JANUARY 2019

WORLD’S BEST
MASTER TRUE

DETECTIVE
SPECIAL
CRIME
STORIE S
EVERY MON TH!

REPORT
INSIDE
THE
MIND
OF A
CANNIBAL
BOAR “THEY CAN
HUNTER ONLY
EXECUTE
LURES ME ONCE”
FRIEND Said The Triple-Killer

TO HIS LIZ WAS GROOMED,

DEATH MARRIED...AND MURDERED
BEDROOM CARNAGE! MISTRESS’S HUSBAND CARRIES OUT MURDER PLOT
www.truecrimelibrary.com
 InsideMD
www.truecrimelibrary.com January 2019
C annibal killers. They’re a twisted bunch. And in this month’s MD we’re
exploring what turns these murderers into flesh-eaters. In our special,
full-length report (starting right), we feature some of the most fascinating
yet horrific examples of the type. Readers, let us know if you’d like to see
us tackle other crime-related subjects in a similar fashion.
Elsewhere, MD Forum, on page 20, features an intriguing, unsolved
murder from Kent, The Curious Case Of The Dog That Didn’t Bark,
requested by a reader, and Scotland’s Classic Cases, on page 29, highlights
the deadly work – and extraordinary correspondence – of Robert Smith, the
What makes a killer
last man to be publicly hanged north of the border. devour his victim?
Finally, don’t miss the second part of Meet Benny And Stella Mae, on
page 42, in which the law finally catches up with the bank-robber couple...
We shrink back
En joy th e re ad! in dread from the
2 INSIDE THE MIND OF A CANNIBAL thought of eating
From Fish to Dahmer, what turns killers into flesh-eaters?
human flesh—so what
7 PAUL DONNELLEY’S MURDER MONTH
More Murder Months on pages 19, 24, 34 and 49 turns a murderer into
13 VIEWPOINT plus COMPETITION a Hannibal Lecter?
More of your views and a chance to win a book Surprisingly, there are
14 EUROPEAN CRIME REPORT rational explanations,
“Son’s Deadly Revenge At Father’s Tomb,” “Boar Hunter
Lures Friend To His Death,” “TV Journalist Raped And and in this report
Murdered,” “Psychopath Tortured Frenchman To Death” we analyse them,
20 MD FORUM: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG taking you...
THAT DIDN’T BARK
Kent villagers were stunned by the horrific killing of
Margaret “Carrots” Jackson on the eve of the Second
World War
23 LIZ WAS GROOMED, MARRIED...AND
INSIDE T

CA
MURDERED
How cold case cops finally nailed a predatory killer who
met his victim when she was a teenage babysitter
29 SCOTLAND’S CLASSIC CASES:
“DEAR JANE, SORRY I SHOT YOU, CHOKED YOU
AND SLIT YOUR THROAT”
The letter written by a condemned child-killer to a
surviving victim had to be seen to be believed
32 MURDER IN YOUR VILLAGE:
BLASTED TO DEATH BY HIS DAUGHTER’S YOUNG
LOVER

S
omething happened when the
How a scandalous affair led to murder in County Antrim loathsome character of Hannibal
Lecter first crossed our cinema
36 US EXECUTIONS – THE FORGOTTEN DECADE: screens. Cannibalism, once a taboo
“THEY CAN ONLY EXECUTE ME ONCE” too far for most people to discuss,
The victims had one thing in common: they had all done became a subject of curiosity. What
killer David Nelson a favour... must it be like to eat another person?
41 THIRTY YEARS AGO IN CRIME
More headline-making material from MD’s crime archives By John Sanders

42 MEET BENNY AND STELLA MAE – PART TWO It is still the ultimate form of
Just like Bonnie and Clyde, they were young, in love, and sexual sadism – something we all
being hunted by the cops instinctively shrink from. But now
it’s a subject that fascinates as well as
47 BEDROOM CARNAGE AS MISTRESS’S horrifies.
HUSBAND CARRIES OUT MURDER PLOT... A few years ago in a TV series
When an odd and evil married couple conspired to kill on cannibalism, one programme
became so excited about people
Cover and contents of Master Detective produced by Magazine Design & Publishing Ltd. Printed and eating people that it lumped all the
bound by Warners Midlands plc, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH, for the Proprietors and Publishers. most sensational cases together,
Copyright and the rights of translation and reproduction of the contents of Master Detective are strictly including Arthur Shawcross, the
reserved. Distributed by Marketforce (UK), 5 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London E14 5HU. Tel: +44 American serial killer who probably
(0)20 3787 9001. © Magazine Design & Publishing Ltd. wasn’t a cannibal anyway, and tried

2
 Left, Armin Mewes. MD
He invited a
stranger SPECIAL
around for
dinner – REPORT
and then
ate him.
Right,
Hannibal
Lecter
from
the film
Silence
of the
Lambs

Above, Albert
Fish: “Little girls
have more flavour
than little boys.”
Right, Andre
Chikatilo. He
confessed to 34
murders but later
admitted there
could be more
than 50

THE MIND OF A

ANNIBAL
to find common ground between
them. There was none, despite the
programme-makers’ view that there
was.
The truth is that there is no
J effrey Dahmer, a good-looking
homosexual college graduate, cut up
his 17 victims with a power saw, had sex
with their corpses, ate parts of them and
kept their severed heads in his fridge.
Investigating, he found the skull had
exploded, and frustrated he gave up the
idea and trashed the rest of the body.
Dahmer was given so many life
sentences that the minimum total he
MDWhat It’s Like To Eat Somebody

definable type of criminal who might
practise cannibalism.
There are though, as we shall see by
examining some cases, some primary
explanations for it, self-justifications
that lie deep within the subconscious
of the cannibal. And by examining
these explanations psychiatrists
can at least begin to understand
the warped and twisted mind of the
human-flesh eater.
Criminal cannibals are
comparatively rare, although when
they do surface from time to time
their atavistic revelations still have
the power to terrify, sending shock
waves of horror through our inner
minds.
He celebrated his would theoretically serve
30th birthday in 1990 was around 950 years. All
by painting the skull that was to no account
of one of his victims when, two years later,
grey. Dahmer was he was murdered by a
obsessed with the idea fellow-prisoner.
of keeping his victims’ It is known that sadism
bodies in perpetuity. occurs when the libido
After scraping the becomes misdirected or
flesh off a body he perverted, so that the act
tried to make the Jeffrey Dahmer of inflicting pain becomes
skeleton stand up, but in itself an object of
failed for want of some material to hold sexual gratification. At the height of his
the bones together. ecstasy the sadist is able to suppress all
Then he experimented with the idea of reality by the stronger urge and sensation
roasting a head in the kitchen oven in the of desire.
belief that this would preserve it. After an He can be aggressive or passive, or he
hour he was alerted by popping sounds. can be both. In the case of cannibalism

3
 he is both. He is aggressive when he
kills, but passive when, having obtained
the object of his desire – his victim – he
passively devours it.
Ifellow-student
n 1981 in Paris Japanese student Issei
Sagawa, 32, befriended a Dutch girl,
Renee Hartevelt, and fell
in love with her. His love was unrequited
– she was happy to visit his apartment
and talk, but that was all. When she
would not yield to his advances Sagawa
shot her with a gun fitted with a silencer.
“I decided to cut her up,” Sagawa said.
“I used the kitchen knives: they were all
I had. While I was doing this I had an
irresistible urge. For a long time I had
been wanting to eat a young woman.
I cut off little bits and put them in the
fridge.
“I cut out the heart, liver and kidneys,
lips, breasts and the end of her nose and
various other parts of her soft organs. I
cooked some of these in my kitchen on
Friday and ate them. Some I also ate
Above left, Tracy Edwards – one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims that got away. He
escaped from Dahmer’s flat and raised the alarm. Above right, Japanese student
Issei Sagawa. Unrequited love drove him to shoot and eat a Dutch student in Paris
raw.”
Leaving the rest of the body in his
apartment, he went out and bought
two suitcases and a trolley, packed the
remains into the cases, and wheeled
them off to the Bois de Boulogne, where
he threw them into the bushes.
Soon after that Sagawa was traced
through the suitcases and arrested.
After three months in a asylum for the
criminally insane he was handed over to
the Japanese authorities, who took him
back to Tokyo. He was kept in a Japanese
asylum for 18 months, then released
because the doctors decided he was no
longer a threat to public safety.
After his release he wrote a book about
his experience of eating white human
flesh that became a best-seller in Japan.
Asked about the casual approach to this
horrific case, a French police officer said:
“We only let him go to Japan. The
Japanese doctors released him, not us.
4
They were probably right, anyway, since
as far as I know he’s never eaten another
girl.”
No explanation can truly satisfy
for such horrific cannibalistic crimes.
But searching for scientific reasons,
psychiatrists believe that criminal
cannibals are weak-minded people
with a craving to dominate and possess
– possess to the point of having their
victims literally inside them.
Usually in such cases it is the killer’s
intention to possess something he
either loves or hates. He does not want
anyone else to have it – he must be the
sole possessor, and the safest way of
preventing anyone else from having it is
to eat it.
Usually too the killing and the
cannibalism are premeditated – the killer
has worked out his plan for the corpse
before he strikes. He becomes intoxicated
with his own importance and the will to
power, and inflated by the strength of
his ego. His view of himself is, “There is
only me – nothing exists outside of me.”
He seeks only to increase his prestige in
his own eyes, and eating the object of his
desire fulfils that requirement.
O ne 20th-century cannibal whose
monumental crimes seemed to defy
all logic was Albert Fish, who was one
of those “bogey-men” who fill every
mother’s mind with dread. He was a
child-abductor on a grand scale, and
after he was caught he confessed to
killing a little girl, cutting up her body,
cooking it, and eating it over a period of
nine days.
A psychiatrist was later to report that
throughout those nine days, “Fish was
in a state of great sexual excitement.”
His descent into cannibalism began with
experiments in sadomasochism – he
used to beat himself regularly with a bat
studded with nails.
Fish was born in Washington DC
in 1870. He came from an old and
highly respected family. One of his
ancestors was Secretary of State in the
administration of President Grant.
Mental health problems had dogged
his family. His parental uncle suffered
from a religious psychosis and died
in an insane asylum. His half-brother
also died in a hospital for the insane.
A younger brother was feeble-minded
and died of hydrocephalus. A paternal
aunt was considered “completely crazy.”
Fish’s mother was said to be “very odd.”
Another brother was a
chronic alcoholic.
A sister had
Jeffrey Dahmer. He cut
up 17 victims with a
power saw, ate parts
of them and kept their
heads in his fridge
“some sort of mental affliction.”
Fish’s mother and father both died
when he was five. He was sent to an
orphanage, where he was described as a
highly nervous youth. He confessed that
he enjoyed watching his teacher spank
other pupils, and enjoyed being spanked
himself.
When he was 28 he married a woman
nine years younger than himself. His
wife bore him six children, then eloped
with their lodger. Fish left his younger
children in the care of a relative and
began to roam around the country,
picking up odd jobs house-painting or
any other work he could get.
Traits begun in early childhood
persisted in him, and in his 40s he
realised that he was a sado-masochist,
gaining intense pleasure from both
inflicting and suffering pain.
At his trial a psychiatrist said he found
Fish to be addicted to no fewer than 19
sexual perversions. He had many weird
ways of achieving an orgasm, none
stranger than his practice of soaking
pieces of cotton wool in alcohol, inserting
them in his rectum and setting fire to
them.
Before he was 10 he had begun eating
human excrement, both his own and
other people’s. Shortly after he was
arrested, doctors who X-rayed him were
astonished to discover 29
needles embedded in his
skin around his testicles.
Some had been there so
long they had gone rusty.
Questioned about
Above, Albert Fish and below, his victim Grace Budd
(far left) pictured with her brother and sister. He cut up
her body, cooked it, and ate parts of it over a period of
days. Right, detectives searching at Wisteria Cottage
this, Fish said he had also tried to stick
an ice-pick into his stomach and needles
under his fingernails, “but that hurt too
much.”
“I travelled through twenty-three
states,” he recalled. “I went from New
York to Montana and back and I had
victims in every state.”
In the course of his wanderings he
married three more times, abandoning
these women and moving on as soon as
he tired of them.
During this nomadic period, Fish
became a consummate child-abductor.
He admitted to at least 100 abductions in
which he had seduced or forced young
boys into repugnant and agonising sexual
acts. His victims were nearly all poor
Negro children from the urban ghettos,
but sometimes he picked on poor whites.
Often he would pay children to bring
others to him.
Fish described himself as highly
religious and said that he did not drink,
smoke or swear. “I am not a kidnapper,”
he insisted. “I always asked permission
to take a girl along with me. Or at least I
obtained her consent. I never abducted
anyone by force.”
It was clear that in making such
excuses Fish was aware of the difference
between right and wrong. He told one
psychiatrist: “I must have been right, or
an angel would have stopped me.”
He told how he wrote obscene letters
in reply to newspaper advertisements, or
to the patrons of matrimonial agencies.
Once an elderly woman advertised that
she wanted convalescent care. Fish
turned up with a rope and asked her to
beat him with it.
In his 50s he became religious, and
a psychosis developed with delusions
and hallucinations. He had visions of
the tortures of hell. He would take his
victims to remote places, tie them up and
beat them. He never gagged them, he
said, because he liked to hear their cries.
He said he had always expected to be
arrested. “I do not care whether I live or
die,” he told detectives. Insisting that he
was not insane, he said, “I guess I’m just
queer.”
The murder for which Fish was finally
arrested occurred in June, 1928; in New
York City, when he abducted 12-year-old
Grace Budd, saying he was taking her to
a birthday party. Grace was never seen
alive again.
Six years later Fish, then aged 60,
decided to write anonymously to Grace’s
parents, confessing in horrific detail to
having murdered their daughter. He
wrote that he had taken Grace to an
empty house, where he choked her to
death.
“I cut her up and ate a part of her
flesh. I did not have sex with her. I
feasted on her flesh for nine days.
“I learned to like the taste of human
flesh many years ago. I can’t exactly
describe the taste. It is something like
veal, then again it resembles
chicken, only it is tastier than
either. The best flesh, that which
is most tender, is to be had from
children. Little girls have more
flavour than little boys.”
The letter explained that he got
the idea of eating children’s flesh
from a sea captain friend who
had been in China at a time of
famine, when it was dangerous
for boys and girls to be on the
streets – predators would seize
them, cut them up and sell them
as meat.
On returning to New York
the captain had seized two boys
aged 11 and six, stripping them
and locking them in a cupboard at his
apartment. First he killed the 11-year-old
and ate him; then he strangled the
six-year-old, fried, stewed and boiled his
flesh and ate him too.
Not surprisingly the contents of
Fish’s letter reduced Grace’s mother to
a state of collapse. She called the police,
who traced Fish through the envelope.
When they arrested him he seemed
actually proud of his horrific handiwork,
and rnade no attempt to conceal his
sadistic pleasure as he described the
fate of Grace Budd. On the day of the
abduction he had borrowed a car from
an acquaintance and driven with Grace
to Grand Central Terminal, where he
left the car to be picked up by its owner.
5
 Then he took a train for Irvington, near
Greenburgh, with the child.
“I had a saw and a large carving
knife and a hammer wrapped up in a
piece of brown canvas,” he told police.
“I brought these tools with me for the
purpose of cutting up the body. I left
the package on the luggage rack when I
was about to get off, and darned if the
little girl didn’t remind me of it!”
When they approached the empty
house, called Wisteria Cottage, he left
Grace outside picking wild flowers,
while he went in and opened the canvas
package and stripped off his clothes to
avoid getting blood on them. Then he
Right, detectives
put bones, including
those of Grace Budd
(above), into a basket
after searching the
grounds of Wisteria
Cottage
called Grace.
When she saw him standing naked at
the head of the stairs she shrank back
and screamed.
Fish said it took him about five
minutes to choke her to death. Then he
stripped her and cut off her head. Next
he cut across her body above the navel,
leaving the lower part of the corpse and
the torso behind the door of the room
where he carried out the dissection.
He took the head to the outside toilet
behind the cottage and covered it with a
sheet of paper.
He took a piece of one of Grace’s
forearms home for lunch, chopping
it into four parts with a cleaver and
stewing it with some vegetables and a
bouillon cube. Two nights later – on the
night of Tuesday, June 5th, 1928 – he
returned to the cottage to collect more
body parts to take home for cooking.
Several more trips were made to
Wisteria Cottage for further supplies
for his table. His final return trip was
made nine days after the murder, when
he carried the remaining body parts
out of the rear of the cottage and threw
them over a wall.
Psychiatrists would have been
interested in the significance of
6
the parts Fish ate and the parts he
discarded. When a sadistic killer slashes,
cuts, or maims his victim’s body or
commits some perversion on it – as
in this case, eating it – he frequently
concentrates his attack on those parts
which have strong sexual significance to
him, and serve as sexual stimulus. Very
often he has a fetish for a particular part
of the body, and so demands expression
through his mutilation and destruction
of the part that most fascinates him.
Fish of course was a sadist, one who
found pleasure in the destruction of
his victim. In his case there was a mad
desire for possession, annihilation and
consumption of the victim. In purely
scientific terms, such actions reveal the
close relationship between the nutritive
instinct and sadism.
This is a relationship well known to
psychiatrists. One harmless reminder of
it is revealed when lovers nuzzle each
other’s ears during copulation. It can
be traced to the lower animals, where
one has to kill if one is hungry – thus
“He is unpunishable, incurable and unreformable.
In his own distorted mind he is looking forward
to the final experience of supreme pain”
killing and slaughter are linked with the
instinct to feed. In a modest form it is
similarly interwoven with that stage of
childhood when the child gets sadistic
pleasure from sucking and biting. Taken
to its extreme, this instinct may lead to
a desire to swallow, so as to possess the
victim entirely, as one’s very own.
O ne murderer who knew this was
the Crawley acid-bath killer John
George Haigh. In the hope of being
judged insane he let it be known after
his arrest that after killing one of his
victims he drank a glass of her blood.
Vampirism, of course, is akin to
cannibalism, and equally suggests
madness. In Haigh’s case the plea didn’t
work, and in all probability he made
up the story. But did he want to drink
some of that blood, and did he shrink
from doing so only through his inbuilt
inhibitions?
If that question could have been
truthfully answered it might have
changed the jury’s view of Haigh.
Docile and complaisant, Albert Fish
led detectives to the place where they
would find the remains of his victim,
identified as those of Grace Budd by
her teeth and remnants of clothing.
He confessed that a year after he killed
Grace he took another girl into a park
at night. His intention was to kill her
in order to obtain meat for himself and
for those of his children still living with
him. But someone came along and he
fled.
Fish was known to have killed three
other victims in New York State. In one
instance he was questioned by police,
but released because he seemed to be a
harmless old man.
As he committed his list of horrific
crimes, travelling from place to place,
he went under a number of different
names. He usually killed while in his
painter’s overalls, which he wore over
his nude body. On this paint-splashed
garment a little blood would be
overlooked until he could wash it out.
Fish had been arrested several times,
but always for minor crimes. Once
while working in a grocer’s shop he was
convicted of stealing. He was paroled said Fish was undoubtedly insane. “He
after 16 months. Soon afterwards he is suffering from paranoid psychosis. Paul Donnelley’s
was sent back to jail for parole violation. He is introverted and infantilistic. His
Later he was arrested for passing two sexual nature is that of a baby, and he
dud cheques, but received a suspended
sentence. Then he was jailed for 90 days
plays with humans as a child plays with
flies.”
MURDER MONTH
for writing obscene letters. Fish’s 35-year-old son Albert said he January
This last sentence should have had known about his father’s addiction
served as a red light to investigators.
Obscene-letter writers are styled
to needles and had once asked him
about it. “Certain feelings come over S itcom star’s only son murdered
in botched robbery…Ennis Cosby
was the only son among American
“symbolic sadists.” Their letters me sometimes,” his father replied,
are the chosen outlet for their “and I have to stick needles comedian Bill Cosby’s five children.
imagination; in my body.” The boy struggled in school because of
their sadism Fish’s son also undiagnosed dyslexia. After his problem
may stop said that when was assessed, he spent a summer
there or it there was a at a college for pupils with learning
may simply be full moon disabilities.
an interlude his father ate He went on to earn a BA and an MA
between actual little but raw and then began studying for a doctorate
and overt meat, his eyes in special education at Columbia
sadistic acts. were wild and University’s Teachers’ College. He
In the first his face was planned to create a school for children
case the subject constantly with learning difficulties.
either lacks flushed. In January 1997, he was on a break
the courage Despite from his studies and was spending time
to transfer this he was visiting friends in Los Angeles. At 1
his ideas into found guilty a.m. on January 16th, he was driving
practice, or of first-degree north on Interstate 405 when he pulled
his inbuilt murder and off the motorway after his
inhibitions sentenced car developed a flat tyre.
have checked to die. One He drove on to Skirball
his fancied of the jurors Center Drive where he
desires. In the said later, “I stopped his dark green
second case thought he Mercedes-Benz to change
he is clearly was insane, the tyre.
signalling but I figured He telephoned
possible trouble he should be Stephanie Crane, a
ahead. electrocuted friend, for help and she Ennis Cosby
When Fish anyway.” So soon found him. She
was twice apparently parked her car behind his and let her
caught beating did Albert headlights illuminate the area so he
himself with a Fish himself. could see what he was doing. As she
John George Haigh and the inside of his
nail-studded bat He went sat in her car, a man approached her
murder factory in Crawley (below). After
he was sent on and knocked on the window. “Open the
killing one of his female victims he claimed willingly to the
both occasions electric chair, door or I’ll kill you,” he said. Terrified,
he drank a glass of her blood
to a mental helping the Miss Crane drove away but stopped
hospital. He executioner when she was around 50 feet away
was discharged to attach the and returned to the scene. A man was
from one of electrodes to caught in her headlights running away.
them after a his leg. She got out of her car and walked
month with He over to Mr. Cosby’s. She found her
the comment: regarded the friend lying in a pool of blood by the
“Not insane. electrocution driver’s door – he had been shot in the
Psychopathic as a treat. “To head.
personality, die in this Tabloids Globe ($200,000) and
sexual type.” way is the National Enquirer ($100,000) offered
The other supreme thrill, rewards leading to the prosecution of
hospital the only one I the killer. Police suspected robbery as a
discharged haven’t tried,” motive although a Rolex was not taken
him as, “Quiet, he exulted. nor was cash from Mr. Cosby’s pocket.
co-operative, oriented.” Fish seemed A defence psychiatrist commented: In March, Russian immigrant Mikhail
to like mental hospitals, though, for he “He is unpunishable, incurable and Markhasev was arrested and charged
was employed for brief intervals by five unreformable. In his own distorted with capital murder, which could lead
different ones. mind he is looking forward to the final to the death penalty. In July 1998, after
At his trial Fish listened intently to the experience of supreme pain.” a two-week trial, Markhasev was found
evidence, but displayed no emotion, and The first electrical charge failed, guilty and sentenced to life, plus an
his gentle, benevolent expression never possibly short-circuited by the many additional 10 years in prison.
left his face. “If you wanted someone to needles in his body. But a few minutes In February 2001, he instructed
trust your children to, he would be the later Albert Fish was well and truly his legal team to stop his appeal.
one you would choose,” said one of the dead. “I am guilty, and I want to do the
doctors who examined him. Interestingly, when he was arrested right thing...More than anything,
Fish was tried only for the murder of the police found newspaper cuttings in I want to apologise to the victim’s
Grace Budd. No one doubted he would his pocket relating to the trial of Fritz family. It is my duty as a fellow-
be convicted – the issue was whether he Haarmann, a German killer known as citizen, and it’s the least I can
was insane or would go to the chair. the Butcher of Hanover because he too do, after the great wickedness for
Dr. Fredric Wertham, for the defence, went in for cannibalism. which I am responsible.”

7
 B orn in 1879, Haarmann had a
troubled childhood, detesting
his father and dressing up as a girl.
Good-looking but fat, he was put in
an asylum at the age of 17 for offences
committed against children. He escaped
to Switzerland, returned to his family’s
home in Hanover and began a successful
career in the army until he was invalided
out with neurasthenia.
After several years in prison for
burglary, fraud, picking pockets and
indecent assaults on children, he became
a black-market butcher in Hanover. Meat
was in short supply, and Haarmann
did not lack for customers, who were
unaware that they were buying human
flesh cut from his freshly murdered
victims.
He first came under suspicion in
1918 following the disappearance of a
17-year-old youth who had arrived in
Hanover by train. Posing as a policeman,
Haarmann had picked up the youth at
the railway station, but a search of the
butcher’s lodgings revealed nothing. The
police failed to look behind the kitchen
stove, where the missing boy’s head was
hidden under a newspaper.
Haarmann lived with his 24-year-old
53 VICTIMS
FOR THE
RUSSIAN
RIPPER
S he was blonde, pretty and nine
years old. She would never be 10,
but Yelena Zakomova was not to know
that. All she was concerned about on
the evening of Friday, December 22nd,
1978, was that her hair needed tidying.
She had stayed chatting at a friend’s
house longer than she’d intended, and
now she was walking back to her home
in the small mining town of Shakhty,
near Russia’s border with the Ukraine.
She hadn’t gone far when she found
she had company. A tall, middle-aged
man had fallen in step beside her.
Yelena was an outgoing child, and she
responded easily to his small-talk. Her
hair was bothering her, she confided, but
she could do nothing about it till she got
home.
That was no problem, he told her. She
could use the mirror at his place, just
around the corner.
They were soon there. His place
8
“Ruhr Hunter” Joachim Kroll. His
victims were mostly children
homosexual lover Hans Grans, and
together they lured teenage boys to their
home, “befriending” them when they
arrived at the station and then murdering
them, selling their clothes and cutting up
their bodies for sale as meat.
When Haarmann was convicted of
indecent behaviour in 1924 police again
searched his home. Clues there led them
to the remains of 23 bodies on the shore
Andre Chikatilo. He
confessed to eating their
amputated sex organs
turned out to be little more than a
semi-derelict shack. It looked a forlorn
hovel in the winter darkness, but Yelena
saw little of it.
Within seconds of stepping inside she
was forced to the floor. Her companion
knelt over her, ripped off her clothes,
straddled her and rubbed himself against
her. This didn’t give him the satisfaction
he craved, so he penetrated her with his
finger, making her bleed. The sight of
her blood excited him. He wanted more.
He stabbed and slashed her until he
climaxed. Then he strangled her.
A human monster had claimed his
first victim…and discovered his true
nature. Now at last he knew what
gave him sexual ecstasy: domination,
mutilation, his victim’s agony and terror
as his knife did its unspeakable work.
The revelation was to cost more than 50
other lives.
The shack’s owner was traced. He
of a river near his lodgings.
At his trial he said he was surprised
to find himself charged with only 27
murders. He believed the total was nearer
40. That was probably an underestimate,
for in 16 months he was believed to have
dismembered an average of two victims
each week.
Hans Grans was sentenced to 12 years’
imprisonment and Haarmann, then aged
45, was beheaded.
Icriminals
n the 20th century, Germany produced
four other notable cannibalistic
besides Haarmann. The first,
Georg Grossmann, killed scores of girls
and sold their flesh in the famine after the
First World War, when meat was scarce.
Following his arrest in 1921, he hanged
himself in his prison cell before his
scheduled execution.
The second, Karl Denke, killed young
men, pickling and selling their flesh. He
kept a ledger in which he recorded the
name, date and weight of each carcass as
it was pickled. He murdered at least 30
young men before he too hanged himself
in his cell following his arrest.
The third, Joachim Kroll, hunted his
victims in the Ruhr Valley between July
turned out to be Andrei Romanovich
Chikatilo, a 41-year-old schoolteacher.
His wife said he’d been at home all
that night, and the detectives’ interest
switched to another suspect.
Meanwhile Andrei Chikatilo bided
his time. His interrogation over Yelena’s
murder had shaken him. He knew he’d
been lucky to get away with it. And
given the chance, he knew he’d do it
again. Nothing in his unsatisfactory sex
life compared with the thrill Yelena’s
killing had given him. It was as if he’d
been programmed for the crime. This
was what he was meant to do.
Twelve years later, his marathon
orgy of death over, he was to say: “The
purpose of life is to leave your mark on
this earth.” He’d left his mark 53 times
in a manner that beggared description.
As he got into his stride, victim
following victim often in amazingly
quick succession, he refined his
1959 and 1976 and earned the sobriquet
of the “Ruhr Hunter.” He cut steaks from
the flesh of his victims, who were mostly
young children. He was arrested after the
kidnapping and murder of four-year-old
Marion Ketter from a playground in the
Duisburg suburb of Laar.
A mild-looking man with a bald head
had been seen leading the child away.
Police conducted a house-to-house
search, and when they came to Kroll’s
apartment they found parcels of human
flesh neatly wrapped in plastic bags in the
freezer.
On the stove a pan was bubbling away.
Among the carrots and potatoes was a
child’s hand…
As is sometimes the case with sadists
who tum to cannibalism, Kroll had begun
his life of crime as a rapist-murderer. He
then had to kill first and rape afterwards
to achieve sexual satisfaction, so he
became a necrophiliac. Ultimately he
became a cannibal, for which his motive
seemed to be economic – he simply
wanted to save money on his meat bills.
In a period of 20 years Kroll, who was
mentally retarded, probably committed
14 murders – and possibly many more.
When he was arrested he asked police if
technique in order to intensify his
excitement. He began prolonging
the agony of his prey, and hence the
duration of his ecstasy.
With his knife he would begin by
lightly slashing and scoring his victim’s
body in an almost playful prelude to the
horror that was to come. This induced
the terror that each victim was required
to show as an entree to the feast that
was to follow, for Chikatilo enjoyed
munching his prey’s genitals.
As the death toll
escalated the authorities in
Moscow intervened in the
investigation. Semen found
on some of the victims
was found to have come
from a man with AB blood
grouping, which occurred
in only six per cent of the
population. More victims
followed, including a
woman Chikatilo met on a
business trip to Tashkent.
He left her headless.
Yet another murder Andre Chikatilo
was that of a boy whose
mutilations were so horrific that his
prison-guard father fainted in the
morgue on viewing the body.
On September 14th, 1984, Chikatilo
was brought in for questioning. He had
the rare blood group and he had been
seen acting suspiciously at Rostov bus
station, apparently trying to pick up
women – one of whom he persuaded to
give him oral sex. She obliged with her
head concealed under his coat.
When a kitchen knife with an
eight-inch blade was found in his
briefcase, and his shoe size matched
a footprint found at one of the crime
scenes, the investigators thought
Above, Anna Zimmerman. Most
unusually, she was a female
cannibal. Right, her victim, barber
Josef Wirtz. Plastic boxes were
found in a freezer containing
pieces of his dismembered corpse
they had their man. Their confidence
increased when they discovered he had
been grilled in the investigation of Yelena
Zakomova’s murder but released.
Then on November 19th, 1990 – a
year in which he had taken eight lives –
Chikatilo was arrested.
For a start the serial killer confessed
to 34 murders. But these were just those
of which he was suspected. He went
on to admit more, and by the time he’d
finished the “score” was more than 50.
He confessed to eating his
victims’ amputated sexual
organs, but he claimed
he’d never set out to kill.
He’d only murdered, he
said, when he was scorned
or mocked. Nobody
believed him.
His incredulous wife
couldn’t believe what she
was hearing. She said
he couldn’t even kill a
chicken.
Found sane enough to
be tried, Andre Chikatilo
spent his six months in
court in a cage. This was constructed
not to stop him escaping but to protect
him from his victims’ screaming
relatives.
Finally on October 15th, 1992,
Andrei Chikatilo was sentenced to
death. There was no reprieve and he
kneeled before his executioner to be
dispatched by a single bullet in the
back of his head. Despite his earlier
ranting he heard the sentence
impassively. The investigators
were reminded of a remark he had
made during interrogation. “I am
a mistake of nature. I deserve to be
done away with,” he had said.
he could have an operation quickly that
would make him harmless to women,
so that he could go home and have his
dinner. He was given a life sentence.
Germany’s other notable cannibal was,
most unusually, a woman. At the age of
26 Anna Zimmerman was the mother of
two children. She lived with her husband
and her lover, a barber named Josef
Wirtz, because her sexual appetite was so
voracious that one man alone could not
satisfy her.
This arrangement was more than
acceptable to Herr Zimmerman, who
welcomed the assistance provided by the
live-in lover.
But after two years Anna became
increasingly dissatisfied with Wirtz,
who she thought had become sexually
inadequate.
In June 1981, Wirtz disappeared from
their apartment in Münchengladbach,
Anna cut up his body
on the kitchen table
with a circular saw.
She made a pile of
chops, steaks and
roasts to save on her
butcher’s bill...
and a month later part of his body was
discovered in a park. Other parts of the
body, from which the flesh had been
neatly trimmed, were found nearby,
wrapped in plastic bags bearing the name
of a local video shop.
A trawl through the video shop’s club
members led police to the Zimmerman
apartment. There they found human
flesh, including a male sex organ, in
plastic boxes in the freezer. In her
confession Anna said that because of
Wirtz’s poor sexual performance she had
got him drunk, added sleeping pills to his
drinks, then drowned him in the bath.
Afterwards she cut up his body on the
kitchen table, using an electric circular
saw. She made a pile of chops, steaks and
roasts, which she stored away in 50 plastic
9
 containers. Her intention was the same
as Kroll’s – matter-of-factly she said she
wanted to save on her butcher’s bill.
We are all appalled, of course, at the
idea of eating human flesh for that kind
of economic reason. Cases are well
documented where people have become
human-flesh eaters through the necessity
of survival. But Jack the Ripper must
have turned many stomachs when he sent
the kidney of one of his victims to the
Whitechapel Vigilante Committee with
a note that said, “The other piece I fried
and ate. It was very nice.”
M ost cannibals have some sort of deep
possessive instinct, a craving to be
as one with their victims. But Ed Gein, a
reclusive farmer, had many other instincts
too. He lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and
liked to kill women not only to eat them
but also so that so he could wear their
skins.
In December 1954, Mary Hogan, a
middle-aged Plainfield tavern-keeper,
vanished, leaving a large trail of blood
behind the tavern bar leading to the back
room. It seemed to the local sheriff that
she had been shot dead and her body
dragged away.
That set the locals talking. They
remembered other unexplained
disappearances – an eight-year-old girl in
1947, two farmers in 1952. Their bodies
were never found. Nor was that of Mary
Hogan.
Three years later Ed Gein called at
a local general store run by a widow,
Bernice Worden. Gein bought some ice
cream, then ordered some anti-freeze – it
was that sort of store – saying he would
call for it the next morning, Saturday.
He arrived bright and early at 8.30,
when the store and the main street were
still empty. Casually he took a rifle off the
store shelf, loaded it, fussed about with
it, then shot Mrs. Worden at point-blank
range.
He loaded the body into Mrs. Worden’s
delivery van and drove back to his farm.
Later that day two teenage neighbours
who called on him noticed that his hands
were dripping with blood. “I’m dressing a
deer,” Gein explained. The teenagers left
puzzled – they had always been told that
Gein had a dislike of butchery.
Meanwhile Mrs. Worden’s son Frank, a
deputy sheriff, had called at his mother’s
store and found it bloodstained and
empty. A sales slip revealed that she had
had only one customer that day – Ed
Gein. The police were called, and Gein
was arrested while having supper at a
neighbour’s house.
When police went to Gein’s lonely farm
they found a veritable charnel-house.
Hanging up were the carcasses of women
who had been dressed like deer, and
shrunken heads. One of the carcasses had
been decapitated, and there was a huge
hole in the stomach through which all the
internal organs had been removed.
Even though the corpse was headless
and naked, Frank Worden recognised it as
his mother from a mole on her left arm.
He ran outside, retching.
10
Right, cannibal killer Ed Gein
and above, the headless,
“dressed” corpse of Bernice
Worden. Gein was the
inspiration for the Robert
Bloch novel Psycho, later
made into a highly acclaimed
film by Alfred Hitchcock
A few minutes later detectives
found Mrs. Worden’s head on a shelf,
wrapped in plastic. It had apparently
been hung on a wall like a hunting trophy,
because it had two hooks through the ears.
Some skulls had been sawn in half to
be used as drinking vessels. And human
remains had been used as furniture.
A chair, a wastepaper basket and a
lampshade had been covered in strips of
human skin.
Gein had found a way of making
genuine shrunken heads by peeling off the
face and scalp of his victims and stuffing
them with newspaper. He had made nine
of them, all with their hair intact. Some
bore traces of lipstick, and one of them
was recognisable as Mary Hogan, who
had disappeared three years previously.
Gein’s infantile sexual development
was honed by a weak will that longed to
dominate – the only people left for him to
dominate were dead ones – and a strong
mother-fixation which overwhelmingly
obsessed him.
His isolated farmhouse was a complete
mausoleum, with nothing changed since
the death of his mother 12 years earlier.
Old newspapers, half-eaten meals –
everything remained as she had left it.
If that story sounds weirdly familiar,
it is. Ed Gein was the inspiration of the
Robert Bloch novel Psycho, made into a
Hitchcock film.
There can be little doubt that Gein’s
mother was at the root of his problems.
Sternly religious, she hated her drunken
husband. She wanted him dead, and
often said so to her son. She would even
pray for his death. Ed Gein was not
allowed friends and was screened from all
outside influences, which he was taught
would lead him to commit sin.
His father died in 1940, his mother four
years later. At 39 Gein was confronted
with a world from which he had been
Bernice’s head had
apparently been
hung on a wall like
a hunting trophy
taught to shrink in dread. He became
a killer, a cannibal, a transvestite, a
necrophiliac and a voyeur – probably as
a symbolic form of revenge on his cold,
unloving mother.
Both Mary Hogan and Bernice
Worden, it was noted, resembled his
mother – so was he seeking vengeance by
killing his mother twice over?
Gein also told detectives that he had
a compulsion to rob graves. Following a
funeral he would drive into town at night
and dig up the body, leaving the grave in
“apple-pie order.” He had difficulty in
remembering some of the things he did,
but he recalled: “Once I made a vest out
of a woman’s skin.”
He was found insane at his trial, and
died in an asylum in July 1984, aged 77.
With a case like that of Ed Gein we are
moving away from a compulsion to kill
and possess by eating, towards motives
which defy all analysis, and where
therefore the subject is clearly depraved
and insane.
S tanley Dean Baker, a jobless hippie
aged 23, virtually saw this in himself
when police arresting him on suspicion
found some small bones in his pocket.
He was asked: “What are these?”
Above, jobless hippie Stanley Dean Baker being escorted from a plane
upon his arrest and, inset, his victim James Schlosser. “I have a problem,”
Baker said when he was arrested. “I am a cannibal”
With disarming frankness Baker replied:
“Well, they ain’t chicken bones. They’re
human fingers. I have a problem. I’m a
cannibal.”
Police had started out on the trail that
led to Dean Baker when a fisherman
on the Yellowstone River in Montana
“caught” the body of a massively built
man on his line. The post-mortem
revealed that the head and the hands were
missing; there were 27 stab wounds and a
large hole in the chest, through which the
heart had been removed.
One missing person who seemed to fit
the remains was James Schlosser, who was
six feet tall and weighed 17 stone. A call
went out to cops to find his missing Opel
Kadett car, which was yellow with black
racing stripes, and therefore visible for
miles around.
Shortly afterwards a man driving a
small truck was in collision with a yellow
Opel Kadett. When the truck driver
reported the incident, police traced the
Opel driver. He was Stanley Dean Baker.
As he was being driven in a patrol car
to police headquarters Baker described
himself as “Jesus.” He blurted out his
compulsion to eat human flesh, and told
how he developed a taste for it while
receiving electric shock treatment for a
nervous disorder when he was a teenager.
At police headquarters he confessed
to killing Schlosser, with whom he had
been camping in Yellowstone Park. He had
cut up the body into six parts, removing
the head, arms and legs. He cut off the
dead man’s fingers because “I wanted
something to chew on.”
When asked what he had done with the
dead man’s heart Baker responded: “I ate
it. Raw.”
At his trial the prosecution did not
advance any motive for the flesh-eating,
treating it as a plain case of murder.
Searching for reasons, we may remind
ourselves that the eating of a murdered
foe represents total conquest and
contempt.
Baker and his victim could not have
been more different. Baker was a
drop-out, an idler, a hippy. Schlosser was
a college graduate with a jazzy sports car.
Jealousy may have been uppermost in the
hippie’s mind when he shot his sleeping
companion, and subliminal contempt
for the world of success may have been
manifested when he ate part of him. Baker
was jailed for life.
A s was the case with Ed Gein, the
problems of social adjustment
experienced by Edmund Kemper began
in childhood. He was born in December
1948, and one of the first habits he
acquired was that of mutilating his sister’s
dolls. At 13 he cut the family cat in half.
On August 13th, 1963, when he was 15,
he shot and killed his grandparents, and
immediately phoned his mother to tell her
what had happened. “I just wondered how
it would feel to kill Grandma,” he said.
Kemper was detained in a mental
hospital and released into the care of his
mother in 1969. He was then aged 21,
with an IQ of 136 reflecting a superior
intelligence. He was also something of a
giant: six feet nine inches tall and weighing
20 stone.
Kemper had a strong sexual drive, but
at his massive size and weight he was
aware that he was unlikely to be attractive
to women of his age. He was to say after
his arrest: “They couldn’t reject me as a
man if I killed them. It was more or less
making a doll out of a human being, a
carrying-out of my fantasies with a living
human doll.”
And kill them he did, cruising the
highways, picking up female hitch-hikers,
raping them before murdering them.
He killed eight women by shooting,
stabbing and strangulation. He cut off
their limbs and their heads, had sex with
The hulking figure of Ed Kemper.
One of the first habits he
acquired was that of mutilating
his sister’s dolls
their corpses, and committed acts of
cannibalism.
Cutting and sawing, he took Polaroid
photographs of his work, and buried
the body parts he didn’t want in the
mountains.
When some of the body pieces came to
light, and the hunt was on for the co-ed
killer, Kemper, who had friends in the
police force, discussed the murders with
off-duty officers in coffee bars.
On Easter Sunday, April 22nd, 1973,
Kemper killed his mother and one of her
friends. He decapitated his mother, cutting
out her larynx and putting it into the
waste disposal unit. He explained later: “It
seemed appropriate, as she’d bitched and
screamed and yelled at me so much over
the years.”
After his arrest he admitted having
eaten the flesh of two of his victims,
explaining that he cut flesh from their
11
 £100 PRIZE QUIZ ANSWERS
In last November’s MD we challenged
readers’ true crime knowledge with a special
prize quiz. Below are the questions with the
correct answers – and the names of our lucky
winners. Thanks to all those who took part!
1. Name the convicted US killer
whose case was the subject of Netflix
documentary Making A Murderer.
D) Steven Avery
2. With which English county is the
notorious serial killer Peter Sutcliffe
associated? B) Yorkshire
3. In which year was the fashion designer
Gianni Versace murdered in Miami?
D) 1997
4. In which US city did infamous torture-
killer Gary Heidnik perpetrate his crimes?
D) Philadelphia
5. What was the first name of the wife of
Rillington Place serial killer John Reginald
Halliday Christie? C) Ethel
6. Born in 1902 and killed in 1957, this
Italian Cosa Nostra mobster and founder
of Murder Inc. was one of the most feared
hit-men in history. Who was he?
A) Albert Anastasia
7. Who was the US politician assassinated
by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles in June
1968? D) Robert F. Kennedy
8. At which British prison was infamous
“Lady Killer” Neville Heath executed for
two murders in 1946? B) Pentonville
9. Born in October 1968 in Lincolnshire,
she grew up to be a nurse and notorious
serial child killer who the press dubbed
the Angel of Death. Who is she?
C) Beverley Allitt
10. Political terrorist Illich Ramirez
Sanchez is better known as Carlos the...?
A) Jackal
11. How many victims were murdered
by the Co-ed serial killer and necrophile
Edmund Kemper? D) 10
12. At which British crown court did the
trial of killer, kidnapper and extortionist
Michael Sams take place in 1993?
B) Nottingham
13. Name the estate agent whom Michael
Sams kidnapped in January 1992?
D) Stephanie Slater
14. Australian mass shooter Martin Bryant
struck at which location in Tasmania in
April 1996? C) Port Arthur
15. In which year was County Durham
Black Widow Mary Ann Cotton hanged?
B) 1873
16. Which sport is associated with the
early life of notorious London gangsters
Ronnie and Reggie Kray? C) Boxing
17. What artistic skill did hospitalised
19th-century killer Richard Dadd develop
further while a patient at Bethlem and
Broadmoor? B) Painting
18. Which British politician was tried
at the Old Bailey in 1979 on charges of
conspiracy and incitement to murder?
C) Jeremy Thorpe
19. In which year did killer-robber Donald
Neilson, the 1970s criminal dubbed the
Black Panther, die behind bars? C) 2011
20. Which actors portrayed the Wild
West outlaws Robert Leroy Parker and
Harry Longabaugh in the 1969 film Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?
B) Paul Newman and Robert Redford
WINNERS
The winner of the £100 first prize, with 20
questions answered correctly, was Donna
Anderson of Belvedere. Congratulations! Your
prize will be with you soon. The three runners-
up, also scoring top marks and each winning
a six-month MD subscription, were Roy Holt
of Sturton Le Steeple; Michael Williams of
Wirral; and Stan Phillips of Castletown
12
legs, froze it, and then cooked it in a
macaroni casserole. Brought to trial, he
was sentenced to life imprisonment.
When he was asked why he had
committed such atrocious acts, he was
able to articulate the subconscious longing
of the criminal cannibal: “I wanted them
to be part of me and now they are.” Words
to conjure with. But not quite the last
word.
O verbearing mothers have shouldered
considerable blame in this narrative
so far. And now we see a variation on
the theme played out in 21st-century
Germany, a country which figured
strongly in the cannibalism stakes a
century ago.
Armin Meiwes was a 42-year-old
computer technician, a single man
who fixed up classic cars as a hobby at
his home in Rotenburg. Bernd Jürgen
Brandes, meanwhile, was a 43-year-old
software developer for Siemens
Computer repair technician Armin Meiwes. He gained international
notoriety for killing and eating a voluntary victim he had found via the
internet. Inset, his victim Bernd Jürgen Brandes
telecommunications systems. He was
athletic and organised. Both men were
respected by their neighbours.
Both also led secret lives. Brandes was
openly bisexual but used male prostitutes
to meet his demands for increasingly
violent sex. Meiwes had a cannibalistic
fantasy – it was, he said, something he
had wanted to do for a long time. He had
fantasised about killing and devouring
someone, including his classmates, from
the age of eight.
Both, as you might suspect, were deeply
troubled men, and at the root were their
troubled relationships with their mothers.
Psychiatrists believed Brandes blamed
himself for his mother’s death, which his
father often described as a suicide, in a car
crash when he was 12 years old.
Meiwes’ mother was domineering,
berating him loudly and publicly, living
with him until her death in a rambling
tumbledown house, accompanying him
on dates and even going along on troop
outings in the early 1980s when he joined
the German army. Meiwes claimed that
such treatment led him to create “Franky,”
an imaginary brother, as a refuge.
The death of his mother in 1999 seems
to have liberated Meiwes and in her
absence he moved towards fulfilling his
fantasy.
Hitherto unknown to each other,
Meiwes and Brandes met in an online
chat room that catered for their fetishes.
Meiwes posted a request for a willing
victim for his cannibalistic activities, and
Brandes replied with a blunt email that
brought cannibal and meal together. “I’m
your meat,” Brandes wrote in the month
before he died.
Meiwes made a videotape of the
events on the night of March 9th, 2001,
at his home. The tape showed Brandes
consenting to Meiwes amputating his
penis with a knife after failing to bite it
off. The two men attempted to eat it raw
but could not because it was too tough.
After leaving him to “bleed out,” Meiwes
stabbed Brandes to death, hung the body
on a meathook and butchered the usable
cuts from the body. Meiwes ate the body
over the next 10 months, consuming up to
three stone of Brandes’ flesh.
“I always had the fantasy and in the
end I fulfilled it,” Meiwes told the court
on the first day of his trial for murder in
the nearby city of Kassel. He was found
guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to
eight years in 2004, but after an appeal
by prosecutors in 2006 the verdict was
overturned. Meiwes was retried for, and
convicted of, murder. He was sentenced
to life.
In jail to this day, perhaps Meiwes
would echo the words of Edmund
Kemper: “I wanted them to be part of
me, and now they are.” In that simple
sentence there is a human cry some may
recognise. What we cannot recognise,
though, is the method the human
criminal cannibal employs to achieve that
longing.
There are buried impulses that
lie within all of us, some doomed
never to surface. Man is by nature
a carnivore, and only a thin veneer
of civilisation divides him from the
beasts. It is that veneer that causes
him to regard eating human flesh
with revulsion. In the civilised world,
cannibalism is the ultimate taboo.
Killer Pastor’s Rage
Whilst Pastor Christopher Gattis’s
solution was extreme, it’s possible to
understand the source of his frustration
(“When A Pastor Lost His Patience” –
MDviewpoint
Write to MD Viewpoint, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ, or email with full postal address to
December). masterdetective@truecrimelibrary.com • £8 will be paid for every letter published!
First, his visitors had long outstayed
their welcome: there’s an ugly but true Dickson (“Meet Benny And Stella Mae” snippets of information, as it would be
statement that fish and visitors begin – December). Great work from writer interesting to know if in the intervening
to smell after three George Courson! years fresh evidence or a conviction has
days. Second, one A mainstay of the US editions of True occurred.
of these visitors was Detective and Master Detective, George Interestingly, the unsolved murder
his stepdaughter, a entertained with riveting tales such from 35 years ago of Janice Weston
permanent reminder as “Boomerang Blonde” (September is currently in the news as the police
that his wife had 1940), “Trapping the Betty Grable are examining the evidence due to the
had sex with another Extortionist” (May 1947), “Kidnappers’ advances in the forensic world.
man. Third, the Trail” (October 1942), “Case of the Hopefully more dangerous criminals
stepdaughter had Hooded Three” (November 1940), who have got away with the awful things
brought her boyfriend “Rathbourne’s Chain of Crime” (May they have done will be unmasked by the
and it’s likely that 1938), “Persuasive Pauline” (July 1949), advances in criminal science and the
she had sex with him Triple-killer: “Murder for Love” (April 1951), “How cold case squads who reinvestigate them.
under Pastor Gattis’s Christopher G-Men Trapped Ed Bentz” (February Gaynor McKnight, Harlow
roof, an anathema Gattis 1939) and “Swath of the Cyclone
to a religious man. Gattis’s wife was Raiders” (December 1940) – they knew Probation Team Blameless
58 so would have gone through the how to write headlines in those days! “Murder By Car – But Janet Was Not
menopause and possibly lost interest in George caused his editor some worries His First Victim” (November) asked if
physical intimacy: this would explain when reformed felon Clint Smith, 65, probation services should have done
(but in no way excuse) why he’d sued in 1948 for $15,000 over George’s more when Simon Mellors, released
attacked her recently. article “Killer for Hire” which related to after serving 12 years in prison for
The pastor was the head of his church arson charges against Clint that were murdering his then partner, began a
and doubtless revered by the troubled later dropped – it highlighted the risk of relationship with Janet Scott.
youths that he counselled. It must have producing material before conviction. I don’t think there was anything they
been maddening not to have that respect There’s no info on how Clint’s litigation could have done before the occasion
in his own household and this triggered ended – perhaps George hired someone when, four days before
his homicidal rage. to take care of it? killing her, Mellors
C. Davis, Weston-super-Mare Andrew Stephenson, Newhaven followed Janet to
the store where she
Great Read, By George! Crime Updates, Please worked and threatened
I’m already looking forward to the The 30 Years Ago In Crime articles, to kill her and her
second part of the crisply-worded which show clippings of old crimes, estranged husband.
tale of the “other” Bonnie and Clyde are a fascinating read. I wonder if you Probation had already
– Benny and Stella Mae “Sure-Shot” could occasionally do updates on those ensured Janet knew
of Mellors’s previous
conviction for murder.
WIN LANDRU’S SECRET When asked by Janet’s
daughter about the Tragic victim:
On April 12th, 1919, acting on a lead from a housemaid, the Paris police possibility of Mellors Janet Scott
arrested a short, bald, 50-year-old swindler at his apartment near the Gare du killing again, the
Nord. A century later that man, Henri Désiré Landru, remains the most notorious probation officer replied, “I don’t think
and enigmatic serial killer in French criminal history. so.” I’d have answered, “There is always
The official version of Landru’s murderous rampage was so that possibility.”
shocking that it almost defied belief. According to the authorities, Janet Scott’s murder was tragic, brutal
Landru had made “romantic contact” with 283 women during the and undeserved. Janet made a serious
First World War, luring 10 of them to his country houses outside mistake and paid for it with her life.
Paris where he killed them for their money. Until women realise that it is possible
Yet no bodies were ever found, while Landru obdurately to be happy and independent with or
protested his innocence. without a partner, sadly there will always
The true story of l’affaire Landru, buried in the Paris police be tragedies like hers.
archives for the past century, was more disturbing. In Landru’s Ann Nicholl, Strabane
Secret, Richard Tomlinson draws on more than 5,000 pages of
original case documents, including witness statements, police
reports and private correspondence, to reveal the fascinating MD GOES DIGITAL!
details of the case… For some people, there’s
For a chance to win a hardback copy of Landru’s Secret – The Deadly Seductions nothing finer than the printed
Of France’s Lonely Hearts Serial Killer by Richard Tomlinson (Pen & Sword History, word. Others prefer the
£25.00; ISBN: 978-1-52671-529-6), just answer this question: flexibility of digital. Now you
What nickname was used to describe Landru? have the choice, because now
n Yellowbeard n Blackbeard n Bluebeard n Redbeard Master Detective and its sister
magazines are available in
Send your answer, with your name and address, to MD January Competition, PO Box digital editions you can read on
735, London SE26 5NQ, or email masterdetective@truecrimelibrary.com, using the smartphones, tablets and PCs.
subject line “MD January comp.” The first correct entry out of the hat after the closing To get started go to
date of January 11th, 2019, will win. The winner will be announced in the March 2019
www.pocketmags.com
issue. The winner of the MD November competition, with the correct answer Ohio, is
Miss L. Moar from Shetland. Well done! Your prize of The Insanity Defense And the
or download the Pocketmags
Mad Murderess Of Shaker Heights, by William L. Tabac, will be with you soon.
app from the iTunes or Google
Play app store.

13
 EUR PEAN CRIME REPORT
SON’S DEADLY
REVENGE AT
FATHER’S TOMB
A Belgian fireman was devastated when the town council fired
him – and days later committed suicide. His teenage son would
never forget that moment. For nearly three years he nursed his
hatred for the man who had signed his father’s dismissal letter...

F
EW THINGS are more
challenging to a family than when
the breadwinner loses his job in
the prime of his life.
That’s what happened to the
Duponcheel family of Mouscron in the
Belgian Ardennes, when papa – Olivier
Duponcheel – came home in February
2015 and announced to his wife and
three children: “I’ve been fired.”
Olivier was 49. He worked for the
local town council as a volunteer
fireman. He had
been hoping
for a promotion
when the axe
fell. He was
devastated.
Tearfully, and
with a shaking
hand, he held The graveyard crime scene in
out the letter that Mouscron, Belgium. Insets, clockwise
had so abruptly from top, Nathan Duponcheel, Alfred
MDJohn Sanders Reports

ended his career Gadenne and Olivier Duponcheel

in public service.
It was signed
by the town’s affected. His papa’s suicide for the night.
burgermeister, gnawed at his mind. Why This was something he did every
Alfred Gadenne. should the family, hitherto day – arriving at 8 a.m. to unlock the
Two days later, so happy together, be cemetery gates, and returning at night
sick at heart and ripped apart like this? to lock them.
in the depths of The town council, led by Alfred Gadenne never neglected his
despair, Olivier – burgermeister Gadenne, public duties. The son and grandson of
“Ponpon” as he turned out in force for past burgermeisters of Mouscron, he
was affectionately Olivier’s funeral. So too did was a successful businessman before
known – went into the firemen of Mouscron. becoming a full-time member of the
his garage and All trooped solemnly into town council. At 71, he was loved by
hanged himself the local cemetery, where the townsfolk.
from a rafter. His the tragic Olivier was laid to rest. Now flash forward nearly three years
body was found by one of his sons, When silence descended once more – to September 11th, 2017, to be exact.
Nathan, 16. on the cemetery, and the tombs had The phone rings at the police station in
The family distress was been re-possessed by the dead, the Mouscron. The caller appears to be icily
overwhelming. Nathan was the worst burgermeister solemnly locked the gates calm.

14
 “There’s a body in the cemetery. It’s
on one of the paths!”
At first sight there seems nothing
incongruous about a body in a
cemetery. But on one of the paths?
The police hurried to the cemetery.
The gate was wide open. A young
man was waiting for them along the
main path, almost exactly opposite the
tomb of Olivier Duponcheel. Some
recognised him as Nathan Duponcheel.
Everyone recognised the body lying
in a pool of blood behind him: the
burgermeister, Alfred Gadenne. His
throat had been cut.
“There’s nothing you can do for
him,” Nathan said. “He’s dead.”
There was only one suspect: Nathan
Duponcheel.
For nearly three years he had nursed
his lethal hate against the burgermeister
who had signed the letter of dismissal
to his father, the cause of his suicide.
Three years with revenge gnawing at
his vitals.
Nathan had apparently made
no secret of his loathing for the
burgermeister, complaining that his
father was constantly harassed by
Gadenne and overloaded with work.
Patiently he had waited until in the
eyes of the law he was no longer a
Everyone recognised
the body lying in a
pool of blood behind
the young man: the
burgermeister, Alfred
Gadenne. His throat
had been cut
minor, before exacting his revenge. He
would have had no difficulty in tracking
Alfred Gadenne – everyone knew
the burgermeister’s rigid routine. It is
believed Nathan attracted his attention
to his father’s tomb, drew him towards
it on some pretext, and cut his throat in
front of it.
Arrested and placed in custody,
Nathan Duponcheel was the subject
of a fresh protest when, now 19, he
was released from prison wearing an
electronic ankle bracelet pending his
trial. The townsfolk of Mouscron, still in
shock, were furious.
According to the juge d’instuction,
Véronique Laloux, who was in charge
of the case, he was not a danger to
society.
Prosecutor Christian Henry told
the court of a psychiatric report. It
stated that Nathan suffered from
“a psychiatric fragility” which was
accentuated by continuous incarceration
in prison.
However, there was to be a
further twist. Soon afterwards
Nathan cut the bracelet and,
considered to be an escapee, was
returned to custody in Mons.
BOAR HUNTER LURES
FRIEND TO HIS DEATH
F RENCH WINE lovers will know
the Fleury-d’Aude region, halfway
between Béziers and Narbonne in the
far south, where, in the esoteric words
of the wine imbiber, the local brew is
“concentrated on the palate with an
abundance of fruit, fine-grained tannins
and mature acidity.”
That mysterious language is strictly
for the tourists. For the locals, Fleury
is also hunting country, where the
principal target is the sanglier, or wild
boar.
Sangliers are destructive beasts,
powerful and ugly when cornered. The
hunters have to know their job, or else
they could get hurt, or they could even
get killed.
On Sundays in the season you’ll see
groups of them, armed and determined,
disappearing into the fields and woods
with such intent you wonder if they
Feuding French boar hunters: left to right, the 74-year-old killer Roger
Servant and his 48-year-old victim Jean-Yves Bilbe
even enjoy it. They can be belligerent
folk, these southern hunters, as
belligerent as the prey they hunt.
It’s up to the local mayor to decide
whether hunters can roam free across
selected communal land, or whether
he should confine their organisation to
one or more of the societies of hunters,
called dianes, in memory of the ancient
goddess of hunting.
The diane will fix the rules, enrol
members, arbitrate in case of disputes,
define the limits of the territory – in
short, manage anything that might
otherwise be a burden on the mayor.
Generally the system works, but at
Fleury d’Aude recently it went fatally
wrong.
Trouble started when as a result of
internecine warfare in the local diane
the society split into three different
branches. These were called the Diane
When his friend
Roger left his hunting
club to join another,
Jean-Yves was furious.
This was treachery,
and at the aperitif
hour in the local café
Jean-Yves made sure
the village knew what
he thought about it
de Fleury, the Dianette, and the Diane
Saint-Pierre. In the case of this last
one, hunters had rights only over
land around Vinassan, outside Fleury
territory. Hunters owed their allegiance
to one of the three dianes, and didn’t
have much truck with the other two.
Except in the case of one hunter,
Roger Servant, who at various times
was a member of all three dianes, and
currently a member of the Diane
Saint-Pierre. Aged 74, the former
building worker was divorced and
lived with his brother and nephews in
a narrow pedestrians-only road called
Rue 14 Juillet.
Servant was a querulous character,
built like a sanglier, who liked to throw
his weight around. He qualified for
the title of least popular villager in
Fleury. He was critical of everyone and
everything. On a hunt he complained
about the beaters, the dogs, and about
everyone who told him to shut up. You
didn’t pick a quarrel with him if you
could possibly avoid it.
That was the mistake that another
l Continues over page
15

A local man points to the scene of the murder-suicide outside Roger
Servant’s home in Rue 14 Juillet, Fleury
hunter, Jean-Yves Bilbe, 48, made. He
didn’t try to avoid it.
Jean-Yves, vice-chairman of the
Dianette, was also built like a sanglier.
A notable local rugby player, he was a
masterful hunter, one who knew all the
hills and valleys, the woods and fields
surrounding Fleury. A man you listened
to if you wanted to learn the secrets of
the craft.
Like Roger Servant, Jean-Yves was
divorced. He was the father of three
children and lived with his partner
Beatrice, the local florist, outside the
village. He had a number of jobs,
including chef in summertime in a
tourist restaurant, nightclub bouncer in
Narbonne, and viniculture in the local
vineyards.
Jean-Yves Bilbe and Servant had once
been great friends when they hunted
together. But when Roger Servant quit
the society and went to join Diane
Saint-Pierre, Jean-Yves was furious.
This was treachery of the worst kind,
he declared, and after that the two men
seldom spoke to each other again.
That non-communication truce was
broken when Jean-Yves and his fellow-
organisers at the Dianette decided to
hold a Saturday open day for hunting
– an open invitation, that is, to all the
hunters in the Fleury region. At the
evening aperitif hour in the café in the
Place Jean-Moulin the event was being
eagerly discussed, when Roger Servant
said, “I think I’ll have a go at it.”
The customers fell suddenly silent.
Jean-Yves, his face set grimly, turned in
his chair and faced his erstwhile friend,
now his enemy.
“Forget it!” he said icily. “You won’t
be welcome, Roger. I’m warning you, if
you turn up on Saturday it will be the
worse for you.”
Roger Servant’s mouth dropped in
surprise. Before he had time to take
another sip of his beer, Jean-Yves went
raging on.
“You don’t belong to this village any
more. As far as we’re concerned, you’re
a foreigner. We don’t like you here. I’m
speaking for everyone – we all feel the
same way about you!”
Roger pushed his half-finished beer
away. “So that’s it,” he murmured
slowly. “In that case I’m going home
16
00
now.” So saying he got up, left the café
and headed back to his house in the
Rue 14 Juillet, no more than a hundred
metres away.
As the café door closed behind him
the irascible Jean-Yves called after him:
“Roger, you’re a disgrace to this village!”
Silence engulfed the café. Jean-Yves
sat at the counter, nursing his drink,
glad to have got it off his chest but
wondering perhaps if he had gone
a step too far. The outburst was out
of character, but he must have been
convinced that Roger deserved it…
At that moment his mobile rang.
It was Roger Servant. There was a
brief conversation, and then Jean-Yves
finished his drink and left the café,
heading for Roger’s house in the Rue
Neighbours came
running. They found
Jean-Yves lying in the
narrow street, half his
head blown away
14 Juillet. Roger answered his knock
on the door; there was another brief
conversation and then a tremendous
explosion as a hunting rifle was fired.
Neighbours came running. They
found Jean-Yves lying in the narrow
street, half his head blown away. Brain
tissue, blood and bone were adhering to
the walls of the little terraced cottages.
The neighbours shrank back.
Someone told Roger, who was standing
at his doorway, to put down his gun. He
took no notice. Instead, he took a step
forward, pointed the gun at the dead
man’s neck, and fired another blast.
Then, while the small scattering of
onlookers watched from their front
doors in unbelievable horror, he pointed
the gun barrel under his chin and fired
a third and final shot, blowing his own
head off and falling beside his victim.
Next day a neighbour pointed
out with trembling fingers a hole
in the wall of his house made by
a bullet. The village was closed
while the police investigated. On
the café door a handwritten notice
read: “Closed because of the drama
involving our dear friend.”
l Hunters are killing or injuring
people rather than animals on an
increasing scale. In 2016 there were
18 fatal hunting accidents reported
in France.
The latest victim is 34–year-old
Marc Sutton, a British man from
South Wales, who
died on October
13th, 2018, after
being shot by a
single bullet while
cycling in thick
woods near the ski
resort of Les Gets,
France.
Marc, a chef, had
lived in the Alps
for a number of
years and owned Above and
a restaurant there below, tragic
with his girlfriend. expat chef
A friend said: Marc Sutton
“There is anger from South
here because every Wales
year there are
hunting accidents.”
The huntsman, a 22-year-old with
a firearms licence, was with a group
of about 20 other hunters when the
accident happened. An investigator
said: “He went into deep shock, and
was taken to hospital.
“Marc was riding a mountain
bike on a popular and well-used
track. It would not have been very
busy as darkness approached. The
hunter may have mistaken him for
an animal.”
But the regional prosecutor said:
“He couldn’t have been confused
with an animal, because he was
wearing a coloured helmet and
riding a coloured mountain bike.”
The weapon could have gone off
accidentally, it was suggested.
However, the police are initially
treating the incident as aggravated
manslaughter, for which there could
be a jail sentence.
There has been a series of
hunting accidents in France in
which people have been killed or
severely wounded. Last year a
59-year-old hiker was shot dead by
a hunter in the Drome region, and
a 13-year-old boy died when he was
accidentally shot by his grandfather.
In 2017 a woman who was sitting
in her garden was killed after a
stray hunter’s bullet passed through
her garden hedge.
 TV JOURNALIST RAPED
AND MURDERED
E UROPE DOESN’T seem to be too
safe a place for celebrity journalists
these days – three of them have been
murdered in the past 15 months.
The latest victim is 30-year-old
Viktoria Marinova, whose body was
found in a park in the Bulgarian border
town of Ruse on the Danube river in
the first week of October. She had been
raped.
Viktoria became a celebrity after
reporting on an investigation into
alleged high-level corruption involving
European Union funds.
The death of Viktoria, who recently
launched a talk show with a focus on
investigative journalism, raised concerns
that she may have been targeted for her
reporting.
After the murder the Bulgarian prime
minister, Boiko Borissov, summoned
foreign ambassadors to a meeting
in Sofia to complain about “false
allegations of press intimidation” in his
country.
“I read monstrous things in the
newspapers about Bulgaria, none
of which are true,” he told a press
conference.
The probability that this was not
a secret plot was reinforced when a
20-year-old Bulgarian man, Severin
Krasimirov, was arrested in Stade,
near Hamburg, at the request of the
Bulgarian police. Bulgarian prosecutors
say he has a criminal record for theft
and was already wanted by police over
another rape and killing,
“We have enough evidence to link
this person to the scene of the crime,”
the Interior Minister said. After
investigators determined that there
was no evidence to suggest that the
murder was linked to her work, Interior
Minister Mladen Marinov said: “This is
about rape and murder – that’s all.”
The regional prosecutor in Ruse, the
Fears dismissed that
death of Bulgarian
TV presenter
was linked to EU
corruption probe
Above, tragic Viktoria Marinova in
the TV studio. Below, a candlelit
vigil held for her in Sofia
scene of the crime, said: “Her death
was caused by blows to the head and
suffocation. Her mobile phone, car
keys, glasses and some of her clothing
are missing.”
Viktoria was a board member of one
of the most popular TV channels in
Bulgaria. She presented a current affairs
investigative programme called Detector.
A former colleague described her as
“extremely disciplined, ambitious, and
with an extreme sense of justice.”
In October 2017 Daphne Galizia,
Malta’s best-known investigative
journalist, was killed when a
powerful bomb blew up her car.
Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak was
shot dead in February 2018.
Christophe was a
self-effacing young
man, and that was
his undoing. After
forcing him for
weeks to submit to
their barbarity, his
tormentors burned his
body down to ashes,
and then scattered the
ashes over a field
PSYCHOPATH
TORTURED
FRENCHMAN
TO DEATH
T HE MISFORTUNE of Christophe
Rambour was that he was just a
nice guy. Solid, robust, yet placid, even
timid, he wanted to please everyone.
After an immigrant entrepreneur took
him on, he even wanted to please the
boss.
Too late, he discovered the boss was
beyond all pleasing. Narin Bun, who
had come to France from Cambodia,
was a cruel, vicious psychopath who
enjoyed torturing people. Christophe
Rambour was his ideal victim. A strong
yet self-effacing young man was just the
type he liked to reduce to the status of a
brutalised slave.
Brutalised slave: timid victim
Christophe Rambour
At 26, Christophe, born in northern
France, was a dozen years younger than
the Cambodian, who was nonetheless
old enough to recall the catalogue
of horrors inflicted on his fellow-
countrymen by the Khmer Rouge.
Narin Bun, his partner Coralie Sauval
and their five children had settled in
Villers-Faucon, in the Somme region of
France, where Narin Bun bought flats
to rent, and a nightclub to keep himself
busy. Christophe was employed to do
any job available – bouncer, barman,
chauffeur, anything that was going.
No one outside the Bun family had
l Continues over page
17
 any idea how or why the persecution of
??MDCRIMEQUIZ?? Christophe began. All that was known
outside that strange enclave was that
Christophe went to work for the Buns
1. Oscar Pistorius, 9. In which year did in 2011. Some time in the middle of
the disabled South US brothers Joseph that year an old friend of Christophe’s
African athlete, and Erik Menéndez saw him in a supermarket and was
was convicted (right) murder their shocked by his appearance. He was pale
of murdering his parents at their and matchstick-thin.
girlfriend Reeva Beverly Hills home?
Steenkamp on St. Q1 n 1987 n 1988
In December 2012 Christophe’s
father wrote to the law-enforcement
Valentine’s Day, n 1989 n 1990 Q9 authorities to say his son had gone
2013. How did he kill his victim
(seen above, with Pistorius)? missing, and hadn’t been seen or
n Strangling n Drowning 10. Who currently serves as heard of for a year. The police began
n Shooting n Poisoning Commissioner of the Metropolitan an investigation, questioning the Bun
Police service in London? family, who had nothing to say.
o Cressida Dick o Sir Bernard Hogan- Eventually Gilles Lefèvre, who had
2. “Turn up the radio and I’ll go Howe o Sir Paul Stephenson o Sir Ian been married to Narin Bun’s sister,
quietly,” were reportedly the last Blair decided to tell all he knew.
words of which Scottish killer “Christophe died from exhaustion,”
before his execution at the Barlinnie
gallows in July 1958? 11. In which year he told astonished detectives. “He was
o Anthony Miller o Peter Manuel was the Metropolitan tortured for several months by Narin
Police founded by Sir Bun, his
o Henry John Burnett o Archibald Hall Robert Peel (right)? employer.
o 1826 o 1829 o 1832 “The
3. Which British executioner always
o 1835 Q11
wore a bow tie during executions torture was
as a sign of respect for the steadily
condemned prisoner? increased. It
o Albert Pierrepoint o Harry Allen 12. Name the South
African axe-man began with
o John Ellis o Syd Dernley kicks, then
(right) who killed most
4. In which US State did the of his own family in punches
infamous Manson Family Murders a savage attack at and spitting.
their luxury Western Christophe
take place in the summer of 1969?
Province home in Q12
o Oregon o California o Washington was forced
January 2015. to walk on
o Nevada n Stewart Wilken n Henri van Breda all-fours
n Gert van Rooyen n Pieter Mason
5. Which member of and to eat
the Beach Boys had a Q5 from a bowl
brief friendship with 13. Convicted of the on the floor Above, evil ringleader
cult leader Charles murder of six elderly like a dog.” Narin Bun who was
Manson (right)? women on Sydney’s Gilles sentenced to 30
n Brian Wilson n Dennis North Shore, this went on: years. Below, his
Wilson n Carl Wilson Australian serial killer,
dubbed the Granny “Narin Bun sister Nari Bun who
n Mike Love
Killer, committed did so many was sent down for 21
6. By what name did Q13 things to years
suicide behind bars in
the notorious East 2005. Who was he? Christophe
End gang headed by o Leonard Fraser o William I can’t even
the Kray twins (right) MacDonald o Arnold Sodeman remember
come to be known in o John Wayne Glover them all.
the 1960s? Q6
o The Mob o The Once Narin
Family o The Fix o The Firm Bun said,
14. What was the ‘Look,
occupation of
Alfred Whiteway everyone,
7. Which famous public I’ve got a
school had the English (right) who in May
cricketer and convicted 1953 murdered two new trick.’
murderer Miles Giffard teenage girls, Barbara He trod on
(right), who battered Songhurst and Christophe’s
Christine Reed, near foot and
his parents to death in Q7 the River Thames at Q14
1952, once attended? Christophe
n Eton College n Rugby School Richmond? opened his
n Harrow School n Charterhouse n Postman n Labourer mouth to
School n Teacher n Electrician yell. Then
Narin Bun popped his cigarette into the
8. To which devout 15. Whose child open mouth and said, ‘This is my new
religious group did the did 36-year-old ashtray.’
parents of the infamous Louise Masset (right)
Acid Bath Murderer murder in London in “Narin Bun cut pieces of flesh from
John George Haigh 1899? Christophe’s foot with a nail cutter.
(right) belong? Q8 o Her own child He forced Christophe to eat his own
o The Quakers o The o Her sister’s child excrement. He forced him to go to the
Plymouth Brethren o The Jehovah’s o Her brother’s child toilet on all-fours.
Witnesses o Presbyterian o Her employer’s child
Q15 “Narin’s brothers and his sister joined
in the beatings, the harassment and
Quiz Answers humiliation, until Christophe finally
Brethren 9. 1989 10. Cressida Dick 11. 1829 12. Henri van Breda 13. John Wayne Glover 14. Labourer 15. Her own child succumbed.”
1. Shooting 2. Peter Manuel 3.Harry Allen 4. California 5. Dennis Wilson 6. The Firm 7. Rugby School 8. Plymouth What happened next was horrific
beyond belief.

18

The murder house in Villers-Faucon where Christophe died. Below, the
cellar where the victim’s body was partly burned
Narin Bun ordered Gilles to torture and communal barbarity.
dismember the body of his dead slave. Coralie Sauval, Narin Bun’s partner,
Gilles hesitated, whereupon Narin was charged with failing to denounce a
Bun knelt and made a short prayer to crime.
Buddha: “Pardon me, Lord Buddha, for It took two weeks for the court to
what I am about to do.” Then he picked drag some truth and some half-truth
up a sharp knife and an axe and set from the accused. There were no direct
about the job himself. answers; no one could remember
Next, he placed the body parts piece anything precisely, not even the date
by piece in the garden incinerator. First when the unfortunate Christophe died.
the legs went in, then the arms, followed Narin Bun finally agreed that he had
by the torso, and finally the head. burned Christophe’s body, but said he
The fire burned for hours before had not harmed him when he was alive.
Narin Bun decided to hurry things That wasn’t true, declared the rest of
along by transferring the cremation to the clan; Narin was the instigator of the
the oven in his cellar. torture.
Bun placed the body
parts in the garden
incinerator. First the
legs went in, then
the arms, followed by
the torso, and finally
the head
Narin, denying he had tortured
Christophe, said: “I know that what I
When, at the end of this gruesome did is unacceptable. Only Buddha can
performance, there were only ashes and judge me.”
bits of bone left, he crushed the bones Buddha apparently left that to the
with a stone until they too were dust, assize court. The boss man, Narin Bun,
and finally spread the dust in a field a was sentenced to 30 years, and his
mile away. partner Coralie to five years for failing
This was the testimony of Gilles to report the crime. Gilles Lefèvre got
Lefèvre, but no one else would 18 years, and Nari, the ringleader’s
corroborate it. So, for the next six sister and former wife of Gilles Lefèvre,
years, police in the Somme region received 21 years’ imprisonment. Navin,
painstakingly put together a case against the youngest of the Bun family, was
the Bun family. handed a 15-year sentence.
When, in March 2018, they had “It all adds up to nothing, really,”
sufficient evidence for a trial, Gilles the lawyer for Christophe’s family
Lefèvre, Navin Bun, Nari Bun – the said after the sentences. “My
sister of the boss man, who had been clients will never know how their
married to Gilles Lefèvre – and the boss son died.”
man, Narin Bun, himself, collectively
described as the “Barbarians of the Join us next month for further
Somme,” were arraigned at the Somme
astonishing European cases
Assizes accused of kidnap, murder,
MURDER MONTH
January
M urder in the family…At
around 7 p.m. on January 9th,
1861, George Waterman, 75, and his
73-year-old wife Sarah were at home in
their cottage in Dundry in the Mendip
Hills about six miles from Bristol when
there was a knock at the door. As well
as the cottage, they owned about an
acre of land where they kept a cow that
allowed Mr. Waterman to be a milkman.
The cottage was quite isolated and they
did not have many visitors.
Mrs. Waterman and her husband
were sitting on either side of the kitchen
fire. She was sewing. Before opening
the door, Mr.
Waterman
asked who was
there. “It’s John
the Winford
policeman,” came
the reply.
But when the
door was opened
there were two
men there. One
of them hit Mr.
Waterman with
Ballad of the a stick before
Wedmore
he was dragged
(or Wednore)
brothers upstairs where
he was asked for
money. Then the two men dragged Mr.
Waterman to the neighbouring milk
house where they tied him to a bacon
stand. They told him to stay there for
20 minutes before he called his wife for
help.
However, bloodied and beaten though
he was, Mr. Waterman managed to
free himself and went back to the
kitchen where his wife lay on the floor,
bleeding from the head. He tried to
lift her but she was too heavy so he
stumbled the 300 yards to their nearest
neighbour, William Lovell, the butcher.
Further help was summoned and Mrs.
Waterman was carried upstairs to bed.
A local surgeon attended the scene
but her wounds were too severe and
she died at 9.30 p.m. without regaining
consciousness. It seemed the murder
weapon was the fire tongs.
It did not take the police long to
identify the prime suspects – Charles,
28, and Matthew Wedmore, 34, the
Watermans’ nephews. Indeed, they
drew attention to themselves by going
on a pub crawl after the murder and
trying to sell some of the things they
had stolen. The two brothers were tried
in March 1861 and both pleaded not
guilty.
It did not take the jury long to find
both brothers guilty of murder. The pair
were hanged on April 5th, 1861.
Their mother had offered to
crawl to the jail on her hands and
knees to take the place of Charles
on the scaffold. It was not an offer
that was taken up.
19
 W
AR’S BLEAK shadows had
gathered over the quiet village
of Sholden, Kent, by July 10th,
1939. Situated near Deal, the village
would have made an ideal setting for a
Miss Marple mystery. And just weeks
before Britain was plunged into the
conflict that consumed more than 50
million lives worldwide, the mysterious
murder of a married young woman
in their midst gripped the villagers for
weeks.
“I must be off!” married Sidney
Jackson announced.
After a hurried breakfast, at 8.35 a.m.,
wages clerk Sidney, 28, got on his bike
and set off for work at Betteshanger
Colliery. As he pedalled off, his friend
Robert Leverington approached on his
own bike and saw Sidney turn and wave
towards home.
The pair cycled to work in pleasant
companionship and arrived at 8.45 a.m.
They talked of sport and the Jacksons’
holiday that ended the week before.
Opposite the Jacksons’ cottage,
Eastwood – the last in the street – four
road workers tarring a path drank their
breakfast tea with their foreman, Mr.
Wells, and watched the scene. “More tea,
MDMystery Of Who Killed “Carrots”
Above, tragic
victim
Margaret
“Carrots”
Jackson.
Right, her
husband
Sidney
Jackson,
who was
suspected of
murder
Mr. Wells?”
“Yes, just a drop”
As the men were all
villagers, they knew the
Jacksons well. Fifteen minutes earlier,
at 8.15 a.m., russet-haired Margaret
“Carrots” Newton Jackson, 26, had
been pleased to provide Henry William
Osgood, one of the men, with the water
for their tea when he called at her back
door.
Polite and respectful, Henry Osgood
20
MDforum
Your Questions, Answers & Updates
MD Forum, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ
masterdetective@truecrimelibrary.com
Reader Geraldine Tough, from Crayford, wrote: “Have you ever covered
the unsolved murder of Margaret Jackson in Sholden, near Deal, Kent, in
1939? This case almost bookends the 1930s with the Julia Wallace case
in Liverpool at the beginning of the decade.”
We’ve never previously written about this intriguing pre-war
murder, so it’s high time we put that right! For all our readers,
here’s our report by Matthew Spicer and Donald Carne
had known not to call at the main door E.G. Robey would later say, “Someone
at the side of the house. Such things were would have seen if anyone had entered.”
not done in those days. The Jacksons’ At 9.50 a.m. milkman Tom Jones
brown Irish terrier barked as it looked arrived to collect his payment and
out of the window and marked Henry’s the terrier leaped to the window and
movement down the side of the house to barked. Jones knocked on the side door
the back door. a few times but there was no reply. He
Some of the other workmen chuckled thought this was odd as he knew shy
at the sound. As Mrs. Jackson went to get Mrs. Jackson’s routine. He could see the
the water, Henry made friends with the key was in the door inside. The door also
dog and patted it. “Who’s a good boy, had a Yale lock – so it was doubly locked.
then?” “I could tell Mrs. Jackson was not out,”
One of the workmen, George Welburne, he later recalled, “as the door was locked
sat facing the corner of the cottage as he from the inside.”
drank his tea. He could see the side door Moments later, Jones heard the dog
clearly from this position whilst he sat shuffle off to another part of the house,
there. After Sidney left for work, no one which made him wonder as Mrs.
entered through that door. Jackson’s normal routine was to lock it in
THE CURIOUS
DOG THAT DAt 9.10 a.m., William
Missing, a villager, stood at the
the front room. Mystified, Jones shook his
head and left.
bus stop outside the Jacksons’ Sidney Jackson worked until 12.45
home with his son until the p.m. and then cycled the mile or so back
bus arrived but saw and heard home for lunch. At 1 p.m, Mrs. Emily
nothing. Doubleday, who lived nearby at Ingleside,
It was a warm summer’s was startled when Sidney burst in upon
day and two other neighbours, her.
Mssrs. Mottershead and Coe, He looked awful and was clutching his
pottered in their back gardens head with his hands, his eyes wide. She
between 8.15 a.m. and 9.45 a.m. was the only neighbour he knew that
one and two doors along. They could had a phone. “Oh, Mrs Doubleday! Will
both see into the Jacksons’ back garden. you please telephone for the police and
After Henry Osgood’s brief visit for doctor? I’ve just gone home from work
water, the dog remained silent during this and could not find my wife downstairs.
time and no one was seen in the Jacksons’ I went upstairs. Bashed in the head – I
back garden. The back door was closed. don’t know whether she’s alive or dead.”
“The dog would have barked if a When Detective Sergeant Chamberlain
stranger came to the house,” said a and Dr. Milne arrived, Mrs. Doubleday
neighbour afterwards. “That’s the and Jackson accompanied them to the
mystery of it all.” house. “I went upstairs and found her
“Of all these people,” prosecutor Mr. lying on the bed, with her clothes torn
off,” Sidney explained, clearly distraught.
Mrs. Doubleday noted that Margaret
hadn’t done her washing. Normally she
did that at 9 a.m. after Sidney went to
work.
Bravely, Mrs. Doubleday went
upstairs whilst Sidney remained
downstairs. Margaret Jackson lay
face-down diagonally across the bed,
her head towards the foot. Her face was
buried in a bunched eiderdown. Her
semi-naked body was partly covered by
a torn dark-blue dress, pulled up to her
shoulders.
Margaret’s hair and the eiderdown were
caked in blood. A slipper lay at the top of
the bed under the bolster. The bed looked
unmade since the previous night.
Oddly, Margaret’s torn underwear – a
nightshirt and a full-length slip with
ripped straps and a pink waist slip – lay
scrunched together at the head of the
bed. Under her body, a green apron with
a torn strap and a corset were found.
A pair of neatly folded men’s pyjamas
lay on one side of the bed. An alarm clock
showed the correct time on a bedside
cabinet and a sixpenny piece was found
on the floor. A stepladder was on the
landing, leaning against the bathroom
door.
Other than the disruption to the bed,
there was no other sign of a struggle.
Nothing had been stolen from the house,
not even Margaret’s gold watch, and there
was no sign of a search for valuables.
Three shillings, placed under the milk jug
in the kitchen to pay the milkman, was
still there.
Lights were on in the lavatory and
landing when the police arrived but a
CASE OF THE
IDN’T BARK
neighbour working outside said they had
not been on earlier in the day. Perhaps
Sidney had turned them on when he
went upstairs?
Scotland Yard, led by Detective-
Superintendent James Stuchfield,
and eminent pathologist Sir Bernard
Spilsbury were called into the case.
After studying the contents of Margaret
Jackson’s stomach, Sir Bernard concluded
that she had died at about 8.30 a.m.,
assuming she finished her breakfast at
about 8.15 a.m. Sir Bernard reached this
conclusion with the help of a nurse who
ate the same food as
Margaret had eaten for
her last meal. X-Rays
were then taken of her
stomach at five-minute
intervals.
Family doctor Douglas
Fraser agreed but
Eastwood, the Jacksons’ cottage in
Sholden, Kent, where the murder
took place in July 1939
suggested it might be as late as 8.45 a.m.
Margaret’s empty bladder suggested
she had been to the lavatory after her
breakfast, which would have involved her
going upstairs.
Sir Bernard believed Mrs. Jackson had
been struck twice across the left-hand
side of her face by someone who wielded
a blunt instrument with a small surface. A
bruise on her forehead could have come
from a fist and a bruise on the back of
her head from a fall.
The weapon was not found, nor were
there any signs of a forced entry to the
home or back garden. Scotland Yard
detectives believed Margaret had been
forcibly stripped, beaten and strangled in
a confrontation – but with whom?
Sir Bernard believed Margaret was
“indecently assaulted.”
Not surprisingly, Sidney Jackson was
considered to be a suspect. But if he was
a wife-killer, he was also the finest of
actors. He had appeared as normal that
morning to his colleagues, his work of
the usual excellent standard. Bloodstains
on the bed were of a different blood
group to that found on Sidney Jackson’s
handkerchief in the washing basket.
Sidney and Margaret Jackson had
married five years earlier in Clay Cross,
Derbyshire. They were childless and kept
themselves pretty much to themselves in
the village. “They were an ideal couple,”
said a neighbour. “I can’t think of anyone
who disliked them.”
Although they were members of the
tennis club, the couple only ever played
each other and never
attended social functions.
Both neighbours and
colleagues from the colliery
said they appeared devoted
to one another.
Other than a neighbour
she was on friendly terms
with, who would pop in frequently,
Margaret’s company during the day was
her Irish terrier.
Arrested and charged on August 11th,
Sidney Jackson said, “I think the charge
is ridiculous. I realise that the police have
had many difficulties, and I have kept
away from them for that reason. I am
not satisfied with what the police have
done to catch the man or woman who
committed the murder.”
Showing no fear at his position in the
days of the drop, he later added, “Mr.
Stuchfield, you are making a mistake.
I did not do this. I loved Margaret;
everyone knows that.”
A hearing of the Canterbury
Magistrates was called and William
Smith, a manager at the colliery, said he
had walked through the field at the back
of the Jackson property at 8.30 a.m. that
morning. He saw no one enter or leave
the house, although there was a high
hedge between the back garden and the
field that hindered his view.
He had walked past the house twice –
once in each direction – but hadn’t heard
the dog bark. He thought this odd as the
dog always barked when he passed.
Accused Sidney Jackson,
at the rear, with Detective
Superintendent James Stuchfield
Police noted that the hedge was
undisturbed. No one, it seemed, had
broken through into the back garden.
Margaret, a nervous woman, normally
kept the back door locked – so why was
it open? It was known she had gone into
the garden before breakfast to prepare
some kindling for the fire.
The workmen said they had not heard
the dog bark when the milkman called
but they were tarring at a pace of about
50 yards an hour and, as they focused
on their work, they did not pay the house
much attention. Sometimes, their view
was obstructed by their handcart or tar
barrel.
As far as the workmen could say, they
had not been aware of anyone loitering by
the house, although a lot of people passed
the house that morning as it was market
day in Deal. They agreed that there were
often door-to-door traders in the area.
21
 Sidney Jackson appeared before
magistrates T.G. Elphinston, W.G.
Chandler and A.J. Lilliott at the St.
Augustine’s Session House, Canterbury,
on Tuesday, August 29th, and then again
on September 8th, five days after war
was declared and thoughts began to drift
elsewhere.
Mr. E.G. Robey prosecuted and Mr.
J.A. Davis represented Sidney Jackson.
Jackson said he knew something was
wrong when he arrived home to find his
lunch was not ready at 1 p.m. He entered
through the unlocked back door and
found the dog locked in the front room –
his wife’s normal practice.
He was surprised that the back door
was unlocked as his wife was nervous of
tramps. Sidney added that they had been
true THEY MET ON
THE GALLOWS
An habitual morning routine:
Margaret Jackson
MOTHER, BABY AND
GRANDMOTHER SHOT
DEAD IN DURHAM TRAGEDY
bothered by tramps knocking on the
door lately, and 10 months earlier they
had been burgled. Other possessions had
gone missing since then.
Sidney Jackson’s evidence appeared
to contradict what the milkman had
said about the dog having the run of the
house – but perhaps the killer had shut
the dog in as he entered or had returned
later to do so.
Sidney said Margaret would never use
the stepladder to the attic herself, and it
was normally kept in the kitchen utility
area. He couldn’t explain why it was on
the landing, or why someone would want
to gain access to the loft.
At one point, the police had mused
that Margaret may have been tricked by
someone pretending to be an electric or
gas man wanting to mend a fault. Had
he called her upstairs on a pretext?
Detective Chief Inspector William
Salisbury told the court that Jackson
and his brother had visited Deal police

crime
station on July 22nd to confirm that
GANGLAND Margaret did not know well any other
men and that Jackson was sure the dog
CONFIDENTIAL would have attacked a stranger.
Sidney had added that Margaret was
habitual in her morning routine. He
Detective Monthly JANUARY believed she had been killed at 9 a.m.,
as she had wiped the cream jug and

WHY that was when she went to the lavatory.

“Someone must have entered through
the back door,” he said, “and grabbed

THEY
her as she left the toilet.” To back up
The Evil Life his timing, he said Margaret had not
finished her breakfast by 8.30 a.m. –
And Shocking
DUG UP
and may have continued for five more
Death Of minutes.
“My brother and his wife were a
Whitey Bulger devoted couple. Her death has broken

K ANDY’S 12
him,” Jackson’s brother, Norman, added.
Had the brothers concocted a story? A
number of witnesses described Sidney

KILLER STORY
ISSUE
as exemplary in character, both as a
neighbour and as a colleague.
Mr. J.A. Davis asked if it was likely that
Sidney Jackson would choose to kill his
New WHY 1919 wife at such an odd moment – as he was
about to leave for work – in full view of
Series WAS A workmen in the street, with neighbours
in their gardens, and tradesmen about
Hanged A VINTAGE to call.
Hundred EVEN THE
YEAR FOR
Years Ago POPE
MURDER A fter hearing all the evidence, the
Chairman of the Magistrates said
COULDN’T the Bench were not of the opinion that
SAVE
IPSWICH HORROR £200E “KILLER”
the police had made a prima facie case
against Sidney Jackson. They would
CRIM not forward the matter to trial and they
THE BODY COMP KELLY ordered Sidney’s release.
To escape village gossip, Sidney left his
IN THE SOLVED AT LAST!
home and moved in with his brother and
sister-in-law. With no other suspects in
SUITCASE Killing Of
the frame, and war beginning, Margaret
Jackson’s murder investigation went no
further and remains a mystery.
South-East London Shocker Monaco Had Sidney Jackson committed
HORROR OF THE Millionairess the perfect murder – or was there
some other explanation? Who
HEADLESS WOMAN ON Was All In can explain the mystery of the
THE RAILWAY TRACKS The Family stepladder on the landing, the
unlocked back door and the curious
On sale at your newsagent from December 27th or see the offer on page 30 case of the dog that didn’t bark?
Readers, let us know your thoughts.

22

Killer Finally Nailed
LIZ WAS GROOMED,
MARRIED...AND
MURDERED
T
HE MURDER trial was unique in
several ways. There was no body,
no weapon, no evidence, no crime
scene, no DNA, no cause or time of
death – and no jury. Yet a conviction was
gained. The judge was convinced beyond
reasonable doubt that the suspect was
guilty – but read on and see whether you
agree...
Sally Crill was none too happy when
her husband, Michael Lee Syperda,
suggested they take the babysitter with
them when they moved house in 1995.
“She’s good with the kids – she could
be like a nanny or something,” he said.
The babysitter was Elizabeth Nicole
Forshee, 17. Liz was eager to leave
California and move to Iowa with the
Syperdas. She had finished high school
and she liked the two Syperda kids. She
knew she would love to have children of
her own one day.
And Liz got on well, really well, with
Michael, 35. She had known him since
she was 13. The Syperda family lived
across the road from the Forshee family
in Truckee, California, close to Reno and
the Nevada border.
But Liz’s mother didn’t like the idea.
“She was such a sweet, vulnerable
young girl, and then she lost her father
at the age of fifteen,” said her brother.
Case report by Donald Carne
Above, killer Michael Syperda’s police mug-shot. Left, his wife and victim
Liz Syperda, née Forshee, who was 13 when she met him
“It made her even more vulnerable and
impressionable.”
But how do you stop a 17-year-old
from doing exactly what they’ve set their
heart on?
Perhaps predictably Sally, 30, a nurse,
divorced Michael Syperda a couple of
years later, leaving her former husband
with Liz in their Mount Pleasant
apartment in Henry County, slap bang
in the middle of rural Iowa. Syperda and
Liz married in 1999.
Soon after that, Liz discovered a
different side to herself. She fell in love
with a woman – a Pink-loving roller
derby and mixed martial arts enthusiast
from nearby Peoria whom we’ll call
Jodie. It was hard to resist her attitude
and energy.
When Syperda found out, things went
downhill fast. Discovering that the pair
had engaged in intimate activity in his
apartment, he assaulted them both. Liz
walked out, but when she turned up on
Jodie’s doorstep things didn’t go entirely
to plan. “We were already in the process
of breaking up,” Jodie said.
On July 17th, 2000, Liz disappeared
from Jodie’s apartment. Syperda
MDCold Case Conviction Of Predatory Wife-Killer
skipped work that day. The next day, he
explained his absence to a co-worker,
Jarrod Krabill.
“Michael said he and Liz had been
together the night before, but she left
about 5 a.m.,” Jarrod said. “He said he
had been up all night and wasn’t feeling
well – I could tell he had been drinking.”
It was Jodie who first reported Liz
missing, the day after she disappeared –
but she was told she would have to wait
before filing a missing-person report.
Diligently, she returned two days later
and filed the report.
By the time officers checked, Syperda
had collected his thoughts. He said Liz
had walked out on him and he had no
idea where she was.
With no body, no weapon, no
evidence and no crime scene, the case
of Liz’s disappearance soon went cold
– until it was picked up again during
a review by the Mount Pleasant Police
Department and the Iowa Department
of Public Safety’s Division of Criminal
Investigation in March 2017. Within
months a grand jury indicted Michael
Syperda for murder and he was arrested
in November 2017.
23
 MURDER MONTH
January
A pub confession…Daniel Holt, 55,
was a miller in Lexden, a village
a mile west of Colchester, Essex. On
January 4th, 1788, he set out for work at
the mill but did not return that evening.
His family were used to him working
late so were not concerned. He also
liked to go for a drink with friends.
He did not turn up for work the next
morning but his family assumed that he
was sleeping off a hangover. After the
third day’s absence, a search began.
He had last been seen drinking in
the Blue Pig public house with three
“bad women,” Martha Sansom, Mary
Lawrence and Elizabeth Watts. A
fortnight later, they were brought to
court on suspicion of having robbed
him, but there was no evidence for their
guilt and they were discharged.
On the same day (January 18th)
Mr Holt’s body was found floating in
the river Colne, “between Rowhedge
and Wivenhoe.”
Although the
body had injuries
to the head, a
coroner’s jury
returned a verdict
of accidental
death. No one
was brought
to justice and
Lexden Church
the matter lay
unresolved for 30 years.
In 1820, Charles Williams was
drinking with a friend, William Lester,
in a pub called the Fleece Tap when
he confessed to his involvement in the
death of Daniel Holt. Mr. Lester told
the authorities and this chat resulted in
Charles Williams standing in the dock at
the Essex Assizes on March 14th, 1823,
accused of murdering Daniel Holt by
striking him on the head with an iron
crowbar.
William Lester was the chief
prosecution witness. He said: “The
prisoner…told me that Mr. Holt had
been killed at the Blue Pig, a pub in
Head Street…and that he had helped
another man, Roger Munsey, commit
the murder…Munsey had hit him over
the head with a crowbar and killed him.
They then put the body in a sack…they
got some sawdust to cover the blood.
He never told me what became of the
body.”
And that was the entire prosecution
case. In addition, the coroner, jury and
doctors who had examined the corpse
had all died by the time the case came
to court.
The judge directed the jury to
find Charles Williams not guilty.
If the original coroner’s jury had
returned a verdict of accidental
death, how could a new jury – 35
years later – dispute that? How
Daniel Holt met his death remains
a mystery.
24
B y this stage, Syperda had moved to
Rifle, Colorado, a small town west
of Denver. Does the English language
have a word to sum up his feelings when
officers came calling after 17 years?
Shock, surprise, fear? A bombshell? He
must have believed it was ancient history
by then.
Officers wanted to discuss a V-shaped
diamond and emerald ring and a necklace
found in Syperda’s possession. They
had belonged to Liz and people who’d
known her said she would never have
been parted from them. Syperda couldn’t
explain how he had them.
“The ring was given to Elizabeth by her
mother, Donna Forshee,” said Assistant
Attorney-General Scott Brown. “She
cherished that ring, never removed it, and
would always have it in her possession.”
Syperda was brought before a Henry
County District Court in May 2018 for a
one-week trial before Judge Mark Kruse.
He opted for a jury-free judgment.
“There is no evidence tying Michael
Syperda to his wife’s death,” said public
defender Kym Auge in opening remarks.
“The state is not going to be able to
provide evidence to prove the allegations
against Michael Syperda, much less
beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Contrary to Ms. Auge’s opening
remarks, Scott Brown and Henry
County Attorney Darin Stater presented
a strong circumstantial case. Before
Liz’s disappearance, both she and Jodie
had been threatened and assaulted by
Syperda. A case of assault was pending
against him when she disappeared. He
was later found guilty of that assault and
awarded a suspended sentence.
When Liz left Syperda, he threatened
her. He phoned her repeatedly to abuse
her – the last call being at 10.50 p.m. on
July 16th, 2000, shortly before Jodie left
Liz sleeping alone on her sofa.
Before that, Syperda had threatened to
kill Liz and her family. When she ignored
his wishes and went home to California
for her brother’s graduation, he called
her by phone. “I’ll kill you for this. I’ll kill
them.” He could get angry very quickly.
When Jodie returned to her apartment
at 4 a.m. on July 17th, 2000, she found all
of Liz’s belongings – including her purse
and personal items. Liz never picked up
her last paycheck from her employer. Nor
did she contact her mother or any other
family member after July 17th, despite
being close to them.
She was never seen again.
Michael Syperda’s first wife Sally Crill
told the court that Liz rarely helped with
the children despite being their nanny.
“Liz spent the time drinking,” she said.
“She started babysitting their two kids
when she was thirteen,” Liz’s mother
Donna Forshee said. “She then started
spending nights at the Syperdas’ which I
didn’t like.”
Liz’s friend Harper Tracey told the
court she had witnessed bruises on Liz
and heard Syperda threaten her when Liz
walked out on him for the first time in
1998. This was before Liz and Michael
were even married.
In cross-examination, public defender
Kym Auge suggested to Jodie, who gave
testimony by video link, that as she was
the last person to acknowledge seeing
Liz alive, she might have been involved
in her disappearance. That suggestion
didn’t go anywhere.
Syperda chose not to testify at the
trial.
IlifennowAugust 2018, Michael Syperda, by
58 years old, was sentenced to
in prison without the possibility of
parole. He showed no emotion as the
sentence was read.
He looked towards the ceiling and
then behind him at his adult children.
One of them quickly left the courtroom
in tears. Asked if he wished to comment,
Syperda replied, “No, your honour.”
Judge Kruse said the punishment
fitted the crime. “In the 18 years since
her death, Elizabeth Syperda would
have experienced many things that make
life so special. She may have gone to
Michael Syperda in court with
public defender Kym Auge
college. She would have celebrated many
Christmases. She would have had times
of joy and, like anyone else, she would
have had times of sorrow. She may have
found a career or careers. She may have
had a family.”
In his 58-page summing up, Judge
Kruse said of Syperda: “His intention
to kill was expressed many times before
July 17th, 2000, and did not arise
suddenly or in the heat of passion,
but from thought and planning by an
enraged and obsessive person.”
During the sentence hearing, Donna
Forshee pleaded with Syperda to
tell them where they could find her
daughter. But he offered nothing. “I
hope he lives in misery and pain for the
rest of his life,” she said.
Liz’s brother was in no doubt that
Syperda had groomed liz as a young
teenager and later murdered her, and
he gave this warning to other parents:
“Michael Syperda began grooming
Liz as a 14-year-old girl under the
pretence of babysitting. He controlled
and manipulated her as a teenager, took
her across the country, isolated her from
family and friends and had her lie to my
mother about where they were going.”
But with Syperda’s side of the
story largely unheard, can his
conviction be considered safe? What
do readers think?
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 “Dear Jane, Sorry I
Shot You, Choked You
and Slit Your Throat...”
Dumfriesshire Killer’s Astonishing Letter
O
NE OF the units that Napoleon
could have had in mind when
he called Britain a nation of
shopkeepers was John Scott’s minuscule
grocery and hardware store in the
Dumfriesshire village of Cummertrees.
If that location drives you to your atlas,
as it probably would with most people,
the village is about four miles west of
Annan, and a long way from anywhere
else.
A century and a half ago this was the
home of John Scott, his wife Dinah and

MDKiller Was Last Man Hanged Publicly In Scotland

By Matthew Spicer
their 11 children. Besides running the
grocery shop, which was no more than
a room in the front of their home, called
Burnside Cottage, Scott was a shoemaker.
For people in Cummertrees, Scott’s store
was a godsend. You could buy almost
anything there, and if it wasn’t in stock
they’d order it.
Orders were an important part of this
enterprise. The shop bought its stock
from Annan, and the Scott children
were the carriers between the town and
the village. So it was that on Saturday,
February 1st, 1868, nine-year-old
Thomasina Scott, a well-developed child
for her age, took on the job of going into
Annan to fetch materials to repair a pair
of clogs, and to buy some small items for
the shop.
Thomasina was given a basket and ten
shillings to spend, less one penny, which
was her pocket money for doing the job.
This gave her enough spare cash to catch
the train back from Annan if it rained
later on. If it didn’t, she walked both ways.
John and Dinah Scott made a swift
calculation. Thomasina was setting off at
10.45 in the morning. She would be back
in Cummertrees by 3 p.m. if she walked
both ways, and by just after 4.10 p.m. if
she took the train.
A contemporary illustration of the killer trying to hang his child victim
Thomasina Scott (left) and attacking Jane Crichton
good neighbours welcomed her in from
the rain. Also in the cottage at that time,
sheltering from the weather, was Robert
Smith, 19, a general handyman and a
casual acquaintance of the Crichtons.
Although she was always happy to
give any wayfarer temporary shelter,
Jane Crichton didn’t like Robert Smith.
She couldn’t say exactly why, beyond
him being the kind of man that women
describe as “creepy.” He was forever
hanging around, doing nothing.
A pleasant-looking country boy, he
was an orphan, but had taught himself to
read and write. He was brought up by an
uncle, and started work at the age of eight
in a lime quarry. He never stayed very
long in one job, and there were suspicions
that he was a thief, to the extent that
employers around Annan were reluctant
to take him on.
Presently the rain stopped, and
Thomasina got ready to set off again
along the road to Annan. It was now a
few minutes past midday.
“I’ll go with her,” Robert Smith said
suddenly. “I need to go into town.”
Despite her misgivings about the
handyman, Jane wasn’t worried by this
turn of events.
But Robert Smith never intended to
go to Annan. As he walked side by side
with Thomasina into the area known as
Crofthead’s Plantation, on Howe’s Farm,
he put his hands around the little girl’s
neck, threw her to the ground and raped

scotland’s
She had walked about a mile when her.
it began to rain, as it sometimes does Her screams could not be heard in that
in Scotland, relentlessly. She was close remote place; in any event having satisfied
to a cottage where family friends lived,
the home of Robert and Jane Crichton.
Thomasina knocked on the door and the
classic cases his lust he tightened his hands around her
neck and strangled her. Then he strung
her body up on a tree and let it hang

29
 SUBSCRIBE TODAY l 25% off the shop
price l Never miss an issue l Get
your copy first l Delivered direct to there. Evidence would later suggest that it
your door l Post-free in UK quickly fell to the ground. His final act of
contempt before he walked away was to
steal the 10 shillings from her purse.
GET MASTER Leaving her body at Crofthead’s
Plantation, he continued the rest of the
journey to Annan on foot and there,
DETECTIVE DELIVERED
in the ironmongery shop of a Mr.
Hamilton, he bought a pistol. Incredibly,
his murderous rampage was not over yet.
His next stop was back at the Crichtons’
TO YOUR HOME EACH cottage.
When he arrived Jane was on her knees,
scrubbing the kitchen floor. She scarcely
MONTH... looked up when she heard the door open
to admit Robert Smith.
The evil handyman strode across to the
fireplace, warming himself against the fire
while nursing the pistol under his coat.
Jane had her back to him when suddenly
she felt a tremendous thud on the back of
her head. She had been shot. But Smith
was unfamiliar with the gun – he had
loaded it incorrectly, and that saved her
life.
Stunned by the agonising pain in her
...AND 25% head, Jane nonetheless managed to stay
conscious. She tore off her work hat and
SAVE off the
shop
price!
looked up in astonishment at Smith, who
then pushed her back on to the floor and
started to strangle her.
ways to
3
Visit www.truecrimelibrary.com
Call 020 8778 0514 Stunned by the
subscribe Post Complete the order form below agonising pain in her
head, Jane looked up in
SEND TO:
Forum Press, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ
astonishment at Smith
who pushed her and
n3 Yes! I would like to subscribe to MASTER started to strangle her
DETECTIVE for one year (12 issues)
n UK £31.50 As she twisted and turned she could see
n Outside UK (surface mail) £50/US$68/Au$84 a knife glittering in his hand. Slowly he
n Europe (airmail) €57 started to cut the right side of her throat,
and yet miraculously she managed to
n Rest of World (airmail) US$82/Au$103 wrest the weapon from him.
l You can also subscribe to n True Detective Aware that the kitchen was visible from
the road, he dragged her into a back
and n True Crime at the same price bedroom, clearly intent on raping her. He
pushed her head into the back of a chair
YOUR DETAILS: so that the bars of it acted like a vice,
n Mr. n Mrs. n Miss. n Ms. preventing her from moving her head,
Forename..................................................... and pulled up her dress.
As one hand was tightening like a steel
Surname ...................................................... grip around her neck, Jane struggled
Email ............................................................ desperately, but she knew this was a fight
Address ........................................................ she could not win. And no matter how
loudly she screamed, there was no one
..................................................................... there to hear her.
............................... Postcode ...................... Then, all of a sudden, came a loud
banging at the front door. Smith drew
Country ........................................................ back, surprised and startled. Leaving the
Telephone..................................................... half-conscious Jane he went to the door
and opened it on two young boys.
One of them said, “Could we have a
PAYMENT:
drink of water, please, mister?” He was
n by cheque made payable to Forum Press a sharp-eyed lad. He noticed blood on
n by credit/debit card: Smith’s hands and clothes, and, looking
Please debit my: n Visa
MD0119
beyond him, the twisted body of Jane
disengaging herself from the bars of the
n Mastercard n Maestro chair and screaming for help. Without
Card number: another word the two boys turned and
fled, but not in blind panic. They were off
nnnn nnnn nnnn n nnn to raise the alarm.
Expiry date n n n n Security code n n n It was Smith who panicked now.
47
!
35
11
30
Abandoning his still semi-conscious
victim, he vanished.
Alerted by the two quick-thinking boys,
an ambulance arrived and took Jane to
hospital. She had three pellets removed
from her head but was soon well enough
to tell detectives all about her attacker.
The hunt now began for Robert Smith.
Meanwhile, it was long past four
o’clock and there was no sign of
Thomasina back at Burnside Cottage, the
Scott family store in Cummertrees. John
Scott, Thomasina’s father, made several
frantic trips to the station, but the little
girl wasn’t on any of the trains. The Scott
children set out to walk to Annan to see if
they could find their sister along the way.
There was no sign of her, and when they
learned that she hadn’t even arrived in the
town that day, panic set in.
Bad news sometimes travels faster in
remote districts than it does in urban
areas, and the murderous assault on Jane
Crichton was soon common currency.
When the Scotts heard that the assailant
was Robert Smith, and that earlier that
day he had left the Crichtons’ cottage
with Thomasina, their hearts sank.
As night fell, the Scott family, aided by
the villagers, continued their search by
torchlight and lantern. At 11 o’clock that
night a group of searchers led by young
John Gillespie, an apprentice blacksmith,
was beating its way through a wood at
Crofthead’s Plantation when they found
Thomasina’s body.
She lay on her back, her wide-apart
feet resting in a hollow. Her clothes and
underwear were pushed up over her
waist. Her hair was in disarray and her
hat was found a few yards away, with her
empty basket.
Sorrowfully the search party carried
her little body back to Burnside Cottage,
where it was left untouched until the
police arrived at first light.
The bruises on her neck were there for
all to see, confirming that she had been
strangled with a cord as well as manually
strangled. A post-mortem later reported
that she had been “outraged with great
violence,” and this had contributed to
her death. Other evidence pointed to the
attempt that was made to hang her from
a nearby tree.
Remembering the attack on Jane
Crichton, the realisation dawned on the
community that Robert Smith had tried
to kill Jane in order to stop her naming
him as Thomasina’s killer.
Smith made no serious attempt to
distance himself from his appalling
crimes. The day after the murder of
Thomasina a posse of police descended
on his lodgings in Dumfries and arrested
him. He was still wearing bloodstained
clothes, and a pair of boots whose
prints exactly matched those found at
Crofthead’s Plantation.
Two days later, at a preliminary hearing
before the Sheriff, Smith confessed his
crimes. He said he originally came from
Annandale, some 15 miles north of
Annan. He was unmarried and had been
living rough around the town.
“When I set out for Annan with the
little girl it looked like it might rain again,”
he said. “I persuaded her to come with
me into a wood for shelter. I raped her
first and then strangled her with cord. I
also stabbed her. I cut the money out of
her purse with my knife.
“I went back to the Crichtons’,
intending to kill Mrs. Crichton. I did
so because I thought that if I pleaded
guilty to killing her, I might avoid the
consequences of what I had done to the
little girl.”
This last thought, like most of Smith’s
actions that day, was at least bizarre. But
more strange workings of his mind were
about to become apparent. As he was
awaiting trial in Dumfries Gaol he wrote
a letter to Jane Crichton that must rank
among the most extraordinary letters ever
written by a murderer to an intended
victim.
This is what he said:
Dear Jane Crichton. I write you a few
lines to let you know that I am well at
present, hoping this will find you and all
your family enjoying the good health, thank
God for it.
Dear Jane, I was a great blackguard when
I could have taken away the young girl’s
life so most wickedly and then to come and
boldly to your house again and then to fire
a pistol at you and then to seize you by the
throat for to choke you and then to take my
knife and to try to cut your throat.
If the Lord had not been merciful to you
and saved your life – if it had been the other
way round – it would have been a most
horrible case for me to have done. But I
thank God that he was merciful to do so to
you.
Dear Jane, you and your friends may be
mad at me for it, but you can tell them all
that it is against me that I would let any of
them do anything to me now after I have
seen it, for the Lord’s hand is mightier than
the Devil’s, for the Lord saved your life that
day, but I heard you were getting better for I
hope that when you receive this you will be
all better and going about again the same as
usual.
Dear Jane, I had many a thought of
taking away your life. I wanted to rob your
house and I did not know how to do it until
that day the young girl came in. I thought if
I had a pistol I could soon have taken your
life away.
I thought it was a good job when I got
the ten shillings from the young girl and got
the pistol. I thought it was all right because
I thought the shot would have ended your
days too, and then, there would not have been
any could have informed the police but me,
and I would have got clear from the hands of
men in the meantime. But the Lord proved
merciful to me and to you.
But the young girl is resting in the grave
and I will be there too soon and I well
deserve it and something far worse. Dear
Jane, the Lord was great to save your life, the
Devil is great, but thanks be to God for he is
greater than the Devil.
Dear Jane, I have no more to say at
present. Give my kind love to all the
neighbours, to your son John and all the men
and tell them that I will not see none of them
No mercy: the death mask of rapist
child-killer Robert Smith
on Earth but I trust in God that I will see
you and yours and them in heaven. Robert
Smith.
My address is Dumfries County Prison.
Write soon, Dear Jane and let me know how
you are now.
It is difficult to imagine Jane’s reaction
as she read this for the first time. Did her
blood run cold? Did she recoil in horror,
or did her lip curl contemptuously?
At first Smith intended to plead
insanity, but the prosecution, even though
they believed the letter proved he was
“I was a blackguard to
fire a pistol at you and
then to seize you by the
throat and then to take
my knife and try to cut
your throat”
sane, did not introduce it as evidence. Was
that, one wonders, because they were not
really sure what it proved? Did they think
that perhaps it showed Smith really was
insane?
hen the trial opened at Dumfries
W High Court on April 21st, 1868,
Smith was charged with rape, murder,
and attempted murder. He now tried to
plead guilty to all three charges, but this
was disallowed in capital cases.
Rape was still a capital offence in
Scotland until 1887, and in theory
attempted murder was also punishable by
death in Scotland right up until 1957.
Smith’s defence then to the charge of
murder was that it was manslaughter on
the grounds of diminished responsibility,
and he offered no defence to the other
two charges.
The defence called no witnesses. In his
summing-up Lord Justice-Clerk George
Patton told the jury that there had been
no suggestion that Smith was in any way
mentally ill. The jury retired for just five
minutes and came back with a verdict of
15-0 for murder.
The judge told Smith there would
be no hope of mercy, and he would be
hanged outside Dumfries Gaol on May
12th.
It subsequently transpired that chief
executioner William Calcraft wasn’t
available on May 12th, so the authorities
called in Thomas Askern, who asked for a
fee of 20 guineas.
In the death cell Smith said he did
not want, nor did he expect, any mercy.
A forlorn petition was sent to the
Home Office, however, pleading for the
execution not to be carried out in public.
This was because the Bill to abolish
public executions was almost on the
statute book, but it was to be another
two weeks (Friday, May 29th) before it
became actual law.
So with two weeks still to go, Smith had
to face the public. The law was the law.
Or so it seemed. But the wily locals
didn’t like this one. So they built the
gallows inside the prison, with the result
that on the morning of the execution
spectators could see only the barest
minimum. This satisfied the law that it
was in public.
For added privacy, the gallows, built in
a week, was constructed next to the death
cell – the door literally opened up on to
the scaffold.
The weather conspired to make the
event almost completely private. The
night, like the day of the murder, had
been rainy and cold. Consequently only
about 300-400 people gathered outside
the prison in the vain hope of catching a
glimpse of the public execution that was
now almost private.
Smith was calm and resigned just
before 8 a.m, the hour of his impending
death. “I hope I’m going to a better
world,” he observed. As he stepped on
to the gallows a group of young girls
screamed. Smith looked up and smiled at
them.
Then there was a glitch – Askern had
not tied the noose around the condemned
man’s neck correctly. It had to be taken
off, placed back on, and re-adjusted. That
done, Askern shook hands with Smith,
perhaps in gratitude for his forbearance,
and then moved quickly to pull the lever.
Immediately it was obvious that the
hangman had made another mistake. He
hadn’t tied the knot in the correct place,
with the result that Smith’s body shook
for four minutes as he died slowly and in
agony from strangulation.
Because of the way the gallows had
been built, no one on the outside could
see what was happening. So at the signal
that it was all over, the crowd, described
by the police as “very orderly,” quietly
dispersed.
Seventeen years later, in 1885,
Dumfries Gaol was demolished.
Today no physical evidence remains
of the terrible tale of Thomasina
Scott, whose life was snuffed out so
cruelly on a cold, wet day by a man
whose claim to notoriety rests in
the fact that he was the last person
hanged publicly in Scotland.
31

MD“How Long Would You Say He Breathed After The Drop?”
John Gilmour, as illustrated in the North Antrim Standard railroaded into
W
HEN JANE Gardner became
pregnant it was the talk of the
district. She was 45, the daughter He went to Ballymoney, only three miles
of an elderly farmer...and single. Who
could be the father? There was no
shortage of guesses, but none got within
a mile of the culprit. For John Gilmour,
the son of another County Antrim
farmer, was only 20.
He lived near Dervock with his
parents, who had ensured that he had
a good education with a view to his
entering one of the professions. They
were unaware that since he was 17
he had been having an on-off affair
with Jane Gardner, who lived only
600 yards away at her parents’ farm at
Ballyhivistock.
Neither she nor young John Gilmour
had marriage in mind – their age-gap
put it virtually out of the question. They
just enjoyed having sex...until 1893,
when Jane found she was pregnant.
Her 78-year-old father, Lyle Gardner,
was furious, fearing a great scandal. But
Gilmour had some breathing-space as
Jane said she would not name the child’s
father until the birth.
Like most people in the district,
Gilmour’s parents doubtless enjoyed
the gossip ...until April 16th, 1894,
when the baby arrived and Jane named
the Gilmours’ son as the father. The
two farming families had previously
been on the best of terms, but now the
air became thick with accusations and
counter-accusations.
The full implications of his situation
didn’t come home to John Gilmour until
Lyle Gardner began talking of legal
32
action. Furthermore, at that time it was
by no means unheard of for the
police to “suggest” that young
men marry their pregnant girl
friends.
The constabulary were seen
as moral guardians as well as
law-enforcers. If they became
involved, young Gilmour
realised, they could bring
pressure to bear.
Marriage to a woman
25 years his senior was the
last thing he wanted. Jane
was already middle-aged.
She would be elderly while
he was still comparatively
young. Yet if Lyle Gardner
approached the police, and
they exerted their influence,
Gilmour realised that he
might be coerced into
making Jane his wife. He
must do something to
avert this before it was
too late.
Over the weekend
of April 28th–29th
he brooded and
drank whisky. By
the Monday he had
more or less decided
what he would
do to avoid being
an impossible
marriage or being
pilloried in court as a heartless seducer.
from Dervock, and bought a gun.
He concealed it in a long box wrapped
in brown paper which he deposited at an
inn on his way home, returning to pick
up his “parcel” at 7 o’clock that evening.
Then he went to the Gardners’ farm.
W hat happened next was described
by Jane’s stepmother Mary
Gardner when Gilmour appeared before
magistrates at Dervock courthouse the
Public disgrace and marriage to a
pregnant lover 25 years his senior
were the last thing he wanted – so
John Gilmour went to Ballymoney
and bought a gun...
BLASTED TO D
DAUGHTER’S Y
following day.
Mary told the court that at about
8.30 p.m. she, her husband Lyle and
their servant John Rodgers were in the
farm’s kitchen, sitting round the fire. On
looking up she saw a man’s face at the
window. “Who’s that?” she cried.
Rodgers went to the window while she
and her husband went outside, Mary
going one way, he the other, to discover
who had been peering into the kitchen.
They found John Gilmour, who said to
Mary: “This is a nice charge you are
laying against me.”
She testified that she replied that she
had nothing to do with it. Lyle Gardner
came up and accused Gilmour of being
the father of Jane’s baby. Gilmour
replied that he would let him know that
the child had more fathers than one.
The Gardners returned to their
kitchen and as 9 o’clock approached,
Mr. Gardner began to undress in front
of the fire prior to going to bed.
His wife told the court that she then
heard the report of a gun, two panes of
the kitchen window shattered and her
husband cried out that he’d been shot.
With Jane’s assistance she helped him to
bed, and Rodgers was sent to fetch the
doctor who arrived within 30 minutes.
But Lyle Gardner died about an hour
after the shooting.
Charged with the farmer’s murder,
Gilmour was remanded in custody to
await trial at County Antrim Assizes
held at the County Courthouse, Belfast,
where he appeared on July 18th, 1894,
before Mr. Justice Gibson.
O utlining the case for the prosecution,
the Attorney-General, Mr. T.
MacDermott QC told the jury that Lyle
Gardner had been a popular farmer who
had no enemies. But as Jane’s father he
was the only person who in law could
bring an action for seduction against the
man who had seduced his daughter.
That man was John Gilmour, the
father of Jane Gardner’s illegitimate
 child, and the attorney-general said that Repeating her

MURDER
it was evidently with the possibility of earlier account
legal action against him in mind that he of the shooting,
went to the Gardners’ farm on the night Mary Gardner Story by
MATTHEW
of the shooting. He didn’t want his own went on to tell SPICER

IN YOUR VILLAGE
name brought into disrepute, regardless the court that
of whatever discredit he brought upon Gilmour had
others. earlier asked
After Lyle Gardner died, his stomach her husband if
perforated with shot, the police had gone
to Gilmour’s home, where they found
he intended to bring him to Ballymena
Quarter Sessions.
THIS MONTH:
him in bed but not asleep. As Sergeant
Slattery was bringing him downstairs
a powder-horn containing gunpowder
Jane Gardner was then called to give
evidence and testified that John Gilmour
was the father of her child. She said that
DERVOCK,
dropped from Gilmour’s pocket. about six months before the birth he COUNTY ANTRIM
asked her if
she might the gun he had sold to Gilmour on the
marry, and day of the murder. He also identified the
she had powder-flask he had sold to Gilmour. It
told him bore the dealer’s own private mark.
that no “Did you ask him what he wanted the
one would gun for?” asked the judge.
now have “No, but as he was talking of shooting
her. She crows I understood it was for that
emphasised purpose.”
she had Constable Francis Maguire testified
not had that he found the gun behind bushes
sex with at the rear of the Gardners’ farm in a
Gilmour in search made on May 22nd.
her home. Samuel Wilson, a labourer, confirmed
Their that Gilmour called at his home at about
meetings 9 o’clock on the night of the shooting.
had all been Wilson’s wife and James Donnegan,
outside. a tailor, had also been present, and
Hugh Gilmour stayed for about an hour and a
The Gardners’ home as illustrated Hammill, a Ballymoney gun-dealer, half, appearing to be his usual self.
in the North Antrim Standard identified a weapon produced in court as Sergeant John Slattery testified that at

Gilmour said it was his, and that he had

bought it in Dervock.
When the sergeant arrested him, and
charged him with murder, Gilmour
incriminated himself by saying: “I was in
the house of a man named Wilson at 9
o’clock.”
This the attorney-general picked up
on, asking why Gilmour had hit on 9
o’clock in trying to establish an alibi
when the sergeant hadn’t mentioned the
time of the murder?
The police learned that on the day
of the shooting Gilmour had bought
shot in Dervock, and in Ballymoney
purchased a new gun for 24 shillings,
together with a flask of powder and
some more shot.
Why did he buy a gun when his father Sowing flax on an
had a loaded gun at their home? Because Antrim farm. Both
the safest way to commit a crime, said the Gardners and the
the attorney-general, was to use a new Gilmours were farming
gun of a common make so that nobody families
could say, “That’s your property.”

the time of his arrest Gilmour admitted

being at the Gardners’ farm at 8.30 on

DEATH BY HIS the night of the murder, saying he had

then gone on to visit Samuel Wilson.
Dr. Peter Carmac, who had been
called to the Gardners’ farm after the
shooting, said 40 pellets had been

YOUNG LOVER
extracted from the body during a
post-mortem examination.

O pening the case for the defence, Mr.

T.L. O’Shaughnessy QC challenged
the prosecution’s claim that Gilmour

33

MURDER MONTH
January
M urder of a boss…On September
9th, 1922, Lee Doon decided
to carry out a plan he had been
formulating – to rob his boss, Sing Lee,
33.
Mr. Sing owned a chain of Chinese
laundries and lived above one at 231
Crookes Road, Sheffield. Sharing the
accommodation was Lee Doon who
had worked there for less than a month.
As they finished work on that day,
a Saturday, Mr. Sing asked another
employee, Lily Siddell, to work on the
Sunday. She agreed and went home.
The next day, when she arrived, Lee
told her that Mr. Sing “go back China.
Business belong me.” Mrs. Siddell had
been employed by Mr. Sing for 18
months. She had become friendly with
him and thought Lee’s explanation
highly unlikely. Later that day, workers
arrived to dig a hole in the cellar floor,
which further aroused Mrs. Siddell’s
suspicions that all was not well. Later
still, an irate
woman arrived
at the laundry
demanding to
see Mr. Sing,
furious that he
had apparently
stood her
up the night
before.
Mrs.
Siddell went
Lily Siddell to Liverpool
where some
of Mr. Sing’s relatives lived and told
them the story about him supposedly
returning to China. None of them
had heard anything to confirm the
story, and they told her it was not in
his character to make such a decision
without telling them.
Mrs. Siddell caught the train back to
Sheffield and on the following Friday
went to the police. They entered Mr.
Sing’s house and a search began. Mr
Sing’s remains were found in a locked
trunk buried under two feet of coal.
Marks on the body showed that Mr.
Sing had been beaten up and then
strangled with a length of rope, which
was still around his neck.
At his trial Lee Doon claimed that
he had argued with Mr. Sing over the
latter’s decision to smoke opium. Lee
was, he claimed, opposed to drugs. The
two men grappled and Mr. Sing fell
over and injured himself.
The jury did not believe the story,
especially since there was no trace of
any drugs on the premises. The judge,
Mr. Justice Greer, donned the black cap
to sentence Lee to death.
His appeal dismissed, 27-year-old
Lee Doon was hanged at Armley
Jail, Leeds, on January 5th, 1923, by
Thomas Pierrepoint and Thomas
Phillips.
34
had a motive for killing Lyle Gardner.
The defence counsel asked the jury if
they could believe that Gilmour would
commit murder just because Gardner
might bring “a twopenny-ha’penny
action for seduction” against him.
Mr. O’Shaughnessy also pointed out
that Gilmour had shown no sign of
excitement when he arrived at Samuel
Wilson’s home, although it was alleged
that he had run there to establish an
alibi after committing a murder.
Sara Nicholl, of Ballydivitty, told the
court that she had been at a well near
Samuel Wilson’s house when she saw
Gilmour arrive and go inside. When he
went in she heard the report of a gun
from the direction of the Gardners’
farm. But cross-examined by the
attorney-general, she said that she had
worked for the Gilmours since the
murder. She had not spoken of seeing
John Gilmour at Samuel Wilson’s until
about a week ago when she mentioned
it to Gilmour’s brother.
“When you heard that your
neighbour’s son was arrested,” said the
judge, “and you knew something which
would clear him, why did you not go
and say what you are now swearing?”
“Oh, the neighbours were all alike to
me,” she replied.
On the trial’s second day Mr.
McInerney QC, defending, reminded
the jury that Gilmour had not
attempted to conceal his purchase of
the gun. He had arrived at Samuel
Wilson’s home at about the time the
shot was fired. Therefore it could not
have been him who fired the shot. The
prosecution had claimed that he had
run three-quarters of a mile to get there
within minutes of committing the crime,
but he had shown no sign of this when
he arrived.
Turning to Sara Nicholl’s testimony,
Mr. McInerney repudiated the
suspicion that she had been paid a price
for perjury. She was the wife of an
honest farmer, he said, and her evidence
was direct proof positive, whereas the
Crown’s case was surmise.
The defence counsel said that
Sergeant Slattery had disclosed the time
of the shooting before Gilmour said
where he had been at 9 o’clock. And
if Gilmour had committed the murder
and hidden the gun, why had he not
also concealed the powder and shot?
And if he’d had murder in mind, would
he have shot Gardner within minutes
of being observed at the scene by three
witnesses?
For the prosecution, the attorney-
general asked the jury to consider why
Gilmour had not told his father he was
buying a gun. And having bought it,
why hadn’t he taken it home?
Swasumming-up, Mr. Justice Gibson
told the jury that the Crown’s case
one of circumstantial evidence, of
motive, conduct and a deadly weapon.
Each in itself was sufficient to secure a
conviction, and when put together they
made it almost impossible to resist the
Lyle Gardner’s remains
lie in a churchyard at
Derrykeighan, two miles
from Dervock
conclusion of guilt.
After deliberating for an hour and a
half the jury returned to convict John
Gilmour of murder, coupling their
verdict with a recommendation for
mercy.
Sentenced to death, with his
execution set for August 17th, Gilmour
was placed in the condemned cell at
Belfast’s Crumlin Road Prison, still
maintaining he was innocent. His
parents petitioned unsuccessfully for
a reprieve, and an hour before his
execution he made a full confession.
He said that he had not intended to kill
Lyle Gardner: he had intended only to
frighten him off bringing a prosecution.
His execution was the third to take
place within the prison instead of
outside in public view. It was carried out
by the hangman Thomas Scott. Like his
fellow-Yorkshireman, the executioner
James Berry, Scott took particular care
of the rope which travelled with him.
It was about 10 feet long, made of
Italian silk, and he claimed that together
with his expertise it ensured that his
prisoners’ deaths were instantaneous
and they felt no pain.
At the inquest which followed the
execution, however, the prison’s medical
officer would only say that Gilmour’s
death had been “almost instantaneous.”
“How long would you say he breathed
after the drop?” asked a juror.
“It is impossible to say accurately.”
“A minute?”
“It is possible.”
“Three minutes?”
“I could not swear to the immediate
moment.”
“You don’t think it would be more
than three minutes?”
“I do not.”
So the boasting hangman from
Yorkshire had got it all wrong even
with his 10 feet of silk.
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 US EXECUTIONS THE
FORGOTTEN DECADE Arrested
MOST murders have some
sort of logic behind them.
A twisted logic, perhaps.
But neutral observers
can usually see, if not
an excuse, then perhaps
a reason. Robbery or
revenge, a “domestic” or an
escape, money, a gangland
execution. Some murders
are just random acts by
mad men – or women. This
story is different from the
more usual killings; the
execution-style murders
of three people who had
all done the perpetrator a
favour. A bullet in the head
would probably have done
the job; instead they each The gas
got two slugs. Just to make chamber
at the New
sure... Mexico
penitentiary
Case recalled by Peter in Santa Fe
Matthews and Harold Heys

H
ERE’S a tip for anyone planning

a few random murders. When
you’re on the run, and trying to
put some distance between you and any
cops who might be on the prowl in the
middle of the night – don’t race around
as though you are leading a Formula 1
Grand Prix or the Indy 500.
Cops tend to pick up on that sort of
thing.
It was a cool, bright, starry night and
a chill wind stirred up miniature twisters
of sand on the bleak desert terrain on
both sides of the highway. Sergeant Dick
Barber was a little more than halfway
through his midnight to 8 a.m. shift to
the north of Las Vegas when his eye
was suddenly attracted by movement
up ahead: a pair of headlights coming at
him fast and furious.
He was coming “like a bat out of
hell,” the sergeant mused later. He
was already wheeling his cruiser into a
U-turn as the big, black Buick roared
past. He got a flash of its plates –
California issue – but he’d no chance to
clock the numbers.
In seconds Barber was in full pursuit,
his siren screaming its banshee wail,
his roof light whirling eerie red beams
across the blackened desert.
The fellow in the Buick tried to
outrun him, but Barber was too old a
hand to allow some punk to shake him.
At 80 miles an hour, the fleeing car
held its own, but the sergeant booted
his accelerator until the needle hovered
around 95. The man in the Buick was
clearly outclassed when it came to
driving at this speed.
The police car overtook him steadily
EXECUTE M
and finally, just outside the main gate
to Nellis Air Force Base a few miles
north-east of Vegas, Barber inched
ahead and forced the Buick to the side
of the road. He got out quickly and
ambled over to the driver’s side.
The man at the wheel looked to be in
“Why do we have to
go to the station?”
“I’m arresting you
for reckless driving.
Let’s go!”
his middle 30s. He had wavy brown hair
receding at the temples, and small dark
eyes that glittered in the light from the
brightly-illuminated air base gatehouse.
“All right, let’s see your licence and
registration,” Barber demanded tersely.
“What are you after me for?” the
man whined, his broad face a picture
of wounded innocence. “I wasn’t doing
anything.”
To himself, Barber thought: “A nut!”
And to the nut, he said curtly: “You
were doing 80. In this state, that’s
reckless driving. Let’s see the papers.”
With reluctant fingers, the man at the
wheel slowly took a wallet out of his
pocket, extracted the papers and handed
them across. The experienced officer
was more than wary. The driver he had
stopped had a gun tucked away. He
had a couple of guns. And he had been
using them.
Looking over the papers, Barber
saw that they identified the speeder
as Kenneth Short, with an address in
Burbank, California. “OK,” the sergeant
said finally, “turn your car around and
follow me to the station.”
Kenneth Short wasn’t happy. “Can’t
you just give me a ticket? Why do we
have to go to the station?”
“I’m arresting you for reckless
driving. Let’s go!”
Short began a slow U-turn as Barber
walked back to the police car, but before
the officer reached it Short suddenly
gunned the Buick and it took off down
the highway in a squeal of rubber and
grinding of gears. The sergeant leaped
into his police car and went after it.

36
For Two Murders, He Admitted One More...
“THEY
CAN
ONLY
ME ONCE”
Again, however, Short chickened out
at driving over 80. And again the police
car closed the gap as Barber rammed
his accelerator to the floorboards. Then
the Buick suddenly veered and careered
wildly into a turn. Barber, right on his
tail by now, saw the big sedan spin out
of control at the next intersection, hurtle
off the road into a ditch and topple over
on to its right side. Result.
Short scrambled out through the
window and ran off into the darkness. A
second later the cruiser came to a stop
alongside the Buick. There was no point
chasing the fugitive in the inky darkness
so he radioed a report of the incident to
headquarters, then got out to examine
the wrecked car.
Less than half a mile from the scene
a short time later, Reece Landers, a
50-year-old bachelor bartender, was
suddenly awakened by a sound which
seemed to be coming from the living-
room. He got out of bed to investigate,
walked into the room, turned on the
light and saw a man rummaging in a
clothes cupboard.
The intruder was a mild-looking
fellow, certainly not a man to inspire
fright. Landers demanded: “Who the
David Cooper
Nelson, a man
of many aliases,
is taken,
handcuffed,
into custody for
questioning
hell are you? What are you doing here?”
As the man turned to face him,
Landers noticed the revolver in his
hand. He looked about 35, had a broad,
innocuous face and wavy brown hair
receding at the temples. Landers also
noted that he had a cut over his right
“Open the door and
tell ’em you haven’t
seen anyone. I’ll be
right behind you.
So will this gun”
eye and blood on his shirt.
“My name,” the intruder said politely,
“is Kenneth Short – at least for the time
being. And I’m trying to hide from the
cops.” Bartenders are famous for being
equal to pretty well any occasion, and
Landers was true to his craft. “Let’s ease
the pressure a little,” he said. “What say
we go to the kitchen and have a drink?
What’ll you have – booze or coffee?”
“A pleasure,” Short replied. “Make
mine coffee, if it’s not too much bother.
And I wonder if I might have a slice of
toast with it.”
“By all means. Right this way.”
“You go first.”
They chatted aimlessly on general
topics, the weather, hunting and local
geography. It was all very pleasant
and civilised; a couple of old friends
having a natter over coffee – except for
the pistol which Short kept pointing
towards Landers.
But then the doorbell rang and Short
tensed. “That’ll be the cops, looking
for me. Open the door and tell ’em you
haven’t seen anyone. I’ll be right behind
you. So will this gun.”
The instinct of the fugitive was right.
A uniformed officer was at the door
when Landers opened it. “We’re looking
for a guy,” the cop said. “Seen any
strangers around here this morning?”
“No, I haven’t seen a soul since I got
up.” Then, moved by curiosity, he asked:
“Who is he? What do you want him
for?”
“His name’s Short. It’s a reckless
driving charge.” The patrolman went on
his way.
37
 Landers turned to his visitor, asked where he could get a cut over his
demanding: “What are you, some kind right eye fixed. They directed him to a
of a nut? You run away from the cops, nearby doctor’s surgery.
you bust in here, and you throw a gun A little later, wearing a fresh dressing
on me! If you’d stuck up a bank or on the wound, he checked into the local
something, I could understand it. But all hotel and soon after that, he strolled into
this – and you’re only trying to beat a a cafe and ordered breakfast. The two
traffic rap? I don’t get it!” cops found him there and they asked
Short grinned at him. Then he him if his name was Kenneth Short.
confided: “That’s all they’ve got on me The man blandly denied it, saying that
so far. Pretty soon they might want me he’d never heard of Short. “My name is
for a lot more. I guess you could say I’m Samuel Stuart,” he told them.
kind of a desperado. Now let’s just sit As he closely fitted the description in
down and finish our breakfast.” the Las Vegas bulletin on Kenneth Short,
At 8 o’clock, Short politely asked however, he was taken into custody.
Landers to drive him to Arrowhead “Stuart” all the while continued to deny
Acres. “I’ve got some friends out that any knowledge of the man wanted for
way. They’ll take care of me.” The reckless driving and other charges in
bartender obligingly did as he was told. north Las Vegas. But at the little Caliente
Short told him where to stop. station house his memory suddenly
“I’d like you to have a couple of improved. “I remember that Las Vegas
souvenirs of my visit,” he said then. accident now,” he said. “But I can’t
“You’re a pretty regular guy.” He recall anything that happened before last
handed him an engraved calling card Saturday. I’ve got an attack of amnesia. I
with the name Kenneth Short on it, and get it now and then.”
a wristwatch which he took out of his
pocket. “You can have that, too. It might Left, the real Kenneth Short. Fears
be valuable later today when you learn for his safety grew as his wallet,
it’s a gift from a desperado.” identity papers and murder
Short then said goodbye, got out of weapons (below) were found
the car and walked nonchalantly down hidden at accomplice’s home

“I thought – what
the hell, they can’t
hang me any higher
for two than they
can for one”
the street. Landers immediately headed
for the police station, where he unfolded
the tale of his bizarre experience. The
desk sergeant at once notified Sheriff
W. E. Leypoldt of Clark County and the
local office of the FBI.
During the next hour, on the morning
of January 23rd, 1956, Landers got an
ear-bashing about his erstwhile “guest.”
An ominous collection of documents
had been found in the crashed Buick.
With them, Short could just as easily
have identified himself as Harry Cort of
Las Vegas, J. M. Hardy, also of Vegas, or
Ralph H. Rainey, a Los Angeles butcher.
San Francisco, to drive back to Burbank.
He was due there on Saturday, January
21st, but he never arrived. His wife last
N otified of the arrest, a line of cars
loaded with officers headed for
Caliente. Among them were Sheriff
Identification papers for all three were heard from him via a postcard mailed Leypoldt and three FBI agents. The
found in the Buick’s glove compartment. from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. sheriff brought with him a warrant
The homes of Cort and Hardy, it was On the presumption of interstate charging “Samuel Stuart” with second-
learned, had been robbed quite recently. crime, Sheriff Leypoldt filed a report degree kidnapping. After several hours
And a telephone call to Los Angeles with the FBI. Roadblocks were thrown of interrogation, they all arrived back in
police elicited the information that up over a wide area while a team of Las Vegas at 9.30 p.m.
Rainey’s bullet-riddled body had been deputies combed Arrowhead Acres in During the first round of questioning,
found near Budville, New Mexico, on search of friends the fugitive had told the prisoner complained repeatedly
January 10th. Reece Landers he had there. about his “amnesia.” But he now added:
A check with the California There was no trace of the man “I can recall finding this car of Short’s
motor vehicle bureau in Sacramento posing as Short – at least not until the parked in Santa Rosa (New Mexico).
established that the wrecked Buick following morning, January 24th. It No one came along to claim it, so I took
was registered to Kenneth Short, of was about 7.45 that Tuesday morning it. Any papers you found in it must have
Burbank. Further investigation disclosed when “Kenneth Short” strode down been there when I drove it away.”
that Short, an electrical engineer, had the main street of the little town of He denied kidnapping Reece Landers,
left his home about 10 days before. He Caliente, in Lincoln County, about 120 explaining: “I just told him I had a gun,
bought the new Buick in Michigan, then miles northeast of Las Vegas. He boldly so he came along.” He recalled details
headed back west to meet his wife in approached two uniformed lawmen and of his flight from Las Vegas, but insisted

38
that he could remember nothing else.
Sheriff Leypoldt, while booking the
prisoner, asked his address, closest kin,
colour of eyes, nationality, employer and
occupation. To each question, Stuart
answered either “I don’t know” or “I
don’t remember.”
His fingerprints were sent to the FBI
in Washington in the hope that they
would establish his true identity. They
did. On January 26th, the FBI reported
that “Samuel Stuart” was actually
David Cooper Nelson, an ex-con with
a long record, including convictions for
forgery, carrying concealed weapons
and armed robbery, on which conviction
he had served six
years in the Montana
state prison.
Of far greater
significance,
however, was the
FBI’s report that
Nelson’s fingerprints
matched those found
on a box of tissues in
the abandoned car of
Ralph H. Rainey, the
Los Angeles butcher.
Rainey’s car was
found 70 miles west
of Salt Lake City
several days after his
body was discovered
in New Mexico.
Under more
intensive questioning,
Nelson’s memory
improved enough to
identify the friend
he had visited in
Arrowhead Acres
as Lawrence Tracy.
He also recalled that
his mother lived in
Hurricane, Utah.
Tracy was arrested
at Camp Mercury,
where he worked as an electrician. A
search of his house disclosed silverware
and other items stolen from the homes
of Harry Cort and J. M. Hardy, the men
whose identity papers were found in the
stolen Buick wrecked by Nelson.
In Tracy’s bedroom, the sheriff found
a wallet with Kenneth Short’s name
stamped on it in gold letters. He also
found a pair of shoes three sizes larger
than those Tracy was wearing; they bore
the name of a Los Angeles shoe store.
Also, in a hole in the plaster wall
of the living-room, an FBI agent
discovered two loaded revolvers. Faced
with this incriminating evidence, Tracy
told the officers that Nelson came to his
home on Monday morning and offered
him $50 to drive him to Alamo, in
Lincoln County. When Tracy declined,
Nelson told him: “I’ve got something
here in my pocket that might persuade
you.”
Tracy said he had known Nelson for
some time and knew he was referring
to a gun. He said they first drove to
Glendale, where they bought a bottle
of whisky, then went to Alamo, where
Nelson hitched a ride to Caliente with
a farmer. Tracy was held on suspicion
of burglary and as an accessory to the
kidnapping of Reece Landers.
When Nelson and Tracy were
arraigned in court on January 31st,
Nelson continued to play his amnesia
role, answering every question with
the words: “I don’t know.” Although
strongly suspected of two murders
in New Mexico, at that time he was
charged only with kidnapping.
New Mexico authorities moved
swiftly to compare the signatures on one
of Kenneth Short’s travellers’ cheques,
cashed in Santa Rosa, with Nelson’s
David Cooper Nelson (right)
shortly before being sentenced
to death. “I honestly believe I
can beat it. But, if I can’t, death
doesn’t worry me either.” he
told reporters in jail
handwriting. The FBI undertook similar
comparisons with some of Short’s
cheques cashed in Utah.
When Nelson’s mother was brought
from Utah to confront him in the Las
Vegas jail, Nelson took one look at her
and asked: “Who are you? I don’t know
you.” She left, telling him she’d sent him
some books.
O n February 3rd, 1956, after
extradition had been approved,
Nelson was handed over to the New
Mexico state police. En route to
Albuquerque by car, they stopped at
the spot alongside Highway 66 where
two men had found the body of Ralph
Rainey on January 10th. But Nelson
gave no sign that the spot held any
meaning for him.
Under interrogation in Albuquerque,
Nelson stubbornly clung to his amnesia
story, admitting only that he had cashed
seven travellers’ cheques which he found
in a wallet on a seat in Short’s car. But
beyond that, he insisted, his memory
was gone. He was locked up in the
county jail at Las Lunes.
The questioning continued through
Sunday, February 6th. In the end,
Nelson was forced to admit that he was
faking amnesia. Once this admission
was wrung from him, he quite suddenly
became positively loquacious, beginning
his monologue by admitting the murder
of Ralph Rainey.
On January 9th, Nelson said, Rainey
picked him up while he was hitch-hiking
near Flagstaff, Arizona. Some hours
later, they got into an argument because
Nelson refused to share the driving
chores. Rainey ordered Nelson from the
car. Nelson said he got out, but snatched
the keys from the ignition as he did so.
“Then I reached in the back seat and
took my gun from my suitcase. I took
over the wheel and put the gun between
my legs. At one point, Rainey reached
over for the gun, so I hit him in the
wrist with a judo blow. I told him not to
goof off again.
“But he reached for the gun again, so
I used a judo blow and hit him across
“When you first
smell the fumes
take a deep breath,
Dave. Don’t try to
fight it”
the nose with the edge of my hand.
Then I got a little mad and shot him in
the head. I guess I drove on for about
15 miles when Rainey moaned, ‘Why
did you do it?’ It was then that I fired
the second shot.”
Nelson said he stopped the car and
dumped Rainey’s body in a stream just
off the road. He then drove Rainey’s
car to Utah, where he abandoned it. He
said that one of the .38 revolvers found
in the wall of Tracy’s home was the
weapon he used to kill Rainey.
Later that day, Nelson admitted to
police that he had killed Kenneth Short
somewhere east of Tucumcari, New
Mexico. “I can’t get hung any higher for
two than I can for one,” he said breezily.
“Oh, and I also killed a fellow named
John Valente on January 4th.”
Valente, inquiries soon revealed, was
found in the bathroom of his home in
Pioche, Nevada, on January 5th. He had
been shot twice. “Valente was a good
friend of mine, I was staying with him,”
Nelson said, with no sign of remorse.
“But he caught me searching his house
for some money I thought he had
stashed away…I shot him. Then I got
out of town.”
As for Kenneth Short, Nelson said
he got a lift from him at Sapulpa,
Oklahoma. About 25 miles west of
27
39
 Amarillo, they parked by the roadside
to get some sleep. Short was in the back
seat, Nelson in the front. “The cold
woke me up about daylight,” Nelson
said. “Short was still sleeping. I tied his
hands in front of him and he opened
his eyes and asked me what I was doing.
I told him I needed the car and if he did
what I said, nothing would happen to
him.”
He drove westward for 10 or 15
miles, Nelson continued, then stopped.
Taking Short out of the car with him,
he ordered him to lie down, then tied
his legs. He planned to leave Short
helpless and steal his car.
“But then,” Nelson said again, “I
thought – what the hell, they can’t hang
me any higher for two than they can for
one. So I shot him in the back of the
head with a .38. I got back in the Buick
and drove to Vegas.”
www.truecrimelibrary.com
WORLD’S NO.1 TRUE CRIME MAGAZINE
FROM
POLICE
ACADEMY TO
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NO PAROLE FOR
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Nightmare Voyage Of
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ON SALE AT YOUR NEWSAGENT FROM JANUARY 3RD OR SEE THE OFFER ON PAGE 30
40
Three murders in just a few days –
his “good friend” who was putting him It took a minute for
up, and two strangers who had picked
him up and offered him a lift out of the the white plume of
hot and arid desert. As one of the cops
said: “What a bastard.” Police recovered gas to rise, but it
Short’s body.
could hardly be seen
O n Monday, in jail at Albuquerque,
Nelson spoke to the press. He airily
through the thick
declared: “I honestly believe I can beat glass windows
it. But, if I can’t, death doesn’t worry
me either.”
He said: “When I was only 11 years Nelson was tried in Tucumcari, a
old I was in a reform school. Ever since classic Route 66 stop in New Mexico,
then, I’ve been in all kinds of jams. convicted, and sentenced to die in the
They just seemed to happen to me. I gas chamber. A series of appeals and
guess I’m in the biggest jam of all right stays delayed his execution for nearly
now.” four years, but the day ultimately came
He had been judged to be legally when his debt to society could no
sane and reporters found him voluble, longer be put off.
articulate, well-spoken. So it was that on January 8th, 1960,
David Cooper Nelson went to his death
in the gas chamber at the New Mexico
FEBRUARY penitentiary in Santa Fe.
During his final weeks Nelson had
been attended by prison chaplain Friar
Clement Weber, although he was not a
Catholic. The friar accompanied him
into the gas chamber.
It was a new gas chamber within the
new prison in the basement under cell
IRELAND’S
SHOCKING
block five. Previously hanging had been
the State’s usual method of dispatch.
TALE OF THE
Before midnight, 18 witnesses were
conducted through eight barred doors
into the death room where they looked
MURDEROUS
“BORDER FOX”
on through the chamber’s windows.
Nelson had already been brought in
The Brendan O’Donnell Case
and was strapped to the chair with a
Bible resting on his lap.
The multiple killer was talking with
Friar Weber and told him: “I’m going
Australian Horror
AMBUSHED
home now.” He shook hands with
Warden Harold Cox who reminded
him: “When you first smell the fumes
BY THE
take a deep breath, Dave. Don’t try to
fight it.”
WOLFMAN...
Nelson replied: “OK warden, God be
with you.”
After officials left the chamber the
oval steel door was screwed shut; a lever
PA W
released sulphuric acid into a container
T
RO
T
beneath Nelson’s chair, and at 12:12
a.m. a second lever released cyanide
pellets into the acid. It took a minute
for the white plume of gas to rise, but it
could hardly be seen through the thick
glass windows.
Nelson stiffened, inhaled deeply, then
convulsed for several minutes. At 12:20
RIVER OF DEATH a.m. Dr. Louis Zucal, listening to a
stethoscope strapped to Nelson’s chest,
THE SWISS pronounced him dead.
CHEF AND THE Nelson, as his last request,
PREGNANT bequeathed his body to “some medical
organisation” where it could do some
PROSTITUTE good. The body was removed, cleansed
with a chlorine solution, and delivered
to a funeral home to be prepared for
transfer to a medical facility.
David Nelson, a wastrel and
self-confessed “desperado,” would
finally do, in death, a bit of good –
something he never managed while
he was alive…
More fascinating material
from MD’s archives...

30 YEARS
AGO IN
CRIME January 1989 Jan 5th, 1989
Jan 5th, 1989

Jan 1st, 1989

Jan 6th, 1989

Jan 25th, 1989

Jan 2nd, 1989

Jan 13th, 1989

Jan 5th, 1989 Jan 20th, 1989 41

Jan 31st, 1989

Story By George Courson
MD“You Might As Well Know It. I’m Wanted By The Police In Kansas, Illinois And Missouri”
PREVIOUSLY...
THEY WERE young, in love
and they robbed banks
during the Great Depression
– but they were not Bonnie
and Clyde. In 1938, after
getting married and
pulling off two successful
bank robberies in South
Dakota, Benny and Stella
Mae Dickson were laying
low in Kansas. When the
police arrived to arrest
them the couple became
separated in the confusion...
As guns blazed all around
her 16-year-old Stella,
unsure whether Benny was
alive or dead, hid in the
undergrowth as the police
officers searched for her...
S
HE COULD hear voices, but
couldn’t make out what they were
saying. Then a twig snapped 10
yards in front of her. An officer, gun in
hand, appeared from behind a tree and
looked around. Stella gripped the .38. He
seemed to stare right at her. She held her
breath.
“See any one, Bill?” asked
a voice from the other
side.
“No. I guess she
went the other way.”
The officer turned and
walked away.
Stella began to
tremble so violently that
she couldn’t hold the
gun.
When this passed,
she crept from her
hiding-place and
managed to reach
the highway, only to
discover that it was being
patrolled by officers
armed with rifles. A small
culvert nearby caught
her eye. She crawled
into it and huddled in
its damp confines while
overhead she could hear
the footsteps of the search
party going back and forth.
Night came, and still she
dared not move. She was cold, hungry
and frightened. For the first time she
knew the terror of the hunted criminal.
She stayed in the culvert, trying to sleep.
Once she felt something wet and furry
slide across her legs. She awoke with a
start and saw two tiny eyes shining in the
42
dark. She struck at the creature with her
foot, and it scurried away. After that she
stayed awake.
In the grey light of dawn, she emerged.
The highway was deserted. She took
a mirror from her handbag and began
to comb her hair and fix her lips. She
brushed the dirt from her clothes and
used a handkerchief to clean her shoes.
Then she went out on the road.
The first vehicle that came along was
a vegetable truck. She hailed it and the
driver slowed down.
“What’s the matter, kid – did you have
to walk back?”
Stella tried to look embarrassed. I’d
appreciate it,” she said, “if you’d let me
ride with you as far as Tecumseh.” That
was a small town near Topeka, where
Benny had told her to wait for him if
they became separated.
“Sure,” replied the driver. “Hop in.”
She climbed aboard and crouched in
the corner of her seat, half-sick with fear
and worry.
Meanwhile Dickson was in a tight
spot. Although he had outdistanced his
pursuers, his clothes had been ripped
by bullets, his head was wounded and
his car was shot full of holes and easy to
spot.
Night had found him near South
Clinton, Iowa. Just before dark, he pulled
over to the side of the road and stood
eyeing the highway. Finally another
car appeared over the crest of a hill. It
was a Dodge. He waved his hand. The
driver, seeing the battered vehicle and
the bloodstained man, thought there had
been an accident. He stopped to give
assistance and found himself staring into
The exploits of the couple would
later feature in crime comic
books including Headline #27, in
November 1947 (“The Bobby Sox
Bandit Queen,”) with pencils and
inks by Jack Kirby, and the August
1947 issue of True Crime
the blunt nose of an automatic.
“Get out,” ordered Dickson.
Eyes popping, the driver obeyed.
Benny yanked the man’s hat from his
head, jammed it low on his own brow
and slid behind the wheel of the Dodge.
Moments later he was out of sight,
leaving the driver by the roadside.
When the theft was reported, the car
left behind was examined. Its licence
plates and bullet holes told the story,
and a dragnet for the fugitive was spread
across the adjoining states.
D ickson arrived at the rendezvous
town early the next morning. He was
parked on the main street when he saw
a vegetable truck stop and spied Stella
alighting. He tooted his horn and waved.
She looked around and came running up.
“Get in,” he said. “We’ve got to keep
going.”
Wordlessly, she obeyed, casting
frightened glances at his crudely
bandaged head and bullet-torn clothing.
“Where are we going now?” Her voice
was weary.
“We’ll try to make Detroit. Things may
be quieter there.”
Taking side roads, he drove on until
late afternoon when the pace began to
tell. Then, his face greyer than usual, he
turned to his wife. “Take the wheel. I’ve
got to get some sleep.”
They changed places, and he slept
as though he had been drugged. She
maintained the pace, and the hours
passed without incident until shortly after
dark when they approached Leonidas,
Michigan, where she saw red flares set in
the road.
Wondering what was the matter, she
slowed down. Then she saw a wrecked
car and a cluster of people
around it. There
were some uniforms
in the crowd, and
as she went past
she noted that two
officers scrutinised
the Dodge’s licence
plates. Looking in
the mirror, she saw
that they were getting
into their car. She
accelerated and the
police siren began to
wail.
Dickson stirred
uneasily and opened
an eye. “What’s the
matter?” he asked thickly.
“Cops,” replied Stella.
“We’re being followed.”
He brushed the hair out
of his eyes and licked his
lips. “Give me the wheel,”
he said. Stella slid to the
right and he crossed over,
switching off the car’s lights and pushing
the accelerator to the floorboard. The car
did not respond.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “She
won’t do over forty-five.”
The wail of the police siren sounded
nearer. Benny pulled the car into a side
 MOST WANTED: Stella
Mae Dickson (centre)
pictured in an FBI handout.
She and Benny (far right)
soon became the object of a
wide-ranging hunt...

road and then into a thicket of

brush.
They waited and saw a
searchlight sweep the fields. The
white beam roved from point to
point. Then it went out. Twenty
minutes passed and it did not
reappear.
“I think they’ve gone,” said
Benny. He started the car, backed
out of the brush and swung
into the dirt lane, rejoining the
highway at speed. The car heeled
over as he took the turn, its tyres
squealing. Then a dazzling flash
of light came through the rear
window followed by the siren’s
blare. The police car had been
lying in wait at the cross-roads.
A bullet whined past the

Meet Benny And Stella Mae P A R T T W O :

“Write To Your Mother And

Tell Her I’ve Been Killed”
window.
“What should I do?” asked Stella.
“Get the guns and use them. Let’s see
what you know about shooting.”
He reached over his head and unslung
a rifle. She kneeled on the seat, face
backwards, took the gun and pushed its
nose through the back window. Drawing
a bead on the light of the police car, she
squeezed the trigger. There was a roar
and she swayed with the recoil. The light
went out.
“Aim at the tyres,” Dickson shouted.
She steadied herself for the next shot.
Then she felt something cut across her
forehead like a red-hot knife. When she
opened her eyes, there was a wet trickle
across her face. Benny turned around for
an instant to look at her. “It’s nothing,”
he said. “It only grazed you. Keep
shooting.”
Keeping her eye on the target, she fired
several times. Her fourth shot found its
mark and she saw the police car sway, its
right front wheel disabled.
Within a few minutes they had
completely outdistanced it. She sighed
and settled down in the seat. As she did
so there was a terrific report and her
mouth opened in amazement. Then she
laughed. She had forgotten to take her
hand from the trigger. There was a bullet
hole in their car’s roof.
“Take it easy!” snapped Dickson.
“That’s how they make angels.”
B y 2 a.m. he realised that he would
have to change cars to avoid being
spotted. So he drove into a farmyard. The
car crunched over the gravel driveway
and came to a stop.
Dickson got out and looked over the
farmhouse. Not a light showed. He went
to the door, rapped sharply and waited.
There was no sound. He knocked again,
more insistently. There was a shuffle of
slippered feet, then the door opened. A
tall, grey-haired man looked out. His eyes
were fixed somewhere in the distance.
Keeping her eye on the
target, she fired several
times. Her fourth shot
found its mark and she
saw the police car sway,
its right front wheel
disabled
“Listen,” said Dickson. “I need gas.
Have you got any?”
The old man’s eyes did not move.
“I’m blind,” he replied. “I can’t help you.
Perhaps my son can take care of you.”
Dickson peered into the old man’s
face, and then shoved him roughly aside.
“Get your son,” he ordered. “I’ve no time
to waste.”
The blind man groped his way back
into the house, and soon afterwards his
son appeared.
“What’s the trouble?” He eyed
Dickson coldly.
“I need gas.”
The farmer looked at him suspiciously.
“Your motor’s running, isn’t it? Haven’t
you anything better to do than run
around waking up decent people in the
middle of the night?”
“No,” retorted Dickson. “I haven’t.”
He produced his automatic. “I need a car
– get one!”
The farmer, Claude Minnis, pointed
out that his old Model T was not much
use for a getaway.
“Find me a better one, then,” Dickson
commanded. He jerked a thumb towards
the car where Stella was sitting. “Get in.”
Minnis had no choice. He went to the
car and sat between the couple. They
rode to the next farm, half a mile away,
and entered the driveway.
“Whose place is this?” asked Dickson.
“Henry Metty’s.”
“Call him!”
The two men got out and went up to
the veranda of the house. The boards
creaked under their feet. Minnis knocked.
“Henry,” he called, “wake up!” He rattled
the door-knob.
There was a stir within, and the door
opened. The short, stubby figure of a
man stood on the threshold, blinking.

43

Hostages Claude Minnis and Louis
Karr were in fear for their lives as
they crossed Michigan and Indiana
“What’s the matter, Claude?” he
yawned. “Barn on fire?”
“No. This man wants to borrow a
car.”
Metty’s eyes narrowed. He caught the
note of nervousness in his neighbour’s
voice and sensed trouble. He turned
to Dickson. “Oh, yeah?” he said, and
swung his fist.
Dickson, with a boxer’s instinct, saw
the blow coming and ducked. Metty’s
fist crashed into the door. Then he felt a
gun in his back.
“I wouldn’t try that stunt again,
mister,” said Dickson. “It might ruin
your health. Now show me your car.”
They went to a shed behind the house
where a Ford was parked. Dickson put
Minnis in the back with Stella. He kept
Metty in front where he could watch
him.
“I’ve got to get out of the state by the
quickest route,” he said. “It’s up to you
birds to help me out. You know the back
roads – give me directions.”
“Okay,” replied Metty. “Bear left at
the next crossing.”
The road system seemed to be laid
out in a gridiron pattern, and they were
constantly changing direction. They had
been driving for about an hour when
Stella noticed that they had crossed the
same bridge for the second time. She
wasn’t certain, however, so she said
nothing. Ten minutes later, they were
back at the bridge.
This time Dickson smelled a rat.
“Stop sending me around in a circle.
Another trick like that, and I’ll kill you.”
Metty feigned innocence. “I’m doing
my best,” he replied. But Dickson
noticed that they did not cross the
bridge again and that the number of
turns was diminishing.
Hour after hour, all lights out, they
chugged the country roads. Once they
halted briefly while Benny put his
hostages to work repainting the wheels
and changing the licence plates. Then
the journey was resumed.
car on the Michigan side and turned to
the farmers.
“This is a matter of a few hours of
your time against our lives. We are being
chased and have to get to Chicago. If we
take you across the line against your will,
it means that the FBI will be after us with
a federal kidnapping charge. So either you
go voluntarily, and we’ll pay you for your
trouble, or else we’ll have to tie you up
and leave you in a ditch. Make up your
minds.”
It was quite a speech. The only trouble
was that whether he paid them or not,
he would still violate the law because the
farmers were under duress. He didn’t
know this and thought he had all the
angles figured out.
He looked at them eagerly. They were
without coats and did not seem to relish
the idea of being left in the open fields.
“We’ll go with you,” they decided.
He took out his wallet and handed them
five dollars apiece. Then they all crossed
into Indiana.
They had hardly gone 50 yards when
their ears rang with the sound of a shot.
“What the blazes!” exclaimed Dickson.
Stella’s face was red. She was holding
the rifle, and smoke curled from its
muzzle. There was a jagged hole in the
roof of the car. “I was trying to fix the
safety catch,” she said.
“That’s the second time! Now I’ll have
to get another car.”
An hour later, Louis Karr, a salesman
en route to Chicago, was driving his
Studebaker when he saw a car standing
at the roadside. Three men and a girl
stood by it, and one of the men waved to
him. They looked like people in trouble,
so Karr stopped. As he leaned out to ask
what was wrong, the young man who had
waved drew a gun.
“Sorry, pal. We’ve got to borrow this
crate.”
There was nothing he could do about
it, so Karr moved over to the right,
relinquishing the wheel to Benny Dickson.
Stella and the two farmers climbed into
the back and once more they were on
their way.
As the sun came up, traffic on the road
increased. Metty, who had been looking
imploringly at every passing car, began
to make furtive signs with his hands.
Dickson, looking in the mirror, caught
him attempting to signal to another
vehicle.
“Cut that out,” he warned, “or I’ll lock
you up in the trunk!”
Metty looked aggrieved. Five minutes
later he again tried to attract the attention
of a passing motorist.
Dickson applied the brakes and turned
with a snarl. “I warned you. Now get
out!”
Leaving Stella to cover the other
occupants, he escorted the farmer to the
rear of the car and forced him to crawl
into the boot.
“If I drive too rough, knock on the
floorboard – maybe someone will hear
found the gates down and a long string
of freight cars rolling past. Dickson drove
up to the barrier and waited. As he did
so, the train began to slow down and
finally came to a halt, leaving 10 trucks
to block the road.
Benny took advantage of the lull to get
out and stretch his legs. He walked to the
boot to see how Metty was faring. He
Waitress Gloria Cambron took
Benny’s final order at the Yankee
System hamburger joint
peered inside. The farmer glared back.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m stiff,” Metty replied.
“Get out and stretch then. I’m going to
turn the car around.”
Metty came out groaning and rubbing
his legs. Benny got back into the driver’s
seat. As he started to turn the car around,
Metty suddenly streaked like a hare
for the freight cars and crossed over a
coupling to the other side of the tracks.
Dickson shrugged and turned to
Minnis and Karr. “All right, you fellows
might as well hop off. We’ll make our
getaway without you. Just forget you ever
met us.”
Stella got in the front seat and they set
off in a detour around the stalled freight
train. When they reached Hammond,
Indiana, they put the stolen Studebaker
in a garage and rented a room in a
boarding-house near the railway. Dickson
tumbled into bed and slept for 18 hours.
T heir victims, meanwhile, had gone to
the police, and because a kidnapping
was involved the FBI was notified.
Agents already suspected that the
Elkton and Brookings bank robberies
had been committed by the same pair,
and the series of abandoned cars and
identification of Dickson from his
mug-shot were further links in the chain
of evidence. With warrants out for the
couple’s arrest, director J. Edgar Hoover

A t five o’clock on the morning of

November 28th, they reached the
Indiana state line. Dickson stopped the
you,” he said as he slammed the lid.
They were leaving Griffith, Indiana,
when they came to a railway crossing and
ordered a net to be thrown about the
entire Middle West.
Two days later Benny bought an old

44
Ford for $40 from a factory worker
and headed for Cairo, Illinois. He
knew he was “hot” because radios and
newspapers were full of his doings, so
he drove at moderate speeds, taking
care to avoid being stopped by highway
patrolmen.
At Taylorville, Illinois, they stayed at a
tourist camp for the night and heard a
radio announcer say that Dickson had
been wounded and might be dead.
Benny looked at Stella and winked.
“That’s swell,” he said. “Write to your
mother and tell her I’ve been killed. They
might stop looking for us then.”
She agreed and immediately sat down
at a table with pen and ink. She wrote:
“Dear Mom
Don’t get excited when I tell you this,
maybe it’s for the best after all. Johnny
died the night before last from being
shot in the head. He seemed all right for
a time but all of a sudden he got a fever
and got sick. I tried to get him to drink
some whisky but he wouldn’t. He went
to sleep and I couldn’t awake him up. I
couldn’t cross the bridge with him there,
so I drove down close to the river and
buried him. I dug as good a grave as I
could with the tools and covered it with
brush. I put his gun and all his clothes
over him like he told me to.
I’m going back to some friends of ours
in Michigan. They offered me a job the
last time we were there.
Say hello to Jr. and Dad,
Goodbye and don’t worry,
Stell.
Dickson thought that the ruse might
succeed, but he didn’t know the FBI.
Soon after Mrs. Redenbaugh received the
missive, it came to an agent’s attention.
Although it had been established that
Dickson had been wounded and might
have died as a result, he was known to
have a flair for trickery. So while several
agents were detailed to search the river
banks along the Indiana highway, the
main force continued to concentrate on
his arrest.
Having mailed the letter, Dickson
headed for the South, bought another car
in Memphis, Tennessee, and continued
by way of Jackson, Mississippi, to New
Orleans, Louisiana.
Here they rested, spending days
playing golf and tennis. Weeks passed
and, feeling safe in the city, Dickson
rented a five-room apartment under the
name of Robert Kane and settled down
to continuing his own and his wife’s
education as well as he could under the
circumstances. In February they made
a brief excursion to St. Louis, Missouri,
and then returned to New Orleans.
Meanwhile the FBI let the underworld
know that anyone aiding the fugitive
couple would be relentlessly prosecuted.
Agents were confident that if Dickson
Above, an officer
points out the
spot where
Benny died
outside a St.
Louis hamburger
joint in South
Euclid Avenue.
Left, Stella
Mae (second
from left) was
soon taken into
custody
visited any of his
former haunts, his
presence would be
signalled.
Former inmates
of prisons where
Dickson had
served time were
questioned. Interviews were held with
scores of fight managers, in an effort to
learn whether he was working-out in any
gymnasium. The abandoned cars were
located and watched in case he returned
for them.
T hen word came from St. Louis that
on February 13th, 1939, Stella had
been seen ordering groceries to be sent
to an address where a relative of one of
Benny’s penitentiary friends was living.
Meanwhile the couple had gone back to
New Orleans.
April came and Benny began to feel
like moving. On the third of the month
he discussed this with his wife. “Things
should be quiet now – what do you say
we go back north?”
She readily agreed. “I’m getting fed up
with this place myself,” she admitted.
By the evening of the 6th they were in
St. Louis. Benny was hungry. He parked
the car on a side street.
“Wait here,” he told his wife. “I’ll be
back in a jiffy.”
He entered a hamburger joint and
slumped down in a chair. Waitress Gloria
Cambron took his order.
It was 6.30 p.m.
Fifteen minutes later, the telephone
rang in the house of the special-agent-in-
charge of the FBI’s St. Louis division.
“Listen,” said
a voice, “you
can find Benny
Dickson at the
Yankee System
hamburger joint
across the street
from number
seven, South
Euclid.”
The agent
moved
into action
immediately,
first calling
Washington
and receiving J.
Edgar Hoover’s
approval of
his plan for
the bandit’s
arrest. He
then telephoned the squad of special
agents who had been assigned to the
Dickson case and were working on a
24-hour-a-day basis in the local office.
They were ordered to report to his home
immediately.
The first man arrived three minutes
later. Within 10 minutes nine special
agents had assembled. The agent-in-
charge outlined the plan. “Any
questions?” he asked.
The group was silent. Each man
knew his part in the job ahead. They
had studied every available photograph
of Benny and Stella and knew their
descriptions by heart.
“Let’s go, then,” said the agent-in-
charge.
South Euclid Avenue was in a district
of boarding-houses, eating places and
private residences. The G-men drifted
in as softly as shadows. At one end of
the street, a car pulled up and parked.
Almost simultaneously, a second car
parked at the other end. Then a third
rolled into a parking spot diagonally
across from the hamburger joint and
came to a halt.
The agent-in-charge watched his men
go into position. Then he turned to one
and ordered, “Check the joint. Make sure
it’s Dickson who is inside.”
The officer crossed the street, and
walked past the glass front of the eating
place. Then he rejoined his chief.
“Can’t get a clear view,” he said.
“There’s a young fellow in the fourth
seat, but there’s another man on the
corner stool blocking the view.”
45
 The agent-in-charge let a minute pass.
Then he sent a second man over. As this
one walked past, the customer on the
corner stool got up to pay his bill. For
an instant, the G-man caught a glimpse
of the man in the fourth seat. He took a
second look and then made his way back.
“It’s Dickson” he announced quietly.
But his superior was taking no chances.
He sent a third man over. He too came
back, nodding. “No doubt about it. It’s
definitely Dickson.”
The agent-in-charge studied the
lunch-room, thinking of the need to
protect its other patrons. “Wait until he
pays his check,” he said. “Take him into
custody as he steps outside.”
The G-men went to their posts. They
had hardly reached the kerb before
the door of the joint opened and two
people came out. One was a woman, the
other a man. One of the agents spoke.
“Surrender, Dickson – Federal officers.”
Benny’s first reaction was to duck
behind the woman. She shook him off
and darted out of sight. Then his right
hand went towards his belt.
It was a bad move. Agents of the
FBI are trained to draw and shoot in
a half-second. Whatever Benny’s time
was, it wasn’t good enough. His hand
no sooner touched his gun butt than
two sharp reports split the air and he
dropped to the pavement.
Two bullets had been fired and both
found their mark – one in his stomach,
the other in his heart. Convulsively, he
tried to draw his gun, but he couldn’t
make it. By the time the special agents
stood over him and pried his fingers
loose from his fully loaded .45 Colt,
his blue eyes were beginning to glaze.
Frisking him, the officers found a knife
strapped to his leg, and a loaded .38 in
his left pocket. Five minutes later, as an
ambulance clanged to the scene, Dickson
breathed his last.
S everal cars passed as the agents bent
over the body. One was driven by
Stella. Becoming anxious about Benny’s
failure to return, she had started out after
him. At the corner she heard the crack
of pistol shots, followed by an ominous
silence. Instinctively, she feared the worst.
Passing the hamburger joint she saw
someone stiff and white on the ground
and knew that she had seen the last of
her husband.
Forcing her eyes back to the road,
she drove swiftly to the other side of St.
Louis, finally entering an alley where
there was a sign, “Garage to Let.” Pulling
her hat well down over her eyes, she
found the owner and paid three dollars
for a week’s rent. Then she put the car
inside, closed the garage door, and hid on
the car’s back seat. She tried to blot out
the vision of Benny as he lay dying, but it
wouldn’t go.
After a sleepless night, she crept from
the garage, her face grey and drawn, her
eyes red-rimmed. She hailed a passing
cab.
“To the airport,” she told the driver.
She squeezed back into the seat, afraid
46
“Sure Shot” Stella Mae (above)
in custody. After leaving prison
she managed some semblance of a
normal existence (right, in the late
40s or early 50s) – but her life was
forever marked by the events which
occurred in her youth
of being seen. When they neared the
airfield she saw that several planes were
being tuned up on the runway, and her
heart pounded.
Then she saw a police uniform.
Frantically, she tapped on the cabbie’s
window. He looked around. “Go back!”
she ordered. “I made a mistake.”
The driver shrugged and did as she
requested.
When they reached downtown
St. Louis she paid him off, and then
started looking for a travel bureau that
specialised in car trips. She found one
and arranged to be driven to Kansas
City. Thirty minutes later she was on her
way.
Meanwhile the FBI had dispatched
her photo and description to every travel
agency within a 200-mile radius of St.
Louis.
Stella arrived in Kansas City late on
April 7th, and spent the remainder of the
night wandering the streets downtown,
not daring to rest.
By the next morning, the G-men knew
that she was in town and special agents
of the FBI found her sitting in a parked
car in Kansas City’s business section.
They approached quietly and tapped her
on the arm. At their touch, she stiffened.
“Federal officers,” they announced.
“You’re under arrest.”
She looked at their impassive faces,
and her shoulders sagged. “I guess it’s all
over,” she said dully. “Where do we go
from here?”
They took her to FBI headquarters.
After giving her coffee and sandwiches,
they questioned her. Realising that
denials were futile, she made a complete
confession.
Then her abandoned car was picked
up in St. Louis. It held an assortment
of sporting goods and firearms. Roller-
skates and tennis rackets were mixed with
guns and ammunition. Underneath the
back seat were two loaded rifles, a loaded
shotgun, sticks of dynamite with short
fuses, two belts with 324 cartridges and
11 licence plates from six states.
Through her attorneys, Stella sought
to avoid punishment on the grounds that
she was a minor and had acted under
compulsion. This wasn’t accepted, and
on August 21st, 1939, she pleaded guilty
to two counts of bank robbery.
“Ten years in the federal reformatory,”
was the sentence handed down by the
Judge of the United States District Court
at Deadwood, South Dakota, for each of
the robberies, to be served concurrently.
Stella hung her head. This was
something for which Benny had never
prepared her. Then she was taken away
and the prison doors closed behind her.
Retrospectively many consider her
portrayal as a “gun moll” by J. Edgar
Hoover and the FBI as unfair. The
brutal sentence given to a vulnerable
girl (she was 15 at the time the crimes
began and 16 at the height of Benny’s
spree) was indefensible and cruel.
There was no evidence that Stella had
initiated any criminal act, or had ever
shown any criminal intent. Still, she was
sent to a women’s reformatory prison
in Alderson, West Virginia, where she
spent much time in solitary confinement
and struggled with mental and physical
health issues. The authorities, in a fashion
typical of the Depression era, were harsh
and largely unsympathetic, compounding
the damage an abuse-marred childhood
had wrought on the life of a girl who
might have been considered a victim
before she became a “criminal.”
Stella Dickson remained behind
bars until she was 26. She later
lived in Raytown, Missouri, where
she worked as a grocery store clerk
and married several times. She was
granted a presidential pardon by
Richard Nixon in 1971 and, after
living practically as a recluse for
many years, died of emphysema at
the age of 73 in 1995.
Bedroom Carnage
As Mistress’s
Husband Carries
Out Murder Plot
J
OHN MACKAY was having
a high time with his girlfriend Odd and evil couple:
Nicole. She wasn’t a classy young Nace and Nicole
woman, but he was crazy about her. Houchin on their
Nothing is ever perfect in this sort wedding day
of wild affair, though, and for Mackay
there was something of a problem: his
wife.
She had to go. And, with the hefty
insurance pay-out for her death, the
grieving husband – and his young lady
Case recalled by
MARK DAVIS
– could have a lot more fun. Nicole had
already squared it with her husband
who seemed to be very laid-back about

MDIncompetence Of Attack Beggared Belief

the whole thing. But no one thought to
mention it to Mackay’s wife.
Nicole Houchin, her husband Nace,
and Mackay didn’t want to get their
hands too dirty so they hauled in
another sap to help with the job – for
another cut of the “take.”
It was all getting a bit complicated.
And if any of the others in the murder
team had troubled to weigh it up, they
would have realised that John Mackay
was no mastermind. But he wasn’t
stupid enough to hang around when
the killing was under way. He had left
town and gone to New York, some 250
miles from their smart home in Seasons
Trace, a suburb of Williamsburg,
Virginia. It was an area full of large
homes nestling in heavily-wooded,
rolling hills.
Mackay had gone to spend a couple
of days with his 80-year-old ailing
mother and his sister who looked after
her. He left his wife Dana housebound
and helpless after surgery. She didn’t
stand a chance, but she must have put
up quite a fight.
Regular readers of this magazine
must often consider, with grudging
admiration, the ingenuity many killers
come up with to cover their tracks.
But the cold-blooded murder of Dana
Patterson Mackay, 42, at the home she
shared with Army sergeant John, 44,
was a model of incompetence.
Cops had tabs on the gang within 48
hours. Later, many wondered – what
kept them?
Dana, attractive and stylish, was
found beaten to death at her home on
the night of July 27th, 2013. She could
barely walk after an operation and had
been told that recovery would be slow.
She never got the chance to find out.
She would have been in a deep
slumber, aided by sleeping pills and
painkillers she had been prescribed, and
wouldn’t have heard the three intruders
entering her house on Teal Way just
before midnight.
John Mackay had told Dana that
friends and neighbours would be
popping in to see she was OK while he
was away. In fact, he never told anyone
he was going away.
Mackay had been making plans, but
Dana’s welfare wasn’t on his to-do
list. Her untimely death certainly was,
so that he could collect on her life
insurance and continue his affair with
Nicole Houchin, 36, a co-worker at a
car repair centre.
Dana had her suspicions about her
husband’s fidelity, as she let on to her
sister, but had no idea that he had

The “evil woman” stopped at nothing...

47

The home of Dana and John Mackay. Police found her body beaten to a pulp
become involved in a deadly plot to do
away with her.
Mackay had been having an affair
with Nicole Houchin since April of
that year, and he had promised to leave
his wife to be with her. Mackay had
mentioned the idea of divorce to Dana,
but she had refused to roll over. Nicole
was enraged and had started to stalk
Dana and prank-call her in the middle
of the night.
She had become increasingly
obsessed with the idea of doing away
with her so she could be with her lover.
Dana had told her parents that she
had met Nicole Houchin once or twice
and called her “an evil woman” who
would do anything to get her way.
But who was Nicole going to get to
help carry out the murder? No problem
– husband Nace Houchin, 34, would
help.
In bed one night she had told her
husband, with whom she had a bizarre
on-off relationship, that she wanted to
set up home with Mackay – and, er,
would he mind helping to kill Dana?
She would get a good slice of the life
insurance payout that would come
her lover’s way after Dana was dead
in some sort of break-in-gone-wrong.
Houchin would be well taken care of.
One can only wonder what kind of
life the Houchins had together, but
Nace was already busy weighing it
up and reckoned he needed a bit of
help. He spoke to Greg Crawford, 25,
another employee at the car repair
shop, about joining the plot. Crawford,
who barely had a penny to his name,
agreed to help kill Dana in return for a
share of her life insurance.
T he sheer incompetence of the
plotters beggars belief. “The fewer
involved the better” is a good start to
a murder plot, especially if there is
going to be a share-out of any loot.
Somebody will talk sooner or later,
once the threat of execution is dangled.
Don’t leave behind hundreds of
48
incriminating texts and voice-mails
– and certainly don’t let a colleague
borrow your mobile. It could easily end
up in the hands of the police.
Avoid stalking the victim and don’t
threaten violence or the target will
probably tell friends, family and
neighbours.
Greg Crawford joined in the brutal
project to kill housebound Dana
Don’t use a murder weapon that
leaves a “flag.”
Planning for a burglary-gone-wrong?
Then keep the blood-and-gore count as
low as possible, avoiding spreading it all
over the walls.
Oh, and do keep the noise down.
A cheap paperback detailing a
murder plot along the lines they
planned and carried out would quickly
have merited a place in the nearest
waste bin. But, of course, with some
people logic doesn’t always figure.
Houchin and Mackay had served
together in the Army at Fort Eustis,
a few miles south of Williamsburg.
Houchin must have weighed losing his
wife to a colleague and making as much
as $20,000 from an easy murder, and
reckoned it a good deal. He might have
seen it as win-win.
And so, on the night of July 27th,
2013, the Houchins and Greg
Crawford broke into the Mackay
home. Nicole and Crawford remained
downstairs and ransacked the
living-room so it would appear a
robbery had been committed.
Nace Houchin went upstairs, kicked
in the bedroom door and beat Dana to
death with a breaker bar – a tool similar
to a socket wrench, often used in car
repair shops…
James City County Police were
called to the scene after a neighbour
went to check at the request of Dana’s
mother because she couldn’t reach
her on the phone from her home in
Georgia. Mother and daughter usually
spoke once or twice a day, especially
after Dana had come out of hospital.
Officers arrived to do a welfare check
and instead found themselves at the
centre of a horrific murder scene.
“On arrival, the officers found
Dana’s naked body face-up and
covered in a tremendous amount of
blood,” said attorney Nathan Green.
“Blood had been smeared on the walls
and the bedroom door was hanging off
its hinges.
“Given the carnage in the bedroom,
the victim must have fought for her life
before succumbing to several heavy
blows. The police from the outset
had doubts this was a robbery gone
wrong even though the house had been
ransacked.
“It was an extreme case of overkill.
Any burglar wishes to enter and leave
a house as quickly and quietly as
possible.”
After Dana had been killed, the
Houchins and Crawford drove to
Crawford’s apartment in nearby
Powhatan, where he took the murder
weapon and the clothing the group
wore.
The next day, Crawford told
Nicole Houchin while they were at
work together that he had burned
the clothing and thrown the breaker
bar into the James River. But then
Crawford had an argument with the
Houchins because he had assumed he
would receive $20,000 of Dana’s life
insurance money for taking part in the
murder, rather than just a share of it.
The medical examiner ruled that
Dana’s cause of death was multiple
blunt-force trauma and sharp-force
injuries to the head. She had also lost
one of her fingers in the desperate
struggle.
“When we contacted Dana’s parents
to tell them the terrible news it only
confirmed our suspicions that this was
not a robbery which had gone wrong,”
said Green. “Dana’s mother, Anne
Pearson, blurted out: ‘I had a horrible
feeling this would happen. I’m sure
John is behind it’.”

Above: unhappy partners Dana and John Mackay. Below, Nicole in prison
S he and her husband Steven knew
that Dana had been having marital
troubles and that John was having an
affair. “Our Dana knew there were
good people and bad people in the
world,” said Steven Pearson. “But I
never heard her call anyone evil until
she knew Nicole Houchin.”
Though Dana told neighbours that
she had received multiple threatening
text messages from Nicole, she was still
committed to fixing her marriage.
“I begged her to come home to
Atlanta but she wouldn’t and said
she was going to make it work,” said
Dana’s cousin Holly Wadkins. Several
of Dana’s family members believed she
was optimistic about her chances of
reconciliation, but detectives discovered
Mackay and Nicole had been texting
and emailing each other about plans
to get Dana “out of the picture” just
weeks into their affair.
John Mackay and Nicole Houchin
were arrested two days after Dana’s
body was discovered. On arriving back
in Williamsburg, Mackay, apparently
grief-stricken, told police he had
nothing to do with his wife’s brutal
murder as he was in New York, an alibi
supported by his family.
But his mood soon changed when
he was taken in for questioning and
was presented with a file of electronic
communications the authorities had
discovered.
Mackay admitted that Nicole
Houchin had called him the day
after Dana’s murder and had said:
“It’s done” and “There was lots of
screaming.”
Nicole admitted that she and Mackay
had been having an affair for months
and both wanted Dana out of their
lives.
They had exchanged emails as
recently as July 24th, three days before
Dana’s body was discovered, about a
plan to kill Dana that would be put into
action while he was out of town seeing
his family.
“Will she be gone before I get back?”
asked Mackay, to which Nicole replied,
“Trying to make it happen asap.”
Mackay ended the exchange by
writing, “I’ll be forever in debt to you
and will show you every day. We can
spend the rest of our lives being happy
together. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?”
Investigators said the two had
discussed making Dana’s death look
like a robbery. One idea was to cause
her to fall down the stairs, as she
was prone to dizziness due to the
medication she was on.
N ace Houchin had gone on the run
but was soon apprehended. Police
found a handwritten note in the glove
compartment of his abandoned vehicle,
confessing to the killing.
Mackay and Nicole were charged
with conspiracy to commit murder,
accessory before the fact of capital
murder, and first-degree murder. Later,
Nace Houchin would be charged with
the same crimes.
Mackay and Houchin gave up
MURDER MONTH
January
D ouble-murder…Two butchers,
Tommy Giles and John Lench, were
walking in the village of Oddingley,
Worcestershire, at 5 p.m. on June 24th,
1806, when they heard a shot. They
rushed to the sound of the report and
discovered the local vicar, George
Parker, in a meadow.
He had been shot in the side and his
clothing was ablaze from the wadding
of the gun that had fired the shot. The
right side of his skull had also been
caved in.
They saw a man near the meadow
and gave chase. Mr. Giles was the more
enthusiastic pursuer, but he stopped
when the man turned and pointed the
gun at him, threatening to shoot.
The description given by the two
butchers made an itinerant labourer
called Richard Heming the prime
suspect. However, there was only one
sighting of him after the murder and,
despite a reward of 50 guineas being
offered, no one was able to track down
Heming.
Some suggested that a number of
farmers including Sam Evans and
Thomas Clewes had conspired to
have Reverend Mr.
Parker killed. It was
said that they were
furious at him for
the high taxes he
was paid by the
locals.
The murder
was never solved The murder of
and most people George Parker
forgot about it.
Then a breakthrough occurred on
January 21st, 1830. The new occupant
of Netherwood Farm, once owned by
Thomas Clewes, decided to have a barn
demolished.
Charles Burton, the brother-in-law
of Richard Heming, was given the job.
As he worked, he uncovered a corpse
with a carpenter’s ruler and still wearing
leather shoes.
An inquest on the body opened at the
Talbot Inn, Worcester, four days later.
No locals were allowed to sit on the
jury. It soon became apparent that the
body belonged to Richard Heming.
Attending the inquest was Thomas
Clewes. Evidence came to light that he
had paid £50 to Heming to kill George
Parker. Clewes and two other farmers,
George Banks and John Barnett,
appeared at the Worcester Assizes. Sam
Evans was dead by this time and out
of reach of earthly justice. However, so
much time had passed that the three
defendants were acquitted.
The village of Oddingley became
for a time synonymous with
murder and it was even said that
when it rained its ditches ran blood
red.
49
00
 Crawford, who was arrested and
charged with conspiracy to commit
murder and was held at the Virginia
Peninsula Regional Jail. As the four
awaited trial, all held without bail, the
prosecution insisted the death penalty
remain on the table for the Houchins
and Mackay if convicted.
“Facing the possibility of being
sentenced to death for capital murder
does wonders to concentrate the minds
of even the hardest criminals,” said
Nathan Green. “The Houchins and
Mackay, despite originally pleading not
MASTER
2015. But when the State disclosed
in pre-trial hearings thousands of
electronic communications, Nicole and
Nace Houchin and Mackay all changed
their pleas to guilty, as eventually did
Crawford, and all four came up for
Seasons Trace – the prosperous sentencing in January 2016 in the
suburb of Williamsburg Williamsburg-James City County
Court.
guilty, all promised to co-operate with Dana’s family and friends filled the
the authorities as much as they could in courtroom for the closing chapter of
return for lighter sentences.” this horror story. Many of them sported
They were scheduled for separate matching T-shirts and pins emblazoned
three-day jury trials at the end of with her smiling face and the words
“Justice for Dana.”
Steven Pearson, a pastor of his
FEBRUARY
www.truecrimelibrary.com

On sale at your
church for 30 years, said he never fully
understood the meaning of Jeremiah

DETECTIVE
newsagent 17:9 – “The heart is deceitful above all
from January things and desperately wicked” – until
17th, or see the he and his family were forced to face
offer on page 30 the facts of Dana’s murder. He took the
stand four times to describe the effects
WORLD’S BEST TRUE CRIME STORIES EVERY MONTH! her death had had on his family.
Greg Crawford was sentenced to

RUSSIAN BANKER DOUBLE-

the maximum penalty of 20 years in
prison for conspiracy to commit capital
murder, three years of it suspended.
CHOPPED MURDER Judge Michael McGinty told him: “I
have given you just about the max

UP GIRL- AFTER THE

because I think that’s exactly what this
type of crime deserves.”

FRIEND ROYAL D espite a plea-deal in which Nicole

allowed the state to build a strong

GLASGOW VISIT case against her accomplices despite

a lack of physical evidence, Judge
McGinty still sentenced her to life with
HORROR a minimum 24 years to be served.

THE NAKED Nace Houchin also made a plea-deal,

but his agreement only took the death
BODY IN THE penalty off the table, not the length
of his sentence. The judge said he felt
BASEMENT compelled to sentence him to life with a
minimum of 40 years to be served, due

WHEN THE MURDER IN YOUR VILLAGE to the brutal nature of the crime.
John Mackay was the last of the
This month: Towton, Yorkshire co-defendants to come before the

DEVIL CAME court. “Without Mr. Mackay, evidence

in this case would have been sorely

TO CHURCH “I’M READY lacking, but without him, we wouldn’t

need to be here,” said Green, reflecting

TO GO TO on the balance the court might strike

for his crimes while acknowledging the
role he played in bringing the other

THE CHAIR” three to justice. Mackay was given a life

sentence with a minimum 28 years to

BOASTED TEXAS KILLER be served.

Though justice for Dana was served
in a legal sense, her friends and family
UNSOLVED said that no amount of punishment
BE A CRIME Tragedy
Se New
s

would be able to heal their wounds.

MURDERS
rie

OF THE 1950S MASTERMIND Of The “We will get through Dana’s

KILLING THAT
SPARKED
WIN Murdered
death,” said Steven Pearson, “but
we will never get over it. All my

A CARNIVAL £100 Doctor

daughter wanted to do was to save
her marriage but it seemed evil
triumphed over good.”

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