them – they’re a right mess!”

Five teenagers involved in the attack were arrested within two weeks. Questioned about the incident, each blamed the others. A fifteen-year-old, not named, denied murder while his four companions pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm.

Two of those involved in the attack who had not been identified because of their age were named by order of the judge at Preston Crown Court in April 2008. Brendan Harris, aged fifteen, denied murder, and Ryan Herbert, aged sixteen, who admitted it, were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Three other teenagers who pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent on Robert Maltby were also identified by the judge. Each received a prison sentence.

It was brought out in their trial that the youths had both been drinking heavily; Harris admitted to drinking two litres of cider. He also said he initiated the attack because he was drunk and showing off. Four teenage witnesses to the assault came forward to testify. It transpired that Harris and Herbert had attacked a sixteen-year-old boy four months earlier and had been given community service orders.

The court heard evidence of the animal-like ferocity of the attack, which the judge described as “feral thuggery”. Sophie
Lancaster’s mother took a courageous view of the outcome of the trial and made a plea for tolerance in society.

Man In A Green Suit

A hospital worker walking his dogs in New York’s Central Park on 2 November 1942 let them off their leashes in an area that was being prepared for landscaping. The dogs led him to a patch of grass where, as he discovered, they were sniffing around the corpse of a young woman.

She was neatly dressed but there was no identification on her body and her bag was missing. While there were no immediate signs of injury, an autopsy showed that she had been strangled. Files at the Missing Persons Bureau were checked in the hope of establishing her identity but to no avail. Then, a report came in from a man whose daughter was missing after going out on a weekend date.

The body in the mortuary was identified as twenty-three-year-old Louisa Almodovar. The young woman, who was married but separated from her husband, had been living with her parents. She had taken a telephone call arranging a date but did not say whom she was planning to meet.

Louisa’s husband was Terry Almodovar whom she had met at a dance and they married in 1942 after a whirlwind romance. They separated within a few months. One of the sources of friction between the couple was Terry’s love of dancing in an environment in which there were plenty of attractive partners.

Detectives learned that Terry had previously called at the home of his wife’s parents complaining that Louisa had attacked one of his dancing partners. He had been ordered out of the house. When Terry was questioned about the evening of the murder, he said that he had spent it at the Rhumba Palace Dance Hall, an alibi that would be corroborated by several of the girls he had danced with.

When he was searched, a pawn ticket was found in Terry’s pocket. This, he explained, was for a green suit, which happened to be the one he was wearing on the night in question. The suit was retrieved and tested for
bloodstains, with negative results. Scratch marks on his arms looked suspicious but he gave an innocent explanation for them.

Despite the lack of firm evidence, Terry Almodovar was indicted with first-degree murder and appeared on trial in February 1943. He strongly protested his innocence and things seemed to be going in his favour until the green suit made an appearance. The prosecution had consulted scientific experts and their evidence turned the case on its head.

The green suit had been re-examined for forensic traces and the trouser turn-ups revealed the presence of grass seeds. Not just any old grass seeds but a rare variety that was known to grow only in Central Park. Botanists established that the seeds and other traces of vegetation on the trousers could only have come from one place – the spot where Louisa Almodovar was murdered.

The trial jury returned a guilty verdict and, on 9 March 1943, Terry Almodovar was sentenced to death. He reacted angrily and had to be restrained. It appeared that he had secretly met Louisa in Central Park intending to kill her to make way for a new woman in his life. His mistake, and the flaw in his plan for the perfect murder, was to pick a location with distinctive vegetation that ultimately unmasked his crime.

“. . . I Have No Regrets”

Pakistan’s worst serial killings arose as one man’s act of revenge against the police.

When Javed Iqbal complained to the police in Lahore that he had been mugged and robbed by two boys, he was furious because he believed his claim was not taken seriously. He resolved to take his revenge by killing 100 boys.

Iqbal recruited three accomplices to help him in his mission, two of whom were juveniles. Between June 1998 and December 1999, young boys were lured to his home with promises of food and money. Once under his control, the boys were systematically drugged, raped and strangled with a chain. The bodies were dismembered and put into a vat of acid. After
they had been turned into sludge, their remains were poured into a sewer. Clothes and shoes were kept as trophies.

When he had reached his target of 100 victims, Iqbal wrote an anonymous letter to the police claiming that he had murdered runaway children at his home in Lahore. When police arrived to search his home they found evidence of his claim. His house was a virtual murder factory. Human body parts were recovered, together with piles of clothing belonging to his victims. He had also kept photographs of the boys he killed and the presence of an acid vat was a sinister reminder of their fate.

Iqbal was not at home and managed to avoid capture for a month, despite an intensive manhunt. Finally, he presented himself at the editorial office of a magazine and offered them a diary containing details of the abuse infliicted on his victims, which he said was revenge for the treatment he had received from the police in 1998. “I am Javed Iqbal,” he told astonished magazine staff, “killer of 100 children.”

Together with his accomplices, Iqbal appeared on trial in March 2000. Having admitted his crimes, he now withdrew his confession, which he said was intended to discredit the police. He pleaded not guilty, saying he had made up the story to put a spotlight on the problem of runaway children.

In his original confession, Iqbal said, “I am not ashamed of my actions and I am ready to die. I have no regrets.” He got his wish when Judge Allah Baksh sentenced him to death and described the method by which it should be carried out. He said that Iqbal and his co-accused, twenty-year-old Sajid, should be publicly executed in the presence of the victims’ relatives. They should be strangled with the same chain they had used to kill their child victims, after which their bodies should be dismembered and destroyed with acid.

Applying Islamic Sharia Law, the judge ordered that the punishment be carried out in one of Lahore’s public parks. While the controversial judgment was being debated at higher levels, Iqbal and Sajid took matters into their own hands by committing suicide in their prison cells on 8 October 2001.

No Apparent Motive

In the course of four days in 2000, three women were killed for no discernible motive.

The body of twenty-one-year-old Jodie Hyde, a recovering drug addict, was found near a recreation ground in Sparkbrook near Birmingham in the UK. She had been strangled and set on fire. Three days later, the badly beaten body of Rosemary Corcoran was discovered in a wooded area near Droitwich Spa. She had sustained severe injuries to her head. Within hours, a third woman was killed while walking to work. She was run over by a car, dragged away and battered about the head.

Philip Smith, whose modest claim to fame was that he had once lived in the same street as Fred West, the Gloucester mass murderer, lived in Birmingham where he worked as a cab driver and odd-job man. He was nicknamed “Bigfoot” on account of his considerable size, weighing in at twenty-three stone.

Jodie Hyde and Rosemary Corcoran were regulars at the Rainbow public house, which was also frequented by Smith who provided lifts home for customers. It was possible that the women knew him. Smith was arrested after police viewed CCTV footage from a local club which showed him with Rosemary Corcoran a few hours before she was found dead. She appeared to be resisting him. Smith was also identified by CCTV as the attacker of the first victim. Images showed him in his car.

Smith was arrested on the strength of the visual evidence provided by surveillance cameras. A search of his bed-sit accommodation turned up articles which he had taken from two of his victims. A pair of blood-soaked jeans were found in the bath. DNA testing later showed matches to two of the dead women.

West Midlands Police believed Smith may have been responsible for serious unsolved crimes committed over a period of twenty years. That the three murders in Birmingham appeared to be without motive was a problem for detectives
in linking Smith with other offences, especially as he had no previous convictions.

While initially denying involvement in the murders, Smith changed his plea during the trial at Leicester Crown Court. The forensic evidence and CCTV images placing him at two of the crime scenes conclusively proved his guilt. Sentencing him, Mr Justice Rafferty referred to the brutality with which he killed the three women. Underlining the lack of apparent motive, he said, “I suspect their families will suffer the more, as they simply don’t understand why you did it.” Smith received a life sentence.

CHAPTER 14

Simply Bizarre

All murders may be called bizarre for one reason or another. They may be particularly strange, grotesque or weird in some aspects of their execution, detection or punishment. Most can be fitted into some broad category defined by motive or method, for example, while others remain simply bizarre.

Even a cursory look at a collection of murder cases provides an insight into the lethal excesses of which the human species is capable. Within every human being there lurk primitive instincts related to survival. When threatened, the biological temptation is for protection and self-preservation.

In the modern world, a social veneer hides the dark forces of nature and the restraining influence of nurture acts as a counterbalance. Yet the bounds are easily crossed when a combination of forces erupt into violence or murder.

The circumstances of every murder represent a unique occurrence. A coming together of time and place in combination with elements of chance and opportunity. When this is overlaid with an eruption of emotion and the nuances of the unexpected, a murder matrix is created.

Some murders are so bizarre in their incidents that they might fairly be described as unbelievable. But if murder teaches us anything, it is that the unbelievable can happen. Who would conceive that a successful lawyer would kill his wife by wiring up her car with explosives? Yet Arthur D. Payne did precisely that. Or that Graham Coutts kept his victim’s body in a storage unit so that he could visit it at his leisure.