World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (12 page)

In 1925 his job sent him back to Düsseldorf, to where his troubles had all begun. ‘The sunset was blood-red on my return,’ he said later. ‘I considered this to be an omen symbolic of my destiny’.

He started killing with what seemed an ever-increasing ferocity – animals, children, women and men. He clubbed them, stabbed them, strangled them with his bare hands. The police, following this trail of carnage, could see only one connecting link – the frenzied consumption of blood. The papers called the killer the ‘Düsseldorf Vampire’, and Kürten’s wife was so frightened of becoming a victim of ‘the Vampire’ that she asked her husband to escort her home from work each night.

Early in 1930 he slashed a five-year-old girl to death, yet a few weeks later he let his last potential victim go, after checking that she did not remember his address. But the girl had tricked him, and Kürten soon realized as much.

Kürten confessed to his wife, and persuaded her to give him up for the reward. At his trial he pleaded guilty to nine charges of murder and a host of other crimes.

Before his execution, he told his psychiatrist that he hoped to hear, for just a second or two, the sound of blood gushing from his own neck. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be the pleasure to end all pleasures’.

The East End Rackets

The Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, were probably the nearest London ever came to producing an indigenous Mafia. On the surface they were legitimate businessmen, the owners of clubs and restaurants haunted by the fashionable rich. But in reality they were racketeers and murderers, protected from prosecution by their reputation for extreme violence.

They were born in the London’s East End in 1933 – and soon had a reputation as fighters. Both became professional boxers and, after a brief stint in the army, bouncers at a Covent Garden nightclub. It was then that they started in the protection business, using levels of intimidation that were, to say the least, unusual for their time. Their cousin Ronald Hart later said of them:

‘I saw beatings that were unnecessary even by underworld standards and witnessed people slashed with a razor just for the hell of it.’

In 1956, Ronnie Kray was imprisoned for his part in a beating and stabbing in a packed East End pub, and judged insane. But three years later he was released from mental hospital, and the twins were back in business, cutting a secret swathe of violence through the British capital while being romanticized in the British press – along with people like actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp – as East-End-boys-made-good.

When they were arrested in 1965 for demanding money with menaces, a member of the British aristocracy actually stood up in the House of Lords and asked why they were being held for so long without trial. They were ultimately acquitted.

In the same year Ronnie, who was homosexual, committed his first known murder: of the chief lieutenant of the twins’ main rivals for criminal power in London, brothers Eddie and Charles Richardson.

George Cornell was shot in the head in another crowded East-End pub. But not a single witness was prepared to come forward. When Reggie heard the news of what his twin, known as ‘the Colonel,’ had been up to, he said:

‘Well, Ronnie does some funny things.’

Ronnie, though, was exultant at having got away with the killing and having sent out a message that he was above the law.

‘He was very proud. . .’

— said Hart,

‘and was constantly getting at Reggie and asking him when he was going to do his murder.’

Two years later Reggie chose his mark, a small-time robber and hard man called Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who was said to have bad-mouthed the twins. Reggie had McVitie ‘escorted’ from a Hackney jazz club to a nearby basement, where Reggie stabbed him to death as his brother shouted him on.

In 1969, after a long undercover investigation, the Krays and their henchmen were finally brought to justice, charged with these two murders and with a third: that of an escaped convict called Frank Mitchell, nicknamed the Mad Axe-Man. Though Mitchell’s murder was never proved, both twins were given life sentences, with a recommendation that they serve at least thirty years.

Their elder brother Charlie, who’d helped to get rid of McVitie’s body, was sentenced to ten years.

In 1979, while still in prison, Ronnie was once more declared insane and sent to a mental hospital. But the myth of the Krays as East-End-boys-made-good – men who never forgot a good turn and loved their old neighbourhood and their mother – continued to cling to them.

A feature film was made about their lives and their careers of crime – in that, too, they resembled the American Mafia in more ways than one.

When they died in prison, five years apart, there were massive turn-outs at their lavish East-End funerals.

A Fatal Falling Out

Computer-generated reconstructions are becoming a familiar feature of murder trials in the United States, but there is increasing concern that juries are accepting them as factual representations of what happened, rather than as just one possible scenario. The dangers of accepting computer-generated reconstructions as evidence was highlighted in 1991 at the trial of Californian pornographer James Mitchell.

Forty-year-old James was on trial for the murder of his younger brother Artie. There was no denying the fact that James had killed Artie, for the five shots that had left the hard-drinking, drug-taking strip-club owner lifeless in the bedroom of his San Francisco home had been caught on tape by a 911 operator.

The question was, had James planned the shooting, or was it committed in the heat of the moment? The distinction was critical as premeditated murder carried a mandatory life sentence in the state, whereas manslaughter would put him away for just five or six years. The pair were known to have had heated arguments that frequently resulted in an exchange of blows, but they had always managed to bury their differences before either had suffered a serious injury.

But on the 27 February 1991 it was different and their partnership was terminated, permanently.

At 10.15pm that night police arrived at the scene to find James pacing up and down outside the house in an excitable state, brandishing a .22 rifle and sporting a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster. Once he had been disarmed they went inside, where they discovered Artie’s body. He had been shot in the stomach, the right arm and in the right eye. Eight spent .22 shell casings were found nearby.

Crucial Details

At the trial the prosecution argued that the long space between shots, which could be clearly heard on the 911 tape, clearly demonstrated intent. Had it been a spontaneous shooting the shots would have been fired in quick succession.

Based on spectrograms of the shots, forensic acoustics expert Dr Harry Hollien was able to identify where each shot on the tape occurred. From this the prosecution were able to create a computer-generated video animation of the murder in which a figure representing Artie was shown being pursued by another – his attacker.

In court the film was accompanied by a commentary from Arizona criminalist Lucian Haag, who explained that the sequence of events had been determined by tracing the trajectory of the bullets to the impact points and reproducing any deflections in the crime lab. Haag had even gone to the trouble of buying a door like the one in the victim’s house and shooting at it so that he could measure the angle of deflection under controlled conditions.

Such thoroughness impressed the jury, but the defence successfully argued that, with so many bullets, there were thousands of possible variations and that the video animation was only one scenario, albeit the most likely.

The judge ruled that the video was to be treated as speculative, not definitive. It was not the job of the crime scene investigators to imagine the scene, but to present the facts and interpret the science.

Without a material witness to give evidence as to James Mitchell’s state of mind at the time of the shooting and testimony as to the sequence of events that led up to the fatal shooting, the jury could not be expected to find him guilty of first-degree murder. Consequently James was acquitted on the murder charge but found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail.

The Finger of Suspicion

Dr Sam Sheppard and his wife Marilyn were the image of the all-American couple. Dr Sam, as he was known locally, was an even-tempered young man of considerable personal charm with a profitable practice as an osteopath in Bay Village and a large executive-style home in a leafy suburb of Cleveland which the couple shared with their six-year-old son Chip. But their seemingly idyllic world was shattered when, on the night of 3 July 1954, Mrs Sheppard was found brutally beaten to death in the first-floor bedroom and her husband was accused of her murder.

Dr Sheppard claimed to have been asleep on the living room couch when he heard Marilyn cry out. Bolting up the stairs he had been confronted by a shadowy figure who struck him over the head. When he finally recovered his senses, he stated that he heard the intruder escaping out the back door and gave chase. There in the darkness he saw the silhouette of a bushy-haired man who wheeled around and struck a second disabling blow from which he did not recover until the police arrived.

From the moment the Coroner, Dr Samuel Gerber, was put on the case he began questioning Dr Sheppard’s version of events. To Gerber’s eyes the scene appeared to have been staged, with drawers pulled out of a bureau and neatly stacked on the floor, Dr Sheppard’s surgical bag emptied and placed in the hallway where it would catch the investigator’s eyes and a bag of valuables stashed in a bush at the bottom of the garden. Inside the bag police found the doctor’s blood-splattered self-winding watch which had stopped at 4.15am. Fingerprints had also been hastily erased, supporting the possibility that a third person had been present, but it seemed highly unlikely that an intruder could have failed to notice Dr Sheppard sleeping in the lounge and left him unmolested while he attacked his wife.

The finger of suspicion began to point to Dr Sheppard, and as the investigation dug deeper it emerged that both Sam and Marilyn Sheppard had had affairs. The whiff of scandal brought the local media baying for the doctor’s blood. While the inexperienced local investigators dragged their feet and tried to cover up the fact that they had contaminated the crime scene in their carelessness, the local press demanded that their prime suspect be arrested. Before the week was out the press were setting the agenda and the subsequent trial seemed to be a mere formality.

For reasons best known to himself, Dr Gerber let it be known that the murder weapon was a surgical instrument. And it was this more than any other single piece of evidence which sealed Sheppard’s fate.

It later transpired that the murder weapon had not been found and that the coroner had made his assumption based on a suspicious ‘shape’ impressed in the pillow next to the body.

One thing that might explain Dr Gerber’s stubborn refusal to face the facts was that he considered Dr Sheppard to be a thorn in his side. There was said to be personal animosity and distrust between the two medical men. Dr Sheppard was known to disapprove of the coroner’s approach to forensic investigation and so bruised pride may have been a factor in Gerber’s overlooking, and perhaps even suppressing, significant clues. It is known, for example, that evidence of forced entry at the doors to the basement was never presented in court. Furthermore, there were blood spots on the basement steps which had presumably dripped from the weapon as there were no indications the assailant had been injured.

Dr Gerber presented these blood spots as evidence of Dr Sheppard’s guilt. At that time there was no available method of determining whose blood had been found, only whether it was animal or human. But Dr Sam’s performance on the witness stand gave his defence counsel cause for concern. He recollected the horrific events with an almost academic detachment. When questioned about the events leading to the discovery of his wife’s battered body, he remarked, ‘I initiated an attempt to gather enough senses to navigate the stairs.’

Hardly the kind of tone one would expect of a bereaved husband.

Dr Sam’s poor performance, together with Dr Gerber’s testimony, helped to secure a conviction and a life sentence. However, the forensic evidence suggested that Sheppard might have been telling the truth. Although Marilyn had been repeatedly beaten until her face was unrecognizable the assailant had not used sufficient force to kill her. She had, in fact, drowned in her own blood. Dr Sheppard was a strong well-built man who could easily have killed someone with a single blow using a blunt weapon. Moreover, it is extremely unlikely that he would have bludgeoned his wife to death while their son slept in the next room, no matter how enraged he might have been. More revealing was the blood splatter on the wall and bedroom door to the left of the body which indicated spray from a weapon wielded by a left-handed assailant. Dr Sheppard was right-handed.

With such significant discrepancies a second trial was inevitable. At the retrial in 1964 the defence made much of Dr Gerber’s failure to find the murder weapon, casting doubt on his assertion that it had been a surgical instrument. Greater attention was paid to the significance of the blood splatter and the ‘flying blood’ spray found on the inside of Dr Sheppard’s watch strap, intimating that he had not been wearing it during the frenzied attack, but that it might have been in the possession of an intruder, as Sheppard had insisted.