The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (16 page)

Bowlby (
The Making and Breaking of Affectional
CHRISTIE, John Reginald Halliday

Bonds
[1979]), “In psychopaths the incidence of illegit-Yorkshire-born in April 1898, John Christie endured a imacy and the shunting of the child from one ‘home’ to stern childhood, with little or no visible affection from another is high. It is no accident that [Ian] Brady of the his parents. Developing chronic hypochondria in a bid

‘Moors’ murders was such a one.”

for attention, he also ran afoul of police as a juvenile, That said, the children given up to foster care or the resulting in beatings at home. Christie left school at 15

adoption system may be luckier than some who stay at to become a police clerk but was fired for petty theft.

home. Dysfunctional families are potential crucibles of Next, he went to work in his father’s carpet factory but crime, as indicated by the FBI’s three-year study of 36

was caught stealing again and banished from home.

sexually motivated killers, including 29 with multiple Wounded and gassed in World War I, Christie was victims. When the Bureau’s sampling of killers were blind for five months and suffered hysterical loss of his quizzed on their family backgrounds, 69 percent voice spanning three and a half years. Marriage, in reported histories of alcohol abuse, 53 percent listed 1920, seemed to hold his bad luck at bay for a time, but relatives with psychiatric problems, 50 percent noted in 1934 Christie was struck by an automobile, suffering criminal histories, 46 percent admitted family sexual serious head injuries along with other, lesser wounds.

problems, and 33 percent detailed histories of familial Briefly employed at the post office, he spent seven drug abuse. The FBI study points out certain common months in jail for stealing money orders. In 1938,
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Christie and his wife moved into a flat at 10 Rillington corpse before concealing it in a cupboard. The method Place, in London. A year later, he joined the War worked so well that he repeated it with prostitute Kath-Reserve Police, earning a bully’s reputation for throw-leen Maloney on January 12 and with Hectorina

ing his weight around and punishing neighbors for McLennan on March 3.

minor blackout offenses.

Christie left Rillington Place on March 20, 1953, Christie’s several homicides were all committed in and the new tenants began renovations four days later.

the flat on Rillington Place, with the early crimes occur-They found his cupboard, hidden by a layer of wallpa-ring in the midst of wartime. His initial victim was Ruth per, with three female corpses inside. Police responding Fuerst, an Austrian immigrant who called on Christie to the call soon found his wife beneath the floor and while his wife was visiting relatives. He strangled her unearthed Christie’s first two victims in the garden.

while having sex and buried her that evening in his gar-Searchers found a human femur propping up the fence den. Number two was Muriel Eddy, one of Christie’s out back and in the flat a tin was found containing coworkers at a London radio factory. Stopping by the pubic hair removed from four different women. (Curi-flat with Christie’s wife away, Muriel complained of ously, the hair matched none of Christie’s known vic-feeling ill. Her host prescribed a “cure” which consisted tims.).

of inhaling lethal gas, and Eddy joined Ruth Fuerst in Arrested on March 31, Christie soon confessed to Christie’s busy garden.

the series of murders, contending that Beryl Evans In late November 1949, a neighbor, illiterate truck traded sex in return for his help in committing suicide.

driver Timothy Evans, approached police and said, “I At his trial, in June, the jury rejected Christie’s INSANITY

would like to give myself up. I have disposed of the DEFENSE, and he was sentenced to die. He mounted the body of my wife.” Following his directions, police gallows on July 15, 1953.

searched the drains below Rillington Place, but in vain. A second visit found the corpse of Beryl Evans in a shed behind the house, together with her strangled
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico:
“Serial killer playground”

infant daughter, Geraldine. (During the search, Ciudad Juárez lies just across the border from El Paso, Christie stood talking with two detectives in his gar-Texas, in northern Chihuahua. Long recognized as a den, while a dog rooted around their feet and turned center of violent crime and a major source of narcotics, up a skull. Christie shooed the animal away and trod the city of 2 million residents emerged during the 1990s the skull back under, with his official visitors none the as a “serial killers’ playground,” where women are wiser!)

raped and murdered with alarming frequency. In 2003, Upon recovery of the bodies, Evans first confessed to the
El Paso Times
reported that “nearly 340” victims killing both his wife and daughter, later altering his had been slain during the past decade, while Amnesty statement to blame Christie. In his second affidavit, the International placed the total at 370. Some cases have trucker claimed that his wife died during an abortion been solved, but unnamed “experts” speculate that “90

performed by Christie, after which Christie offered to or more” may be serial murder victims. No one claims a arrange for the “unofficial adoption” of baby Geral-single killer is responsible—in fact, police have jailed dine. Detectives and a jury chose to believe Christie, more than a dozen suspects—but one fact is uncon-described by prosecutors in court as “this perfectly tested: All females are in danger on the streets of Ciu-innocent man.” Convicted of strangling his daughter dad Juárez.

only, Evans was sentenced to death and eventually The first to die, officially, was Alma Chavira Farel, hanged.

found beaten, raped, and strangled in the Campestre By that time, married life was wearing thin for Virreyes district on January 23, 1993. In fact, she may Christie. On the night of December 14, 1952, he stran-not have been the year’s first victim, since local disap-gled his wife with a stocking and wedged her body pearances exceed known homicides. Still, Chavira under the floorboards, afterward claiming that she had remains the first acknowledged victim of a predator suffered spontaneous convulsions and he “could not whom the media would later dub “the Juárez Ripper”

bear to see her suffer.”

or “El Depredador Psicópata.” No mutilations were With the nuisance of a live-in spouse removed, recorded in Chavira’s case, but many subsequent vic-Christie’s murder schedule escalated. On January 2, tims suffered “similar” slashing wounds to their 1953, he brought home Rita Nelson, a London prosti-breasts. Police acknowledged 16 more murders of tute, plying her with liquor before he induced her to sit women in Ciudad Juárez by year’s end, with the last in a deck chair, covered with a canopy, which he had recorded on December 15. That case was solved, along planted above an open gas pipe. When Nelson fell with four others. In the dozen cases still open from unconscious, Christie strangled her and raped her 1993, five victims remain unidentified today. Cause of
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death in those cases includes four strangulations, four that case, and again in August 1981, when he attacked stabbings (one stabbing victim was set afire afterward), a second woman in West Palm Beach. Sharif received one beating, and one gunshot. Advanced decomposition probation for the first rape and served only 45 days for ruled out a determination in two other cases.

the second. Cercoa finally fired Sharif in 1982, tired of In 1994, police recorded eight unsolved murders of paying his mounting legal bills.

women in Ciudad Juárez. “Possible culprits” were Resettled in Gainesville, Sharif was married briefly, named in three other cases, but none were arrested.

then divorced after he beat his bride unconscious. He Three of the dead are still unidentified; the others advertised for a live-in housekeeper on March 17, ranged in age from 11 to 35. In cases where the cause of 1983, then beat and repeatedly raped a young woman death is known, six were strangled, two stabbed, one who answered the ad, telling her, “I will bury you out bludgeoned, and one burned alive. Before that brutal back in the woods. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it year ended, criminologist Oscar Maynez Grijalva again.” Held without bond pending trial in that case, warned local police that some of their unsolved mur-Sharif escaped from the Alachua County jail in January ders might be the work of a serial killer. Maynez later 1984 but was soon recaptured. On January 31, 1984, said that his warning was ignored.

Sharif received a 12-year sentence for rape. Prosecutor The year 1995 was worse yet, with at least 19

Gordon Gorland told reporters that on the day Sharif women slain by mid-September. Eight of the victims was released he would be “met at the prison gates and remain unidentified, with one case solved and “proba-escorted to the plane” for deportation to Egypt, but it ble suspects” named (but not convicted) in two others.

was an empty promise.

Where cause of death could be determined, six were When Sharif was paroled in October 1989, he

strangled, one stabbed, and one shot. Three of the four moved to Midland, Texas, and a job with Benchmark victims found in September presented police with an Research and Technology. The U.S. Department of obvious pattern: On each, the right breast was severed Energy singled him out for praise in his new position, and the left nipple bitten off. It thus appeared that a ser-and Sharif was photographed shaking hands with Sena-ial killer was stalking Ciudad Juárez, linked by a similar tor Phil Gramm. News of a 1991 drunk-driving arrest MODUS OPERANDI to three of the most recent crimes, alerted a former acquaintance from Florida, now living but authorities were not overly concerned. In October in Texas, who reported Sharif to the Border Patrol as a 1995, detectives claimed the case was solved. They had fugitive from deportation proceedings. A long series of charged a suspect—a foreigner—with one of the city’s hearings ensued, and the matter was still unresolved brutal sex murders.

two years later, when Sharif held a woman captive in Abdel Latif Sharif was born in Egypt in 1947.

his home and repeatedly raped her. Sharif’s attorney Decades later, he claimed to have been sexually abused then offered the government a deal: If the latest charges as a child, allegedly sodomized by his father and other were dismissed, Sharif would voluntarily leave the male relatives. He emigrated to the United States in United States forever.

1970, settling first in New York City, where he soon Federal prosecutors accepted the bargain, and Sharif established a reputation for drunken promiscuity, fix-moved to Ciudad Juárez in May 1994, working at one ated on young girls. Fired from his job for suspected of Benchmark’s maquiladoras (factory sweatshops pro-embezzlement in 1978, Sharif moved to Pennsylvania.

ducing goods for export, where workers earn an averA friend, John Pascoe, recalled a deer-hunting expedi-age of five U.S. dollars per day). In October 1995, a tion with Sharif, where the Egyptian reportedly young female employee accused Sharif of raping her at wounded a buck and then tortured the dying animal.

his home in the exclusive Rincónes de San Marcos Pascoe also claimed that girls “often” disappeared in neighborhood. She also said that Sharif had threatened Sharif’s company, though none of the alleged victims to kill her and dump her corpse in Lote Bravo, a desert were identified. Pascoe says he ended the friendship in region south of town where several other victims had 1980, after finding various possessions of an unnamed been found. Those charges were later withdrawn, but

“missing” girl in Sharif’s home, and a mud-caked detectives learned that Sharif had dated 17-year-old shovel on the porch.

Elizabeth Castro García, who was raped and murdered By 1981, Sharif had settled in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 1994. After many delays, Sharif was con-working as a chemist and engineer for Cercoa, Inc. His victed of that crime in March 1999 and received a 30-talents were sufficiently impressive that the company year sentence (reduced to 20 years in February 2003, created a department just for him. On May 2, 1981, he when an appellate court found “problems with the evi-took a 23-year-old woman home, beat and raped her dence”). Police called him a serial killer, yet his convic-repeatedly, then suddenly turned solicitous and drove tion did not solve the grisly mystery of Ciudad Juárez.

her to a hospital. Cercoa bankrolled Sharif’s defense in One month after Sharif’s arrest, police acknowledged
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that 520 locals had vanished in the past 11 months and found on the breasts of at least three victims. Nonethe-that “an important percentage of them are female adoless, in 1999 a Mexican court found insufficient evi-lescents.”

dence to charge Sharif as a conspirator in any Between Sharif’s arrest and the first week of April additional slayings.

1996, at least 14 more victims ranging in age from 10

Even before that ruling, police admitted that their to 30 were slain in Ciudad Juárez. Where cause of death conspiracy theory was defective. The Rebels roundup was known, 10 had been stabbed, one shot, and one changed nothing in Ciudad Juárez. Brutal murders con-strangled. At least four suffered unspecified mutilations tinued, while community groups accused police of neg-after death, and one victim—15-year-old Adrianna Tor-ligence or worse. At least 16 victims were slain between res—fit the pattern of three other slayings, with her April and November 1996, with eight still unidentified right breast severed and her left nipple bitten off. The today. Five were stabbed, three shot, and one was found ongoing slaughter belied official reports that the city’s in a drum of acid. As usual, advanced decomposition homicide wave had ended with Abdel Sharif’s arrest.

left the cause of death unknown in several cases. In Police needed an explanation for the murders, but one 1997, police recorded 17 unsolved murders of females that would not exonerate their prime suspect.

aged 10 to 30, with seven of the dead unidentified.