The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (23 page)

Theodore Robert Bundy faced two murder trials within three years of each other. His first trial date was set for 25 June 1979, in Miami, Florida. The case related to the brutal attacks on the two students. The second trial was to take place in January 1980 in Orlando, Florida, where Bundy was to be tried for the murder of Kimberly Leach. However, it was to be the first murder trial that would seal his fate forever. Bundy defended himself in this trial. During the trial, a forensic dentist told the court that he had matched the bite marks found on the body of one of the victims to Bundy. On 23 July, Bundy was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair.

After many delays, the Kimberly Leach trial began in Orlando, Florida, at the Orange County Courthouse on 7 January 1980. This time, Bundy decided not to represent himself, instead handing over the responsibility to defence attorneys Julius Africano and Lynn Thompson. Their strategy was to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, a plea that was risky but one of the few available options open to the defence. The tactics failed and, faced with strong evidence, Bundy was found guilty on 7
February. After less than seven hours of deliberation, again he was sentenced to death.

After numerous appeals were turned down, his execution finally took place on 24 January 1989 at approximately 7am. Outside the prison walls stood hundreds of onlookers and scores of news media representatives awaiting the news of Bundy’s death. Following the prison spokesman’s announcement that Bundy was officially dead, sounds of cheers came from the jubilant crowd and fireworks lit the sky. Shortly thereafter, a white hearse emerged from the prison gates with the remains of one of the country’s most notorious serial killers. As the vehicle moved towards the crematorium, the surrounding crowd cheerfully applauded the end of a living nightmare.

Having been abused by his mother from an early age, by the time Richard Chase (b. 1950) reached the age of 10, he was exhibiting the early signs that a serial killer might show: bedwetting, pyromania and zoo sadism (pleasure derived from cruelty to animals). In his adolescence, he took to drink and drugs. This led to him becoming impotent and he was unable to hold down a stable relationship. It was deemed that his erectile dysfunction was caused by ‘psychological problems stemming from repressed anger’.

In his youth, Chase went to college and shared an apartment with other teenagers, but his irrational behaviour compelled them to move out, leaving him alone. This was the turning point in his life. Now alone in the apartment, he began to capture, kill and disembowel various animals, which he would then devour raw. He would put the entrails of the animals he had killed into a blender in order to make a drinkable paste of them. Chase reasoned that by drinking this he was preventing his heart from shrinking; he feared that if it shrank too much, it would disappear and then he would die.

In 1975, Chase was involuntarily committed to a mental
institution after being taken to hospital with blood poisoning, which he contracted after injecting rabbit blood into his veins. He escaped from the hospital and went home to his mother; he was apprehended and sent to an institution for the criminally insane, where he often shared fantasies about killing rabbits with the staff. He was once found with blood smeared around his mouth; hospital staff discovered that he had captured two birds through the bars on his bedroom windows, snapped their necks and sucked their blood out. Among themselves, the staff began referring to him as Dracula. After undergoing treatment, Chase was deemed no longer a danger to society and, in 1976, he was released into the recognisance of his parents. His mother, deciding that her son did not need to be on the anti-schizophrenic medication that he had been prescribed, foolishly weaned him off it. Now, roaming free and with no medication to help control his mind, he was a human time bomb – and it wasn’t long before the fuse was lit.

On 29 December 1977, Chase killed his first victim in a
drive-by
shooting, in an apparent rehearsal for the crimes that followed. The victim was Ambrose Griffin, a 51-year-old engineer and father-of-two, who was helping his wife carry groceries into their home.

On 11 January 1978, Chase approached a female neighbour and asked for a cigarette, and then forcibly restrained her until she gave him the entire pack. Two weeks later, he attempted to enter the home of another woman but, finding that her doors were locked, went into her back yard and walked away. Chase later told detectives that he took locked doors as a sign that he was not welcome, but that unlocked doors were an invitation to come inside. While wandering around one day, he met a girl named Nancy Holden, with whom he had attended high school. He asked her for a lift but, frightened by his appearance, she refused. He walked down the street, where he broke into the home of a young married couple, stole some of their valuables, urinated into a drawer of their infant’s clothing and defecated on
their son’s bed. The couple came home while Chase was still in the house. The husband attacked him, but Chase escaped.

Chase continued entering homes until he came across the home of David and Teresa Wallin. David was at work. Teresa was three months pregnant. She was in the middle of taking out the rubbish and had left her front door unlocked. Chase surprised her in her home and shot her three times, killing her – he used the same gun with which he’d killed Ambrose Griffin. He then dragged Teresa’s body to her bedroom and raped it
post-mortem
while repeatedly stabbing it with a butcher’s knife. When he had finished, he carved the corpse open and removed several of her internal organs, using a bucket to collect the blood and then taking it into the bathroom to bathe in it. He then sliced off her nipple and drank her blood, using an empty yoghurt container as a drinking glass. Before leaving, he went into the yard, found a pile of dog faeces and returned to stuff it into the corpse’s mouth and throat.

On 23 January 1978, two days after killing Teresa Wallin, Chase purchased two puppies from a neighbour, then killed them and drank their blood, leaving the bodies on the neighbour’s front lawn.

On 27 January, Chase committed his final murder. He entered the home of 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, who was babysitting her 22-month-old nephew, David. Also present was Evelyn’s six-year-old son Jason, and Dan Meredith, a neighbour who had come over to check on Evelyn. At the time, Evelyn was in the bath while Dan was looking after the children; he went into the front hallway when Chase entered the house. Dan Meredith was shot in the head at point-blank range with Chase’s .22 handgun, killing him. Chase then turned the body over and stole the wallet and car keys. Jason ran to his mother’s bedroom, where Chase shot him twice in the head at
point-blank
range; on the way to killing Jason, Chase also shot David in the head. Chase then entered the bathroom and fatally shot Evelyn once in the head. He dragged her corpse onto the bed,
where he simultaneously committed buggery and drank her blood from a series of cuts to the back of the neck, which he had made. When he had finished, he inflicted on the body other mutilations with the knife, penetrating the anus and the uterus. This caused blood from her internal organs to flow into her abdomen, which he then cut open, draining the blood into a bucket; he then drank all of the blood. Chase then went to retrieve David’s body. He took it to the bathroom, split the skull open in the bath and consumed some of the brain matter. Outside, a six-year-old girl with whom Jason Miroth had a play-date knocked on the door, startling Chase. He fled the residence, stealing Dan Meredith’s car; the girl alerted a neighbour. The neighbour broke into the Miroth home where he discovered the bodies and contacted the police. A crime scene examination revealed handprints and footprints of the person whom the police believed to have been the killer.

Chase, meanwhile, took the baby’s body home with him, where he chopped off the head and used the neck as a straw through which he sucked the blood out of the body. He then sliced the corpse open and consumed several internal organs and made his grotesque ‘smoothies’ out of others, finally disposing of the corpse at a nearby church.

Chase eventually came to the notice of the police as a viable suspect following the identification of his fingerprints at the house of Evelyn Miroth. They went to his apartment and knocked repeatedly, but Chase would not open the door. The police pretended they were going to leave and then waited. Chase emerged with a box in his arms and made his way towards his car. The police apprehended him, but not without a struggle. They noticed that he was wearing an orange parka that had dark stains on it and that his shoes appeared to be covered in blood. A .22 semi-automatic handgun was taken from him, which also had bloodstains on it. Then they found Dan Meredith’s wallet in Chase’s back pocket, along with a pair of latex gloves. The contents of the box he was carrying also proved interesting:
pieces of bloodstained paper and rags. They took him to the police station and interviewed him. He admitted to killing several dogs but stubbornly resisted talking about the murders. While he was in custody, police searched his apartment in the hope of finding a clue to the whereabouts of the missing baby.

What they found in the putrid-smelling place was disgusting. Nearly everything was bloodstained, including food and drinking glasses. In the kitchen, they found several small pieces of bone, and some dishes in the refrigerator with body parts. One container held human brain tissue. An electric blender was badly stained and smelt of rotting flesh. There were three pet collars but no animals to be found. Photographic overlays on human organs from a science book lay on a table, along with newspapers on which ads selling dogs were circled. A calendar showed the inscription ‘Today’ on the dates of the Wallin and Miroth murders and, chillingly, the same word was written on 44 more dates yet to come during that year.

Police officers continued the search for the missing baby, and finally the body was found. On 24 March, a church caretaker came upon a box containing the remains and called the police. When they arrived, they recognised the clothing of the missing boy from the Miroth home. The baby had been decapitated and the head lay underneath the torso, which was partially mummified. A hole in the centre of the head indicated that the child had been shot. There were several other stab wounds to the body and several ribs were broken. Beneath the body, too, was a ring of keys that fitted Dan Meredith’s car. The police now had enough evidence to charge Chase.

In 1979, he stood trial on six counts of murder. In order to avoid the death penalty, his defence team tried to have Chase found guilty of second-degree murder only. Their case hinged on Chase’s history of mental illness and the lack of planning of his crimes, evidence that they were not premeditated. But on 8 May, the jury found Chase guilty of six counts of first-degree murder. The defence asked for a clemency hearing, in which a judge
determined that Chase was not legally insane. Chase was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

While on death row, Chase became a feared presence in prison; the other inmates, aware of the graphic and bizarre nature of his crimes, feared him and, according to prison officials, they often tried to convince Chase to commit suicide, too fearful to get close enough to him to kill him themselves.

On 26 December 1980, a guard doing cell checks found Chase lying awkwardly on his bed and not breathing; he was pronounced dead. A post-mortem determined that he had committed suicide with an overdose of prescribed antidepressants that he had been saving up over the preceding weeks.

In summer 1967, the first of a series of murders in and around the Michigan suburbs of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor took place. Mary Fleszar, 19, was the victim. She had last been seen by a room-mate when she left their apartment near the university campus to go for a walk on 9 July. She was wearing a bright orange tent dress with large white polka dots, and a pair of sandals. She was 5ft tall, weighed about 110lb, wore glasses and had brown hair. She had not taken her handbag, but her car keys were gone and her car was parked across from where she normally left it, which her mother thought was odd. Half an hour after she left the apartment, a university police officer saw her walking alone. Later, a man sitting on his porch who knew her saw her walking towards her apartment. Then he saw a young man driving a blue-and-grey Chevrolet stop beside her, open his window and talk with her. She shook her head and walked on. He drove by again and pulled up in front of her. She again shook her head and walked around him. He backed out, accelerated with an angry screech and left. Concerned, the man on the porch watched her draw close to her building and then lost sight of her, but did not see the car return. He was the last person to see Fleszar alive. Her naked body was found on 7
August at an abandoned farm not far from where she lived. She had been stabbed 30 times in the chest with a knife or other sharp object. Her lower leg bones had been smashed just above the ankles. It also appeared that she had been brutally beaten. One of her hands was missing, along with the fingers of her other hand. Her clothing was found under a pile of rubbish.

The frozen naked body of Eileen Adams, 13, was found in a field on 19 December 1967. It had been wrapped in a rug and mattress cover, and tied with an electrical cord. She had been raped, strangled with the same electrical cord and stuffed into a sack. Her bra was tied around her neck. She had been cruelly beaten with a hammer, and a 3in nail was driven into her skull. Her stockings were arranged on her body, but her shoes were missing. There was evidence of sexual assault and her body was placed in plain sight. She had apparently been left alive but bound in such a way that her struggles to get free had tightened a telephone cord looped around her neck and tied to her ankles, which strangled her. Her shoes and coat were also missing. Police believed that her abductor had held her somewhere for up to two weeks before leaving her in the field.