World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (21 page)

The escape made Mesrine a national celebrity in Canada, but his reputation darkened after he shot to death two forest rangers who’d recognised him. So he fled to Venezuela.

In 1973, Mesrine was back in France and up to his old tricks. By now, he was deep into his gentleman-thief, Robin-Hood role. When, during a bank robbery, a young woman cashier accidentally pushed the alarm button, he said:

‘Don’t worry, my dear. I like to work to music’

and calmly went on gathering the money. On another occasion, when his father was dying of cancer and closely watched, he dressed up as a doctor – with white coat and stethoscope – and went to visit him.

When he was arrested and then held in Santé Prison, he whiled away the time writing his autobiography. Then, when his case, after three and a half years, came to trial, he gave a demonstration in court that was to seal his reputation. After saying that it was easy enough to buy a key for any pair of handcuffs, he took out a key hidden in the knot of his tie and opened his own handcuffs.

A year later he escaped yet again, and continued his adventures. He walked into a Deauville police station, saying he was an inspector from the Gaming Squad and asked to see the duty inspector. When told he was out, he took himself off and that night robbed a Deauville casino. He gave an interview to Paris Match; and he even then attempted to kidnap the judge who’d tried him. When this went wrong, he escaped by telling the police whom he met on their way up the stairs: ‘Quick, quick, Mesrine’s up there.’

By this time he was living with a girlfriend in a luxury apart-ment in Paris; and the police were in no mood to compromise. They staked out the apartment, and when the couple came out and climbed into his BMW, they were soon hemmed in by two lorries. Unable to move, he was then shot. The police kissed each other and danced in the street – and President Giscard d’Estaing was immediately informed of their triumph.

The Lord’s Misrule

Richard John Bingham was an arrogant man, a snob. He was a bully-boy, a gambler and risk-taker with an inflated opinion of his own abilities. But he was also Lord Lucan, the seventh earl of that name, and there were all too many social parasites around him ready to confirm his sense of his own importance. If he hadn’t been Lord Lucan, he might not have committed murder; and if he had, he would have been long forgotten. As it is, almost thirty years after he disappeared, ‘Lucky’ Lucan sticks in the public memory as a symbol of something rotten in the state of Britain – giving off, for all that, the faintest whiff of glamour.

He may, of course, have simply been mad on the night he killed his children’s nanny in November 1974. Certainly he’d been losing heavily at London’s gambling-tables; he was now seriously in debt. And certainly he had a pathological hatred of his wife, from whom he’d separated the previous year, losing custody in the process of his children. He’d contended to his cronies that she was insane and insisted that she was at the root of all his current problems – though how this was the case he had never made entirely clear. He’d had her watched and followed.

Be that as it may, the facts are these: on the night of November 7th 1974, Lord Lucan’s estranged wife Veronica stumbled into a pub opposite her house in London’s upmarket Belgravia area, soaked to the skin, distraught, without shoes and bleeding from a wound in the head. Between sobs, she blurted out an incoherent story about how she’d just escaped from a murderer in her house.

‘My children, my children,’

— she said:

‘he’s murdered the nanny.’

The police were immediately called; and entering the house, they found the body of the nanny, Sandra Rivett, battered to death and stuffed into a canvas bag in the basement. At this point it was not entirely clear what had happened. The killing may have been a murder that had gone wrong, or the unfortuante Sandra might have been murdered by a jilted boyfriend or for some other reason.

However, as Lady Lucan became able to tell her tale something approaching the truth began to come out. ‘Lucky’ Lucan had apparently let himself into the house, meaning to kill his wife, and had hit out in the dark at the first woman he saw there with a length of lead piping. Then, realising his mistake, he’d taken her body down to the basement. In the meantime, Veronica Bingham came downstairs to see what had happened to the nanny, and she in turn was attacked.

Her story continued that her husband then confessed to killing the nanny by mistake – she was the same height and build as was Lady Lucan. She never explained, however, why this confession seems to have taken all of forty minutes: the time that elapsed before she ran out for help.

Lucan, for his part, had a different story. In a telephone call he made that night to a friend, and then to another friend he later visited outside London, he said that he’d come across an intruder who’d been attacking his wife. After a fight the mysterious intruder had fled, whereupon Lady Lucan had herself run out into the night. In his version, Lucan did not mention the nanny’s death at all.

Lord Lucan stayed with his friends for a few hours. They later reported that he had been considerably upset and agitated when he arrived, but had gradually calmed down. Lucan then left his friend’s house saying that he would have to get things sorted out. Then he completely disappeared.

His passport and the clothes he’d intended to wear that night for a dinner with friends at a gambling club were later found at the house he’d been living in. His car was found near the south coast. It was at first assumed that Lucan had boarded a cross-channel ferry to France in the early hours of the morning to flee the man hunt that was bound to pursue him. Foreign police were alerted to the need to the trace the good-looking aristocrat. He was assumed to have access to rich and powerful friends who might be persuaded to believe his version of events and so help him out.

No trace of him has ever since been found, though reports that he’d been spotted, in South Africa, Australia, Ireland, the Caribbean and elsewhere, soon began arriving. He is now presumed dead, the most usual theory being that he drowned himself in the English Channel. Indeed his son has now succeeded him to the Lucan title.

However, the rumours – of rich, aristocratic friends who smuggled ‘Lucky’ Lucan out of the country and still support him – persist. If he ever turns up, it may be on his death, if that has not already happened.

The Macivor Case

When investigators first come upon a crime scene where there are multiple victims, they have to determine the nature of the crime with which they are dealing and identify which victim was the real target since it is possible that the other victims were innocent bystanders. Such was the problem facing FBI profiler Dayle Hinman in the case of the brutal murder of an attractive young couple, Missy and Michael MacIvor.

The MacIvors were discovered dead in their luxury home in the Florida Keys on an August morning in 1991. The initial suspicion was that it was a drug-related killing. Michael was an aircraft mechanic and pilot who had allegedly become mixed up with drug dealers, but thought himself ‘bullet-proof’, according to a friend. Four years earlier he had been arrested by customs for landing a plane with narcotic residue, but he had not been convicted. More recently he had bought himself a plane that had been impounded during a drug seizure and he was heavily in debt.

His body had been found on the living room floor, his eyes and ears covered with duct tape. His wife’s naked body was discovered in the master bedroom at the foot of the bed. She too had been tortured and hog-tied (hands and feet trussed up behind her back in one binding) with a belt and a man’s tie, then strangled with a cloth belt from a towelling robe. A ladder had been found propped up against a balcony outside the house and the phone wires had been cut, which indicated a degree of planning.

When FBI profiler Dayle Hinman saw the crime scene photographs she immediately discounted the drug connection. If it had been a drug hit, she reasoned, the killers would have brought their own restraints and weapons. Moreover, they would not have covered Michael’s eyes and mouth if they had intended him to witness the torture of his wife or force him to give them information. Another clue lay in the fact that Missy’s restraints had been tied and untied several times, indicating that she had been the object of the attack while Michael had been murdered merely because he had been in the way.

There were bruises on the back of his neck indicating that he had been struck repeatedly and once unconscious he was left alone. A metal pole was found nearby that looked a likely murder weapon.

Missy had been repeatedly assaulted and strangled indicating that the killer was a sadistic psychopath who enjoyed dominating and tormenting his victims.

The Search For The Suspect

As no other crime of a similar nature had been reported in the area in recent months, Hinman felt it safe to assume the murder was the killer’s first and that he was following the usual pattern in having graduated from burglary to rape and finally to murder. On her recommendation detectives began combing the vicinity for likely suspects, since this type of criminal will begin his career in his own area as he knows it well and will have his eye on escape routes should anything go wrong. This is what is known as the ‘comfort zone’.

Within days a likely suspect was in their sights. Thomas Overton was a small-time cat burglar who fitted the profile. He specialized in breaking into houses where the owner was present. At the time he was working at a local gas station where Missy was a regular customer. This gave detectives a reason to question him but no right to arrest him. Until, that is, he was caught red-handed breaking into a house in the neighbourhood some months later.

Unfortunately, even a criminal caught in the act of committing a crime is not obliged to give a sample for DNA analysis, and with no hard physical evidence to connect Overton to the MacIvor murders there were no grounds for compelling him to submit to a swab under ‘probable cause’.

But then the police had a break. While in custody Overton cut himself shaving and threw the bloody tissue away. It then became the property of the police and could be subjected to analysis. A search of the DNA database proved a positive match to the semen found at the crime scene. This was the kind of hard, irrefutable evidence that can crack a case, as there is a one-in-six-billion chance that it could belong to anyone other than the suspect. But it was not enough to prove beyond doubt that Overton had murdered the MacIvors, only that he had been in the house. The police needed to get Overton to deny that he had ever been in the house, then it would prove he was covering up the fact that he had been there on the night in question.

The Case Is Closed

The detectives devised a strategy to draw out a confession, based on the psychological profile Hinman had provided. They exploited his vanity by inviting him to the police station as an expert burglar to help clear up a series of unsolved break-ins. Overton was encouraged to believe that he might earn a shorter sentence if he cooperated.

He willingly looked through numerous photographs of houses, some of which he had burgled and some of which had been broken into by his associates. When the photograph of the MacIvor house was placed before him, he claimed he had never been there and so implicated himself in the murder.

Had he admitted that he had broken in on the day of the murder a smart lawyer might have been able to argue that some unknown assailant had murdered the MacIvors after Overton had left. And as unlikely as that sounds, it might have sown sufficient doubt to get him a life sentence for sexual assault instead of a death sentence for premeditated first-degree homicide.

Mail Order Murder

When a home-made pipe bomb killed 17-year-old Chris Marquis in his home in Fair Haven, Vermont, detectives had little hope of catching the killer and that was because the lethal ingredients were common household items that could be purchased anywhere in the United States.

Neighbours often joked that Chris and his mother lived in the safest house in town – a bungalow right next door to the local police station. But one morning in March 1998 violent death came to Fair Haven in an innocuous-looking package. Christopher’s mother suspected nothing as she carried the parcel to her son, although she didn’t recognize the name of the sender or the return address. Chris ran a small CB radio sales and repair business from his bedroom and this looked as if it might be something that he had ordered from a supplier. But Chris didn’t recognize the sender either. He opened it anyway and the next moment there was a tremendous explosion which tore a hole in Chris’s leg and left his mother with serious injuries. Chris later bled to death in hospital, leaving his mother distraught and wondering who could have wanted her son dead and why.

Detectives soon had an answer to both questions. On Chris’s computer, investigators found emails from angry customers claiming that Chris had cheated them by advertising an expensive radio over the internet and then sending a cheaper model in its place once he had cashed their cheques and pocketed the difference.

Suddenly they had several hundred suspects. But could any of them really have been so angry that they would take revenge by killing a 17-year-old that they had almost certainly never met?

While detectives trawled through the list of Chris’s customers, forensic experts combed the bungalow looking for physical evidence that could give a clue as to the identity of the perpetrator. They found Styrofoam packaging material and pieces of pipe, wire, grains of smokeless gunpowder and tiny hex nuts – all ingredients of a home-made pipe bomb, but nothing that pointed to a specific individual. The return name and address on the package proved to be fictitious and none of Chris’s outraged customers lived in Mansfield, Ohio, where the package had been posted.