Dec. 3, 2012

Rachel Nickell, Andre Hanscombe and their son Alex in the park

Not even Scotland Yard’s famed Murder Squad is immune from locking in on one suspect to the exclusion of all others and allowing its conceit to permit a serial rapist and murderer to stay at large for years after the evidence to convict him was in the police’s hands.

by Mark Pulham

In the photograph, her smile is wide and bright. A blue sky is behind her and she squints slightly from the sun as a wisp of blonde hair drifts across her face in a breeze. She seems incredibly happy. In another photograph, she and her boyfriend smile at the camera, bundled up against the chill. Between them is the buggy holding their young son.

Some people just radiate happiness, people who are attractive and put a smile on the face of those who saw them, even if they didn’t know the person.

Rachel Nickell was one of those people. Bright, attractive, and with boundless generosity, she was instantly likeable, and was capable of achieving anything that she set out to do.

Rachel Jane Nickell was born on November 23, 1968 to Andrew Nickell, an officer in the army, and his wife Monica, and brought up in Great Totham, a village near Colchester in Essex.  From a very young age, Rachel was naturally charitable, helping out with the elderly and with the disabled children in the area.

When she turned 11, Rachel went to the Colchester High School for Girls, and in her spare time, she joined the Essex Dance Theatre and took up singing, dancing, and acting. She could have pursued this course, but instead, decided to study and get a degree in History and English.

Rachel Nickell

Rachel got a job at a Richmond swimming pool as a lifeguard, and it is there, in 1988, that she met a young motorcycle courier named Andre Hanscombe. The couple fell in love, and a year later, Rachel gave birth to her son, Alexander Louis. Rachel and Andre never married, and there is no indication that they were even thinking about it.

Rachel decided to stop working, at least for then, and devoted herself to being a full-time mother, even though she had been offered work as a photographic model. Maybe when Alex was old enough, she would pursue her ambition to be a children’s television presenter, an ambition in which she no doubt would have excelled.

The young family moved to Balham, in South London, and life seemed perfect. Wimbledon is also in South London. Known throughout the world for hosting the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, people flock there in the summer to watch the matches and eat strawberry cream tarts at the afternoon teas in the pavilions.

But tennis is not the only thing the area is known for.

Feb. 7, 2013

Over a 10-year-year period, from 1972 to 1982, the Shankill Butchers gang, led by psychopath Lenny Murphy, terrorized Northern Ireland Catholics, becoming the most prolific group of serial killers in British history.

by Robert Walsh

“A lasting monument to blind sectarian bigotry.” – The Shankill Butchers, as described by their trial judge, Lord Justice O’Donnel.

Ireland in general (and Northern Ireland in particular) has long had a troubled, violent and dark history. Invasions, rebellions, famine, revolution, civil war and what are generally described as “The Troubles” have cast a long shadow over the Emerald Isle and its neighbor (and former colonial ruler) Great Britain. In recent years, especially after the peace talks and ceasefire of the early 1990’s, both the British and Irish people have begun to bury their differences and to explore their common history, dark and uncomfortable though it often is. One of the darkest episodes was that of the Shankill Butchers.

Feb. 18, 2013

To avoid race riots and the resulting negative impact on tourism, a succession of Bermudian government administrations has whitewashed the assassinations of Bermuda’s governor and police chief in the early 1970s by a radical black-power group known as the Black Beret Cadre.

by Mel Ayton

During 1972 and 1973 the North Atlantic British colony of Bermuda, which had become a playground for vacationing Americans, was suddenly thrust into a climate of fear when a spate of murders, including political assassinations, occurred. Bermuda became the only British territory ever to have the Queen’s representative murdered in cold blood and the first nation to suffer the violent effects of the importation of 1960s’ American Black Power militancy.

The tragic events of the early 1970s had been viewed by many Bermudian politicians as a stain upon Bermuda’s reputation as a haven for travellers and an island of tranquillity. This attitude prompted them to ignore the Black Power connection to the assassinations lest further investigations stir up trouble between the races and provoke island-wide riots. Political leaders were also afraid that the truth about the murders and the instability of its political system, which the killings exposed, would damage Bermuda’s tourist industry which was its principle source of income.

Additionally, political leaders were embarrassed that a militant Marxist revolutionary organization, the Black Beret Cadre, which had been widely supported by many young Bermudians, was connected to the killings. The Black Berets, usually never attaining a membership of more than 100, modelled themselves on the American Black Panthers. In fact, many of its members had close connections with Black Panthers in the United States. Although two black Bermudians allied with the Berets were tried and executed for the murders, the weak response of the government in establishing a wider conspiracy effectively swept the whole affair under the carpet.

The Assassinations

The first murder was committed on September 9, 1972 and the victim was Bermuda Police Commissioner (Police Chief) George Duckett, a British expatriate officer who had previously served in a number of British colonies around the world. Duckett had been lured to the back porch of his home, Bleak House, North Shore in Devonshire, where he was ambushed by his killer, or killers.

The Bermuda Police, ill-equipped to deal with a major murder enquiry, sought the assistance of Britain’s Scotland Yard which had been involved in prior murder investigations on the island during the previous decade. Scotland Yard flew a team of detectives out to the colony.

A substantial reward was offered by the Bermudian Government, but neither money nor murder squad detectives could raise any clues to the killer’s identity. The new governor of Bermuda, Sir Richard Sharples, a sailing friend of UK Prime Minister Edward Heath, suspected the involvement of the Black Beret Cadre. Although a number of Black Beret members were interviewed, none were charged with the murder.

Following the British detectives’ return to London, and exactly six months to the day since the police chief was killed, Governor Sharples and his aide Captain Hugh Sayers were shot dead in the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion in the capital city of Hamilton. Once again a team of detectives was requested to investigate the murders. With no more evidence than that three or four black men were seen or heard running from the scene of the latest shootings and a conviction that the two murders were linked with that of the police chief, the detectives once more led a massive hunt for the killers but after months of trying to find them they eventually conceded defeat.

The assassins of the police chief and governor were so confident of their ability to elude police they struck again in the capital city Hamilton on April 6, 1973. Two white shopkeepers, Mark Doe and Victor Rego, were found dead on the floor of their store. They had been shot with a .32 pistol although some .22 bullets were left at the scene of the crime. The .22 bullets indicated a link with the murder of Police Chief George Duckett. With what now appeared to be a further embarrassment to the Bermuda Government, Scotland Yard detectives were once more called to investigate. A new and enlarged Scotland Yard police team arrived in Bermuda and in desperation the Bermuda Government offered a reward of $3  million for information leading to the apprehension of the killers.

In September 1973, the Bank of Bermuda was robbed of $28,000 by an armed man, Buck Burrows, and on October 18^th detectives, acting on a tip off, arrested him. After a second man, Larry Tacklyn, was arrested and charged, and with a large reward still outstanding, information began to trickle in confirming the involvement of the two men in the five murders.  For the next two years police gathered evidence against the accused men who were held on remand in Casemates Prison, situated at the western tip of the island. By November 1975 an inquest jury had concluded that both men had been responsible for the governor’s assassination “with other persons unknown.”

In 1976, Burrows and Tacklyn were charged with the murders of Sir Richard Sharples, Captain Hugh Sayers, Victor Rego and Mark Doe. Burrows faced an additional charge of murdering the police chief. Burrows was found guilty of murdering George Duckett, Governor Sharples, Captain Sayers, Mark Doe and Victor Rego.  Tacklyn was found not guilty of murdering the governor but guilty of murdering the two store owners. (In my book, Justice Denied, I provide compelling evidence that it was Tacklyn, not Burrows, who actually shot Sir Richard Sharples.)

Erskine Burrows

It emerged that although the two men were low-level professional criminals, they entertained some sympathy with the Black Power movement and this had established the political motive for the crimes. However, it was never established at their trials that the Berets trained Burrows and Tacklyn in the use of firearms or that the black militant organization had  told Burrows  he was an important figure in the “coming revolution,” giving him the title of Commander-in-Chief of All Anti-Colonialist Forces in Bermuda.  Additionally, jurors were never told the spate of robberies and drug deals were designed to secure funds for the Black Berets. But jurors were privy to a wider conspiracy when Burrows sent a written confession to the prosecutor in which he admitted killing the governor “along with others I shall never name.” 

Both men received the death sentence. On December 2, 1977 Burrows and Tacklyn were hanged in Casemates Prison. The executions provoked revenge racial riots throughout the island causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage to property and the deaths of three people. The riots were incited by the Black Berets and the intemperate remarks of leading radical politicians. Rioters attacked police stations and business premises, especially in the capital city of Hamilton, and a state of emergency was put into effect that included a call-up of the Bermuda Regiment and the despatch of troops from the United Kingdom.

A Whitewash

For the past 30 years the people of Bermuda had been given a whitewashed version of what exactly occurred when the murders were investigated and the two killers brought to trial. However, as many Bermudians had suspected all along, the government had erred in not bringing the assassins’ accomplices to justice.

Ten years ago the British Foreign Office released its files about the murders. Although they added to the sum of knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the murders it was the release of the Scotland Yard Murder files some years later that put the true story of the assassinations in the proper perspective.

In the summer of 2004 I visited Scotland Yard’s Archives branch situated a short distance from London’s St. James’s Park Tube station. Scotland Yard Assistant Departmental Records Officers Andrew Brown and David Capus allowed me access to the Scotland Yard Bermuda Murders Files before they were reviewed and transferred to the National Archives. At the time, they were inaccessible to Bermuda’s newspapers and they had not been seen by any member of the public.

In September of 2004 I received a letter from Sir Richard Sharples’s widow, Baroness Sharples. She knew about others who were involved in the assassination of her husband. Specifically she named a third man who was investigated by police but never charged. Baroness Sharples wrote, “(name redacted) was the third involved, he went to the USA at that time where he was under observance, returned to Bermuda many years later, where I was informed he would not be arrested if he did not step out of line…” In subsequent telephone conversations, Baroness Sharples expressed dismay and disgust that the authorities had not arrested him. She also believed there was sufficient evidence compiled by the police to bring him to trial.

Additionally, further research by this author and a series of interviews with police officers involved in the murder investigations have provided a context that had been missing when two of Bermuda’s leading newspapers ran a series of stories which had been based on the newly released Foreign Office files.During my research I also made contact with a former high ranking Bermuda police officer, ranked within the top six officers on the Bermuda force, who provided me with information about the murders. According to one of his former colleagues in the force, “… he was an honest man and took his job seriously and professionally…he was one of those people who if he told you to do something you did it not only because it would be an order but because you knew it was right and that he would back you up if there was subsequently any problems; you could trust him…..He was privy to a great deal of information and procedures…..He was someone with ‘status’”.  The senior officer said the information I gave him went beyond anything published on the assassinations. He also said I was correct in my conclusions about who was to blame for the assassination of the governor and the police chief and that I was “…accurately centred in the middle of the nest.” Additional interviews with former prison officers revealed that the assassins were in constant communication with Black Beret members during a period of incarceration following their arrests.

An Unholy Alliance

The Scotland Yard Murder files reveal how a group of Bermudians, an “unholy alliance” of underworld criminals and a remaining hard-core of black militant activists within the Black Berets, conspired to commit murder, assassination and robbery. Self-styled “Godfather” Bobby Greene, who owned a restaurant in the Court Street area of Hamilton, led the underworld element.  He was the mastermind behind the spate of robberies in the early 1970s and was a known drug importer/dealer. The governor’s assassins spent most of their free time at the restaurant. In fact, it was known as a meeting place for the militants.

The Scotland Yard files also reveal that the Black Berets had “reconnoitred Government House” on at least four occasions and watched the homes of leading politicians in the years before the actual shootings. The Berets had even planned a series of political assassinations when the time was ripe for their “Marxist revolution.” Investigators discovered the planned attack on Police Chief Duckett was taken straight from an urban guerrilla manual that was amongst literature read by Black Beret members. Additionally, Black Beret leader John Hilton “Dionne” Bassett had been seen firing a .38 revolver, the same type of weapon used to kill the governor. He fled the island after the murder of the police chief and never returned. It is believed he joined the Black Liberation Army in the United States. The BLA was responsible for assassinations of New York City police officers in the 1970s. This information was never revealed during the trials of the governor’s assassins. Bassett died in the 1990s.

The “Third Man”

The Scotland Yard files reveal the police gathered compelling evidence against another Black Beret leader and that he conspired with Burrows and Tacklyn to murder the governor. Until a Royal Commission re-investigates the assassinations his name must be withheld. He is referred to in my book as the “third man” and is still alive and living in a Middle Eastern country.  (Scotland Yard detectives were also convinced a “fourth man” was involved but they were unable to discern his identity.)  

• The “third man” had expressed hatred for the governor on more than one occasion.
• The “third man” was the most violent member of the Berets. He was the leader of the more militant faction of the Black Power organization. He was a strong advocate for the elimination of the island’s political leaders and the institution of a “revolutionary Marxist government.”
• A witness, who senior police sources said had been a police plant in the Berets, testified he had “reconnoitred” the Governor’s Mansion with the “third man” on at least four occasions. The “third man” had also drawn up sketch plans of Government House and Police Headquarters.
• A live 12-bore shotgun shell was found in the apartment of the “third man.” It was linked to the weapons used in the shootings.
• On March 14, 1971 the “third man” had threatened to kill a senior police officer, Detective Inspector John Joseph Sheehy. He was found guilty of the offense and sentenced to a period of corrective training. He also had a criminal record in the United States. On August 7, 1972 at Berlin, Vermont, he was arrested and charged with attempted breaking and entering of a Sports Shop whilst armed with a .22 rifle. He was later allowed bail but returned to Bermuda where he remained.
• The “third man” was observed handling the weapon that was used to assassinate the governor.
• The “third man” had showed a consciousness of guilt by fleeing the island under disguise when police eventually connected him to the assassination. When police officers attempted to arrest him he struck one of them, then made his escape on a flight to the United States disguised as a woman. Police sources reveal his eventual destination was Cuba or Algeria via Canada(The police received information from intelligence sources that the Berets had received funding from the Cuban government). He was aided in his escape by Calvin “Shebazz” Weeks, a leading member of the Berets. In an email to the author, these facts were corroborated by the alleged assassin’s biological daughter who now lives in the United States.
• At one time the “third man” had shared an apartment with convicted assassin Larry Tacklyn and a notorious Bermudian criminal, Dennis Bean. Bean had been convicted of the robbery of a store in Hamilton and had eventually been sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison.
• Scotland Yard detectives discovered that on the night of the governor’s assassination the “third man” went out of his way to be conspicuous and to be observed socializing with non-Berets. Senior police officers believed he had been trying to establish an alibi.
• Investigating police officers discovered that the quick-tempered and violently anti-white “third man” had a controlling influence over the convicted assassins. He exerted a kind of “psychic hold” over Burrows and Tacklyn and persuaded them they were active revolutionaries who could change Bermudian society at a stroke and help institute a revolutionary-type government. Although Burrows said the assassination of the governor was on his “direct orders” and “inspired efforts” the murder was in fact planned and directed by the extreme faction of the Berets with Burrows and Tacklyn playing the secondary role of hit men. Many years later some former members of the Berets would come to believe that Burrows had indeed been indoctrinated by militant members of the group and this small group of Berets were behind the murders.

Following the escape of the “third man” to North America, the authorities decided it was not in the interests of Bermuda to bring him to justice even though there was substantial and compelling evidence to show he had participated in the governor’s assassination. Police in the United States and Canada had been contacted by Bermudian authorities and a request was made for them to “keep an eye” on him but he was never extradited. He returned to the island a few years later but the arrest warrant had mysteriously gone missing. As a former police officer involved in the murder investigations stated, “With regard to arresting (the “third man”) I don’t believe there was much choice - the whole file including warrants… had gone, I believe from the court registry … I have a vague memory of an arrest on arrival prior to them discovering everything missing. I do not know why it was not reinvestigated with fresh information; maybe too much was missing. Maybe a deal was struck?”

The missing arrest warrant, according to the ex-police officer source, indicates there were people in high places who conspired to prevent the arrest of the” third man.” “My opinion is and was,” the former police officer said, “that if they brought (him) back this would create such a political mess with the Bermuda Industrial Union (Author’s Note: The BIU was allied with the opposition Progressive Labour Party)…. The government had enough on its plate. The island was divided 50-50 on the race issue. They had enough trouble dealing with all the black participants (in the murders)….. I guess the feeling was if anything comes to light that can directly involve and get a confession from someone or point to (the “third man”) that they could put before the courts, it’s better to have him at arm’s length and being watched.” Numerous sources for this book also deduced that the reason why the “third man” was not arrested was due to his strong links to powerful individuals on the island. The motive for stealing or destroying the arrest warrant, the sources allege, was a fear that riots would ensue.

Myth Instead of Truth

Justice Denied By Mel Ayton

The Black Berets continue to play an important role in Bermuda’s political life. Using the same tactics as many Marxists in the UK who joined the Labour Party in the 1970s, many Berets infiltrated Bermuda’s established left-wing Progressive Labour Party (PLP) in order to continue their covert radical agenda. They were clearly aware that their previously overt appeals to racism and violence would be rejected by the moderate black majority. However, the PLP has done nothing to correct the historical record with regard to the Berets. For the past 35 years PLP members have romanticized the black militant organization and embraced many of its former members. Additionally, leading Bermudian politicians of both races have not spoken out about the conspiracy because they believe it would not only affect tourism, which is the island’s principle source of income, but also expose the instability of Bermuda’s political system.

The Black Beret Cadre believed it had a God-given right to inflict its pathologies on the rest of Bermudian society and in so doing created great harm to the island and its people, both black and white. The role the Black Cadre played in the assassinations was whitewashed by consecutive Bermudian government administrations in the interest of racial harmony. Over time the history of the assassinations became a myth. And what people believe happened will unfortunately enter into the culture and memories of generations to come.

Feb. 20, 2013

Lyndsay van Blanken

Eighteen-year-old Lyndsay van Blanken, a promising cartoonist for Walt Disney Animation in Sydney, Australia, was strangled to death by her former boyfriend.

by Marie Kusters-McCarthy

It was the second marriage for Lyndsay van Blanken’s mother, Cynthia Pleasant, in the summer of 2001. It was a beautiful outdoor ceremony in Sydney, Australia. Lyndsay’s parents had an amicable divorce a couple of years earlier and there was no animosity between them. Family and friends were enjoying the good food and music provided by a talented quartet. However, 16-year-old Lyndsay only had eyes for the handsome cellist, William Matheson. During a break he approached her and it was clear the attraction was mutual. They were soon involved in a relationship which was fun but, at times, intense due to William’s possessive nature.

Lyndsay was a talented artist and in August 2003 had been selected, from hundreds of applicants, to join Walt Disney Animation as a trainee cartoonist in their Haymarket office in Sydney.  This was her dream job and her superiors and colleagues were very impressed with her talent and it was obvious she had a bright future ahead of her.    

Like a lot of people, Lyndsay liked to play video games on the Internet which led to the beginning of a special friendship with a 21-year-old hairdresser, Brandon Leonard, who lived in Seattle, Washington.  Brandon said it began as an intellectual relationship but they both soon realized they were falling in love. Lyndsay then ended her involvement with William which he didn’t want to accept. He began to show up unexpectedly at her work place and her home. This behavior made Lyndsay very uneasy and she asked him to please leave her alone.

In July 2003 she received by mail an engagement ring from Brandon and was happy to accept his proposal. In September Brandon flew to Sydney and the couple moved into an apartment at the rear of the van Blanken’s family home. 

November 24, 2003 was an especially happy day for Lyndsay as her mother had given her an early Christmas present of two return tickets to Seattle for herself and Brandon. This was for Brandon to introduce his fiancée to his parents and they planned to get married during the visit.  

Lyndsay’s Final Text Message

Lyndsay left work at 5:30 p.m. and was expected home within an hour. She texed Brandon saying how much she was looking forward to their trip. That was the last communication he would receive from her. When she didn’t arrive home at her normal time, Brandon became worried, as did her mother and other family members.  This was completely out of character for Lyndsay as she was always reliable and would inform someone if she were delayed, or just to report her whereabouts. After a  couple of hours, they contacted the police and reported her missing.

The police found nothing to make them consider foul play and were treating it as a teenage runaway. Even her own mother had thoughts that the last few months of stress with William, the engagement, the upcoming travel and wedding plans might

have become too much and Lyndsay may have just needed some space. Lyndsay’s mother made several emotional appeals asking anyone who might have seen her daughter to come forward.

The police questioned Lyndsay’s ex-boyfriend, William, who admitted he had met with her that day, during her lunch break, at Walt Disney Animation, and again when she alighted from her train around 6 p.m. on her way home. He said he walked with her for a bit and then left her near her home and had not seen her since.     

As the days went by and with no contact from Lyndsay, her family and police began to fear that she had met with foul play. On December 3, the police re-enacted Lyndsay’s last movements in the hope that it might jog someone’s memory. However, that was unsuccessful and the police were left with a baffling case. There had been no activity on her bank account and her mobile phone had not been used since her disappearance.

Her mother made a last emotional appeal. “Lyndsay, the family is missing you terribly, please contact us. We’re desperate to hear from you and we all love you. We’re not angry with you, we just want to know where you are.” There was no response.

Two weeks after her disappearance, in the early morning, police spotted William Matheson “lurking suspiciously” in a quiet street in the Queens Park area of Sydney.  In his backpack they found a small axe, a large pair of scissors, a Stanley knife, surgical gloves, torches, a candle and holder, cling wrap, deodoriser and a bottle of holy water. He, allegedly, told the police he was planning a picnic in the park. 

Obviously, having these items in his possession did not constitute a crime and the police, while suspicious, let him on his way.                                                        

On January 10, 2004, residents of an apartment block, used mainly by backpackers, complained about a foul odor which seemed to be coming from a storeroom underneath the apartments. The building maintenance inspector went to investigate the odor and was horrified to find a badly decomposed body stuffed into a large sports bag. The body was soon identified as that of Lyndsay van Blanken. She had died of strangulation by two cable ties joined together.

Police investigations soon traced the origin of the sports bag which was only sold by one store in that area.The store confirmed that it had sold one of that particular sport bag on November 22, two days before the murder. Under questioning, William Matheson admitted he had bought such a bag but claimed it had gone missing prior to the murder. 

Upon hearing that Lyndsay’s body had been found, William, allegedly, told his father, “I think I did that.” He later said he only meant he felt responsible because he hadn’t walked her the whole way home. His mother informed police that her son was a loner and she was aware that he was not a normal young man.The Matheson family has a history of schizophrenia and William’s brother had committed suicide in 1991.

With the evidence mounting, William was arrested and charged with the murder of Lyndsay van Blanken.

The Trial

The trial began in November 2004. One witness for the prosecution stated that on the day of Lyndsay’s disappearance she saw her involved in a heated argument with a young man she later identified, from 20 police photographs, as William Matheson. Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cuneen read to the court a poem written by William which he had given to a friend, along with Lyndsay’s diary, on the day the body was discovered for safe keeping.

The poem:  “Just the other day I watched you pass away/ You said I love you but please let me stay/ Help is not here for you or for me/Close your eyes when you go/ I’ll meet you there in eternity.” A shocked courtroom was told that Lyndsay had been William’s first and only girlfriend and he had become obsessed. He was unable to accept that she had fallen in love with, and was planning to marry, her American fiancé, Brandon Leonard.    

On November 24, 2003 William met Lyndsay on her way home, and under some pretext, lured her to the storeroom, where they often hung out when dating to be alone and listen to Goth music. However, the prosecution made it clear to the court that the murder was not one of passion, William had bought the sports bag two days earlier and that made it premeditated. William Matheson showed no emotion during the trial.

On December 8, 2005 Matheson was found guilty of the murder of Lyndsay van Blanken. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 18 years. He will not be eligible for parole until the year 2022.

Feb. 27, 2013

Helvetic Airways aircraft at the Brussels international airport (Photo: Associated Press)

In a daring, commado-style operation, eight masked, heavily armed gunmen pulled off a lightening quick heist of more than $50 million worth of diamonds.                           

by J. Patrick O’Connor

For centuries, Antwerp has been the world’s center of diamond trading and remains so today.  According to a spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre about $200 million in diamonds enter and leave Antwerp daily, with about 99 percent of that moving through the Brussels Airport in several shipments each week. The spokesperson said that diamonds traded in Antwerp last year had a total value of $51.9 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s rough diamond trade and 50 percent of trade in polished stones. The only other major diamond center is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

Diamond brokers from around the world store their diamonds and gems – sometimes for as little as a day – in one or more of the 160 safety-deposit boxes located in an underground vault at the Antwerp Diamond Centre. Once a deal is brokered for the sale of the diamonds, shipment is arranged through the Zaventem International Airport in Brussels. The diamonds are placed in small packets and driven by armored Brinks vans to the airport.  On the 25-mile trip to the airport, the Brinks vans are accompanied by armed escorts that peel away once the Brinks vans arrive at the airport’s locked gate.

On the evening of February 18, 2013, eight heavily armed masked men were outfitted in airport security uniforms and drove two black vehicles that had police-style lights on top.  They arrived at Zaventem International Airport in Brussels in darkness intent on pulling off the most audacious heist in airport history. They knew, due to construction near the main security gate, that gate would be unlocked. Using wire cutters, they opened a section of the other 10-foot-high security fence on the perimeter of the airport and then waited eight minutes for the Brinks van to unload some 125 packets of diamonds in the cargo hold of Flight LX789, a Helvetic Airways jet waiting to depart in the next 18 minutes for Zurich, Switzerland.

Minutes after the diamonds had been offloaded from the Brinks van and the doors to the cargo hold locked, a black Audi A8 sedan and a black Mercedes van with blue police lights flashing pulled up next to the airplane at 7:47 p.m.  By 7:52 p.m. the vehicles and 121 packets of the diamonds were gone in a lightening quick and incredibly competent robbery.

With commando efficiency, some of the gunmen stood in front of the jet plane pointing machine guns equipped with red laser sights at the pilots and Brinks crew while others calmly – speaking French – ordered ground workers to open the aircraft’s cargo doors.  Without firing a shot, the robbers unloaded all but four of the diamond packets that contained packages of both polished and uncut diamonds and sped away within five minutes of arriving.

The London Daily Telegraph reported that most of the diamonds were uncut and that 90 percent were bound for the Indian city of Surat, via Zurich. Initial estimates placed the theft at $50 million, but because most of the diamonds were uncut and could possibly be worth far more one expert told The Wall Street Journal that the take could come to more than $300 million, which would make the Brussels heist the largest airport robbery in history by over $200 million. In 2005, an armed gang hijacked a Brinks truck at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and escaped with an estimated $90 million of diamonds. 

The 29 passengers onboard were unaware of anything amiss until informed after the robbers had made their getaway that their flight had been cancelled. No one inside the airport happen to take notice either.

“There is a gap of only a few minutes” between the loading of the gems and the moment the plane starts to move, said Caroline De Wolf, a spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “The people who did this knew there was going to be this gap and when.”

Ine Van Wymersch, a Brussels prosecutor, said the police were investigating whether the robbers had inside information. “This is an obvious possibility,” she said.

Quoting airport security insiders, The Wall Street Journal reported that “the precision of the Brussels heist suggests extensive help from airport insiders,” noting that “all airports employ thousands of low-paid workers and face high turnover.”

An aviation-security specialist knowledgeable about the Brussels Airport robbery told the Journal“the thieves appeared to have detailed information about both the cargo and operations at the airport, and likely had help from people at the airport.”

“I am certain this was an inside job,” Doron Levy, an expert in airport security at a French risk management company,” told The New York Times. The theft, he added, was “incredibly audacious and well-organized,” and beyond the means of all but the most experienced and strong nerved criminals. “In jobs like this we are often surprised by the level of preparation and information: they know so much they probably know the employees by name.”

(Photo Mirror UK)

Levy told The Times that “the audacity of the crime recalled in some ways the so-called Pink Panther robberies – a long series of brazen raids on high-end jewelers in Geneva, London and elsewhere attributed to criminal gangs from the Balkans. But he said the military precision of Monday’s diamond robbery and the targeting of an airport suggested a far higher level of organization than the cruder Pink Panther operations.”

The Mercedes Vaneo used in the robbery was a stolen taxi. It was found burned out within 10 miles of the airport shortly after the robbers fled. The Audi, which had French registration plates, has not been recovered.

March 18, 2013

"I am the bullet in the chamber.  Just do it".-- Nike sports advertisement featuring Oscar Pistorius

Oscar Pistorius’s rise to world fame was as unlikely as his arrest for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

By Binoy Kampmark

It remains to be seen whether this will become a crime of its own singular description, or yet another point of comparison in terms of previous acts of brutality.  Will it be deemed South Africa’s O.J. Simpson trial, with its lashings of bloodlust voyeurism that finds form in evidence, exposures, and innuendo?  The suggestions are that this has already begun, despite the fact that the trial is scheduled to start on June 4. The alleged murder of the model and self-appointed spokeswoman against domestic violence Reeva Steenkamp by the Parlympian Oscar Pistorius is something the analysts and commentators find magnetic. More than bullets were fired the day Steenkamp was killed behind the locked door of the Blade Runner’s bathroom.

Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius

What stands out here is that Pistorius betrayed the image he was bestowed with.  Some of this was his doing, others distinctly not.  The evolution of a cult figure involves tweaking and adjustments.  The processes behind that are not always clear.  A series of catalysts are required, and adulation can rapidly turn to loathing.  He, for instance, became the defiant model on the sporting field, and invariably off it.  He was superhuman, yet not human in attempting to deal with his physical limitations.  For the first time in Olympic history a sporting personality competed against full bodied athletes on their own terms after a battle against officialdom.  This was muscle against adversity, physical triumph as a moral value. 

Pistorius, who told arriving police he shot Steenkamp suspecting an intruder, has fed an insatiable appetite for public consumption and media frenzy.  Pistorius is no longer an accused so much as a freak being, a cipher for anxiety, frontier mentalities and sanguinary lust.  He overcame disability, but did so mechanically through the use of “blades.”  He showed a history of previous violence.  He had a liking for military gear and fantasies of confronting intruders.  He has now been deemed capable of anything, and shooting Steenkamp may end up being an all out symbol of national psychoses, an act undertaken as a violent, anti-social impulse in a violent, anti-social community. If that be the song of the land, then sing it.

The Superhero

Oscar Pistorius

Pistorius became a talismanic athlete, a meritocrat of sorts.  Clare Forrester, writing in the Jamaica Observer (February 27, 2013), gives a sense of that levelling, and ultimately transcending power.  “Here was the supreme poster child for courage and determination, whom Grenada’s 400 metres gold medallist at the London 2012 Olympics Kirani James described as “special although he had finished last.”  But in so doing, he did not merely become the man who triumphed on the field but off it. He was the person who challenged the ruling by the International Association of Athletics that he could not run with other athletes on the basis that his Flex-Foot Cheetah prosthetic legs gave him an unfair competitive advantage.  It was a statement against physical segregation in the sport.  It was also a stance that got the scientists chatting.  He became more than the model athlete, but a model person, the odds in the lottery of life overcome with mind numbing determination. 

It was not merely that he was fast, but he was the world’s fastest double amputee, speedy despite that impediment.  Accounts of his early years seem in awe, as if bearing witness to the exploits of a divine: unable to walk as an infant, born without fibulas, legs amputated below the knee when he was a mere 11 months old, and competing at 12 with other boys in rugby (Scientific American, Jul 24, 2012). In a cover story, the New York Times Magazine described him as “The Fastest Man on No Legs.”  The aura of immortality was stretched even further by suggestions by a German team in 2007 that Pistorius used 25 percent less energy than natural runners.  Blame it, it seemed, on Össur, the Icelandic company behind the prosthetic.  Hilmar Janusson, executive vice president of research and development at the company, certainly did his bit to add to the reputation.  “When the user is running, the prosthesis’s J curve is compressed at impact, storing energy and absorbing high levels of stress that would otherwise be absorbed by a runner’s ankle, knee, hip and lower back.”

The debate about the physicality of Pistorius, its potent power, even its dangers, a mixture of machine and man, of prosthetic being and superhuman effort, was well in place before the killing of Steenkamp.  He troubled the scientists, the sports officials, the administrators and he startled his fellow sporting personalities.  A star-studded scientific team investigated this seemingly astonishing physical anomaly.  Peter Weyand, a physiologist at Southern Methodist University, Rodger Kram from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Hugh Heer, himself a double amputee and known biophysicist, “measured Pistorius’s oxygen consumption, his leg movements, the forces he exerted on the ground and his endurance” (Scientific American, July 24, 2012).  The Journal of Applied Physiology published their findings, noting that Pistorius was “physiologically similar but mechanically dissimilar.”  Here was a beautiful monster at work.

The public comments to the article in the Scientific American are also revealing.  Should a sports person, in fact, have an advantage in becoming prosthetic in competition?  What is deemed a disadvantage – amputation – is superseded by mechanical improvements. One blog post wonders whether the Pistorius precedent is an unhealthy one, effectively encouraging athletes to amputate themselves and become “blade runners” where physical exertion was reduced by virtue of technological trickery. “I would not like to be discouraging, but artificial legs would seem to not have a place in the world’s top physical competition” (Post on July 24, 2012).

He was, in effect, of this world, and yet of some other.  He was “Blade Runner,” a creature of scientific, if not pure mythology, a term of reference that was itself suggestive: Was Pistorius himself a reminder of a dystopian robotic tradition, one that was half expecting Rick Deckard to turn up and “retire” him?

Doing no right

Pistorius found himself in the company of dethroned demigods.  Lance Armstrong, who at one point was not only considered invincible but squeaky clean, found his own character diminished after allegations of dope taking prior to his victories at the Tour de France. His stoic front of denial seemed like an affirmation of innocence rather than concealment of guilt, for a time.  But resistance receded, and mortality was admitted.  The condition of deposing the idealized seemed ubiquitous – the voice behind the children’s series “Sesame Street,” Elmo, was accused of sexual misconduct.  Saints were being scratched and found to be sinners.  The Brown Daily Herald (February 25, 2013) put it in a trite fashion.  “When we create these superhuman personas – whether athletes, musicians or the like – we lose sight of the realities of being a person with both strengths and flaws.”  Avoid, advised the news outlet, any form of deification.

From here on in, Pistorius could do no right. He broke an unspoken social contract.  He has become stuck in a nightmarish morality tale, unleashing interpretations like abundant puss from a boil.  The Daily Mail, the UK’s top muck machine after Rupert Murdoch’s unscrupulous The Sun, reported that a herbal remedy in tablet form was found in the bedroom of the accused containing 23 ingredients, among them “pig testicles, pig heart, pig embryo and pig adrenal gland, cortisone, ginseng and other botanicals.”  The QMI Agency ran with the headline, “Substance found in Oscar Pistorius home contained pig testicles.” The resume of Pistorius the demon figure expands.  He is suggestively half-human, ingesting substances that would boost performance, transforming him into a sexually rapacious creature and narcissistic sports star.

A striking parallel to this is O.J., America’s own celebrated satyr, a vicious channelling for primal violence, the mad man who can do no right. He overdosed on cocaine, claimed an article for the National Inquirer, and abused his girlfriend Christie Prody.  He might have been acquitted, but that is a mere technicality.  He has fed a collection of perceptions. 

The cover of Time, almost crude in its suggestiveness, brings about this transformation in full.  From “man to superman to gun man” it suggests, showing a less than human Pistorius, legs absent yet entirely capable on his prosthetic supports, a menacingly strong torso taut at the ready, a monstrosity that may kill, necessarily or otherwise.  The athlete would not be out of place in Greek mythology, a centaur, a Lapinth perhaps chiselled on a metope of the Parthenon and then carted off to the British Museum.  This is the true mythologising of violence, and Time does its best, through the piece by Alex Perry, to draw out the figures of rape and murder in South Africa, a land populated by such beasts of violence. 

Two separate surveys of the rural Eastern Cape are cited by Perry, revealing that 27.6 percent of men surveyed admitted to being rapists, with 46.3 percent of victims being under 16.  For those interested, figures on abuse of other age groups are also documented.  “What really distinguishes South Africa from its peers in this league of violence is not how the violence rises with inequality nor its sexual nature – both typical of place with high crime – but its pervasiveness and persistence.”  This is South Africa as a sick patient, one howling for help, but like Pistorius, a centaur run wild, a society exceptional for its violent proclivities.

The latest news on his state of mind has also fed the idea of the doomed character struck down by the Gods.  Mike Azzie, a friend of the athlete, claimed on the BBC3 documentary Oscar Pistorius: What Really Happened? that the man is “on the verge of suicide.” He is now moving into that other facet of transformation – into the world of the mad. “He has no confidence in his tone of voice and he is just a man that is almost like someone that is walking around in circles and doesn’t know where he is going.”  This does not dent his confidence, if the documentary is credible in any sense.  To a senior officer who explained to Pistorius on being arrested that he “could go to jail for a very long time,” his reply was dismissive.  “I’ll survive. I always win.”

At the end of the article printed in The Australian describing Pistorius’s alleged mental state are a series of numbers for those with “depression” (contact Beyond Blue); those with “emotional difficulties” (contact Lifeline); and those with what can only be presumed to be mixture of them (SANE).  From deification, Pistorius has become a case study in mental ruination, the violently mad. 

Domestic violence

Another suggestion in the Pistorius affair, pitches Jina Moore in The Atlantic (March 1, 2013), is that of domestic violence with its accompanying apologetics.  For Moore, this is less cultural than individual, a context lost in the broader picture of the man and his times.  She implies that grand narratives may not have a place in dealing with Pistorius.  She is not sure, but she suggests it.  It’s the man’s problem, and violence is to be found less in a milieu than it is to be found in Homo sapiens, or at least this male specimen.  Where, she complains, was the domestic violence specialist in Perry’s story for Time?

In this view, Moore pinches a thread that has grown in the literature on domestic violence, taking issue with readings such as those of Michel Foucault of the Pierre Riviere case.  The bone of contention here is whether such violence can be given the collective brush.  In Riviere’s case, a 20-year-old Normandy peasant slaughtered his mother, sister and little brother with a pruning hook in June 1835.  His father was spared, largely because the killings were done to liberate him.  “I have just delivered my father from all his tribulations. I know that they will put me to death, but no matter.”  His death sentence was commuted by the King, largely due to the intervention of Parisian psychiatrists. 

The impressions the killer left about his mother were vicious.  His parents lived apart. The elder Riviere was considered of “mild and peaceable disposition” while his mother was considered oppressive and manipulative.  He feared that French society had fallen into the hands of women since the Revolution. He was plagued by nightmares of incest.  In the events of such killings, suggested Foucault, one could not neglect the sensationalist criminal literature of the time, nor the state of the medical profession in treating the “mentally ill” with their competing “discourses.” 

Fellow participants in the famous seminar Foucault convened on the subject of Riviere’s killings, published in I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother (1975), had their own take about the violence.  Jean-Pierre Peter and Jeanne Favret praised Riviere as a rebellious figure who revolted against the exigencies of peasant life yet demanding the state kill him justly “and not let him rot.”  This was crime as justified transgression, an act on the part of the socially invisible.  That he should be denied death because of faulty “psychiatry” lay in the false promise of bourgeois humanism.

Not so, claimed subsequent critics, who could detect a more than lurking sexist undertone, a praise of domestic murder.  Could the case have simply been one of standard domestic violence turned murderous?  Julie Marcus scolds Foucault for ignoring gender in the case, discounting the killer’s fears of female incest and female animals.  For Marcus, Riviere was effectively a mother-hating killer.  The Pistorius example may nod at something in that direction, if one is to take Moore’s position.  His past has been dug up; his behavior has been seen in light of other celebrities who have succumbed to gendered brutality.  His copy book is blotted.

Students of women’s studies have certainly found the Pistorius case befuddling.  Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, professor of women’s studies and English at Emory University, saw Pistorius lumped in with other unsavory company, a reverse pantheon of the fallen: Mike Tyson, Charlie Sheen, Kobe Bryant, Mel Gibson, Jovan Belcher “and perhaps most controversially of all, O J Simpson… As our collective image of him shifts from admired athlete to girlfriend killer, something important has been lost” (Al Jazeera, March 14, 2013). 

Garland-Thompson’s legitimate and well spotted fear is that the contagion of violence, the suggestion of angst-driven misogyny, might be linked to the anger, the frustrations, the limitations of one with disability, be it mental or physical. 

What is revealing about Garland-Thompson is that the law does not so much matter less than the issue of “identification.”  Referring back to the O J Simpson trial, she was reminded of the reactions of her own class when raising the case.  Some supported a verdict of guilty against Simpson on the basis of history’s injustices against women.  Others in turn supported a verdict of not guilty on the basis of black injustices in the country.  With such perceptions, facts recede into a dim distance.  One is guilty or innocent less on evidence than on identity.

Frontier themes

Pistorius seen as a collective expression of violence, the internalised fears of a race on the run, has been a popular theme.  The Economist editorialised (October 7, 1995) in sharp fashion on the Simpson trial, using a title that might as well apply to South Africa, albeit with qualification.  “Two nations, divisible,” it suggested. Themes of division for the paper were based on growing polarization.  Was Steenkamp a victim of South Africa’s own polarized communities, the collateral sacrifice in a terrified, gated community?

Pistorius’s justification was one of self-defense, making the home seem a vicious, internalised frontier needing an aggressively vigilant regime of protection.  If the authorities of the day don’t fulfil that role, private citizens will.  “Nothing like getting home to hear the washing machine on and thinking it’s an intruder to go into full combat recon mode into the pantry,” posted Pistorius on Twitter in November.  The Afrikaners find themselves in electrified gated communities conducting a war with the natives in manner both metaphorical and actual. This is a conflict which has never stopped since the Boers settled.

The views of Pistorius’s father, Henke, were a perfect illustration of that sentiment.  Evading matters directly concerning the case of his own son, he preferred to place the blame on the shoulders of the ANC government.  A spotlight was shone on the vast array of arms owned by the Pistorius family.   “Some of the guns are for hunting and some are for protection: the hand guns.  It speaks to the ANC government. Look at white crime levels, why protection is so poor in this country.”  According to the Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld, Henke, Oscar’s grandfather Hendrik, and his uncles Arnold, Theo and Leo owned an impressive collection of 55 shotguns and handguns between them (Telegraph, March 4, 2013).  ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu retorted accordingly, rejecting “with contempt” the claim that the government was indifferent in protecting the white population.  “Not only is this statement devoid of truth, it is also racist. It is sad that he has chosen to politicize this tragic incident that is still fresh in the minds of those affected and the public.”

Crime rates, it might be argued, were kept artificially low during the era of apartheid, when the white regime patrolled white areas with keen scrutiny.  Segregation may have been formally repudiated under the South African Constitution, but the instinctive reactions of division have not.  Official political statistics show a fall in crime in South Africa by 31.8 percent from 2004-5 to 2011-12, with the murder rate dropping by 27.6 percent (BBC News, March 5, 2013). 

It is ironically fitting then that the killing should happen against one from the same community, notably soon after the victim Steenkamp would tweet that she “woke up in a happy safe home this morning.  Not everyone did.  Speak out against the rape of individuals.”  (This tweet, incidentally, riled Moore, who considered it the myopic twaddle of a confused individual ignorant of sexual assault.) 

In South Africa, discussion around Pistorius’s alleged wrong doing have assumed the form of a parable.  “He will have to live with his conscience,” advanced Steenkamp’s father, Barry.  “But if he is telling the truth, I might perhaps be able to forgive him one day.  However, if it didn’t happen as he tells it, he must suffer.  And he will suffer; only he knows” (Sunday Times, February 24, 2013). But the Pistorius affair reveals that the ingredients for his downfall were already present.  Despite being a double amputee, he was a superhuman creature, a variant of primitive mythology and science fiction.  He was all powerful, yet prone to weakness. He was violent and to be feared. He was courageous but ultimately weakened by misogyny.  And finally, he became a victim, even before the court has judged his innocence, of cultural interpretations.   

May 19, 2009

the Palace of Versailles

It took the French government 14 years to bring American expatriate Barrie Taylor to justice for the 1993 murder of her lover's estranged wife. After three trials and three convictions in France for the murder, Taylor continues her fight to be allowed to live freely in the United States.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Thursday, September 30, 1993. It was going to be a quiet day in Versailles, France's "City of Kings." Or so the cops at the local station house told themselves. The trains pulling in from nearby Paris would not be bringing hordes of day trippers to the chateau of Marie Antoinette, France's last queen, as they do at the height of summer. Not that the tourists brought crime to the town, but their coaches did snarl up traffic, and pickpockets were prone to try their luck in front of the palace. It was also a cool, rainy day and the town's street markets would not attract many shoppers. There would therefore be few rogue street vendors to round up.

Boulevard de la République, a street lined with trees and elegant Belle Époque era townhouses, and only a few blocks from the magnificent chateau, was indeed quiet as a small white police automobile, its siren silent, drove up to Number 20, one of six three-storied brick and stone terraced houses. The automobile had four passengers; three uniformed cops and a young man. For the young man, Marc Pavageau, it was his second visit to the house in as many days.

One of the cops knocked at the house’s front door; in France cops and firefighters know never to ring a doorbell, but always to knock in case there is a gas leak inside the property.

April 11, 2010

Princess Diana

Was her death really an accident, or was there a hidden hand at work? Many still say that she was assassinated. Not long before her tragic end, she predicted in a letter to her loyal butler that she would be murdered in a car accident. 

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins 

The telephones started ringing in the homes of Paris’s foreign correspondents soon after 1 a.m. on Sunday, August 31, 1997.

It had been a dull Saturday. After a very hot summer when the temperature in Paris had risen to the high 80s Fahrenheit, the sun had that day disappeared behind thick clouds and the city had turned cool so that the Parisians had to wear warm clothing.  There had also been a degree of languor in the city; the summer vacation was over but no one as yet felt like returning to work, school or university.

The journalists shared the Parisians’ languor; what they called the “silly season” was ending and with the rentrée– the return or reopening – would arrive new political shenanigans, disasters and wars to report.

The callers were editors from the world over. All asked the same question of their correspondents: “We hear Di’s been in an accident in a tunnel. Can we have a story in the next half an hour for our first edition this morning?”

Not one of the journalists would be able to sleep on what was left of the hours of darkness, or indeed for the next couple of days. They knew that they were working on the biggest story there had been for a long time and would probably be for some time. Later, some of the most hardened among those who worked as freelancers would admit that they had earned so much money that night that they had been able to set off on a luxury vacation afterwards.

For that August night, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries she had sustained in a car crash in a Paris tunnel.

If before that night, you had asked anyone – man or woman – who was the most beautiful, most elegant, most compassionate woman in the world, the one they would love to have dinner with, they would have replied: Princess Di.

But that night she lay dead in Paris aged just 36.

June 19, 2010

The Papin sisters

The strange case of the Papin sisters is notable not only for its shocking violence but because the gender of both the perpetrators and victims was female. The case became a media sensation in France with its lurid undertones of lesbianism and incest; the motive for the crime was never quite clarified – was it simply raving madness or was it the calculated (and some would say righteous) revenge of two working-class girls against their oblivious employers?

by Jessica Mason

The Papin Family 

Even by the hardscrabble standards of early 20th century French peasant life, Christine and Léa Papin experienced a particularly dismal childhood. Their father Gustave was an abusive alcoholic and their mother Clémence was a flighty and promiscuous woman with little maternal instinct who, in 1901, was forced to marry their father only because she was pregnant with their first child, Émilia. After her second child Christine was born in 1905, Clémence decided that she could not handle two children and sent the baby off to live with Gustave’s sister. In 1911, Clémence bore a third child, Léa. Soon after the birth of Léa, Clémence discovered that her husband had raped their eldest daughter, Émilia, who at the time was only 10 years old.

Clémence immediately sought and obtained a divorce from Gustave. Her actions, however, were not taken out of concern for her daughter's welfare, but a desire to punish her husband for his infidelity. Clémence apparently believed that Émilia had seduced her father and in order to discipline her, sent her to an orphanage, run by the convent of Le Bon Pasteur, that was known for its harshness. In addition, she pulled Christine out of the care of her aunt and also placed her in Le Bon Pasteur. She also relieved herself of the burden of caring for Léa, who was but a toddler at the time, by giving her over to the care of a great uncle.

Émilia and Christine grew very close to each other in the orphanage and when Émilia became a nun as soon as she was old enough Christine had every intention of following in her sister’s footsteps. However, Clémence, who was depending on her daughters to help support her as soon as they were legally able to work was furious with Émilia for denying her a third of that potential income and forbade Christine from doing the same. She immediately pulled Christine out of Le Bon Pasteur and found her work as a maid in the bourgeois households of Le Mans. Because the sisters of Le Bon Pasteur had tutored her in cleaning, mending and cooking, she was very well-suited to the life of a domestic worker. However, Christine changed employers many times in the first years of her career because the wages they paid were never enough to suit her mother.  Like her older sister, Léa was taken from the care of her relative and put to work as soon as she was able and the two sisters, who though they had been separated, were still very fond of each other and attempted to work together whenever possible.

Jan. 10, 2011 Updated April 1, 2012

Shrien and Anni Dewani on their wedding day. (Photo was handed out to the media.)

Both brilliant and beautiful, Anni Dewani was shot to death on her honeymoon outside Cape Town, South Africa during a carjacking that her millionaire husband, Shrien Dewani, survived.  The three men convicted of the murder say the young husband hired them to kill his wife.  London-based Dewani is fighting extradition. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The names of the places sounded exotic: Gugulethu. Lingelethu. Khayelitsha. Chitwa Chitwa. They created images of beautiful people dancing to the beat of drums on a hot summer night.

To the cops in their dark blue uniforms, who stood around the white Volkswagen Sharan, abandoned in the place that bore the name Lingelethu, there was nothing exotic though about the young woman who lay sprawled across the vehicle’s rear seat. Two holes between her shoulders and another in her neck from which her blood had flowed freely so that most of the inside of the car was covered in blood, told them that the young woman was dead.

They knew her name: Anni Dewani.

They were wondering how they were going to tell her husband Shrien, who had in the first hour of that morning reported her missing and was anxiously waiting at a nearby luxury hotel, what they had found.

April 10, 2013

Yaseen Ege

The murder of 7-year-old Muslim child in Cardiff, Wales in 2010 brought his mother and father to trial. Did the jury convict the wrong parent?                

by Marie Kusters-McCarthy

Arranged marriages are an integral part of Indian Hindu and Muslim culture. Parents, and family members, become involved in the search for a prospective bride or groom through acquaintances, advertisements or marriage brokers. In modern India there has been a move towards flexibility. However, there are still marriages where the bride and groom see each other for the first time at the wedding ceremony. The family will consider several factors such as background, wealth, social status, caste and education. More and more young women in India are university educated and the families are taking that into consideration when choosing a suitable partner.

The custom of arranged marriages in India can be traced back to the 4th century. It began as a means to unite, and maintain, the upper caste system. Eventually it spread to the lower caste as a way of staying within their social status and preventing unsuitable “love” matches. Even today 95 percent of Indian marriages are arranged.

In the Muslim faith it is the responsibility of the parents to provide for the upbringing, education and marriage of their children. Parents have the responsibility to arrange suitable, hopefully happy, marriages for their daughters. Female offspring are considered to be made for someone else’s house.  Parents of sons have the responsibility to seek out eligible, suitable females for marriage. When a possible bride has been identified it is the father of the groom who meets with the bride’s father to reach an agreement as to the suitability of the couple. A dowry will be discussed, presents exchanged and the ceremony date agreed.

The marriage ceremony can often be the first time bride and groom see each other and will not even speak until after the ceremony. During the ceremony both are asked if they are in agreement to the marriage. When they acknowledge their agreement, the Koran is read and a pre-arranged dowry is confirmed. The paying of a dowry is culturally optional, and now legally unlawful, but is still practiced and can be a very important part of the marriage agreement. Once the marriage contract is signed the bride immediately goes to live in her husband’s family home.

It is considered a shame on an Indian family if a daughter remains unmarried over the age of 24.                                                            

All cultures have practiced arranged marriages, be they for dynastic, financial or political reasons. In fact the modern day “on line dating” websites are just marriage brokers but don’t call themselves that. The hope of finding a suitable partner is the reason that people, in Western society, sign up and pay for introductions.

With a lot of young Indian men living in the West, especially England, there is a shortage of eligible marriage partners. That has created a growing need for marriage brokers. 

Sara

Sara Ege

Sara, daughter of Nafees Ahmed and Mohamed Ali Khan, was part of a large extended family and had a happy home life with her antique dealer father, mother and two brothers in the city of Hyderabad, India. She was educated at a Catholic school prior to university where she gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics and statistics.

In 2000 Sara’s parents felt the time had come for her to marry, she was 20 years of age. They registered with a marriage bureau, which is on a par with dating agencies in Europe and the United States.

The bureau presented Yousuf Ali Ege to Sara’s parents for consideration. They were told he was a 26-year-old, educated man with a BA and a Masters degree, had a good job as the manager at a branch of The Royal Mail in Cardiff, Wales. Cardiff is the capital city of Wales which like Scotland and Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. Yousuf’s parents had registered their son with the same bureau as distance and time had made the selection of a bride difficult. Neither family had met prior to the introduction by the bureau.

Within a week of Sara’s registration with the agency, her parents accepted Yousuf Ali Ege as a suitable husband for their daughter.  A visit by the future groom’s family took place on the following Wednesday and the wedding ceremony performed on the Friday. Because of Yousuf’s urgency to return to his job in Cardiff the usual weeks, or even years, of wedding preparation was outweighed. There was no conversation between the couple prior to the marriage.

Sara grew up in the knowledge that her parents loved her and would only want the best for her. She accepted and trusted them to find her a suitable, equally well educated life partner. Within days of her marriage she found herself thousands of miles away from family and friends in a strange country. She soon became aware that she was married to a man with a limited, O’ Level education, (barely high school), was a mail delivery man and part-time taxi driver. The marriage was unhappy from the start. After several miscarriages and three years of marriage, Sara gave birth, through IVF treatment, to a son, Yaseen.

Even though she was very unhappy in her marriage, in Sara’s culture it was unthinkable for her to return home to her parents. It would be considered a shame on the whole family and she would be looked upon as an “unwanted” married woman and a burden.

The Murder of 7-Year-Old Yaseen

On July 12, 2010, fire fighters rushed to a fire at a residential home in Cardiff after receiving a call from a hysterical woman who said her 7-year-old son, Yaseen, was still inside the burning house. The fire was quickly extinguished and firefighters found the boy’s badly burnt body and immediately applied CPR. Firefighter Richard Higson felt something wasn’t right as the body was rigid and hot. The face was not swollen and there was no soot in the mouth. An ambulance rushed Yaseen to the nearest hospital but he was declared dead en route. His mother, Sara Ege, was suffering from smoke inhalation and, accompanied by her husband, was taken in a separate ambulance to the hospital.                                                                                                       

Yaseen’s father told police that his son had not gone to school that day as there was going to be a “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” and the boy did not have a teddy bear. Family, friends and neighbors were traumatised by this tragic accident. Flowers and teddy bears were placed by saddened neighbors, school children and friends outside the home.                                                          

However, within days a post mortem revealed the shocking truth. Prior to his death, Yaseen had suffered a catalogue of systematic physical abuse. His body had multiple injuries to his abdomen, broken ribs, a fractured arm and finger and the little boy was dead prior to the fire.

Both parents were questioned by the police. Within a few days, in a taped confession, Sara told police that she had killed her son for his failure to learn and recite parts of the Koran. Several weeks later she retracted this confession.  Her husband, Yousuf, denied all knowledge of any abuse or beatings his son may have received. Sara was charged with the murder of Yaseen. Yousuf Ali Ege was charged with causing or allowing the death of his son by failing to act.

The Trial of Sara and Yousuf Ali Ege

The trial opened in May 2012 at Cardiff Crown Court. Prosecutor Ian Murphy informed the jury that Sara, in her taped confession, had told police how she had beaten Yaseen regularly with a stick. On the day of the boy’s death she had beaten him until he had collapsed, still murmuring extracts from the Koran. She left her son lying on the floor and upon returning, some 10 minutes later, found him shivering and shaking and within minutes she realised he was dead. She then poured barbecue lighter fluid over the body to cover up the recent and old injuries she had inflicted.

At trial, her defense counsel, Peter Murphy, (not to be confused with Prosecutor Ian Murphy), said Sara had been a victim of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of her husband just days into the marriage.

Testifying in her own defense, Sara told the court she did not cause her son’s death and that it was her husband who was responsible for Yaseen’s death. She said her husband had beaten his son causing the abdominal and other injuries which led to his death. She also said her confession to the police had been given in fear for her life as she had been threatened by Yousuf and his family. She said she had loved her little boy very much and would never have done anything to hurt him.

When the prosecution showed Sara’s taped confession to the jury, an emotional Sara was allowed to leave the court. The harrowing confession gave details of how she had beaten Yaseen “like a dog” regularly as she had become increasingly frustrated by his inability to master the Koran to the level of the older boys at their mosque.                                                                                                                

Sections of unrecorded interviews were also read out to the court in which the defendant said she was out of control, had beaten her son regularly for no reason, had tried to stop but was unable to. “He was so good, he never complained about anything. I just blame my anger, I lost control. I cannot put all this together. There was no intention in me to harm my son.”                                                           

The court heard evidence from a class teacher at Yaseen’s school who, as far back as 2007, had noticed an injury on the boy’s hand. When questioned as to how the injury had occurred Yaseen told him that his mother had hit him with a ruler. The teacher brought this matter to the attention of the head teacher who asked to speak with whichever parent came to collect Yaseen. That afternoon it was his mother who came for him.

There was some confusion as the head teacher, whose name was withheld by a court order, had initially denied ever having spoken with Mrs. Ege regarding her son’s injury, but recalled it later. He said he had no concerns about inviting Sara Ege, whose educational background had impressed him, to be a volunteer classroom assistant with other pupils at the school.

The head teacher asked Sara about the injury and she said that Yaseen had been naughty at home and she had hit him. The head teacher told her “We all lose our tempers but we are not allowed to do that.” She then asked was he naughty at school? The answer was “no.”

Peter Birkitt, the defence attorney for Yousuf Ali Ege, then addressed the court. He said there was no evidence that the father was aware of the suffering and injuries inflicted by his wife on Yaseen. As far as he was aware, Sara was a concerned, caring and devoted mother and he had never received a complaint from his young son. He went on to say that Yousuf had two jobs which meant he was seldom in the home. He did not have the advantage of teachers who were with Yaseen six hours a day to see his pain. The school had discussed their concerns only with the mother and had not brought it to the attention of the father.

Questions were raised as to the behaviour of Yousuf Ali Ege on the day of the fire. To some of those at the scene it appeared he was already aware of his son’s death upon his arrival to the home.

Prosecutor Ian Murphy, in closing, said Sara had promised Yaseen a bicycle if he had been perfect in the first two chapters of the Koran by July 19, 2010. When the boy did not meet these expectations there was an explosion of anger which resulted in Yaseen’s death.

Judge Royce summed up the six-week trial by telling the eight female and four male jurors to put all emotion aside in making a decision as to who was, and who was not, telling the truth. He said “You must approach your task dispassionately, calmly and fairly.”                                                                                                                           

He went on to say, in order to convict Sara Ege they had to be sure she caused the injuries which led to Yaseen’s death, that she failed to get medical attention and that she set him on fire. If they were to find she did kill her son, but was suffering from an abnormality of mind at the time, then they should find her guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.                                                                

To convict Yousuf Ali Ege, Judge Royce told the jury that they would have to be sure that he knew, or should have known, his son could be at risk and failed to take steps to protect him.

After three days of deliberation, the jurors returned to the court saying they were unable to reach a verdict on either of the accused. They also said that even with more time they would be unable to do so. Judge Royce then discharged the jury and the case was listed for retrial. 

Retrial

On October 31, 2012, the retrial of Sara and Yousuf Ali Ege opened in Cardiff Crown Court. As in the first trial, Sara Ege was charged with the murder of her son andYousuf Ali Ege with causing, or allowing, the death of his son by failing to act. Both the accused denied the charges. This time a jury of 10 men and two women were empanelled.

In his opening statement to the jury, Prosecutor Ian Murphy stated that Sara Ege had inflicted the violence on her son with the intention to kill or cause serious harm. She then set fire to his body in an attempt to hide the many injuries he had suffered prior to and on the day of his death. He said medical evidence would be presented describing the injuries which Yousuf must have seen as he had shared a bed with his son.

During the trial, the jury was shown the harrowing taped confession that Sara had made to the police just days after Yaseen’s death. In this tape, Sara described how she had beaten her son after she got angry with him because he was having difficulty reciting verses of the Koran to her required standard. When he collapsed, she dragged him to the kitchen to give him some milk, he sipped the drink and was then brought to a bedroom to change his clothes. She left him for about 10 minutes believing he had fallen asleep. When she returned she found him shaking, shivering and gulped a final breath before dying. She said she panicked and decided to burn his body with barbecue lighter to hide his injuries.

In the tape, Sara said she was out of control and beat her son for almost no reason. She also told police that on one occasion Yaseen had gone to school unable to sit due to a beating. He was sent home by the school. Sara switched him to another school, informing the principal that her son had a leg injury that prevented him from sitting.                                                             

Firefighter Richard Higson reprised his testimony from the first trial, telling the jury that on his arrival to the Ege home that he noticed the badly burnt body of 7-year-old Yaseen was unusually rigid and hot. He said the whole situation “didn’t seem to add up, things were not usual.” He said when the father arrived home Sara said, “He’s burnt, he’s burnt, and he’s actually burnt” and Yousuf, in a very calm manner, asked “but is he alive?” Higson said he felt that the boy was dead but did not tell this to the parents as he was trying to be “very discreet.” However, he had the impression that Sara already knew her son was dead. He also told the court that the father had appeared unusually calm under such circumstances.                                                 

Peter Birkitt for the defense of Yousuf Ali Ege called Dr. Robert Reeves, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, to the stand. Dr. Reeves agreed that Sara had given four, starkly contrasting stories about the events leading up to the death of Yaseen. Dr. Reeves told the court that there were signs of Mrs. Ege having a depressive illness and psychosis before and at the time of her son’s death. He admitted that he found it difficult to accept Mrs. Ege’s claim that she heard voices telling her to beat her son.

Sara Ege followed Dr. Reeves into the witness box. She began her testimony by describing her upbringing in India, her education and her arranged marriage to Yousuf Ali Ege. She stated that she had not hurt Yaseen; it was her husband who was responsible. She said a couple of years prior to the boy’s death staff at two primary schools had drawn her attention to her son being in pain and was advised to take him to a doctor. She had not done this as Yousuf had told her Yaseen would be taken away from her by Social Services.

Sara continued her testimony by saying that the large wooden stick, referred to in her taped confession, was used by her husband to beat both Yaseen and herself. She claimed her confession to the police had been because she feared for her life after threats from her husband and his family. Describing the day of Yaseen’s death she said “Me and Yousuf were arguing in the playroom and he punched me and kicked me to my stomach on the floor. I was screaming and Yaseen came into the playroom and tried to help me saying ‘Don’t hurt mummy.’ Yousuf then beat Yaseen and kicked him twice.”

She had wanted to take her son to the hospital but her husband would not allow her to. The court was told that her husband had beaten her regularly throughout their marriage and had also beaten Yaseen.

The court then heard from Sara’s mother, Mrs. Nafees Ahmed, who said that in 2007 she and her husband were made aware that Yousuf had been arrested for hitting their daughter. They were visited at their home in India by Yousuf’s family who threatened to kill them and their family if anything happened to their son. Mrs.Ahmed told the court that her daughter loved her son and was a good mother. She also said that Sara had never told her she had beaten Yaseen. 

Even though they knew that Sara was unhappy in her marriage they had told her “you are married now and you have to make it work, it is a matter of honor and respect.”                                                                      

Medical evidence was given detailing injuries suffered, at various times, by Mrs. Ege, allegedly caused by her husband. The court was told that Sara had visited the Accident and Emergency unit of a local hospital at least half a dozen times with suspicious injuries. In one incident in 2007, Yousuf had called for an ambulance after an alleged assault on his wife. Paramedics left the scene when he became aggressive towards them and notified the police. When the police arrived at the home, Yousuf dismissed claims he had punched his wife and said she had suffered a “nick” on her lip from his arm and a punch to her chest, unwittingly, when she had “lunged at him during an argument.” Yousuf was arrested but later released as Sara refused to press charges.

Sara’s defense attorney, Peter Murphy, questioned Yousuf Ali Ege about alleged hostility towards his wife from his family because she had suffered several miscarriages and might not be able to have children. Yousuf said, “That is nonsense.” He said his wife had invented all the allegations against him.

When questioned by his own barrister, Peter Birkitt, Yousuf said he had never seen Sara punish Yaseen and she had only ever raised her voice to him in anger. He again stressed that he was totally unaware that Yaseen had suffered any physical violence at all. He said when the post mortem results were told to him he was very shocked.

In her testimony, Sara told the court that her husband had enrolled Yaseen in advanced classes at their local Mosque as they wanted him to become “Hafiz” – an Islamic term for someone who memorizes the Koran. She admitted to becoming frustrated and angry when her son was not reaching the expected level by the deadline.

Guilty!

The case went to the jury on December 5, 2012. After eight hours of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of guilty in the case of Sara Ege for the murder of her son. The jury also found her guilty of perverting the course of justice by burning his body. Upon hearing the verdict Sara Ege broke down sobbing.

Judge Wyn Williams told her she faced a term of life imprisonment.

Yousuf Ali Ege was found not guilty in causing or allowing the death of his son by failing to protect him. He left the court without showing any emotion.

The judge told the court that he would determine a minimum sentence for Sara Ege in the New Year after a medical report had been completed.                                               

After the verdict was announced, District Crown Prosecutor Deborah Rogers, who formed the team for the prosecution and had not appeared in court, made a public statement on behalf of the DCP.  She said “the deeply tragic nature of this case is all too apparent. We should not forget that at the heart of the case is the loss of a bright and friendly young boy who had his whole life ahead of him. It is therefore right that the circumstances of Yaseen’s death were fully examined in a criminal court.”

The verdict caused an outcry of disbelief in Cardiff and beyond. There was a history of physical and mental abuse by Yousuf to his wife and by implication also to his son, Yaseen.  Women’s groups, and others, have taken up the case for Sara to have her verdict overturned and are calling for a further investigation into the actions of Yousouf during their married life.  Questions have also been raised as to whether the female to male ratio on the respective juries in both trials played a part in the final verdict.

Sentence

On December 8, 2012, Judge Wyn Williams passed a sentence of life and ordered that Sara serve a minimum of 17 years before she can be considered for parole. On hearing the sentence, Sara collapsed and had to be helped from the court room. 

Her defense has submitted an application for appeal. 

April 15, 2013

Winton Cooper

Popular BBC reporter Winton Cooper was brutally murdered by his own son.

by Ben Johnson

Staff at the BBC, one of the most high-profile broadcasting companies in the world, was left in shock after the January 2013 trial of a violent murderer who bludgeoned a former reporter and broadcaster to death with a hammer.  Not least because the perpetrator of this sickening crime was the victim's own son.

Winton Cooper was a well respected local journalist, spending many years as a popular reporter working for BBC Radio Sheffield. Since retiring, Cooper, 64, had moved to the picturesque village of Marnhull, a quiet and respectable area on the Dorset coast, known for its natural beauty and quaint architecture.

This peaceful lifestyle was eventually to be shattered by the arrival of Joseph Cooper, then aged 24, in 2009. Winton and Joseph were virtually estranged after an acrimonious divorce between Winton Cooper and his former wife, Joseph's mother, in the mid 90's. This came during the height of Winton's media career, and left his young son devastated at the falling apart of his family.

Joseph had always been a problem child. The middle son of three, he often found himself in trouble with the police and his parents. The breakdown of his family environment escalated these problems until the newly divorced couple found themselves in an unusual situation. They fought over who wasn't going to take custody of the boy.

His father decided that the boy should stay with his mother, citing work commitments as the reason he felt unable to give his son the upbringing he so desperately needed. His mother simply could not cope with the antisocial behavior displayed by her son. Due to this post-nuptial deadlock, Joseph found himself taken into care.

This reluctance to give their son the care and attention he obviously needed (which was kept under tight secrecy due to Winton Cooper's prominent media position) was enough to cause irreparable damage to young Joseph. His mid to late teens were spent committing ever-worsening crimes, until he reached the age of 20, when he finally sought a reconciliation with his father, who was now living in Dorset, caring for his own elderly father.

The trio were reported to have at first lived a “peaceable existence” according to reports from Winchester Crown Court, in which a defense barrister, Stewart Jones, describes their lifestyle as “revolving around the local pub, the shops and their home.”

The First Attack

This idyllic and peaceful lifestyle began to show cracks in 2009, when Joseph is reported to have attacked his father with a metal bar. The older man was forced to barricade himself in his bedroom until his son's temper subsided. Describing the attack to friends, Winton claims that Joseph had “just lost it.”

Psychologists who were called to give evidence at Joseph's eventual murder trial believe that the young man had been suffering from mental health problems since childhood, and the subsequent strain of the acrimonious divorce and sense of abandonment had considerably worsened these violent outbursts.

After the first attack, the relationship in the house became more tense, with Winton often remarking to friends and family that Joseph was acting strangely, or that he was in fear of a further attack.

His prediction was, sadly, to become true just three years later.

During the trial, which took place on January 4, 2013, it was revealed that Joseph had made phone calls to his mother and two brothers, claiming to have killed his father. The trio initially refused to believe this, as Joseph's mental issues were common knowledge among the other members of his family. However, he was eventually able to convince them enough that Mrs .Cooper made a sceptical and apologetic call to police, repeating her son's grisly confession, but warning that this also may be a cruel hoax.

A Gruesome Crime Scene

Local police, who already had experience of the strange behavior of Joseph Cooper, took a much more serious view of this confession, and immediately dispatched three officers to the house.

On arrival, the three policemen are described by Stewart Jones as being confronted by a “shocking and gruesome scene.”

The naked body of Winton Cooper was found in the hallway of his home; he had been attacked with a hammer, three knives and a pair of pruning shears. The attack had been so frenzied that all three knives were bent from the force of the thrusts and the handle of the hammer had broken.

Forensic experts believe that the cause of death were a number of terrible head wounds, caused by repeated hammer blows. The knives and pruning shears are believed to have been used to inflict post-mortem injuries.

“The only way to describe Winton Cooper's head, was that it had been beaten in” said the barrister during his description of the horrific crime scene.

The three officers retreated from the house and called for armed back-up, who arrived quickly on the scene and found Joseph nearby. Joseph was immediately arrested, yet claimed that he had acted in self defense after his father had attacked him with knives. Forensic evidence was soon to disprove this claim and Cooper Jr. pleaded guilty when appearing in court for preliminary hearings.

The Trial

The full trial, held at Winchester Crown Court, was adjourned in August 2012 when Judge Guy Boney halted proceedings in order for Joseph Cooper to undergo extensive psychiatric tests.

It was also at this preliminary stage that details of the defendant's childhood came to light, with close friends of the Cooper family testifying that Mrs. Cooper had been battling a drink problem since the children were at a very young age, and that Winton Cooper was known to have a short temper and could be violent and abusive in certain circumstances.

Judge Boney believed that Joseph's emotional problems were serious enough to have caused this violent attack, and suspended the hearing until January 2013, placing Joseph into the care of a high- security mental hospital.

When the trial finally restarted, two psychiatrists were called to report their findings. Both agreed that this troubled young man was suffering from “such an abnormality of the mind, that it had impaired his responsibility for his actions.”

The Verdict

Summing up, Judge Boney stated that this was an especially “shocking and gruesome” attack, but agreed with the psychiatrists that Joseph Cooper could not be found guilty of murder, but was guilty of manslaughter by diminished responsibility.

In a rare occurrence in any courtroom, the judge, prosecution and defense all agreed on the eventual outcome, that Joseph Cooper would be held indefinitely in a secure hospital until he could be safely released into society.

The press reaction in the UK to this case was one of sadness, rather than the usual lurid outrage. This was a case of a child who could not settle into a normal family lifestyle, and a father who would eventually pay the ultimate price for a lack of affection and moral guidance towards his wayward son.

Winton Cooper will be remembered as a popular and professional journalist, but will also remembered for his untimely and violent death. In life, he witnessed violent death first-hand, as he was one of the correspondents at the Hillsborough disaster, a tragic event which took place at a soccer game in 1989, and resulted in 96 people losing their lives. Twenty-two years to the day from that disaster, Winton Cooper was slain by his own son.

April 18, 2013

How bite marks can lead to convictions.

by Liz Porter

Criminals are regularly nabbed because they make stupid and careless mistakes. The burglar who robbed a safe at the up-market Haigh’s chocolate factory in the South Australian capital city of Adelaide is a perfect example. He was caught by his own bad manners. On his way to burgle the establishment’s safe, he toured the factory’s display area, helping himself to samples and biting into several chocolate bars. He then threw the uneaten leftovers on the floor – from where police collected them. If he had taken his uneaten chocolate home – or neatly disposed of it in a rubbish bin – he might never have been caught.

The robbery took place on a weeknight in early February 1996. Office staff arriving for work at the inner suburban factory the next morning discovered that an intruder had broken in through a skylight. He had used an axe and jemmy to bash the alarm system off the wall and had then overturned the office safe, making a hole in its back and removing the $1,800 inside. The workers also spotted the partially eaten chocolate bars the thief had dropped on the floor, and noticed that he had also stolen chocolate from a display area nearby.

Police recovered the uneaten chocolate, noting that clear tooth marks were visible in a 40 by 55-millimetre piece of chocolate frog, a 27 by 29-millimetre portion of chocolate honey nougat, and a 40 by 77-milllimetre bar of plain chocolate.

The chocolate evidence was stored carefully, while police closed in on a man they believed to have been responsible for a recent series of similar night-time break-ins. A gourmet deli had been robbed on January 14, and bus tickets, blank checks, phone cards and $400 worth of cakes were stolen. On January 22, a travel agency had been robbed of foreign currency. Then, a week later, and only three days before the Haigh’s heist, a robber had climbed through a window of another travel agency and stolen $4,850 in cash. Possibly emboldened by his success in previous break-ins, he left a handwritten note for police or, as he called them, the “boys” in the “Beuro”(bureau) telling them they had “better be considering a new line of work,” and signing it “Traffick.”

The police suspected that the person responsible for all these burglaries was a 24-year-old man from the Adelaide suburb of Northfield. When they raided his home, they seized property allegedly taken in the previous cake shop and travel agency robberies. They also took a Valentine’s Day card with the man’s handwriting on it. But their suspect continued to deny involvement in any of the robberies.

Police were able to use their powers under Section 81 of South Australia’s Summary Offences Act to compel the man to have impressions of his teeth taken with special dental gel. These impressions, along with the chocolate samples, were sent to Adelaide University’s Forensic Odontology Unit, where Dr. Kenneth Brown made casts from the impressions of the suspect’s teeth and used the same gel to make casts of the tooth marks in the chocolate surfaces. The casts were then examined and compared and photographed microscopically.

DNA analysis wasn’t considered as an investigative tool in this case. Although DNA profiling was already being used at Adelaide crime scenes by 1996, the technology available at that time wasn’t up to detecting traces on chocolate, and in separating saliva from chocolate. By 1998, new technology was introduced that revolutionized the sensitivity and reliability and speed of DNA analysis. Even if this case were to happen now, the bite-mark examination would still include forensic odontology, which would be used, with DNA, to add weight to the evidence presented in court.

The suspect’s teeth, Brown noted, had certain distinctive features. He had a 1.5-millimetre gap between his upper left central incisor and his lateral incisor. (The central incisors are the two front teeth, top and bottom, while the lateral incisors are the teeth either side of them.) The upper left lateral incisor was rotated at an angle of about 20 degrees off center. There was a recognizable notch on the biting edge of the upper right lateral incisor and noticeable facets of wear on both the upper right central incisor and the lower right lateral incisor.

Types of Bite Marks

Brown’s next task was to examine the kind of bite marks that had been left in the chocolate samples. Broadly speaking, bite marks in foodstuffs vary according to the kind of food being bitten, and have been classified as Types 1, 2 and 3. Type 1, typically seen in chocolate, fractures the foodstuff, but allows only limited tooth penetration, so that the bite marks will only record the most prominent edges of the incisors and some of the characteristics of the outer edges of the upper and lower front teeth. Type 2, typically seen in apples, requires extensive pressure by the teeth, and sufficient penetration to create a fracture of the surface. Type 3, usually seen in cheese, fractures the food surface, but allows complete or near complete penetration by the teeth.

Fortunately for the investigators, the honey nougat bar, with its layer of softer nougat below the chocolate surface, displayed a Type 3 bite mark, retaining marks made by the scraping of the teeth and recording a more detailed impression of the suspect’s upper and lower front teeth. In particular, the notch on the upper right lateral incisor was recorded in the cast made of the bite marks, along with the distinctive facets of wear on the outside biting edge of the suspect’s lower right lateral incisor. In fact, the entire outline and dimensions of the suspect’s tooth was reproduced exactly in the cast taken from the nougat.

The bite marks on the chocolate frog and the chocolate bar provided extra details, but the nougat evidence was the most useful source of corresponding details between the bite marks and the suspect’s teeth.

After seeing Brown’s results, police had enough evidence to charge their 24-year-old suspect. But, in May 1997, when the man faced the Adelaide Magistrate’s Court on six charges of breaking and entering between November 1995 and February 1996, he continued to deny any involvement in the burglaries, pleading not guilty to all charges.

He may well have been cheered by the news that the chocolate samples, having been returned to police custody after Brown had cast the bite marks in them, had significantly deteriorated during Adelaide’s February 1997 heat wave. But while the original chocolates themselves couldn’t be produced, police tendered the casts made of them as evidence, along with the casts of the suspect’s teeth.

Brown told the hearing that the likelihood of two individuals having an identical dental imprint was “so remote that it is difficult for us to comprehend.” The bite marks recorded in all three chocolate samples bore “remarkable similarity” to the accused man’s teeth, the expert said. The accused, he concluded, had bitten into the chocolates.

The police weren’t the only ones impressed by the forensic odontologist’s evidence. After hearing it, the accused changed his plea to guilty. He also pleaded guilty to the robbery of the travel agency where he had left a note, after he realized that a handwriting expert had matched the writing on a Valentine’s Day card he had sent to his girlfriend to the note he had left for police.

The magistrate, displeased that the accused had pleaded guilty only when “the writing was on the wall, so to speak,” sentenced him to two years in prison.

Not All Bite Marks Are Equal

Evidence of bite marks in foodstuffs have been able offer police more certainty than evidence of bite marks on skin, which has resulted in many  unsafe and unjust convictions – all based on the false belief that a bite mark was “as identifiable as a fingerprint.”

Chewing gum, for example, has been proven to be a useful medium for the recording of tooth marks. In the world’s first reported case, involving a  1976 murder in the United States city of San Diego,  a wad of red cinnamon-flavored chewing gum enabled local homicide detectives to place a suspect at the murder scene and clinch a conviction.

The male victim had been shot and stabbed in his bedroom and there were two suspects, only one of whose fingerprints were found in the room. Impressions of the victim’s and the two suspects’ teeth were taken to compare with a silicon reproduction of the chewing gum found at the scene. Under magnification, it could be seen that the chewing gum had been wedged against the inside surface of the upper and lower incisor (front) teeth of an unknown person.

Comparisons ruled out the victim and the suspect whose fingerprints had been found. The other suspect had an opening drilled in the inside surface of her upper incisor (as access for root canal therapy). There was also a defect – either a missing filling or some decay – on its mesial surface (the side towards the centre of the mouth). These defects were also apparent on the wad of gum. A blood typing test showed that this suspect and the chewing gum user had the same blood group.

The world’s second chewing gum/tooth marks case was reported in South Australia, in May 1990. A local policeman, Detective Constable Geoff Carson, was investigating a burglary at a physiotherapy clinic in the South Australian town of Murray Bridge when he found a wad of pink strawberry-scented chewing gum on the floor. It was in an area of the clinic that was a private dwelling, not a place where a patient could possibly have dropped it. Noticing that it bore distinct tooth mark-like indentations, Carson asked the crime scene examiner to collect the gum. He arranged for it to be stored in the fridge so that it wouldn’t soften before he got it to a forensic expert.

The break-in had been the latest in a spate of burglaries from local houses and businesses, all involving entry via a smashed window and the theft of food. The size of the windows and the kind of food taken suggested that the offender was both young and of a slight stature. Meanwhile, fingerprints found at some of the scenes had been identified as those of a local 15-year-old. The youth was arrested and questioned, but he denied any involvement in any of the robberies, including the physiotherapy clinic break-in. But if the chewing gum were proved to be his, it would show that he had been in an area of the clinic which he could have no legitimate reason for visiting.

Using Section 81 of the South Australian Summary Offences Act, police ordered that impressions of the youth’s teeth be taken by a local dentist, who pressed a special gel around his upper and lower teeth, creating a shape which then set as a mould. In the meantime Carson contacted Dr. Kenneth Brown of Adelaide University’s Forensic Odontology Unit, and sent him the chewing gum and the dentist’s impressions of the suspect’s teeth.

Brown prepared casts of the suspect’s teeth by pouring a dental stone plaster mixture into the impression moulds. When they had set hard, and the impression moulds were removed, these casts represented the shape of the suspect’s upper and lower teeth. Brown then examined the oval-shaped wad of chewing gum, which measured about 29 by 12-millimetres. After photographing both sides of it, he made replicas of the tooth impressions, using a special polyvinyl siloxane mixture. Comparing the teeth on the casts with the impressions on the chewing gum replica, he noted that seven specific features of upper teeth numbers 23, 24, 25, 26 had been reproduced on one side of the chewing gum. The other side of the gum had produced impressions of teeth that corresponded to the lower teeth numbered 34, 35 and 36. There was insufficient detail of teeth 34 and 36 on the chewing gum, but the impression of tooth 35 on its own mirrored six different features of tooth 35 on the cast.

When the youth was confronted with this forensic evidence, he confessed to both the physiotherapy clinic break-in and the other burglaries where he had left his fingerprints.

This case was so remarkable that Malaysian forensic odontologist Dr. Phrabhkaran Nambiar eventually wrote it up for publication in the June 2001 edition of the Journal of Forensic Odonto-Stomatology. Nambiar, who had assisted Professor Brown with the lab work on this case when he was a postgraduate student at Adelaide University, noted that, while some foods were better than others for bite-mark registration, chewing gum was in a class of its own. Chewing gum, for example, is the only “food” which will show the biting surfaces of teeth towards the back of the mouth, providing information not produced when people bite into other kinds of foods.

Bite marks left on surfaces such as food raise a different set of scientific issues. Food has different properties from skin (such as not moving when it is being bitten) and some foods can record better teeth impressions than skin. In the preface to his paper on the Murray Bridge case, Nambiar documented a variety of food bite-mark cases. In one, a lamington (a small sponge cake covered in chocolate) had been bitten into during a night arson attack on a coffee shop in the South Australian town of Mt. Gambier. The offender was convicted on the basis of evidence provided by a computer-generated image of his dental arch. When this image was superimposed over the bite mark in the lamington, it was found to match.

Forensic science academic literature abounds with examples of criminals convicted after leaving bite marks in foods. In one of his many papers on the subject, British expert David Whittaker reported that one of the earliest bite-mark convictions dated back to 1906, when a burglar was convicted after leaving tooth marks in a piece of cheese.

In 1955 the tooth marks left by an alleged rapist in a cucumber helped to secure his conviction, while in 1971 the tooth marks left by a murder suspect in the pastry of a meat pie were also vital in obtaining his conviction.

British forensic dentist Dr. Colin Bamford has also given evidence about bite marks in a series of different inanimate materials, including cheese and apples. He once testified in a murder case involving a bite mark on a Mars Bar, and in a murder and armed robbery case where the defendant had been chewing the plastic butt on a car key and had left tooth marks.

Junk Forensics

The history of cases involving bite marks on skin is not as impressive.  In general, there are too many variables involved in the examination of a bite mark on the skin, where the compression factors vary according to the location on the body of the bitten skin. There may also be problems related to the way the bite mark has been recorded. If a bite mark is very fresh, there will be indentations in the skin. If an impression is taken with synthetic silicone rubber material, these impressions may be reproduced. Otherwise, if the expert is relying on photos, he or she is examining two-dimensional images of a three-dimensional construction.

In fact, the history of forensic evidence in U.S. courts is stained with examples of death sentences unjustly imposed as a result of bite-mark evidence given by dentists. Air force veteran and postal worker Ray Krone, for example, spent four years on Arizona’s death row and another seven in prison on a life sentence after being convicted, in two trials, of the 1991 murder of Phoenix cocktail waitress Kim Ancona. Testimony that his teeth matched bite marks on Ancona’s breast and throat was crucial to his first conviction in 1992 – after which he was labeled “The Snaggletooth Killer.” In 1996, his conviction was reversed on appeal, on the basis of the prosecution’s concealment of evidence from Krone’s lawyers. He was re-convicted in 1996, again on bite-mark testimony, despite DNA tests which indicated that blood found on the victim was not his – or hers.

Krone continued to proclaim his innocence. Finally, in April 2002, DNA tests of blood and saliva on his supposed victim implicated a man by then in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a 7-year-old girl. Four days later, Krone was set free.

In 1992, when a 3-year-old girl was found raped and strangled near Brooksville, Mississippi, police arrested Kennedy Brewer, 21. As the victim’s mother’s boyfriend, he was automatically a person of interest. He was also home alone with the victim and his own two children on the night the little girl vanished. The traces of semen found in the child’s body were too small for 1992 DNA techniques to use. But a confident forensic dentist testified that the 19 mysterious marks on the child’s body were bite marks, five of which matched Brewer’s teeth “with reasonable medical certainty.” (A defense expert said they were insect bites, sustained during the two days the child’s body lay undiscovered in the open.)

Brewer was convicted and sent to death row. In May 2002, new DNA tests indicated that two unknown men raped the tiny victim, and a new trial was ordered. Brewer’s conviction was “vacated” and he was moved from death row to pre-trial detention, where he remained until 2007, when he was released, pending a new trial. In the meantime, investigations by the Innocence Project led to the identification of Justin Albert Johnson, one of the original suspects in the crime, as the perpetrator. Johnson subsequently confessed. Finally, in February 2008, charges against Kennedy Brewer were dropped and he was exonerated.

Yet, some skin bite-mark opinions can be delivered with a degree of confidence. Forensic odontologists can certainly give opinions on whether or not a bite mark is self-inflicted. Their opinion in such cases is based on anatomical as well as dental issues. A person cannot, as Melbourne forensic odontologist Dr. Tony Hill points out, bite themselves on the back, or on the genitals. Hill has testified in several rape cases where he has been able to testify that a bite mark is human, not animal, and made by an adult, rather than a child. He has also been able to state that someone else, not the victim, inflicted the bite. But was that person the accused? He has not been able to say.

Forensic odontologists can also use bite marks to exclude certain suspects – as in a case where an alleged biter has a missing front tooth or unusually crowded teeth and the bite mark doesn’t show the same peculiarity. A biter with unusual teeth might also be able to be identified in a “closed” incident where the culprit has to be one of several suspects (and no one else has had access to the victim). In one South Australian case involving allegations of abuse of a baby girl of approximately 20 months of age, experts from Adelaide University’s Forensic Odontology Unit examined the teeth of five suspects and were able to eliminate the chief suspect and three of the others. The fifth one was the culprit, who was convicted.

April 22, 2013

 Hans van Meegeren

Hans van Meegeren duped a string of wealthy collectors into paying vast sums for fake artwork of the Old Masters. One victim was Reichsmarschall Herman Goering.

by Robert Walsh

When many people are asked to name a selection of truly master criminals they’ll probably come up with the usual suspects: Jack the Ripper, Charles Ponzi, notorious English highwayman Dick Turpin or maybe legendary Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. One name that’s highly unlikely to appear is possibly the greatest (and certainly the boldest) art forger in criminal history, Hans van Meegeren.

Van Meegeren was born in October, 1889 in the Dutch town of Delft, the same town as the equally legendary artist Johannes Vermeer, a 17^th century master.  Van Meegeren, like any aspiring local artist, was a fan of Vermeer and was keen to become Delft’s other big name in the art world. He succeeded, but in a way that even the most inventive crime fiction writers couldn’t possibly have dreamt up.

It’s fair to say that the art world in general (and the Dutch art scene in particular) wasn’t exactly overwhelmed while Van Meegeren was painting under his own name. The general consensus among Dutch art critics was that he wasn’t nearly as talented as he aspired to be, was technically crude and, creatively speaking, fairly unoriginal. In short, he was generally regarded as a journeyman painter rather than another Vermeer. Like many people possessing a creative temperament and an artist’s ego, Van Meegeren was constantly stung by the criticism (and sometimes outright dismissal) heaped upon him by critics and contemporaries. Eventually he devised an elaborate (and, some would say, slightly crazy) plan to humble his critics, elevating himself to the standing he craved while doing so at their expense.

Initially, his career as an artist had gone well enough. He earned a decent living painting portraits for wealthy European and American socialites, exhibited his work in his native Holland and further afield and early in his career was invited into the HaagseKunstkring (a select Dutch artistic society composed of young, gifted painters and writers). If he had a problem with the Dutch art establishment it was that his talent as a creative, original artist had peakedby the early 1930s and by the mid-1930s his personal and artistic relationships with his peers had almost totally dissolved. This was due to his own increasing bitterness at the Dutch art community not tolerating his increasingly confrontational attitude and not giving him the recognition he felt himself entitled to.

A Grand Plan

His plan to reverse his fortunes was both technically challenging and perversely brilliant. Rather than simply forging copies of classic paintings by famous artists, Van Meegeren opted to create supposedly undiscovered pieces by a variety of Old Masters. Having (so he hoped) comprehensively duped the critics and collectors previously so dismissive of his own works, Van Meegeren then intended to openly admit he was a forger, create havoc in the art world, humiliate his critics and reap the rewards of the resulting publicity. By the strangest route and largely beyond his control he managed exactly that and, ironically for a forger, any painting proved to be a Van Meegeren is nowadays worth a lot more than it would be otherwise.

His first obstacle was purely technical. Even in the 1930s it was possible for any collector to run scientific tests on a suspect painting. If the canvas wasn’t old enough to match the lifespan of the supposed artist, if the chemical composition of the paint was incorrect or if the brushstrokes were obviously made using a different type of brush (Vermeer was well known to use brushes made from badger hair, for example) then a fake could easily be detected. Granted, with advances in forensic and scientific testing since the 1930s (when Van Meegeren was producing his best work and plenty of it) his fakes would never pass inspection today, but in this era he managed to come up with raw materials sufficiently similarto those of the Old Masters he admired so much. Certainly close enough that they easily fooled the critics and collectors he so despised.

Van Meegeren devised an aging process that, by 1930’s standards, made his fakes almost indistinguishable from the real thing. His paint was custom-made by grinding pigments in oil of lilac and then adding just the right amount of phenol formaldehyde resin dissolved in either benzene or turpentine. The resulting paint had all the right characteristics of a genuine 17^th century artist’s paint.

Finding canvas that would pass inspection was rather easier. Van Meegeren simply obtained cheap, almost worthless paintings from the same era, removed the original paint and then recycled the blank canvas into forgeries close enough to fool many art critics and collectors. During the 1930s he produced fakes by a variety of distinguished artists, selling them as newly discovered works. His particular masterpiece came in 1936 when he created a fake Vermeer named “The Supper at Emmaus” which Van Meegeren personally regarded as his finest work. It was instantly accepted by many top-level Dutch experts as being the genuine article.

Hans van Meegeren’s most famous dupe, Reichsmarschall Kerman Goering.

Scamming Kerman Goering

One of his better works was “Christ and The Adulteress” which his artistic agent sold to a German art collector in 1942 for the equivalent of $7 million in today’s money. The collector was none other than Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe and one of Adolf Hitler’s most senior colleagues. Goering (himself an avid art collector) had no idea he’d paid so much for a fake and gave it pride of place in his personal gallery at his official residence, Karinhall. Aside from the obvious risks attached to making a fool of one of Nazi Germany’s most senior figures (while also pocketing a huge amount of his money) the decision by Van Meegeren’s agent would have serious consequences for his employer, although eventually his post-war legal problems would provide him with notoriety, celebrity and the public profile that he so desperately craved.

Money was never an issue for van Meegeren. His fakes went unexposed and for increasingly high prices. A rough estimate is that, in total, he pocketed somewhere around $60 million in today’s money from his many forgeries. He owned houses and hotels, moved around Europe freely before the war and relatively freely during it. He was said to have accumulated so much cash that he began hiding jars and boxes around his many homes and that future residents were still finding caches of pre-war Dutch banknotes even well into the 1960s. His desire for recognition far outweighed his admittedly lavish tastes, a desire that probably extended from his childhood and would only grow stronger as time went on. He could easily have exposed himself as a forger and humiliated many of his detractors long before the end of World War II but instead continued turning out fakes, reaping the profits while laughing privately at those experts he had taken for the fools he thought they were. It was with the end of the war (and the liberation of his native Holland) that a certaindeal with a certain German collector reared its ugly head and he was finally forced out into the limelight.

Van Meegeren in the Crosshairs

In May of 1945 van Meegeren was visited at his studio by two military officers representing the Allied Art Commission. The AAC was busily investigating the vast trade in stolen artwork during the Nazi era. The Nazis (when they bothered buying things instead of simply confiscating them) kept meticulous records of their dealings with art vendors. What they’d bought, where they bought it, how much they paid and (bad news for Van Meegeren) who they paid it to were all easily checked, providing an investigator had access to the right paperwork. The AAC investigators certainly did.

The name of Hans van Meegeren appeared on some of those papers in connection with the supposed Vermeer masterpiece “Christ and The Adulteress” as bought in 1942 by one Hermann Goering. For the first time in his long career as a master forger, Hans van Meegeren was now in extremely serious trouble. What made things especially grim was that he was arrested and held for trial as a suspected Nazi collaborator instead of as a forger. In early post-war Holland forgery didn’t carry the death sentence. Collaborating with the Nazis (especially top-level Nazis) very definitely did.

Van Meegeren was now in a highly dangerous and equally surreal situation. In order to prove he wasn’t a collaborator he would have to admit that he’d been selling forgeries for over a decade. If he confessed to being a professional forger he’d certainly draw a jail sentence for what the Dutch then called “falsification.” If he failed to prove that he was a common criminal and that he’d actually had the nerve to take a top-level Nazi for a fool then he’d quite likely be shot as a collaborator. In the years immediately after the war the Dutch were in no mood to show leniency to collaborators which left him with only one option: Cop a plea for being a top-level international forger and take whatever jail sentence the court chose to hand down.

After six weeks in custody, van Meegeren’s sense of self-preservation and desire for public attention finally won through. During yet another interview with Dutch investigators he finally cracked and bluntly told them that he was a forger. He freely admitted selling forgeries for over a decade and that the painting he sold Goering wasn’t a genuine classic from one of Holland’s greatest artists but was really a fake he’d painted himself. The cat was finally out of the bagand Hans van Meegeren was about to become an Old Master of the criminal variety. He’d serve some time, certainly, but he’d avoid the firing squad and still be able to reap the benefits of becoming a celebrity crook after his release. So far, so good, all except for one small problem.

The investigators didn’t believe him.

Van Meegeren’s artistic talent and instinct for fakery had landed him in a cell, possibly with a firing squad waiting for him. He’d come clean about his extensive criminal career and, when he’d finally shown his true colors, the authorities refused to accept his plea that he was only a common criminal, not a traitor to his country. Just to stay alive he’d now have to completely incriminate himself of lesser charges and simply accept whatever mercy the Dutch chose to offer.

Proving He Was a Forger, Not a Collaborator

Van Meegeren made the authorities a startling offer. He would prove his criminal talents by producing yet another faked painting using his standard mimicry, showing beyond doubt that he really was the master forger he claimed to be. His original plan to make himself a star and shame his detractors had come to fruition, granted. But it had come by a route so convoluted and downright bizarre that truth really had become stranger than fiction.

In front of the court he assembled his raw materials and set to work. While the judges, jury, international media, and the Dutch art community witnessed his every brushstroke(no doubt cringing at the mention of the journeyman they’d sent packing before the war). Van Meegeren showed every little trick and detail he’d used to fool so many people into parting with so much of their cash and credibility. Van Meegeren delivered a tour de force performance, proving beyond reasonable doubt that he wasn’t a collaborator, but certainly was one of the all-time great master forgers.

The charges of collaboration were dropped, the Dutch art community was left in a state of huge collective embarrassment and the most the judges were prepared to give van Meegeren was a token one-year sentence for “falsification.” Van Meegeren himself became an international star touted by no less a writer than Irving Wallace as “The man who swindled Goering.”American art lovers especially regarded him as though he was more of a prodigal son than a career criminal.

Postscript

Sadly for van Meegeren, his fame has long outlived him. While waiting to start his token jail sentence his health (which had been slipping for years through heavy smoking, heavier drinking and an addiction to morphine-based sleeping pills) finally gave out. He succumbed to a severe attack of angina the day before he was due for transfer to a Dutch jail. He lingered for a few weeks, but the damage was done and he died without serving so much as a day of his sentence.

Hans van Meegeren’s fame has survived through his surviving paintings and his legacy as one of the masters of forgery. Ironically, for a master forger, his known fakes and pieces painted under his own name are now worth considerable sums – some have netted six-figure prices, such is the art world’s appetite for his work. Not because they are artistically brilliant, but simply because there are many collectors prepared to pay decent prices to have either a fake Old Master or a genuine van Meegeren in their collections, something which would certainly have been immensely gratifying to him. He set out to achieve fame and fortune and he did so, albeit by so bizarre a route that even he must probably have shaken his head at the sheer strangeness of it all.

April, 25, 2013

 Steve Wright

The murders of five prostitutes by the Suffolk Strangler in 2006 set off one of the largest manhunts in British history. DNA evidence led to the arrest and conviction of a man who admitted he had sex with four of the five dead women, but was he the actual serial killer? 

by Siobhan Patricia Mulcahy

During November and December of 2006, five prostitutes were murdered one at a time in Ipswich, England. Although each was asphyxiated and not strangled, the British media dubbed the serial killer “the Suffolk Strangler.” 

Forensic evidence suggested that all five victims were attacked from behind and that the assailant put his arm across the victims’ throats to render them unconscious. The first two bodies were found fully or partially clothed in a nearby river in Ipswich. The last three victims were left naked in woodlands near the same area; no attempt had been made to hide or bury the bodies. Each victim was arranged in the form of a crucifix with her hair extended outwards in the form of a halo. Jewelry and other trinkets were taken from the victims but have never been recovered.

The victims were 19-year-old Tania Nicol, 25-year-old Gemma Adams, 24-year-old Anneli Alderton, 29-year-old Annette Nichols, and 24-year-old Paula Clennell. Clennell, the fifth and final victim, had predicted her own murder during a television interview about the serial killer. She had been friends with the other victims as they worked the same streets touting for passing trade.

At the time of the murders, Suffolk police asked the Forensic Science Service to assist in one of the largest murder manhunts in British history. From the time Tania Nicol was reported missing on November 1, 2006, the police investigation involved 600 officers from nearly every law enforcement force in Great Britain. The inquiry team received more than 12,000 calls from members of the public and almost 11,000 hours of closed-circuit TV footage were scrutinized.

More than 100 scientists spent more than 6,000 hours analyzing “swabs” for body fluids and DNA, along with thousands of fibers from the victims themselves, including the locations where each murdered woman was found. Initially, the surface of each of the victim’s bodies was swabbed to recover foreign DNA. Over 100 swabs were taken and processed using the SGM Plus profiling method.

A DNA Match

Tania Nicol

A DNA match led police to a man named Steve Wright, who at the time of the murders was working as barman in Ipswich's red light district and as a forklift truck driver in the Ipswich Docklands. His DNA profile was held on a police computer database after a previous conviction for theft; in 2002 he was convicted of stealing £80 from a former employer. Investigators said Wright’s DNA was recovered from Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nichols.

Wright was arrested at his home at 5 a.m. on December 19, 2006 and taken in for questioning. At the time, the police told the assembled media: “This is a significant arrest and the team is feeling quite buoyant.” The police said that they were no longer appealing for information in relation to the murders and that the arrest was a major breakthrough in the case. They were very certain they had the culprit – to the exclusion of all other possible suspects.

When questioned by police, Wright admitted frequently using prostitutes in Ipswich's red light district and also admitted having sex with four of the five victims but he maintained “this did not make him a murderer.”

The police also told the media that the basis of the arrest was closed-circuit TV footage which they thought showed Wright's car picking up the first victim, Tania Nicol. Wright picked her up on October 30, 2006 and her body was not found until December 8. Wright said it was “quite possible” he was the driver of the car seen in CCTV images that showed Nicol getting into a vehicle on the night of her killing but he also said that after he picked her up he changed his mind about having sex and dropped her back in Ipswich's red light district.

Steve Wright’s Background

Gemma Adams

Steve Wright had a troubled childhood and adolescence. His mother walked out on the family when he was 8 years old and he did not see her again for 25 years. He and his siblings lived with their father, who remarried and had a son and daughter with his second wife. At age 16, Wright left school with poor academic results and joined the Merchant Navy where he became a chef. While in the navy, he began to frequent prostitutes and continued to do so throughout his adult life. When he left the navy, he worked as a lorry driver, a steward on the QE2 and as a bar manager in various locations and at one point, he lived in Thailand for a few months.

He was married and divorced twice and fathered two children. His second marriage lasted only a year and he may have had a third wife in Thailand though he has always denied this.

DNA Matches Lead to Conviction

Anneli Alderton

After his arrest, initial examination of over 500 items recovered from Wright’s home and car confirmed the presence of body fluids. Scientists extracted the DNA from these fluids – using SGM Plus methods and obtained profiles matching Paula Clennell, Anneli Alderton and Annette Nichols.

Scientists also recovered fibers from the bodies of Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nichols using adhesive tape. These were then compared against items recovered from Steve Wright’s home and car. There were other incriminating items uncovered such as fibers matching the carpet of Steve Wright’s car found in Tania Nicol's hair and fibers from a pair of navy blue track suit bottoms recovered from Wright’s home which were found to be “indistinguishable” from those recovered from four of the victims.

During a six week trial at Ipswich crown court, the prosecution used CCTV footage and all the forensic evidence linking Wright to the murders – links so strong that prosecution experts said the odds of being mistaken were one in a billion.  In the end, jurors took only eight hours to convict Wright unanimously on all counts. In summing up, the trial judge, Mr. Justice Gross, said it was an “extremely disturbing case.”

Prosecutor Peter Wright called on the judge to impose a “whole life term.” He said the criteria for passing such a sentence were met because there was “a substantial degree of premeditation or planning.”

Wright was sentenced to life imprisonment with little chance of parole. Justice Gros called him the “epitome of evil.”

Is Steve Wright Innocent?

Annette Nichols

Wright, who adamantly professed his innocence from the time of his arrest, was shocked at his conviction. After his conviction, he said the verdict was like a “knife in the heart” as he had not expected to be found guilty. In a letter dated August of 2008 from Long Martin Prison, Worcestershire to the East Anglia Daily Times, he wrote that he was not the “real killer.” He also said that he was “numb with shock” after being found guilty of the murders and that there “was not one shred of evidence” against him.

“People should believe I am innocent because I have gone through my whole life trying to be as fair and considerate to other people as I possibly could. I don't have a violent bone in my body and to take a life I would have thought would be the ultimate form of aggression…All their evidence proved was that I had contact with the girls but not one shred of evidence showed that I killed them,” he wrote.

Wright is not alone in maintaining his innocence. To crime investigator and writer David Dixon, the forensic evidence linking Wright to the murders does not prove that Steve Wright was the killer. “The forensic experts testified that most fiber deposits would be lost in the wind and rain after a few hours of exposure to the elements, yet a full profile of Wright's DNA was found on three murder victims despite the bodies being exposed to wind and rain for several days, and even though Wright used condoms during sex with the women.”

To Dixson, all the scientific evidence only proves Wright had contact with the victims and that he had sex with four of the five murdered prostitutes – which Wright readily admitted from the outset.

Dixon says: “This CCTV footage, presented at the trial, alleged to show Tania Nicol being picked up by Wright's Ford Mondeo, but the footage was taken at night, and the car might not have been a Ford Mondeo, and if it was, it might not have been the killer's car, or Steven Wright's, and the girl getting into it may not have been Tania Nicol either.”

“Another very important point is that Paula Clennell (the final victim) reported to the police that she had seen Tania Nicol some two hours after this time, talking to a man in a silver car in the red-light district.”

Paula Clennell

Clennell therefore died as a potential material witness for Wright's defense, Dixon says. And another witness also saw Nicol talking to two men in a “posh” car after the CCTV sighting undermines this CCTV evidence completely.

Dixon believes a more obvious candidate for a suspect car is a blue BMW with polished alloy wheel hubs that was seen by several witnesses. Anneli Alderton was last seen alive getting into a dark blue BMW. Gemma Adams was last seen outside a BMW garage, according to Dixon. But this evidence never received an airing in court.

“Annette Nicholls was seen getting into a blue BMW with polished alloy wheel hubs a week before she is thought to have vanished. Tania Nicol was last seen at the driver's window talking and giggling with two men sitting in a “posh” blue car,” Dixon says.

“Another witness, a doorman at an Ipswich massage parlor, saw a driver in a blue BMW with polished alloy wheel hubs behaving very strangely in the car park in early December. The driver repeatedly reversed his car back and forth outside the door, then moved further up into the car park and did the same again, revving up his engine and stopping it repeatedly. He then drove off very fast.”

If we add up all the elements, Dixon says, what we get is “last seen alive,” “seen getting into,” “last seen outside a BMW garage,” “acting suspiciously outside a sex-related venue,” “last seen talking to two men in a posh car” – all of which must guarantee suspicion of a blue BMW.

Dixon believes Wright's defense did not make enough of this during the trial.

Wright also admitted having sex with Adams in his car at around the time she disappeared, and said that at later times he took the other women – Alderton, Clennell and Nicholls - back to his home for sex while his partner was at work. He would take them to his bedroom but would not use the bed in case his partner was able to smell sex on the bedclothes.

Instead, he had sex with them on two jackets on the floor. The court heard bloodstains from Clennell and Nicholls were found on one of the jackets.

Crown Prosecution advocate Michael Crimp said Wright was the “common denominator” linking all five murdered women. He concluded that Wright was the last person to see them alive and the scientific evidence proved he was responsible for their deaths. He said Wright had failed to give a satisfactory explanation as to why blood from two of the victims was on his jacket. This was one of the main factors in Wright's conviction.

Indeed there was no attempt by Wright's defense to investigate the origin of the blood stains. Could they have been menstrual blood? All the murdered prostitutes were drug addicts. Could this blood have been the result of lack of personal hygiene after injecting heroin? Or could the blood have resulted from rough sex with other customers earlier in the night? None of these possibilities were explored by Wright's defense in court.

According to Dixon, the prosecution also failed to explain why no jewelry and clothing from the victims had ever been found – surely if “trophies” had been kept by the murderer, they would have been uncovered in Wright's home or car.

Dixon says: “Wright made admissions that he need not have made, such as his awareness of some of the areas that the bodies were disposed in, where a dishonest denier would always deny if he could. He has had a long history of involvement with prostitutes dating back a quarter of a century with no sign of a psychopathic disposition in his history.”

Dixon also has a problem with the modus operandi of the actual murderer.

“The first two victims disappeared at fortnightly intervals and were found weeks later in a nearby river, in circumstances designed to eliminate the risk of forensic and DNA evidence. The last three were all killed in a single week, and the bodies were laid out on dry land for a quick discovery, plastered in DNA and forensic evidence that implicated the hapless defendant Steven Wright.”

Dixon says the murders can be described as “serial cascade murders” because of the change in timing between the first two murders and the last three. He believes there is also a corresponding switch between the two sets of murders, with the bodies of the first two being found in the east of Ipswich, and the bodies of the last three being found to the west of Ipswich.

Dixon concludes with the question: “Why would a serial killer accelerate the pace of his series so dramatically when the police surveillance of the small district from which he took his victims was at its height?” He may have a valid point.

Dixon is not alone in claiming the wrong man may have been convicted of the Ipswich murders.

Noel O'Gara, owner/editor of Court Publications in the Republic of Ireland has conducted his own investigation into the Ipswich murders, and last year, published an eBook about the case called The Real Suffolk Strangler. He believes the actual murderer is still on the loose.

O'Gara agrees with Dixon on a number of issues. He says: “The evidence that Steve Wright's DNA was found on the victims did not prove that he was a killer. What it did prove was that he had sexual relations with them as he admitted.”

He also agrees with Dixon that the blue car is a major “loose end” in the case, and like Dixon, he believes the existence of this car was not properly investigated by the .Ipswich police.

In his book, O'Gara suggests that a former police officer who worked as a pimp for all the murdered prostitutes was the real killer. He also claims that “the real killer” was the driver of the mysterious blue car seen in the CCTV footage shown in court.

O'Gara's chief suspect, Tom Stephens, was indeed arrested by Ipswich police before Steve Wright and was also named in one of the UK's Sunday newspapers as the potential culprit but O'Gara claims the police “lost all interest” in the ex-cop turned pimp once they arrested Steve Wright. He says Wright was a much “better fit” for the police who then stopped following leads on other suspects.

Though O'Gara spent several years gathering his own evidence in this case, he was unable to interview his chief suspect who (locals say) disappeared from the Ipswich area shortly after Wright's conviction. O'Gara says: “I went to the central police station in Ipswich to discuss my evidence but received a very hostile reception there and a request to meet the chief police officer was dismissed out of hand.”

Appeals

In March, 2008, Wright revealed he would be lodging an appeal against his conviction, as well as the trial judge's recommendation that his life sentence should mean “a whole life.” He has also claimed that the trial should never have been held in Ipswich, and that the evidence against him was not sufficient proof of his guilt. In a letter to the court of appeal, he stated: “All five women were stripped naked of clothing/jewelry/phones/bags and no evidence was found in my house or car.”

In July 2008, Wright renewed his application to appeal which was to be considered by three judges but in February 2009, he dropped this bid without explanation. British media have speculated that this decision was made because of lack of money. Wright’s family has said they hope to convince the Criminal Cases Review Commission to take on the case but they have had no success with this plan to date.

O'Gara cannot explain why Steve Wright has dropped the appeal against his conviction.

“He probably feels the cards are stacked against him. Ipswich police have repeatedly said they will not be reopening the investigation as they are satisfied they have caught the real killer.

If Steve Wright is indeed innocent, then the real killer is still on the loose.

Feb. 27, 2013 Updated May 8, 2013

Helvetic Airways aircraft at the Brussels international airport (Photo: Associated Press)

In a daring, commado-style operation, eight masked, heavily armed gunmen pulled off a lightening quick heist of more than $50 million worth of diamonds.     

Update: May 8, 2013 Nearly three months after the spectacularly daring diamond heist at Brussels Airport, authorities announced on May 8, 2013 that at least 31 people – spread out over France, Switzerland and Belgium – have been detained in connection with the estimated $50 million theft.

The Associated Press reported that a Frenchman, who is believed to have been one of the airport robbers, was arrested in France, while eight people, including a lawyer, were detained in Geneva, and 24 in and around Brussels.

“In Switzerland, we have found diamonds that we can say are coming from the heist, and in Belgium large amounts of money have been found. And the investigation is ongoing,” said Jean-Marc Meilleur, spokesperson for the Brussels prosecutor’s office.  In Geneva, a police statement said “a very important quantity of diamonds was seized” during the roundup of suspects. 

A Swiss investigator told reporters that almost a third of the stolen diamonds were seized in the Geneva raids and that about $110,000 in cash and a number of luxury cars were also confiscated. The unnamed investigator said all eight of those detained in Geneva were middlemen and intermediaries involved in the cutting and selling of the stolen diamonds.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

For centuries, Antwerp has been the world’s center of diamond trading and remains so today.  According to a spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre about $200 million in diamonds enter and leave Antwerp daily, with about 99 percent of that moving through the Brussels Airport in several shipments each week. The spokesperson said that diamonds traded in Antwerp last year had a total value of $51.9 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s rough diamond trade and 50 percent of trade in polished stones. The only other major diamond center is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

Diamond brokers from around the world store their diamonds and gems – sometimes for as little as a day – in one or more of the 160 safety-deposit boxes located in an underground vault at the Antwerp Diamond Centre. Once a deal is brokered for the sale of the diamonds, shipment is arranged through the Zaventem International Airport in Brussels. The diamonds are placed in small packets and driven by armored Brinks vans to the airport.  On the 25-mile trip to the airport, the Brinks vans are accompanied by armed escorts that peel away once the Brinks vans arrive at the airport’s locked gate.

On the evening of February 18, 2013, eight heavily armed masked men were outfitted in airport security uniforms and drove two black vehicles that had police-style lights on top.  They arrived at Zaventem International Airport in Brussels in darkness intent on pulling off the most audacious heist in airport history. They knew, due to construction near the main security gate, that gate would be unlocked. Using wire cutters, they opened a section of the other 10-foot-high security fence on the perimeter of the airport and then waited eight minutes for the Brinks van to unload some 125 packets of diamonds in the cargo hold of Flight LX789, a Helvetic Airways jet waiting to depart in the next 18 minutes for Zurich, Switzerland.

Minutes after the diamonds had been offloaded from the Brinks van and the doors to the cargo hold locked, a black Audi A8 sedan and a black Mercedes van with blue police lights flashing pulled up next to the airplane at 7:47 p.m.  By 7:52 p.m. the vehicles and 121 packets of the diamonds were gone in a lightening quick and incredibly competent robbery.

With commando efficiency, some of the gunmen stood in front of the jet plane pointing machine guns equipped with red laser sights at the pilots and Brinks crew while others calmly – speaking French – ordered ground workers to open the aircraft’s cargo doors.  Without firing a shot, the robbers unloaded all but four of the diamond packets that contained packages of both polished and uncut diamonds and sped away within five minutes of arriving.

The London Daily Telegraph reported that most of the diamonds were uncut and that 90 percent were bound for the Indian city of Surat, via Zurich. Initial estimates placed the theft at $50 million, but because most of the diamonds were uncut and could possibly be worth far more one expert told The Wall Street Journal that the take could come to more than $300 million, which would make the Brussels heist the largest airport robbery in history by over $200 million. In 2005, an armed gang hijacked a Brinks truck at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and escaped with an estimated $90 million of diamonds. 

The 29 passengers onboard were unaware of anything amiss until informed after the robbers had made their getaway that their flight had been cancelled. No one inside the airport happen to take notice either.

“There is a gap of only a few minutes” between the loading of the gems and the moment the plane starts to move, said Caroline De Wolf, a spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “The people who did this knew there was going to be this gap and when.”

Ine Van Wymersch, a Brussels prosecutor, said the police were investigating whether the robbers had inside information. “This is an obvious possibility,” she said.

Quoting airport security insiders, The Wall Street Journal reported that “the precision of the Brussels heist suggests extensive help from airport insiders,” noting that “all airports employ thousands of low-paid workers and face high turnover.”

An aviation-security specialist knowledgeable about the Brussels Airport robbery told the Journal“the thieves appeared to have detailed information about both the cargo and operations at the airport, and likely had help from people at the airport.”

“I am certain this was an inside job,” Doron Levy, an expert in airport security at a French risk management company,” told The New York Times. The theft, he added, was “incredibly audacious and well-organized,” and beyond the means of all but the most experienced and strong nerved criminals. “In jobs like this we are often surprised by the level of preparation and information: they know so much they probably know the employees by name.”

(Photo Mirror UK)

Levy told The Times that “the audacity of the crime recalled in some ways the so-called Pink Panther robberies – a long series of brazen raids on high-end jewelers in Geneva, London and elsewhere attributed to criminal gangs from the Balkans. But he said the military precision of Monday’s diamond robbery and the targeting of an airport suggested a far higher level of organization than the cruder Pink Panther operations.”

The Mercedes Vaneo used in the robbery was a stolen taxi. It was found burned out within 10 miles of the airport shortly after the robbers fled. The Audi, which had French registration plates, has not been recovered.

March 18, 2013

"I am the bullet in the chamber.  Just do it".-- Nike sports advertisement featuring Oscar Pistorius

Oscar Pistorius’s rise to world fame was as unlikely as his arrest for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

By Binoy Kampmark

It remains to be seen whether this will become a crime of its own singular description, or yet another point of comparison in terms of previous acts of brutality.  Will it be deemed South Africa’s O.J. Simpson trial, with its lashings of bloodlust voyeurism that finds form in evidence, exposures, and innuendo?  The suggestions are that this has already begun, despite the fact that the trial is scheduled to start on June 4. The alleged murder of the model and self-appointed spokeswoman against domestic violence Reeva Steenkamp by the Parlympian Oscar Pistorius is something the analysts and commentators find magnetic. More than bullets were fired the day Steenkamp was killed behind the locked door of the Blade Runner’s bathroom.

May 20, 2013

DNA and the transgender Gypsy super-criminal.

by Paul Buchanan

On the afternoon of April 25, 2007, Michele Kiesewetter, a 22-year-old police officer in the German city of Heilbronn, drove with her partner to the parking lot of the local Theresienwiese, a sort of fairground along the east bank of the Neckar River, used for Oktoberfest. The two parked there for a lunch break. Witnesses in the area reported hearing gunfire at around 2 p.m.

Police units arriving on the scene found Kiesewetter lying dead outside her BMW 5-Series patrol car from a single gunshot wound to the head. Her partner, Martin A., had also been shot in the head. He would emerge from a coma weeks later, with no memory of what had happened.

Both the officers’ service handguns were missing, as were their handcuffs. The crime scene and the victims’ patrol car were scoured for forensic evidence. Minute traces of DNA were recovered from the car’s center console and from its back seat. The DNA samples were found to belong to an unidentified woman, a person of interest who would come to be called Die Frau ohne Gesicht, or The Woman without a Face.

That same unique DNA signature had already been linked to a couple of murders. In 2001 that DNA was tied to an unsolved 1993 murder in Idar-Oberstein, Germany, a town about two-and-a-half hours northwest of the Heilbronn murder. There, 62-year-old Lieselotte Schlenger, a churchwarden and pensioner, was found dead in her home. She’d been garroted with a wire taken from a bundle of flowers that were strewn on the woman’s table. No fingerprints or footprints were recovered, but a swab later taken from the rim of a Meissen china teacup yielded enough genetic material to be typed. That DNA, from a crime scene 14 years earlier, perfectly matched the DNA found in Kiesewetter’s patrol car.

The DNA also matched a sample found on a door handle in Joseph Walzenbach’s home in Freiburg. Walzenbach was found murdered in March 2001. A 61-year-old antiques dealer, he too had also been strangled, this time with garden twine. Both the Schlenger and Walzenbach murders were thought to have occurred during the commission of a burglary. Neither scene provided any further forensic evidence, and the DNA recovered matched no individual known to the German penal system. All that could be determined was that the genetic material came from a woman of Eastern European ancestry.

A few months after Walzenbach’s murder, yet another DNA match suggested a possible motive for both the earlier murders. In October 2001, 7-year-old Juergen Bueller stepped on a discarded syringe on a pathway near his home in Gerolstein, about 300 kilometers northwest of Heilbronn. He brought the shattered syringe home, and his parents immediately took him and the needle to a local hospital, fearing that he might have been exposed to the HIV virus.

Tests showed that the syringe had been used recently to shoot heroin. Traces of blood found on the needle showed no signs of HIV but did come back with a perfect match to the same phantom killer’s DNA. The killer, police concluded, was a junkie. She may have killed her earlier victims during botched robberies fueled by her habit. Celebrated criminal profiler, Kurt Kletzer, concluded that the Woman without a Face was “someone from a damaged home life” who had been abused by her drug-addicted caretakers. She was, “compelled to murder to feed her habit, thus reducing the victim to the status of a worthless object.”

Yet in many ways the phantom woman’s crimes didn’t seem those of a desperate addict. She was brazen, that was clear—but she wasn’t reckless. She left no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues of any sort—except her DNA. As the crimes linked to her multiplied—break-ins and burglaries and cash-register thefts—the scenes sometimes yielded a second strand of DNA, but it was never the same strand twice. This suggested that the Woman without a Face sometimes worked with an accomplice but never with the same one twice. This inference hinted at powers of manipulation or intimidation that would keep a series of associates quiet. In many ways her methods seemed more the work of a cold and cunning psychopath than a junkie feeding her addiction.

In the years between Schlenger’s strangulation in 1993 and Kiesewetter’s execution in the Heilbronn parking lot in 2007, the same woman’s DNA was detected on a half-eaten cookie in a trailer-home burglary in Germany; on a toy gun at the scene of a gemstone robbery in France; at an optometrist shop robbery in Austria. A car stolen in Heilbronn was found to have her DNA on the gas cap. A bar robbery crime scene in Karlsruhe yielded her DNA on some beer bottles and on the rim of an empty wine glass. In all, the “Woman without a Face” was linked to nearly 40 major and minor crimes scattered across central Europe.

Some of the cases were eerily perplexing. In Worms, in 2005, a local gypsy shot his brother with a 7.65 caliber pistol. After his arrest for attempted murder, traces of the mysterious woman’s DNA were found on one of the bullets. This, The Observer noted in 2008, suggested “that she may have ties with one of the loosely linked groups and communities who move back and forth across Europe's increasingly porous frontiers.”

After Michele Kiesewetter’s murder, the reward for information that would lead to the phantom’s identity reached €300,000. The Heilbronn police department, alone, racked up 16,000 hours of paid overtime in its pursuit of the phantom. More than 800 women with criminal records were tracked down across Europe and tested for a DNA match. In all, the search for the Woman without a Face cost an estimated $14 million.

Police wondered if the woman might be a transsexual or might, at least, be able to convincingly impersonate a man. Eyewitnesses had seen a young man on the site of a 2006 Saarbruecken burglary attempt, but it was the phantom’s DNA that turned up on a stone found at the crime scene. A composite picture of an androgynous young man sporting a soul patch was released to media outlets hungry for information. “We can't rule out that our suspect is a man now, or that she looks like a man,” a police spokesman told the BBC. “We just don’t know.”

Then, in February 2008, the bodies of three Georgian car dealers were dragged from the Rhine, near Mannheim. The men had come to Germany on a mission to buy used German cars to transport home for resale. Evidence showed that the three had been executed near Ludwigshafen and their bodies transported about 15 kilometers to be dumped in the river.

Two men, a 40-year-old Iraqi and a 26-year-old Somali, were quickly arrested. The Iraqi had been working as a police informant, and the white Ford Escort station wagon he drove (on loan to him from local police authorities) showed blood traces belonging to one of the victims. His car had been used to transport the bodies. When forensic officers subjected the Ford’s carpeting and upholstery to analysis, they found yet more DNA traces of the Woman without a Face. Had she been the executioner?

The arrests seemed like a huge break—the police finally had two of the phantom’s accomplices in custody—but both men accused the other of being the triggerman, and neither would admit that a woman had been involved in any way. The police had bought the Ford Escort second-hand several months earlier, so all previous owners were tracked down and investigated, but no new leads emerged. “We are as baffled as everyone else about how her DNA came to be there,” Chief Superintendent Horst Haug told Australian journalist Alan Hall. “But it is one more piece in the mosaic. All criminals, no matter how deadly or how clever, all slip up eventually. We just hope we catch her before she kills again.”

There was indeed a “slip up,” but its discovery proved even more astonishing than the capture and prosecution of a transsexual Gypsy super-criminal.

In March 2009, French authorities tried using DNA to identify a burned corpse. Their investigation indicated that the body was probably that of a particular male asylum seeker who had gone missing. The man’s application for asylum, which he had filled out years earlier, had required a fingerprint. Authorities hoped that by matching the corpse’s DNA to any trace genetic material found on the fingerprint they could clearly establish the dead man’s identity.

Instead, the results that came back were literally incredible: the DNA obtained from the fingerprint belonged to The Woman without a Face.

This made no sense. “Obviously that was impossible,” a prosecutor’s office spokesperson, told Spiegel, “as the asylum seeker was a man, and the phantom’s DNA belonged to a woman.” A second test on the fingerprints found none of the phantom’s DNA. There seemed only one explanation: the sample taken from the fingerprint had to have been contaminated.

Some old-fashioned, low-tech detective work was called for. It seemed impossible that the DNA sample from the asylum-seeker’s fingerprint could have been contaminated between when it left the document and when it was processed in the lab. So there was only one other possibility: somehow the DNA had been introduced to the process before the fingerprint was tested.

Investigators quickly found a pattern: the French lab and the lab in Heilbronn used the same brand of cotton swab manufactured by the same German company. Other regional crime labs that used a different brand of swab had never found a match to the phantom.

After nearly a decade of inspiring dread, the Woman was finally given a Face. She was an employee of the Greiner Bio-One factory, an innocent, though perhaps careless, woman who worked packaging sterile cotton swabs.

 “The things were double-packaged,” one investigator told Bild newspaper. “We thought they were the Mercedes of cotton swabs.” The swabs were marketed as being sterile, and they were. They had been processed to remove all germs, fungi and viruses—but the process did not destroy DNA. They simply weren’t designed for collecting genetic material. Hence, forensic technicians across three nations had for years found the same DNA at scores of crime scenes because they had brought it there on the sterile swabs they carried.

If a lesson is to be learned from the Phantom of Heilbronn—and with so much effort and money wasted, one would hope a lesson might be at hand—it is perhaps that we should temper our current infatuation with forensic science with a little common sense. It seems instructive that so many trained professionals would sooner posit the presence of a transsexual-Gypsy-addict-serial-killer than wonder if someone, somewhere had made a simple mistake.

June 20, 2013

From Austria’s first serial killer, Hugo Schenk, to the internationally shocking case of Joseph Fritzl.       

by Faye Karavasili

Austria is widely known mostly for its flowing waltzes and tasty schnitzel. When one walks through its cobbled pavements it is very hard to imagine that this is the same country that, alongside Mozart and Freud, has unleashed depraved monsters such as Jack Unterweger and Joseph Fritzl.

That slightly more disturbing side of the country can be visible to those who want to see throughout history. An excellent record of the country’s criminal history is preserved and reaches all the way to the Habsburg dynasty times with verdicts published in the local newspapers. Within it, both the criminal history of the land and the ensuing legislative adjustments brought about unfold.

During the Habsburg years of the monarchy, 1809 – 1918, crime seems to have been limited to common robberies going wrong or wretches with rat poison doing away with their husbands or rivals for the attention of a gentleman. Often charges were complimented by sorcery accusations.   Executions of violent offenders of either gender were rather commonplace.

Austria’s First Serial Killers

Austria’s first serial killer, at least on record, appears on the scene around 1883. Hugo Schenk began his criminal career with petty frauds at the age of 21. He was sentenced but later pardoned and when he teamed up with Karl Schlossarek, whom he met in prison, murder was not too far away.

Together the pair murdered four domestic helpers. A handsome lad, Schenk had no trouble attracting the attention of the ladies. Charming them into believing his intentions were honorable was not a difficult task for the experienced conman. During a puritanical time when such affairs of the heart needed to be conducted in secrecy, he could move in the shadows.

His method was simple. He would charm the girl, make her believe marriage was imminent and ask her to gather all her belongings (including all of her savings) and meet him at a remote part of the city, or indeed, in the countryside. Then he would rape and rob her. With Schlossarek’s help he would then murder the woman and conceal her body in the wilderness or throw it into the Danube. Both men were arrested and hanged on April 22, 1884. (An almost copycat killer, Max Gulfer, adopted a very similar modus operandi in the 1950s.)

Martha Marek

Another sensational for the time case was this of Martha Marek and her husband Emil. It started out as a routine insurance related case when, in 1925, Emil lost one of his legs due to an accident. Shortly before the accident, he and his wife Martha had taken out an insurance policy worth a hefty sum of money. The experts, however, insisted there was conclusive evidence that the limb was removed deliberately and not only refused to pay the money but they also ensured Martha Marek landed in prison for attempted fraud. Soon enough a compromise was achieved and Martha was allowed to return home to her husband. In the meantime, and while in prison, she had become acquainted with Leopoldine Lichtenstein who had murdered her husband with rat poison. It was later widely rumored that it had been this meeting which had inspired Martha to murder her entire family.

Shortly after she was released from prison, her husband Emil unexpectedly died. He had been suffering from ill health as a consequence of his leg’s amputation – intentional or not – so nobody suspected foul play and sympathy for the young widow poured in, along with the money to support the headless family. She played her role impeccably and took it a notch further, poisoning her own daughter, prompting further expressions of support, monetary or otherwise, after her death. Still, that was not enough and soon the widow found herself in dire need of more cash. It is assumed that her pathological greed was linked to a poor childhood. She had the need to maintain a high standard of living, one she could not really afford. She would get into debt habitually. 

Desperate again for money, she grew careless and resorted to the same scam which had landed her in trouble in the first place. She took an insurance policy in the name of her tenant, Felicitas Kittenberger, who, unsurprisingly enough died after a short and unexpected illness. This time around though, there was an autopsy, the results of which proved that the strikes of fate around Marek had not been fate at all. All bodies were exhumed and the evidence piled against her.

Loyal to Austrian tradition, her death sentence was converted to life imprisonment because she was a woman. This was overturned when Adolf Hitler seized power and her original penalty was reinstated. Martha Marek was decapitated on December 6, 1938.

Alfred Engleder – “The Hammer Rapist”

Prompted by an “intense hatred and contempt” towards women, the first major case of serial rape and murder after the war was that of the aptly named “hammer rapist,” Alfred Engleder, who was born in 1920 in the rural area of Steyr, Austria. He would follow the same pattern every time. He would approach his unsuspecting victims riding a bike, he would then hit them on the head with a hammer, rendering them unconscious. He would then rape them. One of his, altogether six, victims succumbed to the injuries sustained during the attack and shortly afterward Engleder was apprehended after yet another – this time unsuccessful – attempt. Later on, life was to play a somewhat ironic game on the man who hated women as he met his own demise after being stabbed by his latest girlfriend. He had previously been convicted to a life sentence, being conditionally released after 26 years in custody.

Murders in Favoriten

The most sensational story of the 1980s was no doubt incorporating every parent’s worst fear. Three consecutive years, three young girls found murdered and sexually molested in similar fashion and within a close radius from one another in the otherwise peaceful district of Favoriten. Year by year the victim was getting younger, starting with 20-year-old Alexandra Schriefl, found naked, abused, and choked with her own pantyhose tied to a tree on October 27, 1988. The murder shocked the close knit community but efforts to discover the identity of her killer were initially unsuccessful.

In 1989, another gruesome finding came to remind Vienna that a killer was on the loose. Choked in a similar fashion, sexually molested and tied to the railings of a building’s staircase, 10-year-old Cristina Beranek was discovered by her own father on February 2, 1989. The child, just like Alexandra, had been strangled with her own clothing. That murder too went unresolved, in spite of a massive investigation launched by Vienna’s criminal police, including the offering of a significant bounty.

The third victim was 8-year-old Nicole Strau, found on December 22, 1990 in a wooded area. She too had been raped and strangled with her own shoelaces. Efforts intensified and the area was gripped by fear at the, almost inescapable certainty that a sadistic serial killer was operating in the area. However, this was proven not to be the case. After the random arrest of an individual named Herbert P. for an unrelated offense in 2000 and the obligatory DNA samples obtained by him, linked him directly to the rape and murder of Alexandra Schriefl. As it turns out he had been – erroneously – classified in the wrong blood group by mistake when he had been examined back in 1988, thus excluding him from the pool of suspects. Once again, the investigation was reopened and, while Herbert P. was found not to have been the perpetrator of the other two murders, the resolution of the murder of 8-year-old Nicole was not far off. A man named Michael P., at the time romantically linked to the girl’s aunt was questioned once again. Back then, it had appeared that he had an alibi, but authorities reexamined evidence and deemed his refusal to provide with a DNA sample suspicious. Indeed, the man refused a second time around until a judge signed court order brought about the inevitable and the second killer was identified.

What was really extraordinary in these cases was the utter confusion of the jury of lay people concerning DNA science and its application. Especially in the case of Nicole. A certain and crystal clear conviction was almost lost for the prosecutor as jurors struggled with the scientific evidence before them. Regarding the rape charges, and even though a perfect DNA match was available, one juror voted for the defendant’s innocence, not entirely convinced that a one in a billion chance for two individuals to have the same DNA sequence was conclusive enough. Two additional jurors refused to find the accused guilty on the grounds that the DNA evidence only indicated he was the perpetrator of the rape and not necessarily the murder. The trial prompted fierce debate around the problem of extreme reliance on DNA evidence exclusively by jurors who may be inclined to believe trial depictions on fictional shows such as “CSI” are entirely accurate.

The murder of Christina Beranek was never found, as no DNA evidence was available to link either man to her murder. It had also been assumed at some point that the girl was one of the victims of serial killer Wolfgang Ott who was terrorizing and murdering young girls throughout Austria, but this too could never be positively proven.

“Angels of Death”

A slightly different criminal affair stirred a different kind of controversy in the 1980s. The sheer volume of the death toll was, at the time, as unimaginable for the country, as its perpetrators were unlikely. When a rumor began to circulate about a series of murders taking place underneath the nose of the establishment within the sanctuary of the hospital of Lainz the management did not quite believe it. Especially since those boasting the act seemed rather amused by their wicked deeds and eager to find even more victims.

The truth turned out to be uglier than anyone could imagine. It all began when one of the terminally ill patients asked nurse Waltraud Wagner, 23, to help her end her life in dignity. She complied and administered the patient a lethal dose of morphine, viewing her act as a “mercy deed” and thus perfectly justifiable. She did not stop there. Joined by three female colleagues, the murderous company would habitually seek out the meek and the frail and murder them in cold blood. Sometimes they would use insulin, other times sedatives.

Wagner was eventually charged with 32 separate counts of murder (even though she confessed to more than that. Expert testimonies indicate the group’s victims may have been more than a hundred), after bodies were exhumed and the real cause of their death was determined. The women rightfully earned their press nickname, “angels of death,” and insisted their actions were motivated purely by empathy for the terminally ill whose quality of life had deteriorated beyond salvation or even tolerance. All four women were eventually convicted and incarcerated. Today all four of them have been released on probation, relocated and changed their names in an attempt to start a new life. They were released in 2008 after remaining in prison for 17 years.

Modern times are certainly not lacking in either gore or violence, and even though savaged by the World War II, Austria had plenty a moment when a criminal case has attracted international attention or has prompted vigorous debate and parliamentary interventions. Prominent cases include amok killings of the innocent, serial offenders and, of course, the notorious abduction cases of Natascha Kampusch and Josef Fritzl and celebrity serial killer Jack Unterweger.

 “The Vienna Woods Killer” – Jack Unterweger

Jack Unterweger, otherwise known as ‘the Vienna woods killer’ is possibly Austria’s most prominent serial killer. Indeed, his murderous activities spread well beyond the borders of Austria, reaching even the United States. He murdered numerous prostitutes by choking them with their own panty hose or brassiere and mostly dumped their bodies around the Vienna woods area (which earned him his nickname), between 1990 and 1994 when he was finally arrested.

Unterweger spent much of his youth in and out of prison, sustaining convictions mainly for sexual assaults. In 1976 he was sentenced to life with no parole for the murder of a woman. He spent 15 years in prison, developing a charming persona and secured the support of Vienna’s intellectual elite. He was released in 1990, as a stellar example that rehabilitation works, and proceeded to become a celebrity. He murdered four women just on the year of his early release. His killer’s trademark had been the unusually tied knot on the women’s undergarments used to choke them found on every crime scene. He committed suicide before a conviction was secured, leaving the ultimate proof behind him as he hung himself: the same unusual knot.

The Abduction of Natascha Kampusch

The abduction of 10-year-old schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch in 1998 shook Austria to its foundations. The child was taken by a man in a white van while she was on the way to school. In spite of intensive searches and extensive publicity she was not to be found. A deranged man, Wolfgang Priklopil, had kidnapped her and kept her locked in his cellar for eight years. He used the young girl as his own personal slave. Initially, Kampusch was not allowed to leave the tiny cellar underneath the perpetrator’s garage, but gradually she was allowed into the main house where she also interacted with a friend. She even took a ski trip with her abductor at some point but Kampusch felt unable to escape since she was under constant surveillance and she was being threatened. She finally managed to escape on August 23, 2006, and to seek refuge at a neighbor’s home. Priklopil committed suicide by throwing himself on the train tracks to avoid apprehension and Kampusch achieved celebrity status.

A Symbol of Pure Evil – Josef Fritzl

Josef Fritzl went from example of a respectable elderly family man to synonym for pure evil when a series of events led to the unveiling of a gruesome tale of captivity, rape and incest which catapulted him to notoriety. When his eldest daughter Elizabeth disappeared, nobody believed anything bad had happened to her. She had always been rebellious and often clashed with her strict father. Besides, a number of letters written by her indicated she had just run away. In reality, Elizabeth was being kept captive in a soundproof cellar underneath her family’s condominium complex by her own father who raped and terrorized her regularly.

In the course of 24 years, Fritzl had fathered a total of seven children with his daughter. One of them, a boy named Michael died, as he did not receive proper medical care, and was incinerated by Fritzl on his property. Three of the children were removed from the cellar and lived in the family home. Fritzl had claimed to have found the children on his doorstep with notes written by his daughter pleading with him to raise them for her as she was herself unable to. Three more children were kept captive in the basement along with their mother. The tragedy was revealed when Fritzl was forced to take the eldest of these children to a hospital after a serious illness. He was subsequently arrested and convicted to life imprisonment.

Although Austria is, relatively speaking, a peaceful and safe country, it, like human nature, possesses two distinct faces, the elegant and more sophisticated one concealing the darker, more sinister side of the same coin. But when the dark side makes an appearance in the person of Jack Unterweger or Josef Fritzl, it seems the whole world notices.

Aug. 12, 2013

Colin Ireland

Colin Ireland was a nobody who wanted to become a somebody by becoming a serial killer. Like two serial killers before him, he trolled the Coleherne Pub in Earls Court for gay men to murder.

by Mark Pulham

Earls Court has been many things in its time. During the late 1800s, it was the Bohemian quarter of London, and in the 1940s, following World War II, it was inhabited by Polish immigrants, which led the area to be nicknamed “The Danzig Corridor.” In the 1960’s it was taken over by Australian and New Zealand travelers which led to a new nickname, “Kangaroo Valley.”

It was the home to many of the famous. Alfred Hitchcock lived in the area, as did Howard Carter, the man who discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun. Hollywood film star Stewart Granger was born in Earls Court; lead singer of Queen, Freddie Mercury, lived there; and probably most famously, Princess Diana had a flat there for a couple of years before she married Prince Charles.

Roman Polanski filmed the 1965 movie Repulsion in Earls Court, and the 1981 horror comedy An American Werewolf in London was also filmed there. And the 1941 novel by Patrick Hamilton, Hanover Square, was set in Earls Court.

The Coleherne Pub – a Notorious Gay Bar

But long before Soho and other places had made the claim, Earls Court was known as a gay district. And one establishment became notorious: The Coleherne Pub, located at 261 Old Brompton Road.

It began as a regular pub, although with a Bohemian clientele, in 1866, but by the 1930’s, it was featuring drag acts to entertain the crowd after a Sunday lunch. By the mid-1950’s, when homosexuality was still illegal, it was firmly established as a gay pub, though the bar was separated into a gay side and a straight side.

By the 1970’s, the pub had become a fully gay pub, and had transformed into a Leather bar. Behind the pubs blacked out windows, the sadists and the masochists mingled with each other, the color-coded handkerchiefs hanging from their pockets, displaying whether they were tops – the master or dominant partners, or whether they were bottoms – the slave or submissive partner. 

New friends would be made, anonymous and secretive, and the night would be spent in each others company.

The Coleherne Pub attracted the unwanted attention of the police, who found it an easy place to make arrests. The offenses were obstruction, importuning, and soliciting, even though all they were doing was standing in the street saying goodnight to each other. It did no good for those arrested to point out that the other pubs in the area that were not gay also had people standing outside saying goodnight.

The pub also attracted a well known clientele, such as Rupert Everett, Freddy Mercury, Rudolph Nureyev, and Anthony Perkins. Armistead Maupin, in his Tales of the City book, Babycakes mentions the pub, as did the group The Stranglers in its song “Hanging Around.”

But the group was not the only stranglers that are connected to the pub.

Between 1978 and 1983, the Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen strangled and drowned 15 young men whom he had met at various locations throughout the city. One of the locations he frequented on his hunt for victims was the Coleherne.

In 1986, Michael Lupo, an Italian living in London, murdered four men. Once again, he was a frequent visitor to the Coleherne.

One serial killer associated with the pub is unfortunate, two is a huge coincidence, but three is a pattern.

A New Year’s Resolution to Kill Someone

In 1993, a new killer came onto the scene. Like many others, on January 1 he had made a New Year’s resolution. While others resolved to change their lives, or lose weight, or become a better person, this man’s New Year’s resolution was that this year, he would kill a human being.

The man was a nobody, but he thought that this was the best way to become a somebody. For many killers, there are easy targets. Runaways, hitchhikers, prostitutes, all are potential victims for one reason or another. For this man, he chose homosexual men, easy victims because many lead double lives, anxious to conceal their sexual preference from family members, friends, and co-workers, who may not understand.

And this man chose his hunting ground well, a gay pub where no questions were asked, where the clientele moved in anonymity.

Although the resolution was made in the New Year, it wasn’t until the beginning of March that the man made his first move. On March 8, he entered the Coleherne Pub, using the side door as he knew that the front door was covered by a security camera. Even then, he was unsure of whether he would carry out his plan. He would later tell the police that if he had not been approached, he would probably would not have done anything.

Victim No. 1

The man indicated that he was a “top” and waited, and soon, a “bottom” came over, accidentally spilling his drink on the man. The bottom asked that he be punished. The two men began chatting.

Peter Walker was a 45-year old choreographer and former dancer, originally from Liverpool, who had only recently been hired to work in the West End on the musical City Of Angels. He regularly went to the Coleherne hoping to meet someone. Later, friends would say that Walker was a lonely man, whose only real companions were two dogs that he owned, Sammy, a white German shepherd, and Bessie, a black Labrador. They said that he didn’t want to go home to an empty flat.

Walker made it clear that he was a homosexual who was into S & M, and that he was the submissive partner in a sexual relationship. The invitation was clear, and the man took it.

They eventually left the Coleherne, using the side door, and caught a cab to Walker’s home in Battersea, South London, chatting happily to each other on the way, both men no doubt looking forward to the rest of the night, though Walker’s idea of how the night would go differed wildly from that of his new friend.

When they got back to the apartment, the man put the two dogs in another room and closed the door, while Walker got undressed. The man had brought a bag with him, and inside was his “murder kit” containing gloves, cord, handcuffs, and a complete change of clothing. If Walker saw what was in the bag, he wouldn’t think anything of it. It seemed like standard equipment for the S & M crowd.

The man got Walker onto the bed, a four poster, where he bound him with the cord and handcuffed him. The man then gagged him using tied up condoms. Walker was now helpless, but not worried. The man then began to beat Walker, using his fists, and then using a dog lead and a belt.

It’s likely that even at this stage that Walker was not concerned with what was happening, assuming it was part of the fantasy, part of the game. But soon, the violence became excessive, and Walker must have become worried. The man left Walker for a moment and went into the kitchen. When he returned, he had a plastic shopping bag with him.

He pulled the bag over Walker’s head and held it there for a short time, then removed it, taunting his victim and telling him how easy it would be for him to end Walker’s life. He would later tell the police that when Walker asked if he was going to die, the man told him that he was. He felt that Walker had resigned himself to his death, and that he had, in a sense, given up.

Finally, tired of the game, the man put the bag over Walker’s head for the last time and suffocated him. When it was over, the man burnt Walker’s pubic hair. He would explain to the police later that he was curious to know what it would smell like. The killer then did a search of the apartment, during which the killer found something that enraged him. Among the papers he rifled through was evidence that Walker was HIV positive and he had not told him, but was perfectly willing to engage in sex.

The man, angered, pushed a condom in Walker’s mouth and into a nostril, and then arranged two teddy bears in a 69 position on the bed.

The killer was an enthusiastic reader of true crime books and FBI manuals, and he knew how to clean up a crime scene. He wiped down any surface that he may have touched and changed his clothes, putting the ones he had on in the bag, along with the cord that he had used to bind Walker to the bed.

He then settled down to wait out the night, thinking that leaving at that time would cause suspicion. He watched television until he felt it was safe enough to leave.

Once the morning rush hour had started, the killer left, blending in with everyone else on their way to work. He threw away keys he had taken from the apartment into the Thames from Battersea Bridge as he headed across into Chelsea. Then, on a train heading home, he threw the murder kit out the window and into a canal.

There had been nothing in the newspapers about the murder the day after the killing, so the man called the Samaritans. He told the person who answered about the dogs, telling them they had been locked in the room a couple of days and that someone should go there. He explained that the owner was dead, and that he had killed him.

This was done not because of the killer’s concern over the plight of the dogs, but so that someone would go and discover the body.

Not content with one phone call, he made a second one, this time to The Sun newspaper. He told them of his New Year’s resolution to kill someone, and pointed them in the direction of Peter Walker, telling them that the victim was a homosexual that was into kinky sex, adding, “You like that stuff, don’t you?” This was a reference to the newspapers disreputable content.

But what the killer didn’t know was that the body had already been discovered, by the building caretaker. The police investigation, led by Detective Inspector Martin Finnegan, came to what seemed an obvious conclusion, that this was a sex game that had gone horribly wrong.

The police needed to know the identity of Walker’s sexual partner on the evening of his death. Finnegan went on television to appeal for the man to come forward, but to no avail. The police reached out to the gay community, and immediately hit a wall of resistance.

The police and the gay community had never had a good relationship, and the police had a reputation for not taking crimes against homosexuals seriously, even when they were assaulted, and were even hostile themselves toward members of the gay community.

If that wasn’t bad enough, on March 11, two days after the death of Peter Walker, the House of Lords ruled that it was an offense to cause bodily harm to someone while engaging in a sado-masochistic act, even if there was consent. Effectively, S & M was now illegal.

This, along with their past experiences, virtually guaranteed that there would be no co-operation with the police from the gay community, especially those who enjoyed rough sex who now feared they would be subject to prosecution. With no clues left at Walker’s apartment, no witnesses, and the lack of co-operation from the gay community, the police had no choice but to close the case as unsolved.

Two months passed. The killer was lying in wait, waiting for the police investigation to die down. By this time, any fears that were going through the gay community would have passed and they would feel safe. But by the end of May, the urge to take another victim had built up and needed to be satisfied.

Back to Prowl the Coleherne

On May 28, the killer travelled back to the Coleherne and hunted for another victim.

Christopher Dunn

Christopher Dunn was a 37-year-old librarian, a regular at the Coleherne, and like Peter Walker, a submissive partner. Dunn was precisely the type the killer was looking for. The two men started chatting in the pub, and Dunn revealed to the man that he liked to be dominated.

The two men left the pub, again by the side door, and went to Dunn’s home, a Victorian cottage in Wealdstone in North London. Once there, they spent some time together, having something to eat and watching an S & M film that belonged to Dunn. When it was over, the man told Dunn to go and get ready. Dunn left and went to the bedroom.

The man waited a short while, and then he too entered the bedroom. Dunn was naked, except for a studded belt and a black leather body harness. The man told Dunn to lie down on the bed on his stomach. He then handcuffed Dunn and tied his feet together. The man asked Dunn how he felt, and Dunn told him he felt scared but excited.

His excitement would soon pass, but the fear would increase. The man began to beat Dunn with his fists and a belt and started to demand his cash card and PIN. The violence was horrific, and Dunn gave him everything he wanted. But the man didn’t believe the PIN he gave him was real, of the four numbers, three consecutive numbers were identical.

The killer took his lighter and held the flame to Dunn’s testicles, and there was more beating. Satisfied that he had the right information, the killer took some pieces of cloth and jammed them into Dunn’s mouth, suffocating him.

Once again, the killer cleaned up the crime scene thoroughly, putting the plate and glass he had used earlier into his bag and wiping everything down, and even cleaning the batteries from his flashlight, something he had seen on a television program. His clothing and shoes had been changed and the discarded clothes placed in the bag to be disposed of by throwing them from the train.

As before, he stayed at the apartment until he deemed it was safe enough to leave. Later, he would tell the police that he believed staying in the apartments with the corpses affected him mentally, that sitting with them as they gradually became blotchy wasn’t something he could cope with.

It turned out that murdering men was a costly business, what with having to replace items in his murder kit and having to buy new clothes to make up for the ones he was throwing away. With this in mind, the man used Dunn’s cash card and PIN to withdraw £200 from his account.

On May 30, two days after his death, Dunn’s body was discovered by a friend who had come to call on him. The police who investigated believed, at first, that it was a sex game gone wrong, having been informed that Dunn was a gay man who went to bars and clubs, including the Coleherne, that catered to the homosexual community. But when they realized that money had been taken from Dunn’s bank account using his PIN, the theory was changed to a robbery and murder, and that he was tortured to reveal the PIN.

At the time of the killings, the Metropolitan Police were split into five different areas, and they didn’t normally consult each other on crimes that had taken place. As the police investigating the Dunn killing were from a different station than the Battersea police who were looking at the Walker killing, neither of the two murders was linked. Once again, there was no forensic evidence or any witnesses that could help with the investigation.

The Urge to Kill Sharpens

On June 4, 1993, the man was back in the Coleherne pub. It had been just six days since the murder of Christopher Dunn. The man’s urge to kill was escalating, and the gap between killings was becoming shorter. He was becoming frustrated by the fact that the killings had not been linked, and the craving he had for recognition had not been fulfilled.

Perry Bradley

Perry Bradley III was a tall and handsome blond man from Sulphur Springs, Texas, the International Sales Director for J-B Weld Co, an adhesives manufacturing company. Perry’s late father was Perry Bradley Jr., a U.S. Congressman and a Democratic Party fundraiser, and Perry himself, with success in both the real estate and construction businesses, was already quite wealthy.

Bradley had his fatal meeting at the Coleherne and the two men went back to Bradley’s apartment in Kensington. The 35-year-old Bradley took off his clothes and his new friend suggested that he tie him up as foreplay. But Bradley was not into S & M, and was reluctant to do so. However, the man told him that for him to get aroused, he needed the bondage foreplay. Bradley relented and soon, he was face down on the bed, hands cuffed behind his back and his feet tied together with cord. The man then placed a noose around Bradley’s neck.

To Bradley’s horror, the man then demanded Bradley’s cash card and PIN, and told him he was quite willing to kill him if he needed to. The man threatened to take his lighter and burn Bradley’s testicles if he wasn’t told what he wanted to know.

Bradley, frightened for his life, told the man where the card was and the PIN, and offered to go to the bank with him to withdraw the money. The man said that would not be necessary.

He then told Bradley that it was going to be a long night, and suggested that he get some sleep. As amazing as it seems, Bradley actually drifted off to sleep. According to his statement to the police, the killer sat around for a while and considered letting Bradley live, but then decided it was easier just to kill him.

As Bradley slept, the man began to tighten the noose. Bradley hardly struggled as the man took away his life. Once Bradley was dead, the man searched through the apartment, finding £100, which he stole. He then cleaned up thoroughly and spent the rest of the night relaxing, listening to the radio, until it was safe to leave. Before he left, the man placed a doll on Bradley’s body.

At the bank, the man used Bradley’s cash card to withdraw another £200, then headed back home, again throwing the murder kit from the train window.

This third killing was also not linked to the others, again because the police investigating the death were from a different area. It was also not linked because the others concerned the deaths of known homosexuals, and this was not a homosexual death. Perry Bradley III was not gay. At least, that’s what people thought. Bradley had kept his sexual preferences so secret that no one knew that he was a homosexual.

When people back in Sulphur Springs heard of his death and that there was a suggestion of homosexuality, they all dismissed it. One said that Bradley loved beautiful women, and suggested that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The police may have kept an open mind about Bradley’s sexual preferences, but likely went along with the heterosexual suggestion to protect the family.

However, the death of the son of a prominent political figure did make the headlines, though the killer was still angry that despite having killed three times, none of the deaths were linked, and therefore his wish to be recognized as a serial killer was still unfulfilled.

This time, the gap between killings became even shorter. On June 7, just three days after he killed Perry Bradley, the man was back at the Coleherne searching for yet another victim.

Victim No. 4

The man met and began chatting to 33-year-old Andrew Collier, who worked as a warden for a sheltered housing complex in Dalston, in North East London. They left the Coleherne and went back to Collier’s apartment where, just after they arrived, a disturbance took place and both men looked out of the window.

Whatever it was died down, and the two men returned to the reason they were there. As with the others, Collier allowed the man to handcuff him and tie him to the bed. A noose was then put around Collier’s neck.

Once again, the demands for the cash card and the PIN were made, but Collier refused to give them. Angry, the man began to torture Collier, and then started searching through the apartment. Among the items he found was notification that Collier was HIV positive.

The man’s anger increased, and he tortured Collier some more, using his lighter to burn parts of Collier’s body.

Then, to Collier’s horror, the man caught Collier’s pet cat, Millie. As Collier watched, the man hanged the cat by the neck from the door, killing it in front of Collier. No doubt at this point, Collier knew he was going to die, and he was right. The man tightened the noose around Collier’s neck and killed him, then stuffed condoms in his mouth.

But still angry, the man then decided to humiliate Collier even more. He placed a condom over Collier’s penis, and another one over the cat’s tail. He then positioned the cat on Collier’s body so that the cat’s mouth was around Collier’s penis, and the cat’s tail was in Collier’s mouth.

Once again, he cleaned the crime scene and waited until the streets were busier so he could blend into the crowd. He took with him £70 that he had found, and a mug that he had used.

When Collier was eventually found, it was a scene that the police had never encountered before. Once again, this was a different team investigating this death. Although, like the killings before, this could have been interpreted as a sex act that had gone too far, the fact that the cat had been killed and displayed in such a manner caused the detectives to think that this may be something more.

The investigating officers, led by Detective Chief Superintendant Albert Patrick, began to look at other deaths within the past few months to see if anything similar had occurred. Detective Sergeant Terry Webster called the team investigating the Bradley death, but was told that as Bradley was not homosexual, it wasn’t linked. With the Christopher Dunn death labeled as accidental, it was not surprising that none of them were linked. But when Webster saw the details of the Patrick Walker killing, he knew that he was on to something. The two teddy bears left in the 69 position were similar, in essence, to the position that the cat and Collier were left. Webster called the police in Battersea. Finally, two of the deaths were linked.

The police made an appeal to the gay community, but there were bridges that had to be built.

The killer still craved publicity, and on June 12, five days after murdering Andrew Collier, he called the Kensington police and gave details of the killing, and claimed that he had killed four men in total.

He also called the Battersea police. “Are you still interested in the death of Peter Walker?” he asked them. He also asked them if they had stopped the investigation into Walker’s death, and suggested that they were not interested in the death of a homosexual. He told them he dreamed of committing the perfect murder, and said that he will kill again.

The Last Victim

That night, the man went out once more, back to the Coleherne, hunting for another victim.

Emanuel Spiteri was 42 years old, originally from Malta, now a chef working in London. He was a short man who liked to dress in leather pants and wore motorcycle boots. He frequently went to many gay bars, but as one barmaid stated later, he was shy and retiring, a classic wallflower.

On June 12, he went to the Coleherne.

The killer met him there and they chatted for a while, but then Spiteri left. This could have been a lucky escape, but unfortunately, a while later, the killer bumped into him again at Earls Court Tube Station. They chatted again, and this time Spiteri invited him back to his apartment in Catford, South East London.

It took several trains to get there, but once in his apartment, the usual scene played out. Spiteri was handcuffed and tied to the bed, and a noose was placed around his neck. Once more, the killer demanded the cash card and PIN, but Spiteri refused to give it. The man tightened the noose, strangling Spiteri.

The man performed his usual clean up, removing any forensic evidence, and watched television until the morning before he left. But this time, he decided to add something new. He gathered papers and put them on the floor in the bedroom, then set them alight. He hoped the blaze would destroy the whole apartment block, and had even considered turning on the gas, though he then decided not to.

The next day, the man called the police and told them to look for his fifth victim at the scene of a fire in South London. What the man didn’t know was that just after he had left, the fire burned itself out, doing little damage.

While the police were searching through reports of fires, the police station got a call in the early evening of June 15. The woman was a landlady who reported that one of her tenants was dead, and that there was evidence of a fire in the bedroom. The police had found Emanuel Spiteri.

It was now clear that a serial killer was on the loose, targeting the homosexual population. Both Walker and Collier had been linked, and now Dunn, Bradley, and Spiteri had been added to the list of victims.

The police called a midnight press conference. Detective Chief Superintendant Ken John, heading the inquiry, said that the five murders were linked both “pathologically and forensically” and were the work of the same man. John made an appeal to the gay community, asking them to be careful, and recommended that if they were going off with anyone they didn’t know to inform a friend exactly where they were going. Albert Patrick added “I am extremely frightened that this man will strike again. There may well be other victims we don't yet know about, and heterosexuals may also be at risk.”

Patrick also added what may be the motives for the murders. “It is possible that the killer has AIDS and is taking revenge for his own HIV infection. I have a gut feeling that the men were lured for sex and then things went badly wrong.”

On June 17, another press conference was called, this time allowing Ken John to make a direct appeal for the killer to give himself up. “Speak to me, I am willing to speak to you. I need to speak to you. This is something we can talk about. Enough is enough. Enough pain, enough anxiety, enough tragedy. Give yourself up – whatever terms, whatever you dictate, whatever the time, to me or my colleagues.”

He then explained to the press that a man had been calling the police and telling them that he had committed the murders, giving details of the killings, but that now the calls had stopped. John believed the calls were a cry for help.

Two days after the last press conference, London’s Gay Pride Festival was held. It was attended by more than 50,000 homosexuals, and the police were present to hand out leaflets giving details of the murders of the five victims, and asking for anyone to come forward if they had information, and warned the homosexual community to be careful in any encounters with people they meet casually.

“The Gay Slayer”

The news of the killer, now given the nickname “The Gay Slayer,” chilled and horrified the city, though the least shocked seemed to be the gay community itself. As one put it, “Gay people take a lot of risks anyway, and it just seems like another one to look out for.” In fact, within the gay community, he began to be jokingly referred to as the “queerial killer.”

This may have seemed like an odd reaction, but as the publisher of London’s Capital Gay newspaper, Michael Mason, said, “After living 10 years under the shadow of AIDS, suddenly people are wondering if we're quaking with fear because five people have been murdered, as terrible as that is.”

Profilers Weigh In

The police asked psychologist Dr. Mike Berry to draw up a profile of the killer. Berry advised them that the killer was driven by violent fantasies, but each killing didn’t live up to the fantasy that he had in his head, causing him to have to recreate the killing with a new victim. He also said that he believed the killer is not HIV positive and therefore not taking revenge on the homosexual community.

Another psychologist, Dr. Jonas Rappeport, agreed with Berry, and went on to suggest that the killer was possibly not even homosexual, but just pretending to be one to attract the victims to him, giving them a false sense of security.

Criminal psychologist Paul Britton also gave advice, as did Dick Walter, a psychologist from Michigan, and famed FBI profiler Robert Ressler, who happened to be in England on a book tour.

One Fingerprint Left Behind

Despite the cynicism of the gay community regarding the police and their distrust, one gay man came forward. It happened that this man was on the same train from Charing Cross to Hither Green as Spiteri and his killer on the night that he was murdered, and got a clear view of the man Spiteri was with. He gave the police a description, which was released on June 24. The man with Spiteri was a white male aged between 30 to 40 years old, over six feet tall, and clean shaven. He had a full face and had short dark hair. The police, based on this description, created an E-FIT, an Electronic Facial Identification Technique, of the suspect, and issued it to the press.

As the witness said he was on the train from Charing Cross, the police contacted the station and asked for their security camera tapes for the night in question, hoping that they were lucky enough to have captured the killer on tape. Charing Cross Station sent them almost 500 hours of videotape which they had to go through.

Still from CCTV camera

Finally, the officers’ viewing paid off, the man with Spiteri had been caught on tape. Taking a still from the videotape, the police released it to the public on July 2 and asked for information. By the next day, the police had received more than 40 telephone calls, many of them from men claiming that they had seen or even talked to the man in the Coleherne Pub.

On July 19, a 39-year-old man walked into the office of his solicitor in Southend-on-Sea, a coastal resort town in Essex, some 40 miles from London. He had seen the video still that had been released and had recognized the man with Spiteri. He was that man.

His name was Colin Ireland, and he explained to the solicitor that the man in the video was him, but he had not killed Spiteri. He said he had met Spiteri and had agreed to go home with him, but when they arrived, there was another man there, and Ireland didn’t want any part of that, so he left.

By this time, the police had already identified the man in the video as Colin Ireland, and were on their way to see him in Southend. The solicitor called the police, and they went to the solicitor’s office to await the arrival of Colin Ireland.

When Ireland arrived, he handed them a written statement, telling the story that he had told the solicitor. The police immediately placed him under arrest and took him back to London. At Islington police station, Ireland’s fingerprints were taken, and he was interviewed, but Ireland had decided not to talk.

Anatomy of a Serial Killer

The police looked into his background. Colin Ireland’s mother was a young news agent’s assistant when, at the age of 17, she gave birth to her son at the West Hill Hospital, in Dartford, Kent. It was March 16, 1954. The pregnancy was unplanned, and, no surprise to her, the father wanted nothing to do with it. He vanished from the scene, and the young mother left his name off the birth certificate.  She was unable to cope with being a mother on her own, and with barely enough money coming in for herself, let alone a newborn, she moved in with her grandparents at Myrtle Road, Dartford.

They stayed there for the next few years until more relations from abroad came to stay. At this point, now 22 years old, she decided to move with her 5 year old, and become more independent. They moved to Birch Road in Gravesend, but things were more difficult, with her trying to balance looking after a small child, and trying to earn enough money from part-time and unskilled work. Eventually, when it became too much, they moved back into the house at Myrtle Road until 1960, when she had saved some money.

This time, they moved to Sidcup in Kent, but later that same year moved again, this time to Westmalling in Maidstone, Kent.

Westmalling was a camp for homeless women and their children, almost like a prisoner of war camp than a home. The day she arrived there, the young Colin remembered her bursting into tears. She was able to stand it for three months, but no more than that. She returned to Myrtle Road.

By the following year, things had improved. She had met a man, and the three of them moved to Farnol Road, Dartford. There they would remain for three years, after getting married, and changing Colin’s last name from Ireland to his new stepfather’s name of Saker.

Colin liked his new father, but though he was an electrician by trade, he only worked once in a while, and was completely irresponsible when it came to money. With the constant moving around, Colin’s school life suffered, constantly being the “new boy” with its subsequent taunts. Tall and thin, Colin just never seemed to fit in. Between the ages of five and 10, Colin went to six different primary schools, with a move causing him to leave just as he was getting used to it.

Colin became a loner and withdrawn, standing on the sidelines watching rather than joining in.

In 1964, the family was evicted from Farnol Road for non-payment of rent. Colin and his mother ended up back at the women’s camp at Westmalling, with his stepfather having to find somewhere else to stay as the camp was for women and children only.

That same year, Colin’s mother discovered that she was pregnant. It was clear that the emotional and financial strain could not take the addition of a new baby, but Colin’s mother wanted the child. They decided that Colin would go into foster care until the financial situation improved.

Colin stayed with a family in Wainscott, Kent, until his family was able to take him back. When he was returned, his mother, stepfather, and a baby brother were living in West Kingsdown.

Still poverty stricken, his mother would sacrifice for her children, often going hungry so the kids would have enough to eat. Colin bonded with his mother, and although poor, things seemed to be going right. But then what little stability they had was torn apart when Colin’s stepfather abandoned them.

The marriage had been going downhill for quite a while, and before her husband had even left, she had already met another man. The couple married fairly soon after, but Colin, angry and resentful to all adults, refused to take the new stepfathers name, reverting back to the name of Ireland.

The new stepfather was stable and good hearted, and in 1965 the family moved to Clyde Street in Sheerness, Kent. They would stay in this house for the next five years.

By this time, Colin was 12 and beginning to get interested in sex. He started masturbating at this age, his fantasies fueled at that time by the usual stuff, mildly erotic magazines and the underwear sections of shopping catalogues, the same things that most boys used as fantasies at that time.

But there were other sexual experiences that were not so normal. On four occasions, elderly men approached him in the hopes of enticing him somewhere for sex. In each case, nothing happened, Colin refused to go with the men, but the attempts made him angry, and for a boy with an already diminished confidence, it made him feel that he was destined to be a victim.

In 1970, Colin turned to crime. The 16 year old stole £4.00 and planned to run away to London with the money. But the plan failed. He was caught and made the subject of a “fit person order” and sent to Finchton Manor School in Kent. There he was bullied by other boys who made fun of his accent and also made fun of the fact that the council was paying for his stay there, whereas the other boys were being paid for by their parents.

In revenge, he went to the room he shared with two boys and set fire to his belongings.

The fire brigade put the fire out, and Colin was taken away by a social worker. No charges were brought against Colin for the incident.

Fires seemed to have played a great part in Colin’s mind. He had recurring nightmares that revolved around fire, and read books about the fire brigade. It’s likely that this was the reason he set fire to Spiteri’s room.

Now free of Finchton, Colin ran away to London and began hanging around Playland, an amusement arcade where pedophiles would often pick up young runaways. Although Colin was never abused, he saw others sell their bodies for a place to sleep.

Colin had no money, and nowhere to sleep, and inevitably, he found himself in trouble again, committing minor offenses which led to a sentence at Hollesly Bay Borstal. The security was so light that Colin escaped. His freedom was short lived, however, as he was picked up by the police and sent back to Borstal, this time the tighter institutions at Rochester and Grendon.

He was there in 1971 and 1972, and then, at the age of 18 he was released. It was around this time that he began his first relationship with a woman, but which was not a happy period of his life. The relationship faltered.

When he was 21 years old, in December 1975, he was captured after stealing a car, damaging property and committing two counts of burglary. No longer a minor, he was sentenced to 18 months, though he only served 12.

Shortly after he was released, he moved in with a woman and began his first sexual relationship, losing his virginity at the age of 22. This relationship lasted a few months before Colin left.

Over the next few years, Colin went back and forth between prison for crimes such as demanding with menaces, robbery, and attempted deception, interspersed with jobs such as a volunteer fireman, a volunteer in a homeless shelter, and a bouncer at a number of bars, including a gay bar.

When he was 27, he was working as a chef when he met a woman named Virginia Zammitt at a lecture on survivalism. She was 36 years old, nine years older than Colin, confined to a wheelchair after being paralyzed in a road accident when she was 24, and she had a 5-year-old daughter. Nevertheless, they hit it off, and the following year, 1982, they married.

Colin loved Virginia and her daughter, but he was becoming more unstable, and eventually, the marriage failed as Colin was becoming increasingly aggressive and getting into more trouble and finding himself imprisoned. When Colin had an affair in 1987, the marriage ended.

Two years passed, and in 1989, Colin met the landlady at the Globe pub in Buckfast, Devon. Janet Young fell in love with Colin, and within the space of a week, he moved in with her and her two children, aged 11 and 13. Three months later, they were married.

Four months into the marriage, Colin drove Janet and her children to her mother’s house. Nothing seemed wrong. But Colin then disappeared, taking with him everything from the house, emptying Janet’s bank account, stealing money from the pub, and taking the car.

With the collapse of this marriage, Colin moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex. There, he got a job working in a shelter for the homeless. The manager, Richard Higgs, said that he was liked by the guests as he had similar problems and could empathize with them. But, by December, 1992, many unfounded allegations were made against Colin, forcing him to resign. Colin went to an adult training center, where he found himself breaking up wooden pallets. To Colin, it was demeaning work, and he was becoming frustrated. He realized in this life he was a nobody, and he wanted to be a somebody. His solution was to become a serial killer.

Colin had been an avid reader of crime books and knew that to be classed as a serial killer, according to one book, he had to murder five people. He also knew about the relatively new theory of geographical profiling, and that the serial killers home range was, in England, seven miles. Killers operate within this seven mile radius, and with this knowledge, Colin chose to trick the police by consciously killing outside that seven-mile limit.

To further confuse the police, he would throw the murder kit from the window of the train, but always within that seven mile radius.

And on March 8, 1993 his plan became reality.

After his capture, Ireland maintained his silence through two days of interrogation, revealing no emotions. Instead, he just stared at the officers. But Ireland was shocked for a moment when the police revealed one thing. As much as Ireland’s story of leaving Spiteri with the other man at his home was plausible, they had one piece of evidence that proved he was lying: a fingerprint. And it had been found not in Spiteri’s home, but in the apartment of Andrew Collier.

The Collier Crime Scene

That night at Collier’s home, the disturbance outside which caused them to look out of the window resulted in Ireland accidentally touching the inside of a bar that was across the window. Ireland had completely forgotten that he touched it, and so didn’t wipe it when he cleaned up. After the initial shock of the fingerprint evidence was over, Ireland went back to silence.

On July 21, the police charged him with the murder of Andrew Collier, and two days later, with the murder of Emanuel Spiteri.

The Confession

Ireland was remanded in custody, and for the next four weeks continued to be silent, until August 19, when he suddenly decided to make a confession. He was the man responsible for the five deaths. Once he started, he gave detailed descriptions of what he did, showing no emotions. The next day, he was also charged with the murders of Walker, Dunn, and Bradley.

Ireland told the police that he felt he needed to be removed from society, adding that he knew the murderous side of his personality could only be controlled if he was in prison. He pointed out that he himself was not gay, and had no particular grudge against homosexuals. He just picked them because they were easy targets. According to him, it could just as easily have been women he targeted.

Colin Ireland had confessed to all five murders, and so there was no need for a trial, just a sentencing. By confessing, Colin had ended the chance of becoming as famous as previous serial killers.

On December 20, at the Old Bailey’s Number One Court, Colin Ireland was sentenced by the judge, Mr Justice Sachs, who said, “"By any standards you are an exceptionally frightening and dangerous man. In cold blood and with great deliberation you have killed five of your fellow human beings. You killed them in grotesque and cruel fashion. The fear, brutality and indignity to which you subjected your victims are almost unspeakable. To take one human life is an outrage, to take five is carnage. You expressed the desire to be regarded as a serial killer. That must be matched by your detention for life.”

And life it was. While walking in the yard at Wakefield Prison, Ireland, then 57 years old, slipped and fractured his hip. Ten days later, on February 21, 2012, Colin Ireland died from pulmonary fibrosis and the fractured hip.