Killer Couples (11 page)

On 6 June 2001, Daniel and Manuela were married. The bride had dyed the front of her hair a vivid pink and tied it back in a high ponytail to reveal the shaved sides of her head. At the back, the rest of her long black hair hung darkly over her shoulders, almost obscuring the outsized tattoos on her biceps. Her eyebrows had been painted into thin, mean lines that began at the bridge of her nose and travelled up her forehead, ending high at each temple. In addition, her eyes were heavily ringed
with dark make-up and several large silver rings hung from her ears, as well as from the piercing in her nose and eyebrow.

No traditional wedding dress for Manuela. Instead, she wore a black PVC bondage-style corset cut low to show off the upside-down crucifix around her neck.

Her groom was also dressed entirely in black. His head was similarly shaved at the sides, with a longer, slicked-back top section. Daniel’s forehead was also adorned with two decorative vertical lines and a heavy devil’s horns pendant hung about his neck.

This was literally a marriage made in Hell.

While most newlyweds throw themselves into planning for their first home, perhaps their future children, Daniel Ruda and his new bride had just one topic of conversation: their human sacrifice. Such was the level of the couple’s self-delusion by this point that their discussions never touched on the ‘why’, only the ‘who’, the ‘where’, the ‘how’. As far as they were concerned, whoever they chose was privileged beyond belief, for they would get to live with Satan. It wasn’t a question of who deserved to die, but who deserved to live with the Devil, their lord.

Frank Hackert, known to most as ‘Hacki’, was an unlikely friend for the increasingly ostracised Rudas. A co-worker of Daniel’s at the auto-parts centre, the 33-year-old was everything they weren’t – warm, entertaining, popular, normal even… While they listened to the impenetrable wails of black metal music, his great love was the Beatles.

‘Why do you mix with those weirdos?’ people would ask him,
as he prepared to meet Daniel and Manuela for a drink or something to eat.

‘I dunno. They’re OK really,’ he’d shrug.

The truth was that Frank was the kind of person who liked to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sure, Daniel and his wife were eccentric, but since when was being different a crime? He wouldn’t have liked to spend all his spare time hanging out with them, but the odd evening didn’t hurt. Didn’t it take all sorts to make the world an interesting place?

He would pay very dearly for his magnanimity.

‘He’s perfect,’ Manuela told her husband approvingly. ‘He’s always so funny – he’ll be the perfect court jester for Satan.’

At the beginning of July 2001, Frank was pleased to be invited to a drinks party round at the Rudas’ flat. He was curious to know who else would be there – Manuela and Daniel kept such strange company. At the very least the evening would not be boring. The date of the party was 6 July. The Rudas would pick Frank up and bring him to the apartment.

If Frank was surprised to find himself the only guest, he didn’t show it. Daniel and Manuela were so flaky perhaps they’d forgotten to invite anyone else, or just decided to abandon the whole party idea. But, as the minutes wore on, he became increasingly uneasy.

You wouldn’t expect Daniel and Manuela to live in an ordinary place, but this apartment was seriously weird. The skulls, the spooky lighting, the scalpels all over the place, not to
mention the banner reading ‘When Satan Lives’ – all of it was deeply unnerving. And then there was the behaviour of the couple themselves. Always highly strung, tonight the pair seemed particularly manic, exchanging glances as if they were both in on some fantastic, thrilling secret. Frank shivered slightly. There was something really awry here tonight, he just couldn’t put it into words.

Mercifully, he would never have to.

As he sat on the sofa in the Rudas’ living room, Daniel excused himself from the room. When he returned, he had a hammer in his hand and he immediately he launched a frenzied attack on his guest, smashing him brutally about the head.

Manuela was beside herself with excitement. She’d known from the minute they got back into the flat that they weren’t alone, that a force field of other entities was there in the apartment with them. When Daniel had come back into the room with the hammer, she could have sworn she’d seen his eyes glowing. He really was Satan’s messenger, just as he’d told her.

Frank staggered to his feet, clutching his bleeding face. Manuela knew she had to do something. She had to demonstrate her devotion to Satan, to prove herself worthy of admittance to his inner sanctum. Spotting a knife on the windowsill, she leapt up to get it, just as a voice inside her head commanded: ‘Stab him in the heart!’ Manuela didn’t need telling twice. Snatching up the knife, she plunged it into Hacki’s body again and again and again.

Frank Hackert, the man whose only crime had been to be too
open-minded and too entertaining, was stabbed a total of
sixty-six
times. It wasn’t just a knife that was used, but other sharp instruments such as carpet cutters and a machete. Manuela and Daniel had talked many times of being ‘possessed’ by the Devil himself. Now there was no doubt about it. They felt euphoric, super-human. When they grew exhausted from stabbing Hacki, they used a scalpel to carve a pentagram into his chest. Now he belonged to Satan. Where the blood flowed freely, they collected it in a bowl and each drank deeply from it. The deed was done – they were on their way.

The original plan had been for the Rudas to take their own lives immediately after the murder. They had always assumed that the killing of Hacki would be their entrance fee to the joys of Hell. Once they’d made their sacrifice, the gates would magically open to them and they’d take up their rightful places with the Devil, their master. And yet, on 6 July 2001, with the first part of the plan in place, the second failed to materialise.

After the murder, still high on the adrenaline and the conviction of being conduits for some greater power, the Rudas retired to their bedroom, where they had sex on top of the oak coffin, convinced this would be their last earthly physical encounter. Afterwards, the energy that had driven them forward all evening suddenly seemed to desert them, however.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Manuela, urgently, eyeing the blood spatters on the wall and the scalpel still sticking out of the congealing wounds on the grotesquely mutilated body.

Daniel shrugged miserably. Just minutes before, the certainty of imminent immortality had surged through him, creating in him a life force, an invincible superhuman energy. Now he felt sated, abandoned and defeated.

They were waiting for a sign from the Devil, but there was nothing, just the overpowering scent of incense, hanging leadenly in the blood-heavy air.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Daniel muttered.

Carelessly cramming their belongings in bags, the couple fled to their car. They didn’t know where they were going or what they were going to do. All they knew was that they had to get away from the flat while they awaited their next instructions.

So began a bizarre impromptu road trip that saw the Rudas criss-crossing Germany, making pilgrimages to places with links to the world of Satanism they’d so whole-heartedly embraced. Sonderhausen, Apold and Jena were all towns connected with a crime, infamous in Germany, known as The Case of Satan’s Children. In 1993, three schoolboys who lived near Jena and were members of the same nationalistic black metal band, Absurd, had been found guilty of the supposedly black-magic inspired killing of one of their classmates. On his release, one of the youths – Hendrik Möbus – had settled in Sondershausen, where his public neo-Nazi leanings had soon seen him back behind bars. His brother, who’d taken his place in the band, ran a black metal label in Apold. For the impressionable Rudas, these towns therefore held an almost mystical significance.

Picture Manuela and Daniel in the week following the murder as they aimlessly drifted around Germany, looking vainly for connections to the ‘master’ who had deserted them. They’d planned this moment for so long, convinced a ritualistic killing would become their passport to Hell, only to find themselves cast adrift and abandoned, all sense of purpose faded to nothing.

Manuela, in particular, was grief-stricken. She’d told herself that when they gave Satan their gift of Hacki’s soul, she’d be turned into a vampire. Freed from the torture of everyday life among ordinary people with their drab mediocrity and uncomprehending stares, she’d commit herself to Satan’s service and fully become a creature of the night.

On the day of the murder, still sure of their imminent acceptance to Satan’s inner circle, the couple had written their farewell letters. It had all seemed so simple then – they’d carry out the killing, then slash their own wrists, or get hold of a gun, or smash their car headlong into an oncoming truck. But then, whatever power sustained them through their gruesome frenzied crime left just as suddenly as it had arrived. Days later, they were still driving pointlessly around, waiting to be shown what to do.

In the end it would be the laws of man, rather than those of the Devil, that would dictate the couple’s next move.

Receiving what appeared to be a suicide letter from her daughter, Manuela’s mother panicked. ‘I am not of this world,’ her daughter had written, in typical over-blown grandiose style. ‘I must liberate my soul from the mortal flesh.’

Manuela’s mother had long ago stopped trying to understand the girl whose every move for the past decade seemed designed to shock and horrify, but that didn’t mean she didn’t still care about her and worry about what happened to her.

On 9 July, with a sense of deep foreboding, Manuela’s mother approached the police and accompanied them to the Rudas’ apartment in Witten. The shutters were closed, and the lights didn’t work, but it was immediately obvious from the dark blood spatters on the walls and the stench of decay that hung in the putrid, festering air that something terrible had taken place inside.

It didn’t take long to find the decomposing body of Frank Hackert – the man who’d loved the Beatles, who’d refused to see bad in anyone – the scalpel still lodged deep in his flesh. Nearby was a handwritten list of fifteen names of potential future victims.

For the next few days, the country was on alert looking for the Rudas. With their trademark black clothes and outrageous hair and make-up, they weren’t hard to find.

On 12 July, a motorist saw the couple at a petrol station near Jena in Eastern Germany. They were arrested at a police roadblock a short time later. The Devil had failed to claim his own.

The Rudas’ trial in Bochum in January 2002 was one of the most sensational in recent German history. For a month, the flamboyant couple treated the courtroom like their own personal stage, striking angry poses for cameras and making devil’s horn signals to the public and in particular to the family of Frank Hackert, who attended the trial in an attempt to gain
some kind of understanding of the people who could murder a man they claimed to like.

From the start, the Rudas, still supremely convinced of their own uniqueness and superiority, tried to shape the proceedings to fit their own warped viewpoint. Manuela asked for the windows in the court to be blacked out. After so many years of only going out at night-time, the light hurt her eyes, her lawyer protested. Though her request was turned down, she was allowed to wear dark glasses, the black of the lenses contrasting with the chalky white of her skin.

The couple both openly mocked the parents of their victim, staring pointedly at them, occasionally flicking out their tongues to lick their lips and opening their eyes wide in manic hilarity.

Despite the gruesome evidence against them and the horrific photos produced in the courtroom showing the victim’s injuries, which led the prosecutor to exclaim, ‘I have never, ever, seen such a picture of cruelty and depravity!’, Manuela and Daniel refused to show one iota of remorse.

‘The Devil made us do it,’ was their defence.

According to them, the whole trial was a farce as there was simply no case to answer. It was Satan who’d carried out the murder, not them; all they’d done was to act as instruments of his will. They were just obeying orders, they maintained.

‘If I kill a person with my car and half his bloody head is left on my bumper, it’s not the car that goes to jail,’ Daniel explained to a shocked courtroom. ‘It’s the driver who is evil. I have nothing to repent because I did nothing.’

The couple’s lawyers were hoping such statements would have their clients declared mentally unfit and the case would be thrown out of court, but they were to be disappointed.

On 31 January 2002, Daniel and Manuela Ruda were found guilty of a ‘terrible crime’ and sentenced to fifteen and thirteen years respectively, to be served in a secure psychiatric unit.

Before the couple, smiling to the last, indulged in a passionate goodbye kiss for the benefit of the cameras, the judge pronounced them ‘humans, not monsters’.

‘This case was not about Satanism, but about a crime committed by two people with severe disorders,’ said Judge Arno Kersting-Tombroke. ‘Nothing mystical or cult-like happened here, just simple, base murder.’

‘
I
f they think I was here on my own, they’ll fit me up. You know what’s happened to me in the past.’ Ian’s voice held that familiar note of plaintive self-pity, but there was something else mixed in this time: an edge of panic, even fear.

Sitting in her mum’s house in Grimsby, Maxine Carr wasn’t surprised that her fiancé was nervous. Four years before he’d been accused of raping a woman and spent time in prison, nearly having a nervous breakdown. He’d only been released when CCTV footage had shown that he’d been somewhere else completely at the time, but he’d never forgotten it. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? And now, with these two young girls going missing and a National Missing Persons hunt underway, he’d be the first one under suspicion if police knew he’d been home alone when the pair came past, asking about her.

‘You should never have gone anyway,’ he snivelled.

That was more like him. Finding a way to turn it round to be her fault, her responsibility. Just because she’d gone back to Grimsby for the weekend, leaving him alone.

But hearing the tearful appeal in his voice, she wavered. Maxine never could resist Ian when he was like this – compliant, dependent, reaching out for her reassurance, needing her love. He had been falsely accused last time, and the whole thing had caused him to have a nervous breakdown. And besides, she acknowledged guiltily, she had been a bit flirtatious last night when she was out, as he’d predicted she would be in that row they’d had on the phone just before she went.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll sort itself out,’ she relented, her voice softening.

It wasn’t as if she wasn’t concerned about the two 10-
year-olds
– of course she was. She’d helped with their class at school, for goodness’ sake, and she’d even promised them they could be her bridesmaids. But she was still hopeful they’d turn up soon enough and she didn’t want Ian getting into trouble in the meantime. They’d only just settled into new jobs and got their new house the way they wanted it. She didn’t want anything casting a shadow over their lives in Soham, just when things were starting to go so well.

By the time Ian came to pick her up from her mum’s the following morning, she’d come to a decision. ‘All right, you can tell them I was at home in the bath when the girls came past,’ Maxine agreed.

She usually did end up agreeing with Ian. It was the only way to ensure any degree of domestic peace; he simply couldn’t stand it if you tried to argue with him. Anyway, she told herself hopefully, she was sure it would all turn out to be nothing. Sensible girls like Holly and Jessica didn’t come to any great harm, not in a quiet respectable place like Soham. They’d be back, with some explanation no one had thought of yet. And if they didn’t come back, a possibility she didn’t even want to think about, it meant someone else had got to them after Ian had seen them off.

‘It must be awful for you, knowing you were the last one to see them,’ she sympathised, remembering again how he’d gone to pieces during that last run-in with the police. ‘I know the girls walked away from our place alive and well. That’s all that matters,’ he replied.

Maxine Carr never killed anyone. And although Ian Huntley would later insist otherwise, it seems pretty certain that she had no inkling that her fiancé might have killed anyone either. But that casual decision to lie for her man, whether prompted by loyalty, fear or just a desire for an easy life, would cost the Cambridgeshire police nearly two weeks in wasted time and resources. It would cause the families of the two missing girls untold extra stress and grief, as they lingered in that agonising limbo between hope and despair. And it would cost Maxine Carr everything.

A Saturday night out in Hollywoods nightclub in Grimsby isn’t an obvious venue for meeting the love of your life. Although the
town itself, once the biggest fishing port in Europe, is far from the dreary backwater its name suggests, Hollywoods has a reputation for being more of a cattle market than a romantic hotspot. But from the moment she saw him across the crowded dance floor in February 1999, Maxine Carr was instinctively attracted to Ian Huntley. He had big, liquid eyes and, when she eventually got talking to him, a way of looking at her that made her feel really special.

For Maxine, that was a novelty. She’d always thought of herself as plain and uninteresting. Though doted on by her mum, she was the youngest in her family by a long way and always felt she lagged behind her older sister. When her father walked out on the family when she was just two-and-a-half years old this did nothing to increase her confidence and left her constantly seeking male approval. At school, where she was often mocked for her surname or for being overweight, Maxine had aspired to no higher aim than to blend anonymously into the background and be left alone. Not surprisingly, in her teenage years she was beset by agonising insecurities and her self-esteem was so low she used food to punish herself, starving herself until her body was as thin and brittle as the skeletons of the fish she used to fillet at the fish factory where she worked for a time.

But Ian Huntley made her feel worthy, in the beginning at least. When he talked to her, she wasn’t the pinched-face nervous girl who’d worked in a variety of dead-end jobs such as gutting fish or bathing elderly people as an assistant in an old people’s home. Instead, she was someone who was worth
talking to, someone worth finding out more about and eventually, someone worth loving.

‘I used to be in the RAF but I had to leave on account of hurting my back,’ Ian told her early on, and she’d felt impressed with both his heroic past and with the quiet resignation with which he related what must have been a crushing disappointment.

Within a month, 22-year-old Maxine had moved in with her handsome new boyfriend. Like many insecure young girls unused to acting independently, she’d dreamed of a fairytale prince coming in to rescue her from a life that seemed to hold little promise. For a while Ian Huntley seemed to fit the bill. He was older than she was, more experienced and already he seemed to have done so much in his life. She was flattered by his obvious interest in her, and grateful for his attention.

By the time Maxine discovered that half of the things her new boyfriend told her, like his training to be a professional bodybuilder, were fantasies he’d invented to boost his own fragile ego and impress young women, she was already too entrenched in their relationship to get out. Very quickly the man who’d made her feel he wanted to take care of her turned into a lazy slob who wanted her to run around after him. The man who’d boasted of past achievements and future prospects couldn’t be bothered to get up from the sofa and rarely held down a job for longer than a few months. But by the time all that became clear, it was already too late.

Ian Huntley was a long way from the romantic hero of Maxine’s girlhood dreams. As a boy he’d got on well enough
with his schoolmates, despite the nickname ‘Spadehead’ – given on account of his wide forehead. But he was considered a little more cocky than his limited abilities really justified. After school he too had held a string of uninspiring jobs, but unlike Maxine, he always believed those menial positions didn’t work out because he was too good for them, because he was destined for higher things – he just didn’t know what yet.

If he floundered in his work life, Huntley fared little better when it came to dealings with the opposite sex in which he was inclined to be oversexed and overemotional – an explosive combination. Always attracted to younger girls, probably because they were more likely to let him take control, he made a surprise marriage at the age of 21 to teenager Claire Evans. The marriage lasted less time than it took for the wedding day hangovers to wear off, and Claire rapidly found comfort in the arms of a new man: Huntley’s own brother Wayne.

For Ian Huntley, who loved to be in charge and had an inflated sense of his own self-importance, this double betrayal was a bitter pill, particularly when it was compounded some time later by his brother and ex-wife getting married. Relationships were not to be trusted, that was the lesson he took away; women would let you down.

From then on, Huntley turned his attention to ever younger girls, who were easily impressed with his pleasant, if slightly doughy looks; who didn’t question his more fanciful stories, or his clumsy lovemaking. The problems came when the girls were too young – Ian didn’t draw the line even at 12-year-olds – or
when they refused to readily acquiesce to his amorous advances. Ian Huntley wasn’t someone who took kindly to either rejection or restriction. By the time he met Maxine Carr in 1999, the
25-year
-old had already come to the attention of the authorities for a string of relationships involving under-age girls, and for a series of complaints against him for sexual offences. The girls involved tended to be well under the age of consent, in one case, 11. In the year and a half prior to meeting Maxine, he’d been accused of rape four times, but there’d never been enough evidence for a conviction.

He was known to be violent with girlfriends. There was talk of him kicking one pregnant girlfriend down the stairs so that she miscarried and locking another in his bedsit, starving her of food. He was a sadistic bully to those he was involved with, and according to the nine girls who came forward to lay complaints of sexual assault or rape he was even more violent to those he didn’t know. One girlfriend who had gone on to have a baby by him refused to allow him anything to do with his own daughter.

Put it this way, on paper, Ian Huntley was no great catch. But love is blind, as they say, particularly when only a limited version of the truth is given. Maxine never knew about Ian’s full history although she did on one occasion provide an alibi for him in another rape charge that she was completely convinced was trumped up. Content to paddle in the shallowest waters of human relationships, all Maxine knew was that a good-looking, charming man had fallen in love with her – and she wasn’t about to let him go.

Because of her insecurities and emotional neediness, Maxine Carr rapidly and willingly became psychologically reliant on Ian Huntley. When he was in a good mood, she basked in his approval, and when he wasn’t she tried anxiously to win him round. Of course that didn’t mean she always agreed with him, they had their rows like any other couple, but arguing made her nervous out of all proportion to the seriousness of the argument and she preferred to avoid conflict whenever possible. If she was really honest with herself, she was a bit scared of Ian when he was in a bad mood. He seemed to lose all control and could flip from Mr Nice Guy to Mr Really Really Angry in seconds.

‘You’ve got to stand up to him, Max,’ her older sister Hayley would tell her. ‘You let him walk all over you.’

But Maxine was in love. Ian could be so lovely to her, that’s what no one else understood. Take the anorexia, for example. He was always so concerned about her being too thin, sometimes he’d beg her to eat. And when he was away from home he’d call her, often several times a day, just to remind her that it was lunch time or tea time.

‘You just don’t see the side of him I see,’ Maxine would say. Hayley and her husband Graham tried to get along with Ian, for Maxine’s sake, but it was always a strain. Around Graham, he was always defensive, particularly when he discovered they both came from the same place – Immingham, just outside Grimsby.

‘He never seems to want to talk about anything connected with home,’ Graham puzzled to his wife. Either Ian was
extremely unfriendly, or he had something to hide. Either way, it didn’t look good.

The closer Maxine and Ian became, the less time she seemed to spend with her family.

‘I can’t make it then, maybe the week after,’ she’d say vaguely, cancelling yet another visit.

Her family had no doubts what was behind this sudden withdrawal. Since she’d been with Ian, Maxine didn’t seem to have a mind of her own – she’d changed the way she dressed to please him, and now she seemed to be cutting herself off from the people who loved her. Their concerns grew after Hayley made Maxine godmother to her baby daughter and Huntley wouldn’t even allow her to go to the christening, in an attempt to put some distance between Maxine and her family.

‘You can’t let him tell you what to do, Max,’ Hayley told her angrily. ‘For goodness’ sake, grow a backbone!’

But Maxine was already caught up in the desperate, approval-seeking cycle that would come to characterise her life with Ian. She loved her family, but she dreaded offending her boyfriend, hated the way his face closed up against her, shutting her out, hated the way his hands balled up into fists, his knuckles white and hard like marbles. It was easier just to do things his way. Her family would always love her unconditionally, but Ian’s affection fluttered like a banner in the breeze – one gust of wind and it could be gone. It was a risk she wasn’t prepared to take.

The two of them, together with Ian’s dog Sadie, got into a
pattern of moving frequently. They’d worked out a scam whereby Maxine could claim benefits she wasn’t really entitled to, but it meant they couldn’t hang about in any one place for too long. The weeks went by in a blur of unpacking in shabby bedrooms and cooking in drab beige rented kitchens. Ian briefly changed his name from Huntley to Nixon, his mother’s maiden name, in a bid to further confuse the authorities. The couple told different stories to the neighbours they left behind – they’d won the Lottery, Ian had got a great new job in New York…

Like many women caught up in a relationship where power becomes interchangeable with love, Maxine quickly learned to make excuses for Ian’s increasingly volatile behaviour. He was stressed, he loved her so much that it made him act crazy, she’d done something to annoy him… No wonder he sometimes lashed out in anger; no wonder, he occasionally pulled the phone out from the socket when she was talking to her friends or family; or told her they were finished and started to hurl her things out of the flat.