World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (29 page)

Brutal Correctional Institution

Panzram was arrested for the crime and sent to the Minnesota State Training School in 1903, aged twelve. This was a brutal institution in which he was regularly beaten and raped by the staff. Here he acquired a taste for forced gay sex and an abiding hatred of authority. In 1905 he expressed this hatred by burning part of the school down. He was not identified as the culprit, however, and was able to persuade a parole panel that year that he was a reformed character. The opposite was closer to the truth: the Carl Panzram who emerged from the school was in reality a deformed character.

Panzram returned home for a while, went to school briefly, then left after an altercation with a teacher. He worked on his mother’s farm until, at fourteen, he jumped on a freight train and headed westwards. For the next few years he lived the life of a teenage hobo. He committed crimes and was the victim of them; he was sent to reform schools and broke out of them. When he was sixteen, in 1907, he joined the army but refused to accept the discipline and was then caught trying to desert with a bundle of stolen clothing. He was dishonourably discharged and sent to the fearsome Leavenworth Prison, where he spent two hard years, breaking rocks and becoming a very strong, dangerous man. On his release, he returned to his roaming. He was arrested at various times and under various names for vagrancy, burglary, arson and robbery. The one crime he was not arrested for, but took particular pleasure in carrying out, was homosexual rape. Once he even raped a policeman who was trying to arrest him. His crimes escalated in savagery and so did his prison sentences; he served time in both Montana and Oregon.

In 1918, Panzram escaped from Oregon State Prison, where he had been serving a sentence under the name Jefferson Baldwin. He decided to leave the north-east, where he had become very well known to the police. He changed his name to John O’Leary and headed for the east coast, where he would make the transition from robber and rapist to cold-blooded killer.

Bait

He began by carrying out a string of burglaries that made him enough money to buy a yacht. He would lure sailors on to the yacht, get them drunk, rape them, kill them and then dump their bodies in the sea. This went on until his boat crashed and sank, by which time he reckoned he had killed ten men. Broke once more, Panzram stowed away on a ship and ended up in Angola, Africa. He signed on with an oil company who were drilling off the coast of the Congo. While he was there, he raped and killed a twelve-year-old boy. Then he went on a crocodile hunting expedition that ended when he killed the six local guides he had hired, raped their corpses and fed them to the crocodiles.

Captured

Panzram retuned to the States soon after, as witnesses had seen him engage the guides. He went on to rape and murder an eleven-year-old boy, George McMahon, in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. Over the next months, he carried out two more murders and numerous robberies.

Finally, he was captured while in the act of burgling a railway station. This was to be his toughest sentence yet: he began it in Sing Sing, but proved so unruly that he was sent on to Dannemora, an infamous establishment where he was beaten and tortured by the guards. His legs were broken and left untreated, leaving him semi-crippled and in constant pain for the rest of his life.

On release in July 1928, Panzram immediately carried out a string of burglaries and at least one murder before being rearrested. By now he was evidently tired of life. On arrest he gave his real name for the first time and, while in prison in Washington DC, confessed to several murders of young boys. Encouraged by a prison guard with whom he struck up an unlikely friendship, he went on to write a 20,000-word account of his terrible life and crimes. This remains a remarkable document, a horrifying but unusually even-handed account of a serial killer’s inner life. Following the confessions, and amid a flurry of media interest, Panzram was tried for the most recent of his murders: the strangling of Alexander Uszacke. He was found guilty and sentenced to serve twenty-five years at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Following the sentence, Panzram warned the world that he would kill the first man who crossed him when he was inside. He was as good as his word. He was given work in the laundry and one day murdered his supervisor, Robert Warnke, by staving in his head with an iron bar.

This time, Panzram was sentenced to hang. He positively welcomed the court’s verdict and claimed that now his only ambition was to die. There was nothing else that he wanted. When anti-death penalty campaigners tried to have his sentence commuted, he ungraciously wrote to them to say: ‘I wish you all had one neck and I had my hands on it.’ Shortly afterwards, on 3 September 1930, his wish to die was granted, and he was duly hanged.

Carl Panzram was a man who positively loathed his fellow human beings.

The Rippings in Rostov

Andrei Chikatilo, the ‘Rostov Ripper’, killer of over fifty women, girls and boys, came to the attention of the world following his arrest in 1990, just as the Soviet Union was starting to break up. Indeed, had he been caught earlier it is more than likely that his name would have remained obscure. Soviet Russia liked to pretend that such crimes as serial murder were purely a product of the decadent West; we still do not know the full extent of criminality during the years of the communist regime.

Hannibal Lecter

Chikatilo was born in Yablochnoye, a village deep in the heart of rural Ukraine, on 19 October 1936. The baby was found to have water on the brain, which gave him a misshapen head and, it was later revealed, a degree of brain damage. He was also unlucky enough to be born during the period of forced collectivization imposed by Stalin, a time of terrible famine and untold suffering. According to Chikatilo’s mother, Andrei had an older brother named Stepan who was kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbours during this time. It is unclear if this was actually true – there is no record of a Stepan Chikatilo ever existing – but it was certainly a tale that succeeded in traumatizing the young Chikatilo. (Thomas Harris later borrowed this awful story to explain the pathology of his fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.) To make matters worse, the boy’s early childhood was spent during the Second World War, when the region’s misery grew even worse. His father was taken prisoner during the war, then sent to a Russian prison camp on his return.

On leaving school, Chikatilo joined the army. He also joined the Communist Party, which was essential for any ambitious young person who wanted to succeed in Soviet Russia. On leaving the army, he worked as a telephone engineer and studied in his spare time to gain a university degree, which eventually allowed him to became a schoolteacher near his home in Rostov-on Don. At the same time he married a woman named Fayina, found for him by his sister. As it emerged later, Chikatilo had lifelong problems with impotence, but he did manage to father two children.

False Alibi

Chikatilo appeared to be living a regular life. By the time his darker urges began to express themselves, he was forty-two, much older than most serial killers. In 1979 he chose his first victim, a nine-year-old girl called Lenochka Zakotnova. He took her to a vacant house in the town of Shakhty, attempted to rape her, failed, and then using a knife, stabbed her to death and dumped her body into the Grushovka River. She was found there on Christmas Eve. Luckily for Chikatilo – who was questioned as a suspect in the case but was given a false alibi by his wife – a known local rapist Alexander Kravchenko was beaten into confessing to the crime and put to death.

Nevertheless, evidence of Chikatilo’s true nature was starting to leak out and he was fired from his teaching job for molesting boys in the school dormitory. His party membership stood him in good stead, however, and he was soon given a new job as a travelling procurement officer for a factory in Shakhty. The job involved plenty of moving around the area and thus plenty of opportunity to kill. His preferred method was to approach his victims at a train or bus station and lure them into nearby woodland to kill them.

He started in earnest in 1982 with the murder of seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko, a girl known locally for exchanging sexual favours for food and drink. Chikatilo strangled her and piled dirt into her mouth to muffle her screams. He later claimed that his first killing had upset him, but that this second one thrilled him. In June 1982 he killed his next victim, thirteen-year-old Lyuba Biryuk, cutting out her eyes, an act that became his trademark.

Increasing Savagery

Over the next year he killed six more times, two of the victims young men. What the killings had in common was their increasing savagery and the removal of body parts, particularly the genitals. It is believed that Chikatilo ate the parts he removed in a hideous echo of his brother’s fate, however, he himself only confessed to ‘nibbling on them’.

The murders attracted much police concern, but the Soviet media was not permitted to publicize the existence of a maniacal killer on the loose. In the single month of August 1984, eight victims were found. The only clue the police had was that, judging by the semen found on the bodies of some of the more recent victims, the killer’s blood group was AB.

Soon afterwards, in late 1984, Chikatilo was arrested at a railway station where he was importuning young girls. He was found to have a knife and a length of rope in his bag but, because his blood group was A, not AB, he was released. This discrepancy has never been explained.

Released by the police, Chikatilo simply carried on killing. Dozens more innocents lost their lives over the next five years. In 1988, he claimed eight lives and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed nine more people. By then a new detective, Issa Kostoyev, had taken over the case.

Kostoyev hit on a strategy of flooding the train and bus stations with detectives, and eventually the plan paid off. Immediately after murdering his final victim, twenty-year-old Svetlana Korostik, Chikatilo was spotted, perspiring heavily and apparently bloodstained, at a station. A detective took his name and, when it was realized that he had previously been a suspect, he was arrested. After ten days in custody he finally confessed to fifty-two murders, more than the police had been aware of. He was arrested and brought to trial in April 1992.

Locked inside a cage to protect him from victims’ relatives, Chikatilo was a shaven-headed madman who ranted and raved in the courtroom. Found guilty, on 15 February 1994, he was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.

During his trial Andrei Chikatilo spent his time rolling his eyes and raving at the court.

The Rush Hour Massacre

In the 1980s, a partially blind Japanese masseur called Chizuo Matsumoto (aka Shoko Asahara) claimed to have travelled to the Himalayas and to have achieved nirvana there. A group of believers gathered around him into an organisation called AUM Supreme Truth; and in 1989 they applied to the Tokyo Municipal Government for registration as a religion.

The bureaucrats had their doubts. For Asahara, as he preferred to call himself, had a police record for fraud and assault. In August, though, they caved in after demonstrations by AUM members, giving it not only tax-exempt status, but also the right to own property and to remain free of state and any other interference.

Less than three months later, a young human rights lawyer who had been battling the cult on behalf of worried parents vanished into thin air, along with his wife and infant son. It later transpired that a television company had shown an interview with the lawyer to senior AUM members before its transmission, but it hadn’t bothered to tell the lawyer this. Nor did it bother to tell the police either, after the lawyer’s disappearance.