Quantcast
Channel: Crime Magazine - Foreign Crimes
Viewing all 43 articles
Browse latest View live

Walking in a Killer’s Footsteps

0
0

Sept. 2, 2013

An edited extract from Cold Case Files: Past crimes solved by new forensic sciencewinner of Australia’s 2012 Davitt Award for best true crime book and available for Kindle in the United States on amazon.com. Hard copies available at www.panmacillan.com.au

by Liz Porter

What are the chances of revisiting a crime scene, more than 11 years after a murder – and several years after it has been renovated and repainted – and finding the blood stain that will finally crack the case?

British crime scene expert Andrew Barclay and forensic scientist Dr Angela Gallop would both describe the odds of success in such a case as “very low.”

But during 1999 and 2000, the duo was able to revisit a 1988 crime, where most of the blood stains had already been destroyed by earlier testing, and find the stain that would eventually lead them to a killer.

The Murder of Lynette White

By 1999, the murder of sex worker Lynette White, stabbed to death in 1988 in Cardiff, was beginning to look like one of those cases that are doomed to remain “cold” forever.

In December 1988 local police had arrested a group of local men, one of them the boyfriend of the victim. Late in 1990 three of the men, soon known as “the Cardiff Three” were convicted.  But by 1992 all three had been freed after an appeal court found that their convictions had been based on statements and confessions that had been bullied out of witnesses and one of the defendants. Fortunately, the original forensic testing done at Miss White’s apartment, in the dockside area of Butetown, was police work of a far better quality.

The first police on the scene had documented copious blood stains, most of them bloodied fingerprints left on the apartment’s walls. The blood grouping tests in use at the time had alerted investigators to the presence of blood that did not belong to the victim.  But 1988 was the very beginning of the era of DNA testing, and the main police focus had been on extracting useful fingerprints from the stains: a process that rendered the stains useless for future DNA testing.

By 1999, newer DNA techniques had evolved, and scientists were able to produce results from tiny amounts of blood. But new blood samples, undamaged by previous testing, were required.

To find any such untested material, Barclay and Gallop needed to work out exactly where the killer had been in the flat, so they could find places where he might have shed blood that had not yet been found.

The 1988 police had done a relatively thorough job of recording their findings. This enabled Barclay to map the crime scene and locate each of the recovered fingermarks in the position in which it had been found. He could also identify the positions of these prints on some of the flat’s original wallpaper: paper from the hallway wall had spent the intervening decade folded up in a storage cupboard at a police station in Cardiff. Unfortunately the paper from the murder room had been lost, although color crime-scene photos offered a detailed record of the blood stains on the wall.

The crime scene map and photos – and the wallpaper – revealed the existence of several interesting blood stains that had been more or less ignored in 1988, because the investigators had been focused on the fingerprints.

The 1988 investigators had quickly realized why there were so many bloodied finger marks on the walls: there had been no coins in the flat’s pay-as-you-go electricity meter (then a common arrangement for gas and electricity in low-rent accommodation). The room in which White was murdered would have been illuminated at the time by the street light outside the window, but the rest of the flat would have been pitch-black. So after committing the murder, the killer had to feel his way out of the flat. Outside the room was a narrow corridor, which immediately took an unexpected turn towards the flat’s front door. The light in the building’s communal hall was also out, meaning the murderer had to find his way down the staircase by touch, before reaching the door that opened onto the street.

Barclay and Gallop began looking at the bloodied finger marks from the hall and bedroom walls. One of the forensic scientists on the case in 1988 had been certain that the killer had cut himself during the attack, and he had identified some of the wall stains as cast-off blood – drops shed from the murderer’s bleeding hand.

This phenomenon is not unusual in knife murders involving multiple stab wounds: the handle of the knife becomes so slippery with blood that the killer’s own hand slides along it and onto the sharp cutting edge, making cuts – possibly severe ones – on his palm. The crime-scene photos reinforced this theory, with the smears of blood left by the killer becoming more intense as he felt his way along the wall towards the exit, suggesting that his own blood was still flowing as he left the flat. If the blood had been the victim’s alone, the smears would have become fainter.

Back in 1988, the gentrification of the dockside area had only just begun and was temporarily halted by the aftermath of the murder. But by 1999 it was long complete and the murder flat, by then exquisitely repainted and redecorated, bore no resemblance to the slum dwelling in the crime-scene photos. Fortunately, its owner was willing to allow both Gallop and Barclay to visit and inspect it.

Bringing the Murder Narrative Alive

Late on a dark November night in 1999, Dave Barclay made his way up to the flat. He wanted to walk in the killer’s shoes and to do so in conditions as close as possible to the winter dark that would have shrouded the flat in February 1988.

Starting in the pitch black of the murder room, Barclay closed his eyes and took his first steps. Unable to prevent himself from opening his eyes, he wedged a handkerchief behind his glasses and began feeling his way out of the main room. Taking the sharp left turn into the narrow corridor that led towards the flat’s front door, he tried to match his fingers to the places where the killer had been seen to touch the wall. The aim of the exercise was three-fold: to calculate the killer’s height – an estimated 183 cm, some 5 cm shorter than Barclay; to gauge the manner of his exit – most probably a panicked rush; and most importantly, to identify new places where the assailant might have left bloody traces.

Meanwhile Angela Gallop had been supervising the reconstruction of the flat’s main room and passageway in the lab at Culham, just outside Oxford. The salvaged hall wallpaper was mounted on panels representing the passageway. The mocked- up crime scene brought the murder narrative alive, with the blood stain patterns on the wallpaper mapping the movements of someone running down the corridor with blood on his or her hands. A vivid slap mark on the wall opposite the murder room door showed how the killer had rushed out, in darkness, into a corridor with an abrupt left turn. The stain even revealed blood squirting out from underneath the palm. Along the wall, successive smears at hand height documented the murderer’s path along the passageway. A crime-scene photo showed a diagonal smear across the front door, near the catch, deposited as the killer fumbled to find a way to open it and leave the premises.

Gallop also worked through the vast volume of material that the 1988 crime scene officers had collected.  There was a cache of condoms, matches and coins from a cardboard box on a windowsill, along with rubbish from the floor, including biscuit or cake packaging and a piece of trampled cellophane from the cover of a cigarette packet. With the housekeeping standards of the flat, it was impossible to tell whether the cellophane had been dropped by the killer or had been lying on the floor for months. Gallop noticed some smeared blood on it, and, more interestingly, one tiny discrete blood spot. It looked like blood that had been airborne; she’d seen blood spots exactly like it at other scenes involving a frenzied knife attack. Spotting can happen in many ways, one of which occurs when a killer, his or her hand bearing the palm cuts common in such cases, continues to wield the knife, flicking small drops of blood around the room. The cellophane was sent for processing and produced a clear DNA profile. It wasn’t the victim’s. And it was male.

“Cellophane Man”

The scientific team christened this unknown person ‘Cellophane Man.’ All they knew about him was his DNA profile. The sample did not necessarily tie him to the murder; in principle, the blood could have been shed weeks earlier. But if they could find the same blood in the marks on the walls and on White’s clothing, they would know it belonged to the killer. Gallop retested White’s jeans and one blood-stained sock. She could obtain only partial profiles; as far as they went, however, they matched the cellophane sample. But the scientist wanted to try a spread of blood samples that had been taken from White’s body and as close as possible to it, in the hope of getting better results.

Testing blood from cardboard boxes that had been stacked against the wall near to where White’s head had been, Gallop found a partial profile of Cellophane Man. But once again, she needed more. Returning to the crime-scene photos, she studied the blood stains on the walls. One drop of cast-off blood under a window was so large that it had run down the wall. The 1988 tests had shown that it wasn’t White’s. Might some of it have trickled right down behind the skirting board? Although the flat had been renovated, might the painters have merely slapped on a new coat of color over the old without sanding down the surface first? It was a long shot, but worth a try.

At Gallop’s request, police crime-scene officers removed an almost meter-long section of skirting board directly below the spot where the cast-off foreign blood had been identified. They also removed the front door in the hope of unearthing the diagonal smear of blood left as the killer groped for the catch in the darkness and shown in a crime scene photo.

Back at the lab, Gallop’s assistant scraped away at the skirting board paint under the microscope. It was a difficult, delicate procedure: go in too cautiously and you miss what might be there; scrape too deeply and you go through all the layers of paint and miss the hidden forensic treasure altogether. The lab technician got it just right, uncovering blood stains which later yielded profiles of both Cellophane Man and his victim. More cast-off blood was found behind the skirting board; it contained a full profile of Cellophane Man.

The scraping back of paint from the front door revealed no visible blood staining, but the scientists were able to chemically detect blood traces which produced a mixed profile. Its components were from Cellophane Man and Lynette White.

The killer’s cut hands had been on the walls and the door – and in contact with White’s blood. It was time to return to the victim’s clothing yet again and look for Cellophane Man there.

When White’s body was discovered, her jacket and sweatshirt had been soaked with her own blood and twisted around her body in a strange way, possibly as a result of the killer manhandling her into the spot on the floor where she was found. Gallop spent several hours working out precisely how the clothing had shifted during this process and trying to calculate the places where the killer was most likely to have placed his hands while moving the body. She took five samples and found Cellophane Man’s DNA on both the jacket and the sweatshirt.

Gallop had also discovered some crime-scene swabs collected during the original investigation but not analyzed. They were samples of stains from the wall outside the door of the murder room, from the wall opposite that room and from a wall near the entrance. They yielded full or partial profiles of Cellophane Man. In one place, there was a mixture of Cellophane Man’s and White’s blood – the same result as that from the recently tested front door and skirting board.

The same foreign blood had now been found on the victim’s body and at different spots along the killer’s exit route from the flat. Put together, these results spelled out the narrative of the murder.

By January 2002, South Wales Police were ready to go public with the news that they had DNA samples from the scene, including the killer’s. All the original suspects, including those acquitted, had volunteered for DNA testing. The police also began intelligence-led screening: an analysis of the database of 5,000 names that had come up in the original investigation, in order to reduce it to a shorter list of suspects who could be eliminated through DNA testing. In the meantime they were hoping for a tip-off from the public that might help them to give Cellophane Man a name.

The investigators had been repeatedly running Cellophane Man’s profile against the more than 1.5 million profiles on the UK’s national database. New profiles were being added every week, with more than 560,000 added in the 2001–02 financial year. Three hundred samples taken in 1988 were also tested. But there were no matches with either the database or any other suspects identified in the review.

Familial DNA Matching

It was time to consider familial DNA matching: a search of the DNA database for a profile that is a match close enough to the one already found to mean that it belongs to a sibling or close relative of the person sought.

The technique of familial matching had only just been devised, and was still so new that it had to be done manually. To make the search feasible, the scientists looking for Cellophane Man’s relatives narrowed their field to Cardiff, making the slightly risky assumption, given that the murder happened in the area of the docks, that the killer had been local, with a local family.

One of the alleles out of the 20 in the man’s DNA profile was relatively rare, occurring in about one in every 100 people. The scientists used it as a starting point, which enabled them to whittle a list of thousands down to 600. They then looked for profiles that had seven or more alleles in common with the killer’s. That reduced the pool to 70. The scientists looked at all the matching components in the profiles, checked their individual rarity and calculated the relative frequency of the different combinations found in the list.

One profile stood head and shoulders above the others in terms of its similarity to Cellophane Man’s. But it belonged to a 14-year-old boy, who hadn’t even been born at the time of the murder but had been DNA tested after committing a minor crime.

The boy’s father, the police surmised, could be the killer; he was certainly of an appropriate age. Initially, the boy’s mother was DNA tested so the scientists could subtract the parts of the boy’s DNA that came from her and see whether the relevant components were still left. They were. The father was then tested. But, while his profile was very similar to Cellophane Man’s, it wasn’t a match. The man’s brother was tested: again, the result was similar but not a match.

A Lifetime Loser

Questioned again, the family revealed there was another brother. According to his siblings, Jeffrey Gafoor was a lifetime loner who had always had difficulty making friends. In 1990, he had suddenly gone to Germany for a short period. His departure, it could now be seen, had coincided with the conviction of the Cardiff Three, but his family had had no reason to make that link. Three years later, when he moved away from Cardiff and cut himself off from his family, his siblings had assumed that the impetus for his retreat had been the death of their mother. They weren’t to know that his self-imposed exile had followed the Cardiff Three’s successful appeal against their conviction. Around this time, Gafoor had come to the attention of police for the first and, until 2003, only time in his life. After hitting a work colleague over the head with a house brick during an argument, he had been sentenced to 80 hours’ community service. But he was not DNA tested because he was convicted in 1992 – two years before the passing of the legislation that set out procedures for the DNA testing of people convicted and even suspected of criminal offences.

In 2003, Gafoor, then 38, was living half an hour out of Cardiff, working nights as a security guard, rarely leaving his home during the day and avoiding most human contact. His landlord’s front door was only three  meters away from his own, but, rather than pay his rent in person and have to speak to the man, each month he would drive almost two kilometers to the nearest mail box and post his rent check.

On 28 February 2003, police visited Gafoor at work and took a DNA sample from him. They were not going to arrest him until they had the DNA results, but they kept him under surveillance, in case he decided to run. That surveillance saved his life: curious about a series of visits he had made to chemist’s shops, police broke into their quarry’s flat and discovered him in the process of swallowing the 64 paracetamol tablets he had bought. They rushed him to hospital, obtaining a partial confession on the way, in which he reportedly said: ‘Just for the record, I did kill Lynette White. I have been waiting for this for 15 years. I sincerely hope to die.’ Before he recovered, the DNA profile results were in. Jeffrey Gafoor was Cellophane Man.

On 4 July, 2003, Gafoor stood in the Cardiff Crown Court dock and pleaded guilty to murdering Lynette White. Through his barrister, he apologized to his victim’s family, claiming that the murder had happened after he changed his mind about wanting to have sex and White refused to return the £30 he had paid her. According to the barrister, Gafoor had not committed a premeditated sexual killing; rather, he had been carrying a knife because he had been robbed three months earlier in Butetown. During his argument with White, he had threatened her with the knife. She had then grabbed the weapon and a struggle had ensued. ‘He doesn’t know why what followed, followed,’ the barrister told the court. ‘There was shame, panic, and there was a frenzied attack with a knife.’

Authors: 

The Baker Street Bank Heist

0
0

Sept. 5, 2013

The tunnel started in leather goods shop Le Sac and ended inside the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank.

After taking almost three months to tunnel under a branch of Lloyds Bank on Baker Street, on September 1, 1971, three robbers forced open more than 260 safety-deposit boxes and walked away with loot valued at more than £3 million. None of the stolen valuables was ever recovered.

By Robert Walsh

“We’ve got about £400,000. We’ll let you know when we’re coming out…” – Part of the intercepted radio chatter between gang members during the robbery.

September 1, 1971. In Wimpole Street, London, amateur CB radio hobbyist Robert Rowlands is tuning his set at around 1a.m., trying to tune in popular European station Radio Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg doesn’t come through his speakers, but what does provides both him and Scotland Yard detectives with something that none of them have run across before. Rowlands has unwittingly picked up walkie-talkies operating ordinary public frequencies and the conversation is all about a bank robbery in progress. But which bank and where?

Rowlands, once he’d heard enough to know what he’d stumbled upon, called the police. The officer he spoke to, given that it was 1a.m. on a Saturday morning, assumed it was yet another hoaxer who’d perhaps taken one drink too many. He politely suggested that if Rowlands heard any more suspicious chatter he should record it and then ended the call.

Rowlands picked up a small tape recorder, recorded every time the unknown crooks started talking and then dialled the police a second time. This time he was absolutely insistent that a major robbery was still in progress and this time Scotland Yard detectives were sent to his home to talk it through and listen to the tape. What they heard caused a major alert and search operation. It was clear from the tape that a major robbery was still in progress and, if they moved quickly enough, police stood a good chance of finding exactly which bank was being robbed and maybe of catching the robbers red-handed.

What followed was a successful heist, a huge score for the robbers, a serious blunder by Scotland Yard, stiff sentences for the robbers and a crime that lent a seemingly baseless conspiracy aspect to the 2008 feature film The Bank Job. The film alleges (on scanty, limited and sometimes dubious evidence) that it was masterminded by the British Security Service (MI5) to recover compromising photographs of senior public figures including Princess Margaret which were being used by a London criminal to blackmail authorities into letting him continue operating. The film took mere allegations and presented them as though they were hard fact. As far as can be reliably confirmed, they weren’t.

The entertainment business deciding to take a perfectly good story and add fictional, often unnecessary spice is nothing new, that’s been happening for decades. Even some of the earliest feature films marketed as first-hand film of real events were actually shot in some back lot studio somewhere. But, like so many films based on real events, the Baker Street Robbery never really needed spicing up in the first place.

An Elaborate Plan

Like most criminal enterprises it was, theoretically at least, simple. Thieves targeted a branch of Lloyds Bank (one of Britain’s best-known banks) intending to break into the safety-deposit vault, force open as many deposit boxes as possible in the time available and escape with whatever they found worth taking. Safe-deposit vaults are sometimes considered a tempting target for robbery because, as a rule, only high-value items such as jewellery, bearer bonds, securities, uncut gems and large amounts of cash tend to be kept in them and, once robbers breach the vault, whatever they find is likely to be worth the time, effort and expense of breaking in. In the United States, robbing such vaults isn’t unusual and gangs specialising in the higher end of breaking-and-entering (often known as “B&E crews”) are regularly active across the country. A B&E crew operating in the UK had never taken such a huge haul before the Baker Street robbery and none have managed it since.

The theory was simple, the practice wasn’t. Simply to reach the vault the robbers had to choose a nearby shop (leased by an accomplice), break through the floor to a depth of 5 feet, tunnel 40 feet under the Chicken Inn fast food shop between its base and the bank itself (which meant digging through around eight tons of earth and rubble), then tunnel 15 feet back up (owing to sloping ground), break through three feet of reinforced concrete forming the vault floor, break open hundreds of deposit boxes, sort through them for anything worth taking and then escape back through the tunnel with the loot. All this had to be done without tripping any of the vault’s security devices or arousing any public attention while digging the tunnel and robbing the vault. To succeed the plan needed time, patience, significant funding, technical expertise with explosives and a thermic lance (both needed to breach the concrete floor), thorough planning, a willingness by the robbers to risk their lives during the tunnelling and break-in and no small amount of luck. Such a robbery, on such a scale, was simply unheard-of in the UK in 1971. Given the technical difficulties and obvious physical risks it’s not hard to see why.

The gang chose to tunnel under the vault because the walls and ceiling were protected by vibration alarms, trembler switches that would sense unusual vibrations or shockwaves and automatically trigger an alarm summoning police. The vault door was protected by a standard alarm that would be triggered by the door either being opened or directly attacked. Through a contact at the local security company protecting the bank the gang knew that the tremblers in the vault floor were turned off due to false alarms caused by work on nearby roads, a major security lapse. It was essentially a safecracker’s logic applied to an entire bank vault (bank vaults are essentially large safes, after all). A safecracker will often ignore a safe door and try forcing either the base, sides, top or back of an ordinary safe because the door is usually the strongest, best-protected part of it. Bank vaults can often be attacked along similar lines, albeit on a larger scale.

Police estimated that the gang took almost three months to lease the nearest available ground-floor property (a leather goods store named Le Sac just two doors down from the bank), assemble the equipment, dig the tunnel, breach the vault floor and rob its contents. It was a highly-specialised robbery needing considerable technical expertise which makes it unusual that the gang themselves weren’t high-level experts as much as journeyman crooks making an unusually complex entry into the big leagues.

The Robbers

The Baker Street robbery involved four principal players, none of whom had a record or reputation for the higher leagues of crime. Desmond Wolfe leased the store used as the tunnel entrance (something that would come back to bite him later on). Anthony Gavin, Thomas Stephens and Reginald Tucker did the tunnelling and the robbery itself. All these men were known to the police, but none was thought to have the skills for something as complex and difficult as this. Police suspected (but were never able to prove) that the crime was actually masterminded by another London criminal whose identity was never established and the robbers themselves never gave anything to the police to confirm those suspicions.

The gang only dug during weekends, minimizing the risk of anyone noticing unusual noise or visitors going to and from their hideout and explaining the time taken to dig the tunnel. The debris and rubble were stored inside the leased shop which had its windows painted white and a sign placed on the door stating that it was closed for refurbishment. To any passing pedestrian it was just another empty store and the noise inside would easily be put down to the interior being remodelled before re-opening under new management. Having passed under the Chicken Inn between its base and the bank they were faced with another obstacle: There were three feet of reinforced concrete floor between them and the inside of the vault.

They originally chose a thermic lance or “burn bar” to cut through the vault floor, but eventually had to blow a breach using explosives. The burn bar was taking too long and creating dense, toxic fumes in the tunnel itself making it impossible for the robbers to finish the job without blasting. Having partially burnt through the floor and blasted the rest of the way, leaving enough concrete to avoid bank staff noticing any cracks or putting their feet through the weakened section they were in position to wait  to make their move. In 1971 British banks were usually closed from Friday afternoons until Monday mornings, giving them the maximum time between burgling the vault and the crime being discovered when the bank re-opened. All they had left to do was break through the remaining concrete, enter the vault and break into as many deposit boxes as possible overnight. Or so they thought, anyway.

The robbers were smart enough to keep one of their number as a look-out on a nearby rooftop and stay in touch via walkie-talkies. The walkie-talkies operated on the Citizen’s Band public frequencies where anyone could intercept the conversations and listen in, which wasn’t very secure. The likelihood of their chatter being intercepted was fairly small, though. Although amateur radio enthusiasts were growing in numbers, CB radios were still technically illegal to use in 1971 and expensive to buy, few people had them and so it’s unlikely the gang thought too much about whether they were providing a play-by-play for anybody who (accidentally or otherwise)  found the right frequency. Robert Rowlands did. The chase was now on to figure out the gang’s exact location and hopefully catch them in the act. It didn’t quite work out as Scotland Yard, would have liked.

Having had to make not one phone call, but two before the police would send officers to visit him, Rowlands made a point of telling the police that the range of walkie-talkies at the time was quite short, especially in urban areas with tall buildings, thick concrete and stone walls, electrical interference and varying weather conditions all affecting a signal’s strength. He told the officers that if his ordinary set was picking up walkie-talkie chatter then that meant the robbers and their target couldn’t be more than a mile or two from Wimpole Street. Baker Street is within two miles of Wimpole Street. If it had been acted on Rowlands’s information about the radios’ range would certainly have narrowed the search area hugely, making it far more likely that the gang would have been caught red-handed. But it wasn’t acted on. The gang escaped from the crime scene taking over £3,000,000 of assorted swag that would be worth around £36,000,000 at current values.

Scotland Yard Diddles

Instead of using Rowlands’s radio knowledge to concentrate its search the police decided to visit every bank within 10 miles of his home, some 750 addresses in all, and check all of them as quickly as possible. Given the gang’s use of CB radios police also tried mobilizing radio-detection vehicles from the Post Office. Prior to privatizing national utilities during the 1980’s, pinpointing unlicensed radio transmissions came under Post Office jurisdiction. Unfortunately, like banks, the Post Office worked conventional hours as well. They didn’t have any detection vehicle crews on duty at 1a.m. on a Saturday morning. The police, aside from the sheer number of banks they had to check, could only enter private property without a warrant when there was cause to believe a crime was actually in progress inside that property. In order to work through the list of possible targets they had to identify, the police had to contact and transport the managers of all the banks listed so they could open their premises and check their vaults. The police couldn’t simply force entry to any private address on the off-chance of raiding the right one.

Of course, all this took time to arrange. Enough time for the robbers to breach the floor, enter the vault, open over 260 deposit boxes, rifle their contents and escape with whatever swag they wanted. It wasn’t until the Monday morning that the manager of the Baker Street branch of Lloyds, which had been checked at the time without anything unusual being spotted, entered the bank, opened the safe-deposit vault and was greeted by piles of discarded high-value property, hundreds of smashed deposit boxes and a man-sized hole in the middle of the vault floor. What the manager said isn’t on record (which is probably just as well, considering what he’d found), but he immediately called the police. Scotland Yard was faced with considerable public embarrassment. Investigators also now had a vast amount of evidence to sift through even before they could start to identify and catch the gang responsible for what was at the time one of the biggest robberies in British criminal history.

The amount of evidence was huge, time was short and London’s banking community (not forgetting over 260 less-than-happy customers) was in a state of shock. The owners of every box forced open had to be identified, informed and asked exactly what they had deposited which, for any depositor with anything either highly embarrassing or outright illegal in their box, could have caused serious problems. Every one of the hundreds of pieces of swag left behind had to be catalogued and photographed, the tunnel had to be made safe to enter before being traced back to its source, evidence left in the tunnel and the leather goods store had to be catalogued and examined and then the police could actually start hunting for the gang themselves. They needed every lucky break they could get and, for the first time in the case, they actually got one.

One Little Detail Breaks the Case

It was a small break but, as with so many successfully solved crimes, it proved to be absolutely vital. Desmond Wolfe was in the leather goods trade when not breaking the law and it was Wolfe who leased the shop the gang used as a base. Unfortunately for him (and the rest of the gang) Wolfe provided lasting proof of his not being a criminal genius by leasing it under his own name. Once the police identified the source of the tunnel they went looking for whoever owned or leased the shop and it wasn’t long before Wolfe was safely under lock and key to answer a few questions.

With one gang member under arrest, the police looked for Wolfe’s known criminal associates, especially associates who didn’t have alibis, did have records for burglaries and similar crimes and weren’t already in jail for unrelated offences. Soon, Anthony Gavin, Thomas Stephens and Reginald Tucker were all under arrest and being questioned by Scotland Yard detectives. True to the “criminal code,” none of the four men offered any information or offered to give evidence in return for lighter sentences when the case came to trial. In January 1973 all four men were convicted. Wolfe received only eight years due to his age (he was 64 at the time) while Gavin, Stephens and Tucker all received stiff penalties of 12 years each. Two other men were tried for allegedly handling stolen money from the robbery and were acquitted. Not a single item of stolen property from the Baker Street robbery has ever been recovered.

Unanswered Questions

There have always been unanswered questions about the robbery. First, it was highly unusual for relatively low-level criminals to tackle something needing such special skills and equipment. Using a thermic lance isn’t for novices and whoever set the explosives managed to blow a hole in the vault floor without setting off any of the other security devices protecting the vault itself. That suggests a higher level of technical skill than the gang members themselves were known to possess, raising the possibility that there were others involved who managed to evade detection even today. The sheer scale of the tunnel is also  far bigger and more complex than any job any of the robbers had tackled before, suggesting either an unusual degree of criminal ambition or that perhaps more outside help than they ever admitted to. Not one of them cracked under questioning, none of them cut a deal in return for lighter sentences and, so far, none of them has opted for a book deal or made any public comment about either the crime or the fact that none of the swag has ever been found. And that too makes me wonder whether or not somebody somewhere has had far more luck (and made far more money) than anybody involved in the actual robbery itself.

As far as can be confirmed, the film’s theory about MI5 setting up the robbery to recover blackmail material is a theory and nothing more. The theory goes that a London criminal known as “Michael X” (real name Michael de Freitas and originally from Trinidad) possessed incriminating photographs of Princess Margaret, and used them to force Scotland Yard to turn a reluctant blind eye to his long-term criminal operations. Having been forced to leave London when police attention became too serious to stay there “Michael X” resurfaced in Trinidad where he was later tried, convicted and hanged for ordering a murder. The film’s makers suggest that the robbery deprived him of his lifeline against prosecution, forcing him to leave Britain.

The suggestion is that there was a media blackout after the robbery, something disproved by widespread reporting of the robbery in the press. The police did impose a blackout while the robbery was in progress, hoping to catch the gang red-handed, but once the gang had committed the crime and escaped with the loot there was no need or point in continuing to suppress the story. Just the opposite, in fact, as media attention can often generate witnesses and jog their memories into offering vital clues.

Rowlands states he was told a so-called “D Notice” was issued to suppress the story which, again, is at best extremely unlikely. What was then known as a “D Notice” (Defence Notice) could be issued by a government department concerned with preserving national security by advising the press to avoid discussing certain matters such as intelligence operations or the current activities of Special Forces troops. A “D Notice” however was (and still is) not legally enforceable in itself, amounting only to the government advising the media to keep something quiet. Then as now the press is not obliged to obey one even when its modern-day equivalent (the “Defence Advisory Notice”) is issued. Second, there are neither records logging any request for a “D Notice” nor for one having been issued and there certainly would be records if it had been done.

Second, “Michael X” was a professional criminal, a freelance felon whose main employment was as a slum landlord, pimp and sometime enforcer. If MI5 was so desperate to see him silenced then a relatively simple killing would have been easier to arrange. There’s nothing especially unusual about gangland feuds and related violence in London and just another dead mid-level gangster is unlikely to have caused either much comment or unwelcome curiosity. After all, it was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (ironically himself the victim of a contract killer) who coined the famous criminal line that gangsters only kill each other. Mounting a major deniable “black bag” operation under the noses of Scotland Yard yet using easily-intercepted radio equipment is hardly the action of a professional intelligence organization and in the 42 years since the robbery only Rowlands suggests there was a “D Notice” for unidentified “reasons of national security” and the Royal Family angle is only really touted by George McIndoe who also happened to be involved with the 2008 film The Bank Job.

To sum up, the Baker Street robbery was an unusual moment in British crime, but not nearly as unusual as some people might believe or others might like them to. At the time it was one of the largest robberies in British history, the method was highly unusual and the gang members themselves not the type of robbers anybody expected to tackle something so technically complex. There’s also a question mark over whether or not a so-far-undiscovered “Mr. Big” actually put the job together, whether or not all those involved were actually caught and where all the stolen cash and property finally ended up. Somebody must have arranged its onward sale and disposal of the proceeds, but nobody was ever convicted for having done so.

But the evidence supporting the suggestion that this was really arranged by some shadowy spymasters to protect the high and mighty is limited and (so far) entirely unconfirmed. There’s almost nothing to suggest that this was a conspiracy cooked up in the corridors of power, but there’s plenty to suggest that, while it was a huge score and unusually difficult to pull off, it was simply another case of a gang of crooks robbing a bank because, to quote legendary New York bandit Willie ‘King of the Bank Robbers’ Sutton:”That’s where the money is.”

Authors: 

Justice in New Zealand Cold Case

0
0

Sept. 9, 2013

Menzies Hallett

Menzies Hallett

For 33 years, Menzies Hallett got away with murder because a New Zealand law prohibited Hallett’s wife from testifying against him without his permission. 

by Lisa Agnes

By all accounts, Menzies Hallett was an affable, confident family man who got along with everyone. Yet it only took one anxiety-laden night in mid 1979 for this persona to dramatically unravel, revealing a conflicted, angry man.

New Zealand, in 1979, was not a place known for random acts of violence. The volcanic plateau situated in the middle of the North Island offered stable employment opportunities and a relatively idyllic way of life. But crimes motivated by passionate emotions can explode anywhere. On August 16, Hallett received a letter from his estranged wife denying him custody of their two daughters, prompting him to ring her and threaten to "come down and sort it out."

According to a friend who was with Hallett at the house of his girlfriend later that evening, Hallett had a revolver tucked into the waistbelt of his trousers. At one point, he pointed to a ceramic pot in the kitchen and asked his girlfriend, Margaret Culkin, whether she valued it. Before she could answer he had drawn the pistol and fired, missed, then fired again, destroying the pot and leaving his girlfriend reeling. "I remember there was the television there and I think I collapsed over it," she said. "I didn't know what was going on. I was in shock." Hallett then left in his Ford Falcon 500, intent on some kind of showdown.

A Cold-Blooded Murder

At approximately the same time, some 50 km away, Constable Michael Sullivan was drinking a cup of coffee with his Maori friend, 31-year-old Rodney Tahu, at the Turangi Shell station. Tahu was in sole charge of the service station and, when Sullivan left, it was likely he did not have another customer before closing up and activating the alarm at 1 am. As he was preparing to go home, Menzies Hallett pulled into the forecourt, needing oil for his vehicle after noticing a noise in the engine. According to the confession Hallett made to his wife hours later, Tahu told him that the service station was closed. Hallett replied that was "ridiculous," but when Tahu reiterated the fact, Hallett called him a "black bastard," reached for his gun and aimed it at the man.

Tahu ran off between the petrol pumps and Hallett's first shot missed. However, a second shot caught him in the shoulder and he slumped to the ground. Hallett then walked over and fired for a third time, the gun muzzle just centimetres from his victim's head. Leaving Tahu for dead, Hallett turned around and drove off, back the way he had come.

Tahu's friend Constable Sullivan was among the first to the scene, finding him spread-eagled in a pool of blood on the concrete. An ambulance duly arrived and rushed him to Taumarunui Hospital. Despite paramedics' best efforts, Rodney Tahu died at 5.42 a.m.

Within 24 hours, Menzies Hallett had confessed to his wife, Susan Sharpe, describing how he had been angry at her letter, had been on his way to “get the truth” from their daughter in Palmerston North, and that he had been at a “flash point.” He even showed her the pistol he had used in the killing, flinging it onto the bed in front of her. Eventually he left the house and Ms. Sharpe rang her lawyer, who alerted the police. Meanwhile Hallett took a meandering route back to Taupo, where police were already waiting. Upon seeing the police cars, Hallett made a U-turn. The police pursued.

During a stand-off at a road block, where Hallett remained in his stationary car, a shot rang out. Members of New Zealand's Armed Defenders' Squad moved forward en masse to retrieve him, injured from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was then taken to hospital and later charged with murder.  Two months later, he appeared before the courts.

Justice Denied by the Evidence Act

And this is where the story becomes a bit unbelievable. The law at the time prevented a spouse from testifying unless she had permission to do so, meaning Susan Sharpe could not tell the court what she knew. The magistrate thereby ruled that there was not enough evidence to warrant putting Hallett on trial. And, for the next 33 years, Menzies Hallett effectively got away with murder. Adding insult to injury was the fact than everyone in the general area knew he had committed the crime and were dismayed by this travesty of justice. "He strolled around town as if nothing happened, it was like water off a duck's back, but the whole town knew," says a former aquaintence.

Some regarded Hallett as having a screw loose, rather than as a murderer, remembering him as a "good talker,""a colourful character,""a bit loud after a few drinks," and "unhinged.""There was something a bit creepy about him," a former real estate employer said. "He dressed and talked nicely but, if I had known his past, I wouldn't have given him a job." Now, Hallett apparently could not walk into the yacht club of which he had been a member for years without being ridiculed and tormented, according to club member Brian Garlick. This treatment eventually forced him to move to Rotorua, less than two hours' drive from the location of the murder. "I'm surprised he didn't move further away," Mr Garlick said. "We were all intrigued as to why he wasn't brought to justice."

During his years of freedom, Hallett worked around Rotorua as an insurance agent and a real estate agent. He married Shona Watts in the 1980s, but divorced her a few years later. Watts's brother, Gary, has said that there was some indication of Hallett's character before they married. "My nephew, who was from Taupo, he told Shona before they got married that he had a bit of a shady history, so they must have had a fair idea."

Not long after divorcing Shona, Hallett met his current wife, Joan, an ex-pat Englishwoman working as a theater nurse. Joan has consistantly refused to comment to media.

It was the year 2006 before the Evidence Act changed the outdated notion that marital confidences were “so essential to the preservation of the marriage relationship as to outweigh the disadvantages to the administration of justice which the privilege entails” and it was the year 2011 by the time justice caught up with Menzies Hallett.

The Arrest and Trial

Police investigators spent a year building their case, then approached Hallett as he was shopping in Rotorua township. Shortly after his arrest, he told The Dominion Post newspaper that he knew nothing of the shooting, professing to have "no inkling" as to why he had been arrested. "I've had a two-hour battle with police trying to get me to admit all sorts of things, feeding me all sorts of misinformation," he went on. "I have no idea why he (Tahu) was shot. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Police, though, only ever had one suspect from the outset.

At his trial, the now 72-year-old Hallett remained calm and outwardly amenable. In direct contrast to what he had told The Dominion Post, he denied murder but admitted pulling the trigger that killed Rodney Tahu. Yet, in a last-minute about-turn, he retracted that statement, implying that he no longer accepted it was he who had pulled the trigger. This meant that the jury had to decide not only whether the killing was manslaughter or murder, but that the man who pulled the trigger was, beyond reasonable doubt, Menzies Hallett.

However, the prosecution had several people who had learned the truth directly from Hallett over the years to testify against him, including Susan Sharpe. All had the same story. Hallett had confessed in an apparent unburdening of the guilt that had begun to eat away at him. One former colleague who visited him in the court cells during proceedings said that "there was only one word that sprung to mind and that was just that he looked a little resigned."  And resigned he should have been. After nearly 34 years, time and the Evidence Act 2006 had caught up with Menzies Hallett. After a two-and-a-half week trial at Rotorua's High Court, the jury took only two hours and 45 minutes, including a lunch break, to find him guilty of murder.

The police were justifiably pleased. Rex Hawkins, now retired, was one of the men who initially arrested Hallett after the stand-off at the road block. His words echo other officers' sentiments: "Living with the knowledge for 33 years of who the offender was, and not being able to place him before the court, has been difficult. Having seen the pain and hurt the family suffered, it's been very frustrating to know of the admission Hallett made to his ex-wife, knowing that this wasn't able to be used by the prosecution, and me knowing he was the killer. So it's a real relief to see his conviction at long last and I hope it brings some satisfaction to the Tahu family and gives them some closure on this part of the tragic story."

Tahu family spokesman Colin Hair has said that "the hardest part is we've always known who was responsible for this. It was only an anomaly in the law that allowed it to go by, and I've got to say, on behalf of the whole family, a huge thanks to the police for their tenacious work and not just the work of the current people; the original outstanding work that was done by them back in 1979 which enabled this to come together to its conclusion today. We've had wonderful support from a lot of people."

Sentencing

On July 12, 2013, Menzies Hallett was sentenced to life in prison. Although a minimum non-parole term could not be imposed because, in 1979, such a sentence was not allowed under the law, Hallett will serve at least 10 years before becoming eligible for parole.

Authors: 

History of Crime in Greece

0
0

Sept. 23, 2013

Greece’s criminal profile is one fitting to its Mediterranean temperament of boiling blood, twisted romance and redeemed honor.

by Faye Karavasili

As expected, Greece’s criminal profile is one fitting to its Mediterranean temperament of boiling blood, twisted romance and redeemed honor. Modern Greece did not even exist until the late 19th century. Very little survives from the early days of the newly independent state with regards to jurisprudence, and the little that does comes to us interwoven with a thick yarn of lore, exaggeration and heroics. What is clear is that between then and now little has changed in the way sensational crime affects society. Much like in the ancient Greek drama, the folk would invariably become emotionally involved with the storyline unfolding, as details of such crimes became public. They empathize with the protagonists – and, on occasion, with the perpetrators – they offer alternative views and they defend them with passion. The folk celebrates human nature, even if it is very shady, through songs, films and cautionary tales.

The Criminal Mother-in-Law

One of the earliest documented crimes that managed to capture the imagination of the public was the murder of Demetrios Athanasopoulos in 1931. A relatively well-to-do construction undertaker, Athanasopoulos was at the time of his demise married to a stunning 25-year-old named Foula. She was by all accounts beautiful and intensely sought after, yet she had obeyed her mother’s wishes and married Athanasopoulos, much to the detriment of everyone involved.

Far from being an ideal husband, Athanasopoulos continued to seek the company of prostitutes in order to satisfy his voracious, and somewhat kinky, sexual appetites. Rather unapologetic, he was in fact disillusioned by his wife’s reluctance to satisfy his specific cravings for anal intercourse, especially since none of his occasional mistresses had ever denied him the privilege; and that included his own mother-in-law. Artemis Castro was at the time of the murder 45 years old and ruthless. Already engaging in sexual relations with her son-in-law since before he wed her daughter, she continued to be his occasional lover even after the wedding that she herself had encouraged.

On the night between January 3 and 4, 1931, Athanasopoulos attacked and repeatedly raped his wife anally. His abuse was so brutal, that Foula barely survived his clutches. Terrified, she fled and went to her mother for protection. This would be the last time Athanasopoulos ever laid a finger on her –just a day later he would be dead.

Castro had already decided. Athanasopoulos had to die. Enlisting the help of a mentally challenged cousin named Moskio, they planed the murder. Moskio was one of the numerous young men hopelessly in love with the fair Foula and Castro convinced him that, with her abusive husband out of the way, there would be nothing standing in the way of his happiness together with her daughter.

On January 5, Moskio entered the family home and shot Athanasopoulos in his sleep as Foula watched apathetically. She did nothing to prevent or to assist with the murder. Castro, with the assistance of her daughter, Moskio and a housekeeper, proceeded to set the dead body on fire. The foul stench and thick smoke alarmed them and they put the fire out. Athanasopoulos was then cut into pieces small enough to fit in medium sized parcels and dumped into a river close by. Unluckily for the murderous family, the parcels failed to sink and were subsequently discovered by a passerby, leading to the relatively easy solution of the case by the authorities.

The ensuing trial was one of Greece’s biggest sensations, which was understandable as such cases had been previously unheard of. The trial lasted several months and it included several defendants. Finally, Castro and her daughter received the death sentence, while Moskio – mostly due to a demonstrated degree of mental retardation – was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was only 18.

However, the story of the murderous mother and daughter did not end there. Even behind bars, Foula’s allure proved to be a priceless asset. Soon, the director of the women’s prison where she was serving her sentence fell madly in love with her. The mother remained close to supervise the situation and was also reputedly able to use her own charms for her benefit.

Despite being sentenced to death, both mother and daughter were eventually – and really scandalously – pardoned. Foula was finally free to be with the prison director, yet she married a colonel instead. This time around she remained happily married until her death of a heart condition in 1971 and, even though Castro herself had been dead for years by that time, this was one crime Greek society was in no hurry to forget. A folk song, appropriately titled “Criminal Mother-in-Law” describing Athanasopoulos’s grim fate remains to this day the record holder for more sales in proportion to the gramophones available at the time. It is still a well known tune and is sung at folk festivals around the country.

A Dragon in the Suburbs 

There is perhaps no other case which has given rise to quite as much controversy in the Greek history of criminal justice than that of the Thessaloniki serial murderer/rapist (aptly nicknamed by the press as the “Seych Sou Dragon”) who was active in the 1960s, terrorizing not just the city where he trolled for victims, but the entire country. Decades after the string of brutal attacks on clandestine couples seeking privacy in the thick forest of Seych Sou, the respective rapes and murders of those unlucky enough to cross the killer’s path, and the conspiracy theories are still going strong.

In fact, not only did vocal objections concerning the correct identity of the “beast” not become stifled with time, but they have recently re-emerged, posing the same pressing questions in a controversial episode of a series, suggesting what “Dragon truthers” have been suggesting all along: that the person apprehended, convicted for the crimes and executed was in fact an innocent scapegoat, and that the real “Dragon,” offspring of a posh family of the city – who nevertheless remains anonymous to this day – was essentially allowed to get away with numerous murders.

Aristeidis Paggratidis was the man arrested for the attacks. He was apprehended after sneaking into an orphanage and sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl resident. By that time, the whole country was already gripped with terror. The victims of the first assault survived, but only because the cold managed to stop their bleeding. The second couple was not so lucky. Then came the murder of a nurse. All in similar fashion. Panic ensued. Newspapers were reporting the crimes using emotionally charged, fear- inducing language, the nickname itself was an invention of the press. Young women never went anywhere unattended and still new incidents kept occurring.

By the time Paggratidis was arrested for assaulting the young girl at the orphanage, the police had been under heavy criticism for failing to apprehend the culprit. Until that moment nothing had proven to be effective, not even the considerable monetary reward offered by the government.

Based upon a hunch and initial similarities between the attempted rape and the Dragon’s modus operandi, Paggratidis was arrested. He fit the profile: a drunkard standing on the sidelines, an outcast, an obvious sociopath. Paggratidis immediately confessed. He was, however, to withdraw his confession and insist until the very last moment of his life – in front of a firing squad – that he was the innocent victim of a conspiracy and that his confession was coerced. Even the public prosecutor suggested life in prison instead of death, in case new evidence arose, but the judges disagreed and sentenced him four times to death. He was executed on February 6, 1968.

A great number of books have been written on the subject. The investigating reporters, both his contemporaries and their followers, are still split in two. Forensic science was virtually non-existent in Greece of the 1960s and, while some very strong evidence existed, a lot of it was indeed circumstantial. The timing of Paggratidis’s arrest is also deemed suspect by many, as it coincided with the turmoil and political instability following the political murder of left wing politician, Gregory Lambrakis, also in the city of Thessaloniki. Even now speculation remains rife and opinions just as forceful as they had been 50 years ago.

Another “Dragon” Roams Northern Greece

The nickname “Dragon” has also become a synonym for serial killer/rapist and is still widely used by media. Another case of a notorious “Dragon,” this time committing crimes mostly in a smaller, sleepier town in Northern Greece ironically called Drama, involved a young and valiant cadet named Kyriakos Papachronis some 20 years later.

“I sold my soul to the Devil,” he told the court. “We all did. Just like Faust.”

The absolute terror following his attacks could almost be considered a copycat emotion stemming from the “original” “Dragon” and his legacy. Nevertheless, the terror his actions inspired was also very real and tangible. What made everything even worse was that the perpetrator – as a distinguished soldier – was at a point involved in the investigations conducted to discover his own identity.

Finally, Papachronis was arrested and convicted of the rape and murder of a prostitute in 1981, the attempted murder of M. Postiadou in Drama, also in 1981, the attempted rape and murder on E. Papadopoulou, a student in Drama in 1982, the rape and brutal murder of A. Alexandridou in Thessaloniki in 1982, two more attempted rapes and murders of nurses A. Teza and V. Lazaridou in Drama, two more attempted rapes and murders against prostitutes in Drama, arson at the Kavala Airport and five bombing attacks on various banks and against the army.

His excuse: He was ridiculed during his first ever sexual experience with a prostitute who mocked his manhood and instilled a deep resentment of women within him. Since his arrest, handsome Papachronis has been inundated by love letters from female fans all over the country. His death sentence was eventually converted into life imprisonment when the death penalty was finally abolished in Greece in December 1993, and he was released on probation in 2004. Recently he became engaged, making headlines once again.

For No Reason at All 

Some of the worst tragedies in Greece’s criminal history are extremely difficult to comprehend. No clear motive can be found, other than excessive cruelty or, indeed mental illness. In this fashion, two of the worst massacres in the history of the country can only be described as pointless.

One of those tragedies unravelled in the island of Thasos. The perpetrator was a quirky weird law student Theophilos Sechidis. The victims: his entire family, including his mother, father, sister, uncle and grandmother. Even though Sechidis was clearly mentally ill, he still managed to take all necessary precautions in order to conceal his crime and avoid detection for several months. When a relative of the family expressed concerns about his family’s well being, he tried to reassure her and constructed an elaborate alibi to throw her off tracks. However, when the police got involved, he soon became the prime suspect, falling into the inconsistency trap many times over. Finally, he confessed that on the night between May 19 and 20, 1998 he had slaughtered his entire family (except for his grandmother who was to follow suit), then proceeded to dismember the bodies and dispose of them on various locations.

“They were sick and I wanted to save them,” he said, “They were conspiring to get rid of me because I was not a genuine offspring of the family. I had to get rid of them before they got rid of me.”

He claimed he had been abused. When asked about the elderly grandmother he slaughtered all he had to say was: “I had already killed four. Why should a fifth bother me?”

Having remained more than a day with the dead bodies of his family, Sechidis decided to remove the brains of the cadavers and place them in the fridge. When asked why he had done so his answer was (more or less):

“Why not?”

In 2006 Greece was once again shaken by a seemingly meaningless massacre. Five young hunters, aged between 17 and 33, hunters were shot dead by farmer Dionysis Foukas in the rural city of Agrinio. As the media struggled to understand what the motive behind those killings was the farmer’s father confessed in an attempt to save his son. Nobody was fooled. They were both arrested. The reason behind it: “They were stepping on the cloves and frightening the animals.”

Passion crime 

Perhaps the best known crime of sexual passion was the murder of Zoe Frantzi. On the evening of June 24, 1987 a homeless man made a gruesome discovery. He found the chopped remains of a young woman, later to be identified as 18-year-old Zoe Frantzi, the unfortunate spouse of pathologically jealous Panagiotis Frantzi. The case is, of course, better known for the leaked mortifying pictures of the dismembered young woman, still circulating on the Internet.

Her husband/killer has maintained his innocence throughout court proceedings and conviction, claiming that her death was a grotesque accident during one of their monumental fights. The coroner’s report, however, indicated signs of strangulation around the victim’s neck and detailed an “expert way of dismembering even a professional butcher would be jealous of,” leaving little doubt of Panagiotis Frantzis’s guilt. In 2007 a judicial review rejected Panagiotis Frantzis’s petition to be released on probation for the second time in a row.

Frantzis is the best known case in Greece indicating just how far sexual jealousy is capable of going but by no means original. Unfortunately an alarming percentage of homicides against female victims indicate similar motives and similar techniques.

The Butler Did It!

Wealthy businessman Michalis Chrysafidis and his entire family, including his 43-year-old wife Elizabeth and their two children, aged 16 and 18, were found butchered inside their luxurious home on June 24, 1991. Praser Sertuansa, a Thai national, murdered the entire Chrysafidi family with an axe. He was working for them as a butler. The autopsies performed on the dead bodies suggested not only that they had been horrendously tortured before death, but also that they were not murdered at the same time but gradually, beginning with the men in the family and continuing with the women.

Whether Sertuansa acted alone or with the help of a sketchy accomplice or accomplices has never been established. Also, the motive for the crime remains dark. Nothing was taken from the lush villa of the 48-year-old Michalis Chrysafidis, but his briefcase. The butler had remained in the villa days after his crime and tried to cover his tracks. Calmly, he would answer to concerned phone calls from friends and relatives telling them the family he had just murdered was on a trip abroad. He managed to escape, along with his wife and mother- in-law and is currently one of the most widely pursued individuals on the Interpol list.

In the Name of Satan

They were described as “a sweet bunch, buying records and hanging out.”

They were at the time between 18 and 21 years of age, offspring of normal, middleclass families. Asimakis Kastsoulas, 21, Emmanuil Dimitrokalis, 19, Dimitra Marietti, 18.

It was New Year’s Eve 1993 when the greatest criminal sensation in years was about to sweep Greece. It included elements such as ritual murder, rape, Satanism, the possibility of dark circuits controlling otherwise respectable, above-all-suspicion youth. It was all tantalizing. The evil deeds were undeniable. Some time before their first murders the two boys involved in the case had already begun to organize satanic ritual ceremonies and to convert naïve young things (mainly for their own sexual needs and orgies, all presumably in the name of Satan) such as Dimitra Marietti, who, in spite of her young age fully embraced the evil intentions she had been exposed to.

On August 27, 1992, the group led 14-year-old Dora Syropoulou astray on the pretext of initiating her to white magic. They took Dora to an isolated location where they preceded to handcuff her, strip her naked and force her to kneel holding a candle, before they smashed her head with a plank and, when that failed to kill her, strangled her. One of the young men also raped the young girl’s cadaver before they set fire to it in order to destroy evidence.

Growing bold after evading detection for eight months, the three murderous youngsters decided to strike again. This time, they decided to pick up a random person for their next “sacrificial killing.” In April of 1993, 28-year- old Garoufallia Giourga was a chamber maid in one of Athens’ most prestigious hotels and she was on her way home from work, waiting alone at a remote bus stop. The two young men convinced her to get in their car under the pretext that they were police officers. They drove to a remote area and handcuffed the young woman, stripped and raped her. When they were finished A. Katsoulas bludgeoned her head with a rock, killing her.

However, Dora Syropoulou’s family had not given up the search for their missing daughter. It was due to their determination alone that the satanic trio was not allowed to go on with more heinous crimes. The three were arrested on New Year’s Eve, just before 1993 was about to expire, after the private investigator hired by Dora Syropoulou’s family handed his damning report to the police for further investigation. The trial that followed and the details that emerged were monopolizing conversations for many months to come.

Both young men received life sentences. Dimitra Margetti was sentenced to 17 years in jail. Today she is a free woman. Both men are still serving time in different penitentiaries. A. Katsoulas, the mastermind behind the murders, has shown no signs of remorse and has since been accused of sexual harassment via obscene phone calls to girls aged 11 and 12 and of the attempted rape of a 23-year-old woman during a brief leave he was granted. Once more he had posed as a police officer.

Authors: 

The Silent Witness: DNA from a Leech

0
0

Sept. 30, 2013

A forensics first occurred in 2008 in Tasmania when DNA harvested from a leech led police to a robber.

by Liz Porter

On a late spring afternoon in 2001, two intruders broke into a house in bushland outside the small town of Launceston, in the Australian island state of Tasmania.

The men had apparently heard that the place was a soft target: It had a safe, which suggested money, and firearms – and it was occupied by an elderly couple. Donning black hoods and arming themselves with sticks, the men broke in, finding pensioner Fay Olson alone and terrified.

Forcing her to open the safe, the men stole $500 and a further $50 from the 70-year-old’s handbag. Then, grabbing a belt and tracksuit pants, the men tied their victim up and left.

The woman managed to break free and call police, who were on the scene within an hour. The officers were disappointed to hear that Mrs. Olson could give them little in the way of a description of the intruders because their hoods had covered their faces. It seemed unlikely, given the isolated location of the house, that police would find any witnesses who might have spotted the robbers approaching the house.

But one of the police officers present, Senior Constable Nathan Slater, was still able to spot one potential witness. It was small and entirely silent, but potentially very eloquent. It was a fat-bodied leech, its engorged appearance suggesting that it had recently eaten – meaning that it was full of human blood. But whose blood? Neither of the officers on the scene nor the victim had been bitten. So it t seemed safe to assume that the creature had fed on one of the robbers. Then, sated, it had simply dropped to the floor.

The “silent witness” was sent to the state forensic center, and the blood inside it was analyzed. A  DNA profile was extracted and went onto Tasmania’s DNA database.  It didn't match any of the criminals’ profiles already on the base. But the police were happy to wait. They were fairly certain that the leech’s victim would commit other crimes in the future. When he was caught and charged, his DNA would be taken, his profile would go on to the data base – and it would match the profile taken from the leech.

In the meantime the case was not forgotten. Tasmanian forensic scientists often quoted it when reporters asked them if their working life bore any resemblance to the TV show “CSI.”

In 2006 the forensic biologist who had done the DNA extraction – a tricky job because he had to be sure he was getting the human DNA, not the leech DNA – told a reporter about it. By then the scientist was working in another state, and had lost track of the case. “It may have found a match by now,” he told the journalist.

In fact he would have to wait another two years before the sample he had extracted from the leech could fulfill its potential – and make world headlines because the solving of a crime via DNA harvested from a leech would be a forensic world first.

Late in 2008, seven years after he broke into Fay Olsen’s house and robbed her, Peter Alec Cannon, 54, was charged with drug offenses and DNA profiled. His profile matched that of the blood from the leech.

Cannon pleaded guilty to the robbery and was sentenced to two years jail. His co-offender remains at large.

Authors: 

Count Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley: The Assassin who Sparked the Rise of the Nazi Party

0
0

Oct. 24, 2013

 Count Anton Graff von Arco auf Valley

 

by David Robb

 

Wach auf!” the prison guard shouted in German – the language best for shouting orders. “Wake up!”

It was November 11, 1923, and Count Anton Graff von Arco auf Valley was sound asleep in his comfortable jail cell at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. Arco-Valley was the prison’s most famous inmate – but not for long. A new prisoner was coming that day and the warden wanted Arco-Valley moved to another cell to accommodate his new prisoner – Adolf Hitler, who’d just been arrested for treason for leading an attempted overthrow of the Bavarian government.

Arco-Valley rubbed the sleep from his eyes and got out of bed. The jailer threw a box on his bed and told him to put all his belongings in it. That done, he was taken down the hall to a new, less-comfortable cell.

Arco-Valley was an assassin whose dastardly crime would shape the course of the 20th century. Today he is all but forgotten.

Four years before being moved from his cell to make room for Hitler, Arco-Valley, then a handsome 22-year-old student, former lieutenant in the German Army during World War I, and member of a noble German family, had assassinated Kurt Eisner, the Jewish premier of Bavaria. Young Arco-Valley, a virulent anti-Semite – despite the fact that he himself was half-Jewish – had shot Eisner in the hope of restoring the monarchy that Eisner had overthrown.

“Eisner is a Bolshevist,” Arco-Valley proclaimed. “He isn’t German, he doesn’t feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.”

In fact, Eisner was a German, and he was not a Communist. He was a journalist, socialist, pacifist and patriot who, on November 7, 1918 – four days before the end of World War I – had led a revolt that overthrew the corrupt and militaristic Wittelsbach monarchy that had ruled Bavaria for 700 years.

A few months later, however, Eisner would be soundly defeated in state elections by Johannes Hoffmann, his former minister of education and a member of the Bavarian People’s Party – a group aligned with Bavaria’s deposed monarchy. Eisner received less than 3 percent of the vote.  

On February 21, 1919, Eisner was on his way to the Bavarian Parliament in Munich to tender his resignation. As he was walking along the bustling Prannerstrasse on his way to the opening day of Parliament, Arco-Valley snuck up from behind him and fired two bullets into the back of his head. Eisner crumpled to the sidewalk and his bodyguards returned fire, severely wounding Arco-Valley, who was dragged away from the scene, presumed to be dead.

Arco-Valley, however, was not dead, but his cowardly act would destroy any hope of Bavaria becoming a democratic state. It was the spark that sent Munich spiraling into chaos, instability and madness, making it the perfect cradle for the birth of the Nazi Party.

Less than an hour after Eisner was killed, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior announced the news of the assassination to Parliament. As he was speaking, right-wing fanatics opened fire from the public gallery, showering the majestic hall with bullets. The Minister was wounded in the fusillade, his deputy was killed and two other officials were seriously wounded. Hell was coming to Munich. But Hitler was already there.

Hitler was still in the army – now the Reichswehr (the National Defense) – and he was stationed in Munich that day, working as a Verbindungsmann (police spy), informing on Communists within the military ranks. His testimony would send several of his fellow soldiers to the gallows.

Hitler, in military uniform, even attended Eisner’s funeral a few days later, as seen in this rare photo.

 

Adolf Hitler, far right, at the funeral of Kurt Eisner, Feb. 26, 1919

After Eisner’s assassination, riots and looting broke out all over the city, and within days, radical anarchists and Communists staged a series of revolts in an attempt to install a Soviet-style government in Bavaria. Aristocrats were arrested and wealthy businessmen were taken hostage, 10 of whom were massacred at a local Munich high school.

But reactionary paramilitary groups, called the Freikorps, fought back, and after more than 600 people were killed in brutal street fights, wrested control of the city from the Bolsheviks. Munich, the Bavarian capital, would be a right-wing bastion for the next quarter-century.

Amid this chaos, newspapers around the world report that an angry mob had broken into the hospital where Count Arco-Valley was recovering and lynched him. “Munich Mob Slays Eisner Assassin,” The New York Times reported on April 27, 1919. But it wasn’t true. History had more in store for this anti-Semitic assassin.

Arco-Valley was put on trial, and in January 1920 was found guilty and sentenced to death. At the end of his trial, he told the court: “I hate Bolshevism. I love my Bavarians and hate the Jews. I am a faithful monarchist and a good Catholic.”

There was, however, widespread sympathy in the courtroom – and throughout Bavaria – for Arco-Valley. Even the prosecutor in his trial said of him: “If the whole German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence.”

The next day, the Bavarian cabinet commuted Arco-Valley’s death sentence to life imprisonment, and he was hauled off to the Landsberg Prison. During his confinement, students and right-wing patriotic groups were allowed to visit him in prison, where he had become something of a national hero.

And it was there, in cell # 7 – which was more like a nicely appointed room with a view than a prison cell – that Count Arco-Valley was awakened on the morning of November 11, 1923, and moved to another cell to make way for Hitler, who had been sent to Landsberg after his failed putsch in Munich the year before. And it was here in cell # 7 that Hitler would write Mein Kampf, his hate-filled screed and blueprint for the Third Reich.

The prison cell would later become a shrine and place of pilgrimage for Hitler Youth organizations from all over Germany. In the 1930s, they would trek there by the thousands to see where their Fuehrer had been “unjustly” imprisoned. Upon entering, they would see a plaque that read: “Here a dishonorable system imprisoned Germany’s greatest son from November 11, 1923, to December 20, 1924.” And upon leaving, each of the visiting children would be given a copy of Mein Kampf– “My Struggle” – written in this room, which contained such anti-Semitic observations as these:

  • · In his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
  • · …by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
  • · If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.
  • · With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.

A month after he was moved from this cell to make way for Hitler, Count Arco-Valley’s life sentence was commuted by a right-wing judge, George Neithardt, to five years – to time served – and he was released from Landsberg. He had assassinated a head of state, the premier of Bavaria – a Jew – and now he was a free man.

In June of 1933 – just a few months after Hitler took power in Germany – the city council of Munich ordered that the ashes of Kurt Eisner be exhumed and that the monument erected over his grave be destroyed. And so it was.

That same year, the Nazi regime declared Arco-Valley a “hero of the movement.” But within a few weeks, the Count was arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler. German newspapers reported that Arco-Valley had told a friend: “I wouldn’t mind removing Hitler as I once did Eisner.”

The charges were eventually dropped, and the Count was once again a free man. The next year, he married a distant cousin and together they had four daughters. He would survive World War II, but on June 29, 1945 – less than two months after the war’s end – he was killed in a traffic accident in Salzburg, Austria.

Authors: 

Life Imitates Art: How the Pink Panthers Purloin and Plunder

0
0

Nov. 25, 2013

Smash and grab job by the Pink Panthers (Photo The Guardian)

In the annals of international diamond heists there has never been a group like the Pink Panthers. Of the estimated 200 members of the gang, most are Serb or Montenegrin nationals. Their estimated 120 heists in Britain, France, Dubai, Geneva, Monaco and Japan are marked by the gang’s cool cleverness, boldness and speed.  

by Denise Noe

Since the early 1990s, jewel theft gangs from Balkan areas have robbed high-end jewelry stores around the globe. These gangs operate separately from each other as individual Mafia families do and are believed to have looser structures than is typical of Mafia families. Authorities have nicknamed these disparate Balkan jewel thief gangs the “Pink Panthers.”

British police bestowed this moniker on the entire slew of jewel theft gangs when, in 1993, they searched the home of suspected robber Milan Jovetic, who was from Serbia. They discovered a purloined diamond hidden in a jar of his girlfriend’s face cream. Life appeared to have imitated art as the jewel thief in the 1975 motion picture The Return of the Pink Panther hid a stolen jewel in a face cream jar.

Part of the reason members of so many different gangs are called “Pink Panthers” is that the gangs themselves were spawned in a similar criminal cauldron and are strikingly similar in both the targets they select and the techniques they deploy.

Belgrade criminologist Dobrivoje Radovanovic believes recent violent political conflicts were instrumental in nurturing the Pink Panthers. “The 1990s were an ideal time for creating criminals in the Balkans,” he said.  Investigators think the many groups often referred to under the rubric of the Pink Panthers includes “a host of ex-soldiers hardened by the Balkan wars of the 1990s.”

It is believed there are as many as 200 Pink Panthers, most of them Serb or Montenegrin nationals. Writing for The New York Times, Doreen Carvajal reports that a high number of Pink Panther suspects hail from the Serbian town of Nis and authorities believe many of these thieves are “linked by village and blood.”

The majority of Pink Panthers are men but there are women in these gangs. In a Los Angeles Times article, Jeffrey Fleishman describes the typical Pink Panther modus operandi, “They come in rough, swinging hammers and axes, shattering glass, flashing semiautomatic pistols and an occasional grenade, and vanishing with gems in satchels lined with toilet paper to prevent scratching.” The average time of a Pink Panther heist is 90 seconds.

Even though some news reports refer to the gang as the “rock stars robbers,” both Fleishman and Carvajal note that they are not movie star glamorous. “They’re untailored and uncoiffed, preferring black leather jackets and ball caps to cashmere and cufflinks, a kind of Ocean’s 11 minus the panache. But they’re disciplined and fluent in many languages, and they strike with precision,” Fleishman reports. Carvajal writes that investigators believe, “The group’s members live all over Europe, with some working in mundane jobs [such] as hospital cleaners, waiting to be summoned for the next discount flight to a foreign capital.”

Attention to Detail

Jeff Pohlman and Andrea Day report for NBC News that FBI Special Agent Dan McCaffrey “said the Pink Panthers are known for attention to detail and planning every step of the job – including how they will unload the stolen goods. He added that their goal is to get rid of diamonds as quickly as possible, and in past Pink Panther thefts, FBI agents have recovered stolen diamonds in the United States just days after they were lifted from jewelry stores in Europe.”

Reporting for the Telegraph Media Group, Peter Allen writes that most Pink Panthers are believed to “speak several languages and travel on genuine passports issued to other people.” Allen also reports that they may have perpetrated as many as 120 heists in such far-flung parts of the world as Britain, France, Dubai, Geneva, Monaco, and Japan.

The Pink Panthers are known for their attention to detail and creative thinking they bring to their crimes. Allen reports, “In Biarritz, for example, they applied fresh paint to a bench opposite the jewelry store they were about to rob to deter potential witnesses from sitting on it.”

Carvajal observes, “The fact that cool cleverness, boldness and speed are the hallmarks of the group’s robberies has led investigators to speculate that the Pink Panthers are casting for ideas from movie thieves.”

Indeed, the hiding of a diamond in a face cream jar is only the most dramatically obvious instance in which Pink Panthers have patterned their actions after those seen in films. Many of their heists seem oddly reminiscent of motion picture robberies in swiftness and careful planning.

A Brief History of Pink Panther Heists

Three robbers sauntered into the Doux jewelry store in the Courchevel ski resort in France at about 11:30 a.m. on January 31, 2003. The trio threatened store workers and absconded with jewels valued at millions of dollars.

The next day, someone recognized one of the robbers. He was arrested and found to be Dragan Mikic, a Serbian. Convicted of taking part in the Doux robbery, Mikac’s prison stay was cut short in 2005 when accomplices sprayed the prison watchtower with machinegun fire and Mikac scrambled down a ladder to freedom. He was re-captured in 2009.

Authorities believe that, in 2004, Djordijije Rasovic, Aleksandar Radulovic, and female Pink Panther Snezana “Snowy” Panatojotovic went to the Le Supre-Diamant Couture de Maki store in the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo. Panatojotovic waited in front of the store while the men entered. One man distracted a shop worker and the other sprayed one with pepper spray. The robbers smashed glass cases and fled with jewels including rare yellow diamonds and the famous Countess of Vendome necklace that Jeffrey Fleishman describes as “studded with 116 diamonds, including a 125-carat oval center stone.” The robbery was captured on videotape. Panatojotovic, Rasovic, and Radulovic were apprehended and tried in Serbia in an agreement that country made with Japan. The trio were convicted. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, “Rasovic was sentenced to six and a half years in 2005 for the heist, but he, Snowy and Radulovic have won an appeal for a new trial.” The Countess of Vendome necklace – valued at $31 million – has not been recovered.

In July 2004, Milan Jovetic, whose hiding of a jewel in a face cream jar led to the naming of his criminal coterie as the Pink Panthers, sat in the defendant’s dock beside fellow Serbian Nebojsa Denic in a London courtroom before Judge Gerald Gordon. The defendants had just been convicted of the May 2002 robbery of a Graff’s jewelry store. Judge Gordon had harsh words for Denic, stating, “To achieve your ends, you took with you a fully functional and loaded Magnum .357. Not surprisingly, your use of it succeeded in subduing staff who were terrified and have been, in different ways, markedly and perhaps permanently affected by what you did.”

Judge Gordon sentenced Denic to 15 years imprisonment and Jovetic to five and a half years.

In 2007, masked Pink Panthers rammed two Audi cars into the window of a Graff jewelry store in Wafi City, Dubai. The robbers grabbed $3.4 million worth in diamonds and made getaways in those same cars. The vehicles were later found – burned to obscure evidence. Nevertheless, investigators found DNA in the fire-scorched cars as well as a mobile telephone number on a car rental agreement.

The phone number was that of the cellphone of Bojana Mitic, a female Pink Panther. Her cellphone led investigators to six other suspects. Two Serbians were arrested in Dubai only a few days after the robbery. They were identified in the Arab press as “Nichola M.” and “M.M.” In June 2008, Nichola M. was convicted of aiding and abetting unidentified fugitives in connection with the robbery and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment followed by deportation. M.M., accused of possessing stolen property, was acquitted. Reporting for Arab News, Shadiah Abdullah states that the two Serbians were “the only suspects” who have been “tried in connection with the crime."

Interpol’s Project Pink Panther

The jewel thefts perpetrated by Pink Panthers alarmed law enforcement agencies throughout the world. A conference was held late in 2007 at Interpol headquarters in Lyon about the Pink Panthers. Doreen Carvajal reports, “Interpol now presides over what it calls Project Pink Panthers to share and coordinate information about the gang.” She wrote that Interpol circulated names and photographs of alleged Pink Panthers. One was Dusko Poznan, a dark-haired man from Bihac in Bosnia and Herzegovnia and a suspect in the Dubai caper and one in Liechtenstein.

In October 2008, Poznan was in Monaco crossing a street when a car struck him. Carvajal writes, “Initially, he resisted medical treatment, according to police officers who arrived on the scene.” He was taken to Princess Grace Hospital where an officer recognized him from an Interpol photograph. Poznan and his companion were found to be traveling on forged passports but they insisted they were tourists. Pink Panthers typically insist on their innocence even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

It was close to closing time at the high-end Harry Winston store on Avenue Montaigne in Paris on December 8, 2008, when the shop’s employees saw a man and three stylish women sporting long blond hair, sunglasses, and thick winter scarves huddled out front. Carvajal reports that one of the women “demurely requested to enter” the store. Workers buzzed the four in.

The group rolled in a valise on wheels. Then one member brandished a hand grenade and another a .357 Magnum. The robbers broke display cases and shouted out orders in voices that unmistakably indicated that the three blond ladies were actually men in drag. The strong Slavic accents of their French also led authorities to suspect Pink Panthers, as did their modus operandi. In less than 15 minutes, the four had escaped in a waiting car, taking with them sacks filled with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. The value of the heist is estimated at $100 million.

Boban Stojkovic was apprehended for the Harry Winston robbery. An ex-soldier from the former Yugoslavia, Stojkovic’s attorney, Emmanuel Auvergen-Rey, said that Stojkovic did not belong to the Pink Panthers and insisted that the collection of groups was a figment of police officers’ imaginations. However, Stojkovic admitted to being part of the group that robbed Harry Winston. Before sentencing, Stojkovic told the judge, “I don’t demand your pity because I know I have to pay for these crimes but just leave me an open door to remake my life.” The judge may have been moved by this plea as Stojkovic was sentenced to six years imprisonment.

Prison Escapes

In May 2013, a Serbian Pink Panther, together with four fellow inmates, escaped from a Swiss prison. As Chris Irvine wrote in a report for the Telegraph Media Group, “They were in the walled courtyard at the Bois-Mermet prison on the outskirts of Lausanne with some 30 other inmates when three masked accomplices on the outside climbed a ladder and threw a bag filled with weapons and other items into the yard.”

One of the five flashed a gun retrieved from the bag while others sprayed irritants to keep the guards at bay. The group used pliers from the bag to cut a hole in the fence that blocked the prison wall. Then they climbed the ladder supplied by the masked trio to get over the prison wall. The group of eight raced away in two vehicles.

On July 25, 2013, two people rammed vehicles into the fence of the Orbe prison in Switzerland. By doing so, they cleared away barbed wire, helping two prisoners, Milan Poparic and Adrian Albrecht, make it out of the prison. The escapees and their outside accomplices raced away from the prison in one of the vehicles.

Two days later, on July 27, 2013 a man with a scarf drawn over his face walked into a diamond show at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France and waved a gun in one of his gloved hands. In only one minute, the robber grabbed jewels and diamond-encrusted watches. Then he jumped out of a low hotel window, stumbled and fell, and yet still held onto the loot and made a getaway. According to FBI Special Agent Dan McCaffrey, more than 20 of the jewels weighed at least 30 carats. Carol J. Williams reported, “A subsequent inventory disclosed that more had been taken from a poorly guarded hotel room, where other items were being stored for a diamond exhibit.” The haul was estimated to be worth $136 million. The manner of the crime strongly suggested that the culprit is a Pink Panther.

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, the Carlton Hotel in Cannes had been featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie starring Cary Grant, To Catch a Thief.

No Band of Robin Hoods

The Pink Panthers are hardly a bunch of Robin Hoods – they have threatened and traumatized store workers and they do not give any of their ill-gotten gains to innocent poor people – but their audacious robberies and prison escapes have endowed the group with an aura of glamour among some observers. A Serbian college student said, “It’s not something I would do but they’re rocking. They’re the main topic in coffee shops.” He added, “What they’re doing is stunning, amazing, and awesome.”

Belgrade criminologist Dobrivoje Radovanovic worries about the tendency to romanticize these thieves. “With the Pink Panthers, the public has fallen for false images and mythology.”

Carol J. Williams reports that Interpol believes that Pink Panthers have “stolen more than $400 million in jewels over the past 15 years.” Jeffrey Fleishman reports that investigators believe that they have stolen from over 100 luxury stores throughout the world in the last decade. Well over 100 Pink Panthers are at large.

 

Bibliography

Abdullah, Shadian. “Serb Sentenced to 10 Years in Jail for Wafi City Robbery.” Arab News. June 9, 2008.

Allen, Peter. “Three suspected Pink Panther gang members arrested in Monaco.” Telegraph Media Group. June 20, 2009.

Carvajal, Doreen. “Pink Panthers’ global trail glitters with jewels.” The New York Times. December 12, 2008.

Fleishman, Jeffrey. “Balkans’ Pink Panther jewel thieves smash their way into myth.” Los Angeles Times. July 29, 2009.

“Gems robber jailed for 15 years.” BBC News. July 21, 2004.

“Inspector Clouseau Gets.” Reuters. New York Post. March 28, 2009.

“’Jewel gangster’ held in Monaco.” BBC News. June 20, 2009.

“Jewelers hit again in ‘L1m’ raid.” BBC News. May 28, 2005.

JTA. “’Pink Panther’ Heist of Jewish Diamond King Lev Leviev in Cannes Soars to $136 M.” Forward.com.

“Pink Panther arrests in Monaco.” The New Zealand Herald. June 22, 2009.

“’Pink Panther’ fugitive in Tokyo jail for Ginza heist.” Kyodo News. The Japan Times. August 15, 2010.

“’Pink Panther’ jewel thief escapes Swiss prison.” Associated Press. CBS News. July 26, 2013.

“’Pink Panther’ suspect to serve Cyprus jail term.” Associated Press. The Independent. April 21, 2009.

“Pink Panther thief among escapees in dramatic prison break.” Telegraph Media Group. May 14, 2013.

“’Pink Panther’ to face trial in Montenegro over 2007 Ginza heist.” The Japan Times. May 21, 2012.

Polhman, Jeff; Day, Andrea. “Diamonds in the rough: The hunt for the Pink Panther gang.” NBC News. Aug. 8, 2013.

Rayman, Noah. “Epic Diamond Heist: Did the Pink Panthers Strike Again?” Time. June 29, 2013.

“Rome: Arrested Mitar Marjanovic – one of the leaders of the ‘Pink Panther.’” Novosti Online. March 8, 2012. 

“Serbs guilty of Japan jewel heist.” BBC News. October 2, 2007.

Seward, Deborah. “’Pink Panther’ suspect held in Cyprus.” The Independent. March 28, 2009.

Squires, Nick. “Pink Panther gang member arrested.” Telegraph Media Group. March 8, 2012.

Trevelyan, Mark. “Interpol closing in on ‘Pink Panthers’ jewel thieves.” ArabianBusiness.com. June 14, 2008.

“Two members of an international gang of robbers ‘Pink Panthers’ arrested in Athens.” In.gr. March 14, 2012

Williams, Carol J. “$136-million French Riviera jewel heist may be biggest in history.” Los Angeles Times. July 29, 2013.

Authors: 

Stealing the Crown Jewels

0
0

Jan. 6, 2014

colonel thomas blood

“Colonel” Thomas Blood, who stole the Crown Jewels of England in May, 1671.

The theft of the Crown Jewels in 1671 was the crime of its age, but King Charles II inexplicably pardoned the motley gang and granted extensive lands in Ireland to the ringleader, Colonel Thomas Blood.

by Robert Walsh

London, May 1671.

A motley group of conspirators was making its final preparations for a robbery that will become the most widely known crime of its age. As his accomplices ready themselves, self-appointed “Colonel” Thomas Blood, an Irish “adventurer,” offers a final prayer for his safety and the success of his plot. This is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill score. If they succeed Colonel Blood and his gang will have stolen the most famous symbol of the British monarchy: The Crown Jewels.

The stealing of precious gems has always exerted a particular allure for thieves and not always for purely financial reasons. For Thomas Blood, stealing the Crown Jewels was said to be an act of political protest against the sitting monarch Charles II. Or was it?

Colonel Blood is one of crime’s less-remembered and certainly more mysterious characters. An Irish Protestant, Blood started off as a Royalist but switched to the Parliamentarian side during the Civil War between the Royalists under King Charles I and Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell, serving as a cavalry commander.

After winning the Civil War and ordering the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector until his death in 1660 when the monarchy was re-established and Charles II was enthroned as King of England. This change of fortunes caused Thomas Blood to suffer considerably as a result. Having changed sides from the Royalists to the Parliamentary forces, Blood had been awarded lands and considerable financial benefits when the Parliamentarians won the war. Under Charles II, Blood’s lands and perks were confiscated by the Crown, leading him to turn to crime to make a living.

It was also in 1660 that the new monarch King Charles II ordered a lavish Coronation ceremony which included spending the then-staggering sum of £32,000 on a new set of Crown Jewels. The medieval originals had been confiscated by Cromwell and sold to raise funds so Charles ordered exactly similar, equally lavish replicas to replace them. The Imperial Crown was solid gold and held over 400 precious stones, the Royal Sceptre was also solid gold and so was the Royal Orb. Both the Sceptre and the Orb were also encrusted with gems, albeit not as heavily as the Crown itself.

Charles II had inherited an impoverished country whose national coffers were seriously overstretched but, being a man of flamboyant (some would say decadent) tastes, money was seemingly no object and Charles felt it necessary to make the Crown Jewels not only a set of ultra-lavish trinkets, but also a symbol of the newly restored monarchy itself. According to the conventional historical interpretation, it was for their symbolic value (and in protest at his own treatment by the Royalists) that Thomas Blood decided he was going to steal them.

Before he could steal the jewels Blood needed a good look at where they were kept and how well they were guarded. They were kept at the Martin Tower within the Tower of London (not the easiest place to get into or out of) but were protected by only a locked door and a single custodian named Thomas Edwards. To add to the somewhat serious security deficiencies, Edwards was an unpaid custodian making a living entirely by charging visitors to come and view the jewels in the Jewel Room. Visitors couldn’t enter the Jewel Room itself, but they could get a clear view of the Royal treasure through the single, locked metal grille that stood between them and the swag of a lifetime, a grille to which Edwards had the key. Edwards was a thoroughly honest man, but he was also poor and, being 77-years old at the time, not the type of custodian you might expect for something so valuable. When a friendly country vicar  and his wife dropped by asking to view the jewels, Edwards (also far too trusting a man for such a job) was only too happy to earn some extra money. The vicar was really Colonel Thomas Blood. The wife was an actress. Edwards was in harm’s way and didn’t know it.

While his “wife” feigned illness and Edwards went to get her a glass of water, Blood had the time he needed to case the Jewel Room thoroughly. He noticed the single metal grille and realized that Edwards was almost certainly the keyholder. He also noticed a case of pistols which Edwards kept in the Jewel Room, presumably for protection, but which had never been out of their case and were all unloaded. Once his wife had recovered from her sudden bad spell and Edwards had returned, Blood made a show of admiring the pistols and offered to buy them. Edwards, probably thinking that if you can’t trust a clergyman then you can’t trust anybody, sold them to him. Edwards was now totally disarmed in every sense by the very type of man he’d been employed to stop.

Finding Edwards so compliant and friendly, Blood then used the occasion to propose a wedding between his son and the custodian’s daughter, carefully mentioning the large cash dowry Edwards would receive. Now for the master-stroke. Blood suggested that he return with his son and a couple of friends to finalize the wedding plans and asked Edwards if they could view the jewels as well. Edwards agreed instantly and, in that single moment, the greatest robbery of the time was set in motion.

A couple of days later, Blood and his confederates returned. They arrived at 7 a.m. (a time they chose to avoid early-morning crowds and so leave clearer escape routes when the job was done). Edwards greeted the vicar, his friends and his prospective son-in-law (actually Thomas Blood Jr. the Colonel’s own son, known as “Young Blood”) and left his wife and daughter while he led Blood and his accomplices to the Jewel Room. Edwards unlocked the outer door, ushered his paying guests in for their viewing and suddenly everything moved very quickly.

Edwards suddenly found himself with a hessian sack over his head. Blood smashed him on the skull with a wooden mallet while Young Blood, Robert Halliwell and Robert Perrot restrained him. Edwards, despite his age and being outnumbered by several armed men all younger than him, gamely resisted when they demanded the key to the grille. Blood hit him a couple more times and he still struggled to free himself. One of the gang then stabbed him in the stomach and Edwards, while not fatally wounded, finally decided to play dead and buy himself time to figure out what else to do. With Edwards out of commission and the key taken from him, Perrot stuffed the Royal Orb into his breeches. Halliwell busied himself trying to saw the solid-gold Royal Sceptre in two for easier concealment while Blood used the blood-stained mallet to flatten the Imperial Crown before stuffing it under his coat. The security had been bypassed, the custodian was out of action and the Crown Jewels were literally in the hands of the thieves. What could possibly go wrong?

What Blood and his crew didn’t bank on was the unexpected return of Edwards’s son Wythe. Wythe Edwards had just returned from fighting as an officer in the Dutch Wars and he’d also brought a friend with him, Captain Marcus Beckman. Both were hardened, experienced soldiers and neither was the type to back away from a fight. As they walked into the Martin Tower, old Edwards managed to remove the gag he’d been muzzled by and bellowed “Treason! Murder! The Crown is stolen!”

Wythe and Beckman instantly ran towards the noise. They drew their pistols and pursued the thieves at full speed, demanding their surrender in the name of the King. Blood fired a pistol at Wythe and missed while he and Perrot fled towards their horses, being held at the Iron Gate by another accomplice, William Smith. All three were caught as they tried to mount their horses and escape. Halliwelland Young Blood managed to leave the Tower but Young Blood crashed his horse into a passing cart and was immediately arrested. Halliwell was picked up not long afterward, leaving the robbers all arrested and the Crown Jewels recovered. In Thomas Blood’s opinion “It was a gallant deed, although it failed…” History doesn’t record the opinion of Captain Beckman and especially the Edwards family.

Despite facing the particularly hideous death meted out to traitors (namely being hung, drawn and quartered before a public audience) Blood remained curiously (and, some say, suspiciously) calm and relaxed while under arrest. The outlaws were held in the White Tower of the Tower of London to await their trial and ultimate fate. Nobody would have doubted that they would all be providing entertainment for the general public in short order, especially considering that, by stealing the Crown Jewels, they wouldn’t have been charged with robbery or theft, but with treason, a capital offense.

A Most Unlikely Royal Pardon

Time for another twist in the tale. No less a visitor than King Charles II arrived and visited Blood privately where thief and victim spent some time in very private conversation. The most widely told version of their conversation has Blood not only not begging for his life, but even admitting that after the Restoration of the crown he had spent a morning looking at Charles through the sights of a musket while finally deciding not to squeeze the trigger. Not only was Blood arrogant enough to rob the King of England, he’s also supposed to have then joked with the King about previously attempting to assassinate him. Charles, so it’s said, was so impressed by Blood’s sheer audacity and his remarkable crimes that, rather than simply sending him for trial and execution like any other prospective regicide and violent thief, he pardoned Blood, awarded him extensive lands in Ireland and even a pension of £500 a year for life. Pretty good going from Blood’s point of view, considering that he could have ended up being dismembered before a jeering mob instead.

King Charles could easily have ensured that Blood and his accomplices were tried, convicted and publicly executed. He could certainly have ensured that all of them either spent the rest of their lives in English jails or the penal colonies in modern-day Georgia or Virginia. What he didn’t have to do was heavily reward the leader of the gang and allow the others their freedom and to disappear into obscurity, which is exactly what he did do. The question has to be “Why?” Why would King Charles not only give up the chance to make an example of Blood and his colleagues? Why would he spare the gang and reward their leader after they’d committed treason and inflicted so personal an insult to the monarchy?

According to Alan Marshall, a leading historian on the period, the answers are simple. The first involves money. Charles was by nature an ostentatious man with a strong taste for high living and lavish excess. The fact that he’d inherited a country whose finances were heavily depleted and whose credit was over-extended hadn’t curbed his expensive tastes. Marshall believes that the robbery was an inside job, ordered by the King and given to Blood by one of Charles’ chief hatchet men, the Duke of Buckingham. The Duke was a devoted ally of Charles with a long-established record of arranging dirty deeds that Charles profited from in various ways but could never be seen to involve himself with personally. Buckingham often acted as his middleman, making sure that Charles’s less savory activities were done discreetly, without any direct links to the King himself. Charles could easily have used Buckingham to arrange the robbery, pocket the proceeds privately and then order that taxes be levied to provide replacements at public expense. All of which raises the distinct possibility that the robbery was an inside job and Blood not only surviving but being richly rewarded was really a payment for services rendered.

Marshall also provides evidence that Blood, while seemingly a solid member of the London underworld after losing the lands he gained after the Civil War, also acted as a hitman and spy for Buckingham, performing a number of illegal services on Buckingham’s behalf (and, by extension, the King’s). This would account for Blood having evaded capture for so long during his criminal career prior to the robbery. It would also explain why he made such incredible gains from a crime that would normally have cost him his life. The last thing Buckingham (and especially Charles) would have wanted was one of their former spies playing such a trump card in open court. Blood would very likely have done that if he’d found himself facing the executioner’s axe. Far better to publicly show mercy, claim to be utterly charmed by the sheer audacity of the crime and then seal his own reputation as the “Merry Monarch” by letting Blood and his accomplices off the hook and provide a huge payoff for Blood’s previous work under the cover of Charles’s own well-known eccentricity.

Was the notorious Colonel Blood really a disaffected soldier making a political protest or was he merely the inside man? Was the Merry Monarch really a common thief, stealing his own national treasures to further fund an unsustainably lavish lifestyle? Was the most audacious robbery of its time, involving the theft of the most famous jewel collection in the world, merely a put-up job?

Historians and crime buffs can (and still frequently do) debate these questions. But, of all the questions raised by this remarkable heist, only one entirely solid truth emerges: We’ll probably never really know for sure.

Authors: 

The Real Lady Macbeth: Countess Erzsébet Báthory

0
0

Jan. 13, 2014

Countess Erzsébet Báthory

by David Robb

Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most famous fictional female villainess in all of literature, but in 1606, while William Shakespeare was creating her bloodthirsty character, one of the world’s worst real life villainess was on a serial murder spree like no other.

All but forgotten today, Countess Erzsébet Báthory was descended from one of the noblest families in the Hungarian region of Transylvania. But Erzsébet wasn’t like other girls – she liked to torture and murder them. All told, she may have murdered more than 650 young girls and virgins. The exact number won’t be known until the government of Hungary makes public her diary, which reportedly contains the names of all her victims – a diary so shocking that Hungarian authorities have kept it under lock and key for over 400 years.

Testimony from the ensuing trial revealed that she bit hunks of flesh from the bodies of her victims while they were still alive. Legend has it that she bathed in their blood, believing that this would preserve her youth. No one knows for sure why she did it. What is known is that she murdered at least three-times more young women than did Jack the Ripper – and possibly 100-times more. She was the most prolific female mass murderer of all time, and perhaps the most prolific serial killer – male or female – ever to live. 

Born in 1560, Erzsébet Báthory was a strikingly beautiful 15-year-old girl when she married Count Ferenc Nadasdy, whose wedding gift to her was Cachtice Castle, a majestic, medieval palace set atop a hill overlooking a beautiful valley.  It was here that she would commit a series of ghastly murders. It was, without a doubt, the most picturesque mass murder site of all time.

 Cachtice Castle

Initially, Erzsébet’s husband took part in her sadistic sex games, which she practiced on her servants. Together, they would pierce the servants’ lips and nipples with pins and needles, stick sharp objects under their fingernails, whip them, stab them and bite them – but not to the point of death. They would cover them in honey and let insects bite away at them, or stand them in the freezing snow and douse them with water.

But when her husband left to fight in one of Hungary’s many wars with the Turks, Erzsébet’s thirst to inflict pain and suffering became unquenchable.

Testimony from the hair-raising trial would uncover a catalogue of depravity, mayhem and mass murder.

Erzsébet set up a torture chamber in the castle’s basement where no one could hear her vicitims’ screams. Young girls would be abducted from the nearby village or lured to the castle with the promise of work, and then Erzsébet would tear into them. 

Assisted by her majordomo, her childrens’ nanny, a washerwoman and several other servants, Erzsébet would beat the girls with boards, burn them with hot pokers, freeze them, drown them or starve them to death – all the while ravaging them sexually. Cutting, stabbing, poking and piercing were her favorite pastimes. Their hands were cut off, their eyes gouged out, their breasts and vaginas mutilated. She particularly enjoyed burning the girls’ noses and lips off with a red-hot flatiron, or ripping their jaws off with her bare hands. Erzsébet would bite pieces of flesh off their faces, attack them with knives, and set their pubic hair on fire with a burning candle. Once, a servant testified at trial, while torturing two girls, Erzsébet stuck needles under their fingernails and scowled, “If it hurts, you whores, then simply pull them out!” And when the girls pulled the needles out, Erzsébet cut their fingers off. Then they were killed.

This went on for decades.

But what to do with all the dead bodies? They were dumped in pits and canals, or buried in shallow graves in the surrounding fields or on the castle grounds.

Rumors began circulating about atrocities going on at the castle in 1604, but it wasn’t until 1610 that King Matthias sent someone to look into it. When the king’s envoy finally arrived at the castle, he and his men found one girl dead, another one dying, and many more locked up and hysterical.

The king wanted Báthory beheaded, but his advisors cautioned that this would reflect badly on the other nobles. Instead, Báthory was locked up and her four accomplices were put on trial, during which one testified that 36 young girls had been murdered; another said that the number was 37, and the other two claimed it was more than 50. Local townspeople claimed that as many as 200 bodies had been removed from the castle, and a witness who saw her book said it contained the names of 650 victims.

In the end, three of her accomplices were found guilty and executed. The other defendant was acquitted. Báthory herself was never tried, and was found dead in her cell on Aug. 21, 1614.

Authors: 

Italian Vendetta: The Amanda Knox Case

0
0

Updated Jan. 30, 2014

The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three defendants, American Amanda Knox and Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

by Robert Walsh

On January 30, 2014, an appeal court in Florence, Italy found Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, guilty for a second time of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a British student attending the University of Perugia.  Knox, in absentia, was sentenced to 28 1/2 years and Sollecito to 25 years. She refused to attend the latest trial, opting to send a long email to the court while remaining in the United States – asserting her innocence and that of Sollecito – a move which has antagonized some Italian officials.

Both Knox, who also attended the university as an exchange student and was a flat mate of Kercher’s, and Sollecito were originally convicted in 2009. Two years later, an appeal court overturned both convictions, ending four years of imprisonment for both defendants. Following that ruling, Italy's highest court, the Court of Cassation, departed from its normal role of dealing with legal technicalities and ordered a retrial before the appeal court based in Florence.

Those proceedings, before two judges and six lay jurors, began in November. At the retrial, the prosecution did not produce any new evidence or proof that Knox or Sollecito were in the bedroom when Kercher was stabbed to death in 2007. It merely changed its theory of the case from some sort of ritualistic sex game gone bad to Knox murdering her flat mate because Kercher criticized her lax housekeeping.

Although Sollecito, now 29, attended a good portion of the retrial along with his father, he was not in the courtroom when the verdicts – after 11 ½ hours of deliberation – were announced. Knox, 26, returned to Seattle following her 2011 exoneration.

The question that is fair to ask, given their shaky original case, mishandled forensic evidence and continuing public relations problems over the case, is why were Italian prosecutors still pursuing Knox and Sollecito? To be blunt, the most plausible answer was a vendetta born of anger at being ridiculed at home and abroad and a stubborn reluctance to accept that there may well have been a miscarriage of justice. Italian authorities had already expended enormous amounts of time and resources on this case. They've also had to put up with hostile global media coverage, repeated high-profile criticisms of their investigations and handling of the case and they didn’t want to be seen to endure so much trouble and have squandered so much time and effort only to publicly admit an error. The more they pursued this case, the worse the criticisms will be. The worse the criticism, the less they wanted to be seen to admit a blunder.

Another possible cause of this vendetta may have been inspired by the 2013 publication of Knox’s book, Waiting To Be Heard, allowing Knox to achieve a good dose of vindication and a $4 million advance from Harper-Collins. The book recounts the over-the-top police interrogations she was submitted to, her four years in an Italian prison, and her exoneration on appeal in 2011. In a post-publication interview with the National Post, Knox said most of the advance has already been used to pay legal fees and expenses incurred during her trials, imprisonment and appeals. She also told the National Post she will not change her story regarding alleged police misconduct simply because of threatened defamation lawsuits by Italian police and prosecutors.

Soon after the verdicts were announced, defense attorneys vowed to appeal the reinstatement of the original convictions to the Court of Cassation once the Florence court publishes its justification of its verdicts in late April of 2014.

“It’s evident we will appeal,” said Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox’s attorneys. “We continue to say that there is no evidence,” The New York Times reported the next day. An attorney for Sollecito, Giulia Bongiorno, said the trial had been “empty of proof and evidence” and pledged to appeal. These appeals could easily take two or more years to make their way through Italy’s convoluted justice system.

A request by the prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for the defendants was rejected by the Florence court. The court ruled that Knox was legitimately in the United States and that Sollecito only be required to surrender his passport and not leave Italy.

Only if all subsequent appeals are denied could Italian authorities begin extradition proceedings for Knox’s return to serve her sentence. The decision to honor Italy’s request for extradition rests solely with the U.S. Secretary of State. Because Knox was exonerated previously, the United States will most probably not agree to extradite her to Italy. Doing so would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against double jeopardy. But then, again, one never knows what might happen in the politically charged atmosphere this case has generated.

Now that Knox has been re-convicted she will be unable to enter any European Union country without almost certainly being arrested and held pending an Italian extradition request. European law and various EU treaties would oblige other EU nations to do so.

Furthermore, if she enters any country with a vested interest in either pleasing the Italians or displeasing the U.S. State Department, then they may opt to detain her and offer her to the Italians as a fugitive.

Contrary to popular belief, countries do not need a standing extradition treaty to detain fugitives of another state and offer them for extradition. A notable exception to standard extradition is the EU itself which refuses to extradite prisoners to any country where they even might face the death penalty. As neither Knox norSollecito (who, unlike Knox, has attended the latest trial) would face execution if convicted, that rule wouldn’t apply.

Knox, now 25, is currently enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle and expects to graduate in 2014.

To many observers, it was a farce for the Court of Cassation to order a retrial. Judge Hellman of the original appeal court – the court that exonerated Knox and Sollecito – was outraged by the decision to allow another retrial. Hellman has claimed unequivocally that the Court of Cassation has stepped outside its own authority by interpreting trial evidence instead of strictly confining itself to legal technicalities as required under Italian law. Hellman is suggesting the Court of Cassation effectively retried the original murder case rather than assessing the lawfulness (or otherwise) of the original investigation and trial. Hellman has also made it clear, to use his exact words, that the “Ruling has explained to the judges in the new trial how they should convict the two accused.” His prediction about that was borne out by the new guilty verdicts.

One of the distinctive aspects of the case has been the level of international media coverage. That a murder case involving a British victim and African, American and Italian defendants would attract multinational media attention is no surprise at all. What has given the case a quite tacky aspect has been the kind of media coverage it has attracted. Amanda Knox has suffered from negative publicity as much about her alleged lifestyle in Perugia as her alleged guilt in the murder. She’s been vilified for behaving like a libertine by many Italian media outlets which used her “party girl” lifestyle to sell papers while lambasting her as some kind of scarlet woman. British tabloids have used her looks to her disadvantage, labelling her “Foxy Knoxy” and suggesting she fits the profile of a cold-blooded femme fatale.

U.S. media, on the other hand, have largely been more supportive towards her, not that this has necessarily helped Amanda Knox. No country likes to see its own system of justice pilloried by foreign media and Italy is no exception. It has been suggested that, far from helping Knox’s case, U.S. media criticism of Italian justice was what hardened the resolve of Italian prosecutors to continue pursuing the case against her.

The Murder of Meredith Kercher

The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three defendants, American Amanda Knox and Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

Rudy Guede admitted to being present at the crime scene when the murder was committed and watching as Kercher bled to death, but denied being the actual killer. However, the forensic evidence points firmly to Guede’s guilt. A bloody handprint of his, covered with the victims’s blood, was on Kercher’s bedroom wall. Italian forensic police testified that Guede’s DNA was inside the victim.

Following his trial, Guede was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. That sentence was reduced to 16 years during his appeal hearing when Guede agreed to testify against Knox and Sollecito. Guede becomes eligible for parole in 2014 due to his reduced sentence. Just because he will be eligible for parole is no guarantee he will be released.

Following Guede’s trial and conviction, Knox and Sollecito went on trial in 2009 for their alleged roles in the murder of the 21-year-old Kercher. Both were found guilty and sentenced to more than 25 years. Under the Italian two-tier trial system, the case was then referred to the higher-level court to be heard a second time, after which judges would either confirm or reject the lower-level court's verdict. In 2011 the higher-level court overturned the initial convictions, issuing a ruling lambasting the police’s handling of the investigation. Judges also singled out major defects in the collection, handling and analysis of critical forensic evidence used by the prosecution.

Unlike in the United States and Great Britain where exonerated defendants are protected against being retried for the same crime, Italy operates under the Code Napoleon which offers no protection against double jeopardy. Under Italian law prosecutors have the same right to appeal acquittals as defendants to appeal convictions. Both prosecutors and defendants can go from the higher-level tribunal to the Court of Cassation (Italy's highest judicial body, equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court). Prosecutors appealed the higher-level ruling and, in March 2013, Italian prosecutors won. The higher-level ruling quashing the murder convictions was itself overturned and the court granted a prosecution request for a retrial. That retrial began in November 2013 and lasted until January 30, 2014, when the Florence appeal court upheld their 2009 convictions.

Amanda Knox refused to leave the United States to stand for retrial, but Raffaele Sollecito, frequently in the company of his father, attended a good portion of the retrial. He was not present in the courtroom when the verdicts were announced.  

The Victim

Meredith Kercher
Meredith Kercher

Meredith Kercher had a passion for Italy and its people, language and culture. She started a degree course at Leeds University in 2007 studying European Politics and Italian, electing to spend her foreign study year at the University of Perugia. While at Perugia she studied modern history, political theories and the history of Italian cinema. She was fluent in Italian and supported herself with the usual low-paid student work including promotional work for a local company, working as a tour guide and bar work at local nightclub Le Chic, owned by a Congolese immigrant, Patrick Lumumba.

It was through Lumumba that she met Amanda Knox when Knox took a job at Le Chic. Through Knox she met co-defendants Rudy Guede and RaffaeleSollecito.(Knox has denied ever having met or known Guede, but Candace Demspey, author of Murder in Italy, has stated unambiguously that Knox did meet him at least once. In a recent letter to Italian authorities Knox herself stated she met Guede only once, but never after that.)

Picturesque Perugia is a popular place for students, especially foreigners. The nightlife is vibrant, foreigners – both tourists and students – come and go in large numbers and local people generally welcome foreigners.Kercher lived with two Italian students and Amanda Knox. They shared a flat at Via Della Pergola 7, regarded by locals as one of Perugia’s less desirable neighborhoods, and seemed to get along well. Doubtless there were the usual occasional flatmate arguments, but nothing serious. Just two typical students abroad, sharing a flat and picking up casual work to pay the bills.

Knox, originally from Seattle, had enrolled at the University in Perugia to study Italian, German and creative writing on a one-year course, starting in 2007. She secured a room in the same flat as Kercher just prior to the start of the 2007 academic year in September. She met Sollecito at a classical music concert in mid-October 2007 and the two became a couple only a week before Kercher’s murder.

Sollecito came to Perugia from the town of Bari. A couple of years older than Knox and Kercher, he was nearing the end of his own course in computer engineering. His grades were good and there was nothing unusual about either Sollecito's background or lifestyle.

On November 1, 2007 Kercher was found dead on her bedroom floor. She had been physically restrained, sexually assaulted, beaten and slashed with a knife. The cause of death was two stab wounds to her neck. Suffocation also played a part, her naked body being discovered on her bed covered from head to foot with a quilt. An upstairs window had been broken into and Kercher’s two cellphones were missing along with her house keys, two credit cards and some cash. At first the broken window and stolen property suggested a burglary gone terribly wrong. Police soon discounted this theory. The broken window was around 12 feet above ground level and the missing cellphones were soon found in a nearby garden. The other stolen items and cash were never recovered which did indicate theft was a motive.

Ensnaring Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

Kercher’s murder was discovered by her Italian flatmates, who immediately notified the police. The flatmates initially reported a break-in. After finding bloodstains, they found Kercher’s bedroom door was locked and, despite repeatedly calling her to open it, they got no answer. Fearing for her safety, they broke it down and found her body.

The police quickly began investigating and started by interviewing people closest to the victim. Murder investigations frequently involve starting with the victim and then those closest to him or her. Knox and Sollecito being among the first interviewed implies nothing about either their guilt or innocence. Murder is very often a personal rather than professional crime. Knox (Kercher’s flatmate) and Sollecito (Knox’s new boyfriend) were interviewed separately and their stories compared for discrepancies. As they were being interviewed as witnesses and not (at the time) interrogated as suspects, nothing they said was admissible in court under Italian law. But their status as witnesses also meant they weren’t given the standard protections afforded to suspects such as immediate access to lawyers. Nor were any audio recordings or film footage taken of their initial interviews. .

Sollecito and Knox initially claimed they were together at Sollecito’s flat at the time of the murder. Knox had been told by a text message from bar owner Lumumba that she had the night off. Business was slow that night and it didn’t look like she’d be needed. Both Knox and Kercher worked at Le Chic as barmaids.

The stories Knox and Sollecito told didn’t hold water for very long.

Both were interviewed several times over the next few days. It was Sollecito who changed his story first. (His account originally agreed with Knox's, claiming that they'd spent the whole evening at his flat. He now changed his story, stating that he'd only been with Knox for part of the evening, wasn't entirely sure when she'd left his flat and that he'd spent the rest of the evening at home alone using his computer.

According to Sollecito, investigators told him that Knox had cracked and implicated him in the murder. Sollecito later alleged that police had heavily pressured him to save himself by implicating Knox, threatening to prosecute him for the murder unless he named Knox as the ringleader. Sollecito further claimed that, while he himself had no intention of cracking, he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t bully Knox into implicating him. He was sure that they were trying to do exactly that.

Knox alleges that, once she formally became a suspect instead of a witness, police employed physical abuse, verbal threats and intense pressure to force a confession. At her appeal Knox claimed police slapped her at least twice during questioning. She also accused them of denying her food, drink, sleep and bathroom breaksand that, as she spoke little Italian, the police interpreter not only mistranslated her words but attempted to twist them and pressurise her still further.Italian officers present during her interviews deny all those allegations.

At one point investigators told Knox they had transcripts of the text messages between her and Lumumba when he gave her the night off. Knox claims police interpreted her use of the common phrase “See you later” in her final message to mean that Knox and Lumumba were co-conspirators planning to meet later and commit the crime. It was then that Knox did something very foolish. She accused Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher. She claimed he was obsessed with Kercher and she was sure of his guilt.

In doing so she both changed her initial story (of being at Sollecito’s flat for almost the entire evening) and made an entirely baseless accusation against Lumumba.That false accusation would have serious consequences for both of them. She was now claiming that she'd met Lumumba at the Piazza Grimana, accompanied him to her flat and actually seen him murder Kercher.

Why an innocent person would implicate herself in a murder while falsely accusing an innocent man is hard to understand, but Knox herself alleges that police mistreated her during her questioning and kept pressing her to admit her involvement in the crime. The statement containing these new claims was in Italian, a language Knox wasn't fluent in and wouldn't have been able to read fully before signing it.

Knox also acted oddly both immediately after the murder and during her initial interviews. Her emotional state regularly fluctuated between apparent indifference, crying fits and seemingly clowning around which only increased police suspicions. It also generated increasingly hostile media interest and public opinion. Her unpredictable behavior isn’t evidence of guilt so much as of stress, fear, mental fatigue and perhaps not fully realizing the seriousness of her situation. That said, it isn’t hard to see how it could be considered inappropriate by conventional expectations and suspicious to police officers.

Knox admits she practised yoga techniques at the police station between interviews. She’s also admitted spending some of her time between interviews sitting on Sollecito’sknee.

Other students and mutual acquaintances told police that Knox’s initial response toKercher’s murder seemed disinterested and seemingly callous. When questioned about her apparent aloofness and “inappropriate” behavior Knox stated, understandably, that individuals deal with stressful situations in their own ways. She also said she was under immense stress and pressure and that she never intended to offend anybody or arouse any suspicion. Contrary to police claims, Knox also denies that, in addition to yoga, she also performed cartwheels while waiting to be interviewed.

As a result of Knox’s accusation regarding Lumumba, the bar owner was arrested. He spent two weeks in detention until his alibi (being at Le Chic throughout the night of the murder) was verified. He was released without charge and eliminated as a suspect. During the investigation, his detention and subsequent lawsuit against Knox for calunnia (an Italian form of slander prosecuted as a crime, not as a civil case) he incurred substantial legal fees. His business also suffered greatly. The negative publicity forced him to sell Le Chic to pay legal fees and business debts.

After successfully suing the Italian police for false imprisonment and the loss of his good name and business, Lumumba was awarded 16,000 Euros. His successful lawsuit against Knox brought further compensation when Knox was ordered to pay his legal fees for both his initial two weeks in jail after her false accusation and for his successful lawsuit for slander. The judgment required Knox to pay 62,000 Euros to Lumumba in damages and to serve three years in prison. The prison term was later reduced to time served after Knox won her initial appeal on the murder conviction. It is not known whether she has paid Lumumba.

If things were difficult for Lumumba they were about to get much worse for Knox and Sollecito. Sollecito had also changed his story. He now claimed that Knox had not been at his home for the entire evening and that he’d spent most of it alone using his computer. Changing his story did nothing to allay police suspicions, especially when police examined his computer and refused to accept he’d been using it on the evening of the murder. They also wanted to know why, after Knox’s texts with Lumumba, both Knox and Sollecito switched off their cellphones for three hours that coincided with the murder. Knox claimed she wanted to avoid Lumumba changing his mind and calling her into work that night. Investigators clearly didn’t believe her, although the response was reasonable.

By changing his story –and only making his own situation worse – Sollecito destroyed Knox’s original alibi. With those facts and Knox’s inappropriate behavior, Italian police stopped viewing them as witnesses to be interviewed. Now they became suspects to be interrogated and anything they said could be used against them in court.

 The Ivory Coast Drifter

 

Rudy Guede

So far, investigators had Knox and Sollecito facing possible murder charges and Patrick Lumumba facing financial and personal ruin. There was only one other suspect to examine more closely. That suspect was Rudy Guede. He’d already had run-ins with Italian police on suspicion of burglary, threatening behavior involving a knife and was suspected of dealing cannabis and hashish.

Both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito came from law-abiding, respectable backgrounds. Rudy Guede's background was more turbulent and rather less law-abiding. Originally from the Ivory Coast, Guede, from age 5, had lived in Italy since 1991. His father had returned to the Ivory Coast in 2004 and left Guede in the care of friends, family and a local priest before he was adopted by a local family at the age of 15.

Guede became an underachiever, dropping out of college courses in hotel management and computing. At the time of the murder he had been fired from a job as gardener for his adopted parents who had also evicted him after finally losing patience with his lifestyle and behavior. Guede became a petty criminal, arrested more than once on suspicion of burglary and drug-dealing. His most recent arrest occurred only days before the murder when he was picked up for suspected burglary during which he allegedly threatened the homeowner with a long-bladed knife while escaping.

Police came to believe that Guede’s alleged drug-dealing was how he first met Knox and Sollecito, who both used marijuana freely. As he knew Knox and Sollecito, he also met Meredith Kercher. He first became acquainted with all of them only a couple of weeks before the murder. He knew Knox and Kercher’s address and had previously been found inside their flat. Residents didn’t know how he entered or why he was there. They did know that they had found him sitting asleep on the toilet. Some say he took a particular interest in Meredith Kercher.

Guede was suspected by police of having burgled a lawyer’s office by breaking in through an upstairs window. Only days before Meredith Kercher’s murder, the owner of a nursery school in Milan had caught Guede burgling the nursery school. When confronted Guede allegedly threatened the owner with a long-bladed knife to make his escape. According to Italian forensic experts working the Kercher case that knife was similar to the weapon used to murder Meredith Kercher.

On hearing the police wanted to question him, Guede promptly disappeared. He left Italy and turned up in Germany where he was promptly arrested as a fugitive and returned to Italy. Guede presumably thought leaving Italy put him outside the reach of Italian police. Within European Union member states there’s often considerable co-operation between national police forces. The European Arrest Warrant allows (and obliges) member states to return fugitives wanted in other EU countries. If Guede thought he was safe simply by entering a different EU country, he was wrong.

Guede was formally charged and held in preventive detention to await trial. Rather than plead not guilty and try clearing his name, Guede opted for a so-called “fast-track” trial which was his right under Italian law. Guede was returned to Italy on November 20, 2007. His trial began in February, 2008.

At trial, his claims of non-involvement in Kercher’s murder were thoroughly discredited by forensic and DNA evidence. His DNA was found all over Kercher’s bra strap. A bloody handprint was found on the bed under her body and it matched Guede’s handprint. Prosecutors could prove that he knew Kercher, that he had been present at the crime scene and that his DNA was found not only at the crime scene but also on and inside Kercher’s body.

Guede’s claim that Kercher had invited him into the flat and consented to sex was given no credibility by the panel of trial judges. On October 29, 2008 Guede was convicted of murder and sexual assault. He drew 30 years (later reduced to 16 years on appeal) and will soon be eligible for parole. It’s possible that he might be leaving prison before Knox and Sollecito’s cases are adjudicated.

Despite Guede being by far the most likely suspect, Knox and Sollecito were still regarded by prosecutors and police as prime suspects. With their changing, contradictory stories, seeming lack of verifiable alibis and Italian forensic experts claiming to have found solid evidence of their participation, including DNA evidence linking Knox to what prosecutors claimed was the murder weapon and linking Sollecito to the clasp of Kercher’s bra, it wasn’t long before they were both formally charged with her murder and held to await trial. Their situation looked bleak.

On November 8 they came before Judge Claudia Matteini. It was during an adjournment that Knox met her trial lawyers for the first time. Having met her lawyers only that day, Knox had no time to discuss her case with them or prepare a case for being granted bail. Judge Matteini denied bail for both Knox and Sollecito and ordered that both be detained for a year, long enough for a trial to be arranged.

Knox and Sollecito remained in jail until their trial started on January 16, 2009. They would be tried not before a jury, but before a presiding judge, a deputy judge and six lay jurors. The Italian system is based on the Code Napoleon, a different legal system common in Continental Europe. The Code Napoleon system isn’t used in the United States or the United Kingdom where a single judge and 12-person jury are the norm in criminal trials.

The First Trial of Knox and Sollecito

Their trial began before Presiding Judge Cristiano Massei, Deputy Judge Beatrice Cristiani and the six lay jurors at the Perugia Court of Assizes. The prosecution claimed that Knox and Sollecito teamed with Guede to attack, rape and murder Meredith Kercher, that the supposed burglary was faked by Knox and Sollecito (hence the easily-recovered stolen cellphones) and that the murder was either a group sex game gone wrong or the result of a feud between Knox and Kercher. The prosecution claimed that they had DNA evidence, that Knox and Sollecito had changed their stories under interrogation, that they had improvised a cover story and that Knox had falsely implicated Lumumba to protect their real co-conspirator, Rudy Guede.

The prosecution also alleged that Kercher couldn’t have been physically restrained by a single person and that Knox’s “inappropriate” behavior after the murder and at the police station suggested guilt.

 

A police crime scene photograph.

The physical evidence, according to the prosecution, was heavily in favor of Kercher being overpowered by more than one person. Prosecutors claimed that a knife found in Sollecito’s cutlery drawer was the murder weapon and that, on searching his flat, they noticed a strong smell of bleach which, police claimed, was evidence of the knife having been thoroughly cleaned after the murder. Guede’s shoe prints, fingerprints and DNA had been found all over the crime scene and, as prosecutors alleged he was a co-conspirator with Knox and Sollecito, that this too pointed to their guilt.

According to the prosecution case Knox performed the actual murder while Guede and Sollecito helped restrain the victim and fake the burglary. As evidence of there being more than one attacker they cited the fact that Kercher had no defensive wounds on either her hands or arms. Defensive wounds are very common on victims trying to escape an attacker armed with a knife. Their absence from Kercher’s body was a circumstantial piece of evidence used aggressively by prosecutors. They claimed that Knox had repeatedly banged Kercher’s head against the bedroom wall, forcibly gripped her face to restrain her, forcibly undressed her, repeatedly slashed her with a knife and finally stabbed her twice in the neck while Guede and Sollecito restrained Kercher. They also suggested that two knives might have been used to commit the crime, rather than just the one police had actually found. Proof of Sollecito’s involvement, according to the prosecution, came from his DNA being found on the clasp of Kercher’s bra, which was found at the scene having been cut away from the rest of the garment.

The defense case was, arguably, somewhat more solid. No shoe prints, clothing fibres, hairs, skin cells or DNA from Amanda Knox were found either on Kercher’s body or at the crime scene. Defense DNA experts claimed that DNA on the alleged murder weapon (alleged to be Sollecito’s by the prosecution) consisted of a trace too small to be identifiable as the victim’s. Claiming that police forensic experts had incorrectly collected, handled and analyzed the evidence the defense demanded the prosecution provide dates for the examination of each individual exhibit. If exhibits were examined on the same day (and examined incorrectly) then the risk of contamination was greatly increased.

Police experts refused to provide those dates and were not ordered to by the trial judges. The defense also asked the judges to order the evidence be turned over to an independent forensic and DNA experts for re-examination. They especially wanted new DNA tests and to confirm whether the victim’s wounds actually matched the knife claimed by prosecutors as being the murder weapon. The judges denied their request.

Prosecution claims that Knox and Kercher had a fractious and confrontational relationship despite being flatmates was also challenged by the defense. They produced their own selection of text messages between the defendant and the victim to support their claim that the two women were perfectly friendly and didn’t have any feud with each other.

Defense lawyers freely used their clients’ allegations against the police. Both defendants accused police of using brutality, threats, intimidation and frequent attempts to turn them against each other. Knox claimed that police deprived her of basic necessities during her initial questioning. They also claimed that police ensured Knox had no access to a lawyer, any representative of the American Consulate or Embassy or even a visit from her relatives until after she had been charged. The defense alleged police knew that Knox’s mother was due to arrive in Italy and, the day before she was scheduled to arrive, police increased their pressure on Knox in an effort to make her crack before her mother visited and could involve U.S. consular officials.

Another defense angle came from the initial interviews with the defendants. The absence of film or audio recordings neither proved nor disproved the defendants’ claims of police misconduct. But, according to the defense, police couldn’t disprove those allegations either. It was a somewhat shaky plank in the defense case that, bluntly speaking, came down to whether the judges believed the police or the defendants. At the original trial they clearly believed the police.

The defense was unsuccessful. On December 5, 2009 both defendants were found guilty. Knox received 26 years (with an additional fine and three years added later for falsely accusing Lumumba). Sollecito received 25 years. Both were sent to Capanne Prison to await their mandatory appeal to the higher court.

The Appeal

Italian criminal courts operate under a two-tier system as part of the Code Napoleon. Having been through the first grade level (primo grado) the judgments had to be confirmed or rejected at the second grade (secundogrado) after which they would officially be convicted. If confirmed by the second-grade court then their only option for appeal would be to the Court of Cassation (the Italian Supreme Court). Appeals there could only be brought over legal technicalities or mistakes made during the investigation and first-grade trial. Fortunately for the defendants their lawyers had a number of points to raise at the second-grade hearing.

The second-grade hearing is effectively a second trial. It began on November 24, 2010, presided over by Judges Claudio Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. This time the judges did order independent reviews of the DNA and forensic evidence as originally requested by the defense team. The independent review was damning for the prosecution, police forensic experts and the police themselves. Sapienza University experts Carla Vechiotti and Stefano Conti, both widely respected within the European forensics field, reviewed the DNA-related evidence and submitted a report running to 145 pages. Much of their report detailed incompetence and carelessness on the part of detectives and police forensic experts.

 

Forensic expert Patrizia Stefanoni was castigated by independent analysts.

Junk Science

According to Conti and Vechiotti, the work of forensic expert Patrizia Stefanoni was bungled and flawed, failing to conform to internationally accepted standards of proficiency. They further accused Stefanoni of the much more serious error of giving evidence in court that was unsupported by her own laboratory findings. Vechiotti has also stated that, from the time she was chosen to perform the independent review, unspecified “important documents” were being withheld from her.

The independent experts stated that DNA found on the alleged murder weapon was of insufficient quantity to identify it as Kercher’s. They also quoted some of Stefanoni’s own testimony during the first-grade trial where she herself admitted that she perhaps should have double-checked her own scientific findings but hadn’t actually done so. Regarding the bra clasp used by the prosecution and confirmed as having Sollecito’s DNA, the experts noted huge errors in collection and handling of the clasp. On crime-scene pictures the clasp is obviously marked for collection and examination. It was also found some distance from the rest of Kercher’s bra.

By Stefanoni’s own admission police and forensic experts then forgot about the clasp and it wasn’t actually collected until 46 days after being found at the scene. Even then, the clasp itself was found in the middle of a pile of other objects found at the crime scene. If any of those objects had Sollecito’s DNA on them then being left in an unsorted pile for so long could easily have transferred his DNA to the clasp. Equally important, while Guede’s DNA was found all over the straps of the bra, Sollecito’s was found only on the clasp.

Anybody with even basic forensic knowledge is unlikely to consider such evidence as having huge evidentiary value. The risk of cross-contamination is simply too great. And how, if as the prosecution claims, Sollecito was physically restraining Kercher during the actual crime, could his DNA not be found on her clothing or her body? The experts also questioned the validity of the clasp as evidence when they requested it be re-examined. They were told that it was now too rusty and unfit for re-examination because it had been incorrectly stored by police forensic experts. This wasn’t as conclusive as test results proving cross-contamination, but it certainly bolstered defense claims that evidence-handling by the police forensic experts was substandard. Further proof of that claim was presented in the video footage of the clasp being recovered by the police forensic team themselves. That footage clearly showed the clasp being handled by Stefanoni wearing a visibly dirty latex glove.

Another important shot fired by the defense concerned DNA evidence used against Amanda Knox. According to the prosecution they had Guede’s DNA all over the victim and the crime scene. They had what they considered incriminating DNA from Sollecito on the bra clasp. What they didn’t have was any forensic traces of Amanda Knox on Kercher’s body or in her bedroom which was the crime scene itself. No shoe prints, fingerprints, hairs, clothing fibres or DNA from Amanda Knox were found either on Kercher’s body or in her bedroom.

The second-grade hearing could have confirmed the findings of the first-grade hearing. It could have rendered a verdict of “not proven” rather than a full acquittal. What the judges did was to quash the murder convictions against Knox and Sollecito while upholding Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba. Even after they increased her fine and prison sentence for libelling Lumumba they still ordered her release, ruling her libel sentence had already been served while awaiting her murder trial and appeal. Both Sollecito and Knox – imprisoned for the last four years – were now freed. The judges’ ruling placed the police firmly in the firing line.

Their ruling was damning for police detectives and forensic experts. According to the appellate judges the verdict against Amanda Knox “Was not corroborated by any objective element of evidence.” They disputed the testimony of a supposed witness, a tramp named Curatolo, who claimed he saw Knox and Sollecito near the crime scene at the time of the murder. The judges felt that homeless heroin addicts are seldom the most reliable witnesses. They criticized the original trial judge, Massei, especially the fact that he used the word “probably” at least 39 times in his written ruling deciding their guilt.

They also criticized the police regarding their interrogations of Knox. They described her interrogations as being “Of obsessive duration,” stating that in their opinion her changes of story and fluctuating emotional state were signs of extreme mental pressure and stress rather than guilt. They also noted that, despite the police and prosecution claiming that Knox and Sollecito conspired with Rudy Guede, there was no evidence of phone calls or text messages between either Knox and Sollecito and Guede himself.

In short, although the second-grade finding didn’t explicitly state that Knox and Sollecito were either railroaded or convicted through incompetence that was the impression that was left.The appellate judges excoriated both the police and the prosecution’s forensic experts in their ruling. In a British or American case that would almost certainly have been the end of the matter. It wasn’t.

Authors: 

Murder in Monaco

0
0

The Principality of Monaco leapt onto front pages across the world on May 6, 2014 when an assassin fired a volley of gunshots at billionaire Hélène Pastor and her chauffer. Both would die later from their wounds. More scandal soon followed when police arrested the long-time companion of Pastor’s daughter, Wojciech Janowski, Poland’s honorary consul to the tiny principality since 2007.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Prince Albert, ruler of the Principality of Monaco, remains angry over how the English playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham had described his country decades ago as “a sunny place for shady people.”

The description has done the small city-state of less than one-square mile no harm because now it has more millionaires per capita than any other country in the world.

To make these millionaires feel safe, Monaco also has more CCTV surveillance cameras on its streets than one will find in any other country. Crime in and around the city’s luxury designer boutiques is almost nonexistent.

However, on May 6, 2014, Monaco’s tranquil security was shattered when one of its millionaires -- no, billionaires -- was felled by a volley of gunshots.

The murder

Hélène Pastor

It was a spring Tuesday that promised to be just another day of luxury to those living in the glass-fronted apartment buildings which most of us will only ever see when watching the Monaco Grand Prix on television.

So indeed did the day promise to be for Hélène Pastor, the principality’s wealthiest citizen after Prince Albert and his two sisters, the princesses Caroline and Stephanie, as she set out on her way to visit her 47-year-old son, Gildo Pallanca-Pastor, who was recovering from a stroke in Archet Hospital in the neighboring French town of Nice.

Mid-afternoon, her visit over, Pastor was seated in her dark-colored Lancia beside her chauffeur and major domo of 25 years, Mohamed Darwich, 64. As the car was just pulling away from the hospital’s parking area, a gunman walked up to the automobile and opened fire through the windscreen with a sawn-off hunting rifle. The car continued for a few yards and then crashed into a parked automobile.

When the medics arrived they found both the 77-year-old Pastor and the chauffeur slumped over and covered in blood, grievously wounded, but alive.

The shooter was nowhere in sight, but eyewitnesses told the police that he had rushed from the scene on foot. They said they had seen another man with him. Neither of the two had taken the precaution of covering his face.

Four days later on Saturday, May 10, Darwich died at the Saint Roch Hospital of Nice, the blast of bullets having hit his heart and stomach. Pastor, hit in the jaw, neck and chest, was recovering from her injuries in the same hospital, and her doctors did not fear for her life.

Eleven days later on Wednesday, May 21, her death was however announced: Her condition had suddenly deteriorated and her life could not be saved.

Prince Albert was reported to be devastated. He and his pregnant wife, the former South African swimmer, Charlene Whitstock, now Her Serene Highness, Princess Charlene of Monaco, attended the very private funeral. The media was banned and helicopters circling overhead made sure that no photographs could be taken.

Before she died, she had told the police that she had not received any threats to her life. She did not even have any enemies, she said.

Hélène Pastor

Although she was one of the wealthiest women in the world, Pastor had lived discreetly in Monaco, almost never attending any society event.

Apart from Gildo, she also had a daughter, Sylvia. The latter -- Sylvia Ratkowski-Pastor -- was born in 1961 in Pastor’s first marriage. Gildo Pallanca-Pastor was born in 1967 in her second marriage.

Sylvia, the companion for the past 28 years of the Polish-born Wojciech Janowski, 65, a man with an M.A. degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and Poland’s honorary consul to the principality since 2007, used to complain to her friends that her mother loved her brother more than she loved her.

Notwithstanding that both she and Gildo received a monthly allowance from their mother of €500,000 ($680,000), she also said that her mother was more generous towards Gildo.

How did Pastor become so wealthy?

Her story is one of which dreams are made.

In the 1880s a poor Italian stonemason, Jean-Baptiste Pastor, arrived penniless in the principality from the Liguria region of Italy. In 1936, some of the public buildings he had worked on having caught the eye of the then ruling prince, Louis II (Prince Albert’s grandfather), Jean-Baptiste was commissioned by the prince to build a football stadium. From then on there was no looking back for the Pastors. After Jean-Baptiste’s death his son Gildo had begun to buy up waterfront land on which he constructed luxury apartment buildings. He had also continued to build for the ruling princes. What is more, the two families --the ruling Grimaldi family and the Pastors -- had become friends.

When Gildo died he left his real estate empire to his two sons and his daughter Hélène. On the premature deaths of her two brothers Hélène had become the sole owner and operator of the Pastors’ real estate empire. No journalist has even tried to estimate her wealth, but a wild guess is that she is the owner of more than 3,000 apartments which come to 15 per cent of the principality’s real estate.

Dead, her heirs were her two children: Gildo and Sylvia.

The investigation

The investigation into Pastor’s assassination was to be carried out by the police of Nice and Marseille and with the cooperation of the Monaco police.

The glamour of Monaco always assures high-profile international media coverage when events worthy of news occur in the principality, but the shooting of its wealthiest citizen made front-page headlines around the world and only intensified as the facts of Pastor’s assassination came to light.

As television’s news anchors also led with the news, not many hours passed before taxi drivers went to the police in Nice and spoke of two individuals they had had as passengers on the day of the shooting.

A taxi driver said that in the morning he had picked up two young men at the Nice railroad station after the train from the nearby town of Marseille had pulled in. He had driven the two to a hotel in town.

Another two taxi drivers said that in the middle of the afternoon each had driven a young man to the Archet Hospital.

A fourth taxi driver said that at the end of the day he had picked up two young men at the railroad station who wanted to be driven to the town of Marseille because they had missed their train. They had argued with him over his fare for the 96-mile ride but had finally agreed to pay him €500 ($680).

From CCTV footage at the crime scene as well as at the railroad station, and having lifted fingerprints and taken DNA samples in the hotel room the two young men had stayed in that day, the police put names to them.

They were Samine Said Ahmed, 24, a French national of Comorian origin, and living in Marseille, and the 31-year-old Alhair Hamadi, also a Comorian and living in the northern French town of Rennes. (The Indian Ocean Island of Comoros used to be a French colony.) Both had done time in French prisons for robbery with violence and for drug dealing.

Not announcing that they had identified the two young men, the police tapped their cell phones. Records the phone companies had supplied had already revealed that they had been in Nice and in the vicinity of the hospital on the day of the shooting.

The two were soon arrested.

On Monday, June 23, the French police arrested another 21 people -- 12 in Marseille, five in Nice and four in Rennes -- suspected of having been involved with the shooting of Pastor and her chauffeur. This brought the total to 23.

One of those arrested was another Comorian. He was an auxiliary in the gendarmerie (militarized police).

And then the shoes began to drop. Sylvia, the murdered woman’s daughter, was arrested and so was her companion, the Honorary Consul Janowski.

At a press conference on Tuesday, June 24, the chief prosecutor of Marseille, Brice Robin, said that the investigators had not yet established the connection of Sylvia in the killing.

The investigators had though established through studying the cell phone records of Ahmed and Hamadi that her companion, Janowski, had been in touch with the two. His cell phone records had confirmed this.

Said Prosecutor Robin: “Right now, suspect financial movements have been identified on Mr. Janowski’s bank accounts which need to be explained.”

Wojciech Janowski

He added that the investigators had also established a link between Janowski and another two of the arrested men. The two had put him in touch with Ahmed and Hamadi. They were not named.

Asked by a journalist whether the murder was therefore a contract killing, Prosecutor Robin replied: “We can think that, but it’s too early to talk of motives.”

Some of the investigators though revealed “off the record” that they were leaning towards a dispute over money as motive for the killing, and that there was no doubt that Janowski was the instigator of the killing.

Meanwhile, Sylvia’s friends told the media that they were certain that she could not have known that the assassination of her mother was being planned. They described her as a dignified and reserved woman.

It was as incomprehensible to those who knew the couple that Janowski had played a part in Pastor’s assassination. Known for his charitable work for which he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest award, they described him as a man of great elegance, culture and generosity. They spoke of how he had cared for Sylvia, whom he called “Sisi,” when she underwent an operation for breast cancer last year.

The principality’s other honorary consuls were as sure that Janowski was innocent.  They described him as always prepared to step in to assist where there was a problem.

There was a problem.

As someone who wished to remain anonymous told me: “It is common knowledge here in Monaco that there are arguments in the family about money. This is a family which always wants to be richer and richer.”

A day after the press conference, on Wednesday, June 25, 10 of the 23 who had been arrested were released: four of them from the 14 who had been arrested in Marseille; two of the five arrested in Nice, and all four who had been arrested in Rennes.

Ahmed and Mamadi were not among the released.

Neither were Sylvia and Janowski.

Focusing on Sylvia

Sylvia Pastor 

Rumors began to circulate that the police had begun to focus on Sylvia.

The investigators wanted to know why her mother’s condition had so suddenly deteriorated when her doctors had reassured her daughter and her unofficial “son-in-law” that she was to make a complete recovery.

They learned that on Tuesday, May 20, in the evening, Pastor had received a visit from her daughter.

At midnight, when the nurses had noticed that things were not so well with the patient, they summoned the doctors.  Despite all effort to save the woman’s life, she passed away at dawn of the following day, May 21.

Was Pastor’s death a double-murder?

Had someone entered her private room and administered some substance which had killed her, seeing that the shooting had not?

But her private room was guarded 24 hours a day by armed guards and no one outside of the hospital staff could have entered her room.

Her daughter was in fact her last visitor -- and the last person from outside the hospital to have seen her alive.

Did the police have a case of matricide on their hands?

Twenty-four hours later Sylvia was released.

She had only been “helping the police with their investigation of Wojciech Janowski” the prosecutor’s office stated.

Another six of those the police were holding were released at the same time.

This meant that the police were still holding seven.

One of the seven, it was revealed, was Janowski’s personal trainer named Pascal Dauriac. The latter had been the personal trainer of both Janowski and Sylvia for the past 10 years.

Another of the seven was Janowski.

Who is Wojciech Janowski?

Wojciech Janowski’s life is riddled with affiliations with men whose businesses had a nasty habit of folding shortly after having been listed on lightly regulated stock exchanges.

These “associates” all claimed to hold MSc, PhD, DSc and MA degrees, or put ‘Dr.’ in front of their names.

Their degrees they had obtained from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland, Warsaw University, Toronto University, the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Cambridge University. UNISA is a strictly correspondence university.  As for Janowski’s M.A. in Economics from Cambridge University, still perhaps the most prestigious economics degree in the world, it is bogus: he is “unknown” to the university’s alumni database.

One of the “associates” of Janowski claims that he has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Berkeley, St Andrew’s and at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris.

Another of the “associates” can be viewed on LinkedIn in a casual black t-shirt sitting in front of a timber-frame cabin. He acted as Janowski’s PR man. Public relations -- his website has suddenly gone down -- are however just one of his expertises. Another is offering counsel on a wellness site.  He is the “associate” who claims to have a degree from the University of South Africa: the degree is an M.A. in Religious Studies.  He is also a director of several businesses in Canada and Poland, all in the energy, oil and chemical fields.

Another “associate” is a Polish-born former Canadian and Monaco resident, now back living in Poland. This “associate” specialized in “pump and dump” investment fraud. His dubious financial history commenced with the collapse of a Canadian company in 2001 and culminated in 2005 with a spectacular implosion of a UK-listed company which ended in London’s High Court. England’s Guardian newspaper termed the case “the greatest stock market heist of all time.” At the five-week trial there were revelations of faked bios, faked university degrees and paying bribes -- and of death threats.

Talking

Janowski, being held in Nice, turned down the offer of legal representation.  He had nothing to say because he had had nothing to do with the killing of Pastor, he said. Then, on Thursday evening, facing a fourth night trying to sleep on a hard bunk in a cell, he opened up.

He admitted to having known that a shooting was going to be carried out, but that was all.

As the night progressed, still refusing legal representation, he admitted that, yes, he had discussed the possibility of doing away with Pastor with Dauriac, the personal trainer, but that when he had not done anything about it, Dauriac had presented him with a plan of how it could be done. Dauriac wanted to be paid for overseeing the murder, and had asked him for €200,000 ($270,000). He had given him the money.

Pastor had humiliated him, he said, because she had not accepted him as part of her family, and she had also humiliated her daughter and because he loved her daughter dearly, he wanted to put an end to her suffering at the hands of her mother. Therefore, his having agreed to Dauriac’s plan to murder Pastor was an act of love.

Dauriac had by then already answered each question the investigators had addressed to him and his story differed from that of Janowski. He said that it was Janowski who had planned the murder and that he had done so already some two years ago, and it was in January this year (2014) that he had put the plan into motion. He also said that Janowski had paid him not €200,000 but only €140,000 ($190,000) which he had to share with the others in the killing team.

The killing of Darwich, Pastor’s chauffeur, was not a mistake, he said. Janowski had insisted on the killing of the chauffeur in order to make the police believe that he was the primary target in what was an underworld killing. In other words that Pastor’s killing was collateral.

Ahmed and Hamadi were also confessing. Each said that the other was the shooter. The CCTV footings had shown that Ahmed was the shooter.

What now?

The seven, having been officially charged with the murder of Pastor and Darwich, will await the trial in Marseille’s Les Baumettes prison. The prison has the reputation of being France’s toughest.

 Janowski, Dauriac, Ahmed and Hamadi risk life imprisonment for first degree homicide. The others face jail terms of 10 years or more for complicity to murder.

Janowski has been stripped of his title of honorary consul.

Tomasz Orlowski, Polish Ambassador to France, said in Paris that an irreproachable reputation was needed for that role.

“In the present circumstances there can be no question of trust,” Poland’s foreign ministry added from Warsaw.

As an honorary consul does not enjoy diplomatic immunity there is no possibility of Janowski not paying in full for his crime.

Sylvia has been “totally exonerated” as Prosecutor Robin said at a press conference on Friday, June 27. He described her as “in a state of shock” and “feeling let down as she had total trust in her companion.”

The prosecutor also said that she had denied to the investigators that there had been a conflict between her and her mother, and that there had been arguments about money. She gave as proof of this the fact that over the past year her mother had given her money for her to hand over to Janowski. The amount was €8.5 million ($10.8 million).

As the credit balance of Janowski’s Monaco bank account was only€900,000 ($1.2 million) at the time of his arrest, the prosecutor said that they were still trying to find out where those millions had gone. Some of it had not gone to pay the killing team because Janowski also had an offshore account in Dubai from which he had withdrawn €250,000 ($340,000) in nine transactions between Tuesday, April 22 and Sunday, May 4, two days before the killing.  Why he had needed that amount was being investigated. He was not saying.

Disbelief

Despite what is now known about the killing of Pastor and her chauffeur, Janowski still has supporters among Monaco’s wealthy.

He has, these supporters are saying, enough money not to have to kill for more.

Pistorius: A South African Legacy

0
0

(Photo CBC.ca) The Oscar Pistorius trial has everything: a narrative about a system, a psychology, an issue spanning something far beyond the act of killing Reeva Steenkamp.

By Binoy Kampmark

The Oscar Pistorius case in the High Court of Pretoria ceased being a matter about the subject once the athlete was charged and examined in the dock.  Killings happen every day, the stuff of triviality, the prosaic in action, or the fulfilment of a basic need.  Lives are there to be taken, and for societies where struggle hounds and haunt development, it is expected.  But the recipe is, sadly, spiced by celebrity – the taking of lives becomes more fascinating when it is done by the feted hand, executed by the ennobled figure.  There is no equality in life, crime or beauty – status matters in the killing stakes. 

The alleged murder of Reeva Steenkamp by Paralympian extraordinaire Oscar Pistorius, a series of disjunctions were visible – a man triumphant over his disability but failing in emotion (the mythologized are denied their chance to be humble); a sportsman deemed supreme and yet robotic, an automaton, a machine.  The challenges proved ubiquitous. Oscar Pistorius was that man, a pained construction, a phenomenon, but also one imperilled by his own prowess.  The defense would finally have to resort to something Pistorius had always denied: that disability, in the commission of acts of brutality, may well be important. 

This case had everything, a narrative about a system, a psychology, an issue spanning something far beyond the act of killing Steenkamp.  It was sociology as well, demographics, and disability.  There were studies on the tweets on the trial in an attempt to map public opinion with frame analysis and data mining techniques.[1]  There were campaigns alleging undue racial vilification of whites. There was that every nasty motif of the unknown black intruder who dirties white suburbia.

It meant that those backing and defending the vulnerable were faced by a seemingly contradictory position: A man who killed because he did not have his leg blades (the defense line), a person who killed because he did not have his support mechanism. The shrewd analyst might spot a problem here, suggesting that a person who can’t walk might be considered in a better light because he did not have his wheelchair when the incident happened. But Pistorius was never going to escape exceptionalist storytelling.

Previous trials have called for the marshalling of psychological views, the painting of mental portraits of insecurity, cruel instability, frightful reactions.  If the man be broken, can the man be truly understood yet committed to a cell?  The case of Pierre Revière was history and psychology, and it was subsequently attacked by feminists who claimed it was a straightforward case of woman-hating.  Ultimately, all ideologies demand a way of not seeing, a form of collective myopia. 

Killings of passion and confusion are rarely clear matters.  They involve a rush of blood, a moment of terrible incoherence.  There is only one object in that case, be it death or preservation.  Unfortunately, that understanding may prove at odds to the case. Perception is everything.

Reactions and highlights

The saturation coverage of the Pistorius trial has been unprecedented. While South Africa has not been stranger to spectacular killings, or gruesome murders, the celebrity status of the event has proved peerless.  Audiences have been able to watch live coverage, something of a new phenomenon for South Africans.  “Pop-up” TV channel 199, otherwise called the Oscar Pistorius Trial Channel, did what its title suggested, focusing exclusively on the man in the dock.  The BBC created an interactive graphic about how Steenkamp died.  “Explore the scene of her death interactively.”[2]  Justice, or at least its exploration, became a televised moment, one of dramatic import.

The televised aspect lent a dramatic quality a closed courtroom would have otherwise treated as prosaic.  CNN’s correspondents felt they were seeing “CSI” episodes “replete with gory autopsy details and photographs of the crime scene.”  More than 150 photos of the defendant’s house were taken by the police following the shooting, showing a sanguinary scene of devastation, with the used gun on the floor, trails of blood, spent cartridges.  South African violence had become a live spectacle, a matter of updates and instant commentary.  Each sample of evidence was painstakingly scrutinised and analysed.  The autopsy, according to pathologist Gert Saayman, showed that Steenkamp had eaten two hours before she died, contradicting the defendant’s account that they had been asleep hours before the killing. 

The bathroom door through which Steenkamp was shot was reassembled in court.  The defense had argued that, as a piece of valuable evidence, it had been contaminated. Former police Col. G.S. van Rensburg had resigned over his handling of the piece, and was also subjected to a sustained and seemingly successful attack by Pistorius’s counsel, Barry Roux.  His recounting of the evidence was patchy at best, his powers of observations treated as suspect.  A police expert, forensic analyst J.G. Vermeulen, even swung a cricket bat at the door in an attempt to determine if prosthetic legs were on when the incident took place.  Defense counsel disputed Vermeulen’s theory that Pistorius was still on his stumps at the time.

The prosecution did prove wonky at points, with the police investigation itself subjected to withering criticism.  The handling of Pistorius’s gun by a police ballistics expert proved rather inexpert, given that he wasn’t gloved. A highly prized watch by Pistorius went missing during the investigation into the crime scene, resulting in a “body search” of officers.

Reactions to the trial, seen through the prism of celebrity coverage, became its own object of interest, with celebrity feeding celebrity.  “When is OP taking the stand?” inquired one Molly Seima on Twitter (March 28). “I need to be glued to channel 199 when he does.”  Toshpolela suggested that the channel should be kept functioning as a court channel even after the dust on Pistorius’s trial had settled.  “There are enough cases to feed our curiosity” (March 11).

Those viewing the trial saw various eyewitnesses come to life as actors in a vast, choking drama.  The defendant’s neighbor, Michelle Burger, spoke of “terrible” screams, a cry for help, the firing of “four gunshots.”  The identification of screams was one of several points of inquiry in the trial.  But as acoustics expert and engineer Ivan Lin would explain in court, those screams could not be interpreted reliably as being those of a man or woman.  The reliability of the state’s witnesses was thereby called into doubt.

The biggest of microscopes was, however, reserved for Pistorius the accused.  His psychology, his justifications, his overall view of life, were all dominant highlights.  The defense team did its level best bringing that portrait to the fore.  Daily press accounts were filed recording Pistorius’s vomiting at reliving those moments of the shooting.  In April, Pistorius testified about how the gun, the protective weapon, meant everything to him.  Memories of his mother’s fears lingered.  “She often got scared at night.  We didn’t live in the best of areas. There was a lot of crime.  She would call the police, call us to her room and we would wait for the police to arrive.”  Her response was always the same: tucking a firearm in a bag under her pillow.

The courtroom also heard how Pistorius’s 2009 boating accident, one that subjected his face to horrendous injuries, made doctors place him in an induced coma.  “I was a lot more vigilant of losing my life after that. I became quite fearful, I became quite withdrawn.”

Little wonder, then, that this has been the trial of doctors, physicians and psychologists.  On Day 34 of the trial, orthopaedic surgeon Gerald Versfeld was called. The portrait of Pistorius, less a super figure than one who was markedly fragile, was encouraged.  It was he who bolstered suggestions of vulnerability, reading a statement from Pistorius that spoke of the dog knocking him over “many times.”

Disability in context

The issue of disability has also loomed large.  It had to for the defense, which decided to see it as vital to the Blade Runner image.  Those favoring the prosecuting side have tended to marginalize, if not exclude it as a grounds for consideration.  Advocates have demurred – such matters are vital to the overall setting of the incident.  But any Blade Runner argument can cut both ways – it suggests a machine in action, a beast out of control, or it suggests a being susceptible to weaknesses precisely because of that physical state.

Pistorius had argued against the very idea that he was disabled.  But that was in 2007, when he told the New York Times why he refused to park in disabled bays.  “There’s nothing I can’t do that able-bodied athletes can do.” For Pistorius, a disability did not preclude other abilities. What of those “millions and millions of abilities they have?  So what if you have a leg or two missing?”  Michael Sokolove, in interviewing Pistorius for the paper, found “an athlete’s disposition, that of a person who believes himself to be a royalty of a certain kind – a prince of the physical world.”

The approach of the defense has come full circle on the matter.  The princeling had well and truly fallen from the elite set.  Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Meryl Vorster diagnosed Pistorius as a sufferer of Generalised Anxiety Disorder.  Defense witness Wayne Derman, a professor of sports medicine at University of Cape Town, was brought to testify that Pistorius feared more than those without disability.  “Disability never sleeps.”  Works such as Nick van der Leek’s Recidivist Acts (2014) investigate the nature of Pistorius’s disability and also reiterate the theme.

Such anxiety acted as an incentive, an adrenalin push making him more susceptible to action.  He nursed a “profound fear of crime,” had developed an “exaggerated fight response” (BBC News, July 3).  This was Pistorius bifurcated, two forms of him in operation, the darker side having killed Steenkamp.

Gender violence and hidden truths

One particularly dark side of Pistorius’s conduct was, according to  Lisa Vetten of the University of Witwatersrand, “that not all violence against white women in South Africa is carried out by black men” (The Conversation, May 14). Accordingly, the rate of non-intimate homicide may have fallen in South Africa, but by 2009, the leading cause of female homicide was intimate femicide.[3] This tends to derail arguments of terrified estrangement between the races, focusing on violence committed within racial groups than between racial groups.

In the aftermath of the shooting of Steenkamp in February 2013, South Africa’s minister of women, children and people with disabilities pointed the finger at austere, possessive Calvinism and its attitude to women.  For Minister Lulu Xingwana, “Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they take that life because they own it” (News 24, Feb. 27, 2013). 

Jan Bosman, secretary of the Afrikanerbond, would retort that, “This minister has proven beyond any doubt that she is not fit to hold office in a constitutional democracy” (News 24, Feb. 27, 2013).  For Bosman, Pistorius had become a convenient “smokescreen” for departmental incompetence, notably that of Xingwana.  Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum even entertained the prospects of bringing a complaint before the Equality Court against Xingwana, citing possible contravention of the Promotion of Equality and the Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act.

Through that particular glass darkly, individuals such as Afrikaans singer Sunette Bridges would insist, along with Steve Hofmeyr, that during the 14 months she and Hofmeyr had been gathering news clippings on violence against women between 2012 and 2013, Pistorius was the only white man to have slain a white woman, the grim exception that proved a grimmer rule. 

Black men otherwise asserted a near overwhelming monopoly, dark murderous essences haunting South African society. Importantly, they were adduced to break the notion of intimate femicide, which had no truck for the amateur sleuths. The killers would be both black and unknown, though Vetten’s statistically valid point remains that such figures constitute a mere 2 percent of the female homicide cases nationally.  Other issues involve sampling methods – how they got the information to be interrogated, how the victims’ identities were supplied, what range of papers and print they were examining, and how frequently it was done.

In scouring the press, Bridges also found an astonishing ignorance about reportage of Pistorius.  This was the other side of “otherness” – particularly that Dutch South Africans were being made to fit a particular model of guilt and presumption.  Alex Perry of Time magazine had been short of a fact checker – Pistorius was not, Bridges insisted, an Afrikaner “but an English speaking South African by his own admission!” (Mar 1, 2013).  Perry had become part of the unconscious army against the Afrikaners. 

Racial assumptions

Bridges dismissed assertions that Afrikaner lagers were everywhere, congregations formed against the “Swart Gevaar” (Black Threat).  The point was made to take the shine off the Pistorius lifestyle. Do not assume that such a life such as his might extend more broadly to others of similar skin color.  Many did not live in an Edenic environment, but crippling squalor.  “Almost 700,000 of this minority currently find themselves living in utter squalor in squatter camps.”  Bridges ventured various numbers – 77 White squatter camps in Pretoria alone, with more than 430 in the country in total.  She never cites where she obtains these figures, proving rather reluctant on the reference and footnote.  They are, however, vital in that continuum of Afrikaner identity – one shaped, sharpened and padded by a narrative of persecution and threat.

For Bridges, South Africa was land and country, but one ravaged by a marauding sense of exclusion and assertion against its White populace.  That symbol was typified by such fanatical platforms as those of Julius Malema, insisting on the “Killing of the Boer.”  In a blog post on April 8, 2012, she claimed that she had “been a victim of rampant crime in South Africa six times in 11 months. My house was burgled three times in six weeks and my car window smashed three times in less than a year.”  For her, it was important to mention that, “The victims of crime in this country might not have color, but the perpetrators DO!” (emphasis in original)  It was a country beset by seven million illegal immigrants, an unreliable police force as guilty for the very crimes they were charged to protect the public from.

As Pierre de Vos, Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance at University of Cape Town, would explain (The Conversation, April 15), “at the heart of the defense is an assumption that the high crime rate in South Africa, coupled with Pistorius’s vulnerable state as a disabled person, rendered his actions reasonable.”  This is where the psychology proved sketchy with the environment. The defense strongly emphasised a society run wild, jungle mad with crime. But the gated community, by its definition, allowed Pistorius to, as De Vos explains, “Sleep with the windows of his bedroom open.” Other South Africans without the luxuries of the security community had to rely on “elaborate rituals” of security, activating alarms, locks, private security companies.

Pistorius, wealthy; the Pistorius whose witnesses were overwhelmingly white, all having come from a particular South Africa.  His South Africa that remains overwhelmingly one of celebrity, not squalor; well paid security rather than grotesque insecurity.  There is no ruthless Hobbesian nature here of nasty, brutish and short lives.  If press reports of a brawl in a Johannesburg night club with a taunting customer are to be believed, Pistorius has no fear reminding individuals that he comes from a family that “owns” the South African president.[4] 

Summing arguments

Pistorius, when the judgment is handed down, may well have been the exception that proved several rules – be it on disability, gender violence and his country. His defense team will be drawing upon his psychological profile, reminding the court of a man vulnerable and traumatised even before he raised his weapon in fear. His strength was merely a product of that vulnerability, brute physicality exercised without emotional calm.  The prosecuting team will do what it has done from the start: suggest, that Pistorius’s intent was always to kill, whoever it was who was in the bathroom at the time.  If you fire four shots through a door at someone locked in a lavatory, the intention, as lead prosecutor Gerrie Nel explained in the initial bail hearing, is one of inflicting death.  But for all of that, Nel has already conceded that the case against Pistorius remains circumstantial.  The rest of South Africa has already decided – it remains for the court to hand down its final ruling.

 

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com


[1] Ana Vimiero, Ana Carolina and Renato Vimiero, “Oscar Pistorius and the death of Reeva Steenkamp – mapping public opinions on Twitter using frame analysis and data mining,” Selected Papers of Internet Research 14.0, Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Denver, Colorado, USA.

Authors: 

The Murder of Porn Star Red-Hot Carla

0
0

Her face – and body – were known to millions of men who crawled the Internet for web-sex. Her stage name was Red-Hot Carla and her fans agreed that the name was well chosen. However, the way she looked when the police forced entry into the house she shared with her lover and pimp, would have made them recoil with horror. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The first call to the police reporting that a woman was missing came in the afternoon. The caller, a woman, describing herself as a neighbor, was saying that she has not seen the woman from the house next door for a day. The cop who took the call was wondering what a cop’s work would be like if they were to investigate each call about someone who has not been seen for 24 hours.

Deep into that night the woman again telephoned the police. She still has not seen her neighbor and she was really worried, she said.

The following afternoon the police received a call from a woman reporting that she has heard a gunshot coming from the house of a neighbor. She said that the previous day the man from that house had rung her doorbell and wanted to borrow a bottle of wine. She did not have any wine in the house and he left.  Did the man live alone in the house the cop who took the call wanted to know? The caller said that, no, his wife lived in the house with him.

A missing woman and a gunshot being heard decided the police to go and find out what was going on.

This was the Belgian town of Liège only a few miles from the borders of France, Germany and the Netherlands.

 Therefore, Liège is a frontier town, but there is nothing wild west about it. The French-speaking locals, the Liègeoises, are sturdy and staid, their pleasures mostly culinary.  They love mussels which they eat with fries, and they feast on pancakes and chocolates. They also devour meatballs - boulets à la Liègoise– which are made with pork and beef and very sweet apple syrup.

The address the police went to was a lane in the suburb of Vottem, three miles from central Liège. Two-story, red-brick, terraced houses lined the lane on both sides. There were no front gardens, but lace or chiffon curtains hanging behind small windows kept prying eyes from seeing into front rooms. Such discreet elegance made it obvious that it was a lane where the bourgeoisie lived: perhaps they were not wealthy people, but they were of a good social class.

The police knocked on the door of the house to which they had been directed. There was no answer. They banged on the door. Still no answer. Not being able to see into the front rooms they forced the lock.

A man lay across the settee in the living room. He was covered in blood and his face was a raw wound. A gun hung loosely from his right hand. The cops thought that he was dead, but no, he had a pulse. They summoned an ambulance who raced him under police guard to the local hospital. Someone might have tried to kill him, disguising the attempt on his life as suicide, and that person might still have been around.

In the bed of a bedroom upstairs lay a woman. She was undoubtedly dead: her head had almost been shot off.

Neighbors quickly filled in the police about the couple’s identity.

Stephane Fontaine

The man was named Stéphane Fontaine, 43 years old, and unemployed.

The woman was - well, there was some confusion about what her name was. Her real name.

 Known to the neighbors as Carla Sainclair, she was born Anne Derouck and she was 29 years old.

She was a porn star, and a prostitute, and apart from the name of Carla Sainclair she also called herself Red-Hot Carla - Carla La Chaude. She was a star of porn movies, and as for her real-life role as prostitute, she was selling her charms not only in sex clubs all over Western Europe, but also on x-rated web sites, and indeed in a specially equipped room in the house in which she lay dead.

Stéphane Fontaine was her pimp and her lover.

Had he shot her and then himself?

From the early stages of decomposition of the woman’s body and from the smell in the room they could tell that she had been dead for a few days, whereas the shot which had injured the man had, according to the neighbor, been fired only that afternoon.

Fontaine was unable to enlighten the cops. He could not speak: he was in a coma.

It was Wednesday, October 14, 2009.

He would remain in the coma for three months.

Good Girl

Schoolgirl Anne Derouck excelled in languages and mathematics.  She spoke of wanting to be a journalist and on leaving school she enrolled at a journalism school. However, in the year 2000 it was in a local department store that the dark-haired, curvaceous and friendly 20-year-old went to work as a salesgirl.

Her salary not high, so she hit on a plan to earn more money.

She took a night job at a private men’s club. Dressed as either a policewoman or a nurse, but then stripping down to the skin, she walked among the men who would be taking photos of her.

Next, she began to put in hours at a brothel. In Belgium prostitution is not illegal but for a third-party to live off its proceeds is against the law.  Brothels are all the same tolerated.

The Derouck family was unaware of what Anne was up to.

As she freely admitted to other girls in the profession, she loved the physical pleasure the job gave her.

Soon, her appetite for sexual delights having increased, she began to attend partner-swapping evenings. At such an evening, held in private homes or private sex clubs, or even in 5-star hotels, the understanding is that all inhibitions must be left at home because having sexual relations with as many of those present, male and female, is the rule.

In the year 2000, at one such partner-swapping evening, Anne met Stèphane Fontaine. He was 34 years old and living alone but he was the father of two children.  She was of course just 20 years old. Both would say that theirs was "love at first sight."

Unlike Anne’s happy childhood, Fontaine’s had been unhappy. Born out-of-wedlock, the surname Fontaine was that of the man who would marry his mother and legally adopt him.

Leaving school without diplomas, his first job was that of automobile mechanic. Next, he worked at a golf club doing menial tasks. Both jobs were of short duration and in 1985, 19 years old, he set out on a career of crime, successfully committing several hold-ups. In 1986 his luck ran out when in an armed bank robbery he took the manager and the latter’s young son hostage. Apprehended, he received a seven-year jail sentence.  Released in 1991 after having served five years, he went to work in a biscuit factory.  He was still working there when he met Anne.

Fontaine was a fan of a famous French prostitute, Laure Sainclair, and Anne, in order to please her lover, adopted the surname Sainclair for her prostitution, and as Carla Sainclair, she began to get known as a star of porn not only in Belgium but also in France, the Netherlands and as far away as Spain.  (Laure Sainclair is now retired. She had become an icon in France’s libertine world when she appeared on a TV chat show speaking about her life as a prostitute.)

With web-sex taking a hold in the mid-2000s Carla (I will call her Carla from now on) created a website for herself, and as Red-Hot Carla, she began to promote her sexual talents online. She and Fontaine had moved into the Vottem house and in 2007 when he was dismissed from the biscuit factory because he was drinking too much - his employers said he was an alcoholic - he became Carla’s web-master. He set up a webcam in one of the bedrooms and, having created a second website, viewers could at €500 ($650) a time watch Carla strip and perform sexual acts.

In 2008 Carla contacted a producer of porn movies: she wanted to be in movies. She was auditioned and given a contract and within months Red-Hot Carla starred in not just one, but two porn movies.  The producer was also posting porn videos on the web and Carla starred in them too. By the time of her death she had starred in seven such movies.

Her neighbors having seen the posters for the porn movies - there are sex shops all over Belgian towns where such posters are displayed - was enlightened to the identity of the charming young woman living among them. They appeared not to mind -- not even when men began calling at the house and they realized that she was also working as a prostitute. The couple had transformed the bedroom where Fontaine had already set up the webcam into a room where Carla could receive her clients.

The Derouck family also learned what Carla, who they still knew as Anne, was up to. After her murder some of them said that Fontaine had steered her into prostitution. They said they had never liked him. He would say, as she had herself revealed, she was doing what she was doing because she enjoyed sex. “She fantasized about making love to two men at the same time,” he explained her fondness to the police for partner-swapping evenings.

In 2009 Carla began to complain to some of the other prostitutes she had befriended and also to her mother that Fontaine was drinking too much and that he had become violent towards her. She spoke of an incident when he, drunk behind the wheel, had crashed their car, and when she had become angry with him, he had hit her in the face.

She also bemoaned the fact that he would not look for a job. She told her mother that he was refusing to do so because he said that he was against paying income tax. Carla, on the contrary, had to pay tax on her earnings. Whether she declared every euro she earned only she and Fontaine knew.

Having starred in seven porn movies, Carla, with more admirers than ever, began to travel to neighboring countries and to Spain to participate in private sex parties. Fontaine, at home and not only drinking heavily but consuming a large number of sleeping pills because he was suffering from insomnia, spent the time creating websites for other prostitutes and acting as their webmaster too.

On Friday, October 9 of that year of 2009, Carla was on the phone to her mother saying that she and Fontaine were having another argument. She was to be the main attraction at a sex fair in the town of Tournai, some 100 miles away, and she wanted Fontaine to accompany her but he refused.  At the fair she told the other girls that she wanted to leave him; that she was going to leave him.

Her performance at the fair over, she returned home where Fontaine was waiting.

Some time that night or perhaps during the next day, or it could have been days or weeks earlier, Carla had taken up pen and paper and written down that Fontaine was going to kill her.

She wrote: ‘I, Anne Derouck, testifies that Stéphane has threatened to kill me. He threatens me openly.  If I am to die, I want an autopsy to be carried out on my body.  I declare that I do not want to die.  I am sorry to say it but if I am to die, the guilty one will be Stéphane Fontaine.’

The police found the note in the Vottem house.

The injuries

Carla’s injuries were horrendous.

She had been shot four times into the left side of her face, each shot having been fired at close range while she was asleep.

The first shot was to her temple and had gone through her brain and had killed her instantly. The next two shots had been into her forehead, and the fourth, the last one, was into her left eye.

According to the pathologists, the shooting had taken place at least three days earlier: during the night of Saturday, October 10, to the morning of Sunday, October 11.

Her blood alcohol content (BAC) was 1.51 g/L which meant that she had in the immediate few hours before her death consumed a bottle of wine, or two or three glasses of strong liquor like gin, vodka or whiskey.

There were no bruises, and no scars of recent or old injuries, on her body.

According to the ballistic experts at the murder scene, Fontaine was the one who shot Carla and who, three days later, had turned the same gun on himself.

 Fontaine’s injury was such that the medical experts said it was a wonder that he had survived.

He had shot himself into the left side of his mouth, pressing the gun to his palate. The bullet had entered the left lobe of his brain and destroyed the optic nerve of his left eye.

He had no alcohol in his blood, but he had consumed a large number of sleeping pills in the 72 hours or so hours in which he had gone to ask a neighbor to borrow a bottle of wine and which other neighbors, passing the house, had seen him standing at the windows, his lover dead in an upstairs bedroom.

I needed a gun for our protection

For the three months of Fontaine’s coma the police and psychiatrists waited to speak to him. They knew that he would be suffering from memory loss not only because of the coma but also because of the injury to his brain so they did not expect to get much information from him.

On Wednesday, January 10, 2010, Fontaine was released from hospital into police custody. In a pitiful state, he was incarcerated in the hospital wing of Lantin Prison, four miles outside Liège.  Lantin, Belgium’s largest prison, open since 1979, can accommodate 342 inmates, 40 of them female. The prison also has a secure psychiatric wing.

Because of the destruction of the optic nerve of Fontaine’s left eye he was blind in that eye, and because of the damage to his brain he was classified as intellectually challenged. Both conditions were to be permanent, and so too would be his memory loss. He suffered total amnesia of the days before, during and after he had fired four bullets into his lover’s head.

He would need round-the-clock care and psychiatric counseling too.

Replying to police questions, he spoke of an argument he and Carla had had because she wanted him to accompany her to a sex fair in Tournai and he did not want to go. He could not remember why he did not want to go with her, and he also could not say when exactly they had had the argument. Already back in hospital, told that she was dead and that he had killed her, he had tearfully expressed his regret. She was, he said, the human being he loved more than any other, and he could not envisage a life without her.

Questioned about the gun he had used and for which he did not have a license, he said that he had bought it through a friend who had bought it from a friend who had bought it from a friend. The police tracing this long line of friends of friends identified the original owner of the gun as a man in the criminal underworld.

He needed the gun, said Fontaine, because strangers were coming to the house all the time and he had to be in a position to defend Carla - and himself.

He was adamant that he had never laid a hand on her, and he had not forced her into prostitution: she had masterminded her career herself. And there had never been any talk of her leaving him.

He explained away his armed hold-ups and the bank robbery when he had taken hostages by describing them as follies of his youth. He bitterly regretted having taken that path, he emphasized.

The court-appointed psychiatrists, who by law had to evaluate Fontaine’s mental state, reported that he manifested no signs of anxiety or depression but that he did manifest anti-social and narcissistic behavior, and he showed no empathy towards others. He did love Carla but he did not respect her. His insomnia was severe and he was dependent not only on sleep medication but also on alcohol.

They also reported that Fontaine did not manifest any signs of mental illness and despite that he had become intellectually challenged and his lost memory would never return, he was fit to stand trial.

 Public Prosecutor Marianne Lejeune formally charged Fontaine with first-degree murder. Belgian law classifies first-degree murder as assassination. He was also to be judged for the illegal possession of a firearm.

They were quiet neighbors

On Monday, March 5, 2012, Fontaine, flanked by two uniformed police, walked into the courtroom in Liège.

The hearing was expected to last four days.

Carla’s mother described her murdered daughter as discrete, serious, spontaneous, always in a good mood, and always ready to do someone a favor. Fontaine was violent towards her daughter and he did slap her face when the two had argued about Tournai: Carla had told her about it when the two of them had spoken on the phone in the hours before her daughter had set off for the fair. Carla was not however planning to leave Fontaine, she added. Indeed, Carla loved Fontaine, the only man she has ever had a serious love relationship with.

Carla’s sister spoke of how much her sister had loved life and what a wonderful person she had been. Fontaine’s entire existence focused on sex and he settled his problems with violence, she said.

The couple’s neighbors testified that the couple had caused no problem. The two were quiet and respectful and they were loving towards one another. They certainly had never witnessed any arguments or violence between the two. They did see many men visiting the house, but this did not surprise them because Carla had never hidden that she was a prostitute and starred in porn movies.

A childhood friend of Carla’s said that she had no idea what Carla had been up to and learned about it only after her murder. She said that she remembered Carla as a studious girl and that Carla would have gone into prostitution only because she had been pushed into it.

Women who had been performers at Tournai with Carla testified that she had told them that she was going to leave Fontaine. She had also spoken to them of how he beat her.

Fontaine’s former colleagues from the biscuit factory described him as pleasant. They had kept up with him after he had left the factory and that, they said, was proof that they had not found him disagreeable.

Fontaine, cross-examination by the lawyer representing Carla’s mother, repeated what he had told the police: he loved Carlo with all his heart and he had never hit her. To most of the lawyer’s questions, though, he replied that he could not reply because of his memory loss.

As Fontaine had not denied having shot Carla, Prosecutor Lejeune, in her closing argument, strove to convince the jury of 12 to unanimously find him guilty of first-degree murder. Carla was leaving him and he had therefore decided to kill her.

 Lejeune also asked the jury to find Fontaine guilty on the second charge of the illegal possession of a firearm.

The Belgian Constitution provides that all serious crimes, like murder, be judged by juries. A tied vote is considered a not guilty one whereas, in the event of a hung jury, three professional judges are appointed to decide the accused’s guilt or innocence.

Lejeune asked the judge for a 30-year incarceration sentence.

In their final plea for Fontaine’s liberty his two lawyers, Pascal Rodeyns and Steve Van Laeden, both prominent in Belgium, stated that the autopsy practised on the victim proved that, as there were no scars of violence on Carla’s body, their client had not been violent towards her. Also, no one had ever witnessed any act of violence on his part towards her.

 Rodeyns asked that the case should be analyzed within the framework of the type of relationship the couple had.

 Their client’s amnesia was genuine, he said, and his memory would never return. Accordingly, what had preceded the fatal shooting and the scenario of the victim’s shooting and the following suicide attempt would never be known.

He also said that at the time of the shooting Fontaine was not himself but was suffering from temporary insanity. He had also taken a large number of sleeping pills. He loved Carla and this was why he had turned the gun on himself. “He did not reckon on waking up,” he stated.

On Thursday, March 8, at 3 p.m., after four hours of deliberation, the jury returned.

They found Fontaine guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to 25 years.

On hearing the sentence, Fontaine showed no emotion.  Journalists wrote about his empty eyes and the frozen expression on his face just as he had had during the four days of his trial.

Incarceration

Fontaine was returned to Liège’s Lantin Prison and to its hospital wing for the daily medical and psychiatric care he would need.

Should he be released before he has served his time, it would be into a care home.

As for Red-Hot Carla’s millions of fans. Undoubtedly, they still crawl the Internet for web-sex where also undoubtedly other women are now supplying it.

 The porn movies Carla starred in are showing in theatres in red-light districts not only in Belgium but over all of Europe. Her websites are no longer live on the Internet but her attributes are still to be viewed on sex sites. On those sites she can also still be viewed performing various sex acts as if Fontaine had never blasted four bullets into her face.

The house the couple lived in, they had rented, their furnishings were ordinary, their car was not a luxury one and they had not ever taken a vacation.

Whatever the reason was why Fontaine had slain Carla, it was not financial.

The Dripping Killer

0
0

Kate Webster at the Old Bailey before she was sentenced to be hanged for murder - July 1879

Victorian Britain was horrified by a 30-year-old Irish woman who murdered her employer, dismembered the body, threw bits of it into the river Thames, boiled the head (and other body parts) and sold the fat as "dripping" in local pubs. She blamed two innocent men for the crime and when that didn't work, she pretended to be pregnant so that the judge wouldn't give her the death penalty.

 Such was her notoriety that Madame Tussaud's rushed to create a wax statue of her which remained on display in London for 80 years.

by Siobhán Pat Mulcahy

 Catherine “Kate” Lawler was born in a small village called Killanne, in County Wexford, Ireland in 1849. As a small child, she was caught stealing and became known as a pickpocket. She was imprisoned for larceny in Wexford in December 1864, aged only 15.

 In 1867, she stole enough money to take the boat to Liverpool and continued her criminal career once she got there. In 1868, aged 18, she was sentenced to four years “penal servitude” for a series of thefts.

 She claimed to have married a sea captain called “Webster” by whom she had four children and also claimed that all the children died, as did her husband, within a short space of time.

 In London, she took a job as a charlady and made extra money as a prostitute. In 1873, she moved to Notting Hill to work as a cook/housekeeper and met a man there called “Mr. Strong.”  He became both her lover and accomplice in further robberies but once she became pregnant, he abandoned her.

In April, 1874 she gave birth to a son named John W. Webster, in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Becoming a mother failed to reform her and she took to robbing boarding houses. She would rent a room and sell everything she could get her hands on before absconding. She would later claim to have been “forced into crime” as she had been “forsaken by him [Strong], and committed crimes for the purpose of supporting myself and my child.”

The next few years saw her being arrested on numerous occasions and receiving short prison sentences. In 1875, she spent 18 months in Wandsworth prison.

Back on the outside, she found domestic work with the Mitchell family in Teddington but left them because she said “they didn’t have anything worth stealing.”

She was constantly on the move to avoid the police and used aliases, including:  Webb, Webster, Gibbs, Gibbons and her birth name, Lawler.

Her young son was cared for during her frequent absences by Sarah Crease, a friend who worked as a charlady for a Miss Loder in Richmond. It was Miss Loder who recommended Webster as a domestic worker to Julia Martha Thomas in January 1879.   

Victim, Julia Martha Thomas, who had an "excitable temperment."

Mrs. Thomas was a 54-year-old widow, who lived at 2 Mayfield Cottages in Richmond, had a reputation for being a harsh employer with an “excitable temperament.”Yet, when she was introduced to Webster, she engaged her on the spot, without asking for references.

Webster would later say: “At first I thought her a nice old lady... but I found her very trying, and she used to do many things to annoy me during my work. When I had finished my work in my rooms, she used to go over it again after me, and point out places where she said I did not clean, showing evidence of a nasty spirit towards me.”

The daily arguments between the two women became so serious that Thomas tried to persuade friends to stay with her as “she was afraid to be alone with the Irish woman who was very fond of drink.”

Mrs. Thomas told Webster her employment would end on February 28 and she recorded the decision in what was to be her final diary entry: “Gave Katherine warning to leave.”

Webster begged her to keep her on for a further three days, until Sunday, March 2 and for some reason Mrs. Thomas agreed.

On March 2, the two women quarrelled and several members of the local church said that Mrs. Thomas had appeared “very agitated” during the service.  They said she was so upset that she left church early to confront Webster.

 

Murder

But Webster was lying in wait for her at Mayfield Cottages.

When Mrs. Thomas went upstairs, Webster jumped out from the shadows, took hold of her and threw her down the stairs. Then, to stop her screaming, she put her hands around her neck and choked her until she was dead.

She cut off the dead woman's head with a razor and a meat saw and then hacked off her limbs. She par-boiled the limbs and torso in a copper pot and burned the organs and intestines in the fireplace.

Webster said later that “even she was revolted by the enormous amount of blood everywhere.”

She burnt or boiled as much of the body as she could, then packed the remains into a wooden box, except for the head and one foot for which she could not find enough space.

Webster disposed of the spare foot on a manure heap in Twickenham but was left with the problem of the head which she placed in a black bag. She continued to clean up the cottage on the Monday and Tuesday, then, wearing one of Mrs. Thomas's silk dresses, she visited her former neighbors, the Porter family, taking the black bag with her. They visited several pubs together and in the evening, Webster excused herself and went off, ostensibly to visit a friend, returning later without the black bag, which was never found.

She asked the Porter's young son Robert, to help her carry the box with the torso, taking the lad back home with her to fetch it. She told him she was meeting someone at Richmond bridge who was taking the box and asked Robert to go on without her once they got there. Later, Robert told police he heard a splash of something heavy hitting the water a few moments before Webster caught up with him again.

The box was discovered the next morning by a coal man who reported it to Barnes police station near Richmond.

The local doctor who examined the various body parts could only say that they were “from a human female.”

Meanwhile, Webster continued to live at Mayfield Cottages posing as Mrs. Thomas, wearing her late employer's clothes and jewelry and dealing with tradesmen under her new identity. She made arrangements to sell the house and pawned Mrs. Thomas's gold fillings at a local pawnbrokers.

On March 9, she reached an agreement with John Church, a local publican, to sell Thomas's furniture. He agreed to pay her £68 with an interim payment of £18 in advance.

When a suspicious neighbor, Miss Ives, asked the deliverymen who exactly had ordered the goods removed, they replied “Mrs. Thomas” and pointed to Webster.

Police were called in to search 2 Mayfield Cottages. There, they discovered blood stains, burned finger-bones in the hearth and fatty deposits behind a large copper pot, as well as a letter left by Webster giving her home address in Ireland. They immediately distributed a “wanted” notice giving a description of Webster and her 5-year-old son.

 

Escape to Ireland

Realizing she had been exposed, Webster flew the coop with her son, catching a train to Liverpool and then traveling aboard a coal steamer to her uncle's farm in Enniscorthy, Ireland.

There, the chief of police realized that the 30-year-old woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same person he had arrested 15 years earlier for larceny.

Webster was traced to her uncle's farm and arrested there (still wearing Mrs. Thomas's clothes and jewelry) on March 29.

As Webster travelled under arrest from Enniscorthy to Kingstown (near Dublin), crowds gathered at every station to jeer and gawk at her. Her uncle had refused to give her son shelter when he heard about the murder and the authorities sent him to the local workhouse until an industrial school could be found for him.

She was brought back to England via Holyhead and taken to Richmond police station where she made a statement saying John Church (who had bought Mrs. Thomas's furniture) had committed the crime. Fortunately for him, he had a rock solid alibi and was released almost immediately after his arrest.  She then made a statement implicating Henry Porter (her former neighbor) in Richmond but he too had an alibi. She was formally charged with Mrs. Thomas's murder on March 30, 1879.

 

Trial at the Old Bailey

The London Times reported that Webster's first appearance in court was greeted by “an immense crowd around the building... and very great excitement prevailed.”  In a sign of the public interest in the case, the prosecution was led by the Solicitor General, Sir Hardinge Giffard, while Webster was defended by prominent London barrister, Warner Sleigh. The case was presided over by Mr. Justice Denman.

The trial which began at the Old Bailey on July 2, 1879 was packed to the rafters. Webster pleaded not guilty to both the murder charge and the various charges of theft. Her defense sought to emphasize the “circumstantial nature of the evidence” while highlighting Webster's “devotion to her son.”

The prosecution had difficulty proving that the human remains found by police were actually those of Mrs. Thomas; without the head there was no means of positively identifying them.

At the official inquest, the doctor who examined the body parts attributed them to “a young person with very dark hair” and an “open verdict” had been given for the cause of death

The most damning piece of evidence against Webster came from a hat-maker called Maria Durden who told the court that Webster had visited her a week before the murder and said “she was going to Birmingham to sell some property, jewelry and a house that her aunt had left her.” The jury took this as a sign that the murder had been planned in advance.

In her own testimony, Webster attempted to gain the jury's sympathy by blaming Strong, the father of her child. She said: “I formed an intimate acquaintance with one who should have protected me and was led away by evil associates and bad companions.”

After a six-day trial, the jury retired to consider the facts, returning just over an hour later to pronounce a guilty verdict.

Judge Denmam asked Webster if there was “any reason why sentence of death should not be passed” and Webster replied “Yes, there is. I am quick with child” [pregnant]. The Law Times reported that “a scene of uncertainty and confusion ensued.”

The court's clerk suggested using a “jury of matrons,” selected from the women in the courtroom gallery, to rule on the question of whether Webster was “quick with child.” Twelve women were sworn in along with a surgeon named Bond, and they accompanied Webster to a private room at the side of the court where she could be examined. They returned a few minutes later with a verdict that Webster was not “quick with child,” though this “did not necessarily mean she was not pregnant.”

The judge commented that “after 32 years in the profession, he was never at an inquiry of this sort.”

He sentenced Webster to death by hanging at Wandsworth prison.

 

Webster's confession

The night before her execution, Webster finally confessed to the murder of Julia Martha Thomas. Her confession was recorded in the presence of a prison warder and a Catholic priest, Father McEnrey, at her own request. It reads as follows:

            Mrs. Thomas came in and went upstairs. I went up after her, and we had an argument, which ripened into a quarrel, and in the height of my anger and rage I threw her from the top of the stairs to the ground floor. She had a heavy fall, and I became agitated at what had occurred, lost all control of myself, and, to prevent her screaming and getting me into trouble, I caught her by the throat, and inthe struggle she was choked, and I threw her on the floor.

            I determined to do away with the body as best I could. I chopped the head from the body with the    assistance of a razor which I used to cut through the flesh afterwards. I also used the meat saw andthe carving knife to cut the body up with. I prepared the copper with water to boil the body toprevent identity; and as soon as I had succeeded in cutting it up I placed it in the copper and boiledit. I opened the stomach with the carving knife, and burned up as much of the parts as I could.

In her confession, she gave no mention of Mrs. Thomas's missing head.

 

Execution

Her execution took place three Sundays after sentencing on the morning of Tuesday, July 29, 1879.

Two newspaper reporters were in attendance to record the event. Inside her cell, Webster was being ministered to by FatherMcEnrey.

The governor entered and said “it is time” and she was led out between two male warders across the yard to the purpose-built execution chamber nicknamed the “Cold Meat Shed.”

Executioner William Marwood brought her to the double trap doors and tied leather straps around her waist, wrists and ankles.

As he placed the white hood over her head, Webster's last words were “Lord, have mercy upon me.”

A total of 134 men and only one woman, Kate Webster, were executed at Wandsworth Prison until the last hanging took place there in 1961. The Irish woman is listed in the hand written prison records as “Catherine Webster, interred 29/07/1879 in unmarked grave number 3.”

 

Notorious

The trial and execution caused a sensation on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Her sexual history, which included a string of male companions, suggested “promiscuity” which was abhorrent to respectable Victorian Britain but also served to heighten public interest in the case.

British newspapers variously described her as “gaunt, repellent, and trampish-looking” with “a criminal nature.” The Daily Telegraph said she was “a tall, strongly made woman of about 5 feet, 5 inches in height with sallow and much freckled complexion and large, prominent teeth.”  The Telegraph also claimed Webster had tried to sell two pots of lard or “best dripping” – made from Mrs. Thomas's boiled fat – to the landlady of a Richmond pub.

Dublin's  Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser called the case “one of the most sensational and awful chapters in the annals of human wickedness.”

Newspapers also noted that the accused had only cried once during the trial – when her son was mentioned – which clearly meant that she had “absolutely no remorse for her crimes.”

Her attempts to implicate two innocent men in the murder caused outrage, while her “impersonation” of Mrs. Thomas provoked widespread public revulsion.

Within a few weeks of her arrest, Madame Tussaud's created a wax statue of Webster called “The Richmond Murderess” which remained on public display well into the 20th century – alongside other notorious killers such as the evil Dr. Crippen.

 

Discovery of the missing head

When the Hole in the Wall pub near Mayfield Cottages closed in 2007, it was bought for redevelopment.

In October, 2010, workmen carrying out excavation uncovered a “dark circular object” which, on examination, proved to be a woman's skull. It had been buried beneath the foundations where the pub's stables had been.

Carbon dating carried out at Edinburgh University showed the skull was dated between 1650 and 1880. It had “low collagen levels, consistent with being boiled.” It also had fracture marks consistent with Webster's account of throwing Thomas down the stairs and choking her.

In July 2011, the West London coroner concluded that the skull was indeed that of Julia Martha Thomas.

A verdict of “unlawful killing” was recorded with the cause of death due to “asphyxiation and head injury.”

Jack The Ripper -- We Still Do Not Know Who He Was

0
0

In early September world media splashed the headline that Jack the Ripper had finally been identified by amateur sleuth, Englishman Russell Edwards. The latter, in his book, Naming Jack the Ripper, identified Jack the Ripper as a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski. However, our intrepid reporter, Marylyn Z. Tomlins, says Kosminski could not have been Jack the Ripper. 

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In London during the fall of 1888, it was cold and wet with thick fog descending over the narrow dimly-lit streets, alleys and squares. The weather, however, did not make life for the hundreds of thousands, most of them immigrants, living in London’s Whitechapel district, harder than it already was. For the majority of them unemployed or working at menial jobs for up to 18 hours a day for a weekly wage of five pennies, and living sometimes up to 12 in an unheated room without running water, or living in insalubrious lodging houses, the weather was their least concern.

Survival was what was on the minds of the immigrants, and this was so especially for the women, because at that time the men of Whitechapel considered a woman no different than their other "chattels" -- furniture, carts and horses for example --  and domestic violence was a common occurrence. Furthermore, as for many women prostitution was the only means of survival, they faced an added danger: being beaten up or being slashed with a knife by the men who paid them tuppence (two pennies) for satisfying their sexual demands.

That fall another danger also confronted the women of Whitechapel: Jack the Ripper.

One hundred and twenty-six years later and despite the investigations of thousands of Ripper enthusiasts -- “ripperologists” as they have become known -- many of them writing books claiming to know the identity of this killer, and indeed naming him, the debate over who was Jack the Ripper continues.

Russell Edwards’s book, Naming Jack the Ripper, over 300 pages in length,is a good read, and I was prepared to believe that he had indeed identified Jack the Ripper. Yet, despite headlines like "Jack the Ripper Named,""Jack the Ripper Unmasked,""Jack the Ripper Murder Mystery Solved," it was not long before not only “ripperologists” but also a number of renown scientists cast doubt over Edwards’s declaration that Jack the Ripper was “definitely, categorically and absolutely” Aaron Kosminski.

I then began to doubt it too.

Edwards’s investigation

In his book, Russell Edwards describes himself as from a “regular family” and growing up in a council apartment in a tower block in a tough area of Northern England. Having a wish to be his “own boss” he started off, aged 19, selling furry toys from market stalls. When this did not bring in money he moved down to the south where he went from job to job, once penniless and homeless and sleeping on a park bench. He did all the same enrol at the North London Polytechnic and then the Central London Polytechnic, studying management; after graduation he set up a software company. He left that company and set up another and got married and then he went to see the 2001 Johnny Depp movie, From Hell, and his interest in Jack the Ripper began.

In 2007 a friend told Edwards that an item of Ripper memorabilia was going to be sold at auction. The item was a shawl which, according to the auctioneer, and the media, had belonged to one of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

The shawl was described as having a Michaelmas daisy pattern.

Researching the flower on the internet, Edwards learned that Michaelmas is the Christian feast of Archangel Michael and that the feast day is celebrated in the Christian Orthodox churches: in the Orthodox churches in the West on September 29 and in those of Eastern Europe on November 8.

Edwards, knowing that three of the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper had been committed on those two dates,  had to have the shawl.

It must be pointed out that despite Jack the Ripper’s notoriety as a most vicious and depraved killer it is accepted that he had killed only five women, the “canonical five.”

Mary Ann Nichols -- body found on Friday, August 31;

Annie Chapman -- body found on Saturday, September 8;

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes -- bodies found on Sunday, September 30;

 Mary Jane Kelly -- body found on Friday, November 9.

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were therefore murdered on the day the Western Orthodox churches celebrate the Feast of Archangel Michael, and Mary Jane Kelly on the day the Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate it.

The shawl’s asking price (Edwards does not reveal how much it was) was not met, and the item was withdrawn from sale, and a disappointed Edwards went home, but just to return to the auction house and to buy the shawl directly from its owner, a man named David Melville-Hayes. The latter, in his 70s, is the great-great-nephew of a policeman, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, who in 1888 was 41 years of age, had been on duty in Whitechapel on the night of the murder of Catherine Eddowes and had taken possession of the shawl which had been taken off her body. The story is that Simpson, liking the shawl, had asked the police officer in charge at the murder scene whether he could have it because he wanted to give it to his wife.  Mrs. Simpson apparently would not wear it, but the shawl had remained in the family and finally having become the property of Melville-Hayes he had given it to Scotland Yard’s museum -- the Black Museum -- to be put on display. First though, he had cut two pieces from the shawl and those he had given to a friend who had the two pieces framed. As for what was left of the shawl, Melville-Hayes, later of the opinion that the Black Museum was not displaying it properly, had taken it back.

The shawl was stained and in 2006 the television production company Atlantic Productions doing a documentary about Jack the Ripper carried out a DNA testing on the stains, but the result as Melville-Hayes had been told by the production company had been “inconclusive.”

Edwards, the shawls new owner, would have new DNA testing done on the stains.

The five murders

Each morning at around 3 o'clock those of Whitechapel’s inhabitants who had jobs would begin to set off for their workplaces.

It was just after 3:40 a.m. when one such inhabitant walking fast along a street named Buck’s Row in the northeast of Whitechapel saw what he thought was a piece of canvas lying on the sidewalk. In the half-dark, he stopped to have a look and saw that what he had taken for canvas was a woman. She was lying on her back, her dress pulled up to her waist and her eyes were wide open. Having called over another man who was also on his way to work, the two felt the woman’s hands and found them warm, but even without medical knowledge they could tell that she was dead: she had a large gash in her neck and a lot of blood on and around her. Domestic violence being rife in the area, and it not being unusual for a prostitute to have her throat slashed, the two pulled the dead woman’s dress down over her legs for the sake of decency and then went on their way to find a patrolling policeman.

It was the morning of Friday, August 31.

It was not difficult to identify the murdered woman because she was known in Whitechapel. She was Mary Ann Nichols, who, at 42, abandoned by the man with whom she had had five children, was a penniless alcoholic who had turned to prostitution.

How Nichols had spent the last 48 hours of her life was established. She had been drinking in the local pubs, and drunk and unable to pay the four pennies for a bed in the dormitory of a lodging house -- these were called dosshouses -- she was told to leave. Earlier that morning, as the clock on the local Christ Church struck the half hour after two she had been seen walking east towards where her body would be found. She was very unsteady on her feet.

The walk from where she had last been seen alive and where she was found dead would have taken her about half an hour. She was therefore killed between 3 and 3:40 a.m.

Under the bright lights of a mortuary room it was established that she had two slashes to her throat, several to her vagina and a cut which ran from her neck down to her groin. She had been stabbed in her face as well.

Eight days later, on Saturday, September 8, another prostitute was found dead with similar injuries and all -- the police, the media, the locals and the British -- said that the women had been killed by the same man.

 This second victim was Annie Chapman, 47. Her story was similar to that of Nichols. Separated from the man with whom she had had three children, an alcoholic and consumptive, she had turned to prostitution.

At 6 a.m. on that Saturday an elderly male resident of a narrow four-story brick building at No. 29 Hanbury Street, west of Buck’s Row, had come across Chapman’s body. The building, like the others on the street, consisted of rooms which were let out on a weekly or monthly basis. The street door of each of the buildings opened into an alleyway, and as tenants were coming and going at all times of the day and night, those street doors were never locked. As prostitutes knew that the doors would not be locked, they took their clients into the alleyways.

Also like Nichols, Chapman, having been told to leave a lodging house because she was unable to pay the few pennies for a bed for the night, had been seen walking the streets in the hours before her death. At 5 o'clock that morning, it being cold and rainy, she was seen in a pub drinking when a man said to have worn a “small skull cap” had called her out and she had left with him. The pub was near to where her body was found.

At 5:30 a.m. a woman had seen a man and a woman whom she recognised as Chapman, standing talking outside No. 29 Hanbury Street. She heard the man whom she described as looking about 40, 5’5” in height, dark, “foreign” looking and wearing a dark overcoat and a brown deerstalker hat, ask the woman, “Will you?” and the woman replying, “Yes.”

A few minutes later a resident of the building beside that of No. 29 had heard something fall against a fence which divided the two buildings and he heard a woman saying, “No.”

The first woman was certain of the time because she had seen the it on the clock of Christ Church.

At 7 a.m. according to the female owner of a pub close to Hanbury Street, a man with dry blood on the back of his right hand and below one of his ears and on his collar, had walked in and ordered half a pint of beer. He was, as she said, wearing a dark coat and a “brown stiff hat.”

As Chapman’s body was found at 6 a.m., her killing had taken place in the 30 minutes after 5:30 a.m.  The body lay at the dividing fence. As with Nichols, Chapman’s skirt was pulled up to her waist revealing that her abdomen had been cut open from her neck to her groin, and her throat had been cut.  A pile of intestines was draped over one of her shoulders, and some flesh lay over the other. Her head had almost been severed from her body.

Twenty-two days later, on Sunday, September 30, the bodies of another two women, also prostitutes, were found.

The first body that of Swedish-born Elizabeth Stride, 45, was found at 1 a.m. in a narrow alleyway south of where Nichols’s body was found, and the second, that of Catherine Eddowes, at 1:44 a.m. in an alleyway west of where Stride’s body was found.

By then the killer had become known as Jack the Ripper because four days previously, on Thursday, September 27, a letter written in red ink representing blood had arrived at the office of the Central News Agency in London signed “Jack the Ripper.” The salutation was “Dear Boss” and the sender wrote of how he kept on hearing that he had been caught. He continued, “I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.”  The police thought the letter, grammatically correct, was a fraud: It is now accepted that it indeed was and that it was written either by a journalist with the agency --Thomas Bulling -- or the agency’s manager -- John Moore -- in order to win publicity and thus readers.

Elizabeth Stride, born Elizabeth Gustafsdottir in Sweden, had arrived in London in 1866 where she had married an Englishman, John Stride. The marriage had broken up because of her drinking when, rowdy on the street, the police would lock her up until she had sobered up.

On Saturday, September 29, at 6:30 p.m. she had left one pub to go and drink in another. She had left that second pub in the company of a man who was described as 5’5” in height and who had a black moustache and “sandy eyelashes.” He wore a “morning suit” and a bowler hat.

 At 11:45 p.m. a Whitechapel resident had seen a woman whom he would later identify in the mortuary as Stride walk in the direction of the alleyway, Dutfield’s Yard, where her body would be found. The man and woman were kissing and at the end of the kiss, the man had said to the woman, “You would say anything but your prayers.” The man was described as middle aged, about 5’6”, rather stout, clean-shaven, decently dressed in a black coat and dark trousers and wearing a round cap with a small peak. The witness had watched the two walk off, both appearing sober.

At 12:35 a.m. a patrolling policeman, a William Smith, had seen a man and a woman stand talking in front of Dutfield’s Yard. He described the man as about 5’7” in height, about 28, wearing a black coat and a hard felt hat, and he wore a shirt with a white collar and also a tie. The man, said the policeman, had a small dark moustache and had a dark complexion. He carried something which was wrapped in newsprint.

At about the same time a third witness, a non-English-speaking Hungarian Jew named Israel Schwartz, had also seen the couple in front of Dutfield’s yard. Later, speaking through an interpreter, Schwartz described what he had seen. He had seen the man whom he described as about 30, 5’5” in height, fair-skinned, dark hair with a full face and a small brown moustache and dressed in dark clothes and wearing a black cap with a peak, pull the woman off her feet so that she fell down. She screamed three times. At that moment, as he would recount, he had seen another man watching the scene. This onlooker stood across the street, and the man with the woman, looking in that man’s direction, had shouted out the name “Lipski.” Schwartz, then getting scared, had begun to run, and so had the second man, which had encouraged Schwartz to run faster in order to get the hell out of the place.  The second man would fail to come forward to give evidence; he was in fact never identified.

 “Lipski” was a derogatory term for a Jew because in 1887, in other words the previous year, an Israel Lipski, a Polish Jew, had been hanged for the poisoning with nitric acid of a woman in Whitechapel.

Stride’s body, found at 1 a.m. which was about 30 minutes after Schwartz had seen a man hurling her to the ground, was unlike those of Nichols and Chapman because it was not mutilated, but like theirs, her throat had been cut.

Forty-four minutes later, at 1:44 a.m., another body was found.

The body of Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, 46 years old and most horribly mutilated, lay on a small, totally enclosed square, Mitre Square, half a mile to the west of Dutfield’s Yard.

The square fell within the beat of a policeman who, when he had passed that way at 1:30 p.m. had not seen anyone, dead or alive, on the square.

Eddowes lay on her back, her dress pulled up to her neck which had been cut so savagely that her head was almost severed from her body. Her eyelids had been slashed and the tip of her nose had been cut off and placed beside the raw wound. Her lower abdomen had been cut open and both her uterus and left kidney were missing.

A homeless drunk, Eddowes used to carry her earthly belongings which were mostly clothes and some small kitchen appliances with her, and that night she had done so again. The police making a list of what they were finding at the murder scene and indeed what clothes the murdered woman was wearing, noted that she was wearing an “extremely dirty” white cotton apron over her skirt and that a large piece had been cut from it.

That piece of white cotton, bloodstained, was found at 2:55 a.m. lying in a doorway a quarter mile away to the east, and on a wall above the doorway, written in white chalk, was the sentence: “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

Fearing that there will be anti-Jewish riots should the Londoners, who were already saying that Jack the Ripper was a Jew, read about or saw photographs of the writing, a police officer at the scene ordered it to be washed off. It duly was.

The shawl was not on the police’s list and according to Edwards they had not listed it because when the list was drawn up Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson had already taken it.

That night of Eddowes’ murder only one man had been seen with her. At 1:35 a.m. three men, all Jewish, had seen a man and a woman near to Dutfield’s Yard. Only one of the men could describe the man: he said he was around 5’9” in height, of medium build, had a fair skin, a small fair moustache and wore a greyish jacket and a grey cloth cap. He also said that the man had a reddish scarf or neckerchief knotted around his neck.

Forty days were to pass before there was another murder of a woman in Whitechapel, but during those days many letters were sent to the police and newspapers, the senders claiming to be Jack the Ripper.  A kidney was even sent to a man who had set up a vigilance committee and who was appealing to Queen Victoria to do something to have the killer apprehended and brought to justice.  The letter which accompanied the kidney was full of spelling and grammatical errors and blood-smeared. It could not be established whether the kidney was human, but some newspapers reported that it was part of the left kidney of a human being.

The murder had been committed in the early hours of Friday, November 9 and the woman Mary Jane Kelly, was again a prostitute.

Kelly, 25, Irish-born and described by those who knew her as pretty and having a big bust, had moved from Limerick to London in 1884 when she had begun to ply her trade first in a brothel and then on the street.  The widow of a mine worker, the man she had been living with in Whitechapel had left her nine days previously on October 30, but the two had remained on friendly terms and at 8 p.m. on the last day of her life -- Thursday, November 8 -- he had visited her in her room in a lodging house, Miller’s Court, on Dorset Street in northwest Whitechapel. Dorset Street was known as the worst street for crime in London. After the visit, Kelly had gone out drinking, and obviously looking for clients.

At 11:45 p.m. that night another prostitute and tenant of Miller’s Court, who was on her way out, had seen Kelly going into her ground floor room, No. 13. A man was with Kelly. The prostitute had greeted Kelly, asking her how she was but Kelly was so drunk that she could only manage to mutter, “Goodnight.” The man was described as about 36, 5’5” in height, had a blotchy face and side whiskers and a reddish moustache. He wore a dark overcoat which was described as shabby and a black felt hat.  He was carrying some quarts of beer.  She had watched Kelly and the man go into Room No. 13 and once the door was closed Kelly had started to sing drunkenly. On this woman’s return to Miller’s Court at 3 a.m. on what was then Friday, November 9, all was quiet in Kelly’s room.

Half an hour before that another tenant returning to her room had seen a man stand across the street from Miller’s Court. The man named Hutchinson and describing himself to the police later as a friend of Kelly said that at 2 a.m. of the morning of November 9 he had come across Kelly on the street and she had asked him whether he could lend her a sixpence (six pennies) which he could not do because he was penniless himself. He had then seen a man walk up to Kelly and the conversation of the two had gone as follows:

Kelly:  “Alright.”

 The man: “You will be alright for what I had told you.”

The couple had then walked to Kelly’s room, Hutchinson following, and he heard Kelly say to the man: “Alright my dear, come along, you will be comfortable.” Having seen the couple go into Kelly’s room, Hutchinson had walked off. His description to the police of the man he had seen was that he was about 35, 5’6” in height, pale face, dark eyes and eyelashes, and a moustache which curled up at the edges. He wore a long coat trimmed with astrakhan, a light waistcoat under a dark jacket, dark trousers, and a dark felt hat. On his feet were boots with white buttons. Hutchinson also said that the man wore a gold chain and a gold clip pinned to his tie, and he looked “Jewish,” and he was carrying a parcel.

At 10:35 a.m. Kelly’s naked and dead body was discovered on the bed in her room by an elderly man sent to get six weeks of overdue rent from her. He had knocked and when there was no answer he had looked through the window.

The body lay on the blood-soaked bed. The skin of the abdomen and the thighs had been cut away and the breasts had been cut off. The abdomen had been emptied and the uterus and kidneys placed under Kelly’s head and so too one of her breasts. The other breast and her liver lay between her feet, and so did her intestines. The skin of the abdomen and thighs were laid out on a table. Kelly’s face had been mutilated as the nose, lips, cheeks and eyelids had been partially cut away, and her neck had been slashed right to the bone.

As another Miller’s Court tenant had heard a woman’s voice shout, “Murder!” between 3:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. it was estimated that Kelly had been murdered in those 30 minutes.

By then the “Whitechapel Case” was no longer a local story, but an international one. The women were being called the “Unfortunates” and the name “Jack the Ripper” was on lips across the globe.

Edwards’s DNA profiling

The shawl Edwards had bought from David Melville-Hayes, the great-great-nephew of Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, was in two pieces.  The biggest piece was just over six feet long and just over two feet wide, while the smaller piece was two feet long and one and a half feet wide. The shawl’s right side was dark brown and the reverse side was golden brown, and at each end of the shawl was a two-foot long strip which had a reddish golden Michaelmas daisy design.

There were small stains, some of them dark, others resembling white dots, on both pieces of the shawl and Edwards began looking for a scientist who would not only check the shawl for DNA but would also execute DNA matching should he, Edwards, be able to find descendants of Catherine Eddowes and indeed of the Jack the Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski. By then he had started to focus solely on Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper because the curator of the Black Museum, Retired Police Officer Alan McCormack, had told him that Kosminski was without doubt Jack the Ripper. McCormack had said to him: “I’ll tell you: The murderer was and always has been Aaron Kosminski.”

In 2011, still not having found the needed descendants and not having succeeded in having the stains on the shawls analyzed, Edwards made the acquaintance of Finnish scientist Dr. Jari Louhelainen. The latter, living since 2000 in England and Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology at Liverpool John Moore University as well as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Helsinki, agreed to assist Edwards in his task, by then almost an obsession, to identify Jack the Ripper.

Dr. Louhelainen’s first analysis of the shawl was with infrared photographic instruments and next he used UV photography. The first identified the dark stains on the shawl as arterial blood and the second revealed that one of the stains possessed the characteristics of human semen. The stains were however too old to extract DNA from them so instead Louhelainen used what he called “vacuuming” in interviews. This is to use a special slender tube (pipette) filled with a special liquid to draw DNA from the shawl. However, the substance that could be drawn because of the age of the shawl and the stains was not the genomic DNA used today in criminal investigations but a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The problem was that mtDNA is inherited only from the mother, so it was imperative that the DNA extracted from the stains on the shawl was to be compared solely to that of a female descendant of Aaron Kosminski and a female descendant of Catherine Eddowes. 

Edwards’s research without financial assistance from anyone led him to a female descendant of Eddowes and a female descendant of Aaron Kosminski.

The mtDNA of the alleged female descendant of Eddowes, Englishwoman Karen Miller, matched the mtDNA found on the shawl.

Furthermore, the mtDNA of the alleged female descendant of Aaron Kosminski, who did not want to be named, matched that of the mtDNA of the semen stains on the shawl.  (She apparently lives in Australia.)

Edwards therefore had his Jack the Ripper, and as far as he was concerned, Jack the Ripper was, as Retired Police Officer Alan McCormack, Curator of the Black Museum, had told him, the Polish Jewish man, Aaron Kosminski.

Aaron Kosminski

Aaron Mordke Kosminski was born on September 11, 1865 in the village of Klodawa in Poland’s Kalish Province. The Polish people were at that time in revolt against Imperial Russia, Poland’s ruler and what was known as the “Great Emigration” of Poles was in full swing. Because of Imperial Russia’s anti-Semitism, and indeed that of Poland, the situation of the Jewish Kosminskis was extremely fragile, and in 1881, Aaron, 16 years old, the family immigrated to England. Aaron’s mother Golda, born Lubnowska, was by then a widow so she accompanied her children -- three daughters named Hinde, Blima and Malke, and two sons named Icek and Aaron -- the family settling in Whitechapel. Aaron first lived with the married Icek, then with his sister Blima and her husband Woolf Abrahams and then he and his mother moved in with the married Malke. In Whitechapel, Icek having anglicized his name to Isaac had started a successful tailoring business so that the family’s social status was described as “bourgeois.”

The Kosminski family’s reaction to the 1888 series of killings and to the anti-Semitism they were experiencing in their new country and which was increasing daily because of rumours in Whitechapel that Jack the Ripper was a local Jew, is not recorded, but after Icek had become Isaac, Aaron’s other siblings had also anglicized their first names. Isaac had even begun to use the surname Abrahams which was that of his brother-in-law Woolf, husband of Blima who had anglicized her name to Betsy.

In 1888 Aaron Kosminski was 23 years old and unmarried and as documents dating from the 1890s specified he was a hairdresser.

The first public mention of him was in December 1889 in two news reports, one in the Lloyds Weekly News and the other in the City Press. Aaron Kosminski, then 24, and unknown to the people of Whitechapel and indeed to the police, was arrested for walking an unmuzzled dog in the central London street of Cheapside, then a popular open-air market area. Rabies was rife in England and dogs had to be muzzled.  Appearing in court he defended himself by saying that the dog was not his and that he was therefore not the one who was responsible for muzzling the animal. He was fined but he refused to pay the fine because as it was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, he, as a Jew, as he said, was not allowed to handle money on that day. He returned to the courthouse on the Monday and paid the 10 shilling fine and the incident was over and Aaron Kosminski had yet again become just another resident of London’s infamous East End.

The next mention of Aaron Kosminski was in an official medical document. On Saturday, July 12, 1890 his brother-in-law Abrahams arrived with him at a workhouse, the Mile End Old Town Workhouse. A workhouse was a prison-like place. The inmates, as they were called, were people -- men and women, the latter often accompanied by their children -- who were unable to support themselves or who were layabouts not wanting to work, or indeed were mentally unstable and needed medical supervision. They had to adhere to a harsh timetable, rising at dawn and working all day at menial jobs, to be back in bed by 8 p.m. Wages were minimal and so was the food.

Three days later Abrahams was back at the workhouse to take Aaron back to his and Betsy’s home.

Seven months later on Wednesday, February 4, 1891, Abrahams re-admitted Aaron to the workhouse. The address given for Aaron was then that of his sister Matilda (formerly Malka) and her husband and, in the report of the workhouse’s doctor, Aaron was described as insane: he had attacked one of his sisters, presumably Matilda, with a knife, he heard voices which told him what to do and he only ate food he had picked up in the street believing that should he accept food from anyone he will be poisoned. Furthermore he “practised self-abuse” -- he masturbated which was at the time believed to drive the masturbator insane.

Three days later the workhouse transferred Aaron to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in the North London Borough of Barnet. No reason for the transfer had been recorded but on arrival Aaron’s hands were tied behind his back.

Aaron remained a patient at Colney Hatch, his condition regularly assessed and recorded, so that we know that he was going from being a quiet and well-behaved patient to being demented and incoherent.

On Friday, April 13, 1894 Aaron was transferred to another mental asylum, the Leavesden Asylum For Imbeciles on a street named Asylum Road in Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire County. His mother was named his next-of-kin and the address given for her was again that of Matilda.

Twenty-five years later, on Monday, March 24, 1919 Aaron Kosminski passed away at Leavesden. He was 53 years old and the cause of death was given as “gangrene.” He weighed 96 lbs. On Thursday, March 27, he was buried in the East Ham Jewish Cemetery in Marlow Road in the district of East Ham, east of London.

Those of his family who were still alive and had not left London had the words May his dear soul rest in peace engraved on his tombstone.

Golda and Betsy had died in 1912 and Isaac would die in 1920 and Woolf in 1944. They were buried not in the East Ham Jewish Cemetery, but in another cemetery, the East Ham Plashet Jewish Cemetery.

Collapse of the DNA profiling

No sooner had world media splashed the breaking news that Russell Edwards had identified Jack the Ripper with DNA profiling as Aaron Kosminski, than an Australian “ripperologist” commenting on the website, casebook.com, under a pseudonym, pointed out that Louhelainen’s DNA profiling was scientifically erroneous.

Immediately, four DNA experts agreed with the Australian. They are: English Professor Sir Alec John Jeffreys of the University of Leicester who is the inventor of the techniques to establish DNA fingerprinting and profiling; Austrian molecular biologist Professor Walther Parson, head of the Institute of Legal Medicine of the Medical University in Innsbruck; Dutch Professor Mannis van Oven, of the forensic molecular biology department of Rotterdam’s Erasmus University, and the Austrian Professor Hansi Weissensteiner of the Genetic Epidemiology Division of the Medical University in Innsbruck.

Another “ripperologist,” Englishman Richard Cobb who organizes Jack the Ripper conventions and conducts Ripper Tours, added his own voice. He told The Times of London that Karen Miller attended a three-day Ripper convention in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands in 2007 when the shawl was on open and unprotected display and that her family’s mtDNA could then have got onto it.

Edwards in the last two chapters (28 pages) of his book describes how Louhelainen had gone about isolating mtDNA on six stains on the shawl and then amplifying seven small segments from it to facilitate the analysis.

About these seven small segments Edwards would write in his book (Pg 205) and which the Australian “ripperologist” had quoted on casebook.com: “One of these amplified mtDNA segments had a sequence variation which have a match between one of the shawl samples and Karen Miller’s DNA only; i.e., the DNA sequence retrieved from the shawl did not match with control reference sequences. This DNA alteration is known as global private mutation (314.1C) and it is not very common in worldwide population, as it has a frequency estimate of 0.000003506, i.e., approximately 1 / 290,000.”

As Edwards continues in his book, Louhelainen made the above calculation using the database of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck.

However, as the Australian “ripperologist” and the scientists pointed out the DNA mutation should have been 315.1C and not 314.1C, and that 315.1C was not rare but shared by 99% of ethnic Europeans. It meant that the mtDNA of the shawl would match that of 99% of people of European descent.

The scientists described Louhelainen’s error as one of “nomenclature.”

As for the analysis of the stain on the shawl said to have been human semen, its haplogroup, or collection of particular DNA sequences one inherits from a parent, was identified as T1a1 and so was the haplogroup of the unnamed Australian descendant of Aaron Kosminski.

Louhelainen in an interview with London’s The Independent at the time of publication of Edwards’s book and therefore before his analysis was rejected, had said:  “Because of the genome amplification technique, I was also able to ascertain the ethnic and geographical background of the DNA extracted. It was of a type known as the haplogroup T1a1, common in people of Russian ethnicity. I was even able to establish that he had dark hair.” As Edwards writes in his book, Louhelainen had told him that by saying “Russian” he was including Poland then under Russian administration.

Immediately after Loulehainen’s interview the scientists and historians were back pointing out that the haplogroup T1a1 is not found in Ashkenazim Jews -- Jews from Central and Eastern Europe -- and Aaron Kosminski having been from Poland would have been an Ashkenazim Jew. It is a haplogroup found predominantly in Caucasians people. The meaning of Caucasian in this context being geographical and not the former American racial clarification of a white-skinned person as “Caucasian.”

Also, as the experts pointed out, hair color has nothing to do with mtDNA and like all physical traits and medical disorders are determined by genes in the nucleus.

Accordingly, as the haplogroup on the shawl was T1a1 and Aaron Kosminski was an Askhenazim Jew, he could not be connected to the shawl.

More reasons why Aaron Kosminski could not have been Jack the Ripper

1.      The Shawl

We have only the word of Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson’s descendants that the shawl Mellville-Hayes had put up for auction had been taken off the body of Eddowes.

But was it, and was Simpson even at the murder scene?

The murders of Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Kelly were investigated by the Metropolitan Police (the Met) commonly known as Scotland Yard because the murders had occurred within the Met’s jurisdiction. That of Eddowes by the City Police because it had occurred within the square mile heart of London under the jurisdiction of the City Police.

Simpson was with the Met but as its police had joined those of the City Police at the scene of that night’s murder, it is probable that he had been sent to Mitre Square that night.

The story according to his descendants was that he was on “special duties” that night and that he had discovered Eddowes body. In fact, he had not discovered the body and writers who had studied police records of the time failed to find his name listed with those police who had been at the murder scene that night.

Is it so impossible that Simpson, as an act of self-aggrandizement, had made up the story of the shawl?  He was already 41 years of age, an age which at that time meant that someone was “aged,” yet he was still only an acting sergeant. He would retire around 1893, in other words about five years later and this means that he was indeed at the end of his career.

Furthermore, is it so impossible that Simpson had bought the shawl cheaply -- it was second hand and soiled -- at a market stall on his way home at the end of his shift?

What is certain is that we have no proof that the shawl had been taken off the body of Eddowes.

2.      The Michaelmas daisy design

To a Jew, and Kosminski was a Jewish man, Archangel Michael and the celebration of his name-day would have had no significance. Therefore, there can be no connection between the daisy design on the shawl and the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

3.      The shawl’s age and its country of manufacture

Edwards had been unable to establish the shawl’s age and where it had been manufactured.  Without knowing the date, even an approximate one of its manufacture, and in what country this had been, there is no proof that either Eddowes or her murderer had the shawl on their person that night of the murder of Eddowes.

4.      The dates of the murders

·         The murder of each of the five women took place during the hours of the Jewish Sabbath and what is more Chapman was killed during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

An observant Jew which Aaron Kosminski was as he refused to handle money on the Sabbath would not have left his home where his family, which included his aged and widowed mother, would either have been preparing for the traditional Sabbath meal or were already at table. Also, on those nights he would have gone to the synagogue with his brothers and brothers-in-law.

·         As for Rosh Hashanah, it revolves around the synagogue more than any other Jewish holiday.

On the Jewish calendar, on Thursday, September 6, 1888, the year 5649 had begun: it was the first day of the three-day celebration.

Chapman was killed in the early hours of Saturday, September 8, the Shabbat Shuvah, which is the Shabbat which occurs between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and which is a day of reflection before the Day of Atonement of Yom Kippur.  It is a day Jews spend in the synagogue and concentrate on the Torah, to pray and attain forgiveness for sins of the old year and to start the new one with a clean slate.

It is therefore inconceivable that a practising Jewish man would have gone out killing on such holy days for a Jew.

·         Aaron Kosminski had severe mental problems as we know from the reports of the asylums of Colney Hatch and Leavesden, but apart from having threatened one of his sisters with a knife, there had been no episodes of physical acts of violence reported by the two asylums.

Yet, if he were Jack the Ripper, he would not have been able to refrain from killing in the 20 months between the murder of Kelly on Friday, November 9, 1888 and his admittance to the Mile End Old Town Workhouse on Saturday, July 12, 1890? He was indeed a free man in those 20 months.

5. The addresses

From Aaron Kosminki’s admission to the Mile End Old Town Workhouse and to the asylums of Colney Hatch and Leavesden we know the Whitechapel addresses of his siblings and of his mother, and we also know that he had moved from sibling to sibling, at times his mother moving with him.

The addresses were all within a few minutes walk to where the five women had been murdered.

Would Aaron -- indeed any Whitechapel resident -- have run the risk of killing on his doorstep so to speak and of being recognized in the company of the woman he was about to murder?

6. The Kosminskis’name change

Edwards gives importance to Isaac Kosminski having changed his surname to Abrahams and Golda having done so too. Such a name change can not be interpreted as Aaron’s brother and his mother wishing to separate themselves from him because he was Jack the Ripper.

It was not extraordinary for Jews settling in a new country to have anglicized their first names and their family names. They did so in order to make it easier for officialdom in their new countries to spell their names, yet some also did so in order to hide their Jewish parentage and ancestry. For example the family name Sladowski had become Slade, and when a surname had begun with an O an apostrophe was inserted between it and the next letter, the holder then being able to claim Irish descent.  Like the surname Olinski had become the Irish O’Linn.

Aaron himself had explained to the police at the time of his arrest because of the unmuzzled dog that he sometimes used the surname Abrahams because Kosminski was hard to spell. Indeed, the surname was often spelled Kozminski.

7. Aaron lying in a different cemetery than his family

Edwards also gives significance to the graves of Aaron Kosminski’s family not being in East Ham Jewish Cemetery with that of Aaron. Then, as indeed today, a deceased is buried in a cemetery closest to the place of residence of his or her family.

At the time of Aaron’s burial his address was given as that of Matilda's which was in the district of Bow, east of London.

East Ham Jewish Cemetery was also east of London and it was five miles from the district of Bow.

8.No physical description of Aaron Kominski

“Witnesses” had seen four of the five victims in the company of a man within minutes of the murder of that victim.

Rarely did the description given by one “witness” match that given by another. 

Thus, the men were described as follows:

  • Age: middle-aged; about 40; about 35; about 34 or 35; about 30; between 25 and 30; about 28.
  • Height: 5’; 5’5”; 5’6”; 5’7”, about 5’; no taller than 5’; 5’9”.
  • Build: stout; broad shouldered.
  • Complexion: fair; pale; dark; had a blotchy skin.
  • Face: clean-shaven; had a moustache described as black; brown; dark; fair; reddish; “carroty”; turned up at the edges.
  • Hair: fair; black.
  • Eyes and lashes: dark; fair.
  • Clothes: long dark overcoat buttoned up; long dark overcoat hanging open; shabby overcoat; overcoat trimmed with astrakhan; morning suit; greyish jacket; dark trousers; light waistcoat; shirt with blue cotton collar; tie with golden horseshoe pin; long golden chain hanging over chest; reddish scarf or kerchief knotted around the neck.
  • Hat: brown deerstalker (the fictional private investigator Sherlock Holmes wore one); black billycock (bowler hat); hard felt hat; soft felt hat; dark felt hat; dark felt hat turned up in the middle; cap with a small sailor-like peak; grey cloth cap; small skull cap.
  • General appearance: looked Jewish; looked foreign (this meant Jewish); shabby; genteel; affluent.

The above descriptions were not only contradictory but would have fitted more than half of the men then in Britain and almost all the men of Whitechapel.

Furthermore, as Aaron Kosminski had an eating problem, he would not have been stout.

Therefore, we have no idea what Aaron Kosminski looked like.

For that matter, we have no reliable description of what Jack the Ripper looked like.

Without reasonable doubt

Seeing we have no physical description of Aaron Kosminsky, and the only misdemeanor he had committed was that he had not muzzled a dog he had taken for a walk, he cannot be identified as Jack the Ripper.

Therefore, in 1888, like indeed too today, with exactly what we have on Aaron Kosminski, in other words no DNA, no court would be able to establish without reasonable doubt that he was Jack the Ripper.

 Accordingly, despite my admiration for the dedicated work Edwards had put into trying to identify Jack the Ripper, I say that we still do not know the identify of the man who had slaughtered the five “Unfortunates.”

So it will remain unless someone somewhere finds in a box in an attic a document yellow and brittle with age written by an ancestor confessing to having been Jack the Ripper.


Terrorism in Paris

0
0

Charlie Hebdo attack

(Photo AP)

While protests in Muslim countries against France are increasing rapidly, the French president, government and people continue to support the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo whose editor and several members of its staff were gunned down by two Islamist terrorists this January 2015. Also gunned down on the same day but at a kosher supermarket were four Jewish men. Meanwhile, Paris’s stores, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and museums are deserted  while 5,000 policemen and 10,000 soldiers have been deployed to guard government buildings, synagogues, mosques, Jewish and Muslim schools, and shopping malls and department stores like Galaries Lafayette.

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins 

Parisians woke on the morning of Wednesday, January 7, 2015, to an icy fog descending over the rooftops.

Two days previously, on Monday, the children had returned to school after the Christmas vacation, their parents having returned to work too. All already having had to cope with crowded buses and underground rail cars, and bumper to bumper road traffic for 48 hours, the fact that the weather was not looking so good, did not cheer anyone.

Worse was to come.

At around 11:45 am news began to circulate through the City of Light that a terrorist attack had just a few minutes earlier taken place at the offices of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo.  Several people had been shot: some might be dead.

The perpetrators -- it was not certain how many there were -- were hooded and dressed in black, and had shouted Allahu Akbar (Arabic for "God is Great") as they ran to a parked car and sped from the killing scene.

At the end of the day the death toll would stand at 12.

The following day -- Thursday, January 8 -- someone else would be gunned down, and the day after that -- Friday, January 9 -- another four people would be gunned down.

The total of dead having risen to 17, the three-day terrorist attack would be the worst terrorist attack France had suffered in 54 years. The worst was on Sunday, June 18, 1961, when a paramilitary organisation (the OAS - Organisation de l’armée secrete) opposed to the independence of the French colony of Algeria had detonated a bomb on a packed Strasbourg-Paris train killing 28 people and injuring over a hundred.

In June 1961 France and Algeria were at war -- the Algerian War (1954-1962).

In January 2015 France was not at war with any country. France was in armed conflict, yes, with the various radical Islamist groups, among these, ISIL, ISIS, IS, Boko Haram, Daesh and also al-Qaeda although it had been silent since the death of its leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011. And France was resisting through trial and imprisonment those in the country who either verbally or with acts of violence supported such radical Islamist groups.

But France was at peace.

Festive Season lights were still flickering along the boulevards and there was a bonne année -- a happy new year -- to look forward to.

Shattering that peace

At 1 p.m. on that Wednesday, January 7, the fog having lifted and a cold but bright sun shining, the news of the terrorist attack having broken, an atypical silence fell over Paris. The Parisians were scared. Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, in office since April 2014, had announced that France’s already existing Vigipirate anti-terror surveillance plan had been raised to its highest level of alert attentat -- terror alert.

The terrorists -- it still was not known if two or three gunman had attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices -- were on the run. They were dangerous and were not to be confronted. A number to call was given should they be spotted.

The story was that two gunmen had burst into a room where the satirical weekly was having its first editorial meeting of the year. The journalists in the room that included the editor, Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, 48, and in the post since 2009, having heard something which they had interpreted as Christmas fire-crackers going off outside in the corridor, thought that the two men in black, masked and wearing bullet-proof vests, and brandishing firearms was a prank the staff was playing on them. Then, one of the gunmen had called out the editor’s name and when Charb responded, the gunmen had shot him in the head.

Shot dead in that room were not only Charb but eight of his editorial staff. One was a woman, Elsa Cayat, 54, a psychoanalyst and columnist. Also dead in the room was Charb’s bodyguard, police officer Franck Brinsolaro of the Police Protection Service, 49, who had been assigned to protect Charb 24/7 when in 2013 al-Qaeda had put him on its list for assassination.

Also shot dead was a maintenance worker, Frédéric Boisseau, 42, from the company Sodexo, who was sitting at the reception desk when the two killers had burst into the building. It was the shot fired at him which the editorial staff had heard.

The two gunmen, their murderous work done, had then run from the building to a small black parked car and in the police chase which had followed the two gunman, having jumped from their car, had shot dead a police officer, Ahmed Merabet, 42, a Muslim of Algerian descent.

 Officer Merabet’s killing was filmed from the window of an apartment overlooking the scene.

Shown on television and on-line he was seen lying, already wounded, on the sidewalk, holding up his left arm in a pleading gesture as one of the gunmen aimed and fired an AK-47 at his head.

A short exchange of words between the gunman and the officer was recorded as follows:

Gunman: “Did you want to kill me?”

Officer Merabet: “No, it’s good, chief.”

The scene of the actual shooting of the officer was cut from the visual report, but it later circulated on-line causing a degree of debate because there was no damage to the officer to be seen, not even blood, and gun experts pointed out that a shot from an AK-47 would blow anyone’s head into pieces.

There were also reports which were later dropped that Officer Merabet had identified himself to the gunman as being a Muslim.

Office Merabet lying lifeless on the sidewalk, the two terrorists, had run back to their car, calling out, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad! We have killed Charlie Hebdo!”

Incredible as it will appear, the gunmen, their car in no way powerful, had then thrown off the chasing police vehicle and having abandoned their car a while later, they had hijacked another, forcing the driver out at gunpoint, and had disappeared into the late winter afternoon.

In the night which followed dozens of shocked Parisians holding lit candles or flowers stood as near to the Charlie Hebdo building as the police would allow them:  officers from the police’s forensics sector were inside and around the building gathering evidence.

As for the other Parisians and the few Festive Season tourists still in the city, they stayed indoors. They feared another attack because military experts had pointed out that the killers must have received military training somewhere, perhaps in Syria or Iraq, because they had carried out their killing with military precision, and that they were bound to attack again. One military expert pointed out that there must be a third gunman who had waited in the car.  “They would not have left the car unattended,” he said.

By then the two terrorist gunmen had been named: one of them had either deliberately dropped his identification card in the car or it had fallen from a pocket without him having been aware of it.

The two were brothers: Chérif Kouachi, 32, and Saïd Kouachi, 34. Both were French-born of Algerian descent.

Another name was released. Mourad Hamyd, 18, was said to have been either with the two gunmen and had waited for them in their car, or he had given them logistic assistance.

At midnight Hamyd accompanied by his father walked into a police station: he was at school while the killing was going on and this was corroborated by his teacher and the pupils in his class. He was in his final year at school, and there being no reason for his arrest, he was released.

As for the two Kouachi brothers, at 10 o’clock on the morning after their attack on Charlie Hebdo they would pull up at a gas station 30 miles north of Paris. Holding up the attendant, who would describe them to police, they demanded gas and food from its small self-service and left with the cash the man had.

 Je suis Charlie

That day -- Thursday, January 8 -- Parisians began to hold up a white-on-black slogan Je suis Charlie - "I am Charlie."  They were doing so not only in sympathy for the victims but also in deviance to show that France was a democracy.

Television networks adopted the slogan too.

The slogan was created by Joachim Roncin, an artist and music journalist with the free magazine Stylist.

When even France’s Prime Minister, Manuel Vals, carried a sign with the slogan into an emergency meeting of the cabinet at the presidential Élysées Palace, Roncin told the media that he had created the sign because, “I just got the idea because I’ve been reading the series of children’s books created by the English illustrator Martin Handord with my son.”

He had tweeted the slogan already at 12:52 p.m. the previous day.

The series of children’s books he was referring to is titled Where’s Wally? in the United States and in Canada as Where’s Waldo? Here in France the series is titled Où est Charlie? -Where is Charlie?

Charlie Hebdo got its name in November 1970 after the then French government had banned a satirical magazine entitled Hara-Kiri which had joked about the death of the World War Two hero, General Charles de Gaulle, who had held the office of President of France twice in the period from 1959/1969. Some of the Hara-Kiri staff had then launched another satirical magazine under the title Charlie Hebdo. The "Charlie" derived both from the cartoon character Charlie Brown from Peanuts and from General Charles de Gaulle. Hebdo is short for hebdomadaire -- weekly.

Further killing

The Parisians despite not admitting it when foreign reporters pushed microphones into their faces continued to be certain that there were going to be further terrorist attacks in their city. Announcements in the Métro underground rail network, in French and in English, to report suspicious behavior and parcels which looked abandoned, did not calm their nerves.

Indeed, when early on Thursday morning news came that there had been another fatal shooting, they were sure that they were in for a very rough time.

Clarissa Jean-Philippe, 27, a trainee policewoman from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, was attending a minor traffic accident in the community of Montrouge southwest of Paris when a man dressed in black and wearing a bulletproof vest but who was not masked, jumped from a small car and while running towards her blasted her with what an eyewitness described as “not a big gun because he held it with just one hand.”

As the policewoman was with the municipal police she was unarmed. (Municipal police fall under the local town halls and they are mainly traffic controllers and keepers of the peace, having to summon the state police when a situation looks as if it going to get out of control.)

The wounded policewoman on the ground, two male passersby tackled the shooter as he was running back to his small car. One of the men, a street sweeper, was in turn gunned down.

In the confusion which followed, the shooter raced off, the car to be found abandoned later in the day.

The seriously-wounded policewoman and street sweeper were rushed to hospital. The life of the latter could be saved. The policewoman’s life could not.

The confusion which had been at the killing scene -- a bystander had described it as “panic” -- continued, the police trying to establish whether the shooter had been involved in the car accident to which the policewoman had been summoned, and indeed whether there had been more than one shooter. The police could not or would not say whether there was a connection between the Charlie Hebdo and the Montrouge shootings. Media reports did however describe the Montrouge shooter as of “African origin.”

On the morning of Friday, two days after the fatal Charlie Hebdo shooting and 24 hours after that of the policewoman, a cell-phone call to the police alerted them to a shooting and hostage taking at a kosher supermarket, the Hyper Cacher, on the eastern border of Paris at Porte de Vincennes. The caller was in the store and had grabbed the opportunity to call the police when the attention of the man who had just then burst into the store had been averted.  The man, dressed in black trousers and a short-sleeved gray t-shirt and wearing a bullet-proof vest but was not masked, was brandishing several firearms. He was of African origin.

Instantly, the Paris police unit RAID (Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion - Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence), who had also been called out to the two previous shootings, were on site, and also the FIPN (Force d’intervention de la police nationale -- Intervention Force of the National Police). They blocked off the road, halted public transport running through the area, locked down the schools, and ordered all shops in the area to close. The police also ordered all shops in Paris’s Jewish quarter, the Marais, to close.

Earlier that morning Paris’s Préfecture de Police (Police Headquarters) had issued a Call For Witnesses. The police were looking for two individuals: a man and a woman, considered armed and dangerous. They were wanted in connection with the shooting in Montrouge.

The two were Amedy Coulibaly, 33, of Malian descent, and Hayat Boumeddiene, 27, of Algerian descent. Boumeddienne was Coulibaly’s common-law wife: the couple were religiously married, but in France a marriage is only legal if it had been performed by a mayor at a town hall, so French law did not consider the two legally husband and wife.

Soon the police confirmed that the man holding the people hostage in the store was Coulibaly. The latter had identified himself as such to those he was holding hostage. Whether Boumeddienne was in the store with him the police again could not, or would not, say. 

The police reported that at least one person had been shot dead when the assailant had burst into the store which was busy in the wake of the start of the Jewish Sabbath.

No sooner had the news been reported that another terrorist attack was under way in Paris, than news broke that the two Kouachi brothers had been involved in a shoot-out with police and that the two were holed up in a printing warehouse in the small community of Dammartin-en-Goële (8,000 inhabitants), 22 miles northeast from Paris and six miles from Charles de Gaulle International Airport -- and not far from where they had held up the gas station. Saïd, the younger of the two, had been slightly wounded in the neck.

 The two were holding one or two hostages according to reports.

At 5 p.m., night having fallen, a cold wind sweeping over the countryside and the temperature hardly above freezing, heavily-armed police stormed both the printing warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goële and the kosher supermarket in Paris.

Some reporters said later that the order to the police to attack was a joint decision of President Hollande, Prime Minister Vals and Interior Minister Cazeneuve and they had made the decision because the two Kouachi brothers had burst from the warehouse’s entrance, guns blazing.

For the Dammartin-en-Goële attack the militarized Gendarmerie was in charge, its GIGN (Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale -- National Gendarmerie Intervention Group) in action. The GIGN is the Gendarmerie’s equivalent of the state police’s RAID. Assisting the GIGN was the FIPN already in action in Paris at the Porte de Vincennes.

The Kouachi brothers went down under a hail of fire and in Paris the moment the police stormed the kosher supermarket making an ear-splitting noise with explosions, Coulibaly, in full battle dress, an AKS-74U assault rifle in his hands, sprinted to the glass doors of the entrance, but went down instantly under FIPN fire.

Inside the store four hostages, all Jewish men, lay dead. Coulibaly had shot them when he had burst into the store that morning.

Some of the survivors had hidden in a walk-in freezer in the basement having been led there by one of the store’s employees, Lassana Bathily, 24. The latter a Mali immigrant, and a Muslim, is today a hero because having seen the hostages safe in the freezer which he had switched off, he crawled through a tiny service exit and ran to the police who at first thought he was a terrorist and hurled him down to the ground, sitting on him to handcuff him. He told the police what the interior of the shop looked like and even drew maps of the interior for them.

Bathily has for some years been trying unsuccessfully to obtain French nationality. He has now been given French nationality and his new passport will be handed to him in a short televised ceremony.

“Following the acts of bravery by Mr. Bathily during the hostage taking in the Hyper Casher market on January 9, the Interior Ministry has fast-tracked his request for citizenship,” read a statement issued by the Interior Ministry.

One hostage Bathily had led to the basement had his baby with him. Another had his young child with him.

A few days after their ordeal, having recovered slightly, some of the hostages spoke to the media. Those who had been in the basement freezer told of how they had all desperately tried to keep the two children from crying so as not to alert the gunman of their presence. They also told of how Coulibaly had, on entering the store, asked one of the store’s customers what his name was. The man had obligingly told Coulibaly his first name. Coulibaly then said that he wanted to know his surname and when the man told him, he cold-bloodedly shot him in the head.

On the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack the non-fatal shooting of a jogger in a park outside the community of Fontenay-aux-Roses, southwest of Paris, had received little media attention. At 8 that night the jogger, 32, had knocked on the door of a house and had asked the homeowner to summon the police because he had been shot: he was shot in the shoulder and he did not know his assailant but he told the police that he was un type européen -- white. Because of that description the police did not link the shooting to the two Kouachi brothers, and indeed not later to Coulibaly. Now though the shooting has been linked to Coulibaly because ballistic tests conducted on five bullet cartridges found at the site in Fontenay-aux-Roses matched the Russian automatic Tokarev pistol which Coulibaly had used in the supermarket and which he had left behind along with the arsenal of firearms and firebombs he had in his possession.

Therefore, the Fontenay-aux-Roses assailant is still being sought by the police.

Boumeddienne, Coulibaly’s common law wife, was also nowhere to be found, but she was soon traced to Istanbul airport. On Friday, January 2, the airport’s short circuit spy cameras had filmed her and a man checking through customs after having arrived on a flight from Madrid, Spain. The two -- he has been identified -- are now thought to have made their way from Istanbul to join ISIS in Syria.

Reasons

While the French are asking themselves why some young first generation French hate them so much, the family backgrounds of the two Kouachis and Coulibaly receive much media attention.

Coulibaly, born just outside Paris, was the only son to a Malian immigrant family of 10 children. At the age of 17 he had started off on a life of armed robbery and drug dealing for which he had gone to jail, having met Chérif Kouachi during one of his incarcerations, then becoming friends also with Saïd Kouachi.

In a video released on-line on the morning of Sunday, January 11, he pledged allegiance to ISIS -- Islamic State of Iraq and Syria -- and claimed that the attacks had been coordinated by himself and his “brothers” in “retribution” for what is done to “Palestinians in Gaza and Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.”

He said, rather incomprehensibly: “What we are doing is completely legitimate given what they are doing. You cannot attack and not expect retribution so you are playing the victim as if you don’t understand what’s happening.”

He continued: “The brothers of our team were split into two groups. I went out a bit against the police. If we did things a bit together and a bit separately it was to have more impact.”

The two Kouachis, born in Paris’s working-class 10tharrondissement (district), had a youth of smoking pot, drinking beer, making and dancing to rap music, and of dead-end jobs and jail for hold-ups. In jail Cherif, the younger brother, had become radicalized with resulted in another jail term when he was arrested on his way to Charles de Gaulle Airport to fly to Syria. Saïd too had become radicalised, but he got married and fathered two children.

 The police having somehow decided that the two brothers were no longer a danger to society when Saïd got married and fathered two children, had stopped keeping on an eye on them.

 It has now been reported that in the time when police were no longer watching them they had set off for Yemen where they had received military training, training which they had made use of in their attack on Charlie Hebdo.

According to some media reports during the attack on the magazine they had said that they were with “al-Qaeda in Yemen.” It is thought that they were referring to another Islamist movement - AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) which has after the death of Osama Bin Laden been under the control of Nasser al-Wuhayshi, 38, of Yemen. (http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2013/08/aqap_emir_also_serve.php)

AQAP has since confirmed in a video entitled “A message regarding the blessed battle of Paris” that it had through the two Kouachis carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Said one of its leaders, Nasr al-Ansi, in the video: “We, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the messenger of Allah.”

That the two Kouachis were linked to al-Qaeda while Coulibaly was linked to ISIS, yet they had coordinated their terrorist attacks, has confirmed that the various Islamist groups despite being rivals do work together. They are rivals in that all are competing for the same funding sources and are vying with each other to win followers among the same nationalities.

Police are still investigating who had filmed the Coulibaly video, but as he referred to the shooting of the policewoman, and indeed to the Charlie Hebdo attack, it was filmed after those attacks. In other words on or around Thursday night.

The French and religion

Since France’s 1789 Revolution and its Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen– "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," freedom of religion has been guaranteed French citizens. Reinforced in 1905 with the "Separation of the Churches and the State" law it means that in France the Church has no right in State affairs and the State has no right in Church affairs. The Church in question is the Roman Catholic Church, which along with Judaism, were the only religions practised at the time of the French Revolution.

France is therefore a secular country: here in France the word laïque is used. This means that France’s laïcite -- separation of church and state -- allows French citizens total freedom regarding religion.  

Therefore, today in France a child receives religious instruction only if the child attends a Catholic or Jewish or Muslim school. In fact, if a teacher in a State school speaks to a child of God the teacher can be dismissed. It also means that France’s head of state is not allowed to deliver a eulogy or sermon in any place of religion - Catholic church, Protestant temple, mosque or synagogue.

Also because of the country’s laïcité excessive signs of religion -- like a woman wearing the hijab -- are forbidden in France.  This is something France’s Muslims find difficult to understand and obey.

(Despite that the classification of people by their religion, or the color of their skin, is also not allowed, a 2011 survey showed that Christianity is the dominant religion in the country with 44 percent of the French being Christian. Of these 41 percent are Roman Catholic, 1 percent Protestant, and the remaining 2 percent belongs to the other Christian churches like the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches. The percentage of agnostics is 29 percent and the percentage of atheists is 13 percent. Two per cent is Muslims and 1 percent is Buddhist, and 1 percent is Jewish, and the remaining 10 percent are French who say that they are not one thing or another.)

Of the Muslims of whom there are about 6 million, 75 percent are believers but only 41 percent practice their religion.  (France had experienced an influx of Muslims after the independence of her African colonies which had begun in the 1950s.)

No one knows what percentage of the 41 percent thinks that Charlie Hebdo should have be silenced. In other words the government should have banned it. Or ban it now.

Always had only a small following

Charlie Hebdo has been losing money for some time. A few months ago it even appealed to its readers -- a measly 60,000 -- for donations in order to keep going. Having started publication in 1969 it already had to close for lack of funds in 1981 but had managed to restart publication in 1992.

Never popular, often disliked, the weekly featured cartoons and jokes, no individual and no religion, untouchable.

In 2014 Charlie Hebdo had a go at President François Hollande after the French gossip magazine Closer had published on its cover photos of him visiting a French actress at night when he had a live-in lover, the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, known then as France’s “First Lady” and she receiving an allowance from the State as such.

Closer had snapped the President riding pillion on a scooter to an apartment he and the actress were using as a love nest and he was wearing a crash helmet as the law required and which conveniently made it possible for him to hide his face from passersby when out on his nightly love shenanigans.

Charlie Hebdo’s cover showed a cartoon of a topless Trierweiler holding up a banner that read phallocratie -- male chauvinism -- and over her naked torso were written the words "Fuck the Macho."

Another 2014 Charlie Hebdo cover after Closer’s revelation showed President Hollande in a suit but his penis in the air and the penis saying, “Moi, Président” referring to how during his presidential campaign in 2012 he had always begun speeches with, “Moi, Président” -- When I am President.

The news weekly Nouvel Observateur had then asked its readers whether the satirical magazine had not gone too far and its readers had massively replied “oui” - yes.

The Prophet Muhammad and Islam were however Charlie Hebdo’s pet subjects for ridicule.

In July 2013 the magazine’s cover showed the Prophet Muhammad holding the Koran in front of him for protection against bullets being fired at him but a bullet hitting him all he same. Written on the red cover were the words, “Tuerie en Egypte” and “Le Coran c’est de la merde” and “Ça n’arrête pas les balles” an arrow under the last pointing to the Koran meaning that the Koran could not stop bullets. (Translation: "Death in Egypt, The Koran is Shit, and This Doesn’t Stop Bullets.”)

Christianity also received its fair share of ridicule. As recently as December of 2014, the cover showed a spread-eagled Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus under the heading, “Le veritable histoire du Petit Jésus” - The True story of Little Jesus.

In 2011, because of such cartoons, the magazine’s offices were firebombed and in 2012 its website was hacked and when the magazine republished the cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten the Great Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France failed in their bid to sue the magazine for blasphemy, the French court having ruled that the cartoons had not incited religious hatred.

Now, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo and on Hyper Kosher and a great show of solidarity manifested on Sunday, January 11, when 3.7 million people and 50 world leaders, 1.5 million of the people in Paris, had marched in France holding up Je suis Charlie signs, a few voices are beginning to be heard and they ask if Charlie Hebdo had not gone too far with its cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad: If there is not a point where satire stops and disrespect begins.

Burial and a new issue of Charlie Hebdo

Those who had lost their lives have been laid to rest.

The Jews were buried in Israel. The Charlie Hebdo staff in their respective villages or towns. The policemen in theirs: they had been awarded France’s highest honour, the Légion d’honneur -- Legion of Honor.

In the darkness of the night of Friday, January 16, Saïd Kouachi was buried in the cemetery of the town of Reims where he had lived with his wife and two children. His wife and mother were at the graveside: both had condemned his act.

Chérif Kouachi was buried on Saturday, January 17, in the cemetery of the Paris community of Gennevilliers, the last place where he had lived. He was also buried after night had fallen. Not one of his relatives or friends had attended his funeral.

Neither the mayor of Gennevilliers or of Reims wanted the two terrorists buried in their communities but French law forces a mayor to allow someone who had lived in the community to be buried in its cemetery.

The two graves will remain unmarked to prevent them being vandalised or from becoming Muslim shrines.

No one knows where Coulibaly will be buried, but there is a rumor that his body will be flown to Mali to be buried there.

Charlie Hebdo’s post-attack edition, published on Wednesday, January 14, sold out within 10 minutes of its appearances on the shelves at 6 in the morning. The magazine’s surviving staff had printed one million copies for French distribution only and these having been sold out immediately they had another two million printed. When those had also sold out within hours of being put on the shelves, it was announced that another four million in five languages will be printed. The magazine is selling for €3 ($3.50).

The magazine yet again had a go at the Prophet Mohammad. He is on the green cover, crying and holding up a Je suis Charlie sign. Above him is written, "Tout est pardonné"- All is forgiven.

On Sunday, January 18, France’s Sunday paper Journal du Dimanche reported that in a poll they had held 42 percent of French people thought that cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad should not be published. However, 57 percent thought that they should. One per cent had no opinion.

Respecting France’s 1789 "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" the paper did not give a breakdown of the religion of those they had polled.

And now?

While mosques and synagogues, and Jewish schools, are guarded by heavily-armed police and soldiers, kosher and halal shops are not and they are being vandalised. The words "sale juif" --dirty Jew - have been painted on some of the kosher ones and cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad on some of the halal ones. A doctor known in his village as a Muslim but who is married to a Catholic woman even found a pig’s ear on their front lawn. He told a television network that their little daughter cries at night because she is scared that terrorists will come to kill them.

Searching For A Link To A Broken Lifeline

0
0

Fifteen years after the rape and murder of high school senior Noa Eyal, a man was arrested on a charge of domestic violence and was forced to provide a DNA sample. A year later, in 2014, that sample led Israeli investigators not to arrest the man, but to charge his son with premeditated murder, sodomy, and rape.

by Deborah Rubin Fields

February 1998 found middle class Israeli senior high school students cherishing their last month or two of relative freedom. The pressure to study for multiple spring matriculation tests had not yet fully begun and tests for post-graduation compulsory Israeli military service were not quite yet in high gear. So Noa Eyal and her boyfriend Eldad Bribrom decided to take in an evening movie at Jerusalem's Cinematheque theater. When the film (Wild at Heart, curiously about a couple on the run) ended, they took a bus to the center of town to catch buses back to their respective neighborhoods; Noa to the north Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot and Eldad to the close-by town of Maale Adumin.

Just after Eldad boarded his bus by the Davidka Square, things went bad. Noa apparently missed the last Egged Bus Number 36 back to Ramot. [Sidebar: In Judaism, the science of assigning numeric value to Hebrew letters is called gematria or numerology. In Hebrew, the number 36 equals or translates into the word chai or“life,” times two. (Chai is made up of the Hebrew letter het which is equal to eight and the Hebrew letter yud which is equal to 10. Hence, the sum 18 forms the word for “life.” The number 36 would therefore symbolically mean life, multiplied by two.) Thus, in a symbolic way, bus number 36 would have been Noa's lifeline.]

Maybe she considered the parental instruction many gave their adolescent children: "Don't take rides with anyone you don't know. If you don't make the bus, take a taxi or call home. We'll come for you with the car." Or maybe she used the magic words “nothing will happen to me” to envelope herself in a bubble of security. We'll never know what Noa was thinking because the next day a large search party consisting of friends, volunteers and police found her brutally raped and murdered in a wooded area of her neighborhood. Her attacker had apparently hit her on the head with a rock and knifed her to death. Her hands and mouth were found taped. Her clothes, including the bra one of her girlfriends found, were scattered. 

Despite 15 years of intensive police work, Israeli investigators could not find a match for the DNA semen sample extracted from Noa's body. All this changed, however, in the past year. And the way they found Daniel Nachmani, the suspected killer, was a bit of serendipity.

In 2013, the father of the accused was arrested on charges of domestic violence. Following standard procedures, Israeli police fingerprinted the suspect's parent and took a DNA sample for the offender index. Unexpectedly, the sample revealed a similarity to the database (known as the forensic index) DNA sample taken from Noa's body.

This prompted police to look for murder suspects within the father's family (Note: One half of a person's DNA profile comes from the person's father, the other half is inherited from the person's mother.) Police put the currently accused individual under surveillance, a decision likely reinforced by the discovery that four years prior to Noa's murder, the suspect--while still considered a minor--had apparently raped an 11-year-old tourist. However, because of his then juvenile status, his conviction was ascribed to indecent acts rather than rape. For this “lesser” crime, he was convicted to serve a minimal jail sentence.   

When the watched suspect spat on the sidewalk near downtown, the Jerusalem's police investigation unit’s undercover police managed to collect a saliva sample for DNA testing. This DNA sample was later compared with a DNA sample taken from the water cup the suspect used during his subsequent investigation. These samples matched the crime scene DNA sample.

Armed with this information, on November 11, 2014, the State Attorney officially charged the present suspect, Daniel Nachmani, with premeditated murder, sodomy and rape. According to Yehudah Shoshan, lawyer of the accused, while Nachmani is cooperating with police investigators, he nevertheless denies the charges against him.

Nachmani was now 38 years old.  He has been married for several years. His two daughters were already in their early teens. He still lived in Jerusalem and worked in a local garage as a car electrician. Ironically, the vice-president of Jerusalem's Magistrates' Court judge spotted the suspect at the courthouse and expressed astonishment at finding his Honda car electrician in police custody.

Nachmani's friends likewise have been shocked by his arrest. They immediately set about to raise money to help his unemployed wife. 

When Noa was killed, Nachmani was living in another section of Ramot, a few blocks from her family's home. The suspect's cellphone number was one of those listed as being in the geographic area of the murder scene.

In addition, soon after the murder, a taxi driver came forward to inform police he was parked near the Davidka Square bus stop on Sunday night, February 22, 1998, the night of the murder. Under hypnosis, he was able to produce (unfortunately out of sequence) the numbers of the license plate of a small white car in which Noa apparently accepted a ride. The cab driver said the back of the car had stickers, including the sticker of an elite Israeli army unit. The cabbie maintained the car was a white Ford Escort. Much to the chagrin of both the police and the family, a newspaper leaked this story. In any case, there has been some thinking that the car was actually a similar looking Renault.

In the early investigation, police looked for two witnesses the cab driver claimed were standing close to where Noa stood waiting for her bus. These two witnesses were supposed to be young, ultra-orthodox students. Although police checked numerous synagogues and religious schools (yeshivot), these two were never found and never came forward.

Over the years, a few other stories related to the murder investigation have been released to the public. Early on, for example, a person unknown to Noa's father called him claiming he'd seen passengers scrapping stickers off the back window of a white Ford Escort. The father referred this information to the police, but nothing concrete came of it.

Two women in a Tel Aviv bar informed the police that a young male had come into their favorite bar and had begun talking about the murder in a way that made them suspicious. However, he never returned to the bar.

In a further attempt to close in on the murderer, an Israeli television station even ran a program re-creating the details of the killing. But this unsolved murder show did not bring in any more leads.

If this Israeli murder story has a familiar ring to it, it might be because the familial DNA testing Israeli police used resembles the testing administered in the sensational American Grim Sleeper case. In the Israeli case under discussion, the “sins of the father” led to tracking down the son. In the California-based case, by contrast, it was the DNA of the son that raised suspicions when the dates of a series of California murders were applied. The son Christopher Franklin had his DNA tested following his conviction on a felony weapons charge. His DNA sample eventually led police to follow his father. They managed to get a DNA sample from a piece of pizza the father had thrown away. Lonnie Franklin's DNA matched DNA from the crime scenes. Based on this match, police arrested the father at his home. He was charged in the Grim Sleeper murders of 10 south Los Angeles women. Franklin has been held for several years already, as his defense lawyers continue to get trial delays.

The Knesset, Israel's parliament, only enacted the DNA data bank law in 2007. In preparing the legislation, Israeli lawmakers first looked at the data banks which already had been legally established in Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Ireland, UK, Canada, Australia and the United States. Israel's law most closely resembles the UK precedent.

Armed with academic degrees in biology and biochemistry, Israel police Commander Ashira Zamir began work on establishing Israel's national DNA data bank in 2003, four years before the data bank was made into law. DNA information had been collected since 1996, but had not been computerized. Samples were recorded in individual files. Today, Chief Superintendent Aliza Raziel heads Israel's DNA laboratory. Working for her are three female senior officers each of whom has a master degree in either pharmacology, biology or chemistry.

Once the law went into effect, these file samples were entered into the computerized data bank. After that step was completed, police began collecting biological samples from jailed prisoners, suspects, accused and convicted individuals. Each year, 55,000 DNA samples are entered into the Israeli database. The current database is said to contain 300,000 samples.

Israeli law does not allow DNA sampling in all cases. Moreover, if an individual does not want to give a sample, police may overrule the person's objection by taking a hair sample. Permissible situations include murder cases, attempted murder cases, drug cases, sexual offenses, property or state security. As the law stands today, police are not allowed to take a sample in cases involving knife possession, theft, fraud, threatening and gambling.

In the case of Noa Eyal, the disqualification of knife possession worked against the police, as

the current accused, Daniel Nachmani had previously been arrested for possessing a knife.

In 2002, the National Institute of Justice stated, “Criminal justice professionals are discovering that advancements in DNA technology are breathing new life into old, cold, or unsolved criminal cases” (Using DNA to Solve Cold Cases). In this regard, Noa's father Dr. Avi Eyal recently commented, “The evil now has a face.”

A trial date has yet to be set for the accused, Daniel Nachmani.

INCEST, MURDER AND FLIGHT: THE EASTMILN TRAGEDY

0
0

Four months after his marriage to a beautiful 19-year-old, middle-aged Thomas Ogilvie was dead. His younger brother and the young widow were suspected of conspiring to poison him with arsenic.

by Martin Baggoley

Thomas Ogilvie, a wealthy bachelor in his late 40s and the eldest of three brothers, lived with his widowed mother, Isobel, on the family estate at Eastmiln in Forfar, Scotland. In 1764 he proposed to the beautiful 19-year-old Katherine Nairne, daughter of the late Sir Thomas Nairne. She agreed to marry him and it was believed by both families that at the time of their engagement they were genuinely in love with each other.

That may have been so, but a few days before the wedding ceremony, which took place on January 31, 1765, the groom’s brother, Lieutenant Patrick Ogilvie of the 89th Regiment of Foot arrived at Eastmiln to convalesce. Patrick had suffered a life threatening illness while serving in the East Indies and the prognosis was not good, but if his health improved, he intended rejoining his regiment.

The youngest Ogilvie brother, Alexander, was not present at the nuptials. He was estranged from the family following his marriage to the daughter of an Edinburgh porter, a woman of a much lower social class, who was considered to be unsuitable for him and unacceptable to his mother and brothers.

Thomas was a highly respected member of the community and although it was known he had suffered poor health for some time, there was widespread dismay when it was learned that he had died on June 6, a little more than four months after his marriage. However, there were those who were not surprised. Shortly after the wedding, rumours began to circulate regarding Katherine’s relationship with the lieutenant, which suggested they were lovers and  these rumours now took on a new significance.

Hints of Incest

Several people living nearby had reported seeing the couple embracing and kissing passionately and the possibility that they were on intimate terms was given credence by John Gilloch. Hired to repair items of furniture in Patrick’s bedroom, John arrived mid-morning and although the lieutenant was in bed he told John to start work. After a few minutes, Katherine appeared at the door and Patrick beckoned her to him. As she sat on the bed, John saw her place her hand lovingly on Patrick’s chest, which she caressed for some time before standing as though to leave. As she did so, the naked Patrick kicked away the covers, wrapped a sheet around himself and caught Katherine at the door, where they kissed.

Katherine Campbell, Elizabeth Sturrock and Ann Samplon were servants in the Ogilvie home and they too had apparently seen  the couple behaving in what they felt was a shameful manner and seemingly not caring that they were seen doing so. Katherine Campbell slept in the room below her new mistress’s bedroom and was convinced that some nights, when Thomas was absent on estate business, she heard Patrick enter the room, followed by the sounds of the couple making love. Elizabeth Sturrock had seen the couple in bed together and Ann Samplon was certain she heard Thomas accuse Patrick of seducing his wife and ordering him out of the house.

Suspicions of Murder

Katherine Campbell became so concerned that she took the unusual step for a servant of confronting the lieutenant. He assured her that his brother had asked him to be affectionate towards his wife when he was away. He also insisted that the argument overheard by Ann Samplon concerned a family financial matter.  He was aware of the rumours but insisted the gossips and the servants had misinterpreted what they had seen or heard and that the relationship with his sister-in-law was platonic.  It was true he was about to leave the house,  but this stemmed from his wish to spend a few weeks travelling throughout Scotland before returning to his regiment, and not because he was being ejected by Thomas.

Alexander Ogilvie arrived at Eastmiln the day after Thomas’s death and became the first person to openly accuse the couple of incest and murder. He prevented a burial from taking place and demanded that an investigation be held. The responsibility for this was put in the hands of George Campbell, the Sheriff Substitute of Forfar.

The servants and a number of neighbors were interviewed, together with Anne Clarke, the niece of Isobel Ogilvie. She had arrived at Eastmiln a few days after the wedding and stayed on, saying she wished to mediate between the family and the estranged Alexander. However, what was not realized at the time was that Alexander had deserted his wife and was living with his cousin Anne in an Edinburgh brothel.

Anne claimed to have witnessed Patrick caressing Katherine’s breasts and to have seen them in bed together on two occasions.  She had reported her concerns to her Aunt Isobel, who told Thomas and it was this, she insisted, that led to the argument, heard by Ann Samplon, despite Patrick’s protestations otherwise.  Anne Clarke further advised the Sheriff that she overheard Katherine tell Thomas that she hated him and if she had some poison she would happily murder him.

Those who believed in the innocence of Patrick and Katherine insisted that no credence could be given to Anne Clarke’s account and that she should not be permitted to testify at the trial. She was accused of being a notorious liar and a common whore, who had lived for the previous three and a half years in a noted Edinburgh bawdy house.

These supporters were convinced that Anne and Alexander were the real culprits, who had been motivated by greed. They were accused of taking advantage of the rumors surrounding Patrick and Katherine’s relationship and conspired to murder Thomas and then implicate the pair, thereby ensuring their executions. Given that Thomas had long suffered from poor health and it was assumed he would die childless in the not too distant future and Patrick’s more or less permanent absence on military duties and his more recent failing health, Alexander had been content to wait for what he believed would be a relatively short time to gain control of the family wealth.  But circumstances had changed dramatically and the intention was to eliminate Thomas before he could father an heir and also Patrick, leaving Alexander as the only surviving brother.

Arsenic

However, Sheriff Campbell was not persuaded by this argument and continued to gather evidence incriminating Patrick and Katherine. Dr. James Carnegie, a surgeon friend of Patrick living in Brechin, reported that toward the end of May, Patrick approached him complaining of stomach pains and asked for some laudanum together with a quantity of arsenic, which he said was to poison an unwanted dog. The doctor had no reason to suspect any murderous intent on the part of his friend and on payment of one shilling handed over the laudanum and one ounce of arsenic.

Another to be interviewed was Andrew Stewart, a merchant in Alyth and a relative of the Ogilvies, who was due to visit Eastmiln. Patrick called on him and handed him the laudanum and a sealed packet said to contain salts and asked Andrew to hand them to Katherine, adding that he should not let anyone else in the house know he had done so. At the time, this request did not strike Andrew as being suspicious.

Andrew Stewart arrived on the day before Thomas died and despite Patrick’s request, mentioned to Anne Clarke that he had handed the items to Katherine. She advised him that Thomas might possibly be at risk, but Andrew refused to accept Patrick was capable of such despicable behaviour. Nevertheless, he agreed to inform Thomas and his mother of the delivery.  At first, Thomas dismissed the idea that his wife and brother would wish to harm him but he was persuaded that for the time being at least, he would not eat or drink anything his wife might offer him.

On completing his enquiries, George Campbell was satisfied he knew what occurred on the day Thomas died. That morning, Katherine gave her husband a bowl of tea laced with the arsenic which had been provided by Patrick. The victim suffered no immediately obvious effects and left to visit a tenant. But at 10 o’clock he fell ill, complaining of terrible pains throughout his body. He reached home and from his bed told his mother and Andrew Stewart that Katherine had persuaded him to drink the tea and he agreed to do so despite his earlier promise that he would not, as he continued to believe his wife was incapable of such treachery.

During the day, Thomas developed a great thirst and when Ann Samplon brought him water in a bowl similar to that from which he had drunk the tea, he screamed “Damn the bowl, for I have got my death in it already.” Clearly, Thomas realized he was dying and believed Katherine to be responsible. He died later that afternoon in great agony, but his wife had not visited him once after giving him the tea. Elizabeth Sturrock reported being approached by Katherine that day; she had admitted giving the tea to Thomas and was worried she would be accused of poisoning him. She denied having done so and asked Elizabeth to tell anyone who might enquire, that she too had drunk tea from the bowl without suffering any ill effects, which the servant refused to do.

The evidence against the couple was damning but circumstantial and the sheriff knew that corroborative medical testimony would be helpful. Katherine had disposed of what was left of the suspect tea, so that could not be examined. He discussed the case with local doctor Peter Meik, a friend of the Ogilvy family, who had arrived at Eastmiln shortly after Thomas died. He believed initially that death was due to natural causes but had noticed the deceased’s tongue was terribly swollen. He felt unable to say arsenic was the cause of death but added that on his arrival, the newly widowed Katherine begged him not to disclose any information surrounding her husband’s death that might incriminate her and repeated her fear of being accused of poisoning him.

The sheriff asked two other doctors to examine the body and Gilbert Ramsay described seeing swollen tongues in those who died of natural causes but never one so swollen as that of Thomas. However, he would only say it may possibly indicate a suspicious death but nothing more precise. It was not until six days later that the corpse was examined by John Ogilvie, who was no relation to the family and he agreed with his colleagues that it was impossible to give a definitive cause of death. Neither the accusers nor the accused objected to a post-mortem taking place but Dr. Ogilvie said there was now no point as it would be too late to detect traces of arsenic and the corpse was so putrefied it would be a health risk to others if dissected. Thomas was therefore buried without a post-mortem having taken place but George Campbell, nevertheless ordered the arrests of Katherine and Patrick, convinced they colluded in committing the crime so Patrick could inherit the estate and be with Katherine.

The Trial

Their trial opened in Edinburgh on August 5, 1765 and lasted for several days. A significant part of the prosecution was the hugely incriminating evidence provided by the servants Katherine Campbell, Elizabeth Sturrock and Ann Samplon, but the defense argued this should be ignored. It was not unusual when a major trial was to take place that the important crown witnesses were held in relatively comfortable detention to ensure their attendance at the hearing. On this occasion, the servants were provided with rooms in Edinburgh Castle, which they shared with Anne Clarke. Following objections by the defense, the crown promised to separate her from the others before the trial opened, but did not in fact do so. At the trial, the defense accused her of exerting influence over the servants, meaning their testimonies were tainted and should not be heard. Despite these objections all were called to testify and provide details of what they had seen.

The accused couple acknowledged that not all the prosecution witnesses were acting out of malice, but insisted their displays of affection had been misconstrued or exaggerated by some. Although they had grown fond of each other, incest had not occurred; theirs was not an intimate relationship and Katherine claimed to have loved Thomas and had no reason to wish him dead. She explained that she had been experiencing difficulty in sleeping and prior to leaving Eastmiln, Patrick promised to send her some laudanum and salts, which were the drugs he sent with Andrew Stewart. Patrick denied sending arsenic and Katherine denied administering that or any other substance to her husband.

Their lawyer repeated the claim that Anne Clarke and Alexander Ogilvie were the guilty parties. The jury did not believe this claim and on August 14 both defendants were found guilty of all charges. However, before the judge could pass sentence, the couple’s lawyer rose to his feet. He protested that the proceedings had not been conducted properly and a retrial was necessary. He described a number of occasions when jury members had left the chamber to answer the call of nature, even as witnesses were giving evidence. At other times some had risen from their seats and joined friends sitting in other parts of the courtroom. Nevertheless, the judge agreed with the crown that although they had left their seats, the members of the jury who did so were always able to hear all the evidence.

Katherine then told the judge she was pregnant and as was customary, a panel of five matrons examined her in a side room. They were unable to reach a decision. The custom of the time prohibited execution of a pregnant woman. As a result her sentence was postponed until it could be determined if she was expecting a child. In the meantime she was held in the Tolbooth Gaol.

The Hanging

Patrick's execution date was set for September 25. As he awaited execution, Patrick continued to declare his innocence and there was widespread support for a reprieve, which led to his execution being postponed four times. He was eventually hanged on November 13 in the Edinburgh Grassmarket, before a large and sympathetic crowd. Coincidentally, members of his regiment were billeted in Edinburgh and a watch was kept on them lest they attempted to rescue him. He addressed the crowd briefly but refused to confess to the crimes. After praying, the noose was put around his neck and the ladder pulled away. Regrettably, the noose slipped, causing the condemned man to fall to the ground still alive. The hangman helped him to his feet and to once again step on to the ladder. Patrick did so in a dignified and courageous manner, for which the spectators showed their admiration. Seconds later, the hangman had completed his task successfully. Following his execution, his body was dissected.

Katherine Escapes

Katherine was found to be pregnant and her execution was deferred until after the birth. She returned to the Tolbooth, where she gave birth to a daughter on February 27, 1766. She was permitted to care for her for a few days before being told that her execution would take place on March 17.

However, there would be no hanging. Two days before her scheduled execution, she walked out of the Tolbooth dressed as an army officer, her face hidden by a slouched hat with a cockade and the upturned collar of a greatcoat. It was suspected that her family bribed the turnkeys to facilitate the escape which was not reported for almost 24 hours, allowing her a generous head start over those sent in a fruitless pursuit. Her movements were traced as far as Berwick from where it was learned she took the London coach, still wearing her disguise. To avoid arousing suspicions, it was necessary for Katherine to leave her baby daughter in the Tolbooth Gaol, where she died two months after her mother’s departure.

The escape was widely reported and the government offered a reward of £100 for her arrest, but Katherine was never caught. She was said to have spent the early months of her freedom in Dublin, Ireland, avoiding capture by passing herself off as a man, before travelling to France. Some believed she spent her remaining days in solitary penance in a Lisle convent, but others gave more credence to the probability that she married a wealthy French merchant, had many children, survived the French Revolution and lived to a great age.

Authors: 

The Hammersmith Ghost and the Strange Death of Thomas Millwood

0
0

Hammersmith Ghost

Hundreds of murder trials have been heard at London’s famous Old Bailey and probably the most unusual of them all was that of Francis Smith in the case of the Hammersmith Ghost.  

by Martin Baggoley 

Superstition continued to play a major part in the lives of many in early 19th century England and there was a widespread belief in ghosts and evil spirits. Not surprisingly therefore, a sense of  panic spread throughout the London district of Hammersmith in the final two months of 1803, when reports began to emerge of almost nightly sightings of a ghostly apparition intent on frightening passersbys, be they men, women or children. 

The spectre was thought by some to be the spirit of a man who 12 months earlier had committed suicide by slashing his throat. He was buried in a local churchyard despite the belief that such individuals should not be interred in consecrated ground, for if they were they would be unable to rest at peace. Most of those who had seen it, described a figure in a large white shroud and others said it sometimes wore a calf skin wrapped around its body and had large glass-like staring eyes. 

It was rumoured that two women, one elderly and the other heavily pregnant, had been so terrified on meeting the ghost that they took to their beds and died of fright a few days later. It was also reported that a wagoner, driving a team of eight horses, had been so shaken on seeing it that his 16 passengers had been put in serious danger after he lost control of the carriage. These and other such tales were never substantiated but brewer Thomas Groom provided a vivid account of his encounter. He was walking through a local churchyard at night and was grabbed by the throat from behind. There was a struggle, during which he felt a shroud and as he turned round, the ghost disappeared behind the tombstones. 

And then, on December 29, William Girdler, a night-watchman, saw the figure and gave chase. As it ran along the narrow lanes it removed the shroud enabling it to run faster and avoid capture. This encouraged more men to take to the streets at night, but they did not believe in ghosts. They were determined to rid their neighborhood of this menace, responsible for causing so much distress and alarm and among them was 29-year-old excise officer, Francis Smith. 

 The Shooting of Thomas Millwood 

At a few minutes after 10 o’clock on the night of January 3, 1804, 32-year-old plasterer Thomas Millwood called at his parents’ Hammersmith home. He was wearing his work clothes: linen trousers, a waistcoat and an apron, all recently washed and very white. His mother and father retired to their bed and Thomas sat up with his sister Anne until they heard the watch shout out the hour at 11. He decided to go home and Anne watched from the doorway as he set off walking along Black Lion Lane. 

Within seconds, she heard a man’s voice shout out “Damn you. Who are you and what do you want? I’ll shoot you if you don’t speak.” This was followed almost immediately by a gunshot. Anne called out to Thomas but he did not reply and deeply worried, she went in search of him. After walking a short distance she found him lying on the ground, his face covered with blood and horribly disfigured. Taking his hand, she urged him to speak, but there was no response and she realized he was dead. Already at the scene was a small group of men which included wine merchant John Locke, William Girdler and Francis Smith. The circumstances which led to her brother’s death were soon revealed. 

The Killer Is Arrested and the Ghost Comes Forward 

Earlier that evening, the night-watchman had met Smith, who was carrying his gun, a fowling piece. Smith said he was watching out for the impostor ghost and Girdler promised to join him after he had completed his other duties. It was shortly after calling out the hour at 11 p.m. that he heard the gunshot. It was also heard by John Locke, who a few moments later was approached by a greatly distressed Francis Smith. He told him he had shot a man and asked him to return to the scene of the tragedy with him. He did so and discovered the plasterer’s body and they were soon joined by the night-watchman and Anne Millwood. Smith surrendered to the constable and the corpse was carried to the Black Lion Inn,where it was examined by surgeon, Mr. Flower. At the inquest, he confirmed death was due to a gunshot wound to the left lower jaw and damage was caused to the spinal cord, killing him instantly. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder at the hands of Smith, who was committed to Newgate Prison to await his trial. 

Two days after the shooting, local boot and shoe maker John Graham admitted that he was the Hammersmith Ghost. He explained that he adopted the disguise to frighten his apprentices, who had been terrifying his three children with ghost stories. Graham surrendered to the magistrates, who were unsure of the legal position and granted him bail so they could seek guidance. There is no record of any further action being taken against him.  

The Trial 

Smith’s trial took place one week later and although he admitted firing the fatal shot, he entered a not guilty plea. Nobody had witnessed the actual shooting and reading the trial transcript confirms that essentially, the crown relied on the defendant’s own account of what had occurred. The leading witnesses for the prosecution were John Locke, William Girdler and Anne Millwood. Locke told of meeting Smith shortly after the shot was fired, in a genuinely distressed state and how he willingly surrendered himself to the constable. The night-watchman recalled his agreement to meet with Smith on the night and how after the shooting he had cooperated fully and that he had always regarded him as an honest young man. The bereaved sister told the court of hearing Smith challenge her brother, but insisted that the shot followed so soon afterwards that in her opinion Thomas would not have had sufficient time to surrender or explain who he was. 

 In his defense, Smith made a brief statement in which he acknowledged that he knew he was not dealing with a ghost. He challenged the man twice to stop and give his name, but he had simply continued to advance towards him. Smith described fearing for his safety and in a state of panic, not knowing what the man he had confronted would do, he shot him. A number of witnesses were called who spoke of his good character. Thomas Groom also appeared and his testimony made it clear that he had been terrified by his experience and that the sense of concern was real throughout Hammersmith. 

However, perhaps the most important defense witness was Phoebe Fulbrooke, mother-in-law of Thomas Millwood. He and his wife had lived with her and she told the court of a discussion she had with him on the Saturday before the shooting. He told her that he was wearing his work clothes one night and had frightened two ladies and a gentleman, who passed him in a coach. The man called out that he was a ghost, to which he mockingly replied that he was no more a ghost than the other man was. This caused Mrs. Fulbrooke to urge him to wear a greatcoat when on his way to or when returning home from work. She was aware that groups of armed men were now patrolling the area and she feared he might be mistaken for the ghost by one of them and something bad may happen to him. Events proved her concerns were justified but her son-in-law had scoffed at the suggestion. 

The Verdict 

The Lord Chief Baron took some time in his summing up to the jury to explain why one of only two verdicts, murder or acquittal, was possible. He emphasised that for a murder to occur, malice must be present, but this did not mean the killer had to know the victim and he gave two examples: An individual might fire a gun into a room full of strangers and kill one of them, or a killer might shoot a gun but miss the intended target and kill another person unintentionally; malice was present in both instances as it was in the Smith case. The judge continued by highlighting significant issues the jury must consider, namely, Smith was not acting in self-defence, nor was the shooting accidental. Furthermore, at the time, Millwood was not committing an offense and even if he had shot John Graham, the supposed ghost, there would have been no acceptable reason for doing so, as he was not committing a serious felony such as a robbery, but a far less serious misdemeanor, which would have resulted in a small fine. The judge closed his remarks by reminding the jury that the accused’s good character meant nothing in this case.

Nevertheless, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty to manslaughter, which the Lord Chief Baron refused to accept. His fellow judges, Justice Rooke and Justice Lawrence, addressed the jury in much the same terms as the Lord Chief Baron and agreed that such a verdict was not possible. The jury members therefore consulted with each other for a short time before declaring Smith guilty of murder. He was sentenced to hang and be dissected on the following Monday.  Smith almost fainted and crying loudly had to be carried from the dock by the turnkeys. However, the Lord Chief Baron, who was fully aware of the great public interest in the case and support for the accused, added “The case gentlemen shall be referred to His Majesty immediately.” By seven o’clock that evening the sentence had been respited during His Majesty’s pleasure and was quickly commuted to one year’s imprisonment with hard labour. On July 14, Smith was granted a full pardon.  

Despite Smith escaping the gallows and having his good name restored, there was a widespread belief that the outcome was unsatisfactory as the case had exposed a flaw in the legal code. This centred on the lack of a defense available to an individual acting in good faith and believing action, including violence, was necessary, but having misunderstood a situation and the Hammersmith Ghost case was mentioned in a number of trials in the years that followed. 

Finally, the Court of Appeal settled the matter in 1984 in the matter of Regina v Williams. Gladstone Williams saw a man dragging a youth, who was screaming out for help, along a street, with what he considered to be excessive violence. Believing the youngster to be the victim of a serious assault, Williams hit and injured the supposed attacker, hoping to prevent further harm being caused. However, Williams had misread the situation, for his victim was attempting to detain the youth, the actual offender, until the police arrived. Williams was arrested and subsequently convicted of assault but appealed.

The Aftermath 

The appeal was successful and it was established that if an individual believed mistakenly that force was necessary to protect him or herself or to prevent a crime being committed, then so long as that belief was reasonably held and the prosecution could not prove otherwise, no crime could be said to have taken place. This principle was subsequently written into law and after 180 years, the Hammersmith Ghost was finally laid to rest. 

Authors: 

The case of the electrician and the stolen 271 Picasso artworks

0
0

Picaso_self-portrait-1907

How did a retired electrician become the owner of 271 Picasso artworks worth millions of dollars, and how could he have forgotten for almost 40 years that he had them?

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Thursday, September 9, 2010, Claude Ruiz-Picasso, son of the late Spanish-born artist and sculptor Pablo Picasso, was waiting for a couple named Le Guennec to ring the door bell.

Claude Ruiz-Picasso (68), or Claude Picasso as he is generally known, was in the office of the Paris-based Picasso Administration. The Picasso Administration was founded in 1995 to protect the name and heritage of Pablo Picasso who had died in 1973 aged 92. Headed by Claude Picasso, it deals with the authentification of Picasso artworks and such matters as the organization of Picasso exhibitions as well as controlling the copyright and merchandising of Picasso reproductions.

With Claude Picasso was his personal assistant Christine Pinault.

Neither of the two knew more about the couple they were waiting for, Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec, than that they had in their possession some works by Pablo Picasso which they wanted authenticated.

Seven months previously on Thursday, January 14, a letter from Pierre Le Guennec had arrived at the Picasso Administration office with a request for the 26 photographs he had enclosed in the envelope to be authenticated: He claimed the photographs were of works by Picasso. In March, a second letter had arrived from Le Guennec. He had sent another 39 photographs which he said were of Picasso artworks and which he also wanted authenticated. In April, a third letter had arrived from Le Guennec. He had sent another 30 photographs which he again said were of Picasso artworks and which he also wanted the Picasso Administration to authenticate.

Although Claude Picasso had already on receipt of the first envelope of photographs thought that the works were reproductions because it was unheard of that one individual could possess so many original Picassos, by the receipt of the third batch of photographs, he had become highly suspicious and thought that he was dealing with an art-thief gang and had asked Le Guennec to bring the works to Paris.

It was a wet but warm day when Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec, 71 and 68 respectively, walked into the office of the Picasso Administration close to the chic Vendôme Square where stand the Ritz Hotel and such jewellery stores as De Beers and Cartier.

As Christine Pinault would recall to London’s The Guardian, “The man was wearing an old-fashioned suit and a tie. His wife had made an effort with her hair and make-up, and polished her nails, but you’d have passed them in the street without giving them a second glance. You’ve never have guessed what they had with them.”

Humbly, the grey-haired Pierre Le Guennec was pulling a black wheeled suitcase which the couple had brought the 560 miles from their home in Mouans-Sartoux, in the Province-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region of France, by train to Paris, and then across Paris on the Métro (underground rail network).

From the suitcase the couple took 271 artworks of which six were oils on canvas, 28 lithographs, nine cubist collages, and the rest were watercolors and sketches on sheets of paper or in sketchbooks. One was a sketch -- “Olga accoudée” (“Olga elbowed”) -- of the late Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova who was Picasso’s first wife and mother of his only legitimate child, Paulo. (Paulo, born in 1921, died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975, in other words just two years after his father’s death. Paulo’s son Pablito committed suicide on the day of his grandfather’s funeral by drinking bleach.)

Another of the artworks was a vividly-colored hand study, and another, a cubist collage of a pipe and a bottle - “Papier colle pipe et bouteille” (“Copy paste pipe and bottle”).

“Monsieur Le Guennec opened the case and took the pieces out. One after the other there they were on the table. We were bowled over to see so many unknown works of such great quality. It was an emotional moment. Monsieur Picasso went quiet. There was an atmosphere of stupefaction,” Christine Pinault would also tell The Guardian.

The originals of some of the photographed works Claude Picasso had never seen. They were not in an inventory of his father’s work which the late art historian and auctioneer Frenchman Maurice Rheims (1910-2003) had compiled after the artist’s death, or they were in the inventory but were noted as "missing" having been lost, as was thought, during successive house moves or when his Paris studio had been flooded once. Or indeed, those "missing" works had been stolen. (It had taken Mr. Rheims three years to compile the inventory which at its completion, according to one report, listed 1,885 paintings, 7,089 sketches, 3,200 ceramics, thousands of engravings, and many tapestries and rugs. The inventory has not been made public so media reports differ on the exact number of artworks Picasso had produced, the number varying between 70,000 and 80,000.)

Claude Picasso was certain that what had come from Le Guennec’s suitcase and were on the table in front of him were not fakes but genuine Picassos because his father had an unique and inimitable system of numbering his works and what he was looking at had been numbered in that way.

But there was a snag.

How did this man named Pierre Le Guennec come into possession of such a treasure? 

A treasure it was indeed because on Tuesday, May 4, 2010 -- four months before that September 2010 day -- Picasso’s “Boy with a pipe”produced in 1905 when Picasso was 24 had sold at auction at New York’s Sotheby’s for $104.2 million, and his “Nude, green leaves and bust” produced in 1932 when Picasso was 51 had sold at auction at New York’s Christie’s for $106.5 million, which at that time set a world record for a work of art sold at auction. (The seller was the estate of the Los Angeles art collector and philanthropist Frances Brody. The buyer bid anonymously by telephone and remains unknown.)

Therefore, the nine collages in Le Guennec’s suitcase alone must be worth approximately $45 million: These had been produced in 1912, and art critics had, at that time, described them as “painted proverbs.”  As for the other works in the suitcase all had been produced between 1900 and 1932 and would also be worth millions.

The Handyman

Pierre Le Guennec
Pierre Le Guennec

But who was Pierre Le Guennec and what had been his connection to Pablo Picasso?

According to what Le Guennec told Claude Picasso he had worked for his father and a friendship had developed between them.

In what capacity had he worked for the artist?

As handyman: An electrician by trade, he had first installed a security system in one of Picasso’s three abodes before he had begun to do odd jobs around the property, and he and “the master” as he called the artist, had thus become friends. His wife had also become friends with Picasso’s wife, Jacqueline Roque Picasso, the two women having got on so well that when his wife was in hospital for the birth of their second son, Jacqueline Roque Picasso had visited her.

And Picasso had gifted him the 271 works?

No, it was Jacqueline Roque Picasso, who had one day, as he was getting ready to return home after a day’s work, handed him a closed box with the words, “Here, it’s for you. Take it home.” He had said, “Thank you, Madame,” and had taken the box home. Not having looked to see what was inside the box he had taken it into his garage and there he had left it and forgotten about it.

In what year was that?

Neither of the two Le Guennecs could remember when exactly it was that Picasso’s wife had given Pierre the box but it must have been in 1972 or 1973, because Picasso was then still alive.

It had therefore been 37 or 38 years previously and the only reason they wanted the works authenticated was because they were getting on and Pierre had had a problem with prostate cancer and he wanted to avoid leaving legal headaches behind for their children.

There was no way that Claude Picasso could verify Pierre Le Guennec’s story with Jacqueline Roque Picasso because she was no longer alive. Having fallen into a deep depression after her husband’s death and drinking heavily, she had committed suicide on Wednesday, October 15, 1986, aged 59, by shooting herself in the head. (In 1961, Jacqueline Roque had married Picasso, having met him when he walked into a pottery shop in the South of France where she worked. Picasso was 72 and she was 27.)

Three hours after the Le Guennecs had arrived at the Picasso Administration office, they left.

Pierre Le Guennec was again pulling the black suitcase behind him, and again it was filled with Picasso’s millions of dollars worth of artworks.

Said Christine Pinault to The Guardian: “Monsieur Picasso told the couple the works were interesting and that he would do some research and consider their case and would contact them. He didn’t want to alert them that he knew what they had. We knew we had to let them leave but it was hard and we were worried. We kept thinking, ‘What if something happens to the works’?”

The couple having left, Claude Picasso called the family’s lawyer, Maître Jean-Jacques Neuer, and on Thursday, September 23, the latter began legal action on behalf of the Picasso heirs against the Le Guennecs for “having received stolen goods.”  (Maître is the honorific for a lawyer in France.)

On Tuesday, October 9, the police arrived at the Le Guennecs’ two-story villa in the village of Mouans-Sartoux, three miles from the medieval town of Mougins where Picasso and his wife had lived in the last years of the artist’s life, and where his wife was alleged to have given Pierre Le Guennec the box.

The Le Guennec villa was neat, the outer walls painted white, the shutters, doors and the door of the garage painted turquoise.

Outside the garage stood the couple’s not-so-new Renault 19 hatchback. It was in that garage where the Picasso treasure had stood quite forgotten for almost 40 years.

The police took Pierre Le Guennec into custody and seized the 271 “stolen” Picasso artworks. Three days later he was released without charge, but he remained under investigation for “having received stolen goods.”

The police kept the artworks. These were handed to l’Office central de lute contre le traffic des biens culturels (National Office Against Traffic in Cultural Goods) and deposited for safe keeping in a vault in the Banque de France in Paris.

Nine months later, in June 2011, both Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec were charged with “having received and concealed stolen goods” but they remained free without having had to post bail.

Each media report put a different price tag on the couple’s Picasso treasure; these fell within a range of $50 million and $100 million.

Their Story

The Le Guennecs told their story, or rather stories, to the police.

It was in 1970 that they had moved from the cooler north-west of France to the sunnier and warmer south.

Pierre Le Guennec, then 31 and an electrician by trade, had placed an advertisement in a local newspaper offering to do electrical work and Jacqueline Roque Picasso had contacted him. She wanted a security system installed at their main residence: a Provencal-style farmhouse named “Notre-Dame-de-Vie” a mile outside the medieval village of Mougins. The two Picassos having been pleased with his work, he had gone to work for them on a permanent basis as general handyman at the farmhouse and the other two Picasso properties -- a villa named “La Californie” above the town of Cannes and a small castle, the “Castle of Vauvenargue”, 89 miles from Mougins.

Le Guennec’s story continued that one day Picasso had suggested they sit down for a cup of tea. This is a story he would repeat later to the daily Nice-based Nice-Matin. “He just wanted to know what I did, how I was, simple things like that. From then on tea with the master became something of a ritual,” he said.

He had also done secretarial work for Jacqueline Roque Picasso.

He also told the police that he and his wife were often invited to have cake and coffee with Picasso and his wife when they talked about “de tout et de rien” - about “all things great and small.”

He further told the police, changing his previous story, that on getting back home after Jacqueline Roque Picasso had given him the box he had seen that in it were sketches, pencil drawings, but not knowing anything about such things he had not thought anything of it. “If Madame had given me a painting, then yes, I would have found it weird,” he said.

Danielle Le Guennec’s story to the police was that her husband had one evening come home with a bin bag filled with things Picasso had given him: Picasso, as Pierre Le Guennec had told his wife, had been cleaning up his studio, chucking into bin bags what he did not want to keep.

Meanwhile, the police learned from Catherine Hutin-Blay that when she was going through her mother’s papers on the latter’s death in 1986 she had found an “acknowledgement of debt” note dated 1983 addressed to her mother and signed by Pierre Le Guennec. The amount of the debt was FF450,000 (today’s value $77,500).

Although Catherine Hutin-Blay had torn up the note thinking that Le Guennec’s debt to her mother did not concern her, Le Guennec did not deny to the police that he had borrowed that amount from Picasso’s widow for whom he had continued to work after her husband’s death.

He had borrowed the money, as he told the police, to pay for a taxi license. As the police would find out he had soon again sold the license and had bought two small apartments, one in Cannes and the other in Cagnes, with the money.

To drive a taxi in France is no banal matter. An applicant who wishes to drive individually and not for a taxi company must apply for a license from the local police as well as for a permit from the town hall of the town or city in which he plans to work, and provide proof of no criminal convictions. He also needs a medical certificate confirming he is in good health and he would have to undergo an annual medical check-up. He furthermore needs a driving licence issued not less than two years previously, and most important, he must have undergone a 300/400-hour training course covering all aspects of transporting individuals on the road. Of course also, he has to have a car which is in perfect running condition. Today - 2015 - to obtain such a license would cost around €250,000 ($282,000) therefore the sum Pierre Le Guennec had borrowed from Jacqueline Roque Picasso must have included the price of the vehicle.)

As for the advertisement for electrical work which Pierre Le Guennec claimed he had put in a local newspaper, the police failed to find such an advertisement.

Disbelief

Shortly after the news of the Le Guennec treasure trove broke in the media, Sir John Richardson, then 86, art historian and friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso wrote in the December 2010 issue of Vanity Fair that the retired electrician’s treasure was part of a “massive group of some 70 portfolios of works on paper which the artist had been obliged to remove from his two Paris homes, an apartment on the Rue la Boétie and a studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins, after the French government had enacted regulations preventing people from having multiple residences.” He continued that Picasso was enraged at the ruling and was forced to have the portfolios “stored or sent down to Cannes.”

He also wrote in the article that he and the British Picasso collector, Douglas Cooper (1911-1984) were with Picasso when the shipment had arrived from Paris. “He asked us to help him go through some of the portfolios. The next two days were spent sitting on the floor of the principal studio rediscovering these treasures. He hadn’t looked at most of the material for 20 or 30 years, Picasso said, and the contents were as much a surprise to him as they were to us. The artist’s excitement was infectious and his comments fascinating.”

He added that as soon as he heard of the Le Guennec affair he realized that the works had to have been part of this horde which had arrived in Cannes more than 50 years earlier.

Claude Picasso spoke to the media of his father’s generosity but that Picasso “always signed and dedicated his gifts even when he knew that the people would sell them because they needed the money. To have given such a large quantity of work … it’s never been known and to be honest it doesn’t stand up.”

Maître Neuer’s opinion of such an extraordinary gift was as damning. Speaking to The Guardian he said:  “Frankly it is absurd, out of this world. If you’d been given that many Picasso works, wouldn’t you have put one or two on the wall? And if you are hard up as this couple appear to be, wouldn’t you have sold at least one in the last 40 years to make ends meet?”

He continued: “Picasso kept copious notes and diaries of his life and yet nowhere is Monsieur Le Guennec mentioned as a friend. And yet he gives him not one, but 271 works of art. Does this sound likely? We have to wait for the police to finish their inquiry, but what can I say: I think not.”

An astonishing development

At the end of November 2010, the police investigation ongoing, a genealogist in the town of Bordeaux, south-west France, contacted Maître Neuer.

The genealogist had been appointed by the French State to find close relatives of a wealthy childless woman who had died without a will.

The woman’s death concerned the Picasso family because the woman’s maiden name was Le Guennec, and Pierre Le Guennec was her cousin. And she was the owner of numerous original Picasso artworks as well as original artworks by other artists like Marc Chagall (1887/1985), Max Ernst (1891/1976), Joan Miró (1893-1983) and Fernard Léger (1881/1955).

In France when someone dies intestate and there are no direct heirs -- a spouse, ex-spouse, children be they legitimate or illegitimate, parents or grandparents -- the State searches for relatives like siblings, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, cousins, even grandparents and in-laws who could inherit from the deceased. Each would receive a percentage of the inheritance based on the closeness of the family connection: A sibling would accordingly receive a larger percentage than a cousin.

Pierre Le Guennec therefore stood to inherit from the deceased woman.

The woman, at first referred to in the French media as “Madame B” was Jacqueline Bresnu, widow of a Maurice Bresnu. The latter had been Picasso’s chauffeur from 1966 to the artist’s death in 1973.  Maurice Bresnu had died in 1991, his widow having been his heir, and she had died in 2009 -- in other words the previous year.

The news out that the Le Guennecs and the Bresnus were close relatives, the Paris auction house Drouot immediately cancelled an auction it was to have held on Thursday, December 9, of the “Madame B”, as they called it, Picasso artworks.

Maurice and Jacqueline Bresnu

In 1966, Maurice Bresnu, a taxi driver, had gone to work as chauffeur for Pablo and Jacqueline Picasso who had five years previously made the “Notre-Dame-de-Vie” farmhouse outside Mougins their main residence. The artist was then 85 years old and Jacqueline was 39. That part of France is hilly and the roads can climb and curve dangerously, so it was normal for an 85-year-old to feel that he should no longer drive.

According to the story the Bresnus had told friends and neighbours, a friendship had quickly developed between the two of them and the two Picassos. What is known is that Picasso had given Bresnu, in his early forties, and sporting a full black beard and described by those who knew him then as “burly,” the nickname Nounours --Teddy Bear -- and from then on a bear had often appeared in a Picasso work. Art experts also thought that they recognized Bresnu on several of Picasso’s works: on some such paintings he is naked and on others he is with a female figure the art experts claim is Jacqueline Roque Picasso. She too is naked.

One of Picasso ‘s favourite outings was when Maurice Bresnu drove him the 140 miles from Mougins to a bull fight in the town of Arles or in one in the town of Nîmes, 157 miles away. On photographs of Picasso of those years Bresnu was often at his side, looking totally at ease in the company of his employer and the wealthy and famous -- movie stars and starlets, producers and best-selling authors -- watching the killing of a bull from the stands. Later, the bull dead, he would again be photographed with his employer and the wealthy and famous sitting on the terrace of one of the town’s café-bars enjoying drinks. He would also be photographed with Picasso, the two sitting drinking coffee at a table in the farmhouse’s two-acre garden, the lush Mediterranean vegetation as background.

Often, Jacqueline Bresnu, also in the employ of the Picassos as a housekeeper and chambermaid, would join the two Picassos for lunch either in the garden or in the large dining-room or kitchen.

In 1973, Picasso having passed away, the Bresnus continued to work for his widow, but in 1976 they decided to retire and bought a large house -- some French media described it as cossu (grand and opulent-looking) -- in the town of Sérignac 400 miles from Mougins.

The Brenus’ wealth did not however surprise their friends and neighbors because they knew that the two had been friends with Pablo Picasso and were still friends with Jacqueline Roque Picasso and that the two Picassos had given the couple numerous Picasso artworks. Two Picasso paintings even hung on the wall of the couple’s living room.

One neighbour, describing the couple as “living like gentry in a large house and driving a luxury car,” told the Paris daily Le Figaro: “He (Bresnu) always said to us: I have so much money that I will not be able to live long enough to blow the lot.”

In 1991 Maurice Bresnu passed away and in 2009 so did Jacqueline.

The “Madame B” artworks

In May 2011, a month before the police charged the Le Guennecs with “having received and concealed stolen goods,” a Paris couple named Bernard and Dominique Lambert contacted the National Office Against Traffic in Cultural Goods.

Bernard Lambert was a retired fruit and vegetable seller from Paris and Dominique a retired cleaner. She was the niece of Jacqueline Bresnu and thus also a relative of the Le Guennecs.

The story they told and which was rapidly picked up by the media was astonishing.

They said that the “Madame B” collection which Drouot was going to sell was stolen: they said that the Bresnus had stolen all the Picasso artworks in their possession, and that the couple had not hidden this fact. The couple, they said, used to speak of having “swiped” the artworks.

The Lamberts said that they had first heard about how the Bresnus were stealing Picasso artworks in the 1980s when they were on vacation with the couple at their new Sérignac house. Picasso was of course by then dead but Jacqueline Roque Picasso was still alive.

“He (Maurice Bresnu) never told me how he had stolen the works, but he always maintained that he never took anything while Picasso was still alive,” Bernard Lambert told the Paris prestigious daily Le Monde.

He continued that the thefts had taken place at the Mougins house when Bresnu called in on the distraught widow.

“Maurice (Bresnu) was completely at home there, so he could help himself at his leisure,” he told Le Monde.

As Bernard Lambert further recounted, Bresnu had taken him up to the attic and had shown him the “swiped” Picassos. “There were just the two of us and he showed me everything he had, sketchbooks, folders and files that contained loads of drawings. I remember the drawings in the spiral-bound sketchbooks. I don’t know how many pieces there were, but at least 100, maybe 200.”

Bernard Lambert also told Le Monde that when on Wednesday, October 15, 1986, Jacqueline Roque Picasso had committed suicide, Maurice Bresnu had telephoned him. He said: “Maurice phoned me straight away. He asked me to find potential buyers for the Picassos that he had.”

Lambert approached an antique dealer at Paris’s Saint-Ouen flea market who put him in touch with an art dealer who accepted the task of selling Bresnu’s Picassos.  The Picassos all bore Picasso’s signature which to a dealer had meant that they were not fakes or reproductions, but originals.

As Lambert would further tell Le Monde he had told the police that Bresnu had forged Picasso’s signature on the artworks. “Whenever he was on the telephone and doodling on a piece of paper next to him, he used to imitate Picasso’s signature. It was one of my uncle’s quirks.”

He would also tell the police that Bresnu generally gave him 10 percent of the selling price and a drawing, for example, sold for about FF40,000 (today about $7,000) but Bresnu was complaining to him that the art dealer was paying him too little.

According to Lambert’s calculation his 10 percent should have come to FF1.6 million (today about $276,000) but he had received only about FF1.3 million (today $207,000). The payments were made in cash and Jacqueline Bresnu left the money in Lambert’s bank in a safety deposit box.  (In the 1980s a million French Francs was a large sum of money: a three-bedroom apartment in Paris would have cost around FF250,000.)

The Bresnus were also selling Picassos without Bernard Lambert’s assistance. In 1989 an art gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, was selling on auction 44 previously unseen signed Picasso drawings, most of them erotic: the seller wished to remain anonymous. That same year London’s Christie’s also auctioned several Picassos, and again the seller had wished to remain anonymous, and in 1991 an Italian art dealer put another batch of Picassos on the market on behalf of an unnamed seller. The Geneva gallery, the Italian art dealer and Christie’s would later tell Claude Picasso that the seller had been Maurice Bresnu. In 1995, three years after Bresnu’s death, his widow continued to sell Picassos which included three sketchbooks which the Italian art dealer was selling on her behalf. The Italian had told Le Parisien that when she had given him the sketchbooks she had told him that she had no further Picasso works to give him.

Jacqueline Bresnu had lied. On her death she still had the 143 artworks which Drouot was going to auction, the proceeds of the auction to have gone to the heirs the state-appointed genealogist would have found.

As was stipulated in the Drouot catalogue, the total value of the 143 artworks which included illustrations for books, objects like bronze plates and scarves, ceramics, prints, drawings and paintings, stood between $390,363 and $542,163 - €347,700/€482,910.

The most valuable item in the catalogue was No. 143 which was Picasso’s "Nu feminine aux regards masculines"  -- ‘Female nude with masculine expression -- created in 1972. It was signed, dated and dedicated as follows: "Picasso 25.10.72 pour nounours." The value the auction house put to it was €60,000/€80,000 - $68,000/$90,000.

Another two valuable pieces were "Paul en costume de toréador"– "Paul in torero costume" - created in 1956 and "Paloma à la poupeé,""Paloma with doll" - also created in 1956. Their value was respectively between $33,500 and $55,800, and $22,340 and $44,700.

The total number of Picasso artworks which had been in the Bresnus' possession has not been established, but in 2012, the Picasso Administration had traced 250 pieces which the couple had already sold anonymously by auction. The Picasso Administration thought that beside those in the Drouot catalogue the couple must still have had another 500 pieces. The fate of those remains unknown.

The question

Picasso no longer alive and his widow’s depression and drinking having made it impossible for her to know what was going on in her house, did both Maurice Bresnu and Pierre Le Guennec help themselves to Picasso’s artworks? Or did Bresnu do the taking and Le Guennec did the receiving? Or did Jacqueline Roque Picasso give Le Guennecs the Picassos, as the couple claimed?

The Le Guennecs standing trial for “having received and concealed stolen goods” showed that the police had not found proof that Pierre Le Guennec himself, or the couple, had stolen the Picasso artworks. According to the law of France who had stolen the Picasso artworks the couple had in their possession was not the issue. The prosecution therefore only had to prove that the Picasso artworks in the couple’s possession had come from a “fraudulent origin” and that the couple had known this.

The trial

On Tuesday, February 10, 2115, Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec walked into Hall F of the courthouse in the town of Grasse, six miles from Mougins. Pierre Le Guennec was casually dressed in jeans and a dark windbreaker: Danielle Le Guennec wore a black coat with a fur collar and cuffs and she was neatly coiffed and made-up.

This was a civil case brought by six plaintiffs, all of them Picassos. They were Claude Picasso and his sister Paloma Picasso (65) the two born in the relationship of Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot; Maya Widmaier-Picasso (80) born in the relationship of Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter; Catherine Hutin-Blay (68), daughter of Jacqueline Hoque Picasso; Marina Picasso (65) daughter of Picasso’s late son Paolo, and her half-brother Bernard (56).

At the opening of the trial, Maître Jean-Jacques Neuer, representing Claude Picasso, accused Le Guennec of being the cover for “an international art laundering scam.” He said, “These stolen works were given to him because he had had ties with Picasso. We have before us an international art laundering affair.”

Le Guennec denied that this had been the case. He insisted that the artworks had been gifts. “Monsieur and Madame called me ‘Little Cousin,’” he told the court. It had been reported in the media that Picasso had not only called Bresnu Nounours, but also "Big Cousin," his cousin Le Guennec, smaller in stature, therefore having been named "Little Cousin."

Questioned by Prosecutor Laurent Robert and by Judge Jean-Christophe Bruyère as to why the Picassos had given them the artworks, he said, “Picasso had total confidence in me. Maybe it was my discretion.”

About the day Jacqueline Roque Picasso had allegedly given him the box of artworks, he said that when he got home, he looked inside the box and found “drawings, sketches, crumpled paper.”

He added that he and his wife had not looked through everything though.

Asked by the judge whether he was not a little curious to know what was in the box, he replied, “No.”

Said the judge, “Someone offers you a gift, and you leave it to rest for 40 years. Notwithstanding the financial value, did you not even attach any sentimental value to it? You didn’t want to hang any of the paintings in your home?”

Le Guennec replied, “I didn’t have in mind that they were works of art, they were essays, torn bits, it didn’t grab me. It’s not as if I saw a painting, it’s not the same, it’s not the same reaction.”

He and his wife had then forgotten about the box in the garage. Forgotten about it until 2009.

He further said that having remembered about the box of Picasso artworks in the garage, he had thought of asking the Picasso Administration to authenticate the works, so he had drawn up lists of the works, one of his brothers-in-law who had once had an art gallery, having helped him to do so.

Maître Neuer dismissed that statement, saying that Le Guennec’s lists revealed a great knowledge of art which Le Guennec and a gallery owner would not have. The lists had therefore been drawn up by a great connoisseur like an art historian. The lawyer cited an example from one of the lists. He said that one small pencil drawing was described as having similarities with a 1915 painting of a harlequin exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art: Le Guennec would not have had such knowledge.

The Le Guennecs’ lawyer, Charles-Etienne Guden, counter-attacked by saying that only a dozen or so of the works which had been in his clients’ possession were works of value. He described the rest as “very mediocre.” They were so mediocre that Picasso had not tried to sell them. He added that it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to steal from Picasso as the artist had an “amazing memory” and also his properties were protected like a fortress.

Before the trial he had told AP that “He (Picasso) gave him (Pierre Le Guennec) the works to thank him for his kindness, his availability, for lending an ear. Le Guennec bought bottles of oxygen under his own name for Picasso because he needed it to breathe.” He had added that the Le Guennecs had never tried or needed to sell the works because as Le Guennec had told him, “You don’t sell gifts.”

Maïtre Neuer, also in speaking to the media before the trial, had told reporters:  “They (the Le Guennecs) don’t remember a thing, whether they received this gift in 1970,1971, 1972. If someone gives you 271 Picasso works, you remember that.” Pointing out that what the Le Guennecs had had been created between 1900 and 1932, he said: “You would have to imagine Picasso keeping them for 70 years and all of a sudden wanting to give them away.” He added that Picasso always autographed everything -- whether he had given it away or sold it -- but the Le Guennec’s "gifts" had not been autographed.

While the Le Guennecs continued to insist that the 271 Picasso works had been a gift from Jacqueline Roque Picasso, Prosecutor Laurent Robert knocked their claim down with, “It does not matter that the author of the theft has not been positively identified. Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec knew that the works had been fraudulently acquired.”

As for the possibility that they had acquired the works from Maurice Bresnu, Judge Bruyère emphasized that the Le Guennecs had hidden their family connection with the Bresnus from the police. Pierre Le Guennec’s defense was that he and Maurice Bresnu had not been even friends. They had, he claimed, fallen out in 1975 because Bresnu had “looked down on him.”A witness for the prosecution then told of having witnessed an argument between Pierre Le Guennec and Maurice Bresnu, the latter having accused Le Guennec of having “mucked about” at the Picassos and that they “all risked having problems because of it.” After he had witnessed the argument, added the witness, Jacqueline Bresnu had told him that her husband “was suspecting Le Guennec of helping himself at the Picassos.”

The second day of the trial was devoted to further questioning of the Le Guennecs and projections of the works they had had in their possession.  Judge Bruyère had barred cameras from the courtroom for the day, and indeed no list of the works has been made public.

On Thursday, February 12, the third and last day of the trial, Prosecutor Laurent Robert summed up, saying “We are dealing with a very particular offence, one which has been detrimental to humanity. The amount of works is incompatible with any notion of gift.”

He stressed that the Le Guennecs had harmed the “trust” and “memory” of Picasso, and that he was sure that the works had been stolen.

He asked Judge Bruyère for a five-year suspended prison sentence for the couple. He described such a sentence as “balanced.”

He did though have a kind word for the Le Guennecs. He described them as being “overwhelmed by the events” and added that they had not made any money from their actions. “One can be an honest person in life, and still make a mistake,” he said.

Judge Bruyère’s verdict and sentence, should he find the Le Guennecs guilty, will be delivered on Friday, March 20.

Did Pablo Picasso know that his wife had given 271 of his works to their handyman?

As Pierre Le Guennec had said to journalists before the trial, “Madame gave them to me. And if she gave them to me, he had to be aware of it.”

Art Loss Register

The London-based Art Loss Register (ALR), a computerized database of lost or stolen artworks, antiques and collectables currently (March 2015) lists 300,000 missing objects: this figure increases by about 10,000 each year.

The ALR lists 550 of Picasso’s works as missing.

The most sensational art theft was the 1911 theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa." You can read about it here - http://www.crimemagazine.com/stealing-mona-lisa-world%E2%80%99s-greatest-art-heist

Picasso’s ’Notre-Dame-de-Vie’ Farmhouse

In 2008 a Belgian art dealer bought the three-story 35-room house from Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of Jacqueline Roque Picasso. The unnamed art dealer is said to have paid between $13 million and $16 million for the property. After having had renovation work carried out, he put the property back on the market: asking price $220 million.

For that amount the buyer will have 10 bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a guest house and a guard house, two swimming pools, a tennis court and a two-acre garden.

In 2013, the NiceMatin reported that the property which the Belgian art dealer had renamed "Domaine L’Antre du Minotaire" which translates "The Minotaur’s Lair" after the Greek mythological creature which had so often featured in Picasso’s art, had not yet found a buyer.

The fate of the 271 Picasso artworks

The 271 Picasso artworks will never be returned to the Le Guennecs.On Friday, March 20, Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec were found guilty and given a two-year suspended sentence. The judge at the same time ordered the stolen artworks to be handed over to the Picasso Administration, in other words to the Picasso heirs.

Neither the French court nor the Picasso Administration had put a value to the Le Guennecs’ stolen stash, but back in December 2010 when the story of the theft had broken, Vanity Fair had estimated the stash’s value at between $60 million and $80 million.

However, art dealers now say that considering the May 11, 2015 sale by auction at Christie’s New York of the Picasso painting “Les Femmes d’Algier” --  “The Women of Algiers” --  for $179.4 million,  what the Le Guennecs’ had helped themselves to could be many more millions of  dollars valuable than Vanity Fair’s 2010 estimate.

The art dealers also point out that at a previous auction of the “Les Femmes d’Algier” painting in 1997 the American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz had sold it to a Saudi Arabian collector for $31.9 million. This means that from 1997 to 2015 –- less than two decades -- the value of the painting had increased by 82 percent.

A second Picasso painting was sold at the May 11, 2015 Christie's auction: the 1938 portrait of Dora Maar, the artist’s lover from 1936/1944, named “Femme à la Résille” --“Woman with a Snood” -- for $67.5 million.  This painting’s estimated value was $55 million which means it fetched $12 million more.

The amount of $179.4 million was the highest amount ever paid for a painting sold by auction, and $67.5 million was the 12th highest amount ever paid for a Picasso sold by auction.

The sellers as well as the buyers of both paintings preferred not to be identified.

 

Viewing all 43 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images