A cursory glance at a few randomly selected newspaper headlines illustrates the point. A German man weighing 127 kg (280 lb) squashed his wife to death following a domestic dispute. In China, a woman was reported to have killed her lover by kissing him while releasing a capsule containing rat poison which she held in her mouth. And, in Britain, a promiscuous married woman disposed of her unwanted husband by spiking his steak and kidney pie with toxic garden chemicals. The victim ill-advisedly kept a supply of paraquat in the garden shed and his wife saw her opportunity (
see
Chapter 13).
Apart from the variety of methods, what many of these murders have in common is that they were committed in a domestic setting and were conceived as a way of solving personal problems. These incidents also underline one of the important common denominators of murder which is that murderer and victim, more frequently than not, are known to each other.
Murder seems to attract weird behaviour beyond the basic elements of one person killing another. Tremayne Durham, for instance, a murder suspect in custody in the USA, became fed up with the monotonous institutional food he was served in prison and arranged a plea-bargain whereby he would admit guilt in return for a chicken dinner. The internet has inspired a boom in the sale of prison memorabilia manufactured by prison inmates serving life sentences for murder. Self-portraits of serial killers are popular and form part of a new merchandising sector which has been called psychopathic handicrafts.
Murder is rooted in the ordinary and, sometimes, extraordinary, activities of human beings hence they encompass the full scope and depth of human diversity. For example, the motive that drove a grandfather to sacrifice his ten-year-old granddaughter in India in 2009 was to ensure a good harvest. While every excess of which the human mind is capable has probably been catalogued in one form or another, a killing such as this seems to belong to a primitive era.
The acid test of murder is intention and what the law calls
mens rea
or guilty mind. Guilty intention is described as malice aforethought and it is this which distinguishes it from manslaughter. The classic definition of murder based on malice aforethought goes back to English Common Law and takes account of the age and mental status of the offender. This was set out by Lord Chief Justice Edward Coke (1552–1634) when he referred to “a man of sound memory and at the age of discretion”. In practical terms, this meant an individual who was not insane and aged at least ten years.
While intention is all-important and constitutes the essence of what murder is, there are other factors that give structure to the act of killing. These broadly come together as modus operandi and may be defined as motive, method and opportunity. No matter how bizarre the circumstances of a particular murder, it will be given substance by the perpetrator’s attention to these three principles. They are the factors that energize and give form to the intention to kill.
Other behavioural patterns emerge periodically and these are reflected in official figures and studies of homicide. Analysis of homicide statistics over a ten-year period in New York City has shown that while murder rates in general have declined there are peaks during the summer months, July to September. This is a time when people socialize more frequently and when drinking and drug-taking become more prevalent. Emotional temperatures tend to rise, creating an environment in which violence lurks in the shadows. When murder erupts, it is in a familiar context involving husbands, wives and lovers.
The weapon of choice in these scenarios is the handgun. Fears about possible curbs on the purchase of firearms in the USA in 2009 led to a boost in weapon sales. The arguments about gun control were emphasized by a spate of shootings in several states, including the killing of Dr George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor gunned down in the lobby of the Lutheran church in Wichita, Kansas where he worshipped.
Homicide figures in the UK for 2007/8 showed a decline in the annual murder rate for England and Wales. Patterns indicated that female murder victims were most likely to be killed by someone known to them. One reason given for the decline in homicide was more effective emergency medical treatment of knife and gunshot wounds. Injuries which would have resulted in murder were not fatal and thus the crime reduced to attempted murder.
In common with all human activities, murder has evolved over time, absorbing and reflecting changes in social conditions with greater awareness and self-knowledge on the part of individuals. Yet underlying this sophistication lie dark forces that come to the surface when triggered by elemental drives such as self-preservation, ambition, power, aggression and domination.
The collision of basic instincts and moral values has been explored by some of the great novelists such as Emile Zola and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In
La Bête Humaine
Zola gives a portrait of a personality tormented by the struggle between his social nature, or better self, and a desire to test his powers to the absolute limit. It is not the intention of this book to dwell on the psychology of murder. This has been admirably achieved by others and, in particular, by Colin Wilson in his book,
Order of Assassins
. We are concerned here, though, with what happens when the threshold of intention, of malice aforethought, is crossed and actions lurch into the unpredictable realm of the extraordinary and idiosyncratic.
Premeditation should, theoretically at least, afford the best possibility for committing the perfect murder. This seems logical compared with crimes of passion which, by their nature, pay scant regard to either caution or discretion. They just happen.
Most murders are committed by people who in the ordinary course of events would be regarded as normal and rational. They are the sort of people who would be expected to make some sort of risk assessment before investing their money or committing themselves to a new business venture; the sort of people who, having formed the intention to extinguish the life of another human being, might formulate some kind of murder management plan after taking into consideration factors such as method and opportunity, assessing risk factors and allowing for contingencies.
But how often do they?
There are exceptions, such as the teenage daughter of a millionaire businessman who compiled what amounted to a murder blueprint. Her intention was to enrich herself by killing a wealthy elderly person. She committed a detailed action plan to paper, together with a list of equipment needed for the task. Her mistake was to leave the blueprint where it could be found and provide incriminating evidence against her (
see
Chapter 13).
The murderer’s chief aim is to fulfil the intention while minimizing the chances of being caught – the essence of perfect murder. Yet, at the very moment when planning is called for, calm detachment quickly turns into unforeseen turmoil. Rationality gives way to the beast within and events take an uncharted and erratic course. The release of elemental forces precipitates unthinking responses to the trauma of death, once the murderer’s intention is made real. Confronted with his victim’s corpse, possibly bloodied by violence, the first decision is whether to stay or flee. Already, the forensic trail has been started and every subsequent action is likely to leave a footfall, fingerprint or fibre behind. After all, it is the detectives’ mantra that every murderer makes mistakes.
There are at least two groups of people who should, theoretically at least, be competent at carrying out the intention to kill: first, those who choose not to bloody their hands and can afford to pay someone else to do their dirty work for them, which puts distance between themselves and their victim. Such plans often come unstuck, however, because the hit man lacks guilty intention and falls down on attention to detail but the converse of this is politically motivated assassination where resources and professionalism come together with lethal efficiency (
see
Chapter 9).
The second group that might be expected to have a head start over everyone else consists of members of the medical and nursing professions, who have the knowledge, skills and agents at their disposal. In practice, though, they frequently turn out to be bunglers when it comes to murder and their professional acumen deserts them when they most need it. An example is the Austrian doctor who successfully murdered his mistress but kept her head as a sort of trophy in a jar of preserving fluid (
see
Chapter 3).
Accounts are given here of nearly three hundred murder cases. For convenience, they are grouped under chapter headings such as,
Parts and Parcels
,
Justice Delayed
and
Motive, Method and Opportunity,
which are broadly descriptive. The classification is fairly loose as many of the murders would fit into several categories.
Thomas de Quincey wrote an essay, published in 1827, entitled,
On Murder Considered as a Fine Art
. He talked about a Society of Connoisseurs of Murder who he thought might be called “murder fanciers”. They would meet from time to time to discuss the latest crimes and offer a critique of them in a similar way to making an appraisal of a work of art.
Perhaps the murderer’s canvas is his crime scene on which he leaves his bloody brush strokes, either by design or by default? The Dali Murders (
see
Chapter 7) are possibly the best example of death imitating art. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was an artist who turned to murder and Walter Sickert painted murder victims, although none were claimed by him, unless the accusation that he was Jack the Ripper is ever substantiated.
But the demise of Isidor Fink in a locked room in New York City probably best qualifies as murder considered as a fine art. The fatal shooting of the thirty-three-year-old laundryman has defied resolution for eighty years. In every sense, it is the perfect murder (
see
Chapter 14).
While we might share the fascination of De Quincey’s connoisseurs of murder, we might also be mindful that every murder claims a victim. Murder is undeniably part of the human condition with its roots in the primitive recesses of the brain where moral restraints are overridden by the dark forces of malice. To read about murder is to open a door into the territory occupied by those who transgress the boundaries observed by civilized society. We may be shocked, entertained or informed by what we read, while knowing that in murder cases the unbelievable is all too often true.
In 2009, Vincent Bugliosi, the US attorney who led the prosecution in the Manson murder trial in the late 1960s, was reported as saying that the killings were the most bizarre murders in the history of American crime. He commented that, “If they had been written as fiction no one would have read it. It would have seemed too far out.” And, as Thomas de Quincey reminded his readers, using a question framed by Lactanius, the Roman poet; “What is so dreadful; what so dismal and revolting, as the murder of a human creature?”
Robin Odell
CHAPTER 1
The Dog and the Parrot
Animals frequently play a part in the chronicles of crime. Their role has usually been in a supporting capacity and only occasionally as killers. London newspapers in 1876 reported a “Murderous Attack by a Gorilla” armed with a cut-throat razor in France. The Victorians were fascinated by images of young maidens being attacked by snakes, cats and sea monsters.
The savage natural instincts of animals have sometimes been harnessed by murderers for their capacity to destroy evidence of a crime. Thus in 1937 did Joe Ball, proprietor of The Sociable Inn in Elmendorf Texas, dispose of his victims by feeding them to crocodiles and, in 1960, the Hosein brothers, in all likelihood, fed the remains of their murder victim to the pigs at Rooks Farm.
Only rarely are the lethal attributes of animals used as a murder weapon. Robert James thought he had found a novel way of disposing of his wife by setting rattlesnakes on to her. They failed to kill her quickly enough, though, so he resorted to drowning to make sure.
Whether kept as domestic pets or farm animals, dogs are often encountered by unwanted visitors and are only too willing to attack intruders or alert their owners. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle referred to “The curious incident of the dog in the night time”, when a dog did not bark because it recognized the intruder intent on stealing a racehorse. The dog kept by the landlady of the Cross Keys Inn in London’s Chelsea area clearly knew the individual who robbed and killed its mistress in 1920. The dog did not bark but the killer gave himself away by other means.
Possibly the most unusual intervention by an animal was that of a green parrot which witnessed the killing of its owner in a New York bar in 1942. Gifted with the power of calling out the names of people it knew, the parrot acted as a police informer by identifying the murderer.
Listen To The Parrot
The Green Parrot Restaurant in Harlem, New York City, was a popular watering hole and the bar was presided over by the owner’s parrot. The bird had a useful vocabulary and knew many customers by their first name. Max Geller, the owner, refused all offers to sell his parrot, one of whose tricks was to insult the patrons.
On the evening of 12 July 1942, there was a shooting at the Green Parrot Restaurant. A man came into the bar and demanded a drink, a request that was refused by Max Geller because the man was already drunk. The angry customer pulled a gun, shot Geller and disappeared into the busy street.
Max Geller died three weeks later. The gunshot wound he sustained in the throat had damaged his vocal cords and he was unable to speak. When the police arrived at the bar, they questioned people who had been present but with little positive result. Pedestrians talked of seeing a man fleeing from the bar with a gun in his hand. The most vocal witness was the Green Parrot. The bird was agitated and kept shouting, “Robber! Robber!” The police captain summed up progress with the words “we have a dying victim who can’t talk, twenty witnesses who won’t and a squawking parrot we can’t shut up!”