The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (45 page)

On 26 January 1948, just before the Teikoku branch of the Imperial Bank in Tokyo closed, a man identifying himself as a health official appeared at the main entrance. He presented the acting manager with his business card, which identified him as “Dr Jiro Yamaguchi”. He explained that owing to an outbreak of dysentery in the district he had been instructed to immunize the bank staff as a preventive measure.

Sixteen employees of the bank obediently lined up to receive their medication. The doctor gave each one a pill to swallow and then distributed a number of small cups into which he dispensed a small quantity of liquid. Within seconds of drinking this potion, the bank employees collapsed where they stood. Ten died immediately, two lingered a while before dying and four survived later in hospital. “Dr Yamaguchi” escaped with over 200,000 yen in cash and cheques.

The mass killing had been accomplished using cyanide and the police quickly discovered that “Dr Yamaguchi” had carried out a dress rehearsal, aimed at perfecting his technique, a week earlier at another bank. There were no ill effects on that occasion. It also became known that a similar immunization session had been carried out at a bank the previous year administered, according to his business card, by Dr Shigeru Matsui.

Dr Matsui was a respected physician and it was believed that his business card had been fraudulently used. The Japanese custom of exchanging cards provided the key to “Dr Yamaguchi’s’’ identity. It was thought possible that Dr Matsui had met the mystery man at some point and therefore his identity would be found among the many cards retained by Dr Matsui.

By a painstaking process of elimination, the police narrowed the field to one man, fifty-year-old Sadamichi Hirasawa, an artist whom Dr Matsui remembered meeting two months before the bank murders. Survivors of the bank poisoning recalled the visiting health official as a middle-aged man with greying hair, a mole on his left cheek and a scar under his chin. Hirasawa matched this description.

Following his arrest, Hirasawa made a confession, which he later withdrew. Post-war Japan was controlled by the American Occupying Forces and it was against this background that in December 1948, Hirasawa was tried for murder, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. His execution did not proceed and, on appeal, was reduced to life imprisonment. The grounds for this decision lay in Japanese law which did not permit a citizen to participate in his own destruction and judicial hanging was a process that relied on the weight of the individual when suspended to break the spinal cord.

Hirasawa’s appeal against conviction was rejected in 1955 and he remained in Sendai Prison where he spent his time painting and writing his autobiography,
My Will: The Teikoku Bank Case
. He became an iconic figure in Japan, with many people believing he was innocent of the bank murders and had been made a scapegoat due to the failure of the authorities to find the real murderer.

A “Save Hirasawa Committee” was set up, calling for justice. There were claims that the Japanese and American governments had colluded to cover up wartime atrocities. In particular, links were made to military assassination squads using cyanide to eliminate enemy leaders. There was talk of experiments using human guinea pigs to test killing methods and of the agents being held under arrest after the war to
protect their secrets. The real murderer responsible for the Tokyo bank killings was said to have been a Japanese officer in one of these units.

Meanwhile, Hirasawa served out his time until his death in 1987 at the age of ninety-five. During his thirty-two years on Death Row no government justice minister was prepared to authorize his execution, suggesting to his supporters that they did not believe he was guilty. The Teikoku Bank Murders remains one of Japan’s most enduring crime mysteries.

Dangerous When He Smiles

Jacques Mesrine was a scheming and ruthless career criminal who terrorized Paris with his daring bank raids in the 1970s. He earned the title of “Public Enemy Number One” and operated with style. After his arrest in 1977, he offered detectives champagne and told them he could not be held. He escaped from prison while serving a sentence for robbery, kidnap and attempted murder by scaling the walls of Santé Prison. This was one of his several high-profile escapes.

Mesrine spent his childhood in German-occupied France during the Second World War and was conscripted into the army in 1956. He served in Algeria and was decorated for bravery. Once demobilized, he found civilian life tame and resorted to crime. He started with petty crime in the 1960s but soon graduated to grand schemes.

His special skills lay in bank robberies and his technique was to strike and move on. He became an internationally sought criminal in North and South America in the late 1960s. He was imprisoned in Canada for a failed attempt to kidnap a wealthy industrialist, but as he was to do on several other occasions, he staged a sensational prison escape in 1972.

He returned to France in 1973 and continued his pattern of daring robberies. In 1978 he robbed the casino at Deauville. Wearing a disguise he held up the cashier who was astute enough to sound the alarm, which brought police officers swarming around the casino. In the resultant shoot-out, Mesrine was wounded but still made good his escape.

Wanted posters were put up around Paris bearing an image of Mesrine sporting his trademark moustache and the warning, “He is dangerous when he smiles”. He was a man of ruthless cunning with a criminally adventurous spirit. After his military service, he trained as an architect and while in prison wrote his memoirs,
The Death Instinct
. This account of his life detailed his various crimes, which, by his tally, included thirty-nine murders.

Mesrine’s daring antics infuriated the police. Even when he was captured, he contrived to escape and in 1978 hired a light aircraft to buzz the prison, where his girlfriend was being held, in a threatened rescue attempt. Police Commissaire Robert Broussard regarded him as the most dangerous man in France, a description he fulfilled by planning to kidnap the judge who had sentenced him to prison.

But Mesrine’s daring and taunting adventures went too far and the police finally took their revenge. On 2 November 1979, France’s most wanted man was ambushed in a Paris street as he walked to his car. Marksmen from a special antigang unit gunned him down using high velocity ammunition. The officers returned to their base and toasted their success with champagne and the congratulations of the President of France ringing in their ears.

After a criminal career in France lasting seven years, forty-three-year-old Mesrine was dead, but his demise, or the manner of it, did not meet with universal approval. For some, he was a kind of larger-than-life Robin Hood character whose raison d’être was to defy authority. More significantly, though, came claims in 2002 that Mesrine had, in effect, been assassinated when police riddled his car with bullets without offering him the chance to surrender. The police finally got their man but Mesrine, as usual, stole the headlines.

Journey To Purgatory

Having paid his debt to society for committing murder, Johann (Jack) Unterweger emerged from prison a reformed character. He used his time wisely, educating himself and training to be
a writer. When he regained his freedom in 1990, the prison governor proclaimed that it would be difficult to find a prisoner so well prepared for freedom.

Unterweger had strangled an eighteen-year-old prostitute in Vienna in December 1974, for which he received a life sentence. He used his fifteen years behind bars to good effect, developing a talent for writing which brought him to the notice of the literary and artistic world. He wrote poetry, children’s stories and published an autobiography. The man on the inside was lionized by those on the outside who campaigned for his freedom.

Within months of walking through the prison gates a free man, he strangled a prostitute in Prague while he was in the city doing research. The next month, two prostitutes disappeared in Graz. Their bodies were discovered in January 1991. The Austrian police suspected Unterweger and took him in for questioning. He smooth-talked his way clear, denying any involvement in eight unsolved murders in Graz and Vienna.

As suspicion hardened against him, Austrian police issued a warrant for his arrest in February 1991. But, by then, he had flown to the USA via Switzerland. He planned to do research in Los Angeles on his favourite topic, the twilight world of the red-light district.

In April 1991, Irene Rodriguez travelled to Los Angeles from El Paso. Her body was found in a business car park in Hollenbeck. She had been strangled. On 19 June, the body of Shannon Exley, a prostitute, was found on vacant ground near a Scouts Centre in Los Angeles. A trio of murders was completed with the discovery of Sherri Long’s body at Malibu on 11 July. In each case, the victim had been strangled with her bra.

Detectives in LA realized they were looking for a single murderer, a conclusion supported by the evidence provided in each murder by the bra which had been formed into a strangler’s noose. Meanwhile, Unterweger was using his time attempting to interview film stars in Malibu before returning to Austria. Once again, he was questioned by the police in Vienna and, despite his denials, the evidence against him began to mount up. It was time to return to the USA.

In February 1992, he was detained in Miami for a breach of entry regulations; he had failed to mention that he had a criminal record. US detectives contacted their counterparts in Austria and established a detailed diary of his movements, tying up dates and places.

On 28 May, Unterweger was extradited from the USA to Austria. It would take nearly two years to bring him to court, but in April 1994 he faced eleven charges of murder; seven in Austria, one in the Czech Republic and three in the USA.

The jury returned guilty verdicts on nine counts of murder, including the three in the USA. For the second time in his life, Jack Unterweger was sentenced to life imprisonment. What would later be seen as a prophesy was a poster that had been designed to promote a film about his life, based on his book,
Purgatory
. He posed for a photograph with a noose around his neck.

Six hours after he had been convicted of murder, forty-three-year-old Unterweger took his own life in his cell beneath the courtroom at Graz. He hanged himself with the drawstring from his jogging trousers.

Poet, Artist And Poisoner

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was a man of considerable intellect but flawed personality. He was an accomplished artist and writer and also an effective poisoner. Oscar Wilde captured these talents in his essay on Wainewright,
Pen, Pencil and Poison.

Wainewright was born in 1794 and his mother died shortly after bringing him into the world. He also lost his father at an early age and the boy was brought up first by his grandfather and then his uncle. He showed promise as an artist at school but dreamed of being a soldier.

After an unfulfilling spell as a guardsman, he left the army and developed his talents as an artist and writer. He exhibited his work at the Royal Academy and published essays under pseudonyms. During this period of his life he cut a figure as a bit of a dandy and mixed with contemporary men of letters
such as Thomas de Quincey, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb.

He also incurred debts and, having tried the pen and the pencil, he next resorted to poison. In 1829, he poisoned his uncle with strychnine to gain possession of his house. The following year, he poisoned his wife’s mother, Mrs Abercrombie, and then set his sights on his sister-in-law, twenty-year-old Helen Abercrombie. Before fatally poisoning her, he insured her life for £18,000.

Wainewright’s attempt to claim on the insurance was met with suspicion and the companies refused to pay out. He took them to court and lost. Still in debt, he resorted to forgery and on returning to England in 1837 from a visit to France, was arrested.

Despite pleading guilty to some of the charges, he was convicted and sentenced to transportation to Van Dieman’s Land. While in Newgate prison, he was visited by various friends and acquaintances. One of them chastised him for poisoning Helen Abercrombie. His response was to shrug off the criticism saying, “Yes, it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”

Along with 300 other convicts, he was shipped to Van Dieman’s Land complaining bitterly that “the companion of poets and artists” was assigned to mix with “country bumpkins”. He took up painting again in 1840 but, by then, he was a man on his own after his wife and son emigrated to America and he lost contact with them.

In 1844, he made an eloquent application to the Lieutenant-Governor in Van Dieman’s Land for a ticket of leave which was refused. He died, aged fifty, three years later.

CHAPTER 11

Solved and Unsolved

Some murders seem forever destined to remain unsolved while others that appear to have been solved, unravel with time as other explanations emerge. Even the most intractable cases have some feature that might provide a key to unlock the mystery although, very often, they just seem to tantalize investigators. The killing of Robert Workman, for instance, shot dead on his own doorstep in 2004 offered very little crime scene evidence and no suspects. There was, though, an intriguing telephone call that has never been traced. And in the case of Hugh Chevis’ death in 1931, which gave partridges a bad name when he dined on a bird laced with strychnine, again there was a mysterious message in a telegram, seemingly rejoicing in his death, whose sender was never traced.

A murder investigation may produce a strong suspect but with insufficient evidence to succeed in the trial courts. When Helen Jewett fell victim to an axe murderer in New York in 1836, suspicion was directed against Richard P. Robinson. He faced powerful circumstantial evidence that placed him at the scene of the crime and all but put the murder weapon in his hand. To general disbelief, he secured a not guilty verdict. Consequently, Helen Jewett’s murder remains unsolved.