The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (6 page)

The bunker, which was in the main room of the house, contained coal, underneath which was buried the rest of Mrs Arbuckle’s dismembered remains. In the style of popular reporting, the discovery was referred to as “The Body in the Bunker”.

Local enquiries elicited the information that M’Kay had sought help from a friend to move a large, heavy trunk from Mrs Arbuckle’s house to his lodgings. This occurred on 12 October and, the following day, M’Kay was observed returning to Main Street with the trunk. A neighbour gave a graphic description of his dishevelled appearance, dirty clothes and shoes and with his hair standing on end above his wild, staring eyes.

A few months before she died, M’Kay had insured his mother’s life and when arrested he had writing materials on the kitchen table where he was attempting to forge a will and other documents. Mrs Arbuckle had been a thrifty person and had a nest egg in the bank amounting to eighty-three pounds, which she had not touched for fourteen years.

M’Kay was tried for murder at Glasgow in December 1927. An insanity defence was put forward on his behalf but the jury found him guilty as charged and he was sentenced to death. So desperate was he to profit from his mother’s death that he removed her dentures and attempted to sell them. After he was sentenced to death for murdering her, he called out to his wife, “Cheer up!”

The case made Scottish legal history by being referred to the High Court of Judiciary at Edinburgh. It was the first appeal of its kind under newly enacted legislation. The Court was asked to accept that while M’Kay had dismembered his mother’s body, it was not proved that he had murdered her. It was argued that he might have come home and found her already dead and, believing that he would be held responsible, decided to conceal the body.

This was not an argument that carried much conviction and the prosecutor asked the court to consider the kind of man who would kill and dismember his own mother and then remove the dentures from her mouth and try to sell them. The Court dismissed the appeal and James M’Kay was hanged at Duke Street Prison, Glasgow on 24 January 1928.

Body In The Boot

Twenty-year-old Stephanie Skidmore lived in West Auckland, New Zealand, in a part of the city devoted to the sex trade. She lived with her boyfriend, Jason Menzies, and twenty-month-old baby. She was last seen alive on 12 May 1996 when she left home after a disagreement.

Concerned about the loss of contact, Stephanie’s mother, who lived in the USA, made several repeated telephone calls to Auckland. She spoke to Menzies who explained that Stephanie had left him. He disagreed that he should report her disappearance to the authorities. The couple had frequent arguments and Stephanie had apparently gone off before.

After further phone calls, Menzies agreed to report her as a missing person which he did on 11 June, nearly a month after she was last seen. The police concentrated their enquiries in the red light district where Stephanie had involvement with prostitution and nightclubs. They pieced together a picture of an erratic young woman with a history of running away from home. She had met Jason Menzies in 1993 and, from all accounts, the couple had a troubled relationship.

Police enquiries established that money had been withdrawn from Stephanie’s bank account six days after she went missing. Only she could have done this unless someone else had access to her PIN number. Her friends were convinced that it was unlikely she would have abandoned her baby.

On 27 June, Menzies appeared on nationwide television seeking information from the public in the search for Stephanie. By this time, police were beginning to take a keen interest in Menzies who had made a number of decisions about income support and other matters which suggested he did not expect Stephanie to return.

Officers visited Menzies’ home. It seemed he liked cars and there were six vehicles parked at the rear of his flat. These were searched and in the boot of one of them was a bundle wrapped in an assortment of plastic sheeting and bedclothes tied up with cord. Once unravelled, the bundle was found to contain the decomposing body of Stephanie.

Menzies was arrested and charged with murder. He was tried at the High Court in May 1997. The prosecution case was that he had strangled Stephanie in their flat. He claimed her death was an accident arising over an argument about who should make scrambled eggs. He said she was high on drugs and out of control. She attacked him with a knife and in the struggle that followed he throttled her.

Once she was dead, he wrapped the body up and kept it in the flat for several days while he went about his normal affairs, including looking after the baby. He elicited the help of friends to move the body into the boot of the car where it was eventually found by the police.

The prosecutor dismissed Menzies’s claims that he had acted in self-defence, saying that he lied to save his skin. The jury found him guilty of murder and he was sentenced to life
imprisonment. His failure to dispose of the body had inevitably led to his certain downfall.

The Sunday Roast

Forty-seven-year-old John Perry, a factory worker from Wales in the UK, met his future wife on a holiday in the Philippines in June 1984. Arminda was half his age and had a young daughter. They joined Perry in Wales and Arminda, who changed her name to Annabelle, became his wife.

Their marriage soon got into difficulty due chiefly to Annabelle’s promiscuous ways. She made herself available to other men, which infuriated Perry and arguments ensued. One of the problems was that he worked a nightshift, which enabled the marital bed to be used by Annabelle to entertain her men friends.

In 1990, Annabelle asked for a divorce to which Perry responded by unsuccessfully trying to have her deported. A settlement was agreed whereby Perry would pay her a lump sum and regular maintenance for her daughter. Payment was due in February 1991 and it was then that neighbours noticed Annabelle’s absence. Perry explained that she had gone to London to work as a prostitute.

On 28 February, police called at Perry’s home to enquire about his missing wife. To the question, “What happened to your wife?”, he replied, “I’ve killed her.” This startling response was delivered against a background of activity in the kitchen which seemed to involve a great deal of roasted meat.

Examination of the kitchen, apart from the smell, revealed a coating of grease on every surface, an oven coated with fat and piles of cooked flesh cut into small pieces. In the garage were plastic containers filled with portions of cooked flesh and other body parts. Little remained that could be identified and Perry explained that he had destroyed his wife’s skull. He had not entirely defeated the skills of forensic science, though, for enough remained of the jaws to confirm by dental identification that the remains were those of Mrs Perry.

John Perry was tried for murder at Mold Crown Court in November 1998. When he gave evidence he related how his world collapsed when he realized his wife was having an affair. He described an argument when she threatened to cut her wrist with a kitchen knife. He struggled with her to gain possession of the knife – then everything went blank. He tried to revive her without success and then decided to dispose of her body. At first he thought of burial but he wanted to make sure her remains would never be found so he opted for dismemberment and rendered the remains. Asked why he cooked the body parts, he said he remembered from his school days that a human body was composed of seven-tenths water. He believed that by cooking the body he would reduce it to a condition that would make its disposal easier. He used a popular family medical guide containing diagrams of human anatomy to dismember her body. When questioned, he admitted cooking the remains and feeding some to the cat.

The jury returned a majority verdict of guilty. The judge spoke about Perry’s chilling and ruthless efficiency and the fact that he had not shown the slightest remorse at what he had done. The self-taught anatomist was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Secret Burial

While working as an airline official at Manchester airport in the UK in 1959, Peter Reyn-Bardt met thirty-two-year-old Malika Maria de Fernandez and within three days they had married. Their wedding photograph showed a happy, smiling couple, but for Reyn-Bardt, it was a marriage of convenience. He was a homosexual and he believed that being married would give him credibility with his employer.

Friction soon intruded on the marital scene and the couple decided to lead separate lives. Reyn-Bardt moved to a cottage near Wilmslow, Cheshire, where he lived with his homosexual partner. In the space of nine months he and Malika married, argued and split-up.

In October 1960, Malika turned up at the cottage demanding money. In his statements to the police, Reyn-Bardt claimed that she came at him, clawing at his face, after he refused her demands. He remembered grabbing her around the neck and shaking her. Then she was lying dead at his feet. He said the attack was not premeditated. “Something just boiled over inside me,” he said. He could not remember how he killed her.

Faced with the dead body of his wife, Reyn-Bardt decided on dismemberment. He used an axe to sever the head and limbs and attempted to burn them in his garden. When this failed, he buried the remains.

Then, twenty-two years later, came the discovery of a human skull in the peat bog close to Reyn-Bardt’s cottage. An excavator driver digging out peat for a commercial contractor unearthed the skull about 300 yards from the property. The fact that the skull was that of a female aged around thirty fitted Malika. Questioned by the police in June 1983, Reyn-Bardt admitted killing her.

He was sent for trial at Chester Crown Court in December 1983. Reyn-Bardt pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder. His defence was that he had struggled with his wife after she attacked him but he could not recall what happened afterwards. The supreme irony of the case was provided by testimony from a professor at Oxford University’s department of archaeology. He said that the age of the human skull had been carbon dated to around the year 410 AD.

The jury brought in a majority verdict of guilty and Reyn-Bardt was sentenced to life imprisonment. Among the mysteries concerning Malika was that her remains have not been found and her origins were not clear either. On her marriage certificate she was described as a portrait painter and her father’s name was recorded as Benjamin Mendoza de Fernandez. Attempts to locate him proved fruitless.

“Piggy Palace”

The Downtown-Eastside district of Vancouver in Canada was a rundown area and home to drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. A third of the population of the area fell into one or other of these categories, and the rate of HIV infection was
the highest in North America. Initially, when young women began disappearing without trace in Vancouver in 1983, the police were reluctant to accept that a serial killer was at large. They believed they were dealing with a transient population and when one of their number suggested that the statistical concentration of missing people indicated something more sinister, he was not taken seriously. But, eventually, after a period of twenty years, when more than sixty women had gone missing and bowing to pressure from missing women’s families and the media, an investigation team was assembled.

The investigative trail led to a farm at Port Coquitlam, twenty miles east of the city, run by the Pickton brothers, and to the stabbing of a prostitute. Robert Pickton was charged with this offence but the case was dropped.

Slowly, a pattern emerged at what life down on the farm was like. Pickton ran a late night drinking den in a barn, which he called Piggy Palace. Female drug addicts and prostitutes were among the clientele. A notice on the farm gate warned off intruders – “This property protected by a pit bull with AIDS”.

Police began to receive calls from the public about activities at the farm and in 2002 Robert Pickton was arrested in connection with an enquiry about weapons. A search of the premises turned up some interesting artefacts in the freezer: two human heads and assorted severed hands and feet. This discovery led to a two-year investigation by forensic teams who searched through 370,000 cubic metres of mud and farm waste looking for human remains. They also took over 200,000 DNA samples. Traces of thirty women were found on the seven-hectare farm.

As news of the grim discoveries reached the press, fears were expressed locally that human remains might have found their way into food products via Pickton’s pig feed. It later transpired that he put body parts through a wood chipper.

Robert Pickton, who liked to be called Willy, was a regular user of prostitutes, many of whom had a $500-a-day drug habit. He associated with Hell’s Angels and was thought by many to be weird. Apart from his parties at Piggy Palace, he kept a low profile. He was charged with the murders of
twenty-seven women and sent for trial on six counts based on the identification of human remains found at his barn.

Initially, he pleaded not guilty but then claimed he had killed forty-nine women. He allegedly told a fellow remand prisoner, “I was going to do one more and make it an even fifty.” The evidence against him was unchallengeable but the jury at British Colombia’s Supreme Court took ten days to reach their verdict in December 2007. They found fifty-eight-year-old Pickton guilty of six murders and he received an automatic life sentence. He still faces charges over twenty other deaths and police investigations into forty other missing women continue.

Two Fingers!

In Austria, Vienna’s Police Commissioner Weitzel was startled to find he had been sent the well-manicured, surgically removed digit from a woman’s right hand. This surprise package, received on April Fools’ Day in 1926, was followed some days later by another finger, complete with a gold ring.

Inspection of the surface of the ring indicated it had been etched with what investigators believed might have been the type of acid used to remove tattoos. Microscopic examination of the finger confirmed this theory with the discovery of faint tattoo marks in the form of a snake.