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World Serial Killers
World Serial Killers
World Serial Killers
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World Serial Killers

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World Serial Killers investigates the fiendish crimes of butchers like Fritz Haarman selling human meat on the streets of Hanover, Germany, Edinburgh body-snatchers Burke and Hare and Alberto De Salvo, the notorious Boston Strangler. Read the accounts of deranged real-life monsters such as Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper as well as the stories of many other serial killers from around the world.

Contents: Europe – Burke and Hare, Jack the Ripper, Henri Landru, Fritz Haarmann, Marcel Petiot, Peter Kürten, Peter Manuel, Joachim Kroll, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rosemary West, Harold Shipman. North America – H.H.Holmes, Albert Fish, The Lonely Hearts Killers,The Boston Strangler, Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, The Hillside Stranglers, Clifford Olson, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, Tommy Lynn Sells, Cary Stayner. South America – Pedro Alonso López, Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, Juana Barraza. Australia – Eric Edgar Cooke, William the Mutilator Macdonald, Paul Charles Denyer, Ivan Milat, The Snowtown Murderers, John Wayne Glover, Peter Dupas, Catherine and David Birnie

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 4, 2013
ISBN9781908698162
World Serial Killers
Author

Gordon Kerr

Gordon Kerr worked in bookselling and publishing before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of several titles including A Short History of Europe, A Short History of Africa, A Short History of China, A Short History of Brazil, A Short History of the First World War,A Short History of the Vietnam War, A Short History of the Middle East, A Short History of Religion and The War That Never Ended. He divides his time between Dorset and Southwest France.

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    World Serial Killers - Gordon Kerr

    Introduction

    Murder. It stalks the streets at night waiting to pounce, lying within the most innocent request. When a man wearing a plastercast introduces himself as ‘Ted’ and asks if you would mind helping him carry some books to his car, how are you to know that he is Ted Bundy, killer of anywhere between thirty and one hundred young women, and that hidden about his person is a crowbar that he will bring crashing down on your head as soon as you reach the vehicle? His handsome, smiling face will be the last thing you see before everything goes dark. When a man bids you good evening as you walk in a quiet country lane, how are you to know that he is in reality Peter Kürten, the infamous Vampire of Düsseldorf and as soon as he is a few paces past you, he will be lunging at your back with a knife trying to kill you? If you were an elderly lady and you were offered help to carry your groceries by a pleasant-looking man, you would surely say thank you, not realizing that he was John Wayne Glover, the ‘Granny Killer’, the ‘Monster of Mosman’, and that tucked in his belt was a hammer that he was going to bring down on your head as soon as you were in the secluded foyer of your retirement home.

    Murder also lurks in ordinary places, in a semi-detached, three-storey house in Cromwell Street in Gloucester, the ‘house of horrors’ where Fred and Rose West acted out their depraved fantasies on innocent victims, amongst them their own children. Or in a disused bank in the small town of Snowtown, north of Melbourne in Australia, where a welfare scam resulted in bodies being dissolved in vats of chemicals. A respectable bungalow in High Burnside, on the outskirts of Glasgow, hid the bodies of Marion Watt, her sixteen-year-old daughter Vivienne and her sister, Margaret Brown, killed by Peter Manuel, burglar and rapist turned serial killer, a charmer who became a monster. And you could also find murder in the serenity of your own north of England sitting room. A visit by the doctor just to check up on you and give you a little injection to make you feel better. The only problem is that the doctor’s name is Harold Shipman and he has already given that injection to a couple of hundred people, all of whom died as a result.

    Murder also thrives on every continent around the world. Australia has had its share of serial killers, men like serial sex offender, Peter Dupas, convicted of the murder of three women in Melbourne in the 1990s and suspected of killing at least another three. Catherine and David Birnie were the Australian version of the British Moors Murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. They stalked young women, abducting them and taking them home to work out their sexual perversions on them before murdering them.

    Serial killers are, of course, a breed apart, the doyens of the murder world, people who have stepped over the imaginary boundary that separates men from beasts. They are often deranged, bitter, vengeful people taking their revenge on the world.

    But serial killers are also mother-haters. Ed Kemper loathed his mother, Clarnell, with such a passion that every one of the eight women he murdered, had sex with and dismembered, was a representation of her. When eventually he did kill her, he displayed his fantastic contempt for her by using her severed head as a dartboard. Pedro Alonso López, the Colombian slayer of hundreds of little girls in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador in the 1970s and 1980s, was another mother-hater. His mother had thrown him out of her house at the age of eight – he had been raping his younger sister, after all – and he took revenge on womankind for several decades afterwards. One-eyed mass killer Henry Lee Lucas hated his mother so much he killed her in the middle of a furious argument. She had been the cause of him losing an eye and, earning money as a prostitute, had had no hesitation in conducting her business in front of her eight children and her legless husband.

    But serial killers can also be coldly calculating and manipulative. Charles Manson, leader of the murderous hippie clan known as the Family, was a manipulator of minds who never actually killed anyone but was certainly responsible for the horrific actions of his followers, often runaway girls whose minds had been addled by drugs and his poisonous outpourings about society. French killer, Henri Landru, also preyed on gullible women. A modern-day Bluebeard, he lured a number of them to his house at Gambais where he stripped them of their savings and their clothes before killing them and burning them in a large stove.

    Like Landru, there have been numerous serial killers who were in it for financial gain. The horrific H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, killed in order to benefit from insurance scams, but how he enjoyed it, constructing a block-long killing factory in Chicago in which he tortured and murdered countless women, constantly improvising and experimenting with his methods. The infamous Edinburgh bodysnatchers Burke and Hare also found killing to be a lucrative pastime, certainly easier than actually working for a living, and many people ended up on the dissecting slab at Edinburgh University’s medical school as a direct result of their nefarious activities. French Dr Marcel Petiot exploited Jews trying to get out of Paris after the Nazi invasion of France during the Second World War, killing them horrifically and taking their money and valuables.

    Sex is, of course, often a motivation for killing. The ‘Butcher of Hanover’, Fritz Haarmann, killed young boys, dozens of them, and sold their flesh in the markets of Hanover. Another German killer, Joachim Kroll, the ‘Ruhr Hunter’, raped his victims and ghoulishly also ate their flesh, a perversion he shared with the American Albert Fish who killed in the 1920s and 1930s and who cooked the flesh of his victims like a Michelin-starred chef.

    Of course, there are also the natural-born killers, the ones that just cannot help themselves, men such as the American Tommy Lynn Sells, the ‘Cross-Country Killer’, an itinerant killer, like Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have killed as many as seventy people in his travels across the United States. Luis Garavito may have raped and killed as many as three hundred young boys in Colombia in the late 1990s, travelling the length and breadth of the country. Another born killer was Eric Edgar Cooke, who created panic in the sleepy Western Australian city of Perth in the early 1960s, killing randomly and at will. He did it, as many others did, because he had the urge … and, quite frankly, because he enjoyed it.

    The serial killer is amongst us, going about his business, seething with discontent, raging in private about his mother, his job, his wife, his boss and vowing to take revenge against whatever segment of society takes his fancy.

    All you have to do is hope that you never meet him.

    PART ONE: EUROPE

    Burke and Hare

    In the nineteenth century, as medical science flourished and new teaching institutions opened, there was a growing demand for corpses on which medical students could learn anatomy. Executions had always provided a ready supply of cadavers but with changes to the Bloody Code, the system of law and punishment in England, resulting in only five crimes being punishable by death, as opposed to the dozens that had previously warranted that penalty, the availability of bodies for study was drastically reduced.

    The gap between demand and supply was filled by criminal elements who were willing to provide bodies obtained by any means. These men, feared and reviled by a general public that believed redemption was impossible if the body was not left intact, became known as body-snatchers or resurrectionists. Two of the most infamous of their number were the Irishmen William Burke and William Hare.

    Burke and Hare were Irish immigrants, originating in Ulster and coming to Scotland in the early 1820s to work as labourers on the New Union Canal being built between Edinburgh and Falkirk where it joined up with the Forth and Clyde Canal. Burke was thirty-six years old and had spent much of his adult life in the army. He had a wife back in Ireland, but had soon hooked up with a Scottish woman, Helen MacDougal, with whom he travelled to Edinburgh, leaving MacDougal’s two young children behind.

    William Hare did not meet Burke during his time working on the canal, but following its completion, he, too, was in Edinburgh, lodging in the area known as the West Port at a cheap boarding house owned by a man named Logue and his wife Margaret. Logue died in 1826 and Hare was soon living with Margaret as her common-law husband while running the lodging house with her.

    Burke and MacDougal, also living in the West Port, met Margaret Logue one day by chance and an introduction to Hare followed. They moved into the boarding house and became friends, sharing a liking for whisky and a desire to make money as easily as possible.

    In November 1827, one of the lodgers of the boarding house, an elderly man named Donald, became ill and died. The man owed Hare rent and he was not best pleased to realise that he would never be paid. He and Burke dreamt up a plan to sell Donald’s body to a medical school. They filled his coffin with tree bark to give it adequate weight and sold the body to an ambitious anatomist, Professor Robert Knox, who taught at Edinburgh University. Knox paid them £7 10s for it and Burke and Hare were in business.

    Another lodger became ill a few days later and they decided also to help him on his way. They gave him whisky until he passed out and then suffocated him. Handing the body over to the medical school, they said he had died of drink.

    The next victim was a woman who had been brought back to the boarding house by Margaret who, like Helen MacDougal, was in on their money-making scheme. The woman was again fed a quantity of whisky until she was senseless. She was suffocated and next day was on the dissecting table at the university.

    In February 1828, an elderly woman, Abigail Simpson, had come to Edinburgh to collect some pension money. As she was walking back home, Hare met her and suggested she go to the boarding house for a dram and to rest before continuing her journey. The whisky flowed until it was so late that she was persuaded to stay the night. The trouble was, however, that Burke and Hare had also, by this time, consumed a large amount of whisky and they were incapable of taking action that night. Next morning, however, they plied her with more until she was incapable of fighting back. They held her down and suffocated her. Her body was with Knox by the evening and they were delighted to receive a bonus because the cadaver was so fresh.

    Burke and Hare could not believe their luck at finding such an easy way to make money. They began to hang around inns like the White Hart in the Grassmarket, trying to spot waifs, strays and runaways, people no one would miss. They would then lure them away and strangle or suffocate them before taking them to Professor Knox.

    On the morning of 9 April 1828, William Burke met two eighteen-year-old West Port prostitutes, Mary Paterson and Janet Brown, in a local tavern. He invited them to have breakfast with him, escorting them to the boarding house where they ate and carried on drinking. Eventually, however, Burke’s woman, Helen, walked in and lost her temper when she saw Burke with the two women. A violent argument ensued and Burke threw Helen out. Mary was asleep throughout and remained thus when Janet left. Later, when Janet returned to fetch her friend, she was told she had gone out with Burke. Mary Paterson was never seen again.

    A few weeks later Burke murdered Elizabeth Haldane, a former lodger who had fallen on hard times and who he had allowed to sleep in his stable. He would murder her daughter Peggy a few weeks later.

    Not long after dispatching Elizabeth Haldane, Burke watched the police take a very drunk woman into custody and spotted an opportunity. He approached the constables and told them he knew the woman and was happy to take her home. The officers were delighted to have her taken off their hands. Needless to say, however, Burke had never seen the woman before and she was dead before the day was out.

    An old woman and her deaf grandson were next in their sights. Burke and Hare used the familiar tactic of inviting them back to the boarding house for drinks and once there, suffocated the old woman. They were unsure what to do with the boy but it did not take them long to come up with an idea. With his customary callous disregard for human life, Hare seized the young man and held him over Burke’s knee, pushing down on him and breaking his back. They got £8 for each body.

    But soon, greed would come between the deadly duo. Burke learned that Hare was working on his own, killing and selling the victims without sharing the spoils with his erstwhile partner. He was furious and after loud arguments he moved out. Nonetheless, they continued to work together and it did not matter who the victim was. Even an old friend who visited Burke was soon being dissected by eager students.

    They began to get careless, however. For instance, on one occasion they delivered an eighteen-year-old boy to the university. Known as ‘Daft Jamie’, he was a well-known local character who lived on the streets and entertained children with jokes and riddles. Jamie’s mother located his body at the university and her identification was confirmed by several of the students who also knew him. There was public outrage, although Burke and Hare denied that it was Jamie and Professor Knox began to dissect the face as soon as possible to conceal the boy’s identity.

    They killed for the last time on Halloween morning, 1828. Burke met an old Irish woman, Mary Docherty, in a tavern. He told her that his mother’s name was also Docherty and that she came from the same town as the woman. Therefore, he smiled, they must be related. He persuaded her to return with him to his house where he introduced her to Helen and a couple, James and Ann Gray, who were lodging there. Mary was persuaded to stay the night while the Grays were to be lodged for that night at Hare’s boarding house.

    That night there was a great deal of noise from Burke’s house and, around midnight, a neighbour passing the door heard a woman’s voice shout ‘Murder! Get the police, there is murder here!’ The man tried to locate a police officer but there were none around. He listened at the door again, however, and hearing nothing, assumed everything was alright.

    When the Grays returned the following morning for breakfast there was no sign of Mary Docherty. Helen told them that she had asked the woman to leave because she was paying a little too much attention to Burke. Ann Gray went towards a spare bed in the room in order to get some socks. Suddenly Burke screamed at her to stay away from the bed. She found this very strange, especially when he shouted at her again later on when she went close to it. Alone in the room a little later, she decided to have a look. Lifting the bedcover she found Mary Docherty’s lifeless eyes staring back at her.

    The Grays fled but bumped into Helen MacDougal who asked them where they were going. When they told her they had found the body and asked her what she knew about it, Helen panicked and offered them £10 a week for their silence. They were not to be bought, however. They went straight to the police.

    Helen found Margaret and they ran off to inform Burke and Hare of this disastrous development. The two men managed to get Mary’s body out of the house before the arrival of the police although they were spotted by neighbours manhandling a tea chest.

    Burke and Hare arrived back at the house to find the police waiting for them, but they had worked out alibis, informing the officers that Mary Docherty had left the house at seven the previous evening. They were not believed, however, and were taken in for questioning.

    It all became academic when an anonymous tip-off led police to Professor Knox’s lecture theatre where Mary Docherty’s body was discovered, not yet dissected.

    Evidence against Burke and Hare started to pile up as the authorities began to investigate the spate of disappearances that had occurred in West Port during the last twelve months. The culprits turned on each other but it was still proving difficult to pin the murders on them. There had been no witnesses to the actual killings, after all, and the evidence was mostly circumstantial. The Lord Advocate approached William Hare and offered him a deal. If he would testify against Burke, he would be given immunity from prosecution. Hare did not hesitate and a short while later William Burke and Helen MacDougal were charged with the murder of Mary Docherty, while Burke alone was charged with the murders of Daft Jamie and the prostitute Mary Paterson.

    Their trial began on Christmas Eve and by Christmas Day the jury was already out. When they returned they pronounced William Burke guilty and Helen not proven, a unique Scottish verdict that falls between guilty and innocent. She was free to go.

    William Burke was hanged in 1829 amidst demands that Professor Knox should face the same fate. Although Knox was never charged, his reputation was damaged to such an extent that for the remainder of his career, he was rejected for every position for which he applied.

    William Hare was released and there are stories of him as a blind beggar on the streets of London. The last reported sighting of him was in Carlisle.

    Jack the Ripper

    What is it about Jack the Ripper that still fascinates us, more than a hundred years after he stalked the dingy streets of Whitechapel? After all, compared with the monsters who have entered the annals of crime in the years since, he is small time. Ted Bundy murdered thirty-five women and Gerald Stano confessed to forty-one. The Ripper only killed five. Perhaps the reason for our enduring interest is the fact that we still do not know who Jack the Ripper was. Every year, it seems, there is another theory and an entire industry has grown up around him, with more books having been written about him than have been written about all of the United States presidents put together.

    There are at least twenty-seven suspects, amongst whom is Montague John Druitt, a doctor, who was described by his own family as ‘sexually insane’. They believed him to be the Ripper. Coincidentally, he disappeared around the time that the murders ceased and his body was fished out of the Thames on 31 December 1892, just over a month after the last murder.

    Some claim, on the other hand, that the Polish Jew Aaron Kosminski, was the Ripper. Kosminski, who hated all women but especially prostitutes, lived in Whitechapel and had homicidal tendencies. In 1889, he was declared insane and sent to an asylum.

    Russian doctor Michael Ostrog was another asylum inmate who possessed homicidal tendencies. His whereabouts at the time of each murder was never established.

    Amongst the other suspects are some surprising names. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, popularly known as ‘Eddie’, was Queen Victoria’s grandson. One theory suggests that a shop girl who was carrying his baby had been institutionalised for the remainder of her life by the queen’s doctor, Sir William Gull. The prostitutes who were murdered, it is suggested, all knew the shop girl and were aware of what had happened to her. To maintain silence on the matter, Sir William had killed them, making it look like the work of a madman. There are a couple of elements of this story that make it unlikely, however. Firstly, Sir William was a man of over seventy years of age at the time of the murders and it would have been difficult for a man of that age to commit such murders. Secondly, Eddie’s sexual preferences leaned more in the direction of men than women.

    The artist Walter Sickert has recently become a suspect. He painted prostitutes he met on the streets of London’s East End and his pictures sometimes replicate photographs of the Ripper’s victims. Furthermore, some of the letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper contain phrases used by the American painter James McNeill Whistler. Whistler was Sickert’s teacher.

    Whoever he was – and it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure – he launched his brief eighteen-month reign of terror towards the end of August 1888. Charles Cross was walking through Buck Row in Whitechapel at around four in the morning when he spotted what he thought at first was a bundle of clothing lying on the ground at the entrance to a stable yard. As he got closer, he saw that it was actually a woman lying on her back. His initial thought was that she was drunk. After all, it was not unusual in those times to find someone dead drunk on the street. Whitechapel was a rough area, populated mostly by the poor and the unemployed and serviced by around 1,200 prostitutes.

    Seeing another man walking along the street, Cross called to him for help. They knelt beside her but realised there was nothing they could do for her. For the sake of decency they pulled down her skirt which had been lifted up over her waist. When Constable John Neil arrived on the scene, he noted that her throat had been cut from ear to ear. He shone his lamp in her face and saw it reflected dully in eyes that were wide open and staring. A doctor and ambulance were summoned, but, of course, there was nothing for them to do but confirm that she was dead and remove her from the scene.

    She had been dead for not more than thirty minutes, Dr Rees Llewellyn surmised, and had died as a result of the devastating wound to the throat. Her throat had, in fact, been slashed twice, but on further examination at the mortuary, it emerged that she had also received a stab wound to the abdomen and several other long, deep cuts. The killer had mutilated her as she lay on the ground, it appeared. A police surgeon is reported to have said of this mutilation, ‘I have never seen so horrible a case. She was ripped about in a manner that only a person skilled in the use of a knife could have achieved.’ Perhaps that was the beginning of the

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