The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (46 page)

Steven Ross then further muddied the waters by handing out an unsigned 44-point statement to the media. He claimed police had tried to coerce him into making false admissions about Weygers the day before the raid on the civil libertarian’s home, including suggesting that Ross delivered girls to the former mayor. Weygers had a reputation, when mayor, for making flirtatious or suggestive remarks to female reporters.

“The police made derogatory remarks about Peter Weygers and implied that I was involved in a homosexual relationship with him,” Ross wrote. “I denied that I was in a homosexual relationship with Peter Weygers and that he was not my boyfriend. The police alleged that Peter Weygers exerted an abnormal influence over me, which I denied. The police alleged that Peter Weygers gave me orders that I carried out, which I denied. The police then stated words to the effect that Peter Weygers ‘wanted’ young girls.”

The inability to apprehend the Claremont Killer is seen as a major embarrassment to the Western Australia Police and the “Macro Task Force” set up to investigate the murders has been disbanded and reformed several times. Public confidence has not been helped when several senior officers were implicated in corruption allegations by the Western Australia Police Royal Commission.

In October 2006, it was announced that Mark Dixie, a man on trial in the United Kingdom over the murder in 2005 of the 18-year-old model Sally Anne Bowman, is a prime suspect in the killings, and the Macro Task Force has requested DNA samples from Dixie to test against evidence taken during the enquiry.

Belgium’s Butcher of Mons

On 20 May 1998, Belgian police in the city of Ranst, outside Antwerp found the skeletal remains of what was thought to be seven bodies in a container, along with five human heads. They feared that this might be the reappearance of the “The Butcher of Mons”, a unidentified killer who had dumped 30 bags containing body parts of at least three women, possibly six, in places around the city of Mons, 60 miles away, in 1997.

The killer left police scientists a gruesome anatomical jigsaw puzzle. Some of the remains were so badly decomposed it was an almost impossible task to discover how many victims there were. The authorities were under intense pressure to solve the murders from Belgian Justice Minister Stephane de Clerck after the outcry that followed the bodies of four young girls discovered 20 miles away, victims of paedophile Marc Dutroux.

The killer, who plainly savoured their discomfort, played a grisly game with his pursuers, dumping the bags filled with body parts in places with chillingly evocative names. The first bags, containing 12 neatly-severed parts of an indeterminate number of arms and legs, were found on 22 March 1997 on the banks of the Fleuve Trouille – the River Jitters – a canal bordering Mons and neighbouring Cuesmes.

Two days later, a limbless upper torso was found on the banks of a tributary of the Fleuve Haine – River Hate – next to a road called Chemin de l’Inquietude – the Path of Worry. The limbs had been severed in the same way as those of another torso found floating in the Haine the previous July. The police have established that it was the work of the same killer.

The
gendarmerie
began an intensive search of Mons, using helicopter, sniffer dogs and infra-red equipment. Then on 12 April another two bags were found in a lay-by on the Rue du Depot – Deposit Road. A week later another was found on the Rue St Symphorien – Symphorien was a Christian martyr who was beheaded in AD 200 – at a place called La Poudrière – the Powderkeg – near Havré.

The killer left numerous clues which allowed a team of specialist psychiatrists to compile a profile. He is thought to be an intelligent, methodical, calculating and obsessive man, who takes pleasure in the ritualistic dismemberment of his victims and the careful distribution of their remains. Detectives believe that there might be a perverse religious motive for the killings. Mons is an ancient religious town with connections to a number of saints associated with decapitation.

A stone head of St John the Baptist can be found over the door of the oldest inn in Mons, which dates back to 1776. The inn was built by a monk, a member of the Catholic Brotherhood of St John the Beheaded. The order was established in the Middle Ages to escort condemned men to the scaffold. It still exists today. The head looks out over the Rue de la Clef – Road of the Key – a fact that investigators feel could be significant, given the clues the killer is volunteering. It may also be significant that relics of the decapitated St Symphorien are kept in a nearby church.

Two of the three victims whose names are known disappeared on a Sunday, and the third may also have done so, though no one seems to have noticed that she was missing.

“We have not ruled out that he is a member of a satanic sect,” said Didier Van Reusel of the public prosecutor’s department. “The treatment of the bodies is very methodical, which is often the case with Satanists involved in ritualistic killings.”

A song about the Butcher of Mons called “Bowels of Murder” appears on
Lovecraftian Dark
, the second album of the heavy-metal band Dawn of Relic.

It was initially thought that the killer was a surgeon or a butcher, due to the precision of the dissection. But further investigation revealed that the killer had not dismembered the bodies by hand. He ran his victims through an automatic sawing machine with several circular blades at 12-inch intervals – the kind of machine normally used for slicing chopping logs into planks. The severed limbs were exactly one foot long.

“There are not that many places you can carry out that operation, with the blood and the smell,” said Van Reusel. “And there are not that many people who own a machine like that.”

The killer appears to have chosen his victims from a group of transients, who congregate around Mons station and the string of cheap bars opposite. One of the victims was 43-year-old transexual Martine Bohn, a retired prostitute who had worked out of the bars. Having lost contact with her family years before, she disappeared on Sunday 21 July 1996 and it was her torso found floating in the Haine. Her breasts had been sliced off. It is thought that the killer may have been angry at discovering she was not a real woman.

A second victim was 33-year-old Jacqueline Leclercq, a mother-of-four who had separated from her husband. After losing custody of her children, she drifted into the station scene. She had disappeared on Sunday 23 January 1997.

A third victim was 21-year-old Nathalie Godart, who lived in a bedsit in Mons. Her young son had been taken into care. No one had reported her missing. The staff at the Intercity, the Metropole and the Café de la Gare, the bars opposite the station, knew her well.

“She was promiscuous, but not a prostitute,” said one bar owner.

The police are aware that the killer is playing a complex game with them. Tests indicate some of the first bags found on the bank of the Trouille had lain there undiscovered for months. They were only discovered only when the last bag dumped there hung conspicuously on a tree, drawing attention to it. The remains they contained were between one week and two years old which indicated that the killer had access to an industrial refrigeration unit.

The killer plainly enjoyed the publicity their discovery brought and he became more audacious. Succeeding bags were placed in highly visible places, with evocative names, at a time when the police search was already fully underway.

Psychiatrists believe the perpetrator relishes not just the killing but also the handling of the corpse. Each of the body parts found had been wrapped individually in its own white plastic bag which is then knotted tightly at the top. These white bags are then placed in the larger grey bags. Each grey bin liner has been tied tightly in the same fashion, and the top of the knot then snipped off with scissors – “very neatly, very precisely, the work of an obsessive,” said Van Reusel.

One man was questioned, but was released. He has since left Mons, and is no longer a suspect. All the authorities could do was await the next piece of the puzzle and keep Rue des Sinistres, or Sentier des Morts under surveillance.

The Butcher of Belize

In May 2006, Channel Five, a local television network in Belize, offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a paedophile serial killer who abused and killed at least five schoolgirls during a 16-month binge.

The first victim was 13-year-old Sherilee Nicholas, who disappeared in September 1998. A month later authorities found a body partially submerged in a ditch of water beside a feeder road near Mile 13 on the Western Highway. The body suffered more than 40 knife wounds and showed signs of rape. Investigators believe the girl tried to fight off her attacker. The child’s mother identified the body, but no clues could be found to identify the killer.

Soon after, 9-year-old Jay Blades disappeared. Then, in the northern town of Corozal, 13-year-old Rebecca Gilharry was found raped and strangled. Another child’s body was found in northern Belize and another girl was raped, beaten with a rock and left to die in the southern town of Dangriga. She lived to tell her tale to the police.

Fears grew in Belize City when 12-year-old Jackie Fern Malic vanished on 22 March 1999. Jackie’s sister told police that a family friend, 40-year-old mechanic Mike Williams, had offered to take the two girls for a ride before school, but they turned him down. Police questioned Williams and released him, only to arrest him later. Two days after she had disappeared, Jackie Malic’s body was found on a side road, a few miles away from where Sherilee Nicholas’s body was found. She had multiple stab wounds to the face, buttock, knee and upper left arm, and one of her arms had been severed. The coroner drew attention to the many similarities between the two deaths.

On the day of Jackie’s funeral, children lined the streets with signs demanding that the killer be caught. A Children’s Summit was convened and, in a phone-in programme on the radio, a little boy asked Prime Minister Said Musa: “Why are there special police to protect the tourists, but not the children?”

A week later, the curfew was imposed. No one under 17 was allowed out between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Wardens were stationed at all schools to monitor children and watch for suspicious characters. Parents began walking their children to school. This was quite a readjustment for the citizens of Belize. With a population of just 200,000, the quiet central American country had long been relatively free of sex crimes and murder. But with Williams now in jail charged in Jackie Malic’s death everyone thought the nightmare was over.

In June, a child’s skull and a few bone fragments were found along the Western Highway, near where the other victims had been located. It was assumed that Jay Blades been found at last. But next to the body was Sherilee Nicholas’s school bags. Fearing an error in identification, authorities exhumed Sherilee’s body against her mother’s wishes.

Meanwhile, in June, 10-year-old Karen Cruz disappeared from her home in Orange Walk, just north of Belize City, while her mother was on the front veranda. Her body was found the next day near her home. Newspapers reported suspicions regarding her uncle 38-year-old Antonio Baeza, who lived next door, and suggested he had been stalking the child. Baeza was arrested and charged with murder. But still the killings did not stop.

At the end of the month, nine-year-old Erica Wills went missing. Her body was found three weeks later. She too had been butchered. Found behind a quarry near Gracie Rock, a village 20 miles west of Belize City, her bones had been picked clean by vultures, but her mother recognized her daughter’s hair band and her Tweety Bird ring, and was able to identify the body. A thousand people turned out in Belize City late Monday for a candlelight vigil in memory of the victims and Williams was then released.

Then on 15 February 14-year-old Noemi Hernandez disappeared after her grandmother sent her to collect rent money from a tenant. Nine days later her mutilated remains were fished out of the water near the mouth of the Belize River by a Belize Defence Force Maritime Wing patrol boat. She was found headless and her entire left arm was missing. Like the other victims, she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed repeatedly. The similarities between the murders were very striking and lead police to believe it may have been the work of a serial killer, now dubbed Jack the Butcher. As this is the first case of serial killing to hit Belize, the police lacked the experience to deal with the situation and called on Scotland Yard and the FBI for help. It was hoped that Channel 5’s reward might help bring the culprit to justice.

The Boy Killers of Brazil

A Brazilian man accused of killing 42 boys in a series of macabre Satanic murders was sentenced to 20 years and eight months in jail on 25 October 2006 for one of the killings. Forty-one-year-old Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was found guilty of killing 15-year-old Jonathan Silva Vieira who disappeared in northern Brazil in December 2003. The bicycle mechanic still faces numerous other charges of murder killings and sexual abuse. The police in the Amazonian states of Maranhao and Para maintain that Chagas has confessed.

However, human rights groups following the case were reluctant to accept the police’s version of events and expressed reservations over the tactics used to secure Chagas’ confession. They also questioned previous police work and the future of three people already jailed or awaiting trial for carrying out some of the killings.

“We’ve been questioning the police’s work on this for 13 years, so we are naturally still a little suspicious,” said Nelma Pereira da Silva, head of a local children’s rights group who took the case to the Organization of American States in Washington. “We need to wait and see if this is for real.”

The police believe that Chagas performed black magic rituals before killing some of the boys. He sexually abused his victims and, in some cases cut off their genitals, before decapitating them and burying the bodies.

During the trial, Jonathan’s mother, Rita de Silva, told the court her son had said he was going to pick fruit with Chagas on the day he went missing.