Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (10 page)

The truth is, Manson will never be allowed out.

Chapter 7

The Moors Murderers

Name: Ian Brady

Accomplice: Myra Hindley

Nationality: English

Number of victims: 5 killed

Reign of terror: 1963–65

Favoured method of killing: torture, sexual perversion, strangulation

Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s bizarre and deviant sexual relationship drove them to torture and murder defenceless children for pleasure in a case that appalled the world.
When 19-year-old Myra Hindley met Ian Brady in January 1961 he was already deeply disturbed. He was 21 years old and worked as a stock clerk at Millwards, a chemical company in Manchester, but his mind was full of sadistic fantasies. He had a collection of Nazi memorabilia and recordings of Nazi rallies. In his lunch hour, he read
Mein Kampf
and studied German grammar. He believed in the rightness of the Nazi cause and regretted only that he could not join in its sadistic excesses.
Myra Hindley had problems of her own. When she was 15, her boyfriend had died. She could not sleep for days afterwards and eventually turned to the Catholic Church for consolation. She was known as a loner and a daydreamer although at school it was noted that she was tough, aggressive and rather masculine, enjoying contact sports and judo. But that hardly made her suited to working life in 1950s Britain. After a series of menial jobs, she became a typist at Millwards, where she met Brady. He impressed her immediately. Most of the men she knew she considered immature. But Brady was well-dressed and rode a motorbike. Everything about him fascinated her. ‘Ian wore a black shirt today and looked smashing… l love him,’ she confided to her diary.
For nearly a year Brady took no notice of her. ‘The pig. He didn’t even look at me today,’ she wrote more than once.
Finally, in December 1961, he asked her out. ‘Eureka!’ her diary says. ‘Today we have our first date. We are going to the cinema.’ The film was
Judgment at Nuremberg
.
Soon Hindley had surrendered her virginity to Brady. She was madly in love with him and was writing schoolgirlishly: ‘I hope Ian and I love each other all our lives and get married and are happy ever after.’
But their relationship was far more sophisticated than that. Hindley was Brady’s love slave. He talked to her of sexual perversions and lent her books on Nazi atrocities. They took pornographic photographs of each other and kept them in a scrapbook. Some showed the weals of a whip across her buttocks.
Hindley gave up babysitting and going to church. Within six months, Brady had moved in with Hindley who lived (with her dog) in her grandmother’s house on the outskirts of Manchester. A frail woman, Hindley’s grandmother spent most of her time in bed, giving them the run of the place. Brady persuaded Hindley to bleach her hair a Teutonic blonde and dressed her in leather skirts and high-heeled boots. He called her Myra Hess – or Hessie – after sadistic concentration camp guard Irma Grese.
Hindley became hard and cruel, doing anything Brady asked. She did not even balk at procuring children for him to abuse, torture and kill. The first victim was 16-year-old Pauline Reade who disappeared on her way to a dance on 12 July 1963. Somehow they managed to persuade her to walk up to the nearby Saddleworth Moor, an isolated, windswept part of the Peak Districk National Park, where they killed and buried her in a shallow grave.
Four months later, Hindley hired a car and abducted 12-year-old John Kilbride. When she returned the car, it was covered in peaty mud from the moors. Brady and Hindley laughed when they read about the massive police operation to find the missing boy.
In May 1964, Hindley bought a car of her own, a white Mini van. The following month, 12-year-old Keith Bennett went missing. He too was buried on Saddleworth Moor. At Brady’s behest, Hindley joined a local gun club and bought pistols for them both. They would go up to the moors for practice. While they were there they would visit the graves of their victims. They would photograph each other kneeling on them.
On 26 December 1964, they abducted 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. This time they were determined to hurt their defenceless victim as much as possible. They forced her to pose nude for pornographic photographs. Then they tortured her, recording her screams, before strangling her and burying her with the others on Saddleworth Moor.
Even this did not satisfy the depraved Brady. He wanted to extend his evil empire. He aimed to recruit Myra’s teenage brother-in-law, David Smith. Brady began to systematically corrupt Smith. He showed the youth his guns and talked to him about robbing a bank. He lent him books about the Marquis de Sade and got him to copy out quotations. ‘Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure’ and ‘People are like maggots, small, blind, worthless fish-bait’ Smith wrote in an exercise book under Brady’s guidance.
Brady believed he could lure anyone into his world of brutality and murder. He bragged to Smith about the murders he had already committed, saying he had photographs to prove it. They were drinking at the time and Smith thought Brady was joking.
Brady decided to prove what he was saying – and ensnare Smith into his vicious schemes by making him a party to murder. On 6 October 1965 Brady and Hindley picked up 17-year-old homosexual Edward Evans in a pub in Manchester and took him home. Smith had been invited to visit around midnight.
He was in the kitchen, he heard a cry from the next room. Then Hindley called to him: ‘Help him, Dave.’
Smith rushed through into the living-room to find Evans in a chair with Brady astride him. Brady had an axe in his hands and was smashing it down on the boy’s head. He hit him again and again – at least 14 times.
‘That’s it, it’s the messiest,’ Brady said with some satisfaction. ‘Usually it takes only one blow.’
He handed the axe to the dumbstruck Smith. This was a simple attempt to incriminate Smith by making him put his fingerprints on the murder weapon. Although Smith was terrified by what he had seen, he helped clean up the blood, while Brady and Hindley wrapped the body in a plastic sheet. The couple made jokes about the murder as they carried the corpse upstairs to a bedroom.
Hindley made a pot of tea and they all sat down.
‘You should have seen the look on his face,’ said Hindley, flushed with excitement, and she started reminiscing about the previous murders.
Smith could not believe all this was happening, but he realised that if he showed any sign of disgust or outrage he would be their next victim. After a decent interval, he made his excuses and left. When he got back to his flat, he was violently ill.
He told his wife and she urged him to go to the police. Armed with a knife and a screwdriver, they went out to a phonebox at dawn and reported the murder. A police car picked up Smith and his wife and, at the station, the terrified 17-year-old told his lurid story to unbelieving policemen. At 8.40 a.m., the police dropped round to Hindley’s house to check Smith’s story out. To their horror, they found Edward Evans’s battered body in the back bedroom.
Brady admitted killing Evans, but said it had happened during an argument and tried to implicate Smith. Hindley only said: ‘My story is the same at Ian’s… Whatever he did, I did.’
The only time she showed any emotion was when she was told that her dog had died.
‘You fucking murderers,’ she screamed at the police.
The police found a detailed plan that Brady had drawn up for the removal from the house of all clues to Evans’s murder. One of the items mentioned was, curiously, Hindley’s prayer book. When the police examined the prayer book, they found a left luggage ticket from Manchester station stuck down the spine. At the left luggage office, they found two suitcases which contained books on sexual perversion, coshes and pictures of Lesley Ann Downey naked and gagged. There was also the tape of her screams, which was later played to the stunned court-room at Chester Assizes. Other photographs showed Hindley posing beside graves on Saddleworth Moor. These helped the police locate the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride.
At the trial the true, horrific, sexual nature of the crimes was revealed. The pathologist disclosed that Edward Evans’s fly had been undone and he had found dog hairs around Evans’s anus. John Kilbride’s body was found with his trousers and underpants around his knees. Hindley, it seemed, got turned on by watching Brady perform homosexual acts on his victims. Later Brady let it slip that both he and Hindley had been naked during the nude photographic sessions with Lesley Ann Downey. But otherwise they refused to talk.
They were sentenced to life. Brady did not bother to appeal. Hindley did, but her appeal was rejected. They were also refused permission to see each other, though they were allowed to write.
Brady has shown no contrition in prison and has refused to be broken. He saw himself as a martyr in his own perverted cause. Gradually, he went insane. Hindley eventually broke down and petitioned to be released. When that was refused, a warder, who was Hindley’s lesbian lover, organised an escape attempt. It failed and Hindley was sentenced to an additional year in jail.
She took an open university degree and gave additional information on the whereabouts of the victims’ graves in a bid for mercy. But Brady countered her every move by revealing more of her involvement in the crimes. He saw any attempt on her part to go free as disloyalty.
‘The weight of our crimes justifies permanent imprisonment,’ Brady told the Parole Board in 1982. ‘I will not wish to be free in 1985 or even 2005.’
He got his wish. Though he made several attempts to starve himself Brady was still incarcerated in 2005. Hindley died in jail in 2002.

Chapter 8

Ted Bundy

Name: Ted Bundy

Nationality: American

Born: 1946

Number of victims: 20 killed

Favoured method of killing: rape, strangulation

Reign of terror: 1970s

Final note: conducted his own defence and tried to charm the jury

Executed: 1989

Ted Bundy had the power to charm women. Many of them paid with their lives. He claimed his sexual impulses were so strong that there was no way that he could control them. He later maintained that during his first attacks he had to wrestle with his conscience. But soon he began to desensitise himself. He claimed not to have tortured his victims unnecessarily, but said that he had to kill them after he had raped them to prevent them identifying him.

Bundy had been a compulsive masturbator from an early age and later became obsessed by sadistic pornography. After glimpsing a girl undressing through a window, he also became a compulsive Peeping Tom. His long-time girlfriend Meg Anders described how he would tie her up with stockings before anal sex. This sex game stopped when he almost strangled her. For years they maintained a more or less normal sexual relationship, while Bundy exercised his craving for total control with anonymous victims, whom he often strangled during the sexual act.

His attitude to sex was often ambivalent. Although he desired the bodies of attractive young women, he would leave their vaginas stuffed with twigs and dirt and sometimes sodomise them with objects such as aerosol cans.

Some of the bodies, though partly decomposed, had freshly-washed hair and newly-applied make-up, indicating that he had kept them for necrophilia. In only one case did he admit to deliberately terrorising his victims. He kidnapped two girls at the same time so that he could rape each of them in front of the other, before killing them.

Bundy’s first victim was Sharon Clarke of Seattle. He had broken into her apartment while she was asleep and smashed her around the head with a metal rod. She suffered a shattered skull, but survived. She could not identify her attacker and no motivation for the attack has been given.

Then young women began to disappear from the University of Washington campus nearby. Six disappeared within seven months. At the Lake Sammanish resort in Washington State, a number of young women reported being approached by a young man calling himself Ted. He had his arm in a sling and asked them to help get his sailing boat off his car. But in the car park they found that there was no boat on the car. Ted then said that they would have to go to his house to get it. Sensibly, most declined. Janice Ott seems to have agreed to go with him. She disappeared. A few hours later, Denise Naslund also disappeared from the same area. She had been seen in the company of a good-looking, dark-haired young man who fitted Ted Bundy’s description. The remains of Janice Ott, Denise Naslund and another unidentified young woman were later found on wasteland, where their bodies had been eaten and scattered by animals.

Other witnesses came forward from the University of Washington, saying that they had seen a man wearing a sling and some other bodies were found, again disposed of on waste ground.

The police had two suspects. Ex-convict Gary Taylor had been picked up by the Seattle police for abducting women under false pretences. And park attendant Warren Forrest picked up a young woman who consented to pose for him. He took her to a secluded part of the park, tied her up and stripped her naked. He taped her mouth and fired darts at her breasts. Then he raped her, strangled her and left her for dead. But she survived and identified her attacker. Both were in custody though, and the attacks continued. Bundy’s girlfriend, who was beginning to suspect something was up, called anonymously, giving his name, but it disappeared among the thousands of other leads the police had to follow up.

Bundy began to travel further afield. On 2 October 1974 he abducted Nancy Wilcox after she left an all-night party in Salt Lake City. In Midvale on 18 October, he raped and strangled Melissa Smith, the daughter of the local police chief. Her body was found in the Wasatch Mountains. He took Laura Aimee from a Hallowe’en party in Orem, Utah. Her naked body was found at the bottom of a canyon.

In Salt Lake City a week later, he approached a girl named Carol DaRonch. Bundy pretended to be a detective and asked her the licence number of her car. Someone had tried to break into it, he said. He asked her to accompany him to the precinct to see the suspect. She got into his car, but once they were in a quiet street he handcuffed her.

She began to scream. He put a gun to her head. She managed to get out of the door and Bundy chased after her with a crowbar. He took a swing at her skull, but she managed to grab the bar. A car was coming down the street. Carol jumped in front of it, forcing it to stop. She jumped in and the car drove away.

Carol gave a good description to the police, but Bundy continued undeterred. He tried to pick up a pretty young French teacher outside her high school. She declined to go with him. But Debbie Kent did. She disappeared from a school playground where a key to a pair of handcuffs was later found.

The following January in Snowmass Village, a Colorado ski resort, Dr Raymond Gadowsky found that his fiancée, Caryn Campbell, was missing from her room. A month later, her naked body was found out in the snow. She had been raped and her skull had been smashed in. Julie Cunningham vanished from nearby Vail and the remains of Susan Rancourt and Brenda Bell were also found on Taylor Mountain.

The body of Melanie Cooley was found only ten miles from her home. Unlike the other victims, she was still clothed, though her jeans had been undone, convincing the police that the motive was sexual.

The Colorado attacks continued with Nancy Baird who disappeared from a petrol station and Shelley Robertson whose naked body was found down a mine shaft.

A Salt Lake City patrol man was cruising an area of the city that had recently suffered a spate of burglaries. He noticed Bundy’s car driving slowly and indicated that he should pull over. Instead, Bundy sped off. The patrolman gave chase and caught up with him. In his car, they found maps and brochures of Colorado. Some coincided with the places girls had disappeared.

Forensic experts found a hair in Bundy’s car that matched that of Melissa Smith. A witness also recognised Bundy from Snowmass Village. He was charged and extradited to Colorado to stand trial. However, few people could believe that such an intelligent and personable young man could be responsible for these terrible sex attacks, even though Carol DaRonch picked him out of a line-up.

Bundy was given permission to conduct his own defence. He was even allowed to use the law library to research. There he managed to give his guard the slip, jumped from a window and escaped. He was recaptured a week later.

Bundy still protested his innocence and managed to prolong the pre-trial hearings with a number of skilful legal stalling manoeuvres. In the time he gained, he lost weight and cut a small hole under the light fitting in the ceiling of his cell. He squeezed through the one-foot-square hole he had made and got clean away.

He travelled around America before settling in Tallahassee, Florida, a few blocks from the sorority houses of Florida State University. One evening, Nita Neary saw a man lurking in front of her sorority house. She was about to phone the police when a fellow student, Karen Chandler, staggered from her room with blood streaming from her head. She was screaming that she and her roommate, Kathy Kleiner, had just been attacked by a madman. Both Margaret Bown and Lisa Levy had been attacked sexually – Margaret had been strangled with her own pantyhose and Bundy had bitten one of Lisa’s nipples off and left teeth marks in her buttocks before beating her around the head. She died on the way to hospital. In another building, Cheryl Thomas had also been viciously attacked, but she survived.

The police had only a sketchy description of the attacker. But Bundy had plainly got a taste for killing again. While making his getaway, he abducted 12-year-old Kimberley Leach, sexually assaulted her, strangled her, mutilated her sexual organs and dumped her body in the Suwannee River Park.

Bundy was now short of money. He stole some credit cards and a car, and sneaked out of his apartment where he owed back rent. But the stolen car was a give-away. He was stopped by a motorcycle cop and arrested. At the police station, he admitted that he was Ted Bundy and that he was wanted by the Colorado police.

The Florida police began to tie him in with the Tallahassee attack. When they tried to take an impression of his teeth, he went berserk. It took six men to hold his jaw open. The impression matched the teeth marks on Lisa Levy’s buttocks.

Again Bundy conducted his own defence, skilfully using the law to prolong the court case and his personality to charm the jury. But the evidence of the teeth marks was too strong. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. On death row, Bundy made a detailed confession. He also received sacks full of post from young women whose letters dwelt on cruel and painful ways to make love. Even on death row he had not lost his charm. At 7 a.m. on 24 January 1989, Bundy went to the electric chair. He is said to have died with a smile on his face.