The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (6 page)

It has also been claimed that he fell in with a group of anarchists. It is an unlikely association as in 1890, at the age of 21, Vacher enlisted in the French army. He was sent to the ancient city of Besançon, near the border with Switzerland. There he fell in love with a young servant girl, Louise Barrand, who considered him an object to be mocked.

Vacher the soldier developed a reputation as a brutal drillmaster. Although made a non-commissioned officer, he came to believe that his military service was not being properly recognized and, in both protest and desperation, attempted to slit his throat. Despite the suicide attempt, he remained with the army and was again promoted.

In June 1893, he proposed marriage to Louise. The offer was met with laughter and he attempted to kill the servant girl, but his gun misfired. Before he could be apprehended, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. Although Vacher survived, the bullet remained lodged in his skull. The damage caused paralysis on the right side of his face; his right eye was also affected. It is also thought that Vacher did himself permanent brain damage, leading to headaches and overall mental instability.

Vacher was committed to an asylum in Dôle. There he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoia and hallucinations, and after six months, he was transferred to the Saint-Robert asylum in Isère. On April Fool’s Day, 1894, he was considered cured and was discharged. Homeless and lacking the faculties required for work, Vacher wandered seemingly without aim throughout the countryside of south-eastern France.

Witnesses described him as a filthy, deformed figure; his injured eye seemed to be always discharging pus. Owing to the paralysis in his face, he had difficulty communicating.

For three years he drifted, begging and stealing in order to survive. He was also raping, murdering and mutilating men and women along his path. Vacher committed nearly all his murders by first cutting the throats of his victims. Afterwards he would slice open their torsos. Many of Vacher’s victims were shepherds and shepherdesses; most were adolescents. His weapons were cleavers, scissors and knives – whatever happened to be at hand.

His actions soon drew the attention of authorities, who dubbed their elusive killer
‘L’Éventreur du Sud-Est’ –
‘The Ripper of the South-East’.

In 1895, he was almost caught when he was spotted by a gendarme walking near a recently murdered shepherd boy. When called upon to produce identification, Vacher handed over his discharge papers. The gendarme remarked that he had once served in the very same regiment. When he asked whether Vacher had seen any suspicious characters, the murderer replied that he had seen a man running across the fields about a mile away. The gendarme then set off in pursuit.

The killing came to an end in early August 1897 when Vacher happened upon a woman outside Lyon who was gathering wood. He attacked, but was immediately set upon by his intended victim’s husband and sons. Vacher was arrested.

Although the authorities were convinced that Vacher was
L’Éventreur du Sud-Est,
they had neither witnesses nor evidence. Their big break came from Vacher himself, who one day, without explanation, chose to confess all his crimes.

He was, he argued, not responsible for his actions, owing to the dog that had given him rabies as a child. Vacher was convinced that his blood had been poisoned. It was because of this condition, Vacher claimed, that he felt an urge to drink blood from the necks of his victims. Hatred had also played a role in his murders – hatred brought on by those who found his deformed face unsightly.

Vacher was tried with what appears to have been undue haste. He was examined by a team of doctors who determined that the memory of the accused was clear. The fact that he had fled the scene of each murder was, they claimed, an indication that he was fully cognizant of the difference between right and wrong. Among those who examined Vacher was Alexandre Lacassagne, a professor of forensic medicine at the Université de Lyon. He later wrote a book,
Vacher l’éventreur et les crimes sadiques,
in which he drew comparisons between the serial killer and figures like Gilles de Rais and Jack the Ripper.

On 28 October 1898, after a trial which lasted two days, Vacher was sentenced to death. Two months later, on New Year’s Eve, he was guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse, not far from where he had performed his military service.

DOCTOR H. H. HOLMES

It is not correct, as is often claimed, that H. H. Holmes was America’s first serial killer; both the Bloody Benders (a Kansas family of serial killers) and the Servant Girl Annihilator preceded him. He did, however, kill more people than the Servant Girl Annihilator and all the members of the Bender family put together. The claim that Holmes was the most prolific American serial killer of all time remains an issue of some debate.

The man who history remembers as H. H. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett on 16 May 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Nearly a century and a half later, the town numbers barely more than 3,000 inhabitants. It is perhaps most famous as having served as a model for Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, the setting for the 1956 novel of the same name.

Holmes grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive alcoholic father at its head. School provided only a partial escape. While an intelligent and handsome boy, he was also a frequent victim of bullying. He once claimed that, as a child, he had been forced by his classmates to touch a human skeleton. It was an event that appeared to haunt him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he sought to become a medical doctor and developed a fascination with anatomy. As an adolescent, this interest found expression in his killing and dismembering of stray animals.

At 16, he graduated from school and managed to get teaching positions – first in Gilmanton and later in nearby Alton, New Hampshire. It was there that he met Clara Lovering. The ardour between them was such that the two eloped. However, in marriage that same passion quickly dissipated and he soon abandoned his wife.

Still intent on a career in medicine, he attended the University of Vermont. It was, however, too small for his liking. In September 1882, he enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which held what was considered to be one of the country’s leading medical schools. Two years later, he graduated with what are best described as lacklustre grades.

After graduation, Mudgett adopted as his name the more distinguished sounding Henry Howard Holmes. He took up a position as prescription clerk in a pharmacy owned by a terminally ill doctor named Holton. He endeared himself to Holton’s wife and customers. When the good doctor passed away, Holmes offered to buy the pharmacy, promising the newly made widow $100 a month. After signing over the deed, Mrs Holton subsequently disappeared; Holmes claimed she had settled with relatives in California.

Under Holmes, the pharmacy thrived in the growing Englewood neighbourhood of Chicago. In 1887, he married Myrta Z. Belknap, a stunning young woman whom he had met during a business trip to Minneapolis. She remained unaware that Holmes had been married before – and that he had not obtained a divorce. In their third year of marriage, Myrta bore a daughter named Lucy. By this time she had already returned to the home of her parents. Though Holmes would never seek a divorce, the union was all but over.

Using the pharmacy as his base, Holmes continued to engage in a number of questionable business ventures he had begun several years before. However, his most notable achievement was the construction of a block-long, three-storey building on the site across the street from his pharmacy. Built over a three-year period, ‘The Castle’, as the locals dubbed it, included a ground floor which Holmes rented out to various shopkeepers. The upper two storeys Holmes kept for himself. A huge space, it was a confusing maze of over a hundred windowless rooms, secret passageways, false floors and stairways that led to nowhere. Some doors could only be opened from the outside, while others opened to reveal nothing but a brick wall. During construction, Holmes repeatedly changed contractors, ensuring that no one understood the design of the building or had any idea as to its ultimate purpose.

Beginning shortly after the completion of the Castle, and for the three years that followed, Holmes murdered dozens of women. Some he tortured in soundproof chambers fitted with gas lines that enabled him to asphyxiate his victims. The corpses were sent down a secret chute to the Castle’s basement. There, Holmes would dissect them, just as he had the animals he killed in his adolescence. They would be stripped of flesh and sold as skeleton models to medical schools. Some bodies were cremated or thrown in pits of lime and acid.

One of the first to die was Julia Connor, the wife of a jeweller to whom Holmes had rented a shop. After she came to Holmes with the news that she was pregnant with his child, the doctor murdered Julia and her daughter, Pearl.

Holmes saw great opportunity in Chicago’s upcoming 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and made several modifications to the second storey of the Castle, transforming it into the World’s Fair Hotel. The first guests arrived in the spring of 1893. Some returned home, others did not. With the high volume of guests, Holmes could be selective in choosing his victims. The fact that so many people were coming to the fair without any place to stay ensured that his activities went unnoticed.

One of those who remained alive was Georgiana Yorke, who became Holmes’ third wife in January 1894. She believed Holmes to be a very wealthy man, with property in Texas and Europe. Indeed, he appeared to be quite prosperous. However, his debts had begun to catch up with him.

After having been confronted by his creditors, he came up with a scheme which involved a man named Benjamin Pietzel. As a carpenter, Pietzel had worked on the Castle. Exactly how much he knew of Holmes’ activities is a matter of some debate. What is certain is that Pietzel agreed to fake his own death in order to collect a large insurance claim. In the end, Holmes simply killed the man and kept all the money for himself. He then made off with three of Pietzel’s children.

On 17 November 1894, having been on the road for nearly two years, Holmes was arrested in Boston. Initially, he was suspected of nothing more than fraud. However, an insurance agent’s diligence in attempting to track down the three Pietzel children revealed that they had been killed in the cities of Indianapolis and Toronto. This news encouraged the police in Chicago to investigate Holmes’ Castle. On 20 July 1895, all was revealed. The police spent a month investigating what some now called ‘the Murder Castle’ before, on 19 August, it was consumed by a fire of mysterious origin.

Exactly how many poor souls Holmes murdered is a mystery. The number has typically been estimated as being between 20 and 100. The authorities put the murder count at 27, committed in Chicago, Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Toronto. The police in Chicago noted that many of the bodies in the basement of the Castle had been dissected and burnt to such an extent that it was difficult to determine precisely how many bodies it contained. At his trial, Holmes confessed to 27 murders.

Holmes was led to the gallows on the morning of 7 May 1896. As he watched the preparations for his hanging, he is reported to have said, ‘Take your time; don’t bungle it.’ However, despite the hangman’s care, Holmes died an agonizing death. For ten minutes after the trapdoor was sprung, his body twitched. He was officially pronounced dead after he had been hanging for 15 minutes.

A NEW CENTURY OF VIOLENCE

The early part of the 20th century saw war fought on a previously unimaginable scale in the air and in trenches. Chemical warfare was employed, civilians became targets, and stories of horrific atrocities were spread as propaganda. By the end of the fighting, more than nine million civilians and soldiers had been killed. Perhaps it was contagious. As if a reflection of the war, incidents of psychopathic killing rapidly increased
.

BÉLA KISS

Béla Kiss was one of the most loved and respected men in the small Hungarian town of Cinkota. When he left to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, many townsfolk prayed for his safe return.

Kiss had lived in Cinkota, a part of present-day Budapest, since 1900. A handsome blue-eyed, blond-haired 23-year-old, married to a beautiful woman named Marie, his arrival in the town had not gone unnoticed. Kiss and his wife rented a house on the outskirts of town, from which he practised as a tinsmith. He’d taught himself the trade and, in fact, had had no formal schooling whatsoever. The impressive and expansive knowledge he possessed in the areas of art, literature, history and astronomy was the result of years of independent study. Among the inhabitants of Cinkota, he was considered a highly educated young man. Kiss was also known for his generosity; though dedicated and hard-working, he was famous locally for the wonderful parties he would hold at the local hotel.

Town gossips, however, became aware that things weren’t quite as they appeared. Marie had begun having an affair with an artist. In 1912, Kiss announced that she had run off with her lover. Overnight, Kiss was transformed from jilted husband to the most desirable bachelor in town.

Kiss hired one Mrs Jakubec, a housekeeper, to care for his home while he focused on his trade. He also entered into correspondences with several young women. It was not long before a number of single, attractive women began visiting his Cinkota home. This steady parade prompted gossip of a different sort. As each woman passed through town on the way to the tinsmith’s home, there was speculation as to whether this might be the next Mrs Kiss. It seemed, however, that Kiss was having no luck in finding a suitable mate – most women were seen in his company only once. Mrs Jakubec would later say that she had never had the opportunity to know any of her employer’s visitors.

By the latter half of 1914, when Kiss left to serve in the First World War, no replacement for the unfaithful Marie had been found.

Mrs Jakubec was left alone in the house, and yet neither she nor the townsfolk heard anything from Kiss. As the war progressed, rumours began to circulate that the popular figure had been taken as a prisoner of war. There was some speculation that Kiss had been killed in some unnamed battle. By the end of the second year, the lease had lapsed on the house Kiss had begun renting some 16 years before.

It was at this point that a rather gruesome discovery was made – one that transformed Kiss from a thoroughly respected citizen of Cinkota into the town’s greatest monster. Although there are two very different accounts of the events leading up to Kiss’s unmasking, both involve six sealed metal drums that he had lined up outside his home. One story relies on the memory of something Kiss had supposedly told a town constable. When asked, in the early months of 1914, what the mysterious metal drums contained, the tinsmith revealed that he was hoarding petrol in the anticipation that war would soon be declared. In this version, the constable, thinking the fuel would be of use in the fighting, contacted the military, who, in turn, prised open the drums.

The other story has it that Kiss’s landlord came upon the drums while preparing to rent out the property. Curious as to their contents, he punctured one of the drums and was met with a nauseating smell. Kiss’s neighbour, a chemist, was convinced that the scent was that of rotting human flesh. According to this version, it was the authorities who, under Charles Nagy, the chief detective of the Budapest police, opened the drums.

Whatever the chain of events, both led to the same horrible discovery: each drum contained the corpse of a naked young woman. A search of the property Kiss had rented revealed a further 18 bodies, including that of the adulterous Marie Kiss. All 24 victims had been preserved in wood alcohol, which aided greatly in identification.

Nagy immediately informed the military, advising that Kiss be arrested. Mrs Jakubec, who had protested so strongly against the drums being opened, was detained. Suspicion of the housekeeper deepened when it was discovered that she was the main beneficiary in Kiss’s will. Proclaiming her innocence, Mrs Jakubec led police to a room her employer had forbidden her to enter. It was no chamber of horrors – no further bodies were found, as some had expected. Indeed, Kiss’s forbidden room, containing a few bookcases, a large desk and a chair, at first looked quite innocent. However, its sinister purpose was quickly revealed.

The bookcases were filled with volumes on the subjects of strangulation and poisons. The desk held correspondence with 74 women, including letters going back as far as 13 years. There were marriage proposals, love letters and photographs. Through notices he’d placed in the personal columns of various newspapers, Kiss had been swindling women who were seeking husbands.

The tinsmith had selected his victims with great care. Each victim met two criteria: an abundance of wealth and an absence of relatives. In other words, he desired moneyed women who would not be missed if they happened to disappear.

Among his victims was Katerine Varga, a very wealthy young widow who sold a thriving dressmaking business in order to be with her prospective husband in Cinkota.

The mother of another young woman, Margaret Toth, had given Kiss money after he had promised to marry her daughter. On a subsequent visit to Cinkota, the fiancé forced the young Miss Toth to write to her mother with the news that she was running off to the United States. Evidence indicates that Kiss then strangled the young woman and posted the letter.

Not all of Kiss’s victims had been killed. It seemed that the metal drums and burial on the Cinkota property represented a fate that befell only women who had become troublesome. Indeed, records indicated that two of Kiss’s victims, Julianne Paschek and Elizabeth Komeromi, had initiated separate court actions after he had taken their money under false pretences. The bodies of both complainants were found buried close to his home.

On 4 October 1916, as Nagy’s investigation was set to enter the third month, the detective received word from a Serbian hospital that in 1915 Kiss had succumbed to typhoid. Shortly after, a second message arrived from Serbia, stating that Kiss was alive, recuperating in the very same institution. Nagy travelled immediately to the hospital, arriving to find a corpse in Kiss’s bed – the body of a dead soldier who was quite obviously not the murderer. Nagy was certain that Kiss had somehow been tipped off and had hoped to throw off the police by placing a dead man in his bed.

While the tinsmith may not have been successful in fooling the chief detective of Budapest, his escape was effective. The trail was cold, and was warmed only occasionally by rumour and speculation. In 1919, he was supposedly spotted in Budapest. The following year, it was reported that he was serving under the alias ‘Hoffman’ in the French Foreign Legion.

One unconfirmed report was that he was in a Romanian prison, serving time on a charge of burglary; another had it that Kiss had died in Turkey of yellow fever.

The most intriguing of all these sightings occurred in 1932 when a New York Police Department homicide detective named Henry Oswald thought he saw Kiss exiting the Times Square subway station. Known as ‘Camera Eye’, owing to his flawless memory for faces, Oswald followed the man he thought was Kiss, but lost him in the crowd. He never saw the man again.

THE AXEMAN OF NEW ORLEANS

On the evening of 19 March 1919, residents of New Orleans sat in bars and restaurants, listening to live bands, confident that the music being played, jazz, was protecting them from violent murder. It was just one of many evenings made bizarre by the Axeman of New Orleans, a serial killer who, literally and figuratively, struck randomly in Louisiana’s largest city in the early part of the 20th century.

The mystery of the Axeman of New Orleans begins in two modest flats that once stood at the back of a grocery store at the corner of Upperline and Magnolia streets. In one flat lived Andrew Maggio, a barber, and his brother Jake. The other served as home to a third brother, Joseph, and Catherine, his wife. It was, in fact, Joseph and Catherine’s grocery store and bar that separated the flats from the street. In the early hours of 23 May 1918, Jake was awoken by a sound, a sort of groaning, coming from Joseph and Catherine’s apartment. At first, he tried to get the couple’s attention by knocking on the wall. There was no response. He woke Andrew and together the two brothers went over to the adjacent flat.

They immediately came upon the sign of a break-in: a wooden panel that had been chiselled out of the kitchen door. Entering the apartment by the same point as the intruder, the pair rushed to the bedroom. There, they came upon Catherine. Lying across the bed, her skull was caved in, and her throat was so deeply cut that she was very nearly decapitated. Beneath their sister-in-law, bathed in her blood, lay their brother Joseph. He, too, had been attacked. His head was cut open in several places, yet the grocer was still alive. When he saw his brothers, Joseph attempted to stand, but found he could not. He died before an ambulance could be summoned.

After the authorities arrived, a pile of men’s clothing was discovered on the bathroom floor. A bloody straight razor and an axe were also discovered. The coroner had no doubt that both had been used in killing the couple. The motive for the crime was less clear. Although the Maggios’ safe was found to be open and empty, money placed in other locations in the flat, including a sum discovered beneath Joseph’s pillow, was left behind.

The horrific scene ensured that the murders of Joseph and Catherine Maggio were front-page news. Public interest was further aroused when it was learned that the razor used in the crime belonged to Andrew Maggio.

He claimed he had taken it home from his barber shop on the very evening of the murders in order to repair a small nick in the blade. He was arrested, but released for lack of evidence. The axe, it was determined, had belonged to the murdered couple.

It was during Andrew’s brief time in custody that the case took the first of what would be a number of peculiar turns. Two detectives came across a message scrawled in chalk on the pavement less than a block from where the couple had been murdered. It read: ‘Mrs Maggio will sit up tonight just like Mrs Toney.’

Rumours began to circulate that the Maggio murder had been committed by the same hand that had killed a number of New Orleans grocers six years earlier. Some said it was the work of the Mafia and that ‘Mrs Toney’ was a reference to the wife of Tony Schiambra. In 1911, both he and his wife had been killed by a murderer who had used an axe.

Two weeks after the Maggio murders, baker John Zanca stumbled over a scene not at all dissimilar to that discovered by the bereaved brothers. Early on the morning of 6 June, Zanca arrived with his regular delivery of fresh bread at Louis Besumer’s grocery store and was surprised to find the storefront dark. Looking through the window, he saw no sign of life, and so walked around the building and knocked on the side door. It was opened almost immediately by Besumer. His face was covered in blood. Besumer’s mistress, Anna Lowe, was lying in their bed, unable to move. They had both been attacked with an axe. Despite primitive medical treatment, the grocer managed to survive. His mistress was not so lucky. After clinging to life for a further two months, she died on 5 August, but not before claiming that it was Besumer who had attacked her. The grocer was arrested and, after a brief trial, found not guilty.

That very same day, shortly after midnight, the next attack occurred. The victim was a Mrs Edward Schneider, who awoke to find a dark figure standing over her bed. The intruder attacked her with an axe, hitting her several times in the face. Discovered by her husband, Mrs Schneider not only survived, but three weeks later gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

A pattern, it seemed, had been established. A killer, wielding an axe, was attacking people as they slept. He usually gained access to his victims by chiselling out door panels.

On 10 August, an elderly man by the name of Joseph Romano was killed. His niece, Pauline Bruno, reported seeing a dark figure in the house. He turned and fled her room after she had let out a scream.

For a time, it almost seemed as if Pauline Bruno’s scream had scared off the killer completely. Then, seven months later, in the early hours of 10 March 1919, the Axeman of New Orleans struck again. As in the past, the victims, grocers Charles and Rosie Cortimiglia, and their 2-year-old daughter Mary, were attacked as they slept. Mary, asleep in her mother’s arms, died instantly from a single blow to the back of the head. Charles struggled with the attacker, but was felled by several blows to the torso. Rosie, too, received wounds, primarily to the head.

Three days later, the editor of the
Times-Picayune
received a letter from someone who signed himself ‘The Axeman’. Describing himself as ‘a spirit and a fell demon from the hottest hell’, the correspondent announced that he would strike again ‘at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night’, before offering a magnanimous gesture:

‘I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of those people who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.’

That Tuesday the bars and restaurants of New Orleans were filled with patrons seeking safety from the self-described ‘fell demon’. Even venues not at all known for playing jazz hired musicians for the night. There were no victims that evening.