Guns in the basement

Peter Louis Alphon is ‘a bit of a Del Boy character’. He admits he hasn’t been out of his hotel room for several days but says he’s not been involved in the A6 murder. He says that on the night of the killing he was staying at a different hotel – ‘a Maida Vale dosshouse’ - The Vienna Hotel.On 11 September, a hotel worker at the Vienna Hotel, William Nudds, finds two gun cartridges in a basement guest room.The cartridges are tested. Ballistics match them to the murder weapon.The hotel manager confirms Alphon had stayed at the Vienna.

ACOTT & OXFORDSuperintendent Robert Acott and Detective Sergeant Oxford are in charge of the case. Their prime suspect, Peter Louis Alphon, fits the profile.But he has an alibi…Alphon says he was with his mother. The police put him in an identity parade.The paralysed Valerie Storie fails to pick him out. In fact, she goes straight past him and picks an innocent airman who was there just to make up the numbers.So the police focus on the occupant in the Vienna Hotel before Alpon. The register lists him as ‘Mr J.Ryan.’The details of J. Ryan are published in the newspapers. A nationwide search is launched. Then a man from Ireland rings to say he’s had a man staying with him called J. Ryan. As this J.Ryan wasn’t a good writer, he’d asked the man to write some postcards for him. One was for the man’s mother: Mary Hanratty.Aware that he’s now a wanted man, Hanratty rings the police three times to tell them they’re after the wrong person.Like Alphon, he says he has an alibi: He was in Liverpool on the night of the murder.“Acott and Oxford come round to my house, and said to my mother and father that Jimmy was wanted for car thieving, some cock and bull story, like that. And then, next time he come, I thought, it’s something bigger than that...then he said it – we want to enquire about the A6 murder.”Michael Hanratty, James’ brother“The A6 murder was a sensational murder. It went to the heart of post-war England. ...we’re not talking about the late Sixties...by which time the Krays and everybody are well-known in popular culture. We’re talking about 1961. And here is a cold-blooded murder, nearly a double murder. A gun has been used at a time when gun violence was almost unheard of...the police were under a great deal of pressure.” David Wilson 

On 11 October, Hanratty is arrested in Blackpool.In London, Alcott and Oxford interrogate him. Hanratty says he has an alibi. He was in Liverpool with three friends. But he won’t name them.So the police ask Valerie Storie to do another identity parade.Hanratty has since tried to disguise himself by dying his hair again:“he didn’t do a very good job of it and it came out bright orange. He actually looked like a Belisha beacon. And in the identity parade, the police themselves at one stage thought, this is unfair. We have to give them all skull caps or hats, so that he doesn’t stand out like this. But they didn’t.”John EddlestonThe suspect all have to repeat the phrase used by the killer; “I’m thinking”. Hanratty has a Cockney accent, like the killer had, and so pronounces it as “I’m finking.”One of the two gentlemen cut up by the Morris Minor also identifies Hanratty as the driver.With two positive identifications, six months after the murder, Hanratty is charged with murder.

Scene of the Crime

On 7 August 1985 at 3.26am Bamber rang the police to report that his father had just phoned frantically to say Sheila was going berserk with a semi-automatic rifle.

When the police broke in to the farmhouse they found several bodies and a scene of near carnage. Neville’s corpse, bludgeoned and shot, lay downstairs in a pool of blood. It appeared that he had been shot upstairs but had been beaten as he struggled to the kitchen to summon help.

June's bullet-riddled body was in a bedroom and Sheila's twins had each been shot several times in the head while in their sleep, one of them still sucking his thumb. Sheila, who was also in a bedroom, had been shot in the throat and was clutching a .22 rifle and a bible.

Sheila had a long documented history of illness and it seemed clear to the police that she had shot her parents, children and then finally herself. When Bamber was interviewed at the scene of the crime he appeared genuinely distressed and was comforted by an officer and given tea and whiskey.

So convinced were the police by Bamber’s insistence that his sister perpetrated the dreadful act, that they even agreed to burn carpets and bedding in the house at Bamber’s request. Soon the press were reporting the sensational story.

‘Bambi’ had always wanted fame as a model and ironically she had now won it, briefly, on the front pages of the tabloids as an alleged mass murderer.

Killer cruising

‘From coyotes and wolves to bobcats and lions, creatures who prey on other, weaker animals tend to be highly territorial, confining their kills to a specific hunting ground. The same holds true for most serial killers. Like their four legged counterparts, these human predators generally commit their atrocities within a particular area.’Harold Schechter ‘The Serial Killer Files’Gary Ridgway’s first five victims are found in or near the Green River (a 65 mile length of river in Washington state), and his nickname is born.He targets mainly runaways, drug addicts and prostitutes.“I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex...I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”(Gary Ridgway)

He picks up his targets when driving and either drives them home or somewhere close to where he’ll eventually dispatch them.To place a girl or woman at her ease, so she doesn’t suspect what’s about to happen, he often reassures her by showing a photo of his son and then talks affectionately about him. Now calmed, he has sex with her. And then, when finished, he goes behind her, and strangles her.At first he just uses his arm. But too often his victim manages to inflict defensive wounds, and such regular cuts and bruises could arouse suspicion. So he starts to use whatever is to hand.“Choking is what I did and I was pretty good at it”(Gary Ridgway)He discards their bodies in ‘clusters’ so that he can return to areas and relive the experiences. This was his ‘comfort zone’.He sometimes returns to the bodies to have sex with them.

"Glasgow Kiss"

‘Can yer Maw sew? Get her tae stitch that!’The gangs became infamous for their use of the straight or open razor-one where the blade folds into the handle. But the intention more often than not wasn’t to kill. It was intended to disfigure by slicing open the face. And it wasn’t just razors they used. They used coshes, hatchets, hammers, sharpened bike chains, petrol bombs, and if they ran out of those, there were always the razor blades stitched into their caps and lapels. And as some ambushes started with the chucking of human waste, it can be said that they would use literally anything.A small consolation to the slum dwellers of Glasgow was that the gangs had a code where only other gang members were targets.But crossfire casualties were not uncommon.On the afternoon of the 3 March 1934 a group of about 500 blue scarf, rosette wearing Rangers supporters were gathered at Bridgeton Cross station. They were waiting for a train to take them to the match. But among them was a hardcore of Billy Boys. Then onto the platform arrived a train carrying Celtic supporters. The two sides hurled nothing more than abuse until a Billy Boys man called John Traquair burst onto the train. He set upon the first men he could find–slashing one with a razor and punching another.

A police manhunt ensued and John Trequair was charged with mobbing, assault and rioting. Found guilty, his sentence surprised everyone used to lenient sentences for Protestants. He was jailed for four years. A 40,000 petition appealing achieved nothing. It was a sign of things to come as both police and the judiciary cracked down hard.Billy continued to spark gang violence by marching his gang into Conk strongholds. After one bruising encounter in Norman Street, nearly every Billy Boy was injured, either by the Conks, or the police. The only Billy Boy to escape without injury was the big drum player. He had hid inside his instrument.But such blatant public battles were starting to concern the authorities. Sectarian violence was about to be dealt with at street level by the gangbuster, Percy Sillitoe.

Patients dying at a high rate

The local undertaker noticed that Dr Shipman’s patients seemed to be dying at an unusually high rate, and exhibited similar poses in death; most were fully clothed and usually sitting up or reclining on a sofa. He was concerned enough to approach Shipman about this directly, who reassured him that there was nothing to be worried about. Later, another medical colleague, Dr Susan Booth, also found the similarity disturbing and the local coroner’s office were alerted. They in turn contacted the police.A covert investigation followed but Shipman was cleared, as it appeared that his records were in order. The inquiry failed to contact the General Medical Council, or check criminal records, which would have yielded evidence of Shipman’s previous record. Later, a more thorough investigation revealed that Shipman altered the medical records of his patients to corroborate their causes of death.

Hiding behind his status as a caring, family doctor, it is almost impossible to establish exactly when Shipman began killing his patients, or indeed exactly how many died at his hands, and his denial of all charges did nothing to assist the authorities. Indeed, his killing spree was only brought to an end thanks to the determination of Angela Woodruff, the daughter of one of his victims, who refused to accept the explanations given for her mother’s death.Kathleen Grundy, an active, wealthy 81-year-old widow, was found dead in her home on 24 June 1998, following an earlier visit by Shipman. Woodruff was advised by Shipman that an autopsy was not required, and Kathleen Grundy was buried in accordance with her daughter’s wishes.Woodruff was a solicitor, and had always handled her mother’s affairs, so it was with some surprise that she discovered that another will existed, leaving the bulk of her mother’s estate to Dr Shipman. Woodruff was convinced the document was a forgery and that Shipman had murdered her mother, forging the will to benefit from her death. She alerted the local police, where Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles quickly came to the same conclusion on examination of the evidence.Kathleen Grundy’s body was exhumed, and a post-mortem revealed that she had died of a morphine overdose, administered within three hours of her death, precisely within the timeframe of Shipman’s visit to her. Shipman’s home was raided, yielding medical records, an odd collection of jewellery, and an old typewriter which proved to be the instrument upon which Grundy’s forged will had been produced.It was immediately apparent to the police, from the medical records seized, that the case would extend further than the single death in question, and priority was given to those deaths it would be most productive to investigate, namely victims who had not been cremated, and who had died following a home visit by Shipman, which were given priority.Shipman had urged families to cremate their relatives in a large number of cases, stressing that no further investigation of their deaths was necessary, even in instances where these relatives had died of causes previously unknown to the families. In situations where they did raise questions, Shipman would provide computerised medical notes that corroborated his cause of death pronouncements.Police later established that Shipman would, in most cases, alter these medical notes directly after killing the patient, to ensure that his account matched the historical records. What Shipman had failed to grasp was that each alteration of the records would be time stamped by the computer, enabling police to ascertain exactly which records had been altered.Following extensive investigations, which included numerous exhumations and autopsies, the police charged Shipman with 15 individual counts of murder on 7 September 1998, as well as one count of forgery.

“Rape is not a crime, it’s a state of mind, murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure.”            -Ian Brady's notebook

PAULINE READE, 16

On the night of 12 July 1963, 16-year-old pretty Pauline Reade became Brady and Hindley’s first victim. Pauline was on her way to a local dance. Hindley persuaded her to get in her car. She said she needed help finding a lost glove and offered to give her some music records if she did. Hindley drove Pauline to Saddleworth Moor. Brady followed on his motorbike.According to Brady, Hindley joined in with the sexual abuse and torture that followed.Brady first raped Pauline. She was beaten and stabbed. He then went behind her and cut her throat so hard it looked to Hindley like she’d been decapitated. And then they buried her.On returning, they carefully washed the car down to remove any forensic traces. The murder weapon and all their clothes were burned.But instead of this cementing the killer’s relationship, Brady cooled to Hindley. He started visiting a gay pub in Manchester, the Rembrandt.When he decided he needed to kill again, he brought Hindley a music record, ’24 hours from Tulsa.’ The purchase of records would become part of their pre-murder ritual.Brady told Hindley he wanted to go for someone younger. Pauline had put up too much resistance. 

JOHN KILBRIDE, 12

Four months later, on the Saturday afternoon of 23 November 1963, 12-year-old John Kilbride disappeared from the vicinity of the marketplace in Ashton-Under-Lyne. The eldest of four brothers, his family described him as a pleasant lad, often to be heard singing and whistling. Photos of the boy in his school uniform show him with a hint of a cheeky smile.“I had this terrible feeling that something had happened to him right away because he wasn’t the kind of boy who would leave home for any reason.”-Mother of John KilbrideHis family never saw him again.Brady raped him and then killed him. After killing John, Brady shook his fist at god. His sense of elation quickly evaporated. All his years of intellectual rejection of the idea of an omnipotent being were shown to be a joke as his own instinctual reactions demonstrated he believed in one.Brady returned to their car with one of John’s shoes. As with a lot of other evidence, Brady would later burn it.When John’s grave was finally discovered, it was partly through his remaining shoe that his family would be able to identify their missing John.Smiling, swaggering photos of Hindley and Brady above their victim’s graves would reveal the boy’s final resting place.“...they subsequently take photographs of Hindley on the grave where John Kilbride has been buried. And this is the first real example I can think of where trophies are taken. The photograph becomes a trophy.”Professor David Wilson, CriminologistThe photos were also grave markers for Brady. He would develop the photos back home in his dark room.

KEITH BENNETT, 12

On 16 June 1964, 12-year-old Keith Bennett disappeared whilst on the way to his grandmother’s house. Again, Hindley had lured him into her car and driven him to the Moors.Brady took Keith to a gully next to a stream. He then raped the 12-year-old boy. After, he strangled him. The pair buried his body.Keith’s disappearance wasn’t noted until the next day. A massive police search revealed no clues.Brady was methodical. He has a forensic checklist to go through for each murder. He would brush down coats to remove fibres and afterwards, he would count every button.The authorities thought the disappearances ‘unrelated’.“One of Brady’s loves was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche, of course, is famous for writing about man and superman. Here’s Brady, having committed three murders of three children, in the local community, and has not been caught. He must have thought of himself as being all-powerful. He’s not just a man – he’s superman.”Professor David Wilson

LESLEY ANN DOWNEY, 10

On the afternoon of Boxing Day, 1964, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey disappeared from a local fairground, and again a huge police effort, bolstered by volunteers, unearthed no clues as to her whereabouts. Inevitably, her stepfather came under suspicion.In fact, Lesley had been snatched from the fair and taken back to Hindley’s house.‘DAD WILL YOU TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF ME’

Lesley was bound and stripped. Naked, she was made to pose for pornographic photos. Earlier, Brady had set up his lights to take the best shots possible. He’d also hidden his tape recorder under the bed. After they’d taken the photos, they then told her that they would kill her. With the tape recorder, they captured her heartrendingly begging for mercy. In desperation, Lesley called Brady ‘Dad’. It had no effect.According to Hindley, Brady then strangled her.And despite the commotion, no one reported anything:“We heard shouting. Then we heard boys and girls screaming. But of course I thought it was just boys and girls larking about.”Next door neighbour of Brady and Hindley 

HOUSE OF HORROR

The Brady and Hindley home where the couple killed Lesley was in Hattersley. This Manchester suburban overspill area was the “epitome of respectable working class suburbia.’ There were barely any tower blocks. The new brick builds rented for £3 a week. It was popular with the recent Caribbean immigrant families, some of whom lived on the couple’s street, Wardle Brook Avenue. Their house was as non-descript and innocuous as the next.And the couple mixed with the neighbours just enough not to raise suspicions. Brady liked wine and to play the piano. He seemed aloof to neighbours and he kept himself to himself. But his garden improvements and DIY upgrades to the house suggested he was good for the neighbourhood.They’d interact with the neighbours occasionally when one or the other would walk their black and white dog, the aptly named ‘Puppet’. They went onto the Moors with nearby neighbours Carol Waterhouse and her brother and another child neighbour, Patricia Ann Hodges. Despite repeated trips with them to the Moors, these children weren’t harmed. They remember Myra as ‘sociable and bubbly’ whereas Brady was more withdrawn. They gave them sweets and made them feel the centre of attention.The couple used to go to work together and return in their van. They took it in turns to walk the dog at night.The only visitors neighbours saw was Hindley’s sister and her husband, David Smith. Brady had debated with Hindley whether they should kill David. Instead, they decided to draw him into their world.Brady, already an alcoholic, was now becoming even more arrogant. He boasted of his actions to David. As David had a police record for violence Brady probably felt he was in safe company. David questioned whether Brady could follow through on his claims. Brady offered him a demonstration.

EDWARD EVANS, 17

The couple’s last victim was the smartly dressed 17-year-old Edward Evans. On 6 October 1965 Brady and Hindley drove to Manchester Central Station. Edward had just been to see Manchester United play. Unusually, it was Brady that lured in Edward. This was because Edward was gay. The apprentice engineer agreed to drive back to the couple’s semi-detached home.

But Brady wanted his new acolyte, David, to witness him in action. So he sent Hindley to collect him.Inside the couple’s home, in their front room, Brady repeatedly bludgeoned Evans with an axe.Evans asked for his mum as the blows rained down. Brady is so excited by the kill that he initially doesn’t realise he’s hurt his ankle. The frenzied attack continues and after fourteen blows, Evans skull split open.Brady then strangled him with a piece of electrical flex.He did it all in front of David:“That’s it, it’s the messiest yet.”Brady to Hindley after murdering Evans.Brady told David how the Moors were their other playground and preferred graveyard.Brady joked with David about a time when they’d been digging a grave for one of their victims and a policeman had confronted Hindley about what she was doing.Fearing a similar fate if he revealed his disgust, Smith helped Brady clean up and take the body upstairs.After scrubbing away the blood, the three sat and had tea. David calmly sat with the killers for hours. When he thought it safe, he suggested he’d go home. He casually walked out the door. Only when he knew he couldn’t be seen by Brady and Hindley, did he run all the way home.

Read more:

The eerie mystery of Ian Brady's unopened suitcases

In the early evening of 4th August 2002, two 10-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, were on their way to buy sweets, after leaving a family barbecue when they walked past Huntley's rented house in College Close. Huntley saw them and asked them in, claiming that Carr, who was known to the girls through her work at their school, was also at home. Carr, in fact, was away visiting relatives at the time, and within a short time of Holly and Jessica having entered the house, Huntley had murdered them both.Huntley used his car to transport their bodies some 20 miles away, where he dumped them in a ditch and set them alight, in a bid to destroy the forensic evidence.

Later that evening, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells were reported missing and a police search began at around midnight. Over the next two weeks the search escalated to become one of the most widespread and publicised in British history.

Several witnesses came forward, including Huntley, who claimed to have seen the girls shortly before they disappeared, and his home was searched routinely in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Huntley also granted television interviews to the press, and his unusual interest, together with his emotional involvement, made investigators suspicious, leading to a wider search which revealed the half-burned remains of Holly and Jessica’s shirts, in a storage building at Soham College where Huntley was employed.

"I always knew I'd be a killer"

"I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that. The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate.”Edmund Kemper

Despite Edmund Kemper having killed two people, save for one examination by a panel of psychiatrists after his parole, he receives little in the form of mental health support or psychiatric examination. As the panel believe him reformed, they expunge his juvenile record.

However, the day before the hearing, he had killed. And this killing was his third since being released.

He targets random, female hitchhikers. (Many of them are college educated, hence the nickname, ‘The Co-Ed killer’.) He quickly kills them either with a knife, or a .22-caliber pistol he buys. Death is usually quick as his perversion doesn’t involve torture. Instead, he takes their bodies’ home so that he has the time and space he needs. His necrophilia involves photographing the body, then having sex with it. After dissection, and decapitation, he has sex with the head, and with the viscera.

Twice, he butchers his victim and uses their flesh in a macaroni casserole.

Later, he bags and buries the remains but hurls their heads into a ravine. (If he’s shot them, he’s careful to remove the bullet to minimise forensic evidence.)Six women die this way before Kemper gets to the main event, his mother.

Just before Easter 1973, Kemper enters his mother’s bedroom with a knife and a hammer. He smashes in her skull and then cuts off her head and has sex with the remains. Then...

‘In one of the more symbolically resonant acts in the annals of criminal depravity, he jammed her larynx down the garbage disposal-which promptly spat it back out into his face. “‘That seemed appropriate,” Kemper would later tell the police, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years”

Kemper then props what’s left of her head on the mantel and uses it as a dartboard. Later, he invites his mother’s best friend over for dinner. He strangles her with a scarf and spends the night violating the body.

“I was making life-and-death decisions...playing God in their lives”Edmund Kemper

Horrific Crime

The 22-year-old Short was last seen alive in the foyer of the Biltmore Hotel at 5th Street and Olive in downtown Los Angeles on the evening of 9 January 1947. A week later, on 15 January 1947, local housewife Betty Bersinger found Short’s body in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Bersinger was walking with her three-year-old daughter to the cobblers and thought at first that the waxy white figure lying near the pavement was a store mannequin discarded in the lot. The gruesome truth was that it was a woman’s naked, badly mutilated body, cut in half at the waist and lying face up in the dirt. At 10:40 am, Bersinger ran to a nearby home to call the police, saying, “A person needs attending to” and hung up without leaving her name. She phoned again a few days later to identify herself as the caller.

Two detectives were assigned to the case, Finis Brown and Harry Hansen, but by the time they reached the crime scene, it was overrun with reporters and onlookers, all carelessly trampling the evidence. Agnes Underwood, a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Express was one of the first at the scene. The body had been positioned as if the killer wanted it discovered. The dead woman’s arms had been placed above her head at 45-degree angles and her lower half was lying about a foot away, with her straight legs spread wide open. Her wrists and ankles bore rope marks, suggesting she had been tied up prior to death and possibly tortured. Her mouth had been slashed three inches open on both sides, making it into a hideous clown-like grin. Her nipples had been cut off and her vagina stuffed with grass. Her intestines had been removed and were positioned neatly under her buttocks and her body washed clean of blood.The detectives concluded that due to the lack of blood on the body and the surrounding grass, the murder had taken place elsewhere. They knew from the dew still present under the body, that it had been placed in the lot after 2 am but before dawn and that she had been dead approximately ten hours. They had no clue as to her identity, so they sent her fingerprints to FBI headquarters in Washington and a match was found. Short had her fingerprints taken on two previous occasions, when she was arrested for underage drinking and when she worked in the mailroom at the military base post room in California. Short’s mother confirmed that her last known address was in Pacific Beach, San Diego. The coroner’s office cited the cause of death as massive internal haemorrhaging caused by blows to the head. No traces of sperm were found anywhere on her body.

Unhealthy Relationship

Whilst living in Gloucester, there were eight reported incidents of assault where the perpetrator description fitted West, but he was not linked to these crimes at the time. The West marriage became increasingly unstable, and Rena returned to Scotland, leaving her children with West & Ann McFall, but she returned some months later to find them living together in a caravan.Early in 1967, Ann McFall became pregnant with West's child, urging him to divorce Rena and marry her instead. West, unwilling to do so, killed the heavily pregnant McFall that July, and buried her near the caravan park, cutting off her fingers and toes, a signature mutilation that was to become a common feature in his future crimes. Rena moved back into the caravan following McFall’s disappearance.Within six months of McFall’s death, West may have been linked to another disappearance, that of 15-year-old Mary Bastholm, who was abducted from a bus stop in Gloucester in January 1968, although only circumstantial evidence has ever been produced to corroborate this. In November 1968 he became acquainted with Rose Letts, who went on to become his next wife, and life-long accomplice.Rosemary Letts was born in Devon on 29 November 1953, the result of a difficult pregnancy. Electro-convulsive therapy, administered to her pregnant mother for deep-seated depression, may have caused prenatal injury that contributed to her poor school performance and bouts of aggression growing up. She had a weight problem in adolescence, but it did not stifle an inherent sexual precocity, which manifested itself in an interest in older men.Rose’s parents’ marriage was a turbulent one, with her father prone to violent behaviour that resulted in her mother, Daisy, moving out of the family home, taking Rose with her. Rose, however, decided to move back in with her father again, which occurred around the same time that she became intimate with Fred West, aged just 16.

Her father objected strongly to her relationship, and resorted to contacting Social Services and threatening West directly, but to no avail; she was soon pregnant with West’s child and found herself looking after his two children by Rena Costello, when West was sent to prison on various petty theft and fine evasion charges. She gave birth to daughter Heather in 1970.The pressure of caring for three children, whilst still a child herself, caused Rose to exhibit violent erratic tendencies, and it is believed that she murdered Charmaine, West’s eldest child, in 1971, during one of these violent outbursts.Whatever the circumstances, Charmaine suddenly disappeared and, as West was in jail at the time, it is likely that her body was hidden by Rose until West’s release. He agreed to hide the body, again removed the fingers and toes, as with his first victim, before burying her. This knowledge of Rose’s murderous act undoubtedly gave West a significant hold over Rose.When West’s first wife, Rena, came in search of her daughter, her fate was inevitable: she was strangled, dismembered and also had her fingers and toes removed, before being buried in the same general area as West’s first victim, Ann McFall.Fred and Rose West were married in Gloucester in January 1972, and their second daughter, named Mae, was born in June of the same year. With a growing family, they moved to No 25 Cromwell Street, which was large enough to enable them to take in lodgers to assist with the rent.They were both indulging their unconventional sexual appetites by this time, with Rose earning extra money as a prostitute (often while West watched) and West exercising an almost insatiable appetite for bondage and violent sex acts on underage girls. He fitted out the cellar at No 25 as a torture chamber, and his 8-year-old daughter, Anne-Marie, became one of its first occupants, subjected to a horrifically brutal rape by her father whilst her stepmother held her down. This became a regular occurrence, and the child was threatened with beatings if she told anyone of her ordeal.Their behaviour extended beyond the family circle when, in late 1972, they engaged a 17-year-old called Caroline Owens as a nanny. She was incarcerated, stripped and raped. Despite threats that she would be killed and buried in the cellar, Owens reported the Wests to the police, and charges were brought against them. Incredibly, and despite his existing criminal record, West was able to convince a magistrate, when the case came to court in 1973, that she had consented to the activities, and the Wests both escaped with fines. Rose was pregnant at the time with their first son, Stephen, who was born in August.Over the next five years their good fortune was to prove misfortune for Lynda Gough, Lucy Partington, Juanita Mott, Therese Siegenthaler, Alison Chambers, Shirley Robinson and 15-year-old schoolgirls Carol Ann Cooper and Shirley Hubbard, all of whom became victims of the West couple’s insatiable appetite for violent sex. After brutal sexual attacks, all were murdered, dismembered and buried in the cellar under No 25, having first had their fingers and toes removed.Rose produced children with alarming frequency and daughter Louise was born in November 1978, bringing their offspring to six, although not all were fathered by West. Barry joined the brood in June 1980, with Rosemary Junior following in 1982 and Lucyanna in 1983. They were aware to some extent of the activities in the house, but West and Rose exercised strict control over them.West’s sexual interest in his own daughters didn’t wane either, and when Anne-Marie moved out to live with her boyfriend, he switched his attentions to younger siblings, Heather and Mae. Heather resisted his attentions and, in 1986, committed the cardinal sin of telling a friend about the goings on in the house. The Wests responded by murdering and dismembering her, and burying her in the back garden of No 25, where son Stephen was forced to assist with digging the hole.

Paranoia grows

Berkowitz didn’t take to using his trademark 44-calibre handgun at first. In 1975, as he had become for the most part a recluse, only venturing out to buy food, his behaviour became more psychotic as his paranoia grew about the outside world. He claimed later to psychiatrists that this was when he first began to hear ‘demons’ urging him to kill. By Christmas 1975 he mentally imploded. During one evening he took a large hunting knife and cruised around the city looking for young girls. Two women, one just fifteen years old, were attacked. Miraculously both girls survived.On 29 July 1976 Berkowitz went back out on the prowl. By this time he had moved into a family home in the Bronx. That night two young girls, eighteen-year-old Donna Laurie and nineteen-year-old Jody Valenti were talking in Jody’s parked car outside Laurie’s family apartment. Her parents arrived and cautioned her to go in due to the late hour. Shortly after they had gone inside a man appeared at the side of the passenger door of the car. The girls were startled and in seconds the man pulled out a 44 Bulldog handgun from a paper bag and fired five times. Jody was shot in the thigh and leaned on the horn as the man continued firing, empting the chamber. Donna was killed immediately. Her distressed father, still wearing his pyjamas rushed his young daughter to hospital, but she was pronounced dead.

The police at the time had no indication that this was the work of a would-be serial killer. Little did they know that David Berkowitz had chosen his weapon of preference and intended to kill and maim many more citizens.Three months later on the night of 23 October, twenty-year old Carl Denaro was chatting to college girl Rosemary Keenan in a bar. They both left the venue after 2.30am and drove in his car to her house. As they were talking Berkowitz suddenly appeared at the passenger window and once again fired five times. Carl was wounded in the head, but Rosemary was able to drive away and rush him to hospital. He survived the ordeal but had to have a metal plate inserted in his skull.On 26 November 1976, two young girls were returning home after having been to the movies. Sixteen-year-old Donna DeMasi and her friend, eighteen-year-old Joanne Lomino, stopped at her house. When she noticed a man hovering nearby Joanne urged Donna to quicken their step. This time Berkowitz spoke, asking them where he was. He didn’t even give them time to reply as he pulled out a gun and fired, hitting them both. Berkowitz then fired at a house as he ran away. Joanne’s parents rushed out to the tragic scene. Although Donna was lucky as the bullet had exited her body, Joanne’s spine was shattered. She was left a paraplegic.The police still didn’t realise that these separate attacks taking place in Brooklyn and Queens were linked. Only one bullet was recovered from the scene of the crime. The following year Berkowitz carried out his cowardly attacks again. On 30 January 1977, twenty-six-year-old Christine Freund and her fiancée John Diel were walking back to their car after a night in a Queens wine bar. It was 12.10am as they sat chatting in the vehicle. Two shots shattered the windshield hitting Christine in the head. John lay her down on the driver’s seat while he ran for help. Christine died in hospital.The police were now waking up to the disturbing realisation that they may have a serial killer on their hands.Two forceful police figures, Captain Joe Borrelli and Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey were now working on this latest homicide and looking at the previous attacks. The first thing that stood out about the shootings was the unusual kind of gun used, a large calibre firearm. Soon they realised that Christine’s murder matched those of the previous shootings. Ballistics revealed that it was a 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. Borrelli put together a homicide task force, but with no specific leads it appeared that the killings were the random work of a maniac.Virginia Voskerichian, a college student returning home from classes was to be the next victim on the night of 8 March 1977. She was walking in the affluent Forest Hills Gardens when Berkowitz approached her from the opposite direction. He pulled out his gun and Virginia instinctively held up her books to protect her. The single bullet hit her directly in the face killing her immediately. As Berkowitz ran away the psychopath even said ‘Hi’ to a passing man. He may have been caught there and then by a passing patrol car if it wasn’t for the fact that they abandoned chasing what they thought was just a suspicious man. Instead they went straight to the scene of the crime.The magnitude of what the police force was facing was now beginning to sink in. The latest brutal murder of a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her was a wake up call as to the kind of disturbed mind they were dealing with. A press conference announced details of the killer as being ‘a white male, twenty-five to thirty, six feet tall and with dark hair’.Operation Omega was set up by Dept Inspector Timothy Dowd. Dowd was a highly intelligent and well educated maverick. It wasn’t long before his persistence was to be put to the test with the next murder.On 17 April 1977 close to the area where previous victim Donna Laurie had been murdered, a young couple sat kissing in a parked car. Valentina Suriani was an eighteen-year-old actress and model who was in love with Alexander Esau, her twenty-year-old boyfriend. At 3am a car pulled up alongside them. Berkowitz took out his .44 and shot each one of them twice. Both were killed, Valentina instantly while Alexander later died in hospital.In a manner that reflected the style of Jack The Ripper, Berkowitz left a letter addressed to Captain Borrelli. This was the first time he referred to himself as the 'Son of Sam'. 

The police developed a more detailed profile of the killer. They knew he was a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur who believed he was possessed by demons. There was little doubt that he was a loner and most likely had never experienced a successful relationship.The Omega task force was dealing with hundreds of calls and testimonies from the public. Every call and suspect had to be checked. It was time consuming and the psychological strain on the police force to catch this indiscriminate killer was eating away at their morale.The media attention most likely gave Berkowitz a thrill, making him believe he was now important and an infamous celebrity. He wrote another letter, this time to a reporter at the Daily News. Again it was a rambling pseudo-intellectual rant desperate to appear poetic: ‘Hello from the gutters of NYC, which is filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of NYC which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks’.The incoherent babble included a callous and disturbing reference to one of his previous victims Donna Laurie, describing her as ‘a sweet girl’. The letter ended with a chilling reminder that the writer was going to kill again, “You will see my handiwork at the next job".The police requested that the newspaper withhold some aspects of the letter most likely to make sure they had the means to identify copycat killers or cranks who claimed to be the ‘Son of Sam’.But the next vital lead to the killer’s identity would not come from the Omega task force, but from a member of the public who at the time didn’t realise he once had the killer living under his roof.

The night everything changed

It was me but it was not me.

13 April 1973David begins drinking. He plays darts and cards with a friend in a Vauxhall pub. They have between five and seven pints. The session ends badly when David puts his cigarette out in his friend’s drink. There’s a small altercation between them.Clive comes to take him home. David looks after the children when Clive takes Elsie to and from her bar work. She works just two miles away at the Punchbowl in Ronkswood. When she leaves that night, she has no way of knowing that she will never, ever return.Neither Clive nor Elsie has any reason to be concerned over leaving their 21-year-old lodger in charge of their three children. David’s very good with them and they’d had many happy playtimes together. He’d often bounce Dawn and Samantha on his knees for hours at a time to amuse them:“He seemed just like a normal person really. He used to play with the children, with the elder two, torment them and play with them and things like that, just like any normal person would.”Elsie Urry, Children’s MotherClive likes to pop in for last orders at Elsie’s work and have a quick pint as she finishes up. So by the time he leaves home all the kids are tucked up in bed.

CHILD KILLING SPREEAt some point between quarter 10:15pm and 11:15pm, David, still worse for wear for drink, loses his temper.Samantha, just nine months old, won’t stop crying.So David McGreavy puts his hand over her mouth. Then he strangles her. When she stops breathing, he goes into the bathroom. He takes a razor and uses it on her. He inflicts a compound fracture on her skull.He then strangles Dawn – and cuts her throat with a razor.He strangles Paul with some curtain wire.McGreavy then mutilates their bodies.

“McGreavy...goes into the basement...He finds a pickaxe and with the pickaxe handle, he mutilates the bodies of the children even further. And yet that’s not the end. He then decides to put the bodies of the three children on the railings outside of the house.Now can you imagine that scene?Can you just think of the psychology of a person behaving in that way?...This is not someone who is ashamed of what he has done. He’s showing everybody what he has done. He’s not trying to conceal their bodies by burying them. He is putting their bodies up for display.”Professor David Wilson, CriminologistMcGreavy leaves their impaled bodies on the iron spiked railings of the next door neighbour’s house. He leaves.The police arrive.They cordon off the area. At first they can’t locate the children’s bodies. They then find them. The three siblings are in a row, impaled.“...I’m often asked...how can people kill small children? And...the thing that you’ve got to remember is that the most powerful person in any household is the child; but it’s also the physically weakest. It is the most powerful person in the household because it is the child’s timetable that dictates how that house will operate: the child wakes up, it has to be fed; the child has to have a nappy changed. And so it’s the child’s timetable that dominates how the adults have to behave. And some adults cannot cope with that responsibility. And it’s when the adult who cannot cope with that responsibility is placed in a position of power over a physically weaker human being that sometimes disastrous results happen.”Professor David Wilson

A disturbed individual

Nilsen became increasingly disturbed by his sexual encounters, which only seemed to reinforce his loneliness when they were over. He met his first young victim in a pub on 29 December 1978, and invited him home, as he had on previous occasions. The next morning, overcome by a desire to prevent the man from leaving, he first strangled him with a tie, before drowning him in a bucket of water. Taking the corpse to his bathroom to wash it, he then placed it back in his bed, later remarking that he found the corpse beautiful. He attempted to have sex, unsuccessfully, then spent the night sleeping next to the dead man. He finally hid the corpse under his floorboards for seven months, before removing it and burning the decaying remains in his back garden.Nilsen’s second brush with the police came in October 1979, when a young student accused Nilsen of trying to strangle him during a bondage-play session. Despite the student’s claims, no charges were laid against Nilsen.Nilsen encountered his second victim, Canadian tourist Kenneth Ockendon, at a pub on 3 December 1979. Following a day of sightseeing and drinking, which ended at Nilsen’s flat, Nilsen again succumbed to his fears of abandonment and strangled Ockenden to death with an electrical cable, before cleaning up the corpse as before, and sharing a bed overnight. He took photos, engaged in sex and finally deposited the corpse under the floorboards, removing it frequently and engaging in conversation, as if Ockenden were still alive.His third victim, some five months later, was Martyn Duffey, a homeless sixteen-year-old, who was invited to spend the night on 13 May 1980. As with his first victim, Nilsen strangled then drowned him, before bringing him back to bed and masturbating over the teenager’s corpse. Duffey was kept in a wardrobe for two weeks, before joining Ockenden under the floorboards.

His next victim was rent boy Billy Sutherland, aged 27, who had the misfortune of following Nilsen home one night. He too was strangled.Malcolm Barlow, 24, was an orphan with learning difficulties, who was soon despatched by strangulation.By 1981, Nilsen had killed twelve men in the flat, of whom only the above four could be identified which, given his penchant for preying on the homeless and the unemployed in a large city, is probably less surprising than it might be in a smaller community.Nilsen claimed he went into a “killing trance,” and on seven occasions, actually freed the men rather than complete the act, because he was able to snap out of it. The majority of his victims weren’t so lucky.By the time Malcolm Barlow was killed, Nilsen was forced to stuff him under the kitchen sink, as he was rapidly running out of storage space, what with half a dozen bodies secreted around the flat. He was forced to spray his rooms twice a day, to be rid of the flies that were hatched from the decomposing bodies. When neighbours complained about the smell, he convinced them they stemmed from structural problems with the building.To get rid of the corpses, he would remove his clothing and dismember them on the stone kitchen floor with a large kitchen knife, sometimes also boiling the skulls to remove the flesh, also placing organs and viscera in plastic bags for disposal. He buried limbs in the garden and in the shed, and stuffed torsos into suitcases until he could burn the remains in a bonfire at the end of his garden. On occasions he would burn fires all day, without raising any suspicion from neighbours. He generally crushed the bones once the fire had consumed the flesh, and police found thousands of bone fragments in the garden during later forensic examinations.In 1982, in a desperate attempt to stifle his homicidal behaviour, Nilsen moved into a top-floor flat at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, also in North London, which had no garden and no convenient floorboards. Still unable to quell his impulses, a further three victims were killed in this flat between his arrival and February 1983. These victims were identified as John Howlett, Archibald Graham Allan and Steven Sinclair, and presented Nilsen with much greater disposal challenges, given the flat’s lack of direct access outdoor space. He overcame these by boiling the heads, feet and hands, and dissecting the bodies into small pieces that could be flushed down the toilet, and disposed of in plastic bags.There were five other tenants at Cranley Gardens, none of whom knew Nilsen very well and, in early February 1983, one of them called out Dyno-Rod, the drain specialists, to investigate a drain blockage. In the presence of the tenants, including Nilsen, the technician discovered rotting human remains when he descended via the outdoor manhole, and it was decided that a full inspection would be conducted the next day, after which the police would be called in to investigate. Nilsen, increasingly aware of the prospect of capture, tried to cover his tracks by removing the human tissue from the drains that night, but was spotted by the downstairs tenant, who became suspicious of his actions. It was reported that, on the morning of 9 February 1983, he told a work colleague laughingly: “If I’m not in tomorrow, I’ll either be ill, dead or in jail.”

Rader’s torture fantasies are fuelled by the final moments of his victims’ lives and it is these last seconds that excite him far more than the actual moment of death itself. Rader plans his attacks meticulously, allowing him to kill during the daytime without the cover of night. He considers each murder a "project" and he has many "projects" under surveillance at any one time. Why some live, and some die is arbitrary.

He "trolls" (his word for checking out women) through many, stalks a few, and then selects some. He researches his targets at the local library, cross referencing anything about them, and visiting their workplaces. Most of his victims are women strangled in their own homes. The exception is the first crime attributed to him.

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On a cold winter’s morning on a quiet suburban street in January 1974, BTK begins. He has with him his "hit kit", a briefcase packed with lengths of cord, hoods, plastic bags, tape and wire cutters. He uses the latter to sever the phone lines. He waits by the back door and sometime after 7am, it’s opened to let the dog out. But before the dog can exit, Rader enters. Having done surveillance on the property, he expects to find a mother and her daughter. He nearly loses control of the situation when he finds the father and son there as well. But Rader pulls out a gun.

First, he binds the wrists and ankles of Joseph Otero, 38 (a fellow former Air Force flight engineer). Rader does the same to the wife who he also gags. He strangles the father first, and then the mother. He takes Joseph Junior to his bedroom. Binding his wrists, he covers the boy’s head in a hood. He then sits and watches as the child slowly suffocates.

He moves onto the real target of the family, the daughter Josephine. He takes the 11-year-old down to the basement and hangs her from a pipe. He hasn’t sexually assaulted any of his victims but once Josephine is dead, he masturbates and ejaculates. Afterwards, he methodically goes through each room he’s killed in and cleans away any evidence. Before leaving he steals his first memento, the father’s watch. That afternoon, the eldest child, Charlie Otero, comes home from school and finds his loved ones lifeless.

The police investigate and find that right up to the point of death, none of the Otero family resisted as there are no defensive marks. It’s as if the killer had persuaded them that murder wasn’t his intention. How Rader might have persuaded his victims is answered by a survivor of his next attack. Four months after the Otero massacre, Rader enters the house of brother and sister, Kevin and Kathryn Bright. When they return home at around 1pm, they find a man wearing a ski mask and pointing a gun at them. He says that he’s a fugitive looking for a car and that he won’t harm them if they provide him with food and money.

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The 21-year-old sister is tied up first and then Kevin is tied and gagged in another room. He shoots Kevin twice in the head. He goes back to Kathryn, strangles her to excite himself but she struggles so much that he stabs her eleven times in the stomach to stop her. The amount of blood surprises him. It takes her five hours to bleed out. Somehow, Kevin survives.

In October, Rader writes his first BTK letter for the Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper. He places it in a book in a library and rings a reporter with its name and location. The letter seeks to both claim responsibility and acknowledge the evil of the murders whilst at the same time seeking to blame them on a monster in the murderer’s mind. The letter ends, "Yours, truly guiltily" and is signed off "The code word for me will be...Bind them, torture them, kill them, B.T.K". This communication will be the first of many and it’s this need for public recognition and respect from his pursuers, the police, that will eventually lead to arrest, trial and imprisonment.

By his third kill, Rader has developed a signature, attacking during the day, cutting telephone lines, and then executing his murderous MO according to his acronym. On 17th March 1977, he tries to put into operation "Project Green". But his intended target’s away.

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Ready to kill but frustrated, he wanders the streets and comes across a child returning home. He first shows a photo of his own wife to the child asking if he knew who she was. The boy shakes his head and continues home. Rader watches where the boy goes, follows, knocks on the door, and persuades the boy to allow him in. He enters the home of Shirley Vian, a mother of three in her mid-20s. Once in, he drops any pretence and pulls out a pistol. His story this time is that he has a sexual dysfunction and that tying her up is the only way he can achieve gratification. Shirley believes that if she complies, she will live.

She helps him confine her children, aged 4, 6 and 8 in the bathroom with toys and a blanket. It’s partly sheer terror that causes her then to repeatedly vomit. Rader gives her a glass of water and tries to calm her. He then binds her wrists and ankles. She expects rape. Instead, he strangles her. The children can see what is happening through a gap in the door. Rader intends to do the same to them when the telephone rings. He has not had time to do his usual preparations and quickly exits.

On 8th December 1977, Rader breaks form by one, breaking a window to enter, and two, by attacking during the night. This time his target is 25-year-old Nancy Fox, who he’s had under surveillance for months. He has focused in on her over the last few weeks, discovering her name, and following her to the jewellery store she works at. He uses the same sexual story he’d used on Shirley.

Rader shares a cigarette with Nancy. She prepares herself to be restrained and raped. Rader handcuffs her and lies her face down on her bed. He then strangles her with a nylon stocking. After she’s dead, he masturbates and ejaculates. His memento from the evening is her driving license. Later, he calls the police from a phone box to tell them what he’s done. With no interruptions or mistakes, Nancy is his "perfect hit".

Rader consciously echoes the Zodiac killer’s letters to the media over his next communications and specifically compares himself to others such as Jack the Ripper and the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz. He continues to both express remorse and distance himself from his crimes.

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On 28th April 1979, he breaks and enters into the home of his next victim. He sits and waits. And he waits. But the woman doesn’t arrive. Rader leaves and later writes a letter for the intended victim to show how close they came. Years will pass before he kills again.

On 27th April 1985, Rader puts into action his most audacious plan yet, “Project Cookie”, the killing of a neighbour he actually knows to say hello to, someone that actually lives in his "own habitat". He attacks at night and breaks in. When his target returns, she brings back a male friend and he has to wait till the man leaves after midnight. He emerges from the shadows and strangles his 53-year-old neighbour, Marine Hedge, in her home with pantyhose.

The fact that she lives only a few doors from him thrills him. He takes her body to his church. Once there he excites himself further by photographing her in sexually explicit poses. It takes him five hours to clean up. He dumps her body on a dirt road hoping that a change in his MO will throw police off his trail.

On 16th September 1986, Rader dons his "hit clothes". He wears the uniform of a telephone repair man, carries a company manual and fake identification, all of which helps persuade Vicki Wegerle, 28, to let him in. She’s looking after her two-year-old son and when she’s distracted, he pulls a pistol on her. She struggles and digs her nails into him. He ties her up with leather shoelaces. He uses one of her stockings to strangle the her. He rearranges her clothes and photographs her body.

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Having taken her life, he then takes her driving license but nothing else. It has been so long since he’s killed, many assume the BTK killer may be dead or imprisoned. The unintended consequence is that her husband, Bill Wegerle, not only loses his wife and mother of his children, but he becomes, and remains for years, the chief suspect in her murder.

In 1991, Dolores “Dee” Davis, 63, becomes Rader’s last known victim. His entry method is almost reckless. He waits till she’s asleep and then he throws a concrete block through her window. Once in, he reverts to his old story of being a fugitive on the run. He handcuffs her and ties her with pantyhose. He then pretends to be going through the motions, collecting food and car keys, before turning to her. He slowly chokes her to death. It takes two to three minutes for her to die.

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Man's best friend

In the summer of 1949, Hume was happier than he had ever been. Cynthia, his wife, gave birth to a little girl and, along with a respectable image and apartment, he had a legitimate business. His ego on the other hand was inflated by a deluded belief that he was part of the ‘gangster’ world; a world concocted from the many gangster movies he had gorged himself on week after week in the cinema.

Setty, himself a former jailbird imprisoned under Debtors and Bankruptcy charges, was desperate to get back into business, despite the authorities impeding his attempts. Hume had never liked Setty, but felt compelled to work for him in order to enhance his own wealth prospects. Why Hume disliked Setty so much is not known.

Whatever the reason, the worse thing Setty could have done was strike out at the one thing for which Hume had unconditional love, his dog Tony.

Hume’s terrier accidentally ruined a re-spray job on one of Setty’s stolen cars which prompted Setty to kick the dog in a fit of rage. For Hume, that one act of aggression towards his darling pet caused the brittle veneer of his friendliness towards Setty to disappear. His suppressed resentments gave way to hatred for something that most sane men would have forgotten in minutes. By the time he met up with Setty again in his Finchley Road flat he was ready to strike out at the slightest provocation.

On Tuesday 4 October 1949, Stanley Setty was carrying out his usual business transactions at Warren Street in central London. He sold a new Wolseley Twelve saloon to a dealer for £1000. The buyer gave Setty a cheque which later that day was cashed at a bank for two hundred £5 notes.

Later during the day Setty stopped off at Hume’s flat to talk business. He usually let himself in. By the time Hume arrived home and saw Setty’s car parked outside he was already building up anger.

It is not known exactly what words were exchanged between the two men, only that a heated argument developed into a physical fight. According to Hume’s later confession he picked up one of his wartime souvenirs, a German SS dagger and aimed it at Setty in defence.

Setty called Hume’s bluff and swiped at him. During a violent grapple Setty fell to the floor where Hume slashed repeatedly at his chest. As Setty fought back by trying to break Hume’s neck, he was stabbed in the chest and legs. Hume then lay back and observed Setty dying.

“I watched the life run from him like water down a drain” he recalled in his newspaper memoirs. “I had to hurt him. This man who had kicked my dog.”

Shortly afterwards, Hume dragged Setty’s 13 stone body through the flat to the end kitchen where he hid it in the coal cupboard. He then started to clean up the apartment trying to remove bloodstains, which had seeped into the carpet and into the floorboards. At one point, realising that he had to dispose of Setty’s car, Hume had to retrieve car keys from the dead man’s jacket. He then drove Setty’s car down Finchley Rd past Swiss Cottage and eventually to Setty’s own lock up at Cambridge Terrace Mews. He was back home at around 10.45 pm where he pondered on whether he should go to the police. It dawned on him that he might have got away with the perfect murder.

Hume thought hard about how he could get the large body out of the flat and dispose of it without been seen. He finally came up with the idea of dismembering the corpse, parcelling body parts and dropping them in the sea by plane.

The next day, 5 October 1949, Hume began work on his macabre plan in the early hours. He first took the stained carpet to the next-door dry-cleaners and instructed them to dye it dark green. While Cynthia and the baby were having breakfast, Hume touched up bare patches on the floor with varnish. There were still stains on the sofa that troubled Hume but his main worry was to get the body dismembered and out of the flat while Cynthia was away.

Hume had a bank appointment that morning at 10am and, having pocketed some of the money he found on Setty’s body, he decided to deposit it in order to pay off an overdraft. Most of the £1000 was bloodstained but Hume was able to retrieve £100 of undamaged notes for himself.

When Cynthia left the flat with the baby for an appointment at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Hume had only ninety minutes in which to dismember the body in the flat before the cleaning lady arrived.

The grisly operation was easier than Hume had imagined.

“I felt no squeamishness or horror at what I was about to do”, he recalled as he began dismembering the body using a linoleum knife to cut to the bone and then a hacksaw.He dismembered the legs first and packaged them up into a parcel using carpet felt. It was only Setty’s staring eyes that upset Hume, which he then covered as he continued to cut up the body. It took several strokes to remove the head which he placed in a box that contained baked beans. He also added pieces of brick and rubble to make the parcels heavy. The torso was the most problematic and after an abortive attempt to put it in a cabin trunk he pushed it back into the coal cupboard. The one thing that broke his heart was having to burn the damaged £900.

At 2.30 pm Hume left the flat with two packages, the legs under one arm and the box with the head in it. He got into a hired car along with Tony his loyal dog, and sped towards Elstree Air field where a light blue Austin aircraft was waiting. It was 3 pm by the time he put the gruesome parcels in the plane and set off for Southend, despite his real destination being the English Channel.

Ninety minutes later he could see the French coast. He first threw out the SS dagger and tools before dumping the parcels which sank out of sight. Later he arrived at Southend airfield and made sure he was seen by as many people he could. It was 8.30pm by the time he got back to his London flat.However, the torso deeply troubled him. All the time whilst chatting with Cynthia and trying to keep up the pretence of everyday life, the grisly reminder of the murder lay only a few feet away, hidden from view.

The following morning Hume arranged for a decorator to come to the flat. The unsuspecting man also helped Hume carry the torso, which was heavily packed with lead weights, out of the flat and into Hume’s car. It had even gurgled while the two men carried it to the vehicle, but Hume made a convincing excuse for its strange sounds. Amazingly, while Hume went back to the flat to clean the coal cupboard he left the torso in the car for an hour.

When Hume arrived at the Elstree airport a friendly engineer helped him carry the torso onto the plane. Together with his trusty canine companion, Hume set off again for the English Channel. Only this time the quest to dump the evidence was not so easy. At first the torso, which rested in the back seat, would not budge when he tried to push it out through the door.

Hume even had to hold the joystick between his legs as he wrestled with the body part. After this failed, he tilted the small plane at an angle in order to try and get the torso to slide and smash through the door. Finally, after a great deal of drama that nearly involved the dog falling out of the plane, the torso released itself from its position and fell from the aircraft. Moments later Hume was shocked to see the weights and blanket that had covered the body had got caught on a hook in the cabin. Realising that the torso had fallen out just covered in carpet felt, he knew it was unlikely to sink. He eventually managed to break the weights free leaving them and the carpet to drop into the sea.

Hume was now faced with the worse case scenario, a body that would float. He could see the torso bobbing in the water and realised he had no choice but to return back to land and hope somehow that it wouldn’t turn up on the coastline. The small speck he could still see bobbing in the water was evidence that could hang him.

In 1960, at age 16, Sobhraj began stealing and received his first jail sentence for burglary in 1963. He was sentenced to three years at Poissy prison near Paris. In this harsh prison, Sobhraj began to hone his skills of manipulation in order to endear himself to prison officials to gain favours, such as keeping books in his cell.

In 1969, when Sobhraj was paroled, he moved in with Felix d’Escogne, a man he had met whilst in jail. He simultaneously lived the high society life in Paris, whilst also dabbling in the criminal underworld with various scams and burglaries. Women would fall for him, as he could be particularly charming. It was during this time that Sobhraj met a young lady, Chantal, from a conservative Parisian family, and they fell in love.

On the night that Sobhraj proposed to Chantal, he was arrested for evading police in a stolen car and sent back to Poissy prison for a further eight months, charged with car theft. Chantal waited for him and upon his release, they married. She soon fell pregnant but the couple began to worry about the fact that the French authorities had Sobhraj in their sights and the threat of arrest was ever-present. They decided to leave France for Asia and, using false travel documents, began travelling through Eastern Europe. They would befriend fellow travellers and then rob them of their valuables, beating a hasty retreat to the next victim.

In 1970, the couple arrived in Bombay, India, where Chantal gave birth to their daughter. Here they settled, in an attempt to provide a stable environment for their child. On the surface they made a good impression, endearing themselves to the Indian ex-pat community. However, Sobhraj had turned to crime once more and was running a car theft and smuggling enterprise. Instead of using the profits for something positive for his family, he ploughed them into his newfound hobby of gambling.

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In December 1971, the couple fled to Kabul, Afghanistan, where they stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel for quite a while, apparently departing without paying the bill. It was here that Sobhraj made contacts for illegal gun smuggling, moving the weapons from Afghanistan by land route to sell in India. Sobhraj moved on to Pakistan, where in Rawalpindi he stole a car by drugging the driver, who died from poisoning. Around this time, he is alleged to have also been running a curio shop in Bangkok, in order to lure his favourite victims, foreign tourists. He would drug them, sometimes to death, and steal their belongings.

In 1973, Sobhraj committed an armed robbery at a jewellery shop in Hotel Ashoka, Delhi but was arrested and sent to prison. At the time of Sobhraj’s arrest, police confiscated a number of revolvers, rifles and other weapons from him. After a fortnight in prison, Sobhraj faked appendicitis and managed to escape during a blackout, as it was the time of the India-Bangladesh war. Sobhraj and Chantal went on the run but Sobhraj was soon caught and put back in prison. He managed to borrow money for bail and the couple fled India for Afghanistan.

They settled in Kabul, where they immediately began robbing tourists following the ‘hippie trail’ between Europe and Eastern Asia. Arrested again, Sobhraj escaped once more pretending illness and drugging the hospital guard. This time he left his family behind and fled to Iran.

Weary of the constant disruption to their lives that Sobhraj’s criminal activity brought, Chantal returned to France with her daughter, declaring that she never wanted to see Sobhraj again. For the next two years Sobhraj was on the run from authorities and travelled around Eastern Europe and the Middle East, always using stolen passports. His younger brother, André, joined him in Istanbul and the two of them went on a crime spree in Greece and Turkey. The brothers were arrested and imprisoned in Athens but Sobhraj managed to escape once more, leaving André to serve his sentence.

In 1975, Sobhraj moved to Thailand, becoming a drug dealer to finance his lifestyle. He had also hatched a new plan and that was to create a kind of criminal family, with him at the helm. His first devotee was Marie-Andreé Leclerc from Quebec, Canada. She fell for his charm and was content to ignore both his dalliances with other women and his criminal activity. To gather more members into his clan, Sobhraj formed a new con. He would select his victims, create a troublesome situation for them and then pose as the knight in shining armour who would solve the problem. Having no idea Sobhraj was the cause of their misery in the first place; they would feel indebted to him for his aid.

Using his fluency in French, he homed in on French tourists. Sobhraj stole former French policemen, Yannick and Jacques’ passports, and then helped the men retrieve them. Dominique Rennelleau from France thought he had dysentery when in fact Sobhraj had given him poisoned dysentery medication and then nursed him back to health.

Sobhraj and his "family" were staying at a resort in the beach town of Pattaya, where Sobhraj met a fellow criminal, Ajay Chowdhury. The young Indian man became Sobhraj’s second-in-command and the two embarked on a killing spree in 1975. Many of their victims had been part of the "family" and it is possible that they were killed to prevent them going to the authorities.

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The first known victim was Teresa Knowlton, a young woman from Seattle who had travelled from Bangkok and was en route to Kathmandu, where she was to study Tibetan Buddhism at Kopan Monastery. She met Sobhraj, who allegedly offered to be her guide and to take her to Pattaya Beach, where her body was later found burned.

Jennie Bollivar, a young woman from America, had travelled to Thailand to meditate and to experience the Buddhist lifestyle. When she met Sobhraj, he tried to convince her to join his "family" but she refused. Bollivar was found drowned in a tidal pool in the Gulf of Thailand, near the town of Pattaya, wearing a flower-patterned bikini. A number of months passed before the autopsy results, combined with forensic evidence, proved the drowning in fact to be a murder.

The killers’ next victim was a young nomadic Sephardic Jew, Vitali Hakim. His body was found burned on the road to the Pattaya resort where the "family" were staying.

Henk Bintanja, 29 and his fiancée Cornelia Hemker, 25 were Dutch students who had met Sobhraj in Hong Kong. He had invited them to Thailand and they took him up on his offer. When they arrived, Sobhraj poisoned them then nursed them back to health.

During this time, Charmayne Carrou, the girlfriend of Sobhraj’s previous victim, Hakim, came to investigate his disappearance. Anxious that she may discover what they had done, Sobhraj and Chowdhury swiftly dealt with the problem. Bintanja and Hemker’s bodies were found strangled and burned on 16th December 1975. Later that same month, Carrou was found drowned in similar circumstances to Bollivar, wearing a similar flower-patterned bikini. At first, police investigators did not connect the two cases but when they did, Sobhraj became known as ‘The Bikini Killer’.

Sobhraj decided it was time to move again and on 18th December 1975, he and Leclerc used Bintanja and Hemker’s Dutch passports to enter Nepal. It was here they met two travellers, Laurent Ormond Carriere, 26, from Canada and Connie Bronzich, 29, from California, whom they befriended. Carriere and Bronzich were murdered and their burned bodies found on 22nd December 1975. Some sources claim these victims were Laddie DuParr and Annabella Tremont. Sobhraj was questioned and then released by police in Kathmandu.

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From Bible John to the Zodiac Killer, these 5 serial killers that escaped justice

Sobhraj and Leclerc used Carriere and Bronzich’s passports to return to Thailand before their victims were identified. Once there, Sobhraj discovered his French friends, Yannick, Jacques and Rennelleau, had begun to suspect him of being involved in the Pattaya murders. In Sobhraj’s absence, they had discovered documents belonging to the victims in the resort at which they stayed.

Sobhraj fled to Calcutta, India, where he murdered an Israeli student, Avoni Jacob, for his passport. He used this to travel to Singapore and Malaysia with Leclerc and Chowdhury, then on to India and back to Bangkok, Thailand in March 1976. Sobhraj was questioned by Thai police in connection with the ‘Bikini Murders’ but was not charged. Some sources claim the reason for this was their fear of the potential negative publicity, adversely affecting the country’s tourist trade, such an action could create. Sobhraj immediately left Thailand for Malaysia.

Herman Knippenberg, a Dutch embassy diplomat, was investigating the murders of Bintanja and Hemker and Sobhraj was his prime suspect. Knippenberg began building a case against him and a month after Sobhraj had left Thailand, Knippenberg was given police permission to search Sobhraj’s apartment. He uncovered evidence including documents belonging to the murder victims and poisoned medicines. Encouraged, he continued to collect evidence in the case against Sobhraj, which eventually ran into decades.

In Malaysia, Sobhraj and Chowdhury stole thousands of pounds worth of precious gems. Shortly after this, Chowdhury disappeared and he was never found. It is alleged that Sobhraj murdered him before leaving Malaysia with Leclerc. The couple travelled to Geneva, Switzerland, to sell their stolen jewels before returning to India to rebuild the ‘criminal family’.

Sobhraj’s new recruits were two lost tourists, Barbara Sheryl Smith and Mary Ellen Eather, whom he met in Mumbai. Sobhraj then befriended French tourist Jean-Luc Solomon whom he poisoned in a south Delhi hotel, with the intention to rob him, but Solomon died of the poison. It was Solomon’s death that would finally result in Sobhraj being imprisoned for 21 years in India.

In July 1976, New Delhi, Sobhraj, Leclerc, Smith and Eather managed to trick a group of post-graduate French students into accepting them as travel guides. Once again, Sobhraj used his poisoned dysentery medicine on the group however, this time it backfired because the poison began working a lot faster than he expected. When the first few students began falling where they stood, the others became alarmed and called the police. Sobhraj and his group of three women were arrested and interrogated. Sobhraj was charged with the murder of Jean-Luc Solomon and sent with Leclerc, Smith and Eather to the infamous Tihar prison outside New Delhi to await trial. Conditions at Tihar were extremely harsh and both Smith and Eather attempted suicide during the wait for their trial.

“There have...been some severely disturbed individuals who can only be described as serial killer ‘wannabes’... Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files.

Aged 16, Colin committed his first crime. To run away to London, he stole £4. He was caught, issued with a ‘fit person order’ and sent to Finchton Manor School in Kent. A fee-paying ‘free expression’ school, Finchton only accepted boys who had both intelligence and emotional problems. Colin’s fees were paid by the local County Council as part of the care order.

Again, Colin was teased and bullied. In revenge, he set fire to one of the boys’ belongings. Colin later said he had recurring nightmares of fire and had a lifelong fascination with flames.

Despite no charges, Colin was sent away from Finchton Manor. He immediately ran away to London.

Homeless and penniless, Colin soon resorted to robbery. At 17, he was caught and sentenced to spend time at Hollesly Bay, a borstal. These were notorious British reform schools that were infamous for their brutal and austere regimes. Despite this, Hollesly offered therapy and vocational training. Colin hated it. He again ran away.

Caught, he served the remainder of his sentence in the far stricter borstals of Rochester and Grendon.

In 1972, Colin was 18, and free.

He met his first girlfriend, but this wasn’t a happy time:

'I was entering what I call the lost period, common to those who suffer from psychopathy. …In between custodial periods, a lot of the 70s were a blur. I spent my time detached and wondering.'

In December 1975, Colin, now 21, was found guilty of two counts of burglary, stealing a car and damage to property. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. On his release in November 1976, Colin went to live in Swindon. He met his second girlfriend. She was a West Indian woman, five years his senior and the mother of four children. He lost his virginity with her. They lived together for a few months and planned to marry.

THE GENTLE GIANT?

But in 1977, Ireland was found guilty of ‘demanding with menace’ and sentenced to a further 18 months in prison. In 1980, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for robbery in 1980. In 1981, he was done for ‘attempted deception’. The same year he met Virginia Zammit at a lecture on ‘Survivalism’. She was 36, nine years his senior, had a daughter of five and was confined to a wheelchair after a motor vehicle accident paralysed her at just 24.

The couple were happily married in 1982. Colin adored his wife and stepdaughter. The family lived in estate housing in Holloway and Colin was known to the locals as ‘The Gentle Giant’. But in 1985, Colin was sentenced for six months, this time for ‘going equipped to cheat’. When Virginia found Colin had cheated on her as well, they divorced in 1987.

During this period, Colin unskilled and untrained supported himself through various jobs. These include being a restaurant chef, a volunteer fireman and a bouncer at various bars including a gay nightclub. The lanky, malnourished target of bullying had become a burly, big bloke quite capable of handling himself and others.

In 1989, Colin entered the Devonshire pub of landlady Janet Young:

'He stood in the doorway and the whole conversation in the pub just stopped and everybody turned and looked at him.'

Janet lived with her two children above the pub. Within the week, Colin moved in with them. Within three months, they were married. One night he threw her out of their bedroom. She took refuge in another. He entered. He smashed the light bulb. In the darkness, he moved from corner to corner. As he circled her, he taunted her saying;

'I’m over here, I’m over here.'

'What (control freaks) normally do is put enough fear into their partners that the partners don’t want to upset them...they control them that way. The fear of violence is often more powerful than the actual violence.' Mike Berr, Forensic Psychologist and Police Profiler of Colin Ireland.

When not working, Colin went off to Dartmoor fancying himself as a ‘survivalist’:

'He was gonna go all night and catch a rabbit and all this sort of thing. But actually he wasn’t very good at it and he always came home for his tea.' Janet Young

After one Easter, when Janet was away, Colin cleared out her house and, knowing her PIN number, her bank account – this would be how he stole and financed himself when he became a serial killer.

Colin left Janet broke. She couldn’t even pay her bus fare home. Her and her children were forced into a homeless hostel. She never heard from him again.

Colin next popped up in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. He worked at a homeless shelter whilst being homeless himself. The manager there remembered him for his homophobia. Only once did Colin reveal himself. The manager and Colin were dealing with a repeatedly troublesome client. Colin suggested getting rid of him. When the manager jokingly asked how Colin would do that, Colin replied in all seriousness, he would force snooker balls down the man’s throat.

When other staff made complaints about Colin touching female colleagues, he was let go.

His next job involved breaking up wooden pallets. Depressed, disillusioned and down and out, Colin made a New Year’s resolution for 1993 that would cost five innocent men their lives.

Stephen Griffiths starts 2009 with a conviction in January for harassment. He’ll end it as a murderer.SUSAN RUSHWORTHSusan Rushworth is at 43, already a grandmother, a heroin addict, and a prostitute. She’s been selling her body on the streets for the last three years to fund her drug habit.But her life could have been so different. Her brother, Paul, remembers Susan and him having a happy childhood growing up in the country. She married in her early 20s, has children and life is good. And even after they separate, she finds love again, and starts another family. When, however, this relationship breaks down, one of the new men in her life introduces her, aged 35, to heroin.And so her concerned mother, Christine, pays for rehab. It works: But only for a few months. And so begins a cycle of creeping addiction and cleaning out.It’s the day after Father’s Day, Monday 22 June 2009. Susan leaves her mum’s at 1pm. She takes a mobile phone with her saying she’ll be gone for a few hours. She goes to the chemist and picks up her prescription of methadone as part of her latest attempt to break her addiction.But when her mother calls, no one answers the mobile.And Susan, despite her lifestyle, always kept in contact with her mum. Christine rings the police. Missing posters go up and TV appeals are made by Susan’s son. The police interview potential witnesses such as the local drug dealers and men known to use prostitutes. They comb nearby woodland and drain a local lake.But her bank cards haven’t been used since the day she disappeared.Her brother Paul starts his own inquiries and one of the prostitutes he talks to is Shelley Armitage.

SHELLEY ARMITAGEShelley Armitage was a ‘bubbly’ girl who went to Catholic school. Holiday photos taken on a beach show a carefree child. She grows up wanting to be a model that travels the world.Aged 31, she’s a prostitute that walks up and down Thornton Road in Bradford.She first became a heroin addict at just 16.On 26 April 2010, around lunchtime, Shelley bumps into her father and mother out shopping. They chat. It’s the last conversation they’ll ever have with their daughter.When she doesn’t return to her boyfriend, Craig, in the evening, the police are called.Shelley never turns up for her social security payment.The police release CCTV footage of Shelley on the streets of Bradford hoping to jog memories.For the second time in less than 12 months, police and family comb the area for a missing loved one.SUZANNE BLAMIRESSuzanne Blamires is Bradford born and bred. Photos of her childhood and teenage years capture her attractiveness, confidence and cheekiness. She began training as a nurse. But when she starts going to raves, she starts taking recreational drugs. Around 21 years old, she discovers heroin. By 25, she’s starts sex working to pay for it. When her mother, Nicky, confronts her, Suzanne confesses everything. But it doesn’t stop her ‘merry-go-round’ of scoring, sleeping, and selling herself for her next hit. Her street name is ‘Amber’.On 21 May 2010 Nicky drops Suzanne, now aged 36, off at her flat early in the morning. But, unusually, Suzanne never rings her mum that evening. On Saturday, at about 4pm, her boyfriend, Gregg, knocks on Nicky’s door asking if she’s seen Suzanne. Nicky knows instantly something is wrong. The police are called.But ‘Amber’ has met ‘Ven Pariah’.

A few drinks get out of hand

The following day, 25 July 2004, Blackwell was at home hanging pictures in his bedroom. His parents had been out for dinner and when they returned home, the family sat down in the living room for a few drinks. The conversation soon became an argument between Blackwell and his father. It turned nasty and Blackwell flew into a rage and began beating his father with the claw hammer he still held in his hand.His mother, who had been in the kitchen, ran into the room holding a carving knife and witnessed her son brutally bludgeoning her husband. She tried to stop Blackwell but he wrestled the knife from her grasp and stabbed her up to 30 times, principally in the chest, killing her. He then returned to his father who was not yet dead and, after holding his hand and telling him he was sorry, stabbed him to death.

After the brutal attack, Blackwell took himself and his girlfriend off on his planned holiday to the United States. The couple stayed for three nights in the presidential suite of The Plaza hotel in New York, dining on truffles and champagne, at a cost of around £2,200. They then travelled to Miami, San Francisco and Barbados. Blackwell spent a total of £30,000 on his father’s credit cards and his behaviour throughout the trip was upbeat and normal. Saba had no inkling that her boyfriend was a murderer and that his victims, his own parents, were lying in pools of blood in their home, as yet undiscovered.Returning to England on 12 August 2004, Blackwell stayed with Saba and her parents, telling them he had been locked out of his own home until his parents returned from their holiday in Majorca. A week later he received his A-Level results from Liverpool College, which included A-grades for mathematics, biology, chemistry and Spanish. He had also been accepted into Nottingham University, to start his course in medicine in October. After receiving his results, Blackwell bumped into his head teacher and they had a lively discussion about Blackwell’s excellent results and his rosy future as a doctor. Once again, there was nothing in Blackwell’s demeanour or behaviour that indicated anything was amiss.Neighbours had not initially missed the Blackwells, as the couple holidayed in Spain on a regular basis. However, on 5th September 2004, a neighbour went to visit and noticed an unpleasant smell emanating from the Blackwell house and notified the police. They arrived immediately and discovered the seriously injured and decomposing bodies. Due to the state of the bodies, police initially believed the couple had been shot. Mr Blackwell was in an armchair in the living room, still clutching his spectacles and Mrs Blackwell’s body had been dragged to the bathroom and left lying face down. The post-mortem examination revealed the Blackwells had been killed sometime in July 2004.

Ronald Jebson?

"Jebson is the classic example of the kind of predatory paedophile who will abduct and murder a child who is not known to him. He is effectively every parent’s worst nightmare.”David Wilson, CriminologistRon Jebson was born Ronald Harper in 1938. He was illegitimate and so when he was adopted, his surname changed to that of his new family, Jebson. The Jebson’s lived in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.Ronald was seen as being ‘a bit odd’ as a child and, as a result, had a quite lonely childhood. One of his few friends was Robert Papper.Robert would come to bitterly regret ever meeting his school mate.Unknown to Robert, in the mid 1950s Ronald Jebson became a child abuser. Jebson indecently assaulted a four-year-old:“...from age fifteen, he’s convicted of indecent exposure, then indecent assault, then sexual assault. So gradually, throughout his teens, throughout his twenties and thirties...the sexual offending that he engages in becomes more and more severe, which is typical of the pattern of predatory paedophiles.”David Wilson

THE MAN WITH MANY NAMESRonald Jebson was twice rejected by the army. After successfully joining, he was then discharged in 1958. He became a drifter, a drug addict and an alcoholic. He changed his name as often as his address:“So sometimes he’ll use the name Ronald Jebson, other times he’ll use his birth name...Harper; on other occasions he will use a pseudonym, Alan Purchase.Is he married? Is he Christian, is he Jewish? He constantly plays with his identity, as a way, deliberately I think, of covering his tracks...”David WilsonIn 1968 he was jailed for two years for indecently assaulting a six-year-old girl.He told a prison psychiatrist that he was evil and was afraid of himself.“I was a prison governor...until the late 1980s...(With) convicted paedophiles...we did absolutely nothing to overcome their sexual offending history...they were almost walking time-bombs.As soon as they were released from prison in the Sixties and Seventies, they were almost guaranteed to offend again...”David WilsonPREDATORY, AND FREEIt’s 2 March 1970. Ronald Jebson has just been released from Wandsworth prison.He is a 31-year-old predatory paedophile.He is not yet a killer.He moves to Enfield but catches up with and soon moves in with an old school friend from Hatfield, Robert Papper. Robert lives with his wife Maureen and their four children. The Papper’s have little way of knowing they’ve let a monster through their door.On 31 March 1970, Jebson goes to the job centre in Enfield. He then drives around the area. He sights Gary and Susan playing. He stops and talks to them.He employs his usual technique. It works.He persuades Susan and Gary to go into the woods. The children, perhaps confident that each will look after the other, get in.Jebson drives them to Epping Forest. He draws them in by offering them forbidden drink and exotic cannabis. Once the children are intoxicated, he sexually assaults Susan as he strangles her. He then starts on Gary.The boy tries to resist. But Gary is small for his age. And he’s twenty years younger than his attacker. In just seconds, he’s overpowered.Jebson finishes and strangles them both. He conceals their bodies in a hide he’d built earlier. He takes some of Susan’s clothing as trophies.Four days later, Jebson is arrested.But it’s for indecently assaulting an 11-year-old boy in woods near Nottingham.He is sentenced to five years jail. He’s released after three.

ROSEMARY PAPPERNow a convicted paedophile, but with his double child murder unknown, Jebson goes back to stay with Maureen and Robert Papper in their Hatfield home. He conceals his criminal convictions from the couple and their children.One of their children is called Rosemary:“She was blonde, blue eyes – she was a stunner.”Michaela Odwell, Rosemary’s best friendRobert doesn’t suspect Jebson. As he’s never seen Jebson with a woman, he assumes he’s homosexual.But Maureen grows uneasy. She says there’s something about him she just doesn’t trust.When Jebson buys sweets and treats and tries to get close to their eight-year-old Rosemary, Maureen insists Jebson leaves.Jebson doesn’t take it well. Even the neighbours remember his threat;“I will do something you will regret.”On the afternoon of 9 June 1974 Robert goes to collect his daughter from her primary school. He asks the teachers where Rosemary is. He’s told she’s been driven off by ‘Uncle Ron’.Rosemary tries to resist Jebson’s sexual assaults. Despite threatening violence, she doesn’t give in. So he takes her a birdwatcher hide in some woods. He slaps and hits her trying to get her to acquiesce. She won’t. Because she’s not performing to the script in his head, Jebson finds himself impotent.Humiliated, he fills with a murderous rage. He’s now able to rape her.As he does so, he strangles her to death. He later admits he did not find the experience ‘satisfactory.’“I am not getting pleasure. I am just using her as a waste bin.”Ronald Jebson police interview about Rosemary killingAfter she’s dead, he covers her body with straw.It is virtually a carbon copy of Susan’s killing.Not sated, Jebson sets off for Rosemary’s best friend, Michaela Odwell.Jebson had befriended her father for just this reason. He turns up her at the family home claiming his car had broken down. Michaela’s father offers him the sofa for the night.He had blood in the middle of his jumper, and my dad said,‘What happened, Ron?’, and he went,‘Oh, I cut myself’, so my mother put the jumper in to soak.”Michaela OdwellThe next day, eight-year-old Michaela is too ill to go to school. With her mother in the garden, Jebson attacks. But before the 35-year-old can finish her, her mother returns;“He put 10p in my hand, and he said to me;‘If you ever tell anyone what I’ve been doing up here, I will do exactly what I did to Rosemary. I strangled her. I punched her. I hit her, and I raped her. And I’d do the f******* same to you”When Michaela’s father returns, Jebson leaves.Just a few hours later, police arrest Jebson for Rosemary’s murder.It will be many years before the petrified Michaela is able to repeat what Jebson did and said.In 1974 at St Albans Crown Court, Mr Justice Kenneth Jones sentences Jebson to life and recommends he serve at least 20 years:“The mind recoils from the horror and enmity of the offences committed.”The judge makes it clear that he can find no mitigating factors.There is nothing to either excuse or explain Jebson’s actions.He is simply dangerous.

"The Beast"

“Any human being, whether you’re a police officer or not, would be absolutely appalled at this.”Brian Bowden-Brown, lead investigatorIn the late 80s a spree of rapes and burglaries is terrorising a South London community.It begins when a lady of 57 years returns home after a festive family Christmas get-together. She lives alone in a block of flats on Borough High Street. It’s just yards from a police station. It’s dark by the time she puts the key in her door.Inside, someone is waiting for her. He’s armed with an iron bar.The first blow to her skull stuns her. He proceeds to repeatedly beat her round the head till she’s totally subdued. She is by now bleeding heavily. When the lady is utterly defenceless and incapacitated, he rapes her.By the time he’s finished, she’s critically injured. He proceeds to ransack her flat. After stealing what he wants, he then leaves her, with a fractured skull and jaw.Its 24 hours before her family discover her.

The second attack takes place in the same block of flats. You can see the first victim’s flat from the second. They’re just 40 yards apart.He breaks in through the back door.The woman is 77 years old. Again, she lives alone. Her only company is her cat.He seriously sexually assaults the elderly woman.“The level of violence...is far more than is necessary just to gain the compliance of the victim...it seems to me that the goal is the infliction of physical injury. And the rape is just a secondary way to make the woman suffer.”Kerry Daynes, forensic psychologistBoth victims have been beaten and raped. Both have been robbed of small amounts of change.But the attacks aren’t intended to subdue the victim in order to steal their property. The physical and sexual attacks are the primary motive. They’re intended to degrade.His third victim survives nearly four hours of his ‘terrible, terrible sexual assaults’. She lives alone in a downstairs flat on Rouel Road.She is 66 years old. In between being raped, she tries to make cups of tea for him in order to break the cycle. She asks him not to rape her again. She tries to go to the toilet.Nothing works.Like the other victims, she notices her attacker smells strongly of alcohol.The attacker is gaining in confidence. He feels secure enough to spend an extended period of time in a victim’s home. He’s following a common pattern amongst sex offenders. His fantasies are developing.He conceals his identity. He draws the curtains in the victims’ flats to reduce the light. He attacks from behind. He tells his victims not to look at him. He covers the victim’s face.His fourth victim is 83. She is disabled.He breaks into her flat on John McKenna Walk. Unusually, there’s no rape. But his physical assault is just as savage and sadistic.After the attack, the lady never regains her speech.Other attacks start to be linked to the attacker.One in particular makes headlines.An elderly woman claims her attacker crosses himself and mutters a Catholic prayer as he completes his violent assault. The press dub him ‘The Praying Rapist’.It’s April 1990. Irene Grainey is a 68 year old woman living alone in Bermondsey. She is attacked in her own home. There are other similarities to previous attacks. But this time the offender is armed with a kitchen knife. Irene Grainey is stabbed to death.Irene lies in her ground floor council maisonette flat for over six weeks before her body is discovered. During this time, vital forensic evidence is lost.When an 82 year old man answers a knock on the door of his South London home, he’s punched straight in the face. This breaks his jaw and knocks him unconscious. He’s dragged inside. His flat is ransacked. The attacker washes any taps used. A cloth is used to wipe away any fingerprints.Over the next two decades, the attacker responsible remains at large. The surviving victims spend their remaining years living in fear.

The Hhorror begins

On 21 February 1991, her first victim, seven-month-old Liam Taylor, was admitted to Ward 4 with a chest infection. Allitt went out of her way to reassure his parents that he was in capable hands and persuaded them to go home to get some rest. When they returned, Allitt advised that Liam had endured a respiratory emergency but that he had recovered. She volunteered for extra night duty, so she could watch over the boy, and his parents chose to spend the night at the hospital as well.

Liam had another respiratory crisis just before midnight but it was felt that he had come through it satisfactorily. Allitt was left alone with the boy and his condition worsened dramatically; becoming deathly pale before red blotches appeared on his face, at which point Allitt summoned an emergency resuscitation team.At the time, Allitt’s nursing colleagues were confused by the absence of alarm monitors which had failed to sound when he stopped breathing. Liam suffered cardiac arrest and, despite the best efforts of the attending team, he suffered severe brain damage and remained alive only due to the use of life-support machines. On medical advice, his parents made the agonising decision to remove their baby from life support. His cause of death was recorded as heart failure. Allitt was never questioned about her role in baby Liam’s death.

Only two weeks after the death of Liam Taylor, her next victim was Timothy Hardwick, an 11-year-old with cerebral palsy, who was admitted to Ward 4 following an epileptic fit on 5 March 1991. Allitt took over his care and, again following a period when she was alone with the boy, she summoned the emergency resuscitation team, who found him without a pulse and turning blue. Despite their best efforts, the team, which included a paediatric specialist, were unable to revive him. An autopsy later failed to provide an obvious cause of death, although Liam's epilepsy was officially blamed.

Allitt's third victim, one-year-old Kayley Desmond, was admitted to Ward 4 on 3 March 1991 with a chest infection, from which she seemed to be recovering well. Five days later, with Allitt in attendance, baby Kayley went into cardiac arrest in the same bed where Liam Taylor had died a fortnight before. The resuscitation team were able to revive her and she was transferred to another hospital in Nottingham. Attending physicians discovered, during a thorough examination, an odd puncture hole under her armpit. They also discovered an air bubble near the puncture mark, which they attributed to an accidental injection but no investigation was initiated.

Five-month-old Paul Crampton became Allitt’s next victim, placed in Ward 4 on 20 March 1991, as a result of a non-serious bronchial infection. Just prior to his discharge, Allitt, who was again attending a patient by herself, summoned help as Paul appeared to be suffering from insulin shock, going into a near-coma on three separate occasions. Each time, the doctors revived him but were unable to explain the fluctuation in his insulin levels. When he was taken by ambulance to another hospital in Nottingham, Allitt rode with him and he was again found to have too much insulin. Baby Paul was extremely fortunate to have survived the ministrations of the Angel of Death.The next day, five-year-old Bradley Gibson, a pneumonia sufferer, went into unexpected cardiac arrest but was saved by the resuscitation team. Subsequent blood tests showed that his insulin was high, which made no sense to the attending physicians. A visit from Allitt later that night resulted in another heart attack and Bradley was transported to Nottingham, where he recovered.

Despite this alarming increase in the incidence of unexplained health events, all in the presence of Allitt, no suspicions were aroused at this time and she continued unchecked in her spree of violence.On 22 March 1991, two-year-old victim Yik Hung Chan turned blue and appeared in considerable distress when Allitt raised the alarm but he responded well to oxygen. Another attack resulted in his transferral to the larger hospital in Nottingham, where he recovered. His symptoms were attributed to a fractured skull, the result of a fall.

Allitt next turned her attention to twins, Katie and Becky Phillips, just two months old, who were kept in for observation as a result of their premature delivery. A bout of gastro-enteritis brought Becky into Ward 4 on 1 April 1991, when Allitt took over her care. Two days later, Allitt raised the alarm, claiming that Becky appeared hypoglycaemic and cold to the touch but no ailment was found. Baby Becky was sent home with her mother.

During the night, Becky went into convulsions and cried out in apparent pain but the doctor who was summoned suggested she had colic. Her parents kept her in their bed for observation but she died during the night. Despite an autopsy, pathologists could find no clear cause of death.

Becky’s surviving twin, Katie, was admitted to Grantham as a precaution. Unfortunately Allitt was again in attendance. It wasn't long before she was again summoning a resuscitation team to revive baby Katie, who had stopped breathing.

Efforts to revive Katie were successful but two days later she suffered a similar attack, which resulted in the collapse of her lungs. Following another revival effort, Katie was transferred to Nottingham, where it was found that five of her ribs were broken, in addition to having suffered serious brain damage as a result of her oxygen deprivation.

In a supreme twist of irony, Katie's mother, Sue Phillips, was so grateful to Allitt for saving her baby's life that she asked her to be Katie's godmother. Allitt accepted willingly, despite having inflicted partial paralysis, cerebral palsy, and sight and hearing damage on the infant.

Four more victims followed but the high incidence of unexplained attacks in otherwise healthy patients, along with Allitt’s attendance during these attacks, finally caused suspicions to be raised at the hospital. On 22 April 1991 Allitt’s violent spree was brought to an end with the death of 15-month-old Claire Peck, an asthmatic who required a breathing tube. Whilst in Allitt’s care for only a few minutes, the infant suffered a heart attack but the resuscitation team revived her successfully. Once more alone in Allitt’s presence, baby Claire suffered a second attack from which she could not be revived.

Although an autopsy indicated that Claire had died from natural causes, Dr Nelson Porter, a consultant at the hospital, initiated an inquiry. The high number of cardiac arrests over the previous two months on Ward 4 alarmed him. An airborne virus was initially suspected but nothing was found. A test that revealed a high level of potassium in baby Claire’s blood resulted in the police being summoned 18 days later. Her exhumation resulted in the discovery of traces of Lignocaine in her system, a drug used during cardiac arrest but never given to a baby.

Stuart Clifton, the police superintendent assigned to the investigation, suspected foul play. He examined the other suspicious cases that had occurred in the previous two months, finding inordinately high doses of insulin in most. Further evidence revealed that Allitt had reported the key missing to the insulin refrigerator. All records were checked, parents of the victims were interviewed and a security camera was installed in Ward 4.When record checks revealed missing daily nursing logs, which corresponded to the time period when Paul Crampton had been in Ward 4, suspicions were raised. When 25 separate suspicious episodes with 13 victims were identified, four of whom were dead, the only common factor was the presence of Beverley Allitt at every episode.

Charles Cullen: The killer nurse with an estimated 400 victims

Charles Cullen worked at numerous hospitals in the New Jersey area while his killing spree went largely unnoticed.

Extortion at Epsom

Before the Brummagems and the Sabinis, bookmakers were subject to any passing bully who fancied a cut of their earnings. Some bookies employed bodyguards. Often these were then used to dissuade winning punters from pressing their claims for payment.The racecourse gangs brought in an organised protection racket. Their cut could be as much as half of their profits, but at least it was predictable. And many of the paying public were pleased about the presence of the Brummagems. Pickpockets caught operating on their patch could expect a punishment beating. The Sabinis took a different approach. A gang member used to chalk his hand and on recognising a pickpocket, they would greet the man like an old friend, slapping them on the back. The chalk marked back would be noted by the police happy for an easy arrest. On top of this reciprocal relationship, the Sabinis also made sure a percentage of their profits went in backhanders and bribes to the local police. In return, the gang were left alone at their racecourses.

THE RACECOURSE RACKETEvery opportunity was taken to extract money. Just to operate, the bookies had to pay to stand at their ‘pitches’. Non payment meant instant intimidation. In addition, gang members surrounded the non compliant bookie so that no punters could place bets. Sometimes they would start fights to scare the paying public away.Tribute would soon be paid.Once established, everything they needed also cost. The chalk, the boards, the sponge, their stools to sit on, the list of runners, even the water to wash the board with, all had a charge attached. And after all that, the bookie would then be expected to pay a percentage of their profits to the gangs. The gangs didn’t, however, share any losses. On a course like Brighton, they could clear as much as £5,000 in a day.When the Brummagems targeted Ascot and Epsom, the most lucrative racecourses, and on the Sabini patch, gang war was declared.THE RACECOURSE WARSAuthor Brian McDonald’s ‘Gangs of London’ details the fights that followed, such as ‘The Battle of Bath’. Fights could be a hundred strong and involve hammers, spanners, mallets, bottles, knives, cut throat razors and sometimes guns. One, ‘The Battle of Lewes’ was said to have partially inspired Graham Greene’s gangster classic ‘Brighton Rock’. These tit for tat encounters were costly. On top of the casualties and occasional fatalities, the police were forced to arrest gang members fighting in public. And a gang member in prison was no longer earning.Accounts differ as to why on 27 March 1921 Billy Kimber went to Sabini’s King Cross flat. Some say he had decided to put peace and profits first and call a truce. Others believe he was there just to ‘pour oil on the troubled waters’. What is certain is that the meeting ended suddenly when a fight broke out. Then one of Sabini’s men, a particularly violent man called Alfie Solomon, shot Kimber.

Kimber was found outside Sabini’s with a bullet in his side. Alfie Solomon later stood trial for attempted murder. He was acquitted after everybody lost their memory. Even Kimber refused to give evidence. A jury accepted the shooting was accidental.That April the police were tipped off that there would be a reprisal. But by the time they turned up, they just found two badly beaten Brummy bookmakers. Later, two Jewish chauffeurs for Sabini were ambushed. One had been shot twice. Predictably, neither could identify the shooter.The night before that year’s Epsom Derby, one of the Brummagems was attacked in Covent Garden. He needed 70 stitches. Desperate for revenge, and hoping to put an end to the bloody gang war, the Brummagems planned a final showdown.They planned to sort the Sabinis on the first day of the Epsom Derby. They knew their rivals would be out in numbers. But so were the Metropolitan Police. So as to avoid a confrontation with the law, the Brummagems left the race meeting early. They drove a very conspicuous vehicle, a bright blue charabanc. They hid it behind some bushes and laid in wait for the Sabinis at Ewell – a few miles from Epsom. The spot they chose on the London Road was a perfect ambush point because anyone coming from Epsom would have to go past them.When the Brummagems thought they saw two of their enemy’s car coming, they pulled out their own car to block the way. With a car in front and Birmingham boys behind them, there was no escape for their targets. Armed with an array of weapons, the Brummagems went to work first on the cars and then on the stunned occupants. The Brummagems pulled them out and in a frenzy, broke arms and slashed heads.The attack was incredibly vicious. The Brummagems used guns, hatchets, house bricks, iron bars, knives and razors. Fingers were cut off. It was described as ‘a scene of carnage.’ The people in the surrounding houses screamed in terror. The road was soon littered with bodies. Only when it was too late, did the Brummagems realise the bloodied bodies that lay around them weren’t from the Sabini gang.In their blood frenzy, they had beaten up their allies, the Leeds Mob.

Onoprienko’s first murder was a couple he encountered standing next to their Lada car on a motorway. On an urge, he stopped his car, reversed to where they were parked and shot them in cold blood. He later claimed that from that moment onwards, killing seemed merely like a game from outer space, he gained no pleasure from it and found corpses ugly.

In 1989, Onoprienko began killing with his friend, Serhiy Rogozin, whom he had met at a local gymnasium. Their first crime was when they broke into a home in Bratkovychi to steal valuables. The owners caught them and their response was to kill the family, of two adults and five children, to avoid having any witnesses to their crime.

Onoprienko claimed to have parted ways with Rogozin a few months later but he continued killing. Finding a family of five, including an 11-year-old boy, who were asleep in their car, Onoprienko shot them at point-blank range. Not knowing what to do with their bodies, sat with them in the car for two hours before burning them.

His general formula for crime would be to select an isolated house, to break in and steal what valuables he could and then to murder the entire family, as well as any witnesses he encountered. His methods were violent; he blew doors off homes, gunned down adults, using a 12-gauge shotgun at point-blank range, raped women and battered children with metal objects. After taking money, jewellery, stereo equipment and other items of value, he would set the house alight to destroy any evidence.

On 24th December 1995 he broke into the home of the Zaichenko family in Garmarnia, central Ukarine. Using his sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun, Onoprienko killed the forestry teacher, his wife and two young sons before leaving with stolen jewellery and clothing and setting the house alight.

A few days later, Onoprienko shot and killed a family of four in the Lviv region, before burning down their house. A man spotted him as he fled the scene, so Onoprienko shot and killed him.

Less than a month later, on 6th January 1996, he killed three more people, in three separate incidents. Onoprienko stopped his car near the Berdyansk-Dnieprovskaya motorway. He hailed down other cars, as if he needed assistance, and when they drew up, he shot the occupants. They were Kasai, a Navy ensign; Savitsky, a taxi driver and Kochergina, a cook.

On the 17th January 1996 Onoprienko drove to Bratkovychi and broke into the Pilat family home. He shot five people, including a six-year-old boy, before setting the house alight. He was seen by two witnesses, Kondzela, 27, a female railroad worker, and Zakharko, 56, whom he shot and killed.

In the Fastova, Kievskaya Oblast region, on 30th January 1996 Onoprienko shot and killed Marusina, a 28-year-old nurse, her two young sons and a 32-year-old male visitor, Zagranichniy.

On 19th February 1996 Onoprienko broke into the Dubchak family home in Olevsk, Zhytomyr Oblast. He shot the father and son and beat the mother and daughter to death with a hammer.

He drove to Malina, Lviv Oblast, where he broke into the home of the Bodnarchuk family on 27th February 1996. He shot the husband and wife, killed the daughters, aged 7 and 8, with an axe and shot a neighbour, named Tsalk.

Onoprienko travelled to Busk, outside Bratkovychi, on 22nd March 1996, where he killed the Novosad family of four and set their house alight to destroy the bodies. Onoprienko claimed this was his last murder.

It was during this relentless massacre of families in Bratkovichi and Busk villages over a three-month period that Onoprienko was dubbed ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Citizen O’. Some sources say he killed 43 people in 6 months, whilst others put the figure at more than 50 in 3 months. Whatever the actual total, it was certain that Onoprienko was a serial killer who was out of control.

“To me killing people is like ripping open a duvet. Men, women, old people, children, they are all the same. I have never felt sorry for those I killed. No love, no hatred, just blind indifference. I don’t see them as individuals, but just as masses.”

In March 1996 the Ukrainian police launched nationwide manhunt for the killer, involving 2,000 police and more than 3,000 troops, concentrating specifically on where the murders had occurred in the western Ukraine.

In an unfortunate turn of events during the police investigation, an innocent man, Yury Mozola, 26, was taken in for questioning as a suspect in several of the murders. Over a period of three days, he was held in custody, burned, beaten and given electric shocks in order to force a confession. Refusing to confess to something he did not do, Mozola died during the torture. The six members of the Ukrainian Secret Service, along with the representative of the Public Prosecutors Office, who tortured Mazola and were responsible for his death, were later sentenced to short prison terms.

It was around this time that Onoprienko had asked one of his cousins, Pyotr Onoprienko, if he could stay with him for a while. Pyotr had agreed but became concerned when he found Onoprienko’s store of weapons in the house. Pyotr confronted him and Onoprienko became extremely angry and threatening towards Pyotr and his family. A worried Pyotr asked him to leave and Onoprienko moved in with his hairdresser girlfriend, Anna, and her two children.

Still worried by Onoprienko’s threats, Pyotr Onoprienko approached the police to tell them of the weapon stash he had found. He spoke to deputy police chief Sergei Kryukov and informed him that Onoprienko was living with his girlfriend in the nearby town of Zhytomyr. Kryukov became interested when he learned that a 12-gauge hunting rifle, one of the weapons recently used in a local murder, was the same type of rifle reported stolen in the Zhytomyr area. This could be a thread to link Onoprienko to at least some of the local murders.

“I saw him standing 10 metres from me, shooting at the people who were swimming. He aimed his machine gun at me and I screamed”Adrian Pracon, BBC News Online, 26 July 2011On 22 July 2011, the day Breivik has been planning for many years dawns. One of his first actions is to send himself a test email. Contained within it is his manifesto, about to be sent to 1,000 individuals throughout the globe. He also releases a 12-minute film presenting the evils of multiculturalism and Islamic demographic warfare. He hopes to attract like-minded people to his crusade.Breivik leaves his farm in Rena with a home-made fertiliser bomb in the back of his car. In the afternoon he drives his car into Oslo. He tries to park it in a space he’s carefully selected to ensure his target (the government building) collapses. But a car is already parked in the space he wants, so he chooses an alternative location a couple of hundred metres away.At 3.26pm the bomb goes off in Oslo killing eight people and injuring hundreds more. The windows of the Prime Minister’s office are blown out and the scene resembles a war zone. Bloodied Norwegians stumble around on the ground unsure as to what has just happened. Crucially the government building is still standing. Allowing for this type of failure in his manifesto, Breivik resorts to Plan B.One hour and thirty minutes from Oslo is the island of Utoeya. It’s where the Labour Party’s Youth League has gathered for their summer camp. On the island news about the Oslo terrorist attack starts to filter through. Everyone is shocked but it’s decided that the safest place for them is Utoeya. Unfortunately it’s a bad decision; unbeknown to the occupants of the island, they are actually the terrorist’s next target.Breivik arrives at the lake at 4.57pm. He’s dressed as a policeman and armed with a pistol and automatic rifle. He asks a ferryman to take him across to the island. When the teenagers see the policeman arriving they start to feel a lot safer. Lulling them into a false sense of security, Breivik beckons them to come towards him. But once close enough he opens fire and operates a shoot to kill policy. Everyone he comes across is shot dead. To ensure death an additional shot is fired.With the terrifying realisation that a gunman is on the loose, the teenagers try to find shelter in rooms, or in undergrowth. They cower in fear but keep silent, frantically texting their parents to alert them to the danger they’re in. They also beg their parents not to call as they don’t want to risk the gunman finding them. Others run to the freezing waters surrounding the island to escape, but they are easy targets for Breivik who fires mercilessly into the water.At 5.40pm a SWAT team is despatched to Utoeya. They arrive but there is difficulty in finding a boat big enough to carry them across to the island. They arrive on the island at 6.25pm. By this time Breivik has killed 69 and injured 33 others in less than 90 minutes.

An odd request

In 2000 Meiwes posted a message saying, “I am looking for a young, well-built man aged 18 to 30 to slaughter”. Several men responded, one of which was a man called Borg Jose who was about to become Meiwes' first victim. While laid out on his table preparing to be butchered, Jose complained of feeling ill and asked to be released, which Meiwes obliged.The final man to reply to Meiwes' internet message was Bernd-Jürgen Brandes. Brandes was a 43-year-old bisexual engineer, who wrote to Meiwes on 14 February 2001 saying that he would agree to be eaten. They exchanged various lurid emails, discussing the best way in which he should be eaten and his body used afterwards. Brandes even suggested his skull could be used as an ashtray.On 9 March 2001, Brandes went to Meiwes' home in Amstetten and after having sex, Brandes swallowed numerous sleeping pills, a bottle of Vicks cough medicine and some schnapps before Meiwes amputated his penis for the pair to eat together. Brandes tried to eat a piece of the penis raw but it was apparently too “chewy” and so Meiwes proceeded to fry it with a little garlic and pepper but burned it, meaning that neither of them was able to consume the dismembered part.

Losing large amounts of blood from the injury, Brandes lay bleeding to death in the bath over the next three hours, while Meiwes read a Star Trek book. Ten hours later, Brandes was still alive, so Meiwes stabbed him several times in the neck to put an end to his pain, and his life. Meiwes woud later explain: “My friend enjoyed dying, death. I only waited horrified for the end after doing the deed. It took so terribly long.”Then the cannibalism began. Meiwes hung Brandes' lifeless body on a meat-hook and proceeded to cut the flesh into sizeable chunks and grind the bones into flour. He dismembered the entire body so that he could store the parts in his freezer, which he proceeded to eat over the following 10 months.The entire process of Brandes' penis amputation and subsequent death had been recorded on videotape by the pair and would later be used as evidence against Meiwes.

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5 cannibal stories you won't believe

They call some people animals...animals? I don’t know…But… he was inhuman

THE WEDDING DAY MURDERSDore, South Yorkshire is an affluent suburb of Sheffield situated on the edge of the Peak District. It’s an area equally loved by tourists and locals.

It’s Saturday 23 October 1983. Hutchinson’s been on the run for three weeks.He’s mobile but his injured knee still bothers him. He is now fifty miles south of the Selby Court from which he escaped.He enters the village of Dore.

“We’ve never really understood why Hutchinson went there of all the places he could have done. He’d no reason to go there.”Alan Whitehouse, Yorkshire Post Reporter

Two very happy parents are hosting a wedding reception in their garden. They couldn’t be more proud. Just a few hours before they’d witnessed the marriage of their daughter. Now everyone is gathered in a marquee in their garden.Among the many happy friends and family is the bride’s 28-year-old brother. He hopes to follow his mother’s career and become a doctor. Also present in the house is an 18-year-old woman.

Despite the autumnal date, the rain stays away and the sun shines for wedding photos outside. In one, the father of the bride is wearing tails and holds a drink. The bride’s mother sports a bright orange dress and fascinator. It’s impossible to tell which of them is happier.Later, they all wave their daughter and her husband off on their honeymoon.And as the last guests leave, they make a start at clearing up. Father puts on his pyjamas and mother prepares for bed.

Ever the opportunistic criminal, Hutchinson enters through a faulty patio door.He stabs the couple’s son to death first.

“It didn’t matter who got in his way because he would destroy them”Mick Burdis, Detective Chief Inspector, South Yorkshire Police

His father hears a commotion and investigates. At the top of the stairs, Hutchinson stabs him three times. The father’s body falls down the stairs.Hutchinson enters their bedroom. Mother tries to resist. But Hutchinson’s attack is so savage, there is only one possible outcome. One of the family will be found to have tried to stop the stabbing by grabbing the blade. Instead, the blade slices to the bones of their fingers.

“...this is somebody who is not only capable of breathtaking violence...he literally revels in his cruelty...Hedonistic and entirely callous.”Kerry Daynes, Forensic Psychologist

Hutchinson then turns his attention to the 18-year-old female who is also in the house. At knifepoint, he makes her walk downstairs, stepping over the body of the older man. He then ties her up. His T-shirt is stained with the blood of the family. Resistance would be fatal.He repeatedly rapes her.Why he leaves this last witness alive will never be explained.

What is known is that at some point he is on her bed upstairs. As he kneels on it, his injured knee starts to bleed and it seeps through the bandage staining the bed.

Once he has finished, Hutchinson helps himself to champagne and cheese.He then discards the bottle and puts the cheese back in the fridge.He leaves his rape victim tied up and exits.

Arthur Hutchinson is about to become the most wanted man in Britain.

“He was an insignificant man who felt that he’d not had the chances in life that perhaps he should have had and this was a way of drawing attention to himself...and when he got it, he revelled in it.”Alan Whitehouse, Yorkshire Post Reporter

On 14 February 1965, Malcolm’s East Elmhurst home, still the subject of a bitter legal ownership battle with the Nation of Islam, was firebombed. Malcolm and his family were fortunate to escape physical injury, and no one was ever prosecuted in relation to the attack. Malcolm’s security was increased after the attack and, the next night, he spoke of the firebombing to a gathering of Organisation for African American Unity members at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, New York, claiming a conspiracy between the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for the attack.

Privately, however, he confided to his biographer that he was beginning to doubt whether the attacks against him were Nation of Islam inspired. Despite the daily threats on his life, he maintained a hectic schedule of personal appearances, including a well-publicised appointment to deliver another speech to the OAAU at the Audubon Ballroom, on 21 February 1965. Despite his private doubts about the real source of his attacks, it was to prove a perfect setting for a Nation of Islam assassination conspiracy.

Of the four men involved in the successful assassination plot on Malcolm, only one was ever identified with any degree of certainty; Talmadge Hayer, also known as Thomas Hagen, a member of the Fruits of Islam, a paramilitary organisation charged with the protection of the Nation of Islam. In a sworn affidavit after the fact, Talmadge described how the conspirators had visited the Ballroom on the evening of 20 February, the night before Malcolm’s speech, where a public dance was in progress, to plan their assassination strategy. It was agreed that he would sit near the front of the auditorium with a .45 handgun, allow one of his co-conspirators to draw the attention of Malcolm’s bodyguards by standing and shouting, at which point he and two others would stand and fire at Malcolm.

Shortly after Malcolm had begun his speech to the assembled OAAU, the plan was put into action. There was a commotion in the audience and, whilst the focus of Malcolm’s bodyguards was directed at the source of the disturbance, a man with a sawn-off shotgun rushed forward and shot Malcolm in the chest. Almost simultaneously, Hayer and his accomplice leapt up, stormed the stage, and discharged their own weapons at Malcolm. Malcolm received a total of 15 wounds from the three weapons. Malcolm’s supporters launched an immediate counter-attack on the assassins but three of them used the ensuing chaos to escape. Hayer was not so lucky, a bullet wound in the leg slowed him down considerably, and he was arrested by a police officer outside the Ballroom. By the time an ambulance had been summoned, and had reached New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Malcolm was pronounced dead on arrival.

The first of many murders

Wuornos’ first known victim was an electronics shop owner, 51-year-old Richard Mallory from Clearwater, Florida, who picked up Wuornos on 30th November 1989. She claims that he tried to rape her, and that she killed him in self-defence (he was later discovered to have a criminal record for rape, although it was not raised at her trial.) She shot him three times with a .22 pistol, dumped his body in a wood beside Interstate 95 in Volusia County, Florida and stole his Cadillac. His car was discovered abandoned outside Daytona a few days later, and two young men discovered his naked body on 13th December 1989. During the investigation of Mallory’s life and death, police discovered a pattern of alcohol and sex binges, extending back over a number of years, and made little headway in the search for his killer.

It was six months before the next victim was discovered, 43-year old David Spears, a heavy machinery operator from Sarasota. His naked body was found on 1st June 1990 in Citrus County, 40 miles north of Tampa, Florida, and he had been shot six times with a .22 pistol. It took police another week to effect identification, via dental records, and they discovered that he had been missing since 19th May, and that his truck had been found some days later, abandoned on Interstate 75.By the time Spears had been identified, another naked victim had been found, this time thirty miles south of Pasco County, near the Interstate 75, on 6th June 1990. The body was so badly decomposed that police were unable to progress their identification immediately, but the fact that the corpse was naked, and riddled with nine .22 calibre bullets, led to it being tentatively linked to the two previous victims. The victim was later identified as 40-year old rodeo worker, Charles Carskaddon.The police received their first real break on 4th July 1990, when Wuornos and Moore crashed their car near Orange Springs, Florida, whilst in the midst of a heated argument. They left the crash scene, but were described to the police by a witness later, when the vehicle was found to belong to a missing 65-year old retired merchant seaman called Peter Siems. He had last been seen on 7th June 1990, and the interior of the vehicle, when examined, exhibited signs of a struggle, and yielded a number of finger- and palm prints. The description of the two women, and the crime MO, was circulated throughout Florida and nationwide.Wuornos’ next victim was 50-year old delivery driver Eugene Burress, whose employer raised the alarm when he failed to complete his delivery route on 30th July 1990. His delivery truck was found abandoned the next day, and a picnicking family discovered his body, on 4th August 1990, in the Ocala National Forest. He had been shot twice with a .22-calibre pistol.A month later, 56-year-old Dick Humphreys, a former police chief and Department of Health employee from Sumterville, was reported missing by his wife, on 11th September 1990. His body was found the next evening in Marion County. He had been shot seven times with a .22 pistol.Another two months passed before the discovery of Wuornos’ seventh victim, a 60-year-old truck driver from Merrit Island called Walter Antonio, whose naked body was discovered in Dixie County on 19th November 1990. He had been dead less than 24 hours, shot three times in the back and once in the head, also with a .22 firearm.Recognising the similarities in all the cases, the police released the photo-fit identities of the Siems car accident women to the media, which received statewide coverage throughout Florida, due to the potential of a female serial killer being at large.By mid-December 1990 the police had a number of useful leads, which led to the identification of Tyria Moore, as well as three other names: Lee Blahovec, Lori Grody and Cammie Marsh Green, which all matched the description of the second photo-fit. When Wuornos used the Cammie Marsh Greene identity, to pawn a camera belonging to Richard Mallory, she was required to provide fingerprint identification, in accordance with Florida law. She also used the Greene ID to pawn a set of tools that matched a description of those missing from David Spear’s truck. An analysis of these fingerprints linked Greene to Grody, and also matched the prints lifted from Siem’s stolen car. The information was passed to the National Crime Information Center, and the three aliases were linked to Aileen Wuornos. By 5 January 1991 the police finally had a focus for their investigative efforts.

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The damsel of death: The trial of Aileen Wuornos

When the family began to show intermittent signs of poisoning during the early part of 1961, Young’s father initially suspected that Young might be inadvertently harming the family by the careless use of his chemistry set at home, but Young denied the accusation. The potential for deliberate poisoning was never considered, especially as Young had also been ill on a number of occasions. It remains unclear whether this was by design (to avoid detection), thorough scientific interest in his own reaction, or just carelessness of exactly which teacups he had poisoned.When Young’s elder sister, Winifred, was found by doctors to have been poisoned by Belladonna in November 1961, Young’s father again suspected him, but took no action. Molly Young, his stepmother, became the concerted focus of Young’s attentions, gradually becoming more ill until finally, on 21 April 1962, she was found by her husband writhing in agony, in the back garden of their home, with Young looking on in fascination. She was rushed to hospital, where she died later that night. Her cause of death was determined as a prolapse of a spinal bone and she was cremated (not surprisingly at Young’s suggestion), with no further action taken at the time. It was later discovered that she had developed a tolerance to the antimony with which Young was slowly poisoning her, and he switched to thallium the night before her death to speed up the process. There were even reports of further nausea and vomiting attacks at her funeral: clearly the death of his stepmother had not dulled Young’s scientific curiosity.Following Molly’s death, Fred Young’s attacks of vomiting and cramping became more frequent and increasingly severe, and he was also admitted to hospital, where he was diagnosed with antimony poisoning. He was lucky to have survived his son’s experimentation, but could not countenance his son’s responsibility: that role fell to Young’s school chemistry teacher, who contacted the police when he discovered poisons, and copious material about poisoners, in Young’s school desk.Young was sent to a police psychiatrist, where his encyclopaedic knowledge of poisons soon became apparent, and arrested on 23 May 1962. He admitted the poisoning of his father, sister and school friend, Williams, but no murder charges were brought against him for the murder of his stepmother, as any evidence had been destroyed at the time of her cremation. Still only 14, he was committed to Broadmoor maximum-security hospital, the youngest inmate since 1885, for a minimum period of 15 years.Incarceration barely dampened his enthusiasm for experimentation, and within weeks the death of an inmate, John Berridge, by cyanide poisoning, had prison authorities baffled. Young claimed to have extracted cyanide from laurel bush leaves, but his confession was not taken seriously, and Berridge’s death was recorded as suicide. On other occasions, staff and inmates’ drinks were found to have been tampered with, including the introduction of an abrasive sodium compound, commonly called ‘sugar soap’, used for preparing painted walls, into a tea urn that could have caused mass poisoning had it not been discovered. He continued to read widely about poisoning, although he began to keep his obsession increasingly well hidden, when authorities made it clear that appearing less obsessed would speed up his release.By the late 1960’s Young’s doctors seemed oblivious to his continued fatal fascination and recommended, in June 1970, that he be released as he had been ‘cured’. Young celebrated by informing a psychiatric nurse that he intended to kill one person for every year he had been in Broadmoor; the comment was recorded on his file but, amazingly, never influenced the decision to release him.When Young was released on 4 February 1971, now aged 23, he went to stay in a hostel but had contact with his sister, Winifred, who had moved to Hemel Hempstead following her marriage. Despite having been poisoned by him, she was more forgiving than her father, who initially wanted nothing to do with his son. She was concerned by his fixation with his crimes: he took great delight in visiting the scenes of his past crimes, thriving on the reaction of his old neighbours in Neasden when they recognised who he was.He made trips to London, where he stocked up on the antimony, thallium, and other poisons required for his experiments, and a fellow hostel resident, 34-year-old Trevor Sparkes, was soon exhibiting the familiar cramps and sickness associated with any proximity to Young. Another man he befriended experienced such agony that he took his own life, although no connection to Young was established at the time.Young found work as a store man at John Hadland Laboratories, a photographic supply firm in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, where his new employers were aware of his Broadmoor stay, but not his history as a poisoner.  They might have had some reservations, given the easy availability of poisons such as thallium, routinely used in photographic processes, but Young had, in any case, already secured his poison supplies from unsuspecting London pharmacists. His willingness to make tea and coffee for his co-workers raised no concerns, so when Young’s boss, 59-year-old Bob Egle, began to experience severe cramps and dizziness, it was attributed to a virus thought to be doing the rounds, known locally as the ‘Bovingdon Bug’, which had afflicted a number of local schoolchildren. Other Hadland workers complained of similar cramps, but none were ever as severe as Egle’s who, curiously, seemed to recover when off work ill, but instantly became sicker than ever on his return to work. He was eventually admitted to hospital where he died, in agony, on 7 July 1971. His cause of death was recorded as pneumonia.In September 1971, 60-year-old Fred Biggs began to suffer similar symptoms to Egle, and general absenteeism at Hadland increased dramatically, with employees suffering a variety of unusual and debilitating ailments, including the usual cramps, hair loss and sexual dysfunction. Various sources were considered, including water contamination, radioactive fallout and leakage of the chemicals used at the firm itself, but no real progress was made towards the cause.Biggs was eventually admitted to the London Hospital for Nervous Diseases, but took a long time to die, a cause of some frustration to Young, who recorded his displeasure in his diary. But he eventually succumbed, on 19 November 1971, in excruciating pain.This second death raised great concern within the firm: by this stage about 70 employees had recorded similar symptoms and there were fears for personal safety. The doctor on site tried to reassure staff, by insisting that health and safety rules were being strictly adhered to, and was taken aback when Young challenged him in front of colleagues, quizzing him on why thallium poisoning had not been considered as a cause, considering that it was used in the photographic process. The doctor was surprised at the in-depth toxicological knowledge espoused by Young, and brought it to the attention of the management, who in turn alerted the police.

There has been much speculation about the true number of Milat’s victims, given that he has always maintained his innocence, but the luckiest of them was certainly British backpacker Paul Onions, who was hitchhiking south from Sydney, in search of work, and was picked up by Milat on 25 January 1990.Milat was initially very friendly, introducing himself as “Bill”, but Onions found Milat’s personal questions about his plans unnerving, and he became concerned for his safety when Milat began ranting, and making racist and xenophobic remarks. When Milat pulled his car to the side of the road, Onions tried to get out, but Milat pulled out a revolver and told him to put on his seatbelt. Onions managed to bolt for safety, leaving his backpack, which contained all his possessions and passport. Despite Milat’s threat that he would shoot him, he managed to flag down a passing car, which took him to the nearest police station so that he could report the incident. He returned to Sydney to replace the missing passport, and eventually returned to the UK, not yet aware of his narrow escape.The first of Milat’s less fortunate victims to be discovered were British backpackers, Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. They were found in an area of the Belangalo State Forest known as Executioners Drop, by orienteering enthusiasts who were out on their weekly run, on 19 September 1992. This was fairly close to the area where the attack on Paul Onions had occurred in 1990.Both girls had been missing since May of that year, when they had teamed up to look for work south of Sydney. Joanne Walters had been stabbed repeatedly; including one wound to her spine that, it was believed, might have paralysed her while the killer continued his vicious attack. The zip of her jeans had been undone, but the top button was still fastened, as if she had been partially stripped and sexually assaulted, then buttoned up hastily after the attack. Her remains were too badly decomposed to actually establish whether a sexual attack had occurred. Caroline Clarke, as well as being stabbed repeatedly, had been shot in the head ten times. She also had a similar spinal wound to Walters. Four bullets that remained inside her skull were preserved for forensic analysis, and detectives were confident that they would be able to use these to track the weapon responsible.A primitive brick fireplace had been constructed near the bodies, and cigarette butts and spent .22-calibre cartridge cases were also recovered from the scene. An extensive search of the surrounding area produced no more bodies at that time, and the possibility that a serial killer was on the loose, although speculated in the press, was denied by the police authorities.Despite the abundance of forensic evidence, police made little progress over the following weeks, and sought the assistance of a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Rod Milton. He concluded that the killer was in his mid thirties, with a history of aggression, was familiar with the surrounding terrain and motivated by the pleasure of inflicting pain. Furthermore, he did not believe that a serial killer was responsible, although it was possible that the killer might have an assistant. Police progress continued to be slow, as all leads were painstakingly followed, including a thorough investigation of all suspicious disappearances over the previous decade.The discovery of the second set of bodies, in October 1993, injected new life into a case that had become stale despite the best investigative efforts. The badly decomposed remains were those of Australian nationals James Gibson and Deborah Everist, who had gone missing in 1989. Despite the environmental damage wrought on the clothing, Gibson’s zipper was intact; it was open, but with the top button fastened, in a similar manner to Joanne Walters.  Post-mortem examinations again revealed paralysing spinal knife wounds, inflicted in a similar manner to the earlier British victims.Crime scene similarities included a small fireplace built near the bodies, making the police more certain that they were dealing with the same killer, and Superintendent Clive Small was placed in overall charge of the investigation, setting up a large task force to progress the investigations. A massive manual search of the extended Belangalo Forest area was initiated, and it took almost a month before the next victim was found, on 1 November: German national Simone Schmidl, who had been missing since January 1991, when she had been planning to hitchhike south from Sydney in search of work. The trademark fireplace and discarded .22 shells were close by. There was no doubt she had fallen victim to the same killer, showing the now-familiar spinal injury.Three days later the exhaustive search yielded the final two victims, German nationals Anja Habschied and her boyfriend, Gabor Neugebauer, who had been missing since just after Christmas 1991. The boy’s jeans had been unzipped, but with the button fastened, and he had been strangled, as well as shot numerous times, the recovered bullets a perfect match to previous crime scenes. The girl’s body was missing its skull completely, which appeared to have been severed by a machete or sword.Given the new bodies, Superintendent Small was forced to admit to the media that the police were looking for a serial killer, but this had long been the assumption of the speculative media, anyway. The wide range of methods employed by the killer, including beating, strangulation, shooting, stabbing and decapitation, as well as the sexual assault of both male and female victims, made it difficult to narrow down the suspect list, and police were also hampered by the sheer volume of calls from concerned citizens, who swamped the task force with information.Various independent reports had led the police to develop suspicions about the Milat family and, in particular Ivan Milat, but they had no firm evidence linking Milat to the crimes. The international media interest served its purpose, however, when Paul Onions, the only one of Milat’s victims to escape, contacted Australian authorities in April 1994, with information about his 1990 attack. His account was further corroborated by an independent call from the woman who had rescued Onions and driven him to the police station, and police recognised quickly that, if Onions could identify Milat as his attacker, then they could perhaps tie him to the other murders.Onions was flown out to Australia, where he identified Milat from a video line-up, giving police the excuse they needed to seek a warrant for the search of various Milat family properties. A simultaneous raid was carried out in the early hours of 22 May 1994, which revealed a huge amount of evidence linking Milat to the crimes, including personal effects of many of the victims, including clothing, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment, as well as vast quantities of ammunition. They also found parts of disassembled weapons, including a .22 calibre rifle. A long curved cavalry sword, suitable for the beheading of Anja Habschied, was found in a locked cupboard at the home of Milat’s mother.

The Star of India, one of the most precious jewels in the world, was exhibited along with other valuable gems in what was known as the J.P. Morgan Collection in New York’s Museum of Natural History.On the evening of 29th October 1964, Murphy and his cohorts climbed through a bathroom window they had unlocked during opening hours. The Star sapphire was the only gem in the collection protected by an alarm. Luckily for them the battery operating the alarm was dead. Murphy managed to steal the stones, including the sapphire worth around $400,000.The high he must have experienced from such an audacious robbery that involved no violence, was short lived when Murphy was arrested along with his accomplices just two days later. The Star of India was recovered in a Miami bus station locker. Most of the other gems were also found. The one thing that gave them away was the lavish parties they had held at the Cambridge Hotel while planning the heist.Murphy received 21 months in jail. When he came out it appeared that his experiences had hardened him for he is quoted as saying that when he came out of New York’s Rikers Island prison he didn’t give a ‘damn’ about ‘anything or anyone’.Murder 1968 was to see a turning point in Murphy’s style and image as a glamorous cat burglar.Murphy acted as look-out and getaway driver when he and two partners broke into the huge mansion of Olive Wofford, a Miami Beach socialite. Wofford later told police, the thieves held a pistol to her and also threatened to pour boiling water over her eight year-old niece if she didn't cooperate and open the safe.Murphy was later tracked down by the police, which involved a high-powered chase, where he drove his vehicle through a pair of French doors. When apprehended and found to be swathed in bandages Murphy quipped "I cut myself shaving."But worse to come was the discovery that two Californian secretaries had died at his hands in 1967 despite Murphy denying he had anything to do with the killings. Later to be known as the Whiskey Creek murders, the two women had been shot, bludgeoned to death and then dumped in a creek near Hollywood, Florida.Concrete weights had also been tied to their necks to sink them. The victims had allegedly been brutally killed in a dispute over nearly half a million dollars worth of securities stolen from a Los Angeles brokerage. Murphy was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.Despite denying he was involved in the Whiskey Creek murders, Murphy was convicted of killing Terry Rae Frank, 24, in 1969 and sentenced to life in prison. In 1970, he received a second life sentence, plus 20 years, for conspiracy and assault to commit robbery against Olive Wofford.Due to becoming a model prisoner, a Christian and showing remorse for his past Murphy was paroled from the Florida State Prison in 1986.

The post-War period, in which Rosenberg lost his job, was typified by an unprecedented build up of Cold War intelligence agencies in the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union, and there was a great deal of political capital to be gained from knowing anything that the other side did not.The first link in the chain of evidence, which led directly to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was an encoded KGB report on the Manhattan Project, America’s codename for the project to build an atomic bomb, which was intercepted by the FBI. Its contents led both the FBI and MI5 to suspect that a naturalised British scientist, Klaus Fuchs, could have been feeding details of the Manhattan Project to communist agents. An MI5 interrogation of Fuchs, then living in the UK, led, in turn, to the identification of his courier contact, known to him only as ‘Raymond’.Whilst these complex investigations were underway, the threat of Communism was crystallised, in the first detonation of an atomic device by the Soviets, in August 1949. This made US intelligence services even more determined to trace the source of the leaking of the ‘Manhattan Project’ documents.‘Raymond’ was eventually confirmed as a Jewish chemist, named Harry Gold who, in turn, gave up his own contact within the communist spy ring; a Los Alamos-based US soldier, whose identity was confirmed by investigators as David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother.

The plan that had been gestating in his mind took real form on 31 July 1966, with the purchase of binoculars and a Bowie knife, as well as some supplies. That evening, he began typing a final letter of explanation, which detailed his irrational thoughts, and failure to find any respite from them. He requested a formal autopsy of his body, to establish whether any physical cause might prove to be the source of his mental anguish.He outlined his plan to kill his wife that evening, to enable her to avoid any suffering, and would have continued his typing, but he was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of family friends, who stayed for a while, noticing nothing unusual about his behaviour.After picking up Kathy from work that evening, they returned home, where he phoned his mother and asked if they could come around to visit. For some reason, Kathy chose not to accompany him and he went to his mother’s apartment alone, where he choked her with a length of rubber hose, before stabbing her with a hunting knife. He then sat down and wrote another letter, explaining that he had killed his mother to alleviate her suffering, and stuck the letter on the door of her apartment.Returning home, he swiftly killed his wife Kathy by stabbing her as she slept, before returning to complete his earlier letter, placing the blame for his actions on his father, before writing notes to both of his brothers and his father. He then set about making preparations for the killing spree that he had planned for later that day.He packed his old Marine footlocker with all the supplies that he felt might be needed for a lengthy standoff, including food, torches, knives and a selection of rifles and pistols, supplementing these later that morning with additional supplies and more guns, as well as renting a two-wheeled dolly to help him to transport the heavy locker.Finally, he modified his new shotgun by sawing off part of the barrel and the stock, before loading the dolly and footlocker in his car, donning a pair of blue overalls, and heading for the university campus.  By 11:30 a.m. he had entered the grounds with the use of his security ID, and he unloaded the locker and took an elevator to the top of the tower, where the blue delivery overalls served as a useful camouflage.Edna Townsley was his first stranger victim: she was supervising the Tower’s observation deck that morning, and Whitman hit her on the back of her head with a rifle butt, before dragging her behind a couch, where she died a few hours later from her wounds. Just before noon, Cheryl Botts and Don Walden entered the reception area from the observation deck and saw Charlie leaning over the couch, holding two guns.  They greeted him but were not immediately alarmed, then boarded the elevator, unaware of how fortunate they were to have escaped the carnage that was to follow.Subsequent arrivals were not so fortunate: a party of six were greeted by a hail of pellets from the sawn off shotgun, which killed two of them, wounding another two critically, leaving the survivors to run for help.  The alarm spread quickly on lower floors within the tower, and people began barricading themselves into classrooms and offices.Whitman calmly unpacked his firearms and supplies from the locker, wedged the observation deck door closed with the upended dolly, and took aim at the pedestrians moving along the South Mall far below. His Marine training stood him in good stead, and his first victim there was pregnant student Claire Wilson, whose child was killed instantly by a bullet that pierced her abdomen. Her acquaintance, Thomas Eckman, was also hit in the chest, falling across the injured girl as he went down.  A visiting professor was the next fatality, taking a bullet to the lower back.Whitman then shifted his focus to the East of the Tower where Thomas Ashton, a Peace Corps trainee, was shot in the chest. Whitman was still moving around the observation deck unchecked, and turned his attention westward, toward Guadalupe Street, a busy street lined with businesses, where three more victims were despatched in quick succession, followed by another three, as the inhabitants unsuccessfully sought cover from the crack marksman.Austin Police had, by this time, arrived on the scene, and Officer Billy Speed was their first casualty, shot through a six-inch gap between two stone supports of a statue; Whitman’s sharp-shooting skills were easily equal to the police forces now amassed around the tower, who had begun to return fire towards the tower parapet. Private citizens joined in with their own weapons as well, and yet Whitman still managed to kill one more victim, electrician Roy Schmidt, who was more than 500 yards from the Tower at the time.Through sheer force of numbers, police moved towards the tower, assisting the wounded, making progress upwards towards the observation deck, where they found the door was still wedged shut. Officers Martinez and McCoy finally breached the door, crawling in the direction of Whitman’s gunfire, despite the return fire that was coming from down below, and McCoy managed to shoot Whitman, after which Martinez ran over and also shot Whitman at point blank range. The siege was at an end.Whitman’s death toll was sixteen; fourteen of whom were shot from the tower, and dozens more were injured during the ninety-minute drama. Investigations soon revealed the bodies of his mother and his wife, as well as the notes that he had left.His psychiatrist, Dr. Heatly, came under intense scrutiny, when his records revealed the fantasy killing spree that Whitman had outlined during their session, but he was never held accountable for his failure to act.Interestingly, when Whitman’s body was autopsied, doctors did indeed discover a small tumour in his brain, as he had feared, but experts concluded that this was unlikely to have caused his subsequent actions.  Given that brain science was not as advanced in the mid-sixties, it would be interesting to know if today’s specialists would have drawn the same conclusions.The observation deck at the Texas tower was reopened soon after the shoot-out, following some repairs, but was forced to close in 1974, following a string of suicides.  It was finally reopened again in 1999, with enhanced security which included a metal detector, security guards on the ground floor and the deck itself, and a steel lattice guard to prevent further suicides.

The killer couple claimed their first victim in December 1987. They approached 17 year old Isabelle Laville in a van as she was on her way home from school. They said they were lost and persuaded her to climb into the van to help them with the directions. Fourniret then raped and killed her.

One year later, 20 year old Fabienne Leroy was abducted from a supermarket. Her body was found the next day. She’d been shot-gunned in the chest.

The couple married and had a son together and bought a chateau on the forested border region between France and Belgium. One report suggested he financed the purchase with money robbed from a bank robber/militant cellmate. He tracked down his cellmate’s wife, established where the money was hidden, and then murdered her.In 1989, the couple claimed their youngest victim. Elisabeth Brichet was just 12 years old when she was abducted from the Belgian town of Namur. Her body was found 14 years later in the grounds of the couple’s chateau.

With their son in tow, they presented the perfect picture of a trustworthy family and their happily married respectability tricked girls who would otherwise be wary. Fourniret and Olivier sometimes pretended their son was ill and they needed the girl to help direct them to a hospital. Another ruse was for Olivier to drive alone and pick up a girl but then, as they were driving along, they would see Fourniret waving an empty can of petrol as if he just needed a refill for a nearby car. Olivier would then stop to pick him up.

Fourniret would either strangle, shoot, or sometimes inject air into his victims’ veins to cause a heart attack. Death, however, was no escape from his attentions. After he stabbed to death one girl to death with a screwdriver, he sexually assaulted her corpse. Olivier would watch as he raped and murdered his victims and they would later recreate these scenes in their sex life.

Fourniret would either dispose of the bodies in his grounds or the surrounding area. The killings went on for years but the authorities treated each case separately.

There was little sharing of information between the French and Belgium police and no one considered the possibility that the Ardennes region had an unusually high murder rate because a serial killer was using it as his hunting ground. 

The Crimes: 1931-35 Despite Ma’s boys starting out committing petty crime it wasn’t long before they moved on to more serious escapades, such as bank robberies. It was with the addition of member Alvin Karpis, when they became known as the Barker-Karpis gang, that things turned serious. Already a hardened criminal, Karpis met Ma’s favourite son, Fred when they both serving time at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. At the time Fred Barker was in prison for killing a policeman during a car theft.The Karpis-Barker gang became one of the most notorious and prolific criminal gangs of the 1930s. They did not hesitate to kill anyone who got in their way, even innocent bystanders. They began robbing banks and hijacking mail deliveries, but with the influence of Karpis in the criminal equation, they turned to the more lucrative field of kidnapping.In 1933 they carried out their first kidnap. The unfortunate victim, William Hamm, was a wealthy Minnesota brewer and was ransomed for a startling $100,000. Shortly afterwards, Minnesota banker Edward Bremer, Jr., was also kidnapped and his ransom brought the gang even greater money at around $200,000.By this time a myth was circulating that Ma Barker was the matriarchal leader, ruling the gang with an iron fist. This was the era of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger and newspapers loved to sensationalise and brand the criminals with monikers and personality traits that would become ingrained in the public’s collective memory.However, there is little evidence to support the claim that Ma Barker did anything more than live with her sons, no doubt enjoying the spoils of her brood’s criminal activity, but nevertheless contributing little more than a motherly support. According to Karpis himself in his memoirs she did not possess the attributes needed to plan bank robberies and kidnappings."Ma was always somebody in our lives. Love didn't enter into it really. She was somebody we looked after and took with us when we moved city to city, hideout to hideout. It is no insult to Ma's memory that she just didn't have the know-how to direct us on a robbery. It would not have occurred to her to get involved in our business, and we always made it a point of only discussing our scores when Ma wasn't around. We'd leave her at home when we were arranging a job, or we'd send her to a movie. Ma saw a lot of movies."Karpis continued: “She knew we were criminals, but her participation in our careers was limited to one function: when we traveled together, we moved as a mother and her sons. What could look more innocent?"So if this was the truth, as alleged by one of the gang members themselves, then where did the headline grabbing view of Ma Barker as the mastermind behind her sons’ crimes come from?One theory is that the tyrannical J. Edgar Hoover was responsible for disseminating such information. Hoover was the founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its present form and its director from 1924 until 1972. It is claimed that he needed a ruse to eliminate the gang and the ‘old lady’, without the deed appearing controversial.At the time, kidnappings had become a serious issue, especially after the notorious Lindbergh kidnapping which involved the abduction and murder of toddler Charles Lindbergh III, son of Charles Lindbergh Jr. and Anne Morrow.In addition to this, what had perhaps helped sealed the Barker-Karpis fate was the fact that the father of one the kidnap victims, Edward Bremer Jr., was a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president was keen to see these kind of crimes dealt harshly by the FBI.Soon after, FBI agents stepped up their procedure and initiated highly skilled ‘flying squads’ with agents like Melvin Purvis – who brought in John Dillinger - and who specialised in hunting down the leading criminals and public enemies of the day.Now that other hoodlums had been brought to justice, or assassinated as in the case of Bonnie and Clyde, Hoover now believed it was time to deal with the Barker-Karpis gang.Assassination of George ‘Shotgun’ ZieglerThe main turning point for the FBI and possibly the biggest mistake of Ma’s gangland sons, was to eliminate one of their own. George Ziegler had been one of the masterminds behind the planning and kidnap of Edward Bremer. But he had become a loose cannon, boasting about his exploits and drawing attention to himself. The Barker boys decided that he needed to be silenced.On 22 March 1934, Karpis and the Barker men shot Ziegler as he was coming out of his favorite restaurant in Cicero, Illinois. The attack, according to documents, nearly decapitated him. But Ziegler’s corpse, that was left for the police to investigate, held important information on the gang’s names including other valuable details. The agents could use this information to pick each member off, one by one.