Couples Who Kill (33 page)

After two weeks of evidence, both Daniel Delker and David Sandham were found guilty and given life sentences. Only then was it made public that David Sandham had killed before. Six years previously – in 1997 – he’d been given a five year sentence for the manslaughter of his brother who he stabbed to death after a row about the washing up.

Magdalena Solis lived in Monterrey in north-east Mexico. In the late 1950s and early 60s she made a living as a prostitute, her pimp being her homosexual brother Eleazor.

In 1962 the siblings joined a cult based around offering sex to the gods and goddesses. This involved Magdalena having sex with the females of the group whilst Eleazor had sex with the men. These rituals were supposed to appease the gods and make the harvest prosper, so the cult received money from religious farmers in the area.

Eventually the harvest failed and the farmers became disaffected – but Magdalena promised them renewed fortune if they sacrificed two human beings. She, her brother, and other members of the cult consequently stoned two men to death. This revitalised the farmers’ interest and over the next few months eight more cult members were sacrificed, after which Magdalena beat her lesbian lover to death. Her brother participated when another cult member had his heart cut out, at which stage word got back to the surrounding villages that people were
joining the cult and promptly disappearing, never to be seen again.

A police officer investigated and was soon hacked to death by the group. Angry at this death, one of the cult members then killed the cult’s founder. Reinforcements went in and arrested a dozen murderous devotees, most of whom received appropriately long sentences. Magdalena & Eleazor Solis were both sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, the maximum sentence that could be given in Mexico at that time.

Daniel Ruda began to lust for blood at the age of twelve, describing a metallic salty taste in his mouth which accompanied an urge to kill. He would later be diagnosed with a severe personality disorder and it’s likely it began at this early age. Nevertheless, he found work as a car parts salesman in his native Germany and regularly partied with friends.

By his twenties he had become involved in the neo-Nazi movement, joining up with other skinheads and fascists to protest about Germany’s ethnic minorities. By the time of the 1998 general election he was canvassing for the fascist National Democratic Party. Through this movement he met the more extreme members of the German Gothic community, young men and women who practiced Satanic rituals and who drank each others blood.

Some of these youngsters had been targeted by those in the extreme right who’d noted that it was possible to influence people politically through the entertainment industry. Unemployed young Goths, they could see, were searching for an identity and could be slowly persuaded to
adopt an extreme right-wing stance. This started with persuading German Goths to wear neo-Nazi symbols as a way to shock their parents. The next step was to give them tickets to concerts featuring neo-Nazi bands. In this way, Daniel Ruda became involved in the extreme Gothic scene as well as with the far right. He lost friends because of his politics and became more and more alienated from society.

But the party did badly in the election (after which their very legality was called into question) and Daniel drifted away from them, turning instead to black metal music, a variant of heavy metal, and joining a band called the Bloodsucking Freaks.

When the freaks couldn’t satisfy his longing for a special companion, he placed an advert in a black metal fanzine which read ‘Black-haired vampire seeks princess of darkness who despises everything and everybody and has bidden farewell to life.’ Needless to say, the girls weren’t exactly queuing up for the vampire – but an equally alienated twenty-one-year-old called Manuela replied.

Manuela was thirteen when she began to bite people in the street. She was sent to a psychiatrist but her problems continued. At fourteen she believed that the devil had contacted her – the mentally ill often have such religious hallucinations, as can others under stress. By her mid-teens she had dropped out of school and shortly afterwards took an overdose.

At sixteen she ran away from home and travelled to London, becoming more firmly involved in the vampire scene through people she met at a Gothic club in Islington. The male clubbers followed her about but she pretended to
only be interested in their blood and would claim ‘they were my blood donors.’ It’s more likely that she found she could keep their attention by playing hard to get.

At age seventeen she travelled to Scotland and met up with other alienated Goths. Soon she was cutting her arms and sleeping on graves: photographs taken at the time show a somewhat overweight and desperately unhappy teenager, her white flesh spilling over constricting fetish clothes. But even vampires have to earn a wage, so she took a job as a hotel chambermaid.

By now Manuela had read about a sixty-two-year-old recluse who called himself the leopard man and who lived on the Isle of Skye. She got in touch, telling him that she hated everything and everyone and when the hotel closed for the winter she moved in with him.

In 1998 she travelled back to Germany. There she
reestablished
contact with a former friend who noted that she was always desperate to be the centre of attention and that she loved to be photographed. But her friend also saw her good qualities – that she was reliable and honest, though she didn’t let people get too close.

Fewer people wanted to get close after she had two of her teeth removed and replaced with animal fangs which she later had sharpened to points, the better to pierce human flesh with. She pierced such flesh – and sucked the blood – of other so-called vampires and Goths. Most Goths are harmless individuals who simply enjoy the style of dress, the music: even those few extremists who suck blood don’t usually kill. But most vampires also don’t bite strangers in the street. It was eight years since Manuela had done so and she still hadn’t received significant psychiatric
intervention. Now the girl who was full of hatred was responding to an advert from a man who also hated everything.

In autumn 2000 the couple met up and it was love at first bite. They began to spend more and more time together, and their blood lust intensified. Manuela cut a chunk out of Daniel’s flesh and ate it. She also carved a pentagram on his chest.

They moved in together and Daniel drank from Manuela’s veins so often that she had cuts everywhere. She’d often worn outlandish punk haircuts in the past but now she shaved off most of her hair. More tellingly, she started to talk about other people as if they were vermin – and vermin is routinely destroyed.

Daniel’s grip on reality also lessened during this time. He’d been good at his job and was so reliable that his boss was thinking of putting him in charge of a second-hand car showroom. But now he was often ill and absent, lying about at home listening to black metal lyrics. And when he and Manuela did go out it was to take part in a Satanic sect.

Manuela bought a coffin which she sometimes slept in and she began to avoid the sun which must have played havoc with her body’s supply of Vitamin D.

The couple (he was now twenty-six and she was
twenty-three
) decided to marry at the Registry Office and chose 6th June 2001. It was the sixth day of the sixth month but they needed another six to make up 666, the so-called number of the beast. So they decided to kill someone on the 6th of the following month.

On 6th July the couple invited thirty-three-year-old Frank Hackert to their home in Witten, West Germany. They believed that Lucifer had told them to kill and that he would like a court jester, so they chose Frank Hackert, a colleague of Daniel’s who made them laugh. They told Frank that they were having a party – but in truth he was the only guest.

The couple chatted and shared drinks with Frank for a while, then Daniel walked behind him and dealt him two heavy blows to the head with a hammer. After a moment the bewildered man stood up and Manuela began to stab him with a knife, believing that it was glowing. In total she stabbed him sixty-six times. She’d later say that she saw his soul leave ‘for the underworld’ and added ‘we were empowered and alone.’ The couple then mutilated his corpse by cutting the veins and pouring his blood into a bowl, which they drank from. They left a scalpel protruding from his stomach and cut a pentagram, the sign of the devil, into his chest. They also mutilated his face and his arms and stubbed out cigarettes on his back.

After the murder, the couple took their car and went on a sort of pilgrimage to towns where Jewish people had been murdered. Before she left, Manuela sent a farewell letter to her mother which said ‘I am not of this world. I must liberate my soul from the mortal flesh.’ Fearing that her daughter had made another suicide attempt, Manuela’s mother went to the police who broke into the couple’s house and found Frank Hackert’s mutilated body decomposing on the lounge
floor. The apartment was filled with knives, a hammer, scalpels and human skulls. The coffin which Manuela sometimes slept in was placed next to a radiator in the lounge.

More worryingly, there were names written on the walls next to the words ‘be happy – you are next to die.’ There was also a list of sixteen names which police believe were men and women who the Rudas wanted to kill.

Meanwhile the couple had travelled through Sonderhausen, on to Apold and, finally, Jena, which is where the police caught up with them. The Rudas had stopped at a petrol station because even people with a hotline to a supposed underworld run out of gas. They surrendered immediately, something police were glad of when they found a chainsaw in the boot of their car. The Rudas said that they’d tried to kill themselves several times whilst on the run, but it’s unclear why they failed.

In custody, Daniel Ruda claimed to have no memory of the murder but his wife recalled every detail and happily described the killing to the police.

Whilst in custody, he bit the veins in his arm, then made the unvampire-like move of asking for a doctor. He told his lawyers that he wanted to be more famous than Charles Manson – but Manson’s infamy partly arose because his followers targeted beautiful, rich and famous people. He also achieved fame because there were fewer known serial killers in his day. Numerous men have subsequently chalked up much higher body counts yet are barely known outside the states in which they killed.

The couple’s guilt was a foregone conclusion. Neither denied the murder – they simply said that they were not accountable for the death as they were acting on a higher instruction. After all, some religions kill unmarried women if they aren’t virgins and other religions mutilate their children’s genitalia. They, the Rudas, had been told by their deity Satan to make a blood sacrifice and they had obediently carried this out.

During the trial, they repeatedly made Satanic symbols and stuck their tongues out at the spectators. A
seventeen-year
-old killer vampire profiled in
Children Who Kill
did the exact same thing.

The judge called for psychiatric background reports and these found that both of the accused were narcissistic exhibitionists. Such adults have often been ignored or abandoned as children and grow up with a desperate need for attention, even if it’s negative. The judiciary noted that the couple would probably never have killed if they hadn’t met each other. This is undoubtedly true – Manuela would have continued to seek attention through the transgressive club scene and Daniel would have maintained a grip on reality through his work, getting rid of his aggression at skinhead rallies and violent political events. It was only when they became a couple that they dropped out of society and completely immersed themselves in murderous plans.

On 31st January 2002 Manuela Ruda was sentenced to thirteen years in a secure mental facility and her husband was given fifteen years, also to be served in a psychiatric
institution. The court ordered that they must never be allowed to meet again. Surprisingly, neither Ruda was resistant to the order (though they may have secret plans to defy it) and both are now seeking a divorce.

Couples who kill tend to fit into distinct categories. That is, a small number who
kill for profit
, mainly those who murder babies then live off the child allowance or other adoption placement fees. Frances Schreuder (aided by her abused son Marc) also murdered for profit to enjoy her father’s wealth and Louisa Merrifield killed to enjoy her employer’s estate. Similarly, some of Archibald Hall and Michael Kitto’s murders were motivated by the desire to enjoy the trappings of an upper-class life.

A second category
kill out of fear
, notably Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson who killed their newborn infant rather than admit to their families that they’d had sex.

A third grouping
murder out of jealousy
– Diane Zamora and David Graham exterminated a potential rival whilst George Stoner murdered Alma Rattenbury’s husband in order to have her all to himself. This, though, is a subcategory of fear, with the killers murdering to avoid being deserted, a fate which terrifies them.

A fourth and much smaller group suffer from
serious mental illness
– namely the Papin sisters and vampire killers Daniel and Manuela Ruda. There were also traces of mental illness (but not insanity) in the schizophrenic Leonard Lake and the obsessive-compulsive George Woldt.

But by far the biggest group
kill for power and thrills.
Bittaker & Norris, Bianchi & Buono, Corll & Henley,
Lake & Ng, Coleman & Brown all fit into this category. All made clear statements of their motivation to their victims, from Roy Norris’s ‘scream bitch scream’ to Lake’s explicit diary about keeping sexual slaves.

This power and thrills motivation also applies to many killer couples who aren’t profiled here such as Raymond Fernandez & Martha Beck, David & Catherine Birnie, Judith & Alvin Neelley, Karla Homolka & Paul Barnardo, Gwendolyn Graham & Cathy Wood, Carol Bundy & Doug Clark. (All of the women apart from Martha Beck are profiled in
Women Who Kill
.)

What the individuals in these five groups have in common is that most were from abusive or deeply dysfunctional backgrounds. Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris had suffered emotional and physical abuse throughout their childhoods and Bittaker has spoken of being multiply sexually abused. Angelo Buono also endured a miserable childhood at the hands of his mother after which he hated women. His adoptive cousin Ken Bianchi fared little better, as his natural mother gave him to a childminder who abandoned the infant for hours at a time and only returned to treat him cruelly, then he was constantly spanked and scolded by his adoptive mum.

Dean Corll suffered in childhood at the hands of his authoritarian father and obsessive mother. Serial killers often have multiply-married mothers – and Corll’s married five times. His co-killer Wayne Henley had endured poverty and abuse throughout his formative years and was addicted to alcohol by age fifteen.

The same formative deprivation holds true for Leonard Lake who was abandoned twice by his mother. Charles Ng suffered even more cruelly as a young boy, for his father –
hoping to turn him into an exemplary scholar – bound him and beat him frequently.

Such childhood suffering has been described by so many killers that it’s become cynically known as ‘the abuse excuse’ – but most such killers accounts are backed up by eye-witness statements. Many were known by social services to be at risk, whilst others had relatives who knew that they were beaten, humiliated or starved of love. Psychotherapist Gaynor McManus has written that many of her clients in prison are ‘men who were systematically ill-treated as children … men who learned that violence works when they reached the age of sixteen or seventeen and hit their fathers back for the first time. It is only when they ask for therapy in their quest to change their lives that they learn to understand the reasons for their anti-social behaviour and to realise they have choices.’

The 2004 London Mayor’s Report also noted that ‘physical punishment of children breaches their fundamental rights to respect for their human dignity and physical integrity’ and added ‘research has shown that its use may cause behavioural problems in childhood and later life.’

This author has covered the link between so-called legitimate childhood punishments and later criminality and mental illness in previous novels and true crime books, so doesn’t want to repeat the same information here – but readers who want an end to parents hitting children can send a stamped addressed envelope to Children Are Unbeatable, 94 White Lion Street, London, N1 9PF, requesting further information and a membership form.

One of the questions which crime writers are frequently asked is why one member of a family becomes a murderer
and his siblings don’t. The answer is that everyone deals with violence differently. I can recall one family where the father battered all three of his children on a regular basis. One of his sons ended up on an attempted murder charge, one became a wife-beater and the third child – a daughter – turned the violence inwards and became a compulsive self-harmer, getting through the day on recreational drugs and using increasingly strong prescription drugs to help her sleep. In another family I know which also endured life with a violent father, the son went on to humiliate and threaten his own children whilst the daughter had a nervous breakdown but recovered to devote her life to children’s rights.

The final variable, of course, is choice. Many of us have violent urges when we are under duress – but we don’t have to give in to them. Wanting to hit someone and actually striking them are two very different things. And these killers didn’t strike out once in anger: most planned each murder in great detail, sometimes even customising an abduction vehicle or finding a safe house to imprison their captives.

People who make the best recovery from an abusive childhood are often those who eventually find something that they’re good at, a career or leisure interest which builds their self-esteem. None of the killers profiled achieved this distinction: most settled for dead end jobs and were constantly bored. Their rage against society grew, but rather than seek help for their emotional distress, they preferred to capture innocent victims for deadly entertainment. The rest is history.