The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (24 page)

After each incident those responsible circulated a leaflet, with the heading, “Ludwig”, featured above Nazi insignia. The leaflets explained the reason for the latest murder and declared “We are the last of the Nazis . . . Death will come to those who betray the true god” and finished with the words, “Gott mit uns” – God is with us.

Various explanations of the reference to Ludwig were offered and the most likely was a nineteenth-century writer,
Otto Ludwig, who preached that sinners should be clubbed to death.

The perpetrators of these outrages were caught red-handed in January 1984. Two men dressed in Pierrot costumes turned up at a disco in Mantua where 400 people were dancing and began pouring petrol on to the floor. Marco Furlan, aged twenty-five, and fellow student, Wolfgang Abel, aged twenty-six, were arrested. They said their stunt at the disco was a carnival joke.

Furlan and Abel were murderers and the authors of the “Ludwig” leaflets. The two men were students at Verona University and came from professional, middle-class backgrounds. They studied during the week and spent Saturday night killing people to break up the monotony of the weekend. One of their trademarks was to leave objects at each crime that were identified in their “Ludwig” leaflets, thereby authenticating their crimes.

The two young men, described by contemporaries as highly intelligent but strange, were put on trial in Verona to face charges of killing fifteen people. In keeping with “Ludwig’s” philosophy, they targeted people who they chose to call sinners and who deserved to be eliminated. In practice, this meant some of the least advantaged members of society, like their first victim, a gypsy living in a caravan.

They were accused of acting as self-appointed “angels of death” in committing ritual murder. Furlan and Abel denied being “Ludwig” and both were judged to be “partially infirm of mind”. They were convicted of killing nine people and were sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment.

Natural Born Killers

“Cut off from reality”, “individual anarchism” and “passing ritualism”, were some of the labels offered to describe the actions of two young people which resulted in six deaths on the streets of Paris in 1994. “Natural-born killers” was another epithet directed at twenty-two-year-old Audry Maupin and Florence Rey, his nineteen-year-old girlfriend. On 4 October 1994, armed with pump-action shotguns, the couple appeared at a police compound in Porte de Pantin in Paris. They held up two gendarmes and took their side arms before climbing into a taxi and directing the driver at gunpoint to take them to Place de la Nation.

What followed were moments of deadly drama. When they reached the Cours de Vincennes, the taxi driver drove his vehicle into a police car. He ran from his cab shouting to the two officers as he went. At this point Maupin opened fire, killing both officers and the taxi driver. The couple then hijacked a Renault 5 car and made off again, pursued by a police motorcyclist. They were blockaded in the Bois de Vincennes by police cars and began a second shoot out in which a police officer was killed. When the police returned the fire, Maupin was fatally wounded. Rey comforted him before surrendering. In the course of half an hour’s violent mayhem, three police officers were killed, two taxi drivers were shot dead and Maupin also lost his life.

Maupin was a psychology student who held anarchistic and revolutionary views and Florence Rey was a first-year medical student who seemed to be in thrall to him. She told psychiatrists that she wanted to live up to Audry and impress him. They forsook their university work, acquired weapons and embarked on their own kind of revolution.

Rey was put on trial in September 1998. There was great public interest in this young woman and a desire to know what motivated her. The prosecutor said she had committed crimes that were described as gratuitous, absurd and irrational. Even though she had not fired any of the shots that killed five people, she was guilty with no extenuating circumstances.

Defence lawyers argued that Rey should not be made to pay for crimes committed by Maupin. Against this was the case made by lawyers representing the families of the three dead policemen who stressed that Rey did nothing to stop Maupin. She took an active part in the shooting and, “if she missed, it was because she was a bad shot”. The passenger in the taxi commandeered by Maupin and Rey told the court that it was the girl who threatened to kill the driver and he described how she calmly knelt down to reload the shotgun.

Rey was found guilty of armed robbery, multiple murder, manslaughter, six attempted murders, theft of police weapons, abduction and criminal conspiracy. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison, less than the term demanded by prosecutors. Inevitably, perhaps, there were references in the popular press to “Bonnie and Clyde”. The media interest in the trial had been intense but observers found it difficult to reconcile the image of the slim pale-faced girl in the dock with the uncompromisingly violent part she played in events that had claimed six lives.

A Malign Friendship

While driving home on the evening of 14 January 1994, Mohamed El-Sayed stopped his car at a “give way” sign in Bayswater, West London. A young man entered the car and threatened El-Sayed with a knife. He told him to drive on a short distance and stop. The youth then stabbed the driver in the throat and inflicted other wounds, leaving him dying behind the wheel.

Police enquiries made little headway until they received information that a student at Modes Study Centre in Oxford had confessed to murder. Nineteen-year-old Jamie Petrolini was taken to Paddington Green police station where he made a full confession, implicating his friend, Richard Elsey, and unveiling a world of fantasy heroics.

The two youths came from successful family backgrounds and they had received public school education. They met at Modes Study Centre where they formed what would later be called a “malign friendship”. Their teachers regarded the pair as immature and Petrolini, in particular, was impressionable with an ambition to prove himself.

Elsey played the role of ringmaster, telling his new friend that he was an officer in the Parachute Regiment and spinning tales about his time in the SAS. He liked to talk about “slotting”, denoting throat-cutting, a word he had picked up from reading books about SAS exploits in Iraq. One night in an Oxford pub, they became blood brothers, cutting their hands and allowing the blood to mix.

The scene was now set for Elsey to train for a mission. They gave each other fake names and officer status and tested their skills and nerve by climbing up to the jib of a tower building crane. The real test came within weeks of meeting each other when they decided to find a drug-dealer or pimp on the streets of London and kill him. This was to be Elsey’s initiation into the SAS and forty-five-year-old Mohamed El-Sayed was their random victim.

Petrolini and Elsey were tried for murder at the Old Bailey in October 1994. They opted for what is called the “cut throat” defence, each blaming the other for what had happened. Petrolini drew a picture of his friend as a manipulator who had urged him to take a man’s life. He pleaded manslaughter and diminished responsibility. Elsey said in court that he was shocked when Petrolini stabbed the car driver. He put the full blame for the killing on his friend’s shoulders, claiming he was not even in the car at the time.

Ample evidence of their weird behaviour came out in court. Petrolini, who was nineteen on the day of the murder, described opening his birthday cards on the bus as they journeyed back to Oxford. The principal of Modes Study Centre said he feared the two students were “up to no good”. Petrolini had taken to blacking his face with commando camouflage and running around Oxford at night. Elsey cut his hair short and told his friends he was going on special missions with the Paras.

At the end of the seventeen-day trial, the jury was out for five hours and returned guilty verdicts on both accused. Sentencing them to life imprisonment, Mr Justice Denison told them, “You created a world in which you both played out your fantasies. That obsession led to the brutal murder of a complete stranger . . .”

There were eerie parallels in this case with that of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924. They killed a fourteen-year-old boy to find out what it was like to be a murderer. While Petrolini and Elsey drew their fantasies from military heroics, Leopold and Loeb were obsessed with the Nietzschean philosophy of superman.

Mission Ready

“Dr Crazy”, as he was known by those who sold him weapons, lived in a fantasy world in which he was always armed and ready to go on a mission. He was obsessed with guns, kept survival gear in his vehicle and had a bomb wired up to the passenger seat. Fred Klenner, also known as Fritz, was in every sense armed and dangerous.

Fritz was the son of Dr Fred Klenner, an expert in vitamin therapy with a practice in Reidsville, North Carolina. It was the family’s expectation that Fritz would become a doctor but when he failed to qualify, he told his father that he had passed the examinations and, henceforth, was referred to as “Young Dr Klenner”.

He helped his father at his clinic at the weekends and in the early 1980s met Susie Newson Lynch. She was separated from her husband and, although she had custody of the children, there were legal problems about rights of access and growing bitterness between both sets of parents.

Old Dr Klenner died in 1984 and his clinic was closed down. Fritz spent his inheritance stocking up on guns and fitting out his Blazer station wagon with survival equipment and an explosive device. He was close to Susie and sympathized with her over the problems she was experiencing. Her parents were not keen about her association with Fritz whom they regarded as unbalanced. For his part, Fritz fuelled the flames of discontent by telling Susie her husband was involved in illegal activities.

Tragedy struck in July 1984 when Susie’s mother-in-law and daughter were found shot dead at their home in Prospect, Kentucky. The talk was of a gangland killing but the police investigation made little headway. In the following March, Fritz and Susie moved in together and worked on each other’s neuroses. He referred to her as his wife and, as a result, she became estranged from her family. Meanwhile, Fritz stocked up on military hardware and insisted that Susie’s two boys wore combat uniforms.

Tragedy struck again in May 1985 with a triple murder in North Carolina at the home of Susie’s grandmother. Her
father, mother and grandmother were all killed in another mysterious shooting. Susie and Fritz were both questioned by the police and suspicion began to focus on Fritz when it was established he had been seen near the scene of the killings and that he was armed. Added to this was information he had imparted to a friend to the effect that he was involved in a CIA mission.

With many unanswered questions swirling around and a great deal of suspicion about his actions, Fritz and Susie, together with the two boys, took off in the Blazer heading for Greenboro. A police pursuit developed with Fritz firing at patrol cars with an Uzi machine gun. Three officers were wounded in the shoot-out before the Blazer came to a halt. Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and the vehicle disintegrated killing everyone in it.

That Fritz was preparing for war was borne out by the discoveries made at his home and the Klenner properties. Apart from 8,000 rounds of ammunition, investigators found numerous handguns, eight shotguns, two machine guns, two assault rifles and five semi-automatic rifles. In the course of his private campaign it looked as if “Dr Crazy” had taken the lives of nine people, including his own.

The Black Widow

Marie Audrey Hilley came from a family of textile workers in Alabama, USA. She married Frank Hilley in 1950 and worked as a secretary at a foundry in Anniston. Her husband died, aged forty-five, apparently of hepatitis, in 1975. His widow claimed $31,140 on his insurance and continued life as before.

When she started to spend rather ostentatiously, those who knew her circumstances thought perhaps she was spending beyond her means. At the same time changes in her personality were noticed; she developed a persecution complex, complaining about telephone harassment and reporting burglaries.

In 1979, Hilley’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Carol, became ill, losing weight for no apparent reason. She underwent various medical tests but the cause of her wasting illness remained a mystery. It was only when Carol mentioned that her mother had been giving her injections that alarm bells began to sound. Analysis of a urine sample showed the presence of arsenic in the teenager’s body and the source of her illness became evident.

The bodies of Frank Hilley and Marie’s mother were exhumed and both found to contain arsenic. Marie was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of her daughter. But before proceedings could be started, she jumped bail and promptly disappeared.

At this point, she pulled off a remarkable deception that she perpetuated for four years. She went to New Hampshire where she re-married. With police searches for the bail jumper at their most intensive, she told her new husband that she needed to visit Houston in connection with the death of a relative. There she feigned her own death even to the extent of publishing an obituary. She then returned to New Hampshire in the guise of her twin sister, Teri Martin. But slowly, doubts began to creep into the minds of those she was trying to deceive and her stratagem unravelled. She was arrested in 1983.

Marie Hilley stood trial for murder at Calhoun County Circuit Court in May 1983. The prosecutor told the jury, “You’re going to be looking at a cold, calculating and diabolical killer.” Hilley denied injecting her daughter with poison but a fellow inmate told the court she had admitted to her that she poisoned both her husband and daughter. It was shown that Hilley had taken out life insurance on Carol a few months before she became sick.

Hilley amused herself while sitting in the dock by sketching the trial judge whom she portrayed as a monkey. The prosecutor said, “They tell me that the black widow spider mates and then kills its mate . . . That’s what she reminds me of.” Hilley was convicted of the first-degree murder of her husband and of the attempted murder of her daughter. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.