When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (8 page)

Agra police began their investigations that same day and their suspicions immediately fell on Lieutenant Clark and Augusta Fullam. Their love affair had not gone unnoticed in the local community and they clearly had a motive for both murders. But the detectives assigned to the case could find no conclusive proof.

None, that is, until Inspector Smith called at Augusta Fullam's house and noticed a large metal box hidden under the bed. When he asked what was inside, Augusta turned bright red ‘and fell like a heap into a chair'.

Inspector Smith had the box prised open; inside there were 370 love letters that set down in great detail how Augusta and Lieutenant Clark had planned their terrible crime.

The ensuing trial proved a sensation – colonial India had never before seen such a spectacular double murder. Every sordid detail was splashed across both the Indian and British newspapers.

The two lovers were tried separately and both were convicted. Lieutenant Clark was hanged on Wednesday 26 March 1913. Augusta Fullam, who was pregnant at the time of the trial, was sentenced to life. She served just fifteen months before dying of heatstroke the following year.

‘My very own precious lovie,' she had written when she and Clark first started administering the arsenic, ‘don't you think our correspondence rather risky?'

But Lieutenant Clark assured her it was fine. He said they would never be caught.

 

PART VII

Big-Time Adventure

I was listening to the radio when [the newscasters] told about it. I cut my iron off and I run to my neighbors house and said: ‘Did you hear what was on the radio? My brothers have escaped from Alcatraz.'

MARIE WIDNER, SISTER OF ESCAPING PRISONERS, JOHN AND CLARENCE ANGLIN

 

19

By Balloon to the North Pole

At exactly 2.30 p.m. on 11 July 1897, a gigantic silk balloon could be seen rising into the Arctic sky above Spitsbergen. Inside the basket were three hardy adventurers, all Swedish, who were taking part in an extraordinary voyage.

Salomon Andrée was the instigator of the mission. Charismatic and confident, he managed to persuade Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel to accompany him on his historic balloon flight over the North Pole.

Andrée was confident of success. His balloon, the
Eagle
, used advanced hydrogen technology and he claimed to have developed a revolutionary steering system using drag-ropes.

A disastrous test flight suggested that Andrée's confidence was seriously misplaced. The much-vaunted rope-steerage system had numerous glitches and hydrogen was found to be seeping out of the balloon's 8-million little stitching-holes.

The expedition ought to have been abandoned before it even took off. But Andrée overruled all objections and the launch was scheduled for the second week of July.

The problems began within minutes of getting airborne. As the balloon drifted across the sea to the north of Spitsbergen, it was weighed down by the weight of the drag-ropes – so much so that at one point the balloon actually dipped into the water.

Andrée jettisoned 530 kilograms of ropes, along with 210 kilograms of ballast. This lightened the balloon so much that it now rose too high. The change in air pressure caused huge quantities of hydrogen to escape through the stitching-holes. Andrée remained optimistic, releasing a carrier pigeon with the message: ‘All well on board'.

This was far from true. The first ten hours of troubled flight were followed by forty-one hours in which the balloon, soaked in a rainstorm, flew so low that it kept bumping into the frozen sea.

The
Eagle
eventually crash-landed onto sea-ice some fifty hours after taking off from Spitsbergen. No one was hurt, but it was clear that the balloon would never fly again. The men were stranded, many miles from anywhere and lost in an Arctic wilderness.

They were well equipped with safety equipment including guns, sleds, skis, a tent and a small boat. Yet returning to the relative safety of Spitsbergen involved a gruelling march across shifting, melting ice.

The men spent a week at the crash site before setting out on their long hike. They had a reasonable quantity of food including meat, sausages and pemmican, but found it impossible to transport so much weight across the rucked-up ice. Much of the food had to be abandoned. Henceforth, they were to rely on hunting for their survival.

They left their makeshift camp on 22 July and initially headed for Franz Josef Land. But the ice soon became impassable so they headed instead towards the Seven Islands, a seven-week march, where there was known to be a depot of food.

The terrain was so gruelling that they were reduced to advancing on all fours. But they eventually reached a place where the sea-ice had melted sufficiently for them to use their collapsible boat.

‘Paradise!' wrote Andrée in his diary. ‘Large even ice floes with pools of sweet drinking water and here and there a tender-fleshed young polar bear!'

Their passage soon became impassable once again, forcing them to change direction. Aware that winter would soon be upon them, they built a hut upon an ice floe. But the ice broke up beneath them and they were lucky to struggle ashore onto desolate Kvitøya Island.

‘Morale remains good,' reported Andrée. ‘With such comrades as these, one ought to be able to manage under practically any circumstances whatsoever.' It was the last coherent message he ever wrote. Within a few days, all three men were dead.

Their fate was to become one of the great mysteries of Arctic exploration. What happened to them? They had shelter, food and ammunition and ought to have been able to keep themselves alive. In the absence of any news, the world's media began to speculate on their fate.

It was not until 1930, fully thirty-three years after the men were lost, that their remains were finally found. Far from answering questions, the discovery of their bodies only deepened the mystery.

The most plausible theory is that the men died of trichinosis, contracted after eating undercooked polar bear meat. They certainly had the symptoms of the disease and larvae of the
Trichinella
parasite were found in a polar bear carcass at the site. But recent scientific evidence has thrown doubt on this theory.

Other suggestions include vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear liver, lead poisoning from the food cans or carbon dioxide poisoning from their Primus stove.

By the time they struggled ashore they were living off scant quantities of canned goods from the balloon stores, along with portions of half-cooked polar bear meat.

They were suffering from foot pains and debilitating diarrhoea and were constantly cold and exhausted. Indeed they were so weary on their arrival at Kvitøya Island that they left much of their valuable equipment down by the water's edge.

Nils Strindberg, the youngest, was the first to die. His corpse was wedged into a crack in the cliff. Analysis of his clothing suggests he was killed by a polar bear.

The other two men seem to have weakened dramatically in the days that followed Strindberg's death. As the Arctic winter struck in earnest, they lost the will to live.

It will never be known how many days they survived in their makeshift Arctic shack. By the time they were eventually found, all that remained was their diaries, a few spools of undeveloped film and a heap of bleached bones.

 

20

Escape from Alcatraz

It was a routine inspection by the prison warders. On the morning of 12 June 1962, the guards at Alcatraz high security prison made their morning check on the prisoners in their cells.

When they came to Cell Block B, they quickly realized that something was not quite right. The men were in their beds, but they were showing no signs of life.

The guards unlocked the cells and were stunned by what they found. Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin were missing; in their place were elaborately made papier-mâché heads with real hair and painted eyes. Three of Alcatraz's most dangerous prisoners had escaped.

Neither the guards nor the other prisoners could believe that they'd managed to get away. Alcatraz, after all, was one of the world's most closely guarded prisons. Situated on a rocky island in San Francisco Bay, it was washed by cold and hazardous waters, making escape almost impossible.

In its twenty-nine years as a federal prison, from 1934 to 1963, no one had ever made it out alive. Forty-one inmates tried. Of those, twenty-six were recaptured, seven were shot dead and at least three were known to have drowned.

This proved no deterrent for the three new escapees. In fact, they saw the island's isolation as a challenge.

All three men were hardened criminals. Frank Morris had first been convicted at the age of thirteen. Since that time, he'd been involved in a number of serious crimes ranging from armed robbery to dealing in narcotics. He had been transferred to Alcatraz in 1960.

John Anglin was also an infamous criminal. He'd robbed the Columbia Alabama Bank in 1958, together with his two brothers. It had earned him a thirty-five-year prison sentence.

Clarence Anglin had been involved in a number of other bank robberies and had also been caught escaping from the Atlanta State Penitentiary. It was decided to send him to Alcatraz, in order to prevent him from making any more escape attempts.

All of the men were highly resourceful and extremely motivated. They discovered that there was an unguarded three-foot-wide utility corridor behind their cells. This led to an air vent and thence to the outside world. The prisoners began to chisel away at the moisture-damaged concrete. For tools, they used metal spoons stolen from the canteen and an electric drill that they improvised from the motor of a stolen vacuum cleaner. They did most of the work during music hour, when the noise of accordions covered the sound of their hacking at the concrete.

They also made dummy heads from soap, toilet paper and real hair in order to fool the guards; there were constant checks on the prisoners throughout the night.

It took a year to tunnel through the wall of the service tunnel. The men then had to steal a long piece of cord in order to reach the manhole that covered the air vent. When they finally lifted the manhole cover, they replaced the metal bolts with fake ones made of soap. Finally, on the night of 11 June, all was ready. It was time to make their escape.

Everything went exactly to plan. They crawled into the utility corridor, climbed the air vent and reached the prison roof. Then they clambered down to the rocky ground and began pumping air into a raft that they'd previously made from rubber raincoats. They'd even managed to make oars.

What happened next is a complete mystery. The three men disappeared and were never seen again. They were never captured, despite an extraordinary FBI manhunt, and nor were their bodies ever found.

Their raft was washed up on the following day on Angel Island, some two miles from Alcatraz, and there were footprints leading away from the raft. But there the trail went cold. Did they drown? Did they get away? These are questions that no one has ever been able to answer.

A recent investigation discovered that a car was stolen on the very night of the escape; the prisoners had always intended to make their getaway by car. But despite an exhaustive investigation, detectives are no closer to solving the mystery.

If they survived, the escapees would now be in their eighties. This does not mean that the case has been closed. According to US Marshal Michael Dyke, ‘There's an active warrant and the Marshals Service doesn't give up looking for people … There's no proof they're dead, so we're not going to quit looking.'

And so the search goes on. The FBI website requests anyone with any information regarding the prison's greatest escape to call (415) 436-7677.

 

21

A Lonely Trek Through the Andes

There was a sickening crunch and a violent jerk. The right wing of the plane was ripped off by the mountain peak and flung backwards into the rear of the fuselage. The plane, wildly out of control, smashed into a second peak, which tore off the left wing.

Inside the cabin, the terrified passengers expected the shattered plane to plunge them to their deaths. But the plane's crash-landing miraculously spared some of those on board. The fuselage hit a snow-covered mountain slope and slid downwards before coming to a halt in a deep drift.

As a wall of silence descended over the wreckage, the injured and groaning survivors came to their senses. They were lost in the wilds of the High Andes. But they were alive.

There had been forty-five people on board Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 when it took off on Friday 13 October 1972. Among the passengers was the Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo, en route to Chile.

As the injured survivors clambered from the wreckage they found that thirty-eight of them were still alive, although several were suffering from such injuries that they would clearly not survive for long.

Their pitiful plight soon struck home. They were lost in the snowbound Andes at an altitude of more than 3,600 metres with no food or winter clothing. Worse still, they lacked any medical supplies – a major handicap given that many of them were suffering from wounds sustained in the crash.

They gathered together the remaining food on board. It did not amount to much: some snacks, a little chocolate and a few bottles of wine. There was nothing to eat on the windswept mountains, nor any animals to hunt.

‘At high altitude, the body's caloric needs are astronomical…' wrote Nando Parrado, one of the survivors. ‘We were starving in earnest, with no hope of finding food, but our hunger soon grew so voracious that we searched anyway … Again and again we scoured the fuselage in search of crumbs and morsels … Again and again I came to the same conclusion – unless we wanted to eat the clothes we were wearing, there was nothing here but aluminium, plastic, ice, and rock.'