World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (20 page)

Just days later, he found his next victim, a Canadian called Kenneth Ockendon. This time, after strangling the man with an electric cord, Nilsen dissected the body, using the butchery skills he had acquired in the army. Then he flushed part of the body down the toilet while leaving other parts under the floorboards.

Over the next two years, Nilsen repeated the pattern ten more times. The young men he killed were generally drifters or rent boys; in only a few cases did Nilsen know their names. Each was strangled and dissected, the body parts flushed away or kept as trophies.

In October 1981 Nilsen decided to move house. Some sane part of his brain decided to move out of his garden flat and into an attic flat, in the hopes that this would make it harder for him to dispose of a body and thus would inhibit him from killing again. Before he left, he had one more bonfire in which he incinerated the last remains of his victims.

Over the next year or so, Nilsen succeeded in killing three more times. But finally his new living quarters did betray him. He had been flushing body parts down the toilet once more and this time the drains refused to co-operate.

Another tenant in the house called in a drainage company to unblock the drains. The unfortunate workman who called found that the blockage was due to human flesh and soon traced the problem to Nilsen’s flat. Nilsen was immediately arrested.

Once in custody, Nilsen stunned the police with an exhaustive confession. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Dennis ‘Des’ Nilsen in the army in 1961.

The Kiss of Death

Very little is known about the early life of Bela Kiss, one of the most horrifying serial killers of all time. His story only comes fully into focus when he began his career of murder, as a young man apparently searching for a wife.

A handsome man with blue eyes and fair hair, Kiss was very attractive to women, not only because of his good looks, but also because he was educated, intelligent and well mannered. However, when his crimes came to light, it emerged that Kiss was a lady killer in a more literal sense. He murdered over twenty women and pickled their bodies in alcohol, inside large metal drums that he hid in his home and around the countryside nearby. Perhaps most horrifying of all, he actually managed to get away with it.

Barrels

In 1912, Bela Kiss was living in the village of Czinkota, just outside Budapest in Hungary. He shared a house with his housekeeper, an elderly woman named Mrs Jakubec. Although well liked in the village, Kiss was not on intimate terms with any of his neighbours. A single man, he had a series of relationships with several attractive young women who often came to the house, but who were never introduced to the housekeeper or to any of his neighbours. Kiss also collected metal drums, telling the local police that they were for storing gasoline, which was likely to be in short supply in the future because of the impending war.

In 1914, Kiss was called up into the army. While he was away, soldiers went to his house to look for the extra supplies of gasoline he was known to have kept there. They found the drums and opened them. Instead of gasoline, inside each drum they found the dead body of a woman who had been strangled and whose body had then been preserved in alcohol. A further search through Kiss’ papers revealed dozens of letters from the women, who had visited the house after replying to his newspaper advertisements for a wife.

Kiss lured well-to-do, attractive women by correspondence, promising to marry them and often divesting them of their savings in the process. He then invited them to his home. Once there, he would strangle them, pickle their bodies in alcohol and seal them in the metal drums. The bodies also had puncture marks on their necks and their bodies were drained of blood. Bela Kiss was not just a murderer, but a vampire too.

Why he chose to preserve the bodies in this way nobody knows. It was obviously a risky thing to do. Firstly, the drums were big and hard to hide; secondly, the bodies inside were so perfectly preserved that in some cases even the labels on their clothing could be read. Surely Kiss must have known that if ever the drums were opened, his crimes could easily be traced.

Changing Identity

Several local women who had gone missing were discovered in the drums, along with many others whose absence had not been missed. Kiss had repeated his crimes again and again, with a series of innocent, unsuspecting victims, using a false name, ‘Herr Hoffmann’. Until the discovery of the bodies, the connection between Bela Kiss and ‘Herr Hoffman’, who was wanted for questioning in regard to the disappearance of two widows with whom he had corresponded, had never been made.

With the advent of war, Kiss found a perfect way to escape detection: he faked his own death. He assumed the identity of an army comrade who had been killed in combat, switching his papers with those of the dead man. However, his plan was foiled when, in the spring of 1919, he was spotted in Budapest by someone who had known him from his earlier days. Police investigated, and found out about the fraud, but were still unable to catch up with him. Later, a soldier called Hoffman boasted to his comrades of his prowess as a strangler; but once again, when police tried to find Kiss, the trail went cold.

Many years later, Kiss was apparently spotted in New York by a homicide detective called Henry Oswald, renowned for his ability to remember faces. By this time, Kiss would have been in his late sixties. Oswald pursued Kiss but lost him among the crowds of Times Square. A few years later, Kiss was again seen in New York, this time working as the janitor of an apartment block; but he escaped police and was never apprehended.

Nobody knows how or when Bela Kiss died. The true number of his victims is also unknown. Did he cease killing women when he went on the run, or did he continue his hideous crimes undetected? How many women in Hungary could have been lured to their death by Bela Kiss? These are questions to which we will never know the answers.

Last Will and Testament

Serious criminal cases are rarely resolved using just one type of forensic evidence. Frequently investigators will build a case on as many levels as possible to leave little room for error in case one type of evidence is ruled inadmissible in court for legal reasons or called into question by the defence’s expert witnesses. In the case of the abduction and murder of 18-year-old Shari Faye Smith, her killer was caught and convicted using a combination of modern criminal profiling and good old-fashioned physical evidence.

Astonishingly, Shari had been abducted in broad daylight and within sight of her home in Columbia, South Carolina, on 31 May 1985 as she stopped to collect post from the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Minutes later her father had found her car as she had left it with the engine running, the driver’s door open and her purse on the passenger seat.

The police immediately organized the most extensive manhunt in South Carolina’s history, but no trace of Shari was found. Later that day the Smith family received the first in a series of bizarre calls from the kidnapper, who disguised his voice with an electronic device. He proved that it was not a hoax by describing what Shari had been wearing under her clothes, but curiously he never mentioned the subject of a ransom.

The mystery man appeared simply to enjoy tormenting the family, who at this time still held out hope of finding Shari alive, and he promised that they would receive a letter the next morning.

The letter duly arrived. It was in Shari’s handwriting and had been written on a sheet of lined legal paper headed ‘Last Will and Testament’. It didn’t give a clue as to her whereabouts, but it suggested she could still be alive.

But in a subsequent call some days later her abductor said something which confirmed their worst fears. He said that Shari and he had become ‘one soul’ and he gave detailed instructions as to where they could find her body.

It appeared that he had delayed giving them the location until he no longer had a use for her as a trophy and was certain that the body had decomposed sufficiently to degrade any useful forensic evidence. But there was probably also another reason. Many serial killers keep the location of their victim’s bodies a secret as they get a perverse thrill from revisiting the site and reliving the murder.

A Profile Is Compiled

The FBI Signal Analysis Unit concluded that the kidnapper’s voice had been disguised using a Variable Speed Control Device, which suggested that he might have a background in electronics. This prompted the FBI to compile a profile which speculated that the man they were seeking would be in his late twenties or early thirties, single, overweight and unattractive to women. The fact that he indulged in cruel mind games, including calling the family reverse-charge on the day of Shari’s funeral and describing in graphic detail how he had killed her, suggested that he was probably separated after an unsuccessful marriage and was likely to have a history of making obscene phone calls, all of which were to be proven correct. Two weeks later the same man abducted nine-year-old Debra May Helnick from outside her parents’ mobile home in Richland County, 38km from the Smith residence. Then he phoned the Smiths and told them where the girl’s body could be found.

It was about this time that the FBI had a break in the case. They subjected Shari’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ letter to microscopic analysis using an ESTA machine, which detects the slightest impression in paper which would be invisible to the naked eye. It revealed a grocery list and a phone number which had been written on a sheet elsewhere in the pad from the one Shari had used. The phone number led detectives to the home of a middle-aged couple who had been out of the country at the time of the murders. But they recognized the profile as a description of their handyman, Larry Gene Bell, who they had allowed to live in their house during their absence.

Larry had aroused the couple’s suspicion when he had picked them up from the airport and talked about nothing but the murders, and their suspicions were confirmed when agents played the couple a recording of Larry’s final phone call to the Smith family in which he had not bothered to disguise his voice with the electronic device. His DNA was later recovered from the stamp he had licked before posting Shari’s ‘Last Will’ and matched with a sample obtained on his arrest.

In 1996 Larry Gene Bell became the last person to die in the electric chair in the state of South Carolina.

A Life of Crime

President Giscard de’Estaing regarded the failure to catch Jacques Mesrine as a national disgrace. Much of the rest of the population were delighted. For they sneakingly saw Mesrine as a combination of D’Artagnan, Robin Hood and Errol Flynn: a glorious example of France’s daring and ingenuity. True, he might have killed a few times – and that was regrettable. But his wit! His escapes! His nerve! Besides, he was the most famous criminal in the world – and he was French! When he finally died in a police ambush in Paris in 1979, the police may have hugged each other and danced in the street. But there was something in the heart of every true Frenchman that mourned.

Mesrine was born in Paris in 1937 – and from his earliest years he seems to have been in love with danger. When he was conscripted into the army, he specifically asked to be sent to Algeria, where the French army was fighting against Muslim anti-colonialists.

He was demobbed with a Military Cross for bravery. But life as a civilian – after seeing action – seemed to bore him. He committed his first burglary, on the flat of a wealthy businessman, in 1959 – and it bore all the hallmarks of what was to come. When a drill snapped as he was boring his way into the safe, he simply left, broke into a hardware store for more and came back to finish the job. He escaped with millions of francs.

His reputation rapidly spread in the underworld – and among the police. In 1962 he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. Out a year later, he tried to go straight, but after he was made redundant he went back to crime. Within four years he was the most wanted thief in France; the police were infuriated by his snook-cocking antics.

He moved to Canada where he and his girlfriend Jeanne Schneider were employed by a Montreal millionaire. After being sacked, Mesrine and Jeanne kidnapped the millionaire and held him for $200,000 ransom. They were caught and charged both with the kidnap and with the murder of a rich widow they’d befriended.

Mesrine was outraged: he insisted they were innocent of the widow’s murder – they were both eventually acquitted. After being convicted of the kidnapping, Mesrine escaped from the ‘escape-proof’ St. Vincent de Paul prison at Laval.