The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (32 page)

Their diabolical pact began to unravel with the death in 1995 of Marc Van Beers, Martin’s husband. While the couple were on honeymoon in Corsica, their car went off the road and into a deep ravine, killing Van Beers, while Martin miraculously survived. She claimed to have been thrown clear of the vehicle moments before it plunged into the ravine.

Martin moved quickly to cash in insurance worth £400,000. Her insistence that her husband’s body be cremated raised suspicions. Examination of the body showed that he had been bludgeoned to death before the car went over the ravine. It also appeared that insurance documents had been forged.

Investigators discovered that Schmitt, who was Martin’s lover, had lost his wife in remarkably similar circumstances in 1992. A few months after they were married, Ursula Deschamps lost her life when her car plunged into a canal and she was drowned. Her husband Peter had a remarkable escape when he swam free from the sinking car.

His claim was not without suspicion, chiefly on account of the fact that his clothes were remarkably dry. Schmitt was charged with involuntary homicide and he served two months of a suspended sentence. Meanwhile, he scooped £280,000 from his late wife’s insurance and went to live with his lover, Aurore Martin, in Florida.

The couple, known in the US as the “honeymoon killers”, were extradited to Belgium in 1998. They protested their innocence. They were tried for the murder of Marc Van Beers at a hearing in Brussels. Prosecutors contended that Schmitt was in Corsica at the same time as Aurore and Marc and that he paid to have Van Beers beaten up.

But for Aurore’s insistence on a cremation, they might have got away with this crime. When the circumstances of Schmitt’s wife’s untimely death became known, comparisons were inevitable. In both cases, separated by three years, the spouse was murdered and the body placed in a car. The first sank beneath the water of a canal and the second disappeared over a ravine. And, in both instances, the passenger had a miraculous escape from death.

With insurance payouts totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds, Schmitt and Martin, “the Diabolical Lovers”, went off to live in America and lead a life of luxury. Schmitt had been married a few months when he disposed of his wife, and Martin was on honeymoon when her husband was eliminated. Schmitt, aged thirty-one, was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment and Martin, one year older, was jailed for fifteen years.

Granite Woman And Lover Boy

Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray created sensational headlines in the New York newspapers in 1927 as their trial for murder progressed. They were referred to as “The Granite Woman” and “Lover Boy”.

Thirty-two-year-old Ruth Snyder was trapped in an unhappy marriage to Albert Snyder, thirteen years her senior and a dull, if successful man. Ruth yearned for excitement and her chance came when she met Henry Judd Gray in New York. He was a corset salesman and, like Ruth, was unhappily married.

Ruth and Judd met clandestinely in hotel rooms for nearly two years. This was not quite the life she wanted so she hatched a plan whereby she would be both rich and free of marital encumbrance. Her idea was to insure her husband for a large sum and then murder him.

Judd was, to say the least, apprehensive about the scheme and he turned to drink to ease the pressure Ruth put him under. But she nagged him constantly and when he declined to co-operate she tried her hand at poisoning husband Albert. She failed in these attempts, so kept up the pressure on Judd to fulfil her wishes. “What are you trying to do?” he asked. “Kill the poor guy,” replied Ruth.

Finally, his resolve broke and he agreed to eliminate Albert Snyder whom Ruth had insured for $96,000. On 19 March 1927, fortified with generous doses of whisky, Judd entered the Snyder household and waited in the dark until Ruth and Albert returned from a party. While Albert, the worse for drink, retired for the night, Ruth and Judd engaged in love-making in the spare room where she had thoughtfully laid out the implements of murder, including a heavy sash-weight, chloroform and picture wire.

Once they had sated their sexual appetites, Ruth took Judd into the bedroom where her husband lay sleeping. Taking the sash weight, Judd smashed it down on Albert’s head. He was only stunned and began shouting and struggling with his attacker. Ruth responded by hitting him again with the sash weight. Still he did not succumb, so the chloroform and picture wire were brought into use, and he finally expired.

The deadly duo faked a robbery and Ruth was bound and gagged which was how she was found when the alarm was raised next morning. She told police she had been attacked by a prowler and several items had been stolen. When these same articles were found hidden about the house, suspicions started to form. Judd Gray’s name was recorded in her address book. When the police used the ploy that he had been arrested, Ruth was tricked into a confession.

Under questioning, Ruth said that they had plotted to kill her husband but that she had not struck a single blow. Weak-kneed Judd admitted his part in the plot and said, “She told me what to do and I did it.”

The pair were put on trial in New York in April 1927 and it turned out to be a major attraction. Many celebrities of the day took seats in the public gallery and the press were well represented. “The Granite Woman”, as she was now called, attempted to shift blame on to “Lover Boy”. Judd’s defence played the hapless male card. The poor man was drawn into the spider’s web, weakened by her passionate entreaties. The jury took an hour and a half to bring in a guilty verdict and Snyder and Gray were sentenced to death.

Their appeals were dismissed and while waiting on Death Row, each wrote an autobiography. Ruth Snyder received over 160 offers of marriage from men who clearly wished to bring some excitement into their lives. “Lover Boy” and “The Granite Woman” were executed within a few minutes of each other at Sing Sing Prison on 12 January 1928. The last act in a bizarre case came in the form of a photograph taken of Ruth as she died in the electric chair. This was the work of a newspaper reporter who secretly recorded her moment of death using a camera strapped to his ankle. This was published on the front page of the
New York Daily News
under the headline, “Dead!”

The Tourist From Hell

John Martin Scripps was an international criminal and opportunist who travelled the world’s airways in search of human prey, earning him the name, “The Tourist From Hell”.

Scripps was jailed for drug offences in the UK in 1987 and 1991 and, on both occasions, managed to abscond from custody. While in Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight he learned the butchery trade and acquired skills that he put to use when he later graduated to serial killing.

In early March 1995, Scripps was staying in Singapore where he befriended a visiting South African, Gerard Lowe, and offered to share a hotel room. As others would find to their
cost, Lowe was charmed by the tall, smiling Englishman, and agreed to his proposal to save money.

The next morning, the hotel security guard observed Scripps leaving the hotel carrying a heavy suitcase. Scripps returned, minus the bag, to check out, explaining that Lowe had left earlier. Two days later, dismembered body parts appeared in the sea near Clifford Pier. Scars enabled police to identify the victim as thirty-three-year-old Gerard Lowe and they learned that he had been staying at a hotel in a shared room. It also appeared that large sums of money had been withdrawn from his account using his credit card.

An alert was put out for the smiling Englishman who had travelled to Thailand and was foolish enough to return to Singapore on 19 March when he fell into the arms of waiting police. His luggage contained a stun-gun, hand-cuffs, a hammer and numerous knives. Also in his possession were passports and credit cards belonging to a Canadian mother and son, Sheila and Darin Dalmude.

The Dalmudes had travelled on the same flight as Scripps to Bangkok on 11 March. Their dismembered remains were found in the Phuket area later the same month.

Once in custody, the full extent of Scripps’s criminal activities became evident. In addition to murders committed in Thailand and Singapore, he was believed to have killed a British tourist in Mexico in 1994. His criminal career spanned thirteen years and three continents. He used his mild-mannered charm to offer friendship to people he met on his travels and then resorted to brutal murder to plunder their bank accounts.

Scripps was tried in Singapore in November 1995 for the murder of Gerard Lowe. He admitted killing the South African but claimed he did so out of anger when the man who was his room-mate made a homosexual advance. After he murdered Lowe with hammer blows to the head, he used his victim’s credit card to draw cash and, among other purchases, bought a ticket to a symphony concert.

The “Tourist from Hell” was found guilty and sentenced to death. Scripps appealed against the sentence but then withdrew it. In February he instructed his lawyer not to appeal
for clemency. He said he was “impatient” for the execution to proceed and was angry that the legal formalities were so protracted. On 19 April 1996, his wish was granted when he was hanged at Changi Prison, the first Briton to be executed for murder in Singapore.

The Poisoner From Windy Nook

After the fourth unexpected death with which she had been associated, sixty-six-year-old Mary Wilson joked with the undertaker and suggested he might quote her a wholesale price for funerals.

Red-haired Mary Wilson lived at Windy Nook, near Felling in County Durham, in the UK. In her younger days, she had been in service to a local family and married the son. An avid reader of popular romantic magazines, she also yearned for money.

Growing tired of her husband after forty-three years of marriage she had taken a lover, a man who lodged with her employer. Within a few months, both he and her husband died, seemingly of natural causes. The doctor who examined them suspected nothing sinister. They were elderly and the fact that the two deaths had occurred close together merited no more than passing comment. Mary Wilson benefited from the deaths to the tune of less than fifty pounds.

In 1957, she met a retired estate agent, seventy-five-year-old Oliver Leonard, whom she persuaded to move in with her. They were married in September and, two weeks later, Leonard became ill with breathing problems and died. Again, nothing unusual was suspected and Mary collected another fifty pounds.

Her next move was to approach Ernest Wilson, a retired engineer, who was looking for a housekeeper. In no time at all, Mary was hired, moved in with Wilson and marriage followed. At the wedding reception, she joked with the caterer about saving any leftover cakes as “they will come in handy for the funeral”. Two weeks later Ernest Wilson was dead, supposedly of cardiac failure.

When the undertaker called to measure his body for a coffin, Mary, still in jocular mood, said that as she had put so much work his way, he might consider giving her a wholesale price.

Post-mortem examinations were carried out on both Leonard and Wilson. In neither case was death from natural causes confirmed. What was found was that both had died of phosphorus poisoning. Mary Wilson was charged with murder.

At her trial, prosecution expert witnesses expressed the view that rat or beetle poison containing phosphorus had been administered, most likely in tea. Countering this was a suggestion that the two men had been taking pills to stimulate their sex drive, which had the effect of hastening their demise. This produced laughter in court.

Mary Wilson came to trial in 1958 at a time when the death penalty had been revised under the provisions of the Homicide Act, 1957. The death sentence was retained in five classes of capital murder and in cases where a person had twice committed murder. She did not give evidence and the jury returned guilty verdicts. She avoided a death sentence on account of her age and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She died in prison four years later.

Following her trial, inquests were carried out on the death of her former husband and that of her one-time lover. In both cases, phosphorus poisoning was confirmed as the cause of death, thereby bringing the Poisoner from Windy Nook’s tally of victims to four.

CHAPTER 9

Contract and Conspiracy

The idea of contract murders originated in the US during the 1930s in the gangland world of Murder Inc. When the mob bosses wanted to eliminate someone who was a threat or a rival, or who had simply outlived their usefulness, a contract was issued to a middleman or broker who hired the hit man. This arrangement meant that the puppet master was completely insulated from the eventual killing. Murder management of this kind ensured that very few gangland killings were ever solved.

The concept of the contracted or hired killer readily translated into the general domain, especially for those with wealth and power. If the gangland bosses could hire people to do their killing for them, why not others who saw murder as a convenient way of solving problems and eliminating those who stood in their way?

Dr Karl Menninger, the eminent US psychiatrist, put it succinctly in the context of capital punishment when he wrote that if the state can justify hiring someone to do its killing why shouldn’t powerful people do the same?

The hired killer is usually a person who is a stranger to his targeted victim and operates to a preconceived plan dispassionately and with ruthless efficiency. The victim, perceiving no threat or danger, is caught off-guard. The killer strikes, is meticulous about not leaving traces and disappears.

In what might be called the domestic sector, as opposed to the world of organized crime, the desire to eliminate an unwanted wife, husband or lover may reach a point where hiring a contract killer is seen as a favourable option. Among the advantages are that the hirer keeps their hands clean and may feel this lessens the guilt. In such plans, the middleman is often dispensed with and the contract agreed directly between procurer and operator. The exchange of the necessary co-ordinates to identify the victim and a down-payment are all that is required. This strategy, though, can lead to bungled results as Elizabeth Duncan discovered in 1958 when she hired two young men to kill her daughter-in-law. The plot began to unravel when she defaulted on payment.