Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (12 page)

Sutcliffe dragged Helen’s body into a woodpile and hid it there. Her bra and black polo-neck sweater were pushed up above her breasts. Her socks were left on, but the rest of her clothes were scattered over a wide area. Her black lace panties were found the next day by a lorry driver, pinned to the shed door.

Back at the lavatory, Rita was desperately worried, but fear of the police prevented her from reporting her sister’s disappearance for three days. A police Alsatian found the hidden body. It had been horribly mutilated. There were three gaping wounds in the chest where she had been stabbed repeatedly.

The Ripper’s latest victim had disappeared from a busy street. Over a hundred passers-by were traced, and all but three cars and one stocky, fair-haired man were eliminated. The police appealed on the radio to any wife, mother or girlfriend who suspected that they were living with the Ripper. No one came forward.

A few weeks later, a passer-by spotted an arm sticking out from under an overturned sofa on wasteland in Bradford’s red-light district. At first he thought it was a tailor’s dummy but the putrid aroma soon sent him rushing to a telephone.

The body was that of 22-year-old Yvonne Pearson. She was a high-class prostitute, who serviced a rich businessman trade in most of Britain’s cities. She had been killed two months earlier, ten days before Helen Rytka. The killing bore all the hallmarks of the Ripper. A hammer blow to the head had smashed her skull. Her bra and jumper were pulled up exposing her breasts, and her chest had been jumped on repeatedly. Her black flared slacks had been pulled down. Horsehair from the sofa was stuffed in her mouth.

Yvonne Pearson had spoken of her fear of the Ripper only days before she disappeared. On the night of her death, she had left her two daughters with a neighbour. Soon after 9.30 p.m., she was seen climbing into a car driven by a bearded man with black, piercing eyes. On the wasteland in nearby Arthington Street, he killed her with a club hammer. Then he dragged her body to the abandoned sofa and jumped on her until her ribs cracked.

Although he had hidden her body, the killer seemed concerned that it had not been found and returned to make it more visible. He tucked a copy of the
Daily Mirror
, from four weeks after her death, under her arm.

Two months after Yvonne Pearson’s body was found, the Yorkshire Ripper attacked 41-year-old Vera Millward. The Spanish-born mother of seven children, Vera had come to England after the war as a domestic help. She lived with a Jamaican and had resorted to prostitution in Manchester’s Moss Side to help support her family. On the night of Tuesday, 16 May, she went out to get painkillers from the hospital for her chronic stomach pains. She died in a well-lit part of the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary. Sutcliffe hit her three times on the head with a hammer and then slashed her across the stomach. Her body was discovered by a gardener the next morning on a rubbish pile in the corner of the car park.

Three months after Vera Millward’s death, the police visited Sutcliffe again because his car registration number had cropped up during special checks in Leeds and Bradford. They returned to question him about the tyres on his car. They were looking for treads that matched tracks at the scene of Irene Richardson’s murder, 21 months earlier.

As always, Sutcliffe’s was helpful and unruffled, giving them absolutely no reason to suspect him. They never even asked Sutcliffe for his blood group – the Ripper’s was rare – or his shoe size which was unusually small for a man.

Suddenly the Ripper’s killing spree stopped. For 11 months he dropped out of sight. The police believed that he had committed suicide, taking his identity with him to the grave. This man was eerily similar to the disappearance of Jack the Ripper 90 years before.

But Sutcliffe was not dead. Nor could he contain his desire to murder. On the night of Wednesday, 4 April 1979, he drove to Halifax. Around midnight, he got out of his car and accosted 19-year-old Josephine Whitaker as she walked across Savile Park playing fields. They spoke briefly. As they moved away from the street lamps, he smashed the back of her head with a hammer and dragged her body into the shadows. Her body was found the next morning.

Like Jayne MacDonald, Josephine Whitaker was not a prostitute. She lived at home with her family and worked as a clerk in the headquarters of the Halifax Building Society. Now no woman felt safe on the streets after dark.

Two weeks before Josephine Whitaker died, a letter arrived at the police station. It was postmarked Sunderland, 23 March 1979. Handwriting experts confirmed that it came from the same person that had sent two previous letters purporting to come from the Yorkshire Ripper. This one mentioned that Vera Millward had stayed in hospital. The police believed, wrongly, that this information could only have come from Vera herself. On this basis they leapt to the conclusion that the writer of the three letters was indeed the Ripper.

The letter said that the next victim would not be in Bradford’s Chapeltown district as it was ‘too bloody hot there’ because of the efforts of ‘curserred coppers’. This odd misspelling so closely aped the original Ripper’s notes that it should have rang warning bells.

Traces of engineering oil had been found on one of the letters. Similar traces were found on Josephine Whitaker’s body. The police called a press conference. The public was asked to come forward with any information they had about anybody who might have been in Sunderland on the days the letters were posted. The response was overwhelming, but all it added up to was more useless information to be checked, analysed and filed.

Then, on the morning of 18 June 1979, two months after Josephine Whitaker’s death, a buff-coloured envelope arrived. It was addressed in the same handwriting and contained a cassette tape. On it, there was a 257-word message in a broad Geordie accent.

A huge publicity campaign was mounted. The public could phone in and listen to the ‘Geordie Ripper Tape’, in the hope that someone might recognise the voice. Within a few days, more than 50,000 people had called.

Language experts confirmed the accent as genuine Wearside, and pinned it down to Castletown, a small, tightly-knit suburb of Sunderland. Eleven detectives were installed in a Sunderland hotel and 100 officers combed the town. Only 4,000 people lived in Castletown, but the police could not find their man. The letters and tape turned out to be a hoax and in October 2005 a Sunderland man was charged with perverting the course of justice.

In July 1979, Detective-Constable Laptew visited Sutcliffe. His car had been spotted in the red-light district of Bradford on 36 separate occasions. This time Laptew felt suspicious of Sutcliffe but, because all eyes were focused on the Geordie tape, his report was not followed up and Sutcliffe went back to Bradford for his eleventh victim.

On Saturday, 1 September 1979, Sutcliffe cruised the streets around Little Horton, a residential area. At about 1 a.m., he saw Barbara Leach, a student, moving away from a group of friends outside the Mannville Arms. Just 200 yards from the pub, he attacked Barbara Leach and dragged her body into a backyard. He stabbed her eight times, stuffed her body into a dustbin and slung an old carpet over it. It was found the following afternoon.

Two high-ranking officers from Scotland Yard were sent to Yorkshire but got nowhere. A taskforce from Manchester reviewed the £5-note inquiry. They narrowed the field down to 270 suspects, but could get no further.

Like everyone else in Yorkshire, Sutcliffe spoke to family and friends about the Ripper. He would make a point of picking up Sonia from work to protect her and told a workmate: ‘Whoever is doing all these murders has a lot to answer for.’ Once his colleagues at the depot made a bet that he was the Ripper – but Sutcliffe just laughed and said nothing.

The Ripper took another break of nearly a year. Then on Thursday, 18 August 1980, he struck for the twelfth time. The victim was Marguerite Walls, a 47-year-old civil servant. She was working late at the Department of Education and Science in Leeds, tidying up loose ends before going on a ten-day holiday. She left at 10 p.m. to walk home. Her body was found two days later, under a mound of grass clippings in the garden of a magistrate’s house. She had been bludgeoned and strangled, but her body had not been mutilated so the police did not realise that she was one of the Ripper’s victims.

Three months later, Sutcliffe had just finished eating a chicken dinner when he saw Jacqueline Hill, a language student at the University of Leeds, get off the bus outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. His fingers were still greasy from his supper when he viciously struck her down. He dragged her body to the waste ground behind the shops and attacked it savagely. Death had struck Jacqueline so suddenly that one of her eyes had remained open. Sutcliffe stabbed it repeatedly with a rusty Phillips screwdriver specially sharpened into a fine point.

The Home Office appointed a special squad to solve the case. But six weeks after Jacqueline Hill’s murder, it reached the same conclusion as the West Yorkshire force – it had no idea how to crack the case. What was needed was a little bit of luck.

On 2 January 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring and Police Constable Robert Hydes started their evening shift by cruising along Melbourne Avenue in Sheffield’s red-light district. They saw Olivia Reivers climbing into a Rover V8 3500 and decided to investigate. The driver – a bearded man – identified himself as Peter Williams. He said he wanted no trouble. Then he scrambled out of the car and asked if he could relieve himself. He went over to the bushes lining the street and, while pretending to take a pee, dropped his ball-peen hammer and sharp knife which he kept in a special pocket of his car coat. The police did not notice this as Olivia Reivers was remonstrating loudly with the men who had just saved her life, complaining that they were ruining her livelihood.

But by the time the man had strolled back to his car, the police had discovered that the number plates were false. He was taken to the police station where he admitted his name was Peter William Sutcliffe.

During his interview, Sutcliffe said his main worry was that the police would tell his wife that he had been picked up a prostitute. Otherwise, he was calm and forthcoming. He readily admitted that he had stolen the number plates from a scrapyard in Dewsbury. The police even let him go to the lavatory alone, where he hid a second knife in the cistern.

There was no real reason to suspect Sutcliffe, but the police had so little to go on that, when any man was caught with a prostitute, his details had to be forwarded to the West Yorkshire Police before he could be released. Sutcliffe was locked up for the night. The next morning he was taken, unprotesting, to Dewsbury Police Station.

There, Sutcliffe was a chatty, eager interviewee. In passing, he mentioned that he had been interviewed by the Ripper Squad about the £5 note and that he had also visited Bradford’s red-light district.

Dewsbury police called the Ripper Squad in Leeds. Detective Sergeant Des O’Boyle discovered that Sutcliffe’s name had come up several times in the course of the investigation. He drove to Dewsbury. When he called his boss, Detective Inspector John Boyle, in Leeds that evening, he told Boyle that Sutcliffe was blood group B – the rare blood group the police knew the Ripper had. Sutcliffe was locked in his cell for a second night.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Ring heard one of his colleagues casually mention that the man he had arrested was being interviewed by detectives from the Ripper Squad. Ring rushed back to Melbourne Avenue. Hidden in the bushes there, he found a ball-peen hammer and a knife.

Sonia Sutcliffe was questioned and the house was searched. Then, early on Sunday afternoon, Boyle told Sutcliffe that they had found a hammer and knife in Sheffield. Sutcliffe, who had been talkative up to this point, fell silent.

‘I think you’re in trouble, serious trouble,’ said Boyle.

Sutcliffe finally spoke. ‘I think you are leading up to the Yorkshire Ripper,’ he said.

Boyle nodded.

‘Well,’ Sutcliffe said, ‘that’s me.’

Sutcliffe’s confession took almost 17 hours to complete. He told them of his first killing in 1969 but at that time, he mentioned nothing about hearing a voice from God.

Sixteen weeks later, Sutcliffe stood trial at the Old Bailey. The Crown Prosecution, defence counsel and Attorney General Sir Michael Havers agreed that Sutcliffe was mentally ill, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. But the judge would have none of this. He told both counsels that the jury would listen to the evidence and decide whether Sutcliffe was a murderer or a mad man.

Sutcliffe pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was calm and self-assured, even managing a laugh when he recalled that during his questioning about the size-seven Wellington boot imprinted on Emily Jackson’s thigh and Tina Atkinson’s bed sheet. The policeman interviewing him had not noticed he was wearing the boots. He also claimed that he had been acting on instructions from God to ‘clean the streets’ of prostitutes.

The jury would have none of it. They found him guilty of 13 murders and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 30 years.

Chapter 10

Son of Sam

Name: David Berkowitz

Nationality: American

Born: 1953

Number of victims: 6 killed

Favoured method of killing: shooting

Reign of terror: 1976–1977

Motive: claimed the demons and the dogs made him do it

Final note: not all the Son of Sam slayings can be attributed to David Berkowitz

At 1 a.m. on 29 July 1976, 19-year-old Jody Valente and 18-year-old Donna Lauria were sitting in Jody’s car outside Donna’s home in the Bronx, New York. It was a hot summer night and they were discussing their boyfriends. Then Donna said goodnight and opened the door to get out.

A young man was standing a few feet away. He was holding a brown paper sack. As the car door opened, he reached into the sack, pulled out a gun and dropped to a crouching position.

‘What does this guy want?’ said Donna, rather alarmed.

Before the words were out of her mouth a bullet struck her in the side of the neck. A second bullet smashed the window in the door. A third smashed her elbow as she raised her hands to protect her face. Fatally wounded, she tumbled out of the car on to the sidewalk. The killer then shot Jody in the thigh. She fell forward on to the car’s horn which sounded and the killer ran away.

Donna’s father, Mike Lauria, was taking the family’s dog for a walk and was halfway down the stairs when he heard the shots. He ran the rest of the way. Jody was still conscious, though hysterical. In the ambulance, Mike Lauria begged his daughter not to die. It was too late. When Donna reached the hospital, she was pronounced DOA – dead on arrival. Jody was treated for hysteria, but nevertheless gave the police a good description of their assailant. He was a young white male, about 30 years old, clean shaven with dark curly hair. He was not a rejected boyfriend. In fact, Jody had never seen him before. The only other clue to his identity was a yellow car parked near Jody’s which was gone by the time the police arrived. But New York is full of yellow cars.

The car in question actually belonged to David Berkowitz. In the days leading up to the murder, he had been looking for a job. But he had spent the nights, he said, ‘Looking for a victim, waiting for a signal.’ Demon voices inside him told him to kill. Even though the Devil was on his side, he was not sure that he could be successful.

‘I never thought I could kill her,’ he said of Donna Lauria. ‘I just fired the gun, you know, at the car, at the windshield. I never knew she was shot.’

But the police were not looking for a madman driven by demons. They had another theory altogether. As the North Bronx, where the Laurias lived, was a predominantly Italian area, the police immediately suspected Mafia involvement. Perhaps a hit had gone wrong – a case of mistaken identity. However, the Mafia are usually scrupulous when it comes to contract killings. Women and children are out of bounds. Besides, ballistics tests showed that the murder weapon was a Charter Arms, five-round, .44 Bulldog revolver. It had a powerful recoil and was grossly inaccurate at distances of more than a few metres – hardly a hit-man’s weapon. But still, it was no Saturday-night special. It is the weapon for a man who seriously wants to kill. A .44 Bulldog can blow a large hole in a door at close range.

The other side of the East River from the Bronx lies the borough of Queens. It is a comfortable middle-class area. Eighteen-year-old student Rosemary Keenan attended Queens College there. Twelve weeks after the murder of Donna Lauria, she went to a bar in Flushing, the area of Queens which was considered a ‘posh’ part of New York. There she met 20-year-old record salesman Carl Denaro who was enjoying his last few days of freedom before joining the Air Force. Rosemary and Carl left together in Rosemary’s red Volkswagen. They were parked, talking, when a man crept up on them. He had a .44 Bulldog handgun tucked in his belt. He may have thought Carl, who was sitting in the passenger seat, was a woman because he had long brown hair. He pulled out his gun and fired five times through the passenger window. But his shooting was wildly inaccurate. Only one bullet found its mark. As Carl threw himself forward to protect himself from flying glass, the bullet clipped the back of his head, knocking away part of the skull. Carl Denaro was lucky – he didn’t suffer any brain damage and after two months in hospital, he recovered completely. However, the metal plate in his head ended his career in the Air Force before it had begun.

On the evening of 27 November 1976, two schoolgirls, 16-year-old Donna DeMasi and her 18-year-old friend Joanne Lomino were sitting on the front porch of Joanne’s home on 262nd Street in Queens. At the end of the conversation, they said good night and Joanne stood up and reached in her handbag for her front door keys. It was then that the two girls noticed a man walking down the other side of the road. He was acting rather suspiciously. When he saw them he suddenly changed direction. After crossing the street at the corner, he came over to them as if he was going to ask for directions.

‘Say, can you tell me how to get to…?’ he said, then he pulled a gun from his waistband and began firing.

The two girls fled toward the front door, Joanne frantically searching for her keys. The first bullet hit Joanne in the back. The second hit Donna in the neck. They stumbled into the bushes as the gunman loosed off the remaining three shots – all of which missed. He ran off down the street and was spotted by a neighbour, with the gun still in his hand.

The two wounded girls were rushed to Long Island Jewish Hospital, where Donna was found not to be badly injured. In three weeks, she made a full recovery. But Joanne was not so lucky. The bullet had smashed her spinal cord. She was paralysed from the waist down and would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. The neighbour who had spotted the gunman making his escape gave the police a description. One key feature he mentioned was the young man’s dark curly hair. Despite the girls’ claim that he had long fair hair, this tied the shooting of Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino to the man who had killed Donna Lauria and wounded Jody Valente.

On 29 January 1977, 30-year-old John Diel and his 26-year-old girlfriend, Christine Freund, went to see the film
Rocky
in Queens. Afterwards they went for dinner at the Wine Gallery in Austin Street, where they discussed their forthcoming engagement. Soon after midnight, the couple walked the several blocks to where their Pontiac Firebird was parked. It was cold outside and their breath fogged the windows. They were eager to get home but stopped for a moment and kissed. Then John turned the key in the ignition. But before he could pull away he heard the blast of gunfire. The passenger window shattered and Christine slumped forward, bleeding. She died a few hours later in St John’s Hospital of bullet wounds to the right temple and the neck. She had never even seen her killer. But he had seen her – and so had the demons within him. Berkowitz later claimed that he had heard voices commanding him to ‘get her, get her and kill her’. After firing three shots and realising that he had hit her, he felt calm again.

‘The voices stopped,’ he said. ‘I satisfied the demon’s lust.’

After the murder of Christine Freund, Berkowitz completely gave in to the impulse to kill. After all, he was getting his reward by all the publicity he was getting. ‘I had finally convinced myself that I was good to do it, and that the public wanted me to kill,’ Berkowitz said later.

Six weeks later, on 8 March 1977, Virginia Voskerichian, a 19-year-old Armenian student, left Columbia University in Manhattan after her day’s study and set off home to Forest Hills, Queens. Around 7.30 p.m., she was nearing her home on Exeter Street. A young man was approaching her on the sidewalk and she, politely, stepped out of his way. But he pulled a gun and shoved it in her face. As he fired she raised her books in a vain attempt to protect herself. The bullet tore through them and entered through her upper lip, smashing out several teeth and lodging in her brain. Virginia collapsed in the bushes at the side of the street and died instantly. A witness saw a young man running away. This description was of an 18-year-old man, five feet eight inches tall, and there was no dark curly hair to be seen. The killer was wearing a ski mask.

Berkowitz was almost caught that day. Minutes after the murder of Virginia Voskerichian, the police put out a ‘Code 44’. Two police officers were assigned to the south end of the Bronx with orders to stop all cars containing a single white man. Berkowitz drove up to the checkpoint with his .44 Bulldog loaded and lying in plain view on the passenger seat of his Ford Galaxie. He was third in line when the police called off the search and he could not believe his luck when he watched the officers walk away.

However, the New York Police Department was on his trail. Their ballistics lab ascertained that the bullet had come from a .44 Bulldog handgun. That, in turn, tied it to the murder of Donna Lauria and the shootings of Jody Valente, Carl Denaro, Donna DeMasi, Joanne Lomino and Christine Freund. However, apart from the mention of dark curly hair by Jody Valente and the neighbour in the DeMasi/ Lomino case, the descriptions of the gunman varied so widely that no one in the NYPD had yet concluded that the four shootings were the job of a single individual.

On the afternoon of 10 March 1977, a press conference was held at One Police Plaza, a 13-storey red stone building that is New York’s equivalent of London’s New Scotland Yard. Police Commissioner Mike Codd stood with some trepidation before New York’s hard-bitten crime reporters. As he read his carefully-prepared statement, he began to have an inkling that he was unleashing a wave of hysteria that would engulf the city. He started by saying that the murder of Donna Lauria, nine months before, was linked to the killing of Virginia Voskerichian, a mere two days ago. In both cases, the killer had used a .44 Bulldog revolver which had also been used in three other incidents. Worse, the killer chose his victims completely at random. Reporters pushed for other information. Commissioner Codd said that the police were looking for a Caucasian male, about six feet tall, medium build, 25 to 30 years old, with dark hair. Next day, the ‘.44 killer’ made the headlines.

The man in charge of the investigation was Deputy Inspector Timothy J. Dowd. He had been one of New York’s finest since 1940. By 1973, he had worked his way up to the rank of deputy inspector at a major metropolitan precinct, but the then commissioner, David Crawley, announced a get-tough programme. He said that Dowd and 14 other senior officers had been underperforming and demoted them. Dowd fought the case and a year later it was Crawley who found himself demoted. Michael Codd took over as police commissioner and Dowd was restored to his former rank. But even then it was not plain sailing. As a test, Dowd was put in charge of an investigation in Chinatown. He was to break a secret society called The Flying Dragon and it was generally thought that no westerner could penetrate the Chinese crime syndicates. However, in 1977, Dowd announced that the leader of The Flying Dragons had been arrested for the murder of the leader of the rival gang, The Ghost Shadows. Under Dowd was Chief of Detectives John Keenan who had a special reason for wanting to capture the .44 killer. His daughter was Rosemary Keenan, the girl in the car with Carl Denaro when he was shot in the head.

‘I know he was aiming for her,’ Keenan said. ‘So let’s just say I put a little more than I had to into this case.’

The police realised that their chances of catching a lone, seemingly motiveless killer on the streets of New York were remote. So they announced ‘Operation Omega’ and asked for the help of every New Yorker. Tip-offs jammed the police switchboards. Dowd and the Omega team followed up 250–300 leads a day. There was some speculation that the .44 killer could be the ‘Westchester Dartman’ who had wounded 23 women in Westchester County just north of the Bronx between February 1975 and May 1976. He prowled the area at night and fired inch-long darts at women through ground floor windows, wounding them in the head, neck or chest. He was never caught.

As the investigation got under way, Berkowitz took pity on the police. He decided he would give them a few clues to juggle with, so he wrote them a letter. It took him two days to complete. Then he had to deliver it. But dropping it in a mail box and letting the postal service handle it was too mundane.

Another young couple went to the cinema in New York on the night of 16 April 1977. They were 18-year-old Valentina Suriani and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Alexander Esau. After they had seen the film, they went on to a party. Around 3 a.m., they were parked in a borrowed Mercury Montego outside Valentina’s apartment building in the North Bronx, only three blocks from where Donna Lauria had been killed. Valentina was sitting on Alexander’s lap with her legs stretched out across the passenger seat and they were enjoying a prolonged series of goodnight kisses when bullets shattered the passenger window. Two hit Valentina’s head, killing her instantly. Another two hit Alexander Esau in the top of the head as he dived across the seat towards the passenger door. He died two hours later.

When the police arrived, they found a white envelope in the middle of the road by the car. It was addressed to Captain Joe Borelli, Timothy Dowd’s second-in-command. The letter was all in capitals and full of spelling mistakes. It appeared to be the work of a madman. The writer claimed that he had been ordered to kill by his father, who was a vampire. His father’s name, the writer said, was Sam – hence the killer’s macabre sobriquet ‘Son of Sam’. In the letter, he professed to love the people of Queens, but said he intended to kill more of them – particularly the women, which he spelt as if it rhymed with ‘demon’. The writer signed off with the words:

‘I SAY GOODBYE AND GOODNIGHT. POLICE:

LET ME HAUNT YOU WITH THESE WORDS; I’LL BE BACK! I’LL BE BACK! TO BE INTERPRETED AS – BANG BANG, BANG, BANG, BANK, BANG – UGH!! YOURS IN MURDER, MR. MONSTER.’

By the time the letter reached the police labs, eight policemen had handled it. Only tiny traces of the writer’s fingerprints remained. He appeared to have held the letter by the tips of his fingers and there was not enough of a print on the paper to identify the sender. Consequently, the police kept the existence of the letter secret. But they showed a copy to celebrated New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, who dropped hints about the letter in his column in the
New York Daily News
.