The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (28 page)

“It’s clear they have deprived him of his right to a fair trial,” said Maria Chaisson. She believed that the police were desperate to prove they had caught the serial killer. “They wanted to get a conviction, but whoever did this is certainly still out there.”

Prosecutors admit they have no physical evidence to connect Ellwood to the place the bodies of Cheryl Lewis and Delores Mack were found in February 1993. On 24 February 1999, they dropped one of two murder charges against Ellwood after Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee admitted that Ellwood was in Ohio when Dolores Mack was murdered and could not have committed the crime. This completely undermined Sharon Jones’ testimony and left the prosecution with only Ellwood’s disputed confession, the tales of jailhouse snitches and the testimony of a prostitute who sold drugs to Ellwood and claimed that, when she got in his car, he suddenly became very angry and said to her: “You know what I do to bitches like you? I kill them.”

“This is the biggest railroad case ever in the state of Louisiana,” said Ellwood.

Despite four years work by the task force made up of the FBI, New Orleans’ police and four sheriff’s departments, it seems the killer remained at large. The task force eventually disbanded, leaving the perpetrator free to kill again.

Oklahoma City’s OKC Serial Killer

The dismembered bodies of at least four women found in Oklahoma City between 1976 and 1995, are thought to belong to victims of the mysterious “OKC Serial Killer”. Missing body parts made identification of the victims impossible.

The pieces of the first body were found scattered over several blocks near the Capitol in 1976. The fourth body was found during the ground work in preparation for the construction of the Centennial Expressway in 1985. None of the victims matches women who have been reported missing.

On 22 April 1995, the body of a female Native American and Hispanic was found in a shallow grave on an abandoned stretch of highway 50 miles west of Oklahoma City. The head, feet and hands were missing, again making identification almost impossible. The authorities believe that the perpetrator could be reactivated the “OKC Serial Killer” as the method of dismemberment is similar.

Oradell, N.J.’s Doctor X

Publicity surrounding the suspicious deaths of patients in the Michigan Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, discussed above, reopened a ten-year-old case in New Jersey. Over a ten-month period, beginning in December 1965, some 13 patients died in similar circumstances at Riverdell Hospital, a small osteopathic facility in suburban Oradell, just eight miles from Manhattan. Most of them had had routine surgery and were well on their way to recovery when they died of unrelated causes. A doctor was suspected, but an investigation in 1966 failed to produce enough evidence to bring charges.

Then in 1976, prompted by what he said were “post-Watergate pangs of conscience”, a well-informed source, thought to be a member of the hospital’s staff, became “Deep Throat” to
New York Times
reporter Myron Farber. Armed with inside knowledge, Farber began questioning survivors, doctors and other interested parties. He found inconsistencies in the testimony of the surgeon originally suspected and compiled 4,000 pages of notes on the case. But because the man had never been charged and still practised medicine in New Jersey, when the
New York Times
ran the story he was referred to as “Doctor X”.

The Ann Arbor case also stirred the interest of Bergen County Prosecutor Joseph C. Woodcock and he was impressed by the evidence Farber had unearthed. However, he knew that to press charges against Doctor X he would need a much stronger case than had been established in 1966. Back then several staff physicians had noted that Dr X had been on duty near many of the victims around the time they died, though none of the 13 was his patient.

Nine cases attracted particular suspicion. The first involved 73-year-old Carl Rohrbeck, who was admitted for a hernia operation on 12 December 1965 and died the next day due to “coronary occlusion” – a blockage of the coronary artery. Four-year-old Nancy Savino was admitted on 19 March 1966 to have her appendix removed, and died two days later due to “undetermined physiological reaction”. Twenty-six-year-old Margaret Henderson died on 23 April, after exploratory surgery which proceeded satisfactorily. Edith Post, aged 62, was admitted for surgery on 15 May, dying two days later of undetermined causes. Sixty-four-year-old Ira Holster underwent gall bladder surgery at Riverdell on 12 July and died without apparent cause seventeen days later. Fifty-nine-year-old Frank Biggs was suffering from an ulcer when he entered Riverdell on 20 August. A week later he was dead. Mary Muentener, aged 80, underwent surgery on her gall bladder on 25 August. She died seven days later. Seventy-year-old Emma Arzt also also had gall bladder surgery on September 18, dying five days later. And 36-year-old Eileen Shaw gave birth by Caesarean section on 18 October, but died on the 23rd.

Hospital administrators had launched an investigation on 1 November 1966, after a Riverdell surgeon found 18 vials of curare – most of them empty – in Dr X’s hospital locker. Dr X told Guy W. Calissi, the County Prosecutor in 1966, that he was using the muscle relaxant for experiments on “dying dogs” in his spare time and claimed that other doctors were trying to frame him. But Calissi had been told that it was impossible to detect curare in tissue long after death, so he dropped the case.

However, forensic science had moved on by 1976. Prosecutor Woodcock got permission to exhume five of the bodies and sent tissue samples to specialists who used new detection techniques that could identify toxins in amounts weighing only a trillionth of a gram. Traces of curare had definitely been found in the body of four-year-old Nancy Savino and possibly in two others.

The Bergen County authorities then named Dr X as 48-year-old Dr Mario E. Jascalevich, who had immigrated from Argentina ten years earlier. In May 1976, he was charged with five counts of murder and was forced to surrender his medical licence pending the resolution of the case. Meanwhile, Farber secured a book contract with Doubleday for an advance of $75,000.

Dr Jascalevich hired Raymond Brown, then one of the most well-known trial lawyers in the US, to defend him. Brown went after Farber, calling him “greedy and ambitious”, and repeatedly citing Farber’s advance. He then attempted to subpoena Faber’s notes. Farber and the
New York Times
refused to hand them over, saying that they owed a duty of confidentiality to the journalist’s source. Farber insisted that he had no information of crucial bearing on the case, nothing that could be used to establish Jascalevich’s innocence or guilt. But the judge said he would be the judge of that and demanded that the notes be handed over to the court, so he could read them
in camera
before deciding whether they should be turned over to the defence. Farber refused to comply and The
New York Times
was fined $100,000 for refusing to obey a court order, plus another $5,000 a day until the notes were handed over. Farber still refused to part with his notes. In consequence, he was jailed for a day in July 1978, then for another 27 days in August, and once again in October. As the reporter languished behind bars, the doctor went on trial for the murder of Rohrbeck, Savino, Henderson, Biggs and Arzt.

The prosecution maintained that Jascalevich had committed the murders to discredit his colleagues whose abilities he had little time for. The animosity, it seems, was mutual. The defence maintained that medical experts had conspired with the prosecutor to bring the case. Brown maintained that the patients had, in fact, died of natural causes and general malpractice by other doctors at the hospital. The trial lasted for 34 weeks.

The trial judge directed an acquittal on two of the five murders as the prosecution had failed to prove the presence of curare in those two bodies. The jury was then asked to decide on the three victims. After just three hours’ deliberation, the jury found Jasccalevich not guilty of all charges.

The case had cost the
Times
more than $1 million, including $250,000 in fines. New Jersey’s legislature, appalled at the imprisonment of a reporter, toughened its shield law to protect journalists. However, Farber’s case divided journalists. The executive editor of the
New York Times
, A. M. Rosenthal, maintained: “The First Amendment guarantees the right to print the news, but without the right to gather the news, the right to print has very little meaning.” Others pointed out that the case pitted the First Amendment’s freedom of the press against a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to evidence for his defence. Carl Bernstein, one of the two journalists responsible for unearthing the Watergate scandal, pointed out that, when someone was on trial for their life, freedom of the press was not absolute.

At the end of the trial, Mario Jascalevich returned to his native Argentina, where he died of a cerebral haemorrhage in September 1984. But if he was not the killer, whoever was responsible for those 13 mysterious deaths in Riverdell Hospital in 1966 is still at large.

Philadelphia’s Frankford Slasher

The Philadelphia district of Frankford is older than the city itself. First settled by Swedes in the 1660s, the village became known for its main road, King’s Highway, which later served as the primary route between Philadelphia and New York. Horse-drawn carriages transported members of the Continental Congress along it in pre-Revolutionary days. The Jolly Post Inn served as a popular way station. George Washington is said to have slept there and legend has it that it was at the Jolly Post that the founding fathers decided to let Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Later Frankford became the home of the local mill-owners. It had its own symphony orchestras and a football team – the Frankford Yellowjackets, which eventually became the Philadelphia Eagles. And travelling circuses wintered there.

Then in 1922, the elevated railway – the El – arrived, turning Frankford into a suburb. At first this only served to increase the area’s prosperity, but by the 1970s, Frankford had become the run-down, crime-ridden inner-city area chosen by Sylvester Stallone as the backdrop for his 1976 movie
Rocky
. Then came a series of murders that would taint the name of Frankford to this day.

The story began on 19 August 1985, when 52-year-old Helen Patent was last seen by her ex-husband Kermit when she left the house they still shared 12 miles from Frankford in Parkland, in neighbouring Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A well-known habitué of Frankford, few people knew that she lived outside town.

A week later the body of a middle-aged woman turned up in the rail yard of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Railway workers found the dead woman around 8.30 a.m. on 26 August 1985. She was naked from the waist down. Her legs were opened so her genitalia were exposed and her blouse was pulled up to show off her breasts. She had been stabbed in the head, chest and right arm numerous times. There was also a deep gash across her abdomen, exposing her internal organs. Her body was identified the following day by her ex-husband. A post mortem revealed that she had been sexually assaulted, but she had been stabbed so many times it was impossible to discover which wound had actually killed her. The motive for her murder was not immediately obvious. A regular in local bars and, the newspapers later speculated, possibly a casual prostitute, she might easily have been picked up by a stranger who raped and murdered her.

On 3 January 1986, 68-year-old Anna Carroll was found dead in her apartment in the 1400 block of Ritner Street. It was a cold winter’s day, but the door to her apartment was found open. She had been stabbed six times in the back and was left lying on the floor of the bedroom with the kitchen knife still in her. The body was naked from the waist down and there was a gaping Jack-the-Ripper-style gash from her groin to her breastbone made after death, as if the killer intended to eviscerate the corpse.

Although Anna Carroll’s apartment was ten miles from the rail yard where Helen Patent’s body had found, they were both regulars in bars in the Frankford area – particularly the Golden Bar, known to one and all as “Goldie’s”, near the El station on the 5200 block of Frankford Avenue, as King’s Highway had become known. Both murders seem to have happened at night. Both involved numerous stab wounds. Both women were naked from the waist down and both corpses were opened with a post mortem gash. This lead the authorities to believe that they had both been struck down by the same killer – whom the newspapers would soon dub the Frankford Slasher.

The next victim was 64-year-old Susan Olszef, who was also found in her apartment. She lived on Richmond Street, just three miles from the SEPTA rail yard. She, too, had been stabbed six times in the back. And she was also a regular at Goldie’s.

The problem was that Frankford was an area teeming with nightlife. It was full of strangers who turned up during the hours of darkness and were, perhaps, never seen again. It was an area where it was hard to track witnesses and where it was easy to commit an anonymous murder. The police came up with no positive lead and, as the murders had all occurred in different parts of the city, they began to doubt that they were related.

Then at 7.30 a.m. on 8 January 1987, the body of 28-year-old Jeanne Durkin was found by a restaurant employee under a fruit and vegetable stall on a Pratt Street lot west of Frankford Avenue, just a block from the rail yard where Helen Patent had been found. In and out of mental institutions, Durkin was homeless and lived on the streets, sheltering most nights in the doorway of an abandoned bakery just two doors from Goldie’s, even dropping in for a little warmth on a cold night. Found lying in a pool of her own blood, which had been splattered up the side of the fruit stand and a nearby fence, she had been stabbed 74 times in the chest, back and buttocks. Her body was naked from the waist down and her legs spread. The post mortem showed that she had been sexually assaulted.

It was now clear that a serial killer was at large in Philadelphia and the newspapers began demanding that the police catch the Frankford Slasher. Unfortunately, the Slasher’s murders were quickly upstaged. On 24 March 1987, a young black prostitute named Josefina Rivera turned up at a Philadelphia police station, claiming that she had escaped from a filthy basement on North Marshall Street owned by Gary Heidnik, where he had kept her and a number of other women as sex slaves. He had already killed two of them by maltreatment. The police obtained a search warrant, released the women and arrested Heidnik, who was convicted of the two murders in 1988. He died by lethal injection in 1999.