The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (22 page)

In an attempt to thwart efforts to trace the stolen car by means of its registration plate, Neu covered it with a rough, hand-made sign declaring that the car was in transit. It was not long before he was stopped and questioned by a police patrol. He failed to convince officers about his ownership of the car and questions turned to the recent murder of a businessman in New York. Neu’s response was, “. . . I killed him. This is his suit I’m wearing now.” He also readily admitted killing Sheffield Clark.

Neu’s confession made his trial somewhat of a formality. The only issue was his sanity and after hearing defence arguments, the court decided he was fit to stand trial. He was duly convicted of murder, whereupon he offered the jury his best wishes and went into a song and dance number with a rendition of “Sweet Rosie O’Grady”. Whether or not the jury joined in was not recorded.

While in prison, he apparently spent his time rehearsing song and dance routines, possibly for his last performance on the scaffold. On 1 February 1935, he entertained guards with his own composition of “I’m as fit as a fiddle and ready to hang”. He met his end, if not laughing, at least crooning his way to oblivion.

CHAPTER 7

Out of this World

The association of witchcraft and the supernatural with crime has a long history. It is probably rooted in attempts to explain what on the surface appears to be mystifying, weird or bizarre. The concept of procuring a person’s death by applying witchcraft goes back many centuries and is found in many cultures. In modern times, black magic practices have been offered as an explanation for violent crimes. A notable example is the murder of Charles Walton in 1945 in an English county renowned for observances of witchcraft.

Satanism has been adopted by many murderers as a conduit for hatred and violence. In the 1960s, Charles Manson showed that his followers, fuelled with drugs and satanic values, could be controlled and directed to kill. Devil worship has been embraced by some murderers as an expression of their rage against society. This seemed to motivate the Brazilian serial killer, Francisco de Brito, who confessed to killing in revenge for the abuse he received as a child. Over a period of fourteen years, over forty boys were killed and emasculated.

The idea of taking a life as a ritual sacrifice also has its roots in satanism. Ricky Kasso, inspired by a visit to Amityville and the house where Ronald De Feo killed his family in 1974, murdered a teenager as a sacrifice to Satan. An aspect of this mindset is the initiation ritual involving a killing to establish an individual’s standing among his peers. Such was the motive behind the two murders committed by Lucifer’s Outlaws, Michael Bardell and Stephen Parkinson, to impress their fellow Hell’s Angels.

Fantasists of different kinds form a substantial group among convicted murderers. These are often individuals consumed with narcissism who can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. Their crimes frequently probe the frontiers of forensic psychiatry. One such was Jean-Claud Romand who led two separate lives maintained by lies and secrecy and ended up by killing his family.

Fantasists often work in pairs, like Marco Furlan and Wolfgang Abel, self-appointed angels of death, whose mission was to kill sinners. Or Jamie Petrolini and Richard Elsey who were obsessed with fantasy heroics and trained for pseudo military missions by using murder as an initiation test. A sense of mission also motivated Fred Klenner who equipped himself with enough weapons to start a private war. He was in a constant state of readiness for Armageddon with his family as the ultimate victims.

Those who fake their own deaths in order to cover up for crimes they have committed or to embark on a re-invented life are indulging in a kind of fantasy. Marie Hilley poisoned her husband and successfully feigned her own death to the extent of publishing an obituary. With echoes of a fictional Reggie Perrin, Robert Healey and John Allen staged their own suicides to escape from their crimes and re-establish themselves in another life.

Practitioners of otherworldly arts are often control freaks, like Arthur Covell, a bed-ridden invalid who directed his nephew to murder his mother. He commanded obedience to his will using a combination of astrology and hypnotism. Herman Billik was another self-appointed wizard who used his malign influence to prey on others and usurp their lives and possessions.

There are also well-documented examples of psychic detection and the part played by clairvoyants in solving crimes. Clarence van Buuren’s victim was located by a psychic with uncanny accuracy. Equally astounding was the discovery of Ernest Dyer’s victim as the result of a dream experienced by the dead man’s mother.

When all other explanations fail, we are simply left with the weird, such as the unsolved Dali Murders. The victims were mutilated in ways which parodied the paintings of the female form by the surrealist artist, Salvador Dali.

Sickle And Fork

The gruesome murder of an elderly farm labourer on St Valentine’s Day 1945 in Warwickshire in the UK led to stories of witchcraft. Seventy-four-year-old Charles Walton was a reclusive man who preferred wildlife to human beings. He lived at Lower Quinton with his niece and, despite his arthritis, did handy jobs for the local farmers. At around midday on 14 February he was seen trimming hedges. When he did not return home at nightfall, his niece reported him missing.

A search the next morning located Walton’s body in a field close to where he had been seen working. His throat had been slashed with a sickle and a hayfork driven through his body with such force that it took two policemen to pull it free. A cross had also been crudely scratched on his chest.

Local police sought assistance from Scotland Yard and the famed detective, Robert Fabian, was assigned to the murder enquiry at Lower Quinton. Robbery, revenge and an argument seemed possible motives. The dead man was regarded as being eccentric and there were suggestions that he had money. Unusually, in that age and that community, Walton had a bank account.

Detectives questioned prisoners of war held at nearby Long Marston but promising enquiries came to nothing. Fabian’s guile as a detective won him few friends in Lower Quinton where local residents remained tight-lipped and unhelpful. When he visited the local pub he recalled that, “silence fell like a blow” and that drinkers got up and left.

The detectives discovered that Warwickshire had a rich folklore and many tales of witchcraft. The nature of Walton’s death led to much speculation along these lines. Local historians recorded that in 1875, John Haywood had stabbed an eighty-year-old woman declaring that she was a witch. His chosen murder weapon was a hayfork. Put on trial, Haywood explained that when cattle or farm animals died it was the result of the “Evil Eye” attributed to witches.

Fabian was to have his own encounter with these beliefs with the incident of the Black Dog. While out walking, searching
the area around Lower Quinton, he saw a black dog. Next on the scene was a boy who ran off terrified when Fabian asked him if he was looking for the dog. Legend had it that seeing the Black Dog presaged a death.

Despite taking 4,000 statements and sending all manner of samples for forensic testing, Fabian and his team did not succeed in tracing Charles Walton’s killer. “We had to leave it,” wrote Fabian somewhat ruefully in his memoirs.

In 1987, in a book called
Perfect Murder
, Stephen Knight wrote that Fabian did know the identity of the murderer. Walton was killed by farmer Albert Potter who employed him as a casual labourer and from whom he borrowed money. When Walton pressed for repayment he was killed and the manner of his death disguised with occult symbolism.

Uneasy Verdict

When an elderly spinster was found dead at her home in Pluckley, Kent in the UK, in circumstances suggesting an element of ritual, there were faint echoes of a murder committed thirty-five years earlier.

Gwendoline Marshall’s body was discovered in the garden shed at her home on 7 October 1980. She had been beaten, tied up and pinned to the ground with a hayfork. The use of this implement drew comparison with the unsolved murder of William Walton at Lower Quinton, Warwickshire, in 1945 (
see
above). Like her, he had been an elderly recluse and had been pinned down with a hayfork.

Miss Marshall lived alone with her dog in the house she owned with its six acres of ground. She rarely ventured out, grew her own fruit and vegetables and painted country scenes and still lifes. One of the few visitors to her home was Peter Luckhurst whom she called “Master Peter” and allowed to shoot rabbits on her land. In return, he chopped wood for her and picked apples.

Peter visited her around midday on 7 October, cycling from his home to pick some apples. He discussed with her the possibility of obtaining a shotgun licence. On the following day at about 3.00 p.m., a family called at the house to pick apples at Miss Marshall’s invitation. They knocked on the door but could not raise her, the house was open and the dog was hiding in the garage.

Venturing into the kitchen, the visitors discovered blood on the floor and then the lounge. There was a trail of blood leading upstairs. The police were called and searches made. There was blood everywhere, including each of the bedrooms. When officers reached the garden shed, they found it padlocked. Inside, they found Miss Marshall, hands tied behind her back, brutally beaten and pinned down with a hayfork. The doctor thought she had died within the last few hours.

Detectives made house-to-house enquiries in Pluckley. They spoke to a local youth who suggested they should talk to Peter Luckhurst because he had found the old lady’s dog running loose and took it back to the house. Seventeen-year-old “Master Peter” admitted going to the house and immediately confessed to hitting the old lady with a piece of wood. He later wrote out a statement in which he described hitting her, looking for money, tying her up and putting her in the shed before going home on his bike for tea.

Within twenty-four hours of discovering the murder, police had a suspect, concluding, “Peter did it and he did it on his own”. Villagers were shocked as much by the murder itself as by their disbelief that Luckhurst was the culprit. A key question was how the youngster could have carried out a bloody murderous act and yet have so little blood on his clothes.

Villagers united behind him and Luckhurst stood trial at Maidstone in June 1981. He retracted his confession saying that he had innocently stumbled on a murder scene. The jury did not believe him and found him guilty. He was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. No fingerprints were found at the crime scene and many believed Luckhurst was innocent and possibly covering up for someone who was still at large. The ritual killing angle troubled a number of people who eased their concerns by moving away from Pluckley.

Mutilator

Forty-one-year-old Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito, a bicycle mechanic, lived in an earth-floored shack in San José de Ribamar in Maranhão, Brazil. Police were called after neighbours complained of the dreadful smell. A search revealed the buried remains of two boys. He readily confessed to killing the two boys and admitted responsibility for eighteen other murders.

Investigators made connections between the discovery of human remains at Brito’s house and a series of murders of boys in the states of Para and Maranh o between 1989 and 2003. The killings caused public outrage because the victims were sexually abused and there were reports that some had been decapitated and had their genitals cut off. There were rumours that the emasculated boys had featured in satanic rituals.

Brito was suspected of killing forty-two boys and, following his arrest in April 2004, he was charged with one killing, that of fifteen-year-old Jonathan Silva Vieira, who went missing in 2003. In October 2006 Brito went on trial in Maranh o for the murder of Vieira. This case was chosen because it was one in which the police had the most compelling evidence. In the event, Brito confessed to the murder on the first day of his trial.

When questioned by the police Brito had said he did not remember mutilating his victims because his mind had blanked out at the moment of killing. But in his defence in court, he told the jury that he had been sexually abused as a child by a man called Carlito. He explained that when he killed he did not see a boy before him but Carlito and gave vent to his anger. He said he could not remember how he had killed the boys but blamed their deaths on his reaction to his own ill-treatment. Of his home life he said, “I never knew what love was.”

On 26 October 2006, the jury found Brito guilty of murder and he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. With accusations of murdering dozens of other boys, further trials hang over him. This would make him Brazil’s worst serial killer.

The nature of the serial killings, particularly with their overtones of sexual abuse and black magic, provoked Brazilian
public opinion and there was criticism about the lack of action from the authorities. At least Brito’s conviction, sixteen years after the first murder, was a positive step in resolving Brazil’s series of satanic murders.

“I Love Satan”

A group of youths gathered at their favourite meeting place on 16 June 1984. They lounged around a gazebo in Aztakea Woods in Northport, New York State, playing heavy metal music. They were high on mescaline and arguing. Local residents complained about the noise to the police but there was no follow-up.

The first indication that something was amiss was when Gary Lauwers did not return home. On the teenage grapevine, there was talk about a murder having been committed. Little by little, worrying news came that the group ring-leader, Ricky Kasso, had taken friends to see a body. The police received an anonymous tip-off and, several days after the rowdy party in the woods, Gary Lauwers was found.

The teenager’s body was discovered in a shallow trench. It was a gruesome sight, partly consumed by decomposition. It was later established that he had been stabbed many times, including his face, and that his eyeballs had been gouged out. Written on the nearby gazebo, at the teenagers’ regular meeting place, were the prophetic words, “I love Satan”.