The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (2 page)

In America, it seems, you can get away with murder. For the killer at large, America is the land of opportunity. For those who enjoy killing, there are always plenty more potential victims out there. This is the dark side of the American dream. Indeed, thanks to cheap paperbacks, penny-dreadfuls and Hollywood, a nation heaving with uncaught killers has become the American nightmare.

Ann Arbor Hospital Homicides

Over six weeks during July and August 1975, 27 patients at the Michigan Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, suffered respiratory failure that left them unable to breathe without mechanical assistance. Records showed that cardiopulmonary arrests rocketed to four times their usual rate. Some patients were struck by this life-threatening condition more than once. Eleven died. An analysis of the hospital’s records found no changes in the type of patient in the hospital that could account for this dramatic upsurge. So many breathing failures could not be accidental, and patients and staff quickly figured that a medical serial killer was on the loose.

There were obvious clues; no tell-tale needle punctures or other marks on the patients’ bodies. But a pharmacological investigation revealed that at least 18 of the victims including nine of those who died – had been given Pavulon, the trade name of the drug pancuronium bromide. This is a synthetic version of curare, the lethal plant alkaloid used by South American Indians to tip poison arrows and darts. Anaesthesiologists sometimes administer Pavulon as a muscle relaxant during abdominal surgery. However hospital records showed that none of the victims had been prescribed the drug.

The FBI were called in and agents discovered that most of the breathing failures had occurred in the intensive-care unit during the afternoon shift. All of the victims were fed intravenously, but the drug could not have been added to the drip. In solution, Pavulon would have been too dilute to work. The FBI concluded that, to administer a lethal dose, the IV solution would have had to have been disconnected and the drug pumped directly down the feeding tubes.

Checking the work rosters, detectives found that two nurses from the Philippines, 29-year-old Filipina Narciso and 31-year old Leonora Perez, were on duty in the intensive-care unit during the afternoon shifts when the trouble occurred. Subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, the women denied responsibility for the deaths.

However, one of them was implicated by a survivor. During the investigation, New York psychiatrist Dr Herbert Spiegel hypnotized the survivors while FBI agents questioned them. Under hypnosis, 61-year-old retired auto worker Richard Neely, who was being treated for cancer of the bladder, remembered experiencing unexpected breathing difficulties and calling out to an Asian nurse. But, instead of tending to him, she was frightened by his cry and fled. Later, he picked out one of the Filipino suspects from photographs of the hospital’s nurses.

Although Federal authorities could come up with no motive for the crimes and psychological tests showed their behaviour patterns to be “normal”, the two nurses were indicted. Fearing that Neely and other witnesses did not have long to live, the authorities moved the case speedily to trial. In a hearing that lasted three months, the prosecution introduced 89 witnesses and took testimony from 17 acknowledged experts. The medical testimony left little doubt that many of the patients had received a muscle relaxant without prescription. However, the testimony of the lay witnesses that sought to prove that the two nurses were always present when respiration failures occurred was seen as both “inconsistent” and “confusing”. A proper epidemiological study was not introduced, and the prosecution was prohibited from introducing evidence concerning any respiratory arrests not in the original indictment. After 13 days of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. On 13 July 1977, they found the nurses guilty of five counts of murder, ten counts of poisoning and conspiracy to commit murder. But the case went to appeal in February 1978 and the convictions were overturned.

In the closing argument at the trial, the prosecutor had asked: “What are the odds, ladies and gentlemen, what is the chance, what is the probability that these defendants have engaged in these activities and that all these factors that are incriminating could exist and the defendants would still nevertheless be innocent?” This argument, the appeal court held, was a “most egregious error” as it invited the jury “to engage in a speculative combination of the charges”, while the court instructed them that “each charge, and the evidence pertaining to it must be considered separately. You may not consider evidence introduced as to one count in arriving at a verdict on any other count.”

This meant that the prosecution could not use the unusually high incidence of cardiopulmonary arrest to suggest that criminal misconduct was taking place and that the incidence of it on their shifts did not mean that the two nurses were responsible. Although the prosecution was give permission for a retrial, they dropped the case. No new suspects have been named, so the killers are still at large.

Atlanta’s Child Killers

Atlanta, Georgia lived through a reign of terror from 1979 to 1981 when 29 African-American youths were killed. In 1982, Wayne Williams, himself black, was sentenced to life imprisonment for two of the slayings. After his conviction, the authorities blamed him for the other 22 deaths – though he was never charged for them – and the cases were closed. The other cases were reassigned to individual homicide investigations and remain unsolved to this day. However, there are now serious doubts that Wayne Williams had anything to do with the murders.

Heading those who believe in Williams’ innocence is Louis Graham, the police chief of DeKalb County, which covers eastern Atlanta where some of the killings took place. In 2005, he took the extraordinary step of reopening five of the “Atlanta Child Murder” cases – those of ten-year-old Aaron Wyche, whose body was found on 24 June 1980; 11-year-old Patrick Baltazar, found 13 February 1981; 13-year-old Curtis Walker, found 6 March 1981; 15-year-old Joseph Bell, found 19 April 1981; and 17-yearold William Barrett, found 12 May 1981.

Chief Graham hopes his cold-case squad can either confirm or dismiss his gut feeling that Williams is innocent. Although Graham’s renewed interest in the Williams case was sparked in December 2004, shortly after he became DeKalb County’s new police chief, he has long held the view that Williams was not guilty. During the original murder spree, he was an assistant police chief in neighbouring Fulton County where most of the murders took place. He also worked on the task force that investigated the killings of the 29 victims – mostly male, in the age range of eight to 27.

Graham’s wife taught at the Frederick Douglass High School, which Williams attended, and he met him as a young man. The veteran cop’s assessment was that Williams, the only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, was a spoiled, brash kid, but saw no harm in him and certainly could not see him as a serial killer.

“To me, he’s just not the kind that would do something like this,” said Graham.

When the serial killing task force narrowed its focus on the diminutive, bespectacled Williams, Graham began to have deep misgivings. How could such a puny wimp overpower so many people – some of whom were bigger than him, he wondered. And how come Williams had never been seen?

“He wasn’t that smart,” said Graham.

A college dropout, Williams still lived at home with his parents who doted on him. He had few other friends.

DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, who was the first Atlanta detective to search the Williams’ home, concurred, claiming that most people who knew about the case believed that Williams was not guilty. But the pressure to make an arrest was enormous. State Representative Tyrone Brooks remembered George Bush Snr, then Vice President, coming to Atlanta and telling the local authorities that if they could not catch someone, the Feds would happily take over. Pressure was also applied by Georgia’s Governor George Busbee.

Representative Brooks also believes that Williams is innocent. He knew Williams as a youth and sometimes helped to get leading lights of the civil rights movement to appear on the radio show that Williams broadcast from a station in his garage as a teenager. It was funded by his parents.

After dropping out of Georgia State University, Williams worked for a popular local radio station run by Benjamin Hooks, a leading light of the NAACP, and did odd jobs. He also dabbled in electronics and sold news footage to local TV stations. Using a scanner to listen in on police channels, he would often arrive at the scene with his video camera before the police themselves got there.

“I think he was too close to the scene too often with his camera,” says Brooks. “He was a convenient scapegoat.”

Despite the money he was making, Williams really fancied himself as a music promoter and was determined to discover the next Jackson Five. Unfortunately, he was a fantasist with a tin ear and spent a fortune of his parents’ money recording demos with local boys of limited talent.

The investigation of the case began on 28 July 1979. That afternoon, a woman searching for empty cans and bottles along a roadside in Atlanta stumbled on a pair of corpses dumped in the undergrowth. One victim was Alfred Evans, aged 13, who was last seen alive three days before when he left home to see a karate movie in downtown Atlanta. His death was ascribed by the coroner to asphyxiation, probably due to strangulation. The other was his friend Edward Smith, aged 14. He had been shot with a .22-caliber weapon and had gone missing the previous week after spending the evening at a skating rink with his girlfriend. Both dead boys were black. A story circulated that the two friends had fallen out with a third boy over drugs and the police investigation went little further.

On 4 September 1979, 14-year-old Milton Harvey was out riding his bicycle around the neighbourhood when he disappeared. The bike was found a week later. But Milton’s badly decomposed remains were not found until mid-November outside the city limits, miles from both his home and where the bike was found. A post mortem could not determine how he had died and, as there were no signs of violence, his death was not initially considered a homicide.

Nine-year-old Yusef Bell’s mother Camille sent him to the store on 21 October to buy tobacco for a neighbour. Witnesses saw him get into a blue car, thought to be that of Camille’s former husband. Camille made an emotional appeal to the abductor to return her child. But on 8 November Yusef’s body was found stuffed in a hole in the concrete floor of an abandoned elementary school. The coroner determined that he had been strangled manually by a powerful assailant. Yusef had been barefoot when he disappeared. Curiously, when he was found, the soles of his feet had been washed clean.

The death of Yusef Bell, by all accounts a gifted boy, seized the attention of the black community. City officials and civil rights leaders turned out for his funeral. Atlanta’s newly elected African-American mayor Maynard Jackson promised an exhaustive investigation of Yusef’s death. At that time, the four deaths were not considered connected – except by the fact that victims were all African-American youths and the murders had occurred in poor black neighbourhoods. However, Camille Bell and her supporters began to insist that the murders were racially motivated and that the Ku Klux Klan were behind them.

The spate of killings then took a grim new turn with the first female victim. Twelve-year-old Angel Lenair had gone missing on 4 March 1980. Six days later, she was found tied to a tree with her hands bound behind her. She had been sexually abused, strangled with an electrical cord, and a pair of panties, not her own, had been forced down her throat.

On 11 March, the day after Angel’s body was found, ten-year-old Jeffrey Mathis was sent to the store to buy cigarettes for his mother and disappeared. Again, a witness saw Jeffrey getting into a blue car, possibly a Buick. The driver was a white man. The witness said that he saw the man again some time later. This time the driver pulled a gun on him before speeding off. Jeffrey Mathis’s two brothers said that they had seen a blue Buick parked in the drive of a house Jeffrey visited. Schoolmates said that two black men in a blue car had tried to lure them away from school. They had noted the car’s licence plate number, but the police did little with the lead. The matter was handed over to the missing persons bureau, who assumed Jeffrey Mathis was a runaway. Eleven months later his badly decomposed body was discovered. With little more than a skeleton to go on, it was impossible to determine the cause of death.

Fourteen-year-old Eric Middlebrooks left home at 10.30 on the evening of 18 May after receiving a phone call from an unknown caller. His body was found early the following day a few blocks away. The cause of death – head wounds inflicted by a blunt instrument. Police believed that he had been a witness to a robbery.

With the police getting nowhere, Camille Bell, Willie Mae Mathis and Angel Lenair’s mother Venus Taylor, along with the Reverend Earl Carroll formed the lobby group the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders – STOP – to put pressure on the white establishment. Despite their best efforts the murder rate soared that summer. On 9 June, 12-year-old Christopher Richardson disappeared on his way to the local swimming pool. On 22 June, Latonya Wilson was snatched from her home, the night before her seventh birthday. Her body was found on 18 October, but was so badly decomposed that the cause of death could not be determined.

On 23 June, Aaron Wyche, aged ten, went missing. The next day, his body was found under a bridge where the highway passed over a railway track in DeKalb County. His neck was broken. His death was initially dismissed as an accident. It was assumed he had fallen off the bridge, even though the parapet was as high as the ten-year-old. Aaron was known to be afraid of heights and would not have climbed over the parapet unless he was fleeing from someone. Later he was added to the list of the victims of what STOP were now convinced was a serial killer.

On 6 July, nine-year-old Anthony Carter was playing hide and seek near his home when he vanished. His body was found the next day behind a warehouse less than a mile from his home. The cause of death was multiple stab wounds. Earl Terrill disappeared after being ejected from the South Bend Park swimming pool for misbehaviour on the afternoon of 30 July. Earl’s aunt got a call from a man she took to be a white southerner saying that he had got Earl. He was in Alabama and it would cost her $200 to get him back. The man said he would call back that Friday. He didn’t. Earl’s badly decomposed body was found on 9 January 1981, but again the skeletal remains rendered no clue to the cause of death. A convicted paedophile named John David Wilcoxen, who had been found in possession of thousands of pornographic photographs of children, lived across the road from the South Bend Park swimming pool. Witnesses claimed that Earl Terrill had visited Wilcoxen’s house on several occasions. The police dismissed the connection on the grounds that the pictures in Wilcoxen’s possession were of white boys.