That story about the Black Hand would make a great movie.....the setting and everything. Its what Christopher Moltisanti should have been writing instead of Cleaver.
That story about the Black Hand would make a great movie.....the setting and everything. Its what Christopher Moltisanti should have been writing instead of Cleaver.
Daisy de Melker, mugshot 1932
Daisy de Melker:No one present at the birth of Daisy Louisa Hancorn-Smith had reason to believe that she would one day be famous or, for that matter, infamous. A generation would grow up before a baby girl born in South Africa would again be named Daisy – such was the unpleasant odor that clung to the name.
South Africa's First Serial Killer
It was Thursday, June 1, 1886. The place was Seven Fountains, 25 miles from the town of Grahamstown, in the British Cape Colony. The city of Cape Town was 550 miles further south.
Grahamstown was a frontier town: Antelope, leopard and lynx roamed the surrounding valleys. As for Seven Fountains, it was a cluster of white-washed homesteads with corrugated-iron roofs and wooden verandas. The locals were farming folk: A small plot of land surrounded each homestead. They spoke English and not Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch-descendant Boer people, the majority of the colony's inhabitants, and they attended the English church. Indeed, they looked on themselves as Brits, which they were. Most had arrived from Britain not all that long into the past, while the rest were descendant from the boatloads of British (English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish) settlers who had arrived in the colony in 1820, 66 years before Daisy's birth.
Newborn Daisy's parents also hailed from England, and like all the others at Seven Fountains, Mr. Hancorn-Smith was trying his hand at farming; dairy farming in his case. He was not a poor man, but the colony was poor and therefore the homestead in which Daisy was born had neither electricity nor hot running water. Mr. Hancorn-Smith also had quite a few mouths to feed: Daisy was the couples' sixth child, and they would still have five more. Eventually, the family would consist of seven girls and four boys.
Daisy was rather pretty. She had blue eyes and a clear complexion. Unfortunately, she had a split palate which messed up her speech. She also had the most unmanageable dark wavy hair.
But Daisy was a friendly child and as her peers were soon to realize, she was also intelligent – "bright," as they said. Not that intelligence was going to take her far in life. Seven Fountains was the kind of place that no one ever left: If you were born there, you died there. It was, though, something that seemed to suit everyone. Or at least everyone but Mr.Hancorn-Smith. Therefore, around Daisy's 8th birthday, he started to speak of "going north".
Those days what was meant by "going north" was that a man was going to go and dig for gold, because in the year of Daisy's birth prospectors had discovered a major gold reef in what was to become known as the Witwatersrand – the "ridge of white waters." (The name derives from the optical illusion formed when rain falls on gold quartz rock and makes it look like glistening water.) But Mr. Hancorn-Smith did not have gold prospecting in mind. He was going to bypass the newly-founded Johannesburg with its timber and corrugated-iron shacks on treeless, dusty streets, to head for Rhodesia, the other Southern-African British colony that was north of the great Limpopo River. (Rhodesia was named after mining magnate and politician Cecil John Rhodes. It is today Zimbabwe.) Land, he had heard, was plentiful up there and was even being given away. He was going to go and see whether he could make a better living up in this "new" colony. He took his two eldest sons, strapping young men, with him.
The letters the three Hancorn-Smith men had written home must have painted a rosy picture of life in Rhodesia, because in 1896, several families from Seven Fountains set off, too. Among the families was Daisy. She was just 10 years old. Why the girl should have joined her father and two brothers is not known, but there were alarming rumors of war between the Boer people and their British rulers which might have decided Mrs. Hancorn-Smith that Daisy would be safer with her father and brothers. Yet, it might just have been that a woman was needed to darn the socks and serve the soup "up north".
Daisy set off by train. The previous year the railroad track that had linked Cape Town and the diamond town of Kimberley since 1885 had been lengthened to run all the way north to the "new" Rhodesian town of Bulawayo. It was a seven-day journey with frequent stops at junctions to pick up and drop off not only passengers but also farm produce and livestock. Daisy had taken a basket of provisions along for the journey as well as her own pillow and blankets. That was the norm when undertaking such a long train journey those days.
The 10-year-old settled down well on her father's farm. She was enrolled at a school that served the farm children. Each day a farmhand took her to the school in the farm's buggy and mid-afternoon, he picked her up again. Soon, two of her older sisters, both married women, arrived in Rhodesia as well.
In 1899, Daisy was back in the Cape Colony: She was enrolled as a resident scholar at the Good Hope Seminary in Cape Town. The seminary was quite an elite establishment: Daisy wore a black and white uniform, and black stockings and a white panama hat. She stayed at the seminary until 1903 and then she returned to Rhodesia. She was 17 years old and quite the young lady. Colonial girls grew up fast, but what also catapulted Daisy from childhood to womanhood was that in the year of her arrival at the seminary the war everyone had been talking about had finally broken out. The Boer War, as it was then called, (today it is known as the Second Anglo-Boer War) had raged for the entire time that Daisy was at the seminary.
Back in Rhodesia, Daisy met a young man and for the first time she fell in love. The young man was named Bert Fuller. Bert cut a dashing figure in a British Army khaki uniform and pith helmet. He was assistant commissioner of Native Affairs which meant that he helped administer the colony by supervising the "natives" (the indigenous Matabele nation). It was an enviable job: He was paid quite well; he would one day receive a substantial pension; he lived in free government housing; he had servants (a housekeeper, a cook and a gardener), and he had an automobile.
Daisy, though, despite the promise of an easy life that such benefits would supply, was not yet ready to settle down. She had plans: She wanted to become a nurse. Therefore, bidding Bert goodbye, she returned to the Cape Colony and enrolled at a nursing school in Durban, Natal. Natal, although it was separately governed, was geographically part of the Cape Colony. (Natal, on the south-east Indian Ocean coast of Southern Africa was "discovered" on Christmas Day 1497 by the Portuguese seafarer, Vasco da Gama, who named it "Rio de Natal" – Christmas River. Today, Natal, as KwaZulu-Natal, forms part of the Republic of South Africa.)
The young trainee nurse spent three years at the Berea Nursing Home. Berea was a leafy, middle-class, hilltop area of Durban. No one there spoke Afrikaans, the language of the Boer further south: In fact, the Boer was as despised there as the indigenous Zulu.
In 1906, Daisy returned to Rhodesia: She had not finished her nursing training, but she had left the Berea Nursing Home for good. In Rhodesia, Bert with his benefits was waiting. That time, Daisy could not resist him and the perks. She agreed to marry him. The two became engaged. The date for the wedding was set. It was to be on Saturday, March 2, 1907, the beginning of the African fall. Bert had in the meantime been transferred to a place named Matetsi near the Victoria Falls. Matetsi was proper bushveld of wiry, gray shrubs, aloes and thorn trees. If one looked out a window on a hot day, and most of the days the temperature shot past 110 degrees Fahrenheit, one saw tall, thin buck dance on the gleaming, silvery water of a lake, but it would just be a mirage.
The bushveld was not Daisy's idea of life. No sooner had she said "yes" to Bert than she asked for the wedding to be postponed. She suggested that they should marry only in October. She was living with one of her brothers on his farm near Bulawayo, but had visited Bert several times in Matetsi. To her chagrin, he was rather down medically speaking. Not that it worried her, or him. One caught all kinds of diseases living a frontier life: Malaria, bilharziasis; tetanus; sprue; dysentery and all sorts of fevers.
The reason Daisy had given Bert for the postponement of the wedding was that she wanted to return to the Cape Colony to complete her nursing training. She really would like, she confessed, to get her nursing diploma so that she could do a little bit of nursing before she settled down as a married woman. Wives did not normally work in those days and to have done so gave out the message that money was in short supply. Bert understood. He even confessed that he might join her down in the Cape. Meanwhile, he decided, he was going to make a will: Did one not take a gamble living a frontier life and was it not wiser to get one's affairs in order? On the day Daisy set off by train back to the Cape, she knew that should anything happen to Bert, she would inherit whatever he had, and the British Colonial Office would even pay out to her what money had accumulated in his pension fund.
Daisy did not go all the way to Durban, but got off the train at the Johannesburg railroad station. She had enrolled at the nursing school of a hospital in the town of Boksburg, close to Johannesburg. Hardly, though, had Daisy unpacked her suitcase, than a telegram arrived for her from Rhodesia. Bert was ill. Bert was so ill that it was unlikely that he would survive, therefore, should she want to see him again, she should come immediately. Daisy did not hesitate. Of course, she wanted to see the dying Bert. What was wrong with him? Bert's doctor had diagnosed blackwater fever. Bert was suffering terrible fevers, fevers that left him shivering and babbling nonsense, and his urine was black. (Blackwater fever is a complication of malaria.)
On Saturday, March 2, of that year of 1907, the day that Daisy should have been dressed in white to marry Bert, she was instead dressed in black from head to toe for his funeral. For the three months she was to remain in Rhodesia, she was too overcome with grief to ask about Bert's will: Was there not a time and place for everything?
In July, Daisy was back at the hospital in Boksburg to resume her nursing training. She was, however, complaining of suffering fevers. Going off sick, she said she must have caught blackwater fever from Bert. Daisy's blackwater fever was not, though, fatal. She recovered, did her practical exam and was preparing to start nursing, but in December another missive from Rhodesia arrived, and she was back on the train to return "north." The letter was from a lawyer: Bert had left her ₤95 pounds in his will. Ninety-five pounds was quite a substantial amount in 1907 when a married worker's weekly wage was around ₤4 a week. Should Daisy go slow with her spending, she need not work for at least six months.
How kind of the poor Bert Fuller to have thought of his little tousled-haired fiancée, Daisy.
Marriage and Motherhood
Daisy was soon back in the Cape Colony. She moved in with a relative as a paying guest and started to work as a nurse at a Johannesburg hospital. It was 1908, she was 22 years old, and an independent young woman, something very rare in the colony at that time.
Both the staff and the patients at the hospital liked Daisy. She was an exceptionally caring nurse, they said. So she was. Having experienced bereavement herself, and at such an early age, she seemed to excel at empathizing with women grieving at the bedsides of their suffering, dying husbands.
Some time during that year Daisy met William Alfred (Alf) Cowle, a 36-year-old bachelor who hailed from the Isle of Man. (The Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, is geographically halfway between the coasts of Northern Ireland and north-west England. It is a self-governing British Crown Dependency with Queen Elizabeth II as Head of State.) He was a plumber and worked for the Johannesburg municipality maintaining the city's drains. He was considered quite a catch: He earned ₤7 and 2 shillings a week, in other words, more than the average worker.
On Christmas Day 1908, Daisy and Al became engaged, and on Wednesday, March 3, 1909, one day after the second anniversary of Bert Fuller's funeral, the two were married. The ceremony took place in the St. Mary the Less Anglican church in the heart of Johannesburg. As was the local custom, the couple signed a marriage contract in the presence of an attorney. They had the choice of agreeing to an Ante Nuptial contract or a Community of Property contract. The latter was exactly what it said: All their assets on marriage became their joint property. Under Ante Nuptial, what was "his" remained his, and what was "hers" remained hers. This was what the two chose.
The two newlyweds moved into a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Turffontein – "turf" or "peat" fountain. The house, at Number 22 Tully Street was modest. The toilet was in the backyard and was what was called a "dry latrine." A couple of nights a week, around midnight, a "latrine" truck came to pick up the filled bucket and to leave an empty one. Turffontein had the reputation of not being the healthiest of areas to live in. The reason was that Turffontein had sprung up right in the center of an area dotted with slime dumps from the gold mines.
The slime did soon get to Alf's "English" constitution, a constitution much more fragile than that of his 23-year-old wife, and 14 years his junior. Alf suffered from a bad back and from a weak stomach. He had grown up on the Isle of Man's national fare – "spuds an' herrin," boiled potatoes and herring – and his stomach could not cope with the great quantities of fatty meat and spicy stews the locals served up. Even Daisy, though she fancied herself as an excellent cook, did not go lightly with the curry and coriander.
In 1910, Daisy gave birth to twins to her and everybody's surprise, as it was not possible those days to tell whether a woman was carrying more than one baby. The babies were born prematurely and were weak little things. They would die in infancy, not because of any specific illness, but only due to their general fragility.
Soon after the twins' birth, Daisy was pregnant again. She gave birth to a boy on Sunday, June 11, 1911. The baby was named Rhodes Cecil after non-other than Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate and politician after whom Rhodesia was named. (Rhodes had been Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890/1895.)
Rhodes Cecil, or Rhodes, as his parents called him, was also not all that strong a child, but he was able to fight off all the little ailments of infancy. Just as well too because he was Daisy's pride and joy.
Another son, this one named Lester, was born two years after Rhodes. He came into the world on Sunday, June 1, 1913, the day Daisy turned 27. In 1915, she gave birth to another son. That child was named Eric. Lester was to live for just over four years: On October 19, 1917, he passed away. The cause of death as recorded on the boy's death certificate was: "abscess on the liver."
Lester's death was the fourth in Daisy's life in 10 years, or since the death of Bert Fuller. And there was still to be another death because within weeks of Lester dying, Eric, too, passed away. The illness that carried the child off was not recorded.
Four years after these two deaths, Daisy, Alf and Rhodes left Turffontein and moved to a new house in the heart of Johannesburg. The house was at Number 67 Terrace Road in an area named Bertrams that dated from 1889, or the third year of the existence of the city of Johannesburg.
It was 1922 and Daisy was a full-time mother to Rhodes and wife to Alf. She still adored Rhodes, who, at 11 years of age, was rather spoiled, but in much better health than he had been in his infancy. Alf, at 49, was however in very poor health. Not only had his stomach problems prevailed through the years, but he also suffered from hemorrhoids and a fistula. The Cape food and Daisy's cooking certainly did not agree with him.
Soon after the move to Bertrams, the sickly Alf went into hospital to have surgical treatment for both the hemorrhoids and fistula. He was also treating himself with some old wives' concoctions for the frequent stomach upsets. Often he also drank syrups pharmacists mixed especially for him. Once, back in 1914, when the Cowles had been on holiday in Durban, such a syrup had almost killed him, yet, back home, he had taken the pharmacist's prescription to another to have more of the stuff mixed for him. It too, and all the other concoctions, did not give him any relief from his intestinal discomforts.
Daisy, the loving wife, confessed to her neighbors and some friends and family that she had become rather worried about Alf's health. He was a good husband, she said: Despite his frailty, he had built a high brick wall around their property. The money that Alf was bringing into the family home was also so very welcome.
Alf had started to sleep badly too. Daisy urged him to consult a doctor. Alf had consulted three doctors in the past: The Drs. J. J. Perlman, A.E.H. Pakes and P.J. Leighton. The latter was in private practice, while the other two were the official medical practitioners with the Johannesburg municipality's medical fund. Alf, though, refused to seek advice from the three again: Real men did not run to the doctor because they did not sleep all that well.
It was 1923. On Monday, Jan. 8, Daisy finally persuaded Alf to consult a doctor. Shunning the medical fund's two doctors, he made an appointment with Dr. Leighton. It was for that coming Friday. Thursday morning Alf was suffering such excruciating stomach cramps that he could not get out of bed. When Daisy talked to him, his replies were incoherent. She called the neighbors to come and help. They stood at his bedside as helplessly as she. Alf was vomiting; Alf was coughing; Alf was perspiring; Alf was constipated; Alf was screaming with pain. Daisy helped him drink a glass of Epsom salts she herself had mixed. (Epsom salts is a laxative in the form of tiny white crystals and it contains magnesium and sulfate.) Daisy, almost frantic, summoned Dr. Leighton who rapidly examined Alf and left a prescription for medication with Daisy, but before the day ended, Alf was dead. He was 50. Daisy was 37 and remembering Bert's death, she felt as if she'd been widowed for a second time.
Dr. Leighton, summoned back to come and issue Alf's death certificate, refused to do so. He wanted an autopsy. It was performed by Dr. B.W.H. Fergus, acting police pathologist for the Transvaal. (In 1910 the Cape Colony with the British-ruled Natal and the two "rebellious" Boer "republics" – Transvaal and Orange Free State – the main protagonists of the Second Anglo-Boer War - had united to form the "self-governed" Union of South Africa. The Union had remained until 1960 when it had become the white-ruled "apartheid" Republic of South Africa which comprised four "provinces," that of the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State, each with its own capital. White rule ended in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the country's first president elected by universal suffrage.)
In Dr. Fergus's autopsy report, dated Jan. 12, 1923, the cause of Alf's death was given as Bright's Syndrome which had caused a cerebral hemorrhage. (Bright's Syndrome is a disease of the kidneys which can be either acute or chronic.)
With no foul play suspected, Daisy could bury the man who had been her husband for 14 years. She called Hobkirk Undertakers from Johannesburg to collect the departed one's body from the state morgue. With refrigeration facilities rare and January being the hottest month in southern Africa, Alf was buried the next day in the Johannesburg cemetery of Brixton. Daisy was heartbroken.
With Alf gone, Daisy had a financial problem: His Friday pay packet would no longer be coming in and there was little money in the bank. Fortunately, it was a problem soon solved. Alf, like Bert Fuller, had not died intestate. Daisy had seen to it that he made a will and he had left her everything he had to his name. It came to ₤1245 13s 2d as well as a pension fund pay-out of ₤553 8s 3d. With more than ₤1178 to her name, widow Daisy could be described as a "widow of means." Also, the house at Number 67 Terrace Road in Bertrams had been bought in her name. The bond Alf had taken out to buy the property still had a few years to run before it would be fully reimbursed, but that would not be a problem. As it was, Daisy could even have bought herself a second home, one she could have let. A nice little two-bedroom house would not have cost her more than ₤300 pounds.
Daisy, though, still wanted to return to work. As she had not done any nursing for years and since it was an ever-changing profession, she was not certain that she could just walk into a nursing job. So, she became a hospital porter at the Children's Memorial Hospital in the Braamfontein area of Johannesburg. She started in November and she would work there for almost three years until July 1926. (If the South Africans are to believe, though, Daisy never really left the hospital: She, or rather her ghost, apparently still walks along the hospital's long, silent corridors. Hospital staff even claim that when her ghost appears at the bedside of an ill child, that child dies.)
Content as she was at having landed a job at a hospital, albeit only to push stretchers to and from the operating theatre, Daisy had a new worry. The beloved Rhodes's health was not all that it ought to have been. The 12-year-old had begun to suffer from epilepsy. Also, Rhodes was a bit of a dunce.
But to the latter, Daisy found a solution. Blaming incompetent teachers for Rhodes's learning problems, she sent him to a private school in Natal. The school, Hilton College, in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal, was not only South Africa's most prestigious, but it was also Africa's premier private school. After matriculating at Hilton, the young scholars normally continued their studies at the universities of Harvard, Yale, Cambridge or Oxford.
Rhodes, a resident scholar, wore the school's black shorts, knee-high black socks, white shirt, black tie and black cap, which cost Daisy a small fortune. Such attire did nothing to increase his brain-power, though, and he stayed at the school for only a year. He returned home without having passed a single examination. Daisy would not accept defeat. She sent him to yet another top school. That was Marits Brothers College, and although it was in Johannesburg, he was again a resident scholar: Daisy thought that he would be a more enthusiastic scholar if he could study in the company of other boys, rather than alone at home. Her tactic was not successful, yet Rhodes managed to hang on there for three years, but, aged 16 and still without any diplomas, he was back home. Next, Daisy enrolled him at a trade school. He was going to become a plumber, just like his late dad.
Trying Marriage Again
Robert (Bob) Sproat was 46 years old when he met Daisy Cowle. He was 5'6" in height and weighed 138 pounds, therefore not very well-built for a man: Not a colonial man, in any case. But then Bob was from England: He had arrived in the Colony in 1903, 23 years before meeting Daisy.
Bob was a bachelor; why he was is not known. It might have been because he did not want the financial liability that would have accompanied a wife and kids. Bob was a plumber just like the late Alf. In fact, he and Alf had been colleagues: Bob, too, was employed by the Johannesburg municipality. He earned ₤7.4s a week and it was money he had liked to spend on himself, certainly. He used to sail back home to England often for a vacation with his aged, widowed mother; he was a sassy dresser, and he had an automobile. Another reason for his bachelorhood might have been that he liked beer a little too much.
But widow Daisy was looking for a husband and she focused on Bob. Having been married for 14 years, life on her own was not to Daisy's liking: There was a great big emptiness in her life where once there had been companionship. There was also the sex part of marriage that she missed: All the men who had ever crossed her path had concluded that she was accomplished between the sheets. She also needed a man's hand in dealing with Rhodes. Adorable as she thought he was, she had started to accept that he had no wish to study and that his heart wasn't even in the plumbing career she had chosen for him.
Daisy and Bob – he was 16 years her senior - were married on July 1, 1926, or just over three years after Alf's death. The two signed an Ante Nuptial contract. Daisy knew the story: Bob, just like Alf, would leave everything in a will to her. She had a good idea how much he had to his name. He had a rather large stock portfolio: It came to ₤1088 15s. He also had some savings and then should he die before the age of retirement whatever he had already paid into the municipality's pension fund would go to his widow – in other words, to her. Bob was in all aspects a "catch." His portfolio of shares alone could buy two fairly large houses.
Once married, Bob moved from an apartment he rented from the municipality into the house at Number 67 Terrace Road with Daisy and Rhodes. The latter did not hit it off so greatly with his stepfather. Soon, the stepfather also started to dislike his stepson: He thought Rhodes was a spoiled young man, because whatever he wanted his mother immediately bought him.
History was repeating itself, because Bob Sproat turned out not a healthy man. Just like Alf, he had a weak digestive system: He suffered from stomach cramps and indigestion. Also like Alf, he was a real sucker for old wives' concoctions and for over-the-counter medicine. Bob, though, did consult doctors, several of them. Two – Pakes and Perlman of the municipality's medical fund – had already treated the late Alf. A third of Bob's doctors, Dr. S.S. Mallinick, had a local private practice.
In June 1927, Daisy and Bob were busy preparing to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, when Bob suddenly collapsed. He had a severe pain "in his side," as he told Daisy. Dr. Pakes was summoned to Terrace Road three times in as many days. He diagnosed indigestion. The following month, the couple, by then having celebrated their first anniversary, Pakes was again called to the house: Bob was in such agony that he could hardly breathe. Pakes again diagnosed indigestion and prescribed medication. The medication had no effect on Bob's condition.
Next, Dr. Mallinick was called to the house because Bob had collapsed yet again. Mallinick, after having taken Bob's blood pressure and having listened to his heart, diagnosed high-blood pressure and arteriosclerosis as the problem. He explained to Bob that, as a plumber, he must be working with lead and that the lead had certainly caused his arteriosclerosis. Bob, who did not believe what he was being told, stayed in bed for a few days and then, saying he felt a little better, returned to work.
Bob also had very bad teeth and on Saturday, Oct. 8, he had two teeth pulled out. As was the norm, he was given chloroform to put him out for the extraction. That night, as his mouth was still bleeding, he did not sleep much, but the next day, he took Daisy out for a drive. On getting back home, because his mouth was still bleeding, he went into the bathroom to gargle with a mouthwash. Stepping back into the bedroom, he just had time to sit down on the bed before he passed out. Daisy telephoned Dr. Pakes, but he was not available, so she called Dr. Mallinick instead.
By the time Mallinick arrived at Terrace Road, Bob's stomach was contracted into such a severe spasm that he was screaming for help. He gave Bob an injection which he said was for the pain and then he left.
Half an hour later Daisy called Mallinick again. Could he return because the injection had not dulled Bob's pain at all. Mallinick returned to Terrace Road and injected Bob yet again. As with the first injection, he did not explain what the substance was he was injecting into the suffering Bob, but said that it would certainly ease the pain. He also left a prescription for medication.
Bob's best friend, a fellow plumber named Billy Johnston, arrived at the house soon after Mallinick had left. Daisy had telephoned him to say that Bob was in a bad way. Daisy left Billy with Bob to go and telephone Bob's brother, William, to ask him to come to his brother's "death bed." William Sproat, who had settled in South Africa soon after Bob had done so, lived in the city of Pretoria, 36 miles from Johannesburg. He would be on the first train to Johannesburg he promised Daisy. The road between the two cities was not in a good condition, so it would be much safer and faster to use the railroad.
During the night, waiting for William to arrive, Bob, like Daisy and Billy, certain that he was dying, remembered that he had not made a will. Or at least, he had made a will on one of his vacations in England, but that was before he had married Daisy and he had therefore left all his possessions to his mother. Worried about it, Bob grabbed hold of Billy's arm and asked him to remember what he was going to tell him: Daisy was his heir and his "only" heir.
At 4 a.m., William Sproat arrived at Bob's bedside. Immediately, the two started to "talk" last wills and testaments. Bob had rallied somehow and though pale was not in such atrocious pain. He asked his brother to remember that he was verbally changing his will: He wanted Daisy to be his heir, his sole heir.
That morning, Monday, Oct. 10, William assisted Bob to draw up and sign a new will. Daisy was present. Bob used a standard "Last Will and Testament" form which Daisy had gone to fetch from somewhere in the house.
The will signed, Daisy summoned Dr. Pakes. When he arrived Daisy and Bob told him about Dr. Mallinick's injections. Pakes listened and told the couple not to take notice of what Dr. Mallinick had said and that Bob should not take the medication Mallinick had prescribed.
On Tuesday, Bob was better. He was so much better that he got out of bed and went to work. He also had a prescription Dr. Pakes had given him made up at a pharmacy. The prescription was for a "tonic." Bob was weak and needed a tonic to give him a little energy was what Pakes had said.
That week passed. A month passed. Bob had no further "attacks," but his chronic digestive problems were still very much present. But he had learned to live with those.
It was Sunday again: Nov. 6. Daisy and Bob were going to go for a drive: They loved their Sunday afternoon drives. On waking, Bob told Daisy that he wasn't feeling all that well. He thought he should take some of Dr. Pakes' tonic. He did. He also had a beer: His chronic digestive problems had done nothing over the years to stop his love for the stuff. Daisy started to cook lunch. It was hot. Temperatures were in the high 90's. The house's windows and doors were wide open. Bob was in the living room. Rhodes was ambling around in the garden. Finding it too hot outside, he walked into the living room for a chat with Bob. Bob was lying stretched out on the sofa. He was ashen in the face. Rivulets of perspiration ran over his cheeks. Rhodes screamed for Daisy to come and have a look. Unable to get Bob to respond to her shouts for him to wake up, she summoned Dr. Pakes.
Dr. Pakes was again not available: He did not work on Sundays. Dr. Perlman was also not available. Dr. Mallinick was. When he got to Terrace Road, Bob, with the help of the next-door neighbor, a man named Louis Bradshaw, had been put into his pajamas and was in bed. Mallinick gave Bob one look and announced that he had suffered a stroke. He told Daisy that her husband was dying; that he had only a few more minutes to live. Mallinick left the room, apparently to call a colleague, and while he was away, Bob did indeed die. Daisy was certain he had died of a heart attack. Mallinick would hear nothing of it. In the death certificate he wrote out immediately, he stated that Bob Sproat had died of arteriosclerosis and a cerebral hemorrhage.
Daisy was a widow for the second time. Experienced in such matters, she called the same undertaker she had used for Alf. She wanted Bob buried beside Alf. The funeral was held on Tuesday, Nov. 8. Daisy sobbed bitterly when Bob's casket was lowered into the grave; Rhodes looked shocked but seemed in control of his emotions.
Bob left Daisy more than Bert and Alf had done together. He left her ₤4174 – his portfolio of shares had grown – and a pension pay-out of ₤566 15s 9d. Bob had not omitted to mention his car in the will. It too went to Daisy. Because of such an inheritance, at 41, Daisy had become "comfortably off," as the locals called anyone who was not exactly a pauper.
In June 1928, six months into her second widowhood, Daisy set off for a long vacation in England. Rhodes, unemployed, having failed his plumbing apprenticeship, went along. The two left by train for Cape Town where they boarded a cruise liner from the Union Castle Line for the 12-day voyage to Southampton. Over the years several relatives in England had offered to put Daisy up should she decide on visiting "ye olde country," and Daisy took up their offers. Before her departure she had also written to Bob's aged mother to say that she and her son would be in England and asking whether they could stay with her. The old lady's reply had been that she was not in a financial or physical position to offer anyone hospitality.
For three months Daisy and Rhodes toured England, then, they were back on ship for the long voyage to Johannesburg via Cape Town. Back at the Terrace Road house, Daisy entertained the neighbors with the tales of her travels. Obviously, she and Rhodes had had a splendid time, but she also griped about how the two of them had struggled to get the motorbike she had bought Rhodes in England on the Cape Town/Johannesburg train. The bike, a shiny machine of power and prestige, was parked outside on the street for all to admire, and to oblige those who wanted a quick spin around the block.
From August 1928, the month Daisy had arrived back in Johannesburg, to around the middle of 1930, she lived, to all appearances, the life of a grieving widow: She didn't go out partying and wasn't dating. She again had a money problem. What she had inherited from Bob was slowly running out and that which she had inherited from Bert and Alf had long since been spent. She tried to get back her job as a hospital porter – she had resigned in order to take the vacation to England - but she was told that, as her replacement was working well, there was no need to dismiss him.
Rhodes too was a problem yet again. Having failed his plumbing exam, he was drifting from one menial job to another. He got the jobs easily, but after two or three months he was dismissed, or as he told Daisy, he had been paid off because his employer had run out of money: Always the same excuse. He had worked as a salesman in a haberdashery; he had given plumbing a go despite not having qualified; he had done deliveries for shops, and he had worked on a building site, doing odd jobs. He had lasted three months in that one, but he was puny in stature, and construction work was for heftier men.
Because of Rhodes's inability to bring money into the household, he and Daisy started to quarrel, quarrel loudly. The neighbors heard the shouting. Yet, in 1930, at Easter, the two, apparently best friends again, set off for another vacation. They went to Rhodesia. Daisy's father was no longer alive – her mother had passed away too – but she still had two brothers and two sisters who were living in Rhodesia and they put her and Rhodes up. The relatives did not much care for Rhodes – they thought he was lazy, spoiled and rude – but they thought that Daisy was a wonderfully caring person, and a most loving mother to Rhodes.
To Daisy's delight soon after that vacation, Rhodes got a job. He was to repair service vehicles - automobiles and trucks - for the government of Swaziland. He was to be based in the town of Bremersdorp. (The Kingdom of Swaziland lies between South Africa and Mozambique. It was a British Protectorate in 1930. Bremersdorp, today named Manzini, was the capital at that time. Lobamba is the current capital.)
What Rhodes knew about automobile repairs is perhaps not something to dwell on, but he was good at repairing his motorcycle which must have given him the idea that he could therefore also repair a truck.
Twice Daisy went to Bremersdorp to visit Rhodes. On each visit, he asked her for money and she handed it over, but she also reprimanded him for overspending. Working as a mechanic wasn't all that lucrative, not if you were unqualified like Rhodes, and his salary was less than ₤4 a week.
Daisy always took gifts for Rhodes along too. And always some cookies she had baked especially for him. On one visit, she also took him a Last Will and Testament form. He was to make a will, she told him: A man should not die intestate. That was something Daisy knew all too well.
Alone in the house on Terrace Road, Daisy was lonely. She started to think of marrying again. But to do so, she needed a man, a lonely one just like her, and, more important, he would have to be looking for a wife.
Daisy found him. He was Sidney (Sid) Clarence de Melker also known as "Slapie" de Melker. "Slapie" is Afrikaans for "nap." A pair of sleepy eyes gave the impression that he was about to nod off.
Loving Husband … Problem Son
Sid de Melker used to be famous. In 1930, aged 46 and falling in love with Daisy, he had, though, already learned how fickle fame was. In 1906, aged 22, he had played rugby for South Africa; he had been a "Springbok," as the South African rugby players were and still are called, and in that year he had toured the British Isles with the team. At that time, he had thought that the fame he was experiencing would last forever, but after 24 years, few were those who could even remember the name. Daisy … Daisy remembered.
Sid was, like Alf and Bob, a plumber. He worked at a gold mine, the Simmer and Jack Gold Mine at Germiston, north-east of Johannesburg. (John Jack, a Scotsman, had founded the mining company in the late 1880's with a partner, August Simmer, thus the name. The town that had sprung up around the mine, Jack had named "Germiston" after the Glasgow area where he hailed from.)
Sid always made certain that everyone understood that he was not a miner, not as such. Miners were always black men, and they were the ones who went down into the earth to dig for gold. No, Sid, as a plumber – and a white man – was part of "management" and "management" was always "European," the legal racial classification of whites. The others, the "non-Europeans," were the country's indigenous African, Khoi and San peoples, as well as immigrant Asians and people born of interracial marriages and liaisons, known as "coloreds."
As a "European," Sid lived in a neat white-washed cottage with a red-painted corrugated iron roof – Number 19 Simmer East Cottages – that was in a compound that was owned by the mine and where only whites were allowed to live. The "non-Europeans" lived in "townships," areas outside of the white town and cities.
A widower, Sid shared his home with his daughter, Eileen Norah, an only child. She was 19 and training to be a teacher. Some time, somewhere, Eileen had met Daisy and although the age difference was too great between the two for them to have become friends, they never passed one another without stopping to exchange niceties. Early in 1930, the two had run into each other again. On that day, Sid had been with his daughter and knowing Daisy by sight and reputation – he had heard that she had been widowed twice and that she had nursed her dying husbands with tender care – he had been glad to see her again. Lonely himself, it had been only a matter of days before he and Daisy had become an item.
On Wednesday, Jan. 21, 1931, a sweltering hot summer day, Daisy Louisa Sproat and Sidney Clarence de Melker were married in Germiston, in the St. Boniface Anglican Church designed by master architect, Sir Herbert Baker, who had also designed "Groote Schuur," today the official residence of South Africa's presidents. (Sir Herbert Baker, who died in 1946, aged 84, lies buried in Westminster Abbey in London.)
On the wedding day, Daisy was 45 and Sid was 47. Neither looked like young blood anymore. Sid was a short, slightly-built man with gray hair and a lined face. (The game of rugby has since Sid's time roughened and today a man of such slight build would probably not even consider becoming a player.) As for Daisy, her waist had expanded; her stomach bulged; she had varicose veins, bunions and a double chin, and she wore dentures and glasses, and the African sun had engraved her once clear complexion with myriads of fine lines. There was also her hair. More uncontrollable than ever – she broke combs trying to straighten out the knots whenever she washed her hair – it had become sprinkled with gray.
Present in church were Rhodes, 20, and Eileen, also 20. On meeting, before there was even any talk of them becoming step-siblings, they had taken a dislike to each other. Eileen, who had started to teach, thought, and told her father, that Rhodes was a dim-wit. He even looked dangerous, she said. Rhodes, in turn, had called his mother aside to tell her that Eileen was a busy-body and that she was bound to make trouble in the marriage.
Daisy moved in with Sid and Eileen; Rhodes was still working as a mechanic in Swaziland. Cottage Number 19 was about the same size as the Terrace Road house, but there were memories, too many memories there of illness and death, so Daisy did not mind moving. She put the house onto the market and it was quickly snapped up. As she and Sid had also signed an Ante Nuptial contract, she had the assurance that should the marriage not work out, the money she had obtained for the house would not automatically go to Sid: She could leave it to Rhodes in a will.
Sid was a good husband. Daisy said so to relatives and friends. His health was also excellent and what a change that made from the constant worry she had had over the health of Alf and Bob. However, Daisy did have a worry: Rhodes. Eileen was right when she had called him dangerous: He was getting into arguments with his colleagues in Swaziland and often the quarrels turned physically violent, Rhodes initiating the violence. Daisy even had to take the train up to Swaziland to go and try to calm him down. Always, she took more cookies along for him.
Three months into Daisy and Sid's marriage, Rhodes arrived at Cottage Number 19. He had given up his job. That was what he said, but Daisy, Sid and Eileen suspected that he had been dismissed.
With Rhodes in residence, it became clear immediately that life in the cottage would never be totally blissful again. He argued with Sid; he argued with Eileen, he even hit her once, and he argued with Daisy. Rhodes's health also wasn't all that it should be. Rhodes suffered stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea. Daisy feared that his epilepsy, which had mercifully stopped, would commence again. Should the young man die, and Daisy was not one to shirk from the acceptance that in life one is in death, he had fortunately signed the Last Will and Testament form she had left with him on one of her visits to Swaziland. She also knew that she was his sole heir, sole heir to everything he had to his name. That was not much: It consisted of only an insurance policy she and Alf had taken out for him when he was 11 years old.
So weak did Rhodes soon become that one morning Daisy summoned a physician, Dr. Eric Mackenzie, to the cottage. Dr. Mackenzie diagnosed that the 20-year-old young man suffered from malaria. (Malaria was rife in Swaziland, a land-locked land of mountains, savannas and rainforests.) He left a prescription with Daisy for the medication that Rhodes should take and she promised that she would immediately send someone to a pharmacy to collect it. She also reassured the doctor by saying that she would look after her son herself. She was after all a trained nurse, not even to mention the experience she had gathered nursing her two dying husbands.
For three weeks, Daisy almost never left Rhodes's bedside. Her care, though, paid off. He started getting out of bed and went to sit in the warm fall sunshine out in the garden. Soon, he was so much better that he started looking for a job. He found one. He was to drive a dry cleaner's truck. However, after not many weeks in the job, he was fired for rudeness. Quickly, he got another job. He became a vehicle mechanic once more. Yet again, he started to argue with his colleagues and with customers.
At home, too, Rhodes angrily argued with everyone. One day, his anger out of control, he put an ax to his motorcycle. It was clear, said his colleagues, neighbors and relatives, that he was losing his mind, or worse, he had already lost it.
Next, Rhodes hit Daisy. She, still the loving, adoring mother, however told him, in front of a furious Sid and Eileen, that she forgave him. She'd already been telling Sid and Eileen that she was yet again worried about Rhodes's health. He was losing weight. Never having been fleshy, he was the last one who could afford to lose weight. Daisy thought that the malaria he had suffered earlier had flared up again. On top of this, Rhodes was depressed and started to speak of doing away with himself.
On Wednesday, March 2 – it was 1932 – Rhodes did not return home immediately after work. No one worried about it because they knew where Rhodes had gone. With a stepfather who had once been a "Springbok" rugby player, Rhodes had decided that he too wanted to play rugby. He had therefore gone practicing after work.
Just after 8 p.m., Rhodes walked in. Daisy had kept his dinner warm for him. He sat down to eat, but announced that he wasn't hungry. He said he had a headache; the rugby playing had given him a headache. He was, though, feeling fine within minutes because he got up and said he was going out with some friends for a while. The following morning he got up, went to work and although he was a little yellow in the face, he said he was feeling fine. After a few hours, he was back at home. He wasn't, as he said, feeling fine anymore. He put on a pair of pajamas and crawled into bed.
Early Friday morning, March 4, Rhodes called Daisy to his bedroom and said that he was feeling so poorly that he would not be able to get up and go to work. She immediately telephoned Dr. Mackenzie. He was unable to come to the cottage, but he sent his brother, Dr. Donald Mackenzie in his place. The latter said that Rhodes was suffering from intestinal influenza. He prescribed medication. Daisy saw that Rhodes took it.
All through the day, Rhodes was perspiring yet he also shivered with cold, and he vomited, and had diarrhea. Daisy sat at his bedside and wiped his face with a wet towel; she fed him clear soup, spoon by spoon like she used to feed him when he was a baby. She helped him, almost carried him, to the bathroom and tucked him up in bed afterwards. There was no doubt that she loved him dearly and was going through hell because she might lose him as she had lost Bert, Alf and Bob.
On Saturday, March 5, Rhodes was so weak that he could no longer get to the bathroom: Daisy gave him a bedpan. A neighbor, who had come to see how the young man was, fed him some brandy with a spoon: Daisy had supplied the brandy. As Rhodes no longer wanted to eat or drink anything, Daisy had to keep his mouth open while the neighbor forced the fork in.
Daisy, dissatisfied with both the Drs. Mackenzies, summoned Dr. Fergus to Rhodes's bedside. Dr. Fergus was the one who had performed the autopsy on Alf back in 1923 and had come to the conclusion that he had died of a cerebral hemorrhage that had been caused by Bright's disease. He gave Rhodes chloroform to ease his pain. By then Rhodes was doubled up with stomach pain and to stop the agony had become the doctor's priority. Soon afterwards, Rhodes slipped into a deep sleep, a very deep sleep. Later in the morning, Dr. Eric Mackenzie turned up at the house to see how the patient was doing. Rhodes did not wake up. Dr. Mackenzie nevertheless gave him an injection. He left without saying what the injection contained or what it was for.
In the afternoon, it was clear to Daisy, Sid and the various neighbors who had come to look in, that Rhodes was in a coma. While they stood in stunned, helpless silence around his bed, he breathed his last. He was 20 years old.
Daisy called Dr. Eric Mackenzie to come and certify that Rhodes was dead and to issue a death certificate. The doctor refused. Ill at ease about the young man's demise, he wanted to perform an autopsy. That he did. The reason he gave for the death was cerebral malaria. He told Daisy that her son's brain was congested, his spleen and liver were enlarged and the walls of his stomach were inflamed. (Cerebral malaria is fatal if not treated within 24-72 hours. The main symptoms are fevers, blood in the urine, difficultly breathing, seizures, going into shock and finally coma and cardiac arrest.)
Daisy sent undertakers to the state morgue where the autopsy had been done to collect Rhodes's remains. She had since Bob's death taken insurance with a new firm of undertakers called "Swift." She told "Swift" that her son would be buried on top of his father in Brixton Cemetery. Consequently, on Tuesday, March 8, the grieving Daisy had one consolation; one straw to hold on to. Since Bob lay beside Alf, her three beloved "departed" would be together.
In less than a month, on Friday, April 1, Daisy received a check in the post from the African Life Insurance Company. Rhodes had indeed filled in and signed the Last Will and Testament form she had left with him when she had visited him in Swaziland. In his will, he had named her as his sole heir. All he had to his name was that policy that she and Alf had taken out for him when he was 11 years old. The insurance company's check was for ₤100. Had Rhodes not died, the money would have been his, but the policy still had a year to run to maturity: It would have been paid out on Rhodes's 21st birthday.
Daisy also went around to the garage where Rhodes had worked. She wanted his wages, the wages due to him for the days he had put in during the last week of his life. Fifteen shillings were put into her hand and she took the money: It could buy a week's meat and milk. Getting back home, Sid was waiting to comfort her.
What Sid did not know, what Daisy did not know, was that Bob's brother, William Sproat, had had a word with the police. Having decided that the deaths of his brother and Rhodes were intriguingly similar and, knowing that his sister-in-law's first husband, Alf Cowle, had died in the same way, he wanted the police to exhume the three bodies. William Sproat was certain that the three men had been poisoned, poisoned by none other than Daisy.
Deep into the night of Tuesday, April 15, police stood watch as gravediggers opened up the two adjoining graves where Alf, Bob and Rhodes lay. The first coffin to be brought up was that of Rhodes; next was Alf's and then finally Bob's. Taken to the morgue where two government-appointed autopsy experts, the Drs. G.F. Britten and J.M. Watt, were waiting, the bodies were prepared for analysis. The body of Rhodes, dead 42 days, and still in a fairly good condition, was first to be analyzed. Arsenic was found in his hair, spine and viscera. There was also arsenic in the remains of Alf and Bob. So too strychnine. The two experts had no doubt that the three men had been poisoned. (Dr. Britten was senior analyst at the government's chemical laboratories. Dr. Watt was Professor of Pharmacology at the medical faculty of Witwatersrand University.)
Who had poisoned the three unfortunates? The police had a good idea who the culprit was.
Arrest, Trial and Death
It was to be an ordinary day at Cottage Number 19. Sid and Daisy rose early: Not only does dawn break early in Africa but Sid had to be at work at 7a.m. It was at about the same time that Sid stepped into his white overalls at the gold mine that there was a loud knock at the cottage's front door. Daisy was in the kitchen. She was enjoying a cup of tea with one of her cousins, a woman named Mia Melville. Mia lived close by.
Daisy knew that whoever had knocked must be a first time caller. Relatives, friends and neighbors never knocked; they just walked straight in. Most front doors on the compound were even left unlocked, indeed, they were left open. The "Europeans Only" compound of Simmer East Cottages was secure: White people did not steal; white people did not murder …
A man in gray flannels, blue blazer and dark tie stood on the threshold. He wore a gray fedora: He lifted it in greeting. The caller was Chief Detective Constable J.C.H. Jansen. He asked Daisy whether she was Mrs. Daisy Louisa de Melker and when she said that she was, he asked her to accompany him to his precinct's headquarters. She wanted to know why. He said that the police wanted to have a word with her. He asked Mia to leave the cottage immediately and as he drove off with Daisy, uniformed police began searching it.
At his precinct's headquarters, the CDC informed Daisy that she was being charged with the murder of her first two husbands, Alfred Cowle and Robert Sproat, and of her son, Rhodes Cecil Cowle. She was warned that whatever she would say could be used as evidence against her. She stared at the CDC as if she had not heard him.
When Mia got back to her own home, she telephoned Sid. The latter, hearing that Daisy had gone off with the police, asked his boss if he could have a few hours off. Why would the police want to speak to Daisy? What could be going on, he wondered. The poor dear! And her being in mourning too for her beloved Rhodes.
Daisy, once charged, was driven in a police vehicle to Johannesburg's "The Fort" Prison. There, she was booked into the "Women's Prison" as that section of the prison reserved for women was called. She was body searched and given gray prison garb – frock, cardigan, socks and sandals - to put on. As the prison was racially segregated, just like life outside the prison's gates, she was given a cell in the "Europeans Only" area of the "Women's Prison." There were few inmates in that part of the prison: A white man may still commit a crime, but a white woman certainly not.
The "Old Fort" dated from the days of the Boer War (the Second Anglo-Boer War). It was constructed on orders of President Paul Kruger, the man who had gone to war against the formidable British Empire so that his people, the Boer people, could govern their country themselves. At first, the prison had been for "Europeans" only, but eventually sections were added for "non-Europeans." One such "non-European" was Mahatma Gandhi, incarcerated there in 1906. Another was Nelson Mandela. Winnie Madikizela Mandela, Mr. Mandela's second ex-wife, had also become an inmate as a political activist. At the end of minority white rule in South Africa in 1994, part of the "Old Fort" complex was demolished and was replaced with the country's new Constitutional Court building. The part that has not been demolished houses a museum dedicated to freedom and democracy. Visitors can view Mr. Mandela's cell.
The day after Daisy's incarceration, the South African papers headlined the story. Unanimously, the editors condemned her. She had, they wrote, murdered the three men for material gain. (The Union of South Africa was as poor as the Cape Colony had been. Statistics show that 85 percent of the whites, "poor whites," as they were called, were little more prosperous than the disfranchised blacks in their "townships" where they lived in ramshackle shacks without electricity and running water. Daisy, having murdered for a hundred pounds here and a thousand pounds there, made perfect sense.
The attention the case was receiving made one of Rhodes's co-workers remember that he had gone down with a severe stomach upset on the very day – Wednesday, March 4 – that Rhodes had fallen ill with the illness that had sent him to his grave. The man, James Webster, went to the police and they took cuttings from his hair and fingernails. Those were tested for poisoning, and yes, they contained arsenic. Asked if he could remember what he had eaten or drunk at work that particular Wednesday, he said that he had drunk a cup of coffee from Rhodes's thermo flask. Could he remember whether Rhodes had brought the flask from home? Yes, Rhodes had: Every day Rhodes had brought a flask of coffee with him to work. Did Rhodes ever say who had made the coffee and filled the flask? Yes, Rhodes had: It was his mom, Daisy. Could he remember what the flask looked like? Well, it looked "like a flask". Could he remember, perhaps, what color the flask was? He certainly could. The flask was blue.
On Wednesday, July 20, with Daisy in prison and Sid at work and trying hard to concentrate on what he was doing because he was certain that the police were making one hell of a mistake blaming his wife for the deaths of her previous two husbands and son, CDC Jansen returned to Cottage No. 19 to look for a blue flask. He found three flasks. The glass interiors of two of the flasks were broken. The other flask was intact. It was also blue. Jansen handed the three flasks over to Dr. Britten for tests. On Thursday, Aug. 4, Britten informed Jansen that he had found arsenic residue on the blue flask.
Someone else also came forward with evidence. This was a pharmacist named Abraham Spilkin. He told CDC Jansen that on Thursday, Feb. 25, he had sold arsenic to Daisy. Mr. Spilkin had a pharmacy in Turffontein. It was in Turffontein that Daisy and Alf had lived at the time of Rhodes's birth, before they had moved to Bertrams. While living in Turffontein, Daisy had bought all the family's medication at "Spilkin's Chemist." After having moved to Bertrams and visiting friends in Turffontein, she had on some of those visits popped into the pharmacy to buy medication. Therefore, on that Thursday afternoon back in February, Mr. Spilkin had not been surprised to see her walk in. She had a problem, as she had told him. The problem was stray cats; they wandered onto her property each night and knocked over the garbage can – and they made a terrible noise. She wanted to put arsenic down to kill them: That was something that was quite customary in the country at that time. Could he prove what he was saying, the CDC wanted to know? Sure, he could. As required by law, Daisy – Mrs. Sproat, as the pharmacist called her – had signed the poison register. Though she was no longer Daisy Sproat but Daisy de Melker, which Mr. Spilkin had apparently not known, she had signed the register "D. L. Sproat." She had also deliberately cleared her tracks because she had noted her address as the one she had had in Bertrams: Number 67 Terrace Road.
On Monday, Oct. 17, Daisy's trial opened in Johannesburg High Court. Facing a triple charge of murder, she risked capital punishment. Should she be found guilty of only one murder, say that of Rhodes because of the damning evidence of the presence of arsenic in James Webster's hair and fingernails after he had drunk coffee from a flask that she had filled, she still faced hanging.
Daisy was not worried. She arrived at court, her unruly, graying hair cut in a bob. In a book written shortly after the trial, the late South African writer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, described Daisy as "small, thin, with tousled gray hair, claw-like fingers, a faded skin, large spectacles, a mouth like a fish and a cleft palate." She would continue: "She made no attempt to look beautiful. Her lips were not reddened, nor her cheeks painted. She wore, everyday for six weeks, the same black dress with the same lace front."
Daisy, did not however, see herself as Sara Gertrude Millin described her. No, Daisy, saw herself as a Hollywood star. Every morning, arriving at court, she seductively smiled at the photographers waiting outside the courthouse for her arrival, and arrogantly scowled at those people in the public gallery attending the trial. Most in the public gallery, as the newspapers would report, were women. They wore their "Sunday" best: Hats and gloves were de riguer despite that the courtroom was hot and stuffy. Secretly, Daisy was planning to write a script for a movie on her life. She would go to Hollywood herself to negotiate with producers and directors. She told Sid that she was certain that she would be acquitted. Even an idiot, she said, could tell that no court in the world could find her guilty, not with the pathetic evidence – a poison register kept by some decrepit pharmacist and an old flask – the prosecution was going to produce.
Daisy had the choice of trial by jury or trial by a judge and two assessors. On the recommendation of her two legal counsels, H.H.Morris and I.A. Maisels, she opted for the latter: As the two lawyers had told her, the people were against her to such an extent that a jury would undoubtedly send her to the gallows. Even the two lawyers believed that their client was guilty. Morris, once told that Daisy was highly strung, replied: "Not as high as she's going to be soon."
Being so certain of Daisy's guilt, and fate, Morris and Maisels concluded that all that they could do was to plead for clemency so that the judge (Justice L. Greenberg) and the two assessors (the magistrates A.A.Stanford and J.M.Graham) would pronounce a sentence of life imprisonment and not of capital punishment. At one stage of the hearing it appeared that their strategy was going to be successful because Justice Greenberg dropped the charges against Daisy of having murdered Alf and Bob due to lack of evidence. The country, though, was still screaming for the hangman to get to work and for Daisy to "swing," fair punishment for murder.
The trial lasted 40 days. For Sid, like Moses, it was 40 days of crossing a desert, crossing it on foot and without water. Sid found the thought that he might lose his dear little wife too painful to bear. He totally believed in her innocence. He was, after all, there when she had nursed the poor, dying Rhodes. Surely, had she poisoned the boy, she would not have tried to save his life, as she had done in those last few desperate hours.
In Morris's final plea for Daisy's life, he suggested that Rhodes had committed suicide. Rhodes, he said, had threatened to do so often enough. That the police had checked the poison registers of every pharmacy on the Witwatersrand and even in Swaziland and had not found an arsenic purchase made by the young man, did not mean that he had "not" bought the poison, argued Morris. (As all in the country knew, hardware stores sold arsenic freely to people in the construction profession to use in the mixing of paint, and Rhodes, as a vehicle mechanic, could have passed himself off as a construction worker.)
In Maisels' final plea, he pointed out that even if the court could prove that Daisy had bought arsenic with which to kill her son, then the court still had to prove that she had put it in food or drink she had given him. Rhodes might have done so himself in order to commit suicide.
On Friday, Nov. 25, a sweltering hot day, the court room was packed. It was the day of judgment. All night people had queued outside the court house and the moment the court room's doors opened they were inside. Some were touts, though, and immediately left the court room again to go and sell their seats outside at almost a pound each. All hoped for a day of entertainment. On the previous 40 days, Daisy, loving the attention she received, had made sure that no one would be bored. She had shouted "Liar!" at witnesses (there had been 72 of which a mere 12 had been for the defense) and during her cross-examination by the chief prosecutor (C.C. Jarvis), she had vehemently argued her innocence while she spluttered out insults at just about everyone.
The public gallery was silent when Justice Greenberg rose to pronounce the verdict.
"Daisy Louisa de Melker do you have anything to say before I pass sentence for the murder of Rhodes Cecil Cowle?" he asked, looking straight at Daisy.
She, standing, replied: "I am not guilty of poisoning my son."
"I can pass only one sentence," replied Justice Greenberg. "Daisy Louisa de Melker, I find you guilty of poisoning your son, Rhodes Cecil Cowle, which had caused his death. You will be taken from here to a place of execution where you will hang by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul."
Daisy paled.
In the minutes that followed, Daisy was driven back to the "Women's Prison" in "The Fort" prison complex. There, she was told to pack her belongings. She was being transferred to Pretoria Central Prison, South Africa's "hanging" prison.
On Dec. 30, the white South African people, the "Europeans," packed into bottle stores and butcheries to buy their New Year celebration fare. They would see the New Year – 1933 – in with a barbeque in their gardens. The "non-European" South Africans would be seeing the New Year in drinking home-made beer in the "shebeens," the illegal bars, of their townships.
In Pretoria Central Prison, no one was thinking of celebrating yet. The prison authorities had some unfinished business to get out of the way before there could be any thoughts of a beer and a "braai," the local jargon for a barbeque. They had a woman to hang. By noon the job was done: Daisy Louisa de Melker, 46, was dead. Some rookie coppers had gone to watch. That was the norm: They had to see what a hanging was like.
As for Sid Melker, he would marry twice more.
Death on the Gallows in South Africa
Capital punishment was abolished in South Africa on Tuesday, June 6, 1995. The news was greeted with cheering in Pretoria Central Prison. Some 453 people were still on Death Row. Their sentences were commuted to life.
There had been a moratorium in the country on capital punishment since 1990, but in 1993, the last "white" or "European" government had lifted it, although no further hangings had taken place.
In April 1994, after the country's first non-racial parliamentary election, won by Nelson Mandela's "African National Congress" party, the debate to abolish capital punishment had again begun.
The June 6 decision, taken after a debate by the 11 judges of the Constitutional Court, was hailed by the African National Congress as "a major victory for the democratic forces of our country, who for years had campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty. Never, never and never again must citizens of our country be subjected to the barbaric practice of capital punishment."
The first capital punishment case in South Africa was in 1739, the 87th year after the landing at the Cape of Good Hope of Dutchman, Jan van Riebeeck, an employee of the Dutch East India Company, which began the colonization of that part of Africa. Estiénne Barbier, a French-born Huguenot, was guillotined for having organized a rebellion against the governor, Dutchman, Daniel van den Henghel.
How many had been hanged in South Africa since the beheading of Barbier is not known, but a Nov. 22 1967 UN report claimed that 1,066 people had been executed throughout the world between 1961-1965 and that almost half of them were in South Africa. South Africa's own records show that between 1910 and 1989, 4,200 people were hanged in the country with more than half of them between the years 1978 and 1988. Between 1983 and 1988, the years when the anti-Apartheid struggle was at his height, 638 had been hanged, the overwhelming majority of them Black or "non-European" people. At the time Mr. B. Currin, director of Lawyers for Human Rights, said: "Here it is like a little factory where they just process hangings." Usually, up to seven condemned men were hanged simultaneously at Pretoria Central Prison.
Daisy de Melker was the second white woman to be hanged in the country. The first was Dorethea Van der Merwe, who was hanged in 1921 for assisting in the bludgeoning to death of her former lover, the Polish-and-Russian-Union-born American citizen Louis Tumpowski. (It has not been recorded who the first black or "non-European" woman was who was hanged in South Africa.)
The last woman to be hanged in South Africa was Sandra Smith, who was "mixed race," or "colored." She and her lover, Yassiem Harris, also of mixed race, had knifed to death a young girl they had befriended. The girl, Jermaine Abrahams (also of mixed race), had surprised the two when they had broken into her parents' house to steal jewelry she had told them about. Smith and Harris were hanged simultaneously on June 2, 1989 at Pretoria Central Prison where they were moved from Cape Town, their hometown.
Once the hanging had stopped in South Africa, its last hangman, a man named Chris Barnard, now deceased, who had hanged over 1,500 people, explained the procedure to journalists. The condemned, handcuffed, was taken from Death Row to the pre-execution chamber. It was a walk of 52 paces. Next-door to the pre-execution chamber was the gallows chamber. The condemned was blindfolded and guided into it. It was 40 feet long and painted white and very well lit. A beam from which seven nooses protruded ran the length of the room. The condemned was then positioned underneath a noose and his or her feet were pulled or pushed onto two white-painted footprints on the floor. Next, the noose was slipped over the condemned one's head and a hood was pulled over his or her head. The time had then come to pull the lever that would open the trapdoor underneath the condemned's feet. The executed one was always left to hang for 15 minutes before a doctor would step forward to announce that death had taken place. The body was then washed off with a hose and put into a coffin to be driven immediately to a nearby cemetery for burial.
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Randy Kraft: The Southern California Strangler
There are those who call Randy Kraft the ''Freeway Killer'' and they are wrong. William Bonin, executed at San Quentin in 1996, was the Freeway Killer.
There are police agencies who say the media were wrong to name Bonin the Freeway Killer – that that 'title' belonged to Kraft, whose murder spree began before Bonin's. They too are wrong.
Dennis McDougal's 1991 book Angel of Darkness touts Kraft's murders as ''...the most heinous murder spree of the century.'' That is wrong. McDougal's book is compelling, shocking, detailed, well written and inaccurate.
You cannot discuss the murders Randy Kraft committed without also discussing the Freeway Killer case.
The story began in 1972 when bodies of young men – often Marines – began to be found in Southern California – specifically from the city of Long Beach, through Orange County and into San Diego County. There were several ''signatures'' to the killings: the victims were frequently burned on their left nipple with an automobile cigarette lighter, some of them had their left testicle cut out while they were alive, some had objects shoved into their rectums (in some cases something on the order of a tree branch, in other cases a single sock). The real link to these cases was the use of drugs, the most common being Valium, ingested with alcohol.
The murders were truly horrific. In one instance the victim's eyelids were cut off to prevent him from closing his eyes during the torture.
Not every case carried the signatures of all others – which resulted in differences of opinion from one police agency to another as to whether all of the killings were by the same person.
After a rash of killings through 1975, there was only one such murder in 1976 and one in 1977. The news media did not know about these latter two murders, so it was widely believed the series of killings had stopping in 1975.
Then, in 1978, the murders renewed with a vengeance – with 14 murders occurring between Apr. 16, 1978 through Dec. 13, 1979.
On Dec. 6, 1979, Tim Alger, a young police reporter for the Orange County Register wrote a story that a new killing spree had begun. Significantly, although police in earlier years had been willing to divulge details of the murders – such as burned nipples, emasculation, etc. – they had stopped providing any details whatever, other than name, rank and serial number of the victims.
The following paragraph is an example of what Alger was up against: ''The investigators refuse to give many details of the murders that may link a single suspect to several – or all – of the killings. They talk of ''possibilities'' and ''possible leads'' and, when asked about links between the murders, a detective responded, ''That could be. I can't say one way or another. But it's always a possibility.''''
Alger's story was a lone voice in the wilderness. The Los Angeles Times ignored the killings, as did the television stations.
On Jan. 10, 1980, the Register hired me as an investigative reporter. It seemed obvious that a major serial killer was at work in Orange County and the surrounding areas, whether or not the police cared to admit it. Marv Olsen, the metro editor, assigned me to work on the story full-time.
Since the police wouldn't say there was a serial killer at work, I enlisted the aid of Dr. Albert Rosenstein, a forensic psychologist. On March 24, 1980, the Register ran a story that covered the top third of the front page, titled, '''Freeway Killer' Cruises For Murder.''
Olsen had agreed that giving the killer a 'name' would make him less abstract to the public. It worked. The radio and television stations jumped on the story, and from that point on the killer was a reality to the public. The only major media outlet to shy away from the story was the Times.
My story contained some of the same types of flaws Alger's story had contained. Since the police were withholding details of the murders, Dr. Rosenstein had no way of knowing there were two killers working at the same time, but with different M.O.s. And Rosenstein, in an excess of confidence, had insisted on linking the killer to Patton State Hospital – believing the killer had been incarcerated there as a sex offender.
In his book, McDougal lionizes Orange County detective Jim Sidebotham. When the Register ran its ''Freeway Killer'' story, Sidebotham expressed misgivings about the usefulness of a multi-agency task force, such as had been assembled to catch the Hillside Strangler. Sidebotham argued that, since many of the Freeway Killer victims were unidentified, a multi-agency task force would serve no good purpose. In fact, 10 years after William Bonin was captured, Sidebotham still expressed this view (page 367 of book).
Yet, as McDougal's book demonstrates, a closer relationship between the investigating agencies might have uncovered Kraft much sooner. He was arrested in 1975 in connection with one of the murders, but an assistant prosecutor refused to file charges. Also, a number of victims were known to frequent Ripples, a gay bar where Kraft was a well-known customer.
McDougal adopts the view of some in law enforcement that the Register was ''irresponsible'' in calling Bonin the Freeway Killer, when – they argue – that title belonged to Randy Kraft.
That is untrue. The name ''Freeway Killer'' was coined to describe the serial killer who was in a killing frenzy in early 1980, and that was William Bonin – who murdered 21 young men between August 1979 and his capture on June 11, 1980. In fact, 48 hours before the Register's Mar. 16 story broke, two bodies were found, resulting in a bulletin in the middle of the page one story, that read: ''Two bodies found at noon Saturday between the lower San Juan Campground and Ortega Highway in Cleveland National Forest may be the 30th and 31st victims of the Freeway Killer. The victims were teenaged boys; both were strangled and one was homosexually molested, according to confidential police sources.''
The fact is, long before my story was printed, the police had compiled a 52-inch wall chart, titled, ''The Southern California Strangler(s)'' – a designation apparently unknown to McDougal more than 10 years after the fact. The Los Angeles Police Department on Jan. 31, 1979 issued the first issue of that chart, before Bonin had killed his first victim. Updated versions were issued on May 1, 1979 and July 20, 1979, also before Bonin began killing.
So Randy Kraft is the Southern California Strangler, and William Bonin is the Freeway Killer.
Bonin did not torture or emasculate his victims, while Kraft is accused of that. The most telling difference, however, was that Bonin would stop his vehicle and dump his victims out, while the Southern California Strangler shoved his victims out of a fast-moving vehicle, often leaving long trails of flesh on the highway.
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Victims attributed to Jack the Ripper (L-R): Mary Ann Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.Jack the Ripper’s Victims
The legend of Jack of the Ripper – the first serial killer in recorded history – conjures up visions of fog shrouded streets, the sound of footsteps clicking loudly and menacingly on cobble-stoned alleys, visions of a fiend with evil eyes, thin fingers and a black medical bag dangling from them. The London tours that celebrate his life feed off that image.
Despite the dozens of books written about Jack the Ripper, books crammed with speculation about his identity and his motivation, the fact is no one knows anything about the actual man who committed the most infamous murders in crime annals. The only thing positively known about the Ripper is who his victims were. Over time, they’ve been all but forgotten. Who were they?
Over a period of six weeks in the late summer and early fall of 1888, the Ripper went on his rampage, killing and mutilating five prostitutes with an escalating fury. Despite the largest manhunt in London history, he managed to elude arrest even though he killed two of his victims within a stone’s throw of canvassing bobbies. Unlike almost all other serial killers, he vanished into thin air, disappearing as abruptly as he had arrived.
The murders occurred on weekends, his stalking done on Friday, Saturday or Sunday nights, suggesting a man who held a decent job working regular hours. How is it possible that so few clues were found? How could a man drenched in blood so simply disappear? How could he escape when one third of the police force, both undercover detectives and bobbies in uniform, were stationed in and near dozens of pubs and rooming houses, patrolling the same routes throughout the area every 15 minutes? Did he escape through the ancient but still vast underground labyrinth of London’s sewage system? Or was he himself a policeman?
The horrific murders sent fear throughout London, not just in the East End where they occurred. It probably didn’t help anyone’s peace of mind that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde was playing at London’s Lyceum Theatre. Unlike poor Mr. Hyde, Jack was not an ogre. He might have been an over controlled, hedonistic murderer, but he surely did not look like one. He must have been charming, if not an out and out handsome specter of a man, for he managed to convince women, painfully aware of the dangers of a monster in their midst, to go off with him. He probably looked as nondescript as today’s Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.
Though the police more than likely did not realize it at the time, they did create what could be loosely termed as a psychological profile of the killer, though it was based more on conjecture than viable proof. Because his victims showed no evidence of struggle or defensive wounds, it was suggested the killer was an inoffensive and respectable looking man who struck not only swiftly, but powerfully. Experts also suggested their man was a solitary eccentric, a man of great physical strength (after all, it takes a lot of strength to nearly decapitate a human head), suffering from homicidal or erotic mania and possessing a vengeful, brooding nature. The object of the attacks, they proposed, was neither rape nor murder, but mutilation.
One hundred years later, in 1988, the Institute of Forensic Sciences prepared an FBI psychological profile of the Ripper. The main characteristics are as follows: male in his late 20’s, a local resident of the area. He was believed to be employed and probably free from family obligations, as he kept rather late hours on the weekends. He was likely to have been in trouble with the police in a lesser capacity than murder, and was probably a loner. He was seen as having been abused as a child, perhaps by his mother. Really? Sounds a bit like the ‘profile’ the authorities had developed in 1888.
Though many law enforcement advances had been made by that summer in 1888 and crime scene photographs were generally taken, there still remained the common belief that a photograph of the victim’s eyes would reveal the killer in them. So much for scientific advancement. But it took time to adapt to new crime detection methods and detectives in 1888 did not have the luxury of DNA evidence or tools that could be utilized to examine microscopic evidence such as tissues, hair or clothing. Though blood could be tested to determine whether it was of animal or human origin, blood typing was not yet practiced. Still, what forensic medicine had been developed proved valuable. Though the method of establishing the time of death was fairly new in 1888 -- it was supported in court even though body temperature was still determined by touch and not yet by thermometer -- so was the fairly uncertain calculations used to estimate the onset of rigor mortis. The police did have the ability to identify posthumous bruising, the cause of death, and the ability to determine the nature of murder weapon used. In addition, the measurements of the knife wounds inflicted on Ripper victims allowed investigators to identify the type of instrument he used to murder and mutilate the women.
At the time, London’s East End and Whitchapel sections were considered to be the dumping grounds of society. Slum buildings, lodging houses (over 233 in Whitechapel alone), and dilapidated shops lined crooked and narrow cobble-stoned streets. Traders pushing loaded carts crowded the streets by day, hawking their wares while day workers roamed back and forth to slaughterhouses and meat markets, sometimes covered in blood. Sanitation was practically non-existent and the resulting filth and stench permeated the air hovering over the entire area. What would possibly lure Jack to such a place? The main attraction would appear to be the 62 known brothels and over a thousand prostitutes – no one knows exactly how many prostitutes plied their trade because many women resorted to ‘casual prostitution’ once in a while to make ends meet. For serial killers in general, and for Jack the Ripper in particular, prostitutes are the easiest prey.
Mary Ann Nicholls
The first woman to be positively identified as a Ripper victim was Mary Ann Nicholls. Though several books and historians claim three victims came before her, others dispute the possibility, citing that one ‘Jane Doe’ given the name ‘Fanny Fay’ was fictitious. The other two possible victims, Emma Smith and Frances Coles, are mentioned in the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ file of the Metropolitan Police, although at the time they weren’t believed to have met their demise at the hands of the Ripper.
Mary Ann Walker was born in 1845, making her 43 when she was murdered. At 19 she married William Nicholls and bore him several children, but around 1877 William ran off with another woman. Subsequently, Mary Ann began to drink. In 1880 they were divorced, William keeping the children. He paid Mary Ann a small living pittance until 1882 when he found out she was making a living as a prostitute. By 1888, Mary Ann, the mother of five children, still remained remarkably young looking for someone forced to live in such dire straits. At 5’2", with small features, high cheekbones and gray eyes, she probably had little trouble finding clients. But, unfortunately, during the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 31, she became the Ripper’s first victim.
Police Constable John Neil walked his beat, passing by Buck’s Row, just off Whitechapel Road at 3:30 that morning. A lone gas lamp at the end of the street provided feeble light and enough shadows to hide anyone who did not wish to be seen. All was quiet, no drunken disturbances, no brawls, just a dark and narrow, filthy street winding around dilapidated hovels and slaughterhouses. Upon his return to the location 10 minutes later, Neil found Mary Ann, her throat slit from ear to ear. It wasn’t until after she’d been carted to a makeshift mortuary that jagged incisions were found in her abdomen. Early conjecture was that Mary Ann had been murdered by one of the many gangs roaming the East End, a theory the police were quick to abandon a few nights later when the mutilated body of a second prostitute was discovered on Hanbury Street, less than a mile away.
Annie Chapman
Annie Smith was born in Windsor in 1841. After her marriage to John Chapman in 1869, the couple lived in West London. Shortly before one daughter’s death in 1882, Annie abandoned her family. Friends and family members claimed her marriage was destroyed by Annie’s alcoholism and promiscuity, but her acquaintances disagree. Either way, she eventually ended up in Whitechapel, and by May of 1888 lived in a lodging house on Dorset Street. "Dark Annie" Chapman was also a small woman, 5’ tall, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. She led a rough life hawking her crochet work, selling flowers and other trifles, only occasionally resorting to prostitution to pay for a bed to sleep in each night. She spent the week following the attack on Mary Ann Nichols arguing off and on with a woman named Eliza Cooper. The argument, with occasional blows traded, left Annie with a black eye and bruises around her chest. On the evening of Sept. 7 and the early morning hours of Sept. 8, she reportedly told the deputy of the lodging house, who asked for her doss money, ‘Don’t let the bed. I’ll be back soon.’ (For a more complete transcript of the account, see ‘Jack the Ripper, A to Z’ by Begg, Fido & Skinner.) She never returned, though she was seen at about 5:30 on the morning of the 8th talking to a man outside of a house at 29 Hanbury St. Just before 6 a.m., her body was found in the backyard of the property. No effort had been made to hide her body, and oddly enough, what most witnesses who saw her body remembered were her striped wool socks, which peeked from beneath her rumpled skirt. Her face and tongue were swollen, pointing to her being choked to death, and two incisions on her neck had nearly decapitated her. Her abdomen had been ravaged, intestines lifted from the abdominal cavity and placed on her shoulder, her female organs removed and missing.
Residents of Whitechapel were now painfully aware that a madman lurked in their midst, but what could one do to protect oneself against the unknown? Almost three weeks passed without another attack, but just as the population began to hope the mad killer had moved on, the reprieve ended and he struck again, only this time with increased ferocity.
Elizabeth Stride
Elizabeth Stride, a 45-year-old woman of Swedish descent, had also been married, but the relationship was considered over even before the death of her husband in 1884. She ended up living from time to time at a common lodging house in Whitechapel from as early as 1882. By 1888, she had been arrested and convicted many times for drunkenness. On the evening of Sept. 29, she was briefly seen at her lodging house before leaving, and according to witnesses, apparently in a cheerful mood. She was spotted on several other occasions during the night and into the early hours of Sept. 30, the last time at approximately 12:45 a.m., when she was seen with a man outside Dutfield’s Yard on Berner St. At 1 a.m., a man drove his horse and cart into the Yard, only to discover Elizabeth’s still warm body. Police Constable William Smith, who’s beat encompassed Berner St., saw a man and a woman talking together at about 12:30 a.m. In hindsight… well, who’s to say? Elizabeth’s throat had been slit. Her autopsy recorded bruises on her shoulders, supporting the belief that she had been pressed to the ground and held there while her throat was cut. Perhaps due to the arrival of the cart and horse into the Yard, no additional mutilations were found on Elizabeth’s body. But the night was still waning.
Catherine Eddows
A short time later that night, Catherine Eddows, a 46-year-old with three children, was out and about on the darkened streets. She and her common-law husband also had separated due to heavy drinking and occasional bouts of violence that erupted between them. She had just returned to London from a brief period of hop picking in Kent. She told the manager of her rooming house that she had ‘come back to earn the reward offered for the apprehension of the Whitechapel murderer.’ After being warned to be careful, she replied, ‘Oh, no fear of that.’ (‘Jack the Ripper A to Z’)
At 8:30 on the evening of Sept. 29, she was arrested for drunken misconduct and taken to Bishopsgate Police Station and thrown into a cell to sleep it off. At 1 a.m. on Sept. 30, she was released. At 1:35 a.m., she was seen talking to a man near an entryway into Mitre Square, her hand resting on his chest. At 1:45 a.m., Police Constable James Harvey walked by the Square, but seeing or hearing nothing within, did not enter.
Police Constable Edward Watkins had entered the square from the opposite side at 1:30 a.m. On his first pass through, he shone his lamp into the corners and alleys leading off in three different directions, but saw nothing. On his second pass, he saw the body in the southwest corner and reported that ‘she had been ripped up like pig in the market’ and that her entrails ‘were flung in a heap around her neck.’ (For a complete account of witness statements, see ‘Jack the Ripper – The Complete Casebook’ by Donald Rumbelow) She was still warm. As with the others, her throat had been slit. Her intestines lay over her right shoulder and another short length of intestine lay on the other side of her body. Her face had been savagely mutilated, her eyelids cut, her nose and cheeks gashed. The tip of her nose was gone and her lips and mouth suffered knife damage as well. The autopsy discovered her womb missing.
Then another brief lull in the spree of murders. In early November, the Ripper attacked again, once again escalating the ferocity of the attack.
Today, it is understood and accepted as scientific fact that serial killers usually begin to degenerate, their grasp of control slips, and their passion and need for killing increases and accelerates. The murders grow closer together, as compared with the need of a drug addict who discovers that he must continually increase his dosage of a particular drug to maintain even a thread of ‘normalcy’ in his everyday life. So, it can probably be accepted that Jack the Ripper was on the verge of self-destruction and breakdown the night he met Mary Jane Kelly and went with her to her humble dwelling in Miller’s Court in the wee hours of Nov. 9, 1888.
Mary Jane Kelly
Mary Jane, 25, was the youngest of the Ripper victims, yet her life had been no easier than those lived by the others. She met and lived with a man named Joseph Barnett, but they lived a nomadic lifestyle, continually forced to move due to drunkenness and rent owed. They eventually ended up at 13 Miller’s Court on Dorset St. Mary Jane and Barnett were known to be a nice couple that only got into trouble if they became drunk. Her friends testified that Mary Jane had confided to them that she was afraid of the killer stalking victims in Whitechapel and was thinking about moving. She waited too long.
On the evening of Oct. 30, Barnett left Mary Jane, and though he continued to be friends with her, personal conflicts made it impossible for them to remain together. He gave her money when he could, but more than likely she drank it away, for she was once again forced to resort to prostitution to repay debts incurred even though she was in the first trimester of a pregnancy.
Barnett spent a few moments with her on the evening of Nov. 8 before Mary Jane took to the streets. Throughout the night, she was spotted by acquaintances on several occasions until around 2 a.m. when she was seen going into her room with a man. Three women who lived in the room above Mary Jane’s woke in the pre-dawn hours when they heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ from her room below.
Mary Jane was found at 10:45 that morning, lying on the bed in her room. Her throat had been slit, her head nearly severed. Her abdomen had been sliced open, both breasts removed. Her left arm, like her head, remained attached to her body by flaps of skin. Her nose had been cut off, her forehead skinned, as well as most of her legs, which were also flayed open to the bone. Intestines and other internal organs had been removed and her liver was found between her feet. Muscle tissue from her legs, along with her breasts and nose, were piled onto a nearby table. Due to the lack of defensive wounds, it’s clear that she offered no struggle and was quite possibly killed while she slept. The time of her death was determined to be sometime between 3:30 and 4 that morning.
Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nicholls… ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman… Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride, Catherine Eddows and Mary Jane Kelly… brutally murdered, ravaged and then forgotten, almost an afterthought to the memory of the madman who so brutally murdered them. Annie Chapman was buried at Manor Park, Elizabeth Stride in Pauper’s Grave number 15509, in East London Cemetery. Catharine Eddowes was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Ilford, while Mary Jane Kelly was buried at Walthamstow Roman Catholic Cemetery.
The search for the identity of Jack the Ripper continues. Medical/suspense fiction writer Patricia D. Cornwell has been bitten by the ‘Ripper-bug’, and has been conducting forensic studies of her own on documents still on file in Scotland Yard and elsewhere. But time has a way of hiding secrets, and some facts may never see the light of day. Any explanations of why Jack the Ripper began his rampage and why he stopped, if he did, will most likely never be answered.
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Richard Speckby David Lohr
On the Sunday morning of July 14, 1966, residents on South Chicago’s East 100th Street were suddenly awakened by a woman’s screams. As local residents ran outside, they were shocked to notice a young woman standing on the second story ledge of a small townhouse unit. According to George Carpozi’s 1967 book, The Chicago Nurse Murders, the young woman, Corazon Piezo Amurao, began shouting: "Help me! Help me! Everyone is dead … Oh God … he’s killed them all!" she cried out.
Just then, one of the onlookers noticed a Chicago police car turning onto the street and quickly flagged the patrolman down. Officer Daniel R. Kelly of the South District Station noticed the girl balancing dangerously on the edge of the apartment building and immediately pulled off to the side of the street and jumped out of his patrol car. "You mustn’t jump," he yelled. "Stay right there. I’ll come inside and help you."
As Kelly made his way through the apartment he made a startling discovery. Just to the left of the front door was the body of a nude woman sprawled out on a couch. Kelly immediately ran over to check the young girl's vitals, but it was too late. Her body was cold to his touch -- she had been dead for several hours. Uncertain what he was getting into, Kelly drew his service revolver and made his way up a narrow flight of stairs. Once at the top of the stairway, he immediately noticed a pair of feet sticking out of a doorway into the hall. As he made his way towards the doorway, he made another startling discovery. A half-nude young woman was lying on her back; slash marks were visible on her neck and breasts. The girl was obviously dead and so Kelly continued to make his way down the hall. Then, just a few feet from the second woman’s body, Kelly looked into a bedroom and discovered three more girls’ bodies strew about the room. Their wrists were bound and all three appeared to have had their throats slashed.
With each step he took, the scene unraveling before him was becoming more surreal. Kelly had had only been on the force for 18 months and had never witnessed such brutality, especially on such a scale. This was supposed to be a safe and quiet neighborhood and certainly not an area where one would expect to discover multiple murders. Temporarily clearing his mind of his atrocious discoveries, Kelly continued making his way through the second story.
Gun in hand, Kelly stepped into a second bedroom and made yet another gruesome discovery -- three more girls were lying dead and scattered about the room. The scene was eerily reminiscent of the last and no one appeared to be alive. Kelly spotted the screaming young girl on a ledge outside the window. He quickly ran to her aid and pulled her inside. She was hysterical and trembling uncontrollably. Several patrol cars were beginning to arrive outside, so Kelly yelled down and asked one of the officers to escort the young woman downstairs while he secured the scene.
Less than an hour after Officer Kelly discovered the scene at Jeffrey Manor, Commander Francis Flanagan, chief of Chicago homicide detectives, began interviewing the only surviving witness, 23-year-old Corazon Piezo Amurao. According to the book Crime of the Century: Richard Speck and the Murder of Eight Student Nurses, by Dennis L. Breo and William J. Martin, the young woman’s voice trembled as she explained to Flanagan that she and the other girls shared the apartment together and they were nursing students at South Chicago Community Hospital. As she spoke, Flanagan did his best to comfort her and asked her to describe to him, as best she could, what happened to her friends.
The nurses's apartment.
Cora told Flanagan that the ordeal began the previous night when she heard a knock at the door. When she opened the door, she said she saw a young man in his mid-20s. She could not remember what color hair the man had, stating that it was either dark blonde or brown, but she did recall that it was cut short. She described him as weighing approximately 175 pounds and said that he was wearing a dark waist-length jacket and dark pants. In addition, she remembered the man had a tattoo on his arm, which read "Born to Raise Hell."
After opening the door, Cora said the man produced a gun and shoved her inside. Two of her roommates, 22-year-old Merlita Gargullo and 23-year-old Valentina Pasion, walked over to see what was going on and were taken off guard when the man pointed his gun at them and ordered all three girls to walk down the hall to a bedroom at the back of the house. Walking into the dark room, the man flicked on a light and discovered three other girls sleeping. The sudden light awoke the girls, 21-year-old Nina Jo Schmale, 24-year-old Pamela Wilkening, and 20-year-old Patricia Ann Matusek.
The armed man ordered all of the girls to grab their purses and give him all of their money. One by one, each girl got her purse and emptied out the contents. Suddenly, 19-year-old Gloria Jean Davy walked into the room. She had just gotten in from a date and was unaware of what was happening. The intruder quickly ordered her to join the others on the floor. He then yanked a sheet from one of the beds and began cutting it into strips. Afterwards, he restrained each of the girls and bound their arms and legs. Moments later, the scene was again interrupted when 21-year-old Suzanne Farris and 20-year-old Mary Ann Jordan walked in. The two girls had just gotten home and were immediately startled by the scene. They quickly turned and ran down the hallway. Based upon Cora’s statements and the evidence at the scene, it was apparent that the man quickly caught up to them and shoved them into another room. He then stabbed and strangled the women as they tried to fight back.
After killing Jordan and Farris, the man returned to the room with the other girls and grabbed Pamela Wilkening. He dragged the young girl back to the room where he had just killed the other two girls and stabbed her in the heart with a knife. After washing the blood from his hands, he went back and got Nina Schmale and led her down the hall to a bedroom. Once out of sight, he stabbed her in her neck and suffocated her with a pillow. Cora knew he would eventually come for her and began to squeeze herself under a bed.
When the killer returned, he grabbed Valentina Pasion and dragged her out of the room. Once out of sight, he stabbed her in the neck and began strangling her to death. He then returned for Merlita Gargullo. He lifted the young girl up off her feet and carried her off to meet the same fate as the others. A short while later, the man returned and grabbed Patricia Matusek. He shoved her into the bathroom and punched her so hard in the stomach that he ruptured her liver.
The killer apparently lost track of how many women were in the apartment and did not account for Cora hiding under the bed when he returned. Instead, he stripped down Gloria Davy and raped her. Afterwards, he strangled her, gathered up the money from the girls' purses and left the scene. Cora said that she remained under the bed for hours before she was finally able to gain the courage to climb out on the ledge and cry for help.
After recreating the events that took place, Flanagan immediately went to work on identifying the killer. Police sketch artist Otis Rathel put together a sketch of the suspect and within hours an employee of Maritime Union Hall recognized the man as a merchant seaman named Richard Speck. Now all investigators had to do was track him down.
According to Jack Altman and Marvin Ziporyn, authors of Born to Raise Hell, Richard Benjamin Speck was born December 6, 1941, in Kirkwood, Ill. The seventh of eight children, Speck’s father died when Speck was just 6 years old and his mother raised him. Eventually, Speck’s mother remarried and the family moved to Dallas, Tex. His new stepfather had problems with alcohol and soon began taking his anger out on Speck and his siblings. In retaliation, Speck dropped out of school and started hanging out with older boys.
Speck drank most of his adolescence away and little is known about his early years. In November 1962, 18-year-old Speck attempted to settle down and married Shirley Malone. Shortly thereafter the couple had a daughter, Robby Lynn. Speck was not ready to settle down and eventually reverted to his old ways.
During November of 1963, Speck was arrested and convicted for theft and check forgery. He was later sentenced to three years in prison. After serving a little over two years, Speck earned parole and was released on Jan. 2, 1965. He didn’t stay free long. He was arrested on Jan. 29 for aggravated assault and sentenced to 490 days in prison. After serving only six months, he was again released.
In January 1966, Shirley became tired of Speck's problems with the law and filed for divorce. Later that same year, Speck was arrested for burglary and assault. Nonetheless, he fled the area before he would go to trial and took a bus to Chicago. Once there he began working as a carpenter and spent the majority of his free time frequenting local taverns. During the spring of 1966, Speck began working on an iron-ore ship on Lake Michigan. He was fired after a few months later for drinking on the job.
When investigators looked over Speck’s criminal record, they discovered that he was wanted for questioning by Monmouth, Ill., investigators regarding two separate incidents. According to the reports, on April 13, 1966, Mary Kay Pierce, a barmaid at Frank’s Place, was found dead behind the tavern. She had been murdered three days earlier. Five days later, 65-year-old Virgil Harris was attacked and raped in her home. The assailant had cut up the victim’s housecoat and used the strips to tie her up. Speck was immediately flagged as a suspect in both crimes and later, during a search of Speck’s hotel room, investigators discovered items, which had been stolen from Mrs. Harris’s home, as well as items from other burglaries around town. Speck however was nowhere to be found. He had already fled the area.
As the investigation continued, Flanagan discovered that Indiana authorities also wanted to interview Speck in regard to the murder of three girls who had vanished on July 2, 1966, while Speck was working aboard a boat docked at the local harbor. The girls' purses and personal belongings were eventually discovered, but their bodies were never found. In addition to Indiana authorities, Michigan investigators wanted to interview Speck regarding the murder of four females whose ages spanned four generations — the victims were 7-years old, 19, 37, and 60 — each was murdered near Benton Harbor, while Speck’s ship was docked in the area.
By Saturday July 19, 1966, all of South Chicago was on the lookout for Richard Speck. With few places to hide, Speck decided to avoid arrest by committing suicide in his room at the Starr Hotel. After finishing off a fifth of wine, he smashed the bottle and used the broken glass to slit his wrists. Apparently Speck began to have second thoughts and moments later he called out for help. While no one answered his cry for help, someone did place an anonymous call to the police. Eventually an ambulance arrived and Speck was taken to Cook County Hospital.
As first-year resident Leroy Smith attended to Speck’s wounds, he suddenly realized that the man he was treating resembled the suspected nurse killer he had read about in the newspaper. He then checked the man’s arm, looking for the now infamous tattoo and almost immediately saw it there, "Born to Raise Hell." Smith quickly raced down the hall and called over a policeman who was guarding another patient. The officer, who was initially stunned by the resident’s accusation, started summoning other officers to the scene. Within minutes Richard Speck was arrested and taken into custody.
Speck’s trial began on Monday, April 3, 1967. The prosecution's team, made up of William Martin, George Murtaugh, Jim Zagel, and John Glenville, presented the case to the jury. Regardless of all the evidence they had against Speck, in the end Corazon Amurao’s testimony proved to be the most damming. On April 15, just 12 days after the trial began, Speck was found guilty of all eight murders. Following the jury’s announcement, Judge Herbert Paschen sentenced Speck to death.
In 1972, Speck was saved from his death sentence when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished capital punishment. In the wake of that decision, Speck was re-sentenced to a term of 400 to 1,200 years. On December 5, 1991, 49-year-old Richard Speck died of a massive heart attack after having served 19 years of his sentence. His body was never claimed, so prison authorities had his remains cremated; the ashes were later dumped at an undisclosed location.
Richard Speck in 1989.
In 1996, five years after Speck's death, television journalist Bill Kurtis uncovered a bizarre 1980s home video of Speck, which was shot in his prison cell at Statesville Correctional Institute. On the video, Speck is donning a pair of woman’s breasts -- apparently a result of hormone treatments -- wearing panties and having sex with another inmate. Some segments also showed Speck indulging in drugs and bragging of his crimes. The tape was later shown on the television program "American Justice," causing a major scandal within the Illinois Department of Corrections. Officials at the prison later claimed that Speck and two other inmates obtained the video camera from the prison's educational building.
Richard Speck was never officially charged in any of the other homicides and to this day those cases remain unsolved.
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my personal favourite..Dr Satan
Main street, village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. It was here that Dr. Petiot murdered for the first time.
Dr. Petiot Will See You Now
"Gentlemen, don't look, this won't be very pretty." It was one minute before five on a spring morning in Paris. Marcel Petiot, a physician by profession, was living his last few minutes on earth. The men he had addressed those words to gave no indication that they had heard him. They had come to watch, to witness the guillotine make him pay for his crimes. They were wishing that they were elsewhere, anywhere, but not there in the front courtyard – the cour d'honneur or ceremonial courtyard, as it was known - of La Santè prison on Paris's Left Bank.
Some of the men had been on the prosecution team that had decided that "Dr. Satan," as the media had dubbed Petiot, was to die; others had been on his defense team. Present also were a couple of prison warders, a couple of uniformed policemen, the prison chaplain, and Paris's chief medical examiner and autopsy surgeon, Dr. Albert Paul. The latter would have to verify, after the guillotine's lethal caress, that the recipient had not survived. Dr. Paul would never tire of saying that he found having to do that such an unnecessary thing – as if anyone could survive the guillotine.
It was May 25, 1946: a Saturday morning. Dr. Petiot, 49, had stood trial at the Assize Court at the Palais de Justice for the murder of 27 people. He had been found guilty of the murder of 26. The police had thought, though, that he had murdered many more: 200 was the number they suggested. "To be on the safe side, I'll settle for 150," one of the police investigators had said.
As required by French law, on the opening morning of the trial, the judge who was to preside over the proceedings (Marcel Leser) had confronted Petiot in an ante-chamber. "You are going to be tried for the premeditated assassination of 27 people. If you are found guilty you will be executed by guillotine," he had warned. "Not 27," Petiot had replied, arrogance in his voice. "I liquidated 63 persons, but all were enemies of France!" "Very well, Petiot, but we will start with 27 and the verdict may do for the others as well," Leser had retorted.
Whether Dr. Petiot had killed 26, 27, 63, 150, 200 or more, he holds the title, if "title" is the word, of France's Most Prolific Murderer. How he had killed his victims, the police and pathologists had been unable to establish, but they had thought that after their deaths he had decapitated them before he had cut off their limbs, doing both in a most skilful manner. He had then mutilated the severed heads before scalping them and cutting away the eyebrows, lips and ears. He had also disemboweled the bodies. Then, finally, he had tried to get rid of the remains with fire and quicklime.
Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was born on Jan. 17, 1897, in the town of Auxerre (pronounced Oser) in the wine-making county of Burgundy. He was his parents' first child and for 12 years, until the birth of his brother Maurice, he remained the only one. Félix and Clémence Petiot were both postal workers: She sorted the mail and he laid telephone lines and installed telephone exchanges. His work often took him away from home, a three-storied terraced house at No 100 Rue de Paris, Auxerre's main street. When Marcel, a beautiful, bright, loveable, loving child with wavy black hair and black eyes was 2 years old, Clémence decided that she wanted to accompany her husband on his trips. The boy was therefore sent to live with Clémence's elder sister, Henriette Bourdon. Bourdon was a spinster and she shared her home with Marie Gaston, also a spinster and described as Bourdon's "maid."
The two women knew nothing about bringing up a child, especially not one as lively and inquisitive as their charge turned out to be. Over the years, they would tell stories about him. They said he sulked; he threw tantrums; he pulled their hair; he bit them; he trampled on the flowers in their garden; he impaled insects on their knitting needles; he imprisoned tiny birds and did not feed them so that he could watch them die of starvation, though, some days he did let a bird go free but not before he had stuck pins into its eyes to blind it. And, they said, he smothered his cat, after he had unsuccessfully tried to drown it in broiling water. They also said that he was incontinent of both the bladder and bowl.
Later in life, as an adult, Petiot had things to say about the two spinsters as well. He said that whenever they thought he had been naughty they had dragged him off to early morning mass, and they had kept the garden gate locked at all times. Those early morning masses would turn him into an atheist: (When the prison chaplain offered him the last rites on the morning of his execution, he turned it down with the words, "No thank you. I am an infidel.") As for the locked gate: He never locked a door, or at least, he only ever locked one door, the front door of the Paris townhouse where he murdered his unsuspecting victims.
Petiot had his first brush with the law at the age of 17, two years after his mother died of cancer at age 36. He was caught stealing letters from mailboxes. He had made a kind of fishing rod – a stick with glue at one end – with which he nabbed the letters from the boxes. Police thought he was looking for money or money-orders he could cash. A child psychologist examined him and diagnosed hereditary mental problems. Félix Petiot, his father, was furious: "There is no insanity in the Petiot family and neither is there in the Bourdon family!" he fumed, defending his son in a backhanded way.
The psychologist's diagnosis of mental problems saved the teenage Petiot from reform school, but as his own school expelled him, he continued to study at home for his baccalauriat school-leaving diploma. Within two years he received it with a mark of honors. Proudly, he announced to his father that he wanted to study medicine. Félix Petiot laughed in his son's face: He believed his son would never amount to anything in life. But World War I was raging and the teenager, patriotic, enrolled. Later he would make certain that everyone understood that he had not waited to be called up like a coward, but that he had enrolled.
Petiot's military career was turbulent. He spent most of it – the years from 1915 to 1921 – in mental asylums, and he even did a stint in prison for having stolen army-issue blankets from one of the asylums. His mental problems resurfaced when he was hospitalized for a shrapnel wound in his left foot, a scar he proudly bore until the day he died. (Later, with Petiot on trial, Paris journalists would speculate over whether the injury was self-inflicted.)
At the beginning of 1922, Petiot arrived back in Auxerre. He had good news for his family. He was no longer just plain Monsieur Petiot: He was Monsieur le docteur Petiot, a physician. He did not show them a medical diploma, only a letter from the Paris Medical Faculty attesting that he had passed his medical thesis with honors. Up to this day, it remains a mystery how he could have studied medicine when he was in and out of mental asylums from 1915 to 1921. Even if he had benefited from the shortened and accelerated study programs which had been made available to ex-servicemen, it would still have been hard, if not impossible, for him or anyone else to obtain a medical degree in just short of two years. In 1919 he had still been in the army; in 1920 he had been institutionalized in a mental asylum in the town of Orléans, yet, if he was to be believed in December 1921, he was a "medical graduate."
Dr. Petiot, now 26, opened a practice in the village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne - Villeneuve on the Yonne River, 27 miles from Auxerre. In 1923 it was home to 2,000 rural souls who lived in centuries-old stone houses. With his dark hair, dark eyes and a beauty spot on his right cheek, he was a good-looking man. Such looks – he looked remarkably like Johnny Depp – made him an instant success in the village. He also quickly earned the reputation of being a brilliant doctor. His patients said that he knew what was wrong with them before they had even described their symptoms. He would say, "You were treated by a stupid ass before, but you don't have to say another word as I know exactly what is ailing you." Within days a patient felt better. One such patient was Frascot, owner of the local bistro. Frascot suffered from rheumatoid arthritis: He said that for the first time in years he was able to walk upright again.
Established, Petiot took a lover, Louise Delaveau. She told a friend in the village that she was pregnant, but that Petiot wanted to perform an abortion on her. Louise disappeared mysteriously. When the headless body of a woman was fished from the Yonne River, the villagers said it was Delaveau's body and that Petiot had done her in. The local pandore – this is what the French call members of the Gendarmerie Nationale, the militarized police who are responsible for policing countryside areas and towns with less than 20,000 inhabitants – did not investigate, claiming a lack of sufficient evidence.
Despite the rumors, Petiot ran a successful campaign for mayor. Once in the town hall, he decided that he needed a wife. He found her – the 23-year-old petite, elegant, Georgette Lablais. Her father, Georges Nestor Lablais, was a successful Paris restaurateur, nicknamed "Long Arm." Lablais always boasted, "J'ai le bras long"! – "My arm is long"! - in other words, "I have clout"! Ten months later, on April 19, 1928, the couple's only child, Gerhardt Claude Georges Félix, was born.
Then, one night, a fire broke out at the local dairy. On the premises lived the owners, the Debauves. When flames were first seen shooting from the roof of the couple's home, Monsieur Debauve was having a drink at Frascot's bistro. Henriette, his wife, was home cooking dinner. When firefighters entered the burning house, they found her lifeless body lying on the kitchen floor. She had obviously been murdered: Her head was bashed in. Again, the local gendarme did not believe that he could successfully investigate the woman's murder.
Next, Frascot died suddenly. He collapsed after Petiot had given him a shot for a recurring bout of his rheumatoid arthritis. Frascot had told his patrons that he knew who had bashed Henriette Debauve's head in. It was Dr. Petiot. According to Frascot, the doctor and Henriette had been lovers.
In 1933, the three Petiots moved to Paris. The doctor left a string of accusations and court appearances on charges of theft behind in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne – he had been stealing from the town hall's coffers. In Paris, he quickly built up a prosperous practice. He had made certain that it would be so. On his arrival in the capital, he had distributed leaflets in which he made the most incredible claims. He advertised a fleet of ambulances and every modern item of medical equipment one could think of; he could cure all mental illnesses; he could cure cancer; he had a revolutionary treatment for all gynecological and drug problems. His treatment for gynecological ills was abortion; his treatment for drug addiction was to give the user whatever drug he or she craved. With his waiting room each day filled with patients in search of such "revolutionary" treatments, he could soon afford to invest in real estate. He even bought an entire apartment building where he had 21 tenants.
In September 1939, France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. In June 1940, France capitulated and was occupied by the Boches – this was the derogatory name the French had bestowed on the Germans during World War I and which they revived for World War II. The French government having fled, Hitler annexed that part of France that bordered Germany, and handed the area bordering Italy over to Benito Mussolini, his ally in Rome, while he divided what was left of the country into a northern occupied zone and a southern theoretically free zone, named Vichy-France after the new capital, the spa-town, Vichy. The northern zone – which included Paris – became known as Occupied France. The defeated French army was reduced to peace-keeping under German control and the police and the gendarmerie abandoned their autonomy to take orders from the Gestapo – in fact, the entire French legal machine abandoned its autonomy with judges swearing allegiance to Hitler.
While many Parisians fled the city and its new rulers, the Petiots remained behind. The doctor was virulently anti-Boches, but because of his World War I injury he would not be mobilized. He told his family that he would never let them suffer because of the war; he would provide for them. He already had a bike (he had painted it green) and now he bought a cart. Gasoline was being rationed and a man needed a cart to get his black-market purchases home. He also bought a large townhouse in Paris's elegant 16th arrondissement, the Champs-Elysées a stone's throw away. Real estate had become bargain buys because those fleeing needed cash. That the house at Number 21 Rue le Sueur was quite dilapidated – it had stood uninhabited for a few years – did not bother him; he could afford to have renovation work done.
The renovation work consisted of adding several feet to the property's back wall, converting an outhouse into a doctor's surgery, and transforming another outhouse into a small, triangular chamber. He asked the builders he had hired to do the work to cover one of the chamber's walls with a fake padded door, to fasten large metal rings to a second wall, and to insert a glass peephole in the third. He planned to open a mental asylum was his explanation for such strange requests. As he would be giving electro-shock treatment, he explained further, the padded door was necessary to soundproof the room or the cries of his patients would disturb the neighbors. The rings were for hanging equipment and he needed the peephole to make sure that nothing went wrong during the treatments.
Georgette Petiot did not like the idea of her husband opening a mental clinic. He had, she told him, enough work as it was. "If you do, Gerhardt and I will never see you," she said. She loved her husband dearly.
Petiot did not open a mental clinic: The townhouse was to serve another purpose. One March night of 1944, the Paris police would start to unravel what exactly he had been up to since he had bought the townhouse back in October 1941. On that night – it was March 11, a Saturday – neighbors had called police to Rue le Sueur because for five days a foul smoke had been pouring from the townhouse's chimney. Two patrolmen and some firefighters entered the house through a ground-floor window. What they found at the house was beyond belief. Human remains were being incinerated in an old water-boiler in a basement room. In the triangular room, at the back of the property, they found more human remains being devoured in a pit filled with quicklime. L'Affaire Petiot – the Petiot Case – had begun. Leading it was Commissioner Georges-Victor Massu, chief of the Paris criminal police based at No. 36 Quay des Orfèvres and known as "The Quay." But Petiot was on the run. So was Georgette Petiot, but she was arrested within days hiding out in Auxerre. "Marcel is the most kind, loving husband, father and doctor," she told Massu. He could never, she said, have killed anyone.
Petiot was to remain on the run for seven months. He laid low with a past acquaintance, a housepainter and gullible man, who believed that Petiot was a brave Resistance hero and French patriot.
Over those seven months Commissioner Massu would hear of how a man had been visiting the uninhabited townhouse for the previous two years. This man had come to the house either on foot or on a green bike. On some of the days when he was on foot, he had brought other people with him. Those people had never been seen again. They must, though, have stayed on at the house because noises had come from it. Strange noises: crying, banging. One night, a neighbor, walking past the house after the night-time curfew had already sounded, had even heard a man's voice calling out. Just one word: "Help!" The man on the green bike was Dr. Marcel Petiot. He was invariably described by his cronies, patients, wife and family as "respectable," "respected," "loving," "kind," "a wonderful husband, father and family physician," and "totally innocent of the crimes he was being accused of."
The story of Dr. Marcel Petiot's life and crimes that Massu was to put together chilled him, and everyone else, to the bone.
Petiot, a poor man's son, craved wealth, wealth and respectability. He believed that respectability was wealth's natural companion. He had already made a pretty packet from doing abortions and supplying drugs, but once the Germans had occupied Paris, he hit on the idea of pretending that he was a member of the French Resistance and that he could assist people to flee France. He would charge them, charge them quite a bit. He would also tell them to bring along whatever they had that was valuable – gold bullion, jewels, fur coats – in order to set themselves up in their "new" country: Argentina. They would, though, be going nowhere, but only he would know that; only he would know that the offered "escape route" would begin and end at his townhouse. It was an idea, a plan, he just knew would make him a wealthy man, a wealthy and respected man. Forthwith, he claimed his Resistance nom de guerre was "Dr. Eugène" and he headed a Resistance cell code-named "Fly-Tox."
Petiot's first victim was a Polish-born Jewish furrier, his neighbor at the family apartment. His takings came to hundreds of thousands of francs in cash, several items of extremely expensive jewelry and three mink pelts. So easy was it to make so much money so rapidly, that he told two of his cronies, a certain Raoul Fourrier (a barber) and an Edmond Pintard (an out-of-work cabaret singer), of the "escape route." Could they send it "clients," he wanted to know. Sure they could, they told him, becoming his recruitment agents. He handed a percentage, only a small one though, of the fee he charged the "clients" over to the two. Other cronies also became recruitment agents. One was Eryane Kahan, a vivacious Romanian-born woman with hair dyed the color of vintage champagne. Fourrier and Pintard sent Petiot gangsters and their molls, all Gestapo informers but as scared of the Boches as any other Parisian. Kahan sent him Jews, Jews desperate to get away from the Nazis. Jewish herself, she defiantly refused to wear the obligatory yellow Star of David.
Petiot's killing spree had abruptly ended in May 1943; that was 10 months before the discovery of the human remains at his townhouse. It ended because one Robert Jodkum of IV-B4, the Jewish Affairs Department of the Gestapo, had learned from an informer that a "Dr. Eugène" was assisting people to flee from France. The informer also knew of Fourrier and Pintard and led the Gestapo to Fourrier's barbershop. It was at the barbershop that Petiot "collected" his victims to escort them to the townhouse. The two, once arrested, quickly revealed the true identity of "Dr. Eugène" and Petiot was arrested as well. The three were held for seven months at Fresnes prison south of Paris before they were released without charge. Maurice Petiot had bribed Jodkum to let his brother go, but no such bribe had been necessary for the release of the other two. Considered useless low-lifes, they were told they could go too.
On his release – that was in February 1944 – Petiot faced the task of "cleaning up" his townhouse. The Gestapo had tortured him, yet he had not broken down to admit running an "escape route" and neither had he revealed the existence of the townhouse. As far as cleaning up was concerned, he had a willing assistant, his brother Maurice who even supplied the quicklime. Maurice had been to the townhouse while the Gestapo was holding Dr. Petiot and had come across the bodies. Ashen in the face and unable to keep his discovery to himself, he had told a mutual friend, one René Nézondét, that bodies "as black as the black plague" were at his brother's house. Nézondét, shaking like a leaf in a strong wind, had also passed the terrible news on, telling his girlfriend and the girlfriend's friend. He had, as he was to tell Commissioner Massu later, even told Petiot's wife, Georgette, that her husband was killing people, informing Massu that she had fainted three times while listening to him.
Petiot was arrested on the last day of October that year of 1944. Paris had been liberated in August and the Germans had fled. As soon as firing had broken out in the capital, Petiot had left his hide-out and had joined the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), as the reconstructed French army was called, with false identity papers in the name of Dr. Henri Valeri. He was therefore arrested wearing the black armband of a Fifi, as FFI members were called. The arrest was made by a fellow Fifi: ironically, the man, a Collabo, was himself hiding out in the FFI and would make a runner soon afterwards.
There was yet another irony about Dr. Petiot's arrest. Massu was not the one at "The Quay" to slip the handcuffs over Petiot's wrists. The commissioner was himself under arrest, albeit house-arrest. He had been arrested on suspicion of having been a Collabo. It was said that he had deliberately gone slow with his investigation of Petiot as instructed by the Gestapo. That charge was later dropped, but not before an indignant Massu had tried to commit suicide by slashing his left wrist. The truth is of course that the French police were not allowed to act autonomously during the Occupation. Massu had to seek authorization for each and every action he wished to take to break the Petiot Case, or any other. He had to obtain such authorization from his immediate superior - Amédée Bussière, the politically-appointed Prefect of Paris who as chief of the police and the fire brigade was the guardian of law and order in Occupied Paris. Bussière, in turn, sought authorization from his superior – Count Ferdinand de Brinon, Vichy-France's General Delegate or ambassador to the German Military Government in Paris. De Brinon then did the same by requesting instructions from his superiors: his superiors were the Gestapo. (De Brinon would at the end of the war stand trial for "Collaboration with the Enemy." Convicted, he was shot. Bussière would face the same charge; convicted, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1951, he died peacefully in his bed two years later.)
Petiot's interrogation lasted 11 months. During the first nine months he stuck to his claim that he was a "resistant" and that the cell of which he had been the head had "executed" Germans and French Collabos. "They were all bastards! They deserved what they got!" he said.
For the last two months he refused to reply to questions. On the first day of his "silence" he told the examining magistrate that he would not be answering any further question, and, from then on, his reply was always only "ditto." How many he had killed, how much money he had made out of his victims, indeed how he had killed them were therefore to remain a mystery; it remains so to this day.
The police and pathologists did, though, think that the most likely scenario was that he had first drugged his victims, then, he dictated letters they had to write to their families and friends to announce their safe arrival in Argentina. Next, he had probably given them another shot of some lethal substance, but decomposition, fire and quicklime had made it impossible to tell what that was.
The police did not, however, even try to establish how much Petiot had made from his victims. Journalists, though, estimated the amount to be many millions of francs. Georgette and Gerhardt had been ordered to pay FF1, 820, 000 ($172, 000 current value) restitution to the families of his victims. They paid only a fraction of this amount and after seven years, the families not having claimed the money, lost their right to it. (Georgette and Gerhardt had left France soon after Dr. Petiot's death. They went to a South American country. They never agreed to interviews.)
Having listened to the death sentence being pronounced without even blinking an eye, Petiot spent his final weeks doing embroidery, knitting, and reading. He had been an avid reader since his youth. He read mainly about murder and murderers. He also wrote a book, Le Hasard Vaincu – (Chance Defeated). It was about beating chance and winning at games like poker, yet he also philosophized in it. He wrote, "Not one of all the creations is happy with its lot. The stone is sad thinking of the oak which grows in the sun. The oak is sad when it thinks of the animals that it sees running in the shade of the woods. The animals are sad dreaming of the eagle soaring into the sky. And man is unhappy because he cannot understand why he has been put there … he is aware of all his imperfections." Georgette had the book printed in its handwritten form and Petiot took great pride in autographing it for those who had gone to assist at his trial. The book was an instant best-seller.
It was a long walk for Petiot from his cell to the guillotine. He was handcuffed and his legs were in chains. That was how he had also passed his nights in jail. The guillotine did its work swiftly and expertly. Dr. Albert Paul had to step up to Dr. Petiot's headless body, though, as tradition demanded, to announce him dead.
(Petiot's cronies – 11 had been arrested and this included Georgette and Maurice – were not prosecuted. The police concluded that they had not known what Petiot was up to and those who had known about the "escape route" had thought it was genuine. All but Maurice had faced a charge of receiving stolen property. Maurice had been charged with complicity to murder and had faced capital punishment. He was released because he was dying of stomach cancer. He died shortly after his brother had been guillotined. There had always been a very strong bond between the two brothers. Petiot was to say that until the birth of his little brother, he had loved no one, and until he had met his wife, the only other human being he had loved was his brother. Maurice was only 37.)
Asked, in the minutes before his neck was shaved in preparation for the guillotine's blow, whether he had anything to say, Petiot had replied: "No, I am one traveler who is taking all his baggage with him." So he did.
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bernado was a sick sick guy...wow
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damn,crazy shit
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Serial Killers: Berkowtiz, Toole, Lucas, Dahmer, Bundy, Chikatilo
Charles Albright (b. August 10, 1933) from Dallas, Texas, was convicted of killing Shirley Williams, in 1991. It is suspected that Albright killed two other women, Mary Pratt in 1990 and Susan Peterson in 1991. Charges were never filed in these two murders, but they were used as evidence in Albright’s trial. All three of the the victim's eyes were surgically removed. Albright obsessively removed eyes from dolls and photographs. He was sentenced to five years to life. Albright was adopted from an orphanage. His strict and overprotective mother, a schoolteacher, pushed him academically and he excelled. He began getting in trouble at an early age. WikiJoshua Andrews Rage in his heart? Wanting to be noticed? Imani Taymullah wonders why her son, Joshua Andrews would do something like this.
Richard Angelo was a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital on Long Island where he killed 25 patients through poisoning by injection or IV. Psychologists testified he had dissociative identity disorder. After he' injected patients,a separate personality took over that was unaware of what he had done. Angelo passed a polygraph test when asked about the murders. Mental health experts for the prosecution agreed that Angelo had a personality disorder but could still appreciate right from wrong. He was sentenced to 61 years to life. "I wanted to create a situation where I would cause the patient to have some respiratory distress or some problem, and through my intervention or suggested intervention or whatever, come out looking like I knew what I was doing,.I had no confidence in myself. I felt very inadequate." Wiki
Joseph D. (Joe) Ball (b. January 7, 1896 - d. September 23, 1938) also referred to as The Alligator Man, the Butcher of Elmendorf and the Bluebeard of South Texas. He killed approximately twenty women in the 1930s. A World War I veteran, Ball was a bootlegger. When Prohibition ended he opened a saloon called the Sociable Inn in Elmendorf, Texas. He built a pond with five alligators that he charged people to see . Feeding time was the most popular viewing time--because they were fed live cats or dogs. Women started missing, including his barmaids, former girlfriends and wife. Clifford Wheeler, a handyman admitted helping Ball get rid of the bodies of two women. He led the authorities to the remains of Hazel Brown and Minnie Gotthard. Wheeler said Ball murdered twenty other women, but the alligators consumed the evidence. When two Texas Rangers questioned Ball he pulled a handgun from his cash register and killed himself.
Baton Rouge Serial Murders by Criminal Profiler John Philpin
Mark Barton -- Atlanta's burning -- 44-year-old day trader slaughtered 9 people in Atlanta's business district, after murdering his wife and 2 children. Notes left by Mark Barton. Barton appears to fit the profile described as "sadistic borderline" personalities, a pattern Theodore Millon calls "explosive psychopathy" (Millon & Davis, 1998) or "explosive sadism" (Millon, 1996) Helen Morrison, forensic psychiatrist noted in 1993 Barton was predisposed to violence.
Elizabeth Bathory -- "The Blood Countess of Transylvania" 1560: Elizabeth was born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Transylvania. She had powerful relatives including Istvan Bathory (1533-86) prince of Transylvania and king of Poland from 1575-86. At 4 or 5, Elizabeth had seizures that may have caused "psychotic" behavior. The most notorious vampiress in history, perpetrated cruelties on servant and peasant girls. Csejthe Castle, a mountain top fortress, was the site of blood orgies, and became known as the castle of vampires and the 'Blood Countess.'Raymond Martinez Fernandez and Martha Jule Beck aka "Honeymoon Killers," "Lonely Hearts Slayers," and-- The Lonely Hearts Killers -- Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. Their union was distinguished by their viciousness towards others including the elderly and young children.They killed at least 3 women and one child in the 1940s.The Bender family, John, his wife, son, and daughter Kate owned a general store and inn in Labette County, Kansas from 1872 to 1873. Kate was an attractive, personable self-proclaimed psychic in contact with the dead and had a gift for luring guests to their death. As affluent guests relaxed in a chair, Bender or his son hid behind a curtain with a hammer poised to bludgeon them, slashing their throat and throwing them down a trap door to the cellar where they undressed body before burial. Dr. William York was returning home to Missouri when he arrived at the Inn, where he stayed before. York told his brother, Colonel Ed York, about the inn. When Dr. York never made it home, his brother arrived at the inn searching for him. They claimed they hadn't seen him and claimed it was probably the Indians. Allegedly, after dinner he found evidence that his brother was there. He left quietly in the night and returned with the sheriff early the next morning but the Benders were gone. A property search turned up over 20 bodies including Dr. York. Three hammers (murder weapons) were found in the home. Vigilantes searched for the Benders and Colonel York used his military power to organize investigations and searches but nobody was ever tried for these murders.Bible John Scotland's mysterious serial killer.William Burke and William Hare hard-working Catholics who came to Scotland for work murdered 16 victims in 1829.Cayetano Santos Godino, alias "petiso orejudo" (meaning "big ear pest") was born in Buenos Aires, October 31, 1896. He terrified Argentina when he was sixteen. He murdered 4 children, attempted to murder another 7 children, and set arson to 7 buildings. He died in Ushuaia, November 15, 1944. Wiki
Eric Edgar Cooke (25 February 1931–26 October 1964) was the last person hung in Western Australia. Cooke had a cleft lip and was bullied as a child. As an adult, he married and had seven children.In 1963 he attacked 20 people and killed eight. He killed at random, running people over in the street or knocking on doors and shooting strangers.He was convicted of murder and was executed at Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964. Wiki
Serial killer John Martin Crawford's attacks Native women in Western Canada. His habit was to cruise for prostitutes. He was frequently with drinking a former fellow inmate Bill Corrigan who was involved in some of Crawford's crimes.David Berkowitz -- For 13 months, July, 1976 - August, 1977, NYC was terrorized by a "Son of Sam." He shot to death 6 people and he wounded 7. He shot young couples in lovers' lanes with a .44-cal. revolver, which earned him the title "44-caliber killer."Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka -- A pair of killers accused of 43 sex attacks and a string of killings, including Karla's own sister.Ian Brady -- Myra Hindley -- The 1960s "Moors Murderer" Brady, 27, and Hindley, 23, seemed like any other couple. Hindley was jailed for in 1966 for murdering Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, and an accessory to the murder of John Kilbride, 12. In 1987 she confessed her role in the killings of Keith Bennett, 12, and Pauline Reade, 16. Brady claimed that they tortured and killed children as an "existential exercise" but they had decided to stop and planned to turn to armed robbery.Kenneth Bianchi & Angelo Buono- The Hillside Stranglers strangled 12 women in LA, CA between October 1977 and February 1978.Theodore Robert or Ted Bundy -- Understand the mind of a man obsessed with destroying dozens of women.Richard Trenton Chase -- In 1978, Richard Chase killed 6 people. His victims included a pregnant woman and young child. He confessed to drinking the blood of his victims.Andrei Chikatilo --Forest Strip Killer murdered over 50 girls and boys in Russian 1978 - 1990.Cleveland Torso Killer killed at least 16 people in the 1930s, but was never caught, despite the efforts of federal agent Elliot Ness.In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders by James Jessen Badal -- During the Depression, Cleveland's East Side was filled with the homeless in shantytowns. This was where the remains of the Torso Killer's victims were found. Illustrated with maps, rare crime scene and morgue photographs, and newspaper photos.
Eric Edgar Cooke "Cookie" was a violent man who murdered at least 7 people. He was the last man to be hanged in Western Australia. Daryl Raymond Beamish, a deaf mute convicted of the 1959 murder of Jillian Brewer, Melbourne heiress, served 15 years of a life sentence in prison despite Cooke's detailed confession to the killing, was granted an appeal. John Button's manslaughter conviction of 4th May 1963 was quashed by the Western Australian Court of Criminal Appeal on 25th February 2002.Cooke was the basis for Thomas Harris' serial killer Francis Dolarhyde.
Andrew Cunaan-- On July 23, 1997, it Cunanan went on an alleged killing spree of 5 men, including Gianni Versace, then took his own life.
Jeffrey Dahmer-- Had an obsession with death and cannibalism that started in childhood.
James Mitchell Debardeleben -- A serial sex offender killer videotaped himself torturing women was involved in forgery and counterfeiting leading to his capture by the Secret Service in 1983. It was one of the most baffling manhunts in the history of US Secret Service. Debardeleben is an "Anger-Excitation Rapist," the most dangerous type of serial sex offender.Lethal Shadow: The Chilling True-Crime Story of a Sadistic Sex Slayer by Stephen G. Michaud Profiles James Mitchell De Bardeleban, from his initial arrest as a counterfeiter to the discovery that he was also a sadistic kidnapper, torturer, and sex murderer responsible for a 20 year reign of terror.
Paul Charles Denyer (b. 1972) an Australian serial killer known as the Frankston Serial Killer due to his crimes occurring within the Frankston Victoria area. He is serving life in HM Prison Barwon for the murders of Elizabeth Stevens, 18, Debbie Fream, 22, and Natalie Russell, 17 in Frankston, Victoria in 1993. The Frankston Serial Killer was featured in the pilot episode of the Seven Network show Forensic Investigators. Wiki
Albert DeSalvo -- The Boston Strangler - Between 1962 & 1964, in Boston, DeSalvo killed 12 women. All were sexually assaulted and strangled.
Peter Norris Dupas born 6 July 1953 is an Australian serial killer, is serving two life sentences for murder. His violent history spanned more than 30 years. With every release from prison he committed crimes against women with increasing violence. His signature is to remove the breasts of his female victims. In 2006, Dupas was convicted of two murders and a prime suspect in three or more murders in the Melbourne area.
Marc Dutroux kidnapped six girls between 1995 and 1996.Only two were found alive.
Every Move You Make by M. William Phelps
-- Gary C. Evans, 35, a master of disguise and career criminal who once befriended David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz, is suspected of five killings over a period of 13 years when he led a loose group of jewelry and antiques thieves. A career criminal since at least the mid-1970s, Evans served time in maximum security at Dannemora, the Clinton Correctional Facility where he took a course in art appreciation. He later studied how alarm systems worked and took pride in his ability to purposely leave clues intended to confuse investigators. He. first met James Horton, New York State Police Senior Investigator, in 1985, when he fingered Michael Falco as the brains behind their theft team. He didn't mention he’d shot and buried him. Douglas J. Berry, 63, the owner of a secondhand shop was shot to death as he slept in his store on Sept. 8, 1989. when Evans and Damien Cuomo entered the store to burglarize it. December 1989, in upstate New York. Gary killed and buried Cuomo in December 1989 and then had a ten-year romance with the mother of Cuomo's child, while conning her into believing he was still alive. In 1997, Timothy Rysedorph, 39, was dismembered and buried. Rysedorph, Cuomo and Falco grew up together in South Troy, NY,as childhood acquaintances, though not friends. They were thieves that got together over the years. On Oct. 17, 1991, Gregory Jouben, 36, the owner of a shop was killed in his store as he studied a piece of jewelry Evans wanted to sell. Evans who doesn't eat meat, poultry or fish is opposed to the killing of animals and is proud of the fact that he has never smoked, drunk alcohol or taken drugs (The Albany Times Union). Evans who confessed to his involvement in Jouben's and Berry's death,. led police to the shallow graves of Rysedorph, Cuomo and Falco (MSNBC News).
Albert Fish -- Sadist, masochist, flagellant, castrator, exhibitionist, voyeur, vampire, pedophile, serial killer and cannibal.Michel Fourniret, the "Ogre of the Ardennes" between France and Belgium where he has killed nine people, mostly young women and girls.Caril Fugate & Charlie Starkweather -- Her folks disapproved of him, so he shot them, and choked Caril's baby sister to death. Then he and Caril cuddled up in the same house for 2 days, before going on the lam. Starkweather: Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer by William AllenJohn Wayne Gacy, Jr. -- A politically active businessman, he was once photographed with Rosalyn Carter.and was involved making his community a better place. He was generous, friendly, hardworking, and devoted to community.John Wayne Gacy - Buried Secrets -- Gacy seemed a model citizen. But he had the remains of 33 youths buried beneath his home. Learn how Gacy escaped detection, and manipulated the legal system for 14 years. In never-before-seen footage, Gacy himself recalls the grisly murders.
Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders by Terry Sullivan, Peter T. Maiken Sullivan does an outstanding job of researching the case that led police to the discovery of 28 young men that Gacy had molested and ultimately murdered, then buried in the crawlspace of his suburban Chicago home, as well as the discovery of 5 more bodies Gacy was responsible for.
Donald "Pee Wee" Henry Gaskins ``I felt safer doing my killing and burying in my home state. I guess I'm just a Carolina Southern boy at heart." -- Gaskins is believed to have tortured and killed more than 100 victims, mostly hitchhikers. He was executed in the electric chair September 19, 1991.
Luis A. Garavito, 42, the worst serial killer in Colombian history lured children to their deaths by offering them food and drink. The victims were found mutilated. Similarities to slayings in Ecuador examined.Eddie Gein -- Born at the turn of the century in a small farming community, Gein's domineering mother taught him sex was sinful.
Green River Killer case In Seattle the nations most prolific serial killer, the Green River Killer Gary Leon Ridgway, plea bargained his way out of the death penalty in exchange for information.
Guy Georges, 38, a self-confessed serial killer described by public prosecutor as "the incarnation of evil" and psychiatrists warned that he could not be cured of his desire to kill. He is sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of seven young women in Paris between 1991 and 1997.
John Wayne Glover (b.1932 d. September 9, 2005) was a convicted Australian serial killer. Originally from England, Glover emigrated to Australia in 1956. He was sexually obsessed with elderly women since his mother's death. He began by molesting and robbing them. He kept his violent impulses under control until 1989, when he was 57, he became a murderer. He'd been married for 20 years and had children. Responsible for the North Shore Granny Murders in Sydney, Australia, he was the "The Granny Killer" for his murders of older woman. He beat them with a hammer on the head until near death, then strangled them with their underwear. Glover began his North Shore Australia killing spree on March 1989, lasting until March 1990. His final victim, Joan Violet Sinclair, was a woman he was having an affair with. Afterward he attempted suicide but was found by police officers near death, lying near the body of his victim. He was convicted of six murders and was a prime suspect in many other's which he denied responsibility for. He received a life sentence in prison where he hung himself on September 9, 2005. Wiki
Archibald Hall aka Roy Fontaine "the killer butler"
Myra Hindley -- Ian Brady -- The 1960s "Moors Murderer" Brady, 27, and Hindley, 23, seemed like any other couple. Myra Hindley was jailed for in 1966 for murdering Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, and an accessory to the murder of John Kilbride, 12. In 1987 she confessed her role in the killings of Keith Bennett, 12, and Pauline Reade, 16. Brady claimed that he and Hindley tortured and killed children as an "existential exercise" but they had decided to stop and planned to turn to armed robbery.
Thomas D. Huskey, 38, Accused killer of 4 women in Tennessee. Huskey the "Zoo Man" worked at the Knoxville Zoo. Huskey was sentenced to 66 years in prison for raping 4 women in 1991 and 1992, at the zoo and in the woods. February 15, 1999, a mistrial was declared in the quadruple murder trial because the jury couldn't agree if he was insane.
Jack the Ripper -- Jack the Ripper killed five women between 31st August 1888 and 9th November 1888.
Theodore Kaczynski - Unabomber -- A highly intelligent socially withdrawn man due to paranoid schizophrenia.
Edmund Kemper III-- Picked up young female hitchhikers. After he'd killed them, he took care to conceal their identities and eliminate evidence.
David and Michelle Knotek -- Pacific NW alleged Serial Killers under arrest -- A husband and wife team in a small SW Washington State small coastal community.
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng Leonard Lake was arrested near San Francisco, ending one of the cases of 2 serial killers working together. Lake and Charles Ng were responsible for a series of brutal crimes against women in California and the Pacific Northwest during the mid-1980s. Ng and Lake kidnapped young women to take to a bunker in a secluded area to brainwash them into becoming sex slaves. They killed a couple and their infant during a burglary. Die for Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng & Leonard Lake Torture Muders by Don Lasseter
Edward (Eddie) Joseph Leonski was .born December 12, 1917 in New York. He went into the US Army and arrived in Melbourne in February 1942 when he was 24. He was considered pleasant and laid-back but a heavy drinker. Three months later Ivy Violet McLeod, 40, was found beaten, and strangled to death in Albert Park, Melbourne. Robbery was not the motive. Six days later, Pauline Thompson 31, was strangled after a night out where she was seen with a man who had an American accent. Gladys Hosking, 40, was murdered on May 18 walking home from work. A witness saw an American, who matched the individual Pauline was seen with covered in mud, asking directions He also matched descriptions from women who survived recent attacks. Out of a line-up of American World War 2 soldiers, Private Leonski of the 52nd Signal Battalion was recognized, arrested and charged with three murders. He confessed and was sentenced to death in an American military court on November 4, 1942. He was hanged at Pentridge Prison five days later. The 1986 film Death of a Soldier (1986)
Henry Lee Lucas
William MacDonald From June 1961 to April 1963 Sydney, Australia was terrorized by the gruesome "Sydney Mutilator." June 1961, in a public Sydney Bath, Alfred Greenfield's nude body was found with his genitalia severed and over 30 stab wounds covering his body. William Cobbin, was stabbed repeatedly, mutilated and left in a public toilet at Moore Park. Frank McLean was discovered alive in March 1962 after being assaulted and mutilated in suburban Darlinghurst. He died before he was able to share information on the perpetrator. The fourth victim, Irishman Patrick Hackett was discovered November 1962 in suburban Concord after complaints were made regarding foul odors coming from a shop. Mr. Hackett's nude body was gouged 41 times, and his genitals were mutilated. William MacDonald had purchased the shop where this body was found was purchased a week earlier. In May 1963 MacDonald was traced to Melbourne, Australia working under the alias "David Allen." He immediately took full responsibility for the crimes and then openly discussed his irresistible urge to mutilate randomly chosen males to death. He shared with the police that he was once a victim of teenage homosexual rape. Sentenced to life he is at the Cessnock Correctional Centre in New South Wales. (MacDonald was born in Liverpool, England, in 1924.)
John Allen Muhammad and juvenile accomplice John Lee Malvo. DC Sniper: Addicted: Obsessed With Killing?
Charles Manson --He never physically murdered victims, he had power over his followers, who did his bidding.Kenneth Allen Mc Duff, 52, blamed for 14 murders was executed in Texas November 17, 1998. Mc duff was the only condemned inmate in the nation paroled and then returned to death row for another murder.Ivan Milat "Backpacker Murders" was born December 27, 1944 in Guildford Australia in a a close family with 14 children. They kept to themselves and enjoyed firearms. It’s not clear when his life of crime began. In 1971, he was acquitted of a rape charges. His older brother claims, "Wherever Ivan has worked, people have disappeared.” He thinks Ivan killed, "about 20 or so...” During the 1990s, Milat was responsible for the murders of hikers and tourists. In 1992 two British tourists Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, were found murdered. In 1993, the bodies of James Gibson and Deborah Everist, both 19, missing since 1989, were discovered in the remote Belanglo State Forest. Simone Schmidl, a 20-year-old German national missing since 1991 was found and identified in 1993. Shortly after this a large organized search of the area located the remains of a couple, Gabor Kurt Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Susanne Habschied, 20 -- missing for two years. All victims’ cause of death was likely due to multiple stab wounds. Habschied was decapitated. An eighth possible victim, Diane Pennacchio, 29, was stabbed to death in 199. Her body was posed similarly to Milat's victims. A young woman reported she accepted a lift, in 1990 while backpacking. She was so frightened she got away and ran into the forest as he fired shots at her. Paul Onions, a British tourist told police that during this time-period he accepted a ride from a driver who revealed a gun. As he ran away, the driver shot at him. Onions identified the driver and vehicle through police photos. In May 1994, police raids lead to Ivan Milat, 49, his brother Walter and another man were taken into police custody. Milat was charged with armed robbery and discharging a firearm. Police found a .22 caliber rifle, the type used in the murders and souvenirs he took from the victims. He appeared for the robbery and weapon charges but did not enter a plea. The following week on May 30, 1994, he was charged with the murders of seven people. The trial lasted from March 1996 to July 1996. He received one life sentence for each of the seven victims. He is a suspect in up to 10 unsolved murder cases. In July 2005 his lawyer John Marsden, claimed Milat had had an accomplice.Mark Whittaker and Les Kennedy (1998) Sins Of The Brother: Australian Story: Into the Forest Part 1 | Part 2 WikiDennis Rader -- BTK Serial Killer
Larry Ralston the "Angel of Death." stopped killing for 6 years while he worked in a morgue because he had enough involvement with death, he was satisfied.
Night Stalker -- For a year, he held Los Angeles captive to fear. Dubbed the Night Stalker, he surprised his victims in their home in the dark, and as the bodies mounted, the public cried out for the police to stop this horrifying killer. But the Stalker was careful. Hear from the officers who investigated the crimes, and look at crime scenes in police documents and photos. See how Richard Ramirez was identified and captured, and meet friends of Ramirez with their own spin on the grisly acts. Finally, the trial that saw the Night Stalker put behind bars for life.Gary Ridgway otherwise known as The Green River Killer, spares his life by confessing to 48 murders, making him the United States most prolific serial killer. The search for victims continues. He claims the last date he murdered was in 1998.
Joel Rifkin, aka the "New York Ripper,'' murdered seventeen women from the streets of the New York-Long Island area. Joel Rifkin confessed to killing a woman and tossing her head in Hopewell, NJ but was never prosecuted for it. Jonathan Pincus, M.D., Washington VA Hospital, evaluated Rifkin, and showed he had normal cognitive functions and a superior IQ, but was impaired and had frontal abnormalities.
John E. Robinson Sr. 58, "Slavemaster" the Internet serial killer pleaded guilty of capital murder for the deaths of Suzette Trouten, 27, and Izabela Lewicka, 21, whose bodies were found on his rural Kansas property. He was convicted of 1st-degree murder of Lisa Stasi, 19, whose body was never found, and arranging the fraudulent adoption of her baby.
Daniel Harold Rolling -- Those close to the 5 murdered students curse Rolling for robbing them of so much and 10 years later he is still alive. Victims' families struggle with the murders. Crime profiler John Philpin, who co-authored a book about the 1990 murders, said when he talked with Rolling on the phone, Rolling attempted to reveal compassion. "He made an effort to be very charming," Philpin said. "I very quickly realized everything with this man was a manipulation." The persona Rolling has created out of his insinuation of multiple personalities is not consistent with his premeditated crimes he committed.
Tommy Lynn Sells -- On Dec. 30, 1999, a drifter, Sells broke into a home in Del Rio, Texas, and killed Kaylene Harris, 13. Krystal Surles, 10, had her throat slit but managed to escape. Sells confessed to 12 murders in 7 states, using guns, knives, bat, shovel, ice pick and his bare hands.
Wesley Shermantine Jr -- Guilty of 4 counts of murder, but is he a serial killer?Harold Shipman -- Physician, Britain's worst serial killer, murdered 215 patients. A judge, added there was "real suspicion" of another 45 victims. Shipman began murdering patients in 1975. He was arrested in 1998 and was jailed for life. The 57-year-old, hanged himself in Wakefield prison in January 2004. He was cremated at a service attended by his wife Primrose, 54, who was advised not to bury her husband in case the grave was attacked. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four children Sarah, 36, Christopher, 32, David, 24, and Sam, 21
The South side Slayer killed up to 20 prostitutes in the Los Angeles-area in the mid-1980s. No one was charged. The crimes stopped in 1987.Richard Speck "Super male" -- In 1966, a twenty-four-year-old sailor named Richard Speck committed one of the most shocking crimes in American history. Intruding into a dormitory of female student nurses, he tied up nine women, and then systematically murdered eight of them. The one survivor hid under a bed, and Speck missed her during his homicidal rampage. By Denise NoeCary Stayner -- 37 year old brother of child kidnap victim, Steve Stayner, admits to murdering 4 women in Yosemite while working as a handyman.Michael Swango --"If Swango (is) legally connected to all the suspicious deaths of patients under his care since he began his residency with Ohio State University's medical program in 1983, it would make him the most prolific serial killer in history." - A press release issued by Swango's alma mater.Police believe Maury Travis killed at least 12 prostitutes in the St. Louis area. Travis killed himself in jail after his arrest.
Coral Eugene Watts confessed in 1982 to stabbing, strangling, hanging and drowning 12 women in Texas, and one in Michigan. He is suspected in 26 other slayings. Watts was to be released from a Texas prison April 2006 as part of a 1982 deal that led to a 60-year sentence for burglary with intent to murder. He has immunity for 12 killings in Texas and Michigan. Mandatory release laws and the appeals court reduced his sentence by 35 years. November 2004, Watts , 51, was found guilty of stabbing Helen Dutcher, 36, to death in a Detroit suburb in 1979, and faces a sentence of life in prison without parole. Authorities in Kalamazoo, Michigan, had also charged Watts with murder in the 1974 stabbing death of Gloria Steele, 19, a Western Michigan University student.
Faryion Waydrip stopped killing for 2 years (until he was arrested for crimes occurring many years prior).
The Truro murders was the name given to the findings of the remains of seven young women near the town of Truro, South Australia in 1976 - 1977. Christopher Worrell was a young, good-looking, charismatic sociopath. James Miller, a 40 year old laborer, was a drifter dependent on Worrell for support. Miller and Worrell cruised for local females to engage in sex with Worrell. Miller chauffeured Worrell and his "date" to a private area to have sex. Miller waited outside the car. Then drove them back. The "pick-ups" became increasingly violent. Worrell occasionally raped the women, then moved up to occasional murders. Miller claims he had no knowledge ahead of time that a murder would take place. As the violence increased so did Miller's fear of Worrell. Miller never directly engaged in murder. Worrell was killed in a car accident on February 19, 1977. Miller survived the car accident but after Worrell's death, he became depressed and homeless. In April 1978, the remains of Veronica Knight, 18, and Sylvia Pittman, 16, were found near each other. Clothes, blood, and bones were found nearby. It was believed that there was a link between the two women and other missing young women. Miller told a woman about Worrell's thrill killings, she collected a AUD$40,000 reward for the tip that lead to Miller's arrest. Miller who never touched a victim was found guilty of six murders because he was part of a joint criminal enterprise.
Fred & Rose West -- Rose West, housewife, mother, serial killer responsible for the murder of her daughter and 9 other young women. Fred, husband, father, serial killer, was her partner. He hung himself in prison in 1995.Aileen Wuornos -- Suspected of at least 7 murders, and sentenced to die, she maintains her killings were performed in self-defense, while working as a prostitute.
Robert L. Yates Jr. -- Murder In Spokane -- Over a 2 year period, more than a dozen women were killed in Spokane. Robert Yates Jr. was finally arrested for the killings.The Zodiac Killer -- It has been over 18 years since the Zodiac penned a letter to the press. It has been in excess of 15 years since the last suspected Zodiac killing, though some think that there may have been a Unabomber connection.August 2, 2007
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RICHARD RAMIREZ
Richard Ramirez career started in June 1984 when he broke into a house and raped then killed a 79 year old woman, Jennie Vincow, in a suburb of L.A.
In February of 1985 he abducted two girls in separate incidents. The first was a six year old girl, taken from a bus stop near her school in a laundry bag, then molested and dumped at a nearby location. Two weeks later Richard took another girl, a nine year old, from her bedroom and raped, then dumped her, nearby.
On March 17 Ramirez was described by the survivor of the first "Valley Intruder" attack. Dayle Okazaki was murdered and her roommate, Maria Hernandez, was badly injured. While leaving the scene of this first killing Ramirez dragged Tsa Lian Yu from her car and proceeded to shoot her several times. Lian Yu was pronounced dead the next day.
Ramirez seemed so impressed with these attacks that he abducted another young girl 2 days later, raping her repeatedly before allowing her to leave, in what would seem like a celebration of the earlier attacks.
March 27 : The Zazzara murders. Ramirez beat 64-year-old Vincent Zazzara to death, then stabs his wife, Maxine ,44, to death. Ramirez proceeded to carve out her eyes and take them with him. The bodies were found two days later by their son.
On May 14 Ramirez broke into another house and killed the owner, William Doi, with a bullet to the head. Doi was able to make it to a phone first though, not allowing enough time for Ramirez to get his wife.
Just two weeks later, on May 29, Ramirez had some fun with an 84-year-old, Mabel Bell, and 81-year-old, Florence Lang(an invalid). Ramirez violently beat them and then scratched satanic symbols over them, and their house. The two were not found until June 2. Bell died on July 15, but Lang survived the attack.
On June 27 Patty Higgins had her throat cut, dying, in another "stalker" attack in her own home. And on July 2, Mary Cannon,77, was killed in similar style. Cannon lived less than two miles from Higgins.
July 7, Joyce Nelson, 61, was beaten to death at her home.
On July 20 Ramirez decided to do a double. First off he killed Chainarong Khovanath, 32, then beat and raped his wife. Not content with that he took their 8-year-old son into the next room with a bottle of baby oil. Mrs. Khovanath was forced to listen as Ramirez raped him, then he stole about $30,000 in cash and jewellery. Ramirez then drove to a neighbouring suburb and murdered Max Kneiding, 69, and his wife Lela, 66. The couple didn't even have time to get out of their bed.
On August 6 Ramirez screwed up and left both his victims wounded. Christopher Peterson,38, and his wife Virginia, 27, where able to give a description of their attacker, which matched that of all other survivors.
August 8, Ramirez strikes again. He kills Elyas Abowath, 35, shooting him then brutally beating his wife. It is after this attack that police announce that they are after a serial killer, linking six of the murders. The press dub Ramirez as "The Night Stalker".
On August 17 Ramirez struck in San Francisco, his first attack outside L.A., killing the amusingly named Peter Pan, 66, and badly beating and then shooting his wife. She survived her wounds and identified the 'stalker' from police sketches taken from the earlier survivors.
August 24, Ramirez wounds Bill Carns, 29, with three bullets to the head. He then raped Carn's fiancee, Inez Erickson, twice. As Ramirez drove away Erickson seen his car. It was an orange Toyota station wagon. A local teenager also noticed the car and it's driver. He took down then number plate and gave it to police. The end was near.
On August 30 police found the car abandoned. From it they lifted a single finger print. Ramirez was identified. They issued a APB for Ramirez and his mug shots were shown on national TV.
The next day Ramirez's picture was on the cover of every major newspaper in the state, and on every TV news bulletin. Ramirez had no idea of this until he walked into a liquor store and seen himself staring at him from that days newspaper. Ramirez panicked as other customers realised that it was him. He ran 2 miles in the next 12 minutes, then decided to steal a car. Unfortunately for Ramirez he was in a particularly tough neighbourhood and ended up being rescue by the police as he was being beaten badly by the local thugs. The 'Night Stalker' was caught.
i remember richard I lived close to where he got beat up. about 3 miles away.
I remember people in my hood buying locks, knives and guns.
i dont think ritchie would wanna mess with us bell gardens locos or king cobra
Patricia ALLANSON always thought of herself as special. Her parents took any responsibility away from her and thus Patricia was convinced that a husband had to give her anything she ever dreamed of.
Patricia found this with her first husband, an army seargeant and had three children with him. Obviously he was not giving enough so she headed for six year younger Tom ALLANSON, who seemed able to offer her what she meant to deserve.
They started their honeymoon dressed like Scarlett and Rhett Butler on their heavily mortgaged 52-acre home “Tara” in Zebulon (GA). They raised Morgan horses and Patricia´s “Scarlett dreams” seemed to come true.
It was only two months after their marriage that Patricia talked her husband into a paranoia that his father, Walter ALLANSON, wanted to kill him. Walter ALLANSON made no secret about being against his daughter-in-law.
When a pistol and a rifle were stolen from Walter ALLANSON´s home, his father on the other hand believed that his son planned to kill him.
Police searched Tom´s home - without result.
On June 29, 1974 Walter and his wife Carolyn took a ride with their car, when someone shot at them. Despite Tom was far away, they were convinced that her son had organized the attack.
When Tom wanted to discuss the escalating situation on July 3, he went to his parents home and found nobody at home. He went to the basement to wait for his mother´s return. To his surprise his father came home, who had received an anonymous call by a woman, that Tom would be in the house. After some struggle Walter called the police but sent them away when they arrived. When his wife Carolyn came home, Walter demanded her to bring him the gun, he recently bought.
When police officers arrived once again after another emergency call, they found Carolyn and Walter shot numerous times.
Tom was soon arrested as prime suspect and Patricia tried to get him out by telling lies. Also Tom told lies and so he was convicted and sentenced to life.
Soon after Patricia tried to convince Tom into a suicide pact, he later thought, this was her attempt to get rid of him and inherit everything.
Patricia now had the farm for herself, two months after their marriage only. When the farm and barns burned down, Patricia forged Tom´s signature to get the insurance payments.
She then worked on Tom´s wealthy grandparents, who made her primary beneficiary in their will. Patricia fed them arsenic with their meals and when they grew ill, she was arrested and convicted to eight years in prison.
After her release she did not hesitate to persuade a wealthy couple from Atlanta, Mr. and Mrs. CHRIST, to hire her as nurse. Mr. CHRIST survived only a short period.
Meantime police had quested Tom again, who was free on parole after serving 15 years in prison. They found Patricia ALLANSON to be a manipulative liar who obviously choreographed Tom´s parents homicide.
In a controversial plea bargain Patricia ALLANSON agreed to seven charges, including theft, attempted murder and posing as registered nurse for not being charged with the murder of Mr. CHRIST or the murders of Tom´s parents.
Patricia ALLANSON went to prison for another eight years and allegedly lives with her stepfather and his new wife since her release 1999.
https://linktr.ee/Graveyardshifter
ALBUM OUT NOW! >here https://graveyardshifter.bandcamp.co...piscean-knight
WOW you guys are pretty gay and gothic. people dying, we all will in one form or another, get over it.
smh
there's this one quote from this serial killer that was really fucked up. it stuck in my head the first time i read it but i forget who said it.
it went like "as i sit here with this skull in my hand, i feel like i'm about to lose it" or something like that. anyone know?
sounds familiar
https://linktr.ee/Graveyardshifter
ALBUM OUT NOW! >here https://graveyardshifter.bandcamp.co...piscean-knight
One of the more entertaining reads you can do about a serial/contract killer is of the Cleveland Mafia connected German hitman Hans Graewe.
Get the book Mob Nemesis from your local library and read up on the chapters about him. Eyewitness accounts from Carmen Zagaria, the guy who ratted him out.
Graewe was a sick fuck. Ironic story, its in the book, he was supposed to have murdered my grandfather, but missed his chance.
But really its a good read. Mob Nemesis by Joe Griffin
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