Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (34 page)

Premeditated murder

He decided to kill the couple and phoned them, saying that he’d like to meet up again. In turn, they invited him to their home on Thursday 14 December 2000.

Cédric now got in touch with Mickaël Catherine, a youth who worked as a drug pusher. Several of Mickaël’s sisters had been sexually abused in care and he too was full of hate. The young men made their way to the Narres’ house, Cédric taking along his torture kit.

They immediately tied the couple to separate chairs, stole their cash cards and went out to use them. On their return, Cédric began to beat the couple again and again. He became very excited during the torture and fetched a knife, which he inserted into one of the wounds on Philippe Narre’s head. He told Mickaël Catherine (who apparently covered his ears with his hands to block out the sounds of the couple screaming) that he was enjoying hearing the bones break. He even fractured their facial bones in a very personal assault.

Later, both youths constricted the Narres’ nostrils, giving them access to less and less air so that they suffocated slowly.

After three hours of torture they died and the men (now joined by Cédric’s flatmate) dumped their corpses in the garden shed.

They left the house but decided to return and pour acid on the victims, the latter suggestion being made by one of Mickaël’s sisters, Laetitia. However, the police had got there before them so they turned the car around and fled. Two days later Cédric 284

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Bellec was arrested and swiftly confessed to the cruel double homicide.

Standing trial at Herault Assizes in October 2003, 22-year-old Bellec admitted that he’d fantasised about torture-killing since he was a child and that he’d got a huge adrenalin rush out of beating the couple. A psychiatrist noted that the youth was unable to receive love.

An indifferent Bellec was sentenced to life imprisonment with the proviso that he serve at least 22 years. His accomplice, 25-year-old Mickaël Catherine, was also jailed for life.

Meanwhile, Mickaël’s 23-year-old sister Laetitia, who had suggested pouring acid on the bodies, was given eight years and Cédric’s flatmate, 24-year-old Eric Tirard, who’d robbed the victims post-mortem and helped carry them to the garden shed, was given 12 years, their sentences doubtless reflecting the fact that they’d tried to cover up the crime.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

FEMALE SADISTS

Statistically there are far more male sadists than
female, as abused girls tend to turn their anger
inwards so that it becomes depression or self-harm
(everything from under- and overeating to arm-slashing), whereas boys turn it outwards onto weaker
prey. But those women who
do
become criminally
sadistic – often those who have suffered the most
in childhood and who are highly dominant – are
capable of unrelenting atrocities, as the following
cases show.

AWILDA LOPEZ

Although little is known about her formative years, Awilda Lopez became a heavy cocaine user living in New York. She frequently left her two children alone for days at a time without food or warmth so when they were one and a half and two and a half years old, they were taken away from her and placed in foster care. By then she was eight months pregnant with Elisa, the child she would torture and eventually kill.

Elisa was born on 11 February 1989 with crack cocaine in her system and was immediately sent to a foster home. She thrived there for five months whilst her biological father – who 286

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worked in the homeless shelter where Awilda Lopez resided

– attended parenting classes. He proved to be a caring man and soon won custody.

For the next few years she remained happily with him and also enjoyed her time at nursery school, proving to be an especially intelligent pupil who loved to dance and was adored by the other children and her teachers. Prince Michael of Greece met her when he visited the nursery and was so taken with the lively doe-eyed child that he arranged to pay for her tuition fees.

But when Elisa was almost five her mother won visitation rights. Almost immediately staff noticed that the little girl was bruised and increasingly withdrawn. In the same time frame, Elisa’s father realised that he had terminal cancer and began to make arrangements to send her to relatives in Cuba upon his death. He told everyone that he was determined to keep her from her mother who he was convinced was abusing her.

Unfortunately, upon his death, a judge gave Awilda Lopez custody – this in spite of the fact that Elisa’s paternal relatives begged him not to and nursery staff told of the child’s changed demeanour and many injuries. But the court was swayed by social workers who spoke up for Awilda, saying that she was no longer a neglectful mother and had won her first two children back from foster care.

The reality was very different. Awilda had made a bad second marriage to a violent man who would go on to stab her 17 times during an argument. In turn, she was cruel to all three offspring but she was particularly sadistic towards Elisa, resenting her intellect.

For the next year and a half until her death, the little girl suffered an increasing hell. She’d been offered a scholarship to a private school but her mother turned this down and enrolled her in a public school. She began to torture Elisa by inserting a hairbrush into her rectum: her teachers noticed that the five-287

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year-old had difficulty walking and voiced their concerns but nothing was done.

Repeated whippings

Awilda also enjoyed whipping her little daughter. Neighbours frequently heard the child’s screams but as corporal punishment of children was legal they said that they felt powerless to act.

Traumatised beyond measure, Elisa began to lose control of her bowels and Awilda made her eat her own excrement. She frequently wet herself and Awilda would mop up the urine with the child’s hair.

The sadist also liked to stub out cigarettes over the little girl’s face and body. This and similar tortures were repeated for the next year and a half, some of the beatings resulting in broken bones which didn’t receive hospital care and partially healed on their own.

But in November 1995, the cruel mother went too far, slamming the six-year-old’s head into a concrete wall. She lost consciousness and remained in a fugue state for up to two days, with cranial fluid leaking from her nose, mouth and ears.

Finally her torment ended in death and her mother was charged with her murder. She denied everything until she heard that her two older children wanted to testify against her: they’d seen and sometimes experienced her incredible sadism.

She then admitted the sustained abuse and homicide and was given the minimum sentence of 15 years to life.

OMAIMA AREF

Born in the squatter’s district in Cairo in 1968, Omaima and her seven brothers and sisters endured a desperately impoverished childhood. At six her clitoris was removed without the use of anaesthetic by her Muslim relatives. The pain was so intense 288

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that she doubtless longed for death – indeed, after this barbaric circumcision, many girls die from blood loss, infection or shock.

At ten years old Omaima was raped. This put her at risk from any future husband in her own culture who would see her lack of virginity as dishonourable and could have her stoned to death. Unsurprisingly, she grew up filled with fear and hate.

But at 19 her life improved when an American soldier married her and took her to the United States. Unfortunately the 1986 marriage was over by the end of the decade and she lurched from one unhappy love affair to the next. Her large dark eyes and dark hair made her attractive to men but her experiences ensured that she couldn’t love them. And the fact that she’d been circumcised meant that she got nothing out of sex. However, like many damaged women, she used her sexuality for both sadistic and material ends – it was literally all she had.

In November 1990, she told one of her boyfriends, whom she’d been living with for three months, that she wanted to tie him up. He agreed and she bound both of his wrists to the bedposts. She then aimed a gun at him and demanded he tell her where he kept his cash. Thankfully he managed to tear himself free of his bonds, though he later found that she’d stolen one of his credit cards and run up a $1,600 bill.

Omaima fled from his apartment. Rootless yet again, she flitted from job to job, modelling clothes in a fashion store and looking after other people’s children. In her spare time she went dancing and it was during one of those dance nights that she met former military pilot William Nelson, the man she would torture and kill.

Married in haste

Nelson was 33 years older than the 23-year-old Egyptian beauty and was immediately smitten with her, especially 289

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when she described herself as coming from a good family and speaking six languages. They married on 1 November 1991, though William hadn’t finalised his divorce to his ex-wife so the marriage was actually bigamous.

For the first month, the newlyweds seemed happy enough, honeymooning in Texas in their new Corvette. But Omaima was already tired of sex with her new beau and had decided to avenge herself on the male species and take his cash. She also had plans to leave the town that they’d settled in, Costa Mesa, and return to Egypt to set up a business of her own.

She suggested to her husband that she handcuff him to the bed for a sex session. William Nelson apparently agreed to this and she bound his wrists and ankles to the bed. Once he was secured, she began to torture him with scissors or a knife.

But the victim struggled so violently that the cuffs left deep bruises in his ankles and he tugged so desperately at his bondaged arms that he eventually managed to break the headboard.

Omaima immediately began to club him about the head with a steam iron, doing so until he lost consciousness. She battered him so often and so viciously that she bent the iron and caved his skull in. At one stage, hopefully post-mortem, she cut off his genitals and stuffed them into his mouth. (Some of the male sadists previously profiled also indulged in similar behaviour, stuffing everything from a cat’s tail to excrement into the dead victims’ mouths in an attempt to show their distaste for their prey and perhaps figuratively silence them.)

The new bride then spent the rest of the night dismembering the body and flushing parts of it down the waste disposal unit in the kitchen. She also cooked his hands in oil to destroy the fingerprints. The cooking may have made her hungry as she went on to barbecue her husband’s ribs and ate them with a tangy sauce.

The following day she went to a male friend’s house and offered him $75,000 to dispose of her husband’s body parts 290

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which she’d drained of blood and put into various carrier bags.

He pretended to agree in order to get rid of her then phoned the police.

At the police station, the femme fatale said that she hadn’t seen her husband for days and that she missed him. Later in the same interview she said that he had raped her and two other girls. Still later she alleged that he’d tied her to the bed and hurt her and that she’d got free and killed him in self-defence.

Detectives went to her apartment and found packages of blood-drained flesh in various cupboards. There was more of William Nelson in the freezer, including his cooked and scalped head.

Court

At her trial, she admitted killing her husband but said that she had done so because he kept beating her. However, the prosecution found photos taken the day after she was allegedly badly beaten and her body showed no traces of abuse. And other scars which she showed to the courts were too old to have been inflicted by her spouse of one month. Found guilty on 12 March 1992 of second degree murder, she was sentenced to 27 years to life.

WOMEN WHO TORTURE

STRANGERS

Lone female sadists, we have seen, tend to confine their cruelty to their children and adult relatives, though female sadists who work as nurses behave sadistically towards their helpless patients, female serial killers Genene Jones and Cathy Wood 291

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being prime examples. The sadistic female probably chooses victims in her domestic and work arena because she doesn’t have the physical strength to abduct strangers – and taking a stranger to a forest or an outbuilding to torture them would take the female outside her home- and work-based comfort zone.

Sadly, the following case shows that when a female sadist
is
empowered to terrorise strangers within that comfort zone, she can rise to the challenge again and again…

IRMA ILSE IDA GRESE

Irma was born on 7 October 1923 to Bertha and Alfred Grese.

The couple later had a second daughter, Helene, and the entire family worked on an agricultural farm in Germany. When Irma was 12 her mother died and she was left at the mercy of her father, a strict disciplinarian. The girls’ lives now revolved around school and church. Irma and Helene longed to join the Nazi youth group which most of their schoolfriends belonged to, as this would allow them to enjoy a world of picnics and trips.

Alfred Grese refused to let his daughters join. In retrospect it was a sensible decision, but at the time it just seemed to emphasise his old-fashioned approach to life and the teenage Irma felt thwarted. Alfred was becoming increasingly reclusive so Irma rarely got to go anywhere.