A Criminal History of Mankind (100 page)

The case held the newspaper headlines for more than two years; yet anyone who was in America during that time (as I was) noted a kind of public apathy, a sense of
déjá-vu
. It seemed an oddly out-of-date sort of affair, as if it had been left over from the era of Vietnam protest a decade earlier. By the time Patty Hearst was captured, the North Vietnamese had overrun the south, and vast numbers of Vietnamese took to the sea in boats in an attempt to escape the communist regime. Within months of the communist takeover of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in April 1975, 150,000 people had fled, many in small boats that disappeared. During the next four years, thousands continued to leave, and the sheer scale of the tragedy slowly became clear. Thousands of children were sent on ahead by parents who hoped to join them later, and ended in refugee camps in South-east Asia. As the refugees flooded in, Thailand and Malaysia - the nearest non-communist countries - began turning the boats back to sea. Thai fishermen became pirates and began intercepting the boats and slaughtering the refugees; survivors told stories of rapes, mutilations, children thrown overboard. Yet the detestation of the communist regime was so great that even four years later, in 1979, another 140,000 fled. Although few of the famous names of the Vietnam protest movement - such as Norman Mailer and Jane Fonda - had the grace to admit that they had been wrong and the US government right about the intentions of the North Vietnamese, the facts spoke for themselves. By the late 1970s, most of the prominent leftist rebels of the 1960s had drifted into respectability, or at least ceased to make public statements about the ‘repressive society’ that had nurtured them.

By 1980, left-wing terrorism was diminishing in Europe and America, to be replaced to a disturbing extent by right-wing terrorism. In October 1980, a judge indicted eight right-wing terrorists for the bombing of a passenger train in 1974, when twelve people were killed; within hours, an enormous bomb had exploded at the Bologna railway station, killing seventy-nine and injuring more than 160. On 26 September 1980, a bomb in a dustbin exploded outside the Munich Oktoberfest as crowds were streaming from the exit, killing thirteen and injuring more than 200; a young neo-Nazi, who died in the blast, was believed to be responsible. It was an appalling end to the worst decade of terrorist violence in modern history.

The 1970s also set new standards of viciousness in ordinary criminal violence. The worst crimes of the 1970s were characterised by a brutality, an indifference to human life and suffering that had no parallel in the criminal records of earlier centuries.

In 1971, Juan Corona, a Mexican farmer, surpassed all previous American records for mass murder. A Japanese farmer near Yuba City, California, discovered a grave on his land; it proved to contain the corpse of a male vagrant who had been sexually violated. Further searches in the area uncovered another twenty-four bodies; one of them had in his pocket a receipt signed ‘Juan V. Corona’. Most victims were vagrants or migratory workers; the motive was apparently sexual. Corona’s brother, a known homosexual, fled back to Mexico, and Corona’s lawyers later alleged that he was the real killer. But on the evidence of a bloody machete found in Corona’s home, and a ledger containing some of the names of victims, Corona was sentenced to twenty-five consecutive life terms.

In June 1972, following a supermarket robbery in Santa Barbara, California, three members of a family named McCrary were arrested: the father, Sherman, forty-seven, his wife Carolyn, and their nineteen-year-old son Danny. Later, their daughter Ginger was arrested, together with her husband Carl Taylor. It emerged that the family had drifted across the country from Texas, leaving behind a trail of robbed grocery stores and raped shop assistants. The McCrarys had made a habit of stopping by small shops or drive-in groceries in the evening, robbing the till and, if the shop assistant was attractive, taking her along with them. She was then raped by the three men and shot. The family are believed to have committed more than twenty murders. The two womenfolk apparently made no objection, regarding these rapes as the natural ‘perks’ of males who risk their lives by robbery. Carolyn McCrary commented: ‘It may sound crazy, but I love my husband very much.’

On 8 August 1973, a caller to the Pasadena police department, Texas, explained that he had just killed a man. The police went to the home of thirty-four-year-old Dean Corll and found him lying dead in the hallway, with six bullets in his body. Seventeen-year-old Wayne Henley told them that he had murdered Corll in self-defence. Henley had brought a fifteen-year-old girl to a glue-sniffing party. They passed out, and when they woke up found themselves tied up. Henley had ‘sweet-talked’ Corll into letting him go, promising that he would rape and kill the girl while Corll, a homosexual, raped and killed another teenage boy who was present. Henley had then grabbed a gun with which Corll had been threatening him, and killed Corll.

Under interrogation, Henley admitted that he had procured boys for Corll, and that Corll had been systematically raping, torturing and murdering them. The boys were chained to a plywood board, and sometimes violated for days before being killed. Henley led the police to a boatshed in south-west Houston, and they began digging. Seventeen corpses, wrapped in plastic bags, were uncovered. Henley led the police to other sites where bodies were found; the final total seemed to be thirty-one. Boys had been disappearing from the Heights area of Houston for three years. Another youth, David Brooks, was also implicated, and he and Henley were both sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in the murders. Corll, it emerged, was a morbidly over-sensitive mother’s boy who had never really grown up - one recent photograph showed him holding a cuddly toy. Corll was clearly yet another example of Freud’s dictum that if a child had the power, it would destroy the world.

In April 1973, twenty-five-year-old Ed Kemper - six foot nine inches tall - crept into his mother’s bedroom and killed her with a hammer; the following day he killed her friend Sara Hallett. Then he drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and rang the Santa Cruz police department to confess. In custody, Kemper confessed to six horrific sex murders, all with a strong necrophiliac element. In 1963, at the age of fourteen, Kemper had murdered his grandfather and grandmother, with whom he was living, and spent five years in mental hospitals. In 1972, he picked up two female hitchhikers, threatened them with a gun, and murdered them both; he later dissected the bodies, cutting off the heads. Kemper’s usual method was to take the bodies back to his mother’s house - she worked in a hospital - and rape and dissect them there; he particularly enjoyed having sex with a headless body. The bodies were later dumped over cliffs or left in remote mountain areas. Kemper was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Another psychopathic mass killer, Herb Mullin, was operating in California at the same time as Kemper. As a teenager, Mullin had been voted by his class ‘most likely to succeed’, but by the time he was twenty-one - in 1969 - he was showing signs of mental abnormality. In October 1972, driving along a mountain highway, Mullin passed an old tramp, and stopped to ask the man to take a look at the engine; as the man bent over, Mullin killed him with a baseball bat, leaving the corpse by the roadside. Two weeks later he picked up a pretty college student, stabbed her with a hunting knife, and tore out her intestines. In November 1972 he went into a church and stabbed the priest to death. On 25 January 1973, he committed five murders in one night, killing a friend and his wife, then murdering a woman and her two children who lived in a nearby log cabin. In the Santa Cruz State Park he killed four teenage boys in a tent with a revolver. On 13 February 1973, he was driving to his parents’ home when a voice in his head told him to stop and kill an old man who was working in his front garden. A neighbour heard the shot, and rang the police, who picked up Mullin within a few blocks. At his trial, Mullin explained that he was convinced that murders averted natural disasters - such as another San Francisco earthquake. But he was found to be sane and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In May 1974, a burglar named Paul John Knowles came out of prison in Florida and flew to San Francisco to join a woman who had become his ‘pen pal’ in prison, and who had agreed to marry him. At close quarters, she found him rather frightening and, after four days, told him she had changed her mind. That night, according to Knowles’s later confession, he went on the streets of San Francisco and killed three people at random. After that, he flew back to Jacksonville, Florida, and went on a rampage of murder and rape that lasted four months and claimed nineteen lives. In Jacksonville he suffocated a woman in the course of a burglary; when two small girls, aged seven and eleven, recognised him, he forced them into his car and killed them both, leaving their bodies in a swamp. He broke into a house in Atlantic Beach and strangled a forty-nine-year-old woman, then murdered and raped a female hitchhiker and strangled another woman in front of her three-year-old son. Then, driving around the country in a stolen car, he continued to commit murders and rapes at random. In Miami, he called on his lawyer and made a tape confessing in detail to fourteen murders (as well as the three in San Francisco), then drove on again. An attractive female journalist named Sandy Fawkes met Knowles in Atlanta, and spent several days with him without suspecting that he was a mass murderer; he made no attempt to harm her. He was finally arrested after a police chase in which he took two hostages and executed them both. The day after his capture, he was killed by an FBI agent when on his way to a maximum security jail when he - allegedly - tried to grab the sheriffs gun.

In April 1974, two blacks, Dale Pierre, twenty, and his friend William Andrews, robbed a Hi-Fi store in Ogden, Utah. The assistants, twenty-year-old Stan Walker and nineteen-year-old Michelle Ansley, were tied up. Cortney Naisbitt, a sixteen-year-old youth, walked into the shop and was tied up. So, later, were Stan Walker’s father and Cortney Naisbitt’s mother Carol, who came looking for them. The bandits then forced everyone to drink a caustic cleaning fluid, which burned their mouths and throats. Then they were shot. The girl was raped before being shot. One of the bandits pushed a ballpoint pen into the ear of Mr Walker and kicked it into his head. Carol Naisbitt died after being admitted to hospital, but Cortney survived; after many operations, he was able to resume normal life, although badly impaired. The two killers were careless, and were quickly arrested. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.

In a book about the case,
Victim, The Other Side of Murder
by Gary Kinder (1982), one interesting point emerges. The killers got the idea of making the victims drink cleaning fluid from a Clint Eastwood film called
Magnum Force
, in which a prostitute dies within seconds of being forced to drink cleaning fluid by her pimp; Pierre obviously expected the victims to die immediately.
Magnum Force
is one of Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ films about a San Francisco cop who, sick of the way that a modern criminal can get away with murder, shoots to kill. Like the Bologna and Oktoberfest bombings, the Ogden case seems to show that a violent reaction against violence can be counter-productive.

In the summer of 1974, three teenage delinquents known as the ‘nice boys’ gang committed a series of robberies, rapes and murders in Vienna. The leader, Manfred Truber, was seventeen. In late June they kicked to death an elderly man and kicked a seventy-year-old woman unconscious, ripping off her underwear. In July, a twenty-year-old girl was dragged into bushes and raped by all three, being made to sit astride them and move up and down. A Yugoslav construction worker was stabbed twenty-seven times and his nose almost severed from his face. In August, another girl was raped in the park, and then tortured and humiliated for over an hour. On 30 August a sixty-eight-year-old woman was infuriated when one of the boys punched her on the side of the head, and fought back with her handbag. Police arrived and arrested all three. Their score had totalled two murders, two rapes and twenty-two robberies with violence. Under Austrian law, it was possible to pass only short sentences on the gang.

On 2 July 1976, four-year-old Marion Ketter was playing with friends when a mild-looking elderly man persuaded her to go away with him. A few hours later, police searching a nearby block of flats found that a lavatory was blocked up with a child’s intestines. In a bubbling saucepan on the stove of a lavatory attendant, Joachim Kroll, the police found the child’s hand boiling with carrots and potatoes; the rest of her, wrapped in plastic bags, was in the deep freeze. Kroll admitted that he had been committing rape murders since 1955, and that in most cases he had taken slices of flesh from the victims’ buttocks or thighs and later eaten them. The total number of victims is unknown, but Kroll could recollect fourteen. He seemed to have no appreciation of the seriousness of his crimes, and confidently expected to be allowed home after medical treatment.

A case with overtones of a James Bond thriller occurred in California in August 1976. The school bus of Chowchilla, Madera County, was held up by three men, who forced twenty-six children and the bus driver into two vans. They were then driven a hundred miles or so and, in the early hours of the morning, ordered to climb down a shaft in the ground. It led to a large underground room – in fact, a buried truck-trailer. They were given water and potato chips, and left.

When the sun rose, the van became overpoweringly hot. By standing on a pile of mattresses, the driver succeeded in reaching the steel plate overhead, but it refused to budge. Hours later, they succeeded in levering it aside, only to discover that the top of the shaft had been sealed with boards that were apparently immovable. Eventually, in the late afternoon, they succeeded in digging past the boards, and were able to climb out into the blazing heat of a California afternoon. A man working in a nearby gravel pit stared at them in amazement; then, when they explained who they were, rushed off to phone the sheriff. Frantic parents, convinced that they would never see their children again, heard of the escape over the television.