The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (49 page)

There was speculation that Sophie du Plantier knew her attacker and admitted him to her house. When detectives searched the premises, they found two wine glasses on the kitchen sink. Another curious feature of the crime scene was that, although the murder had occurred outside the house, both front and back doors were latched shut.

Following pressure from du Plantier’s family, a French judge in 2008 ordered the exhumation of her body from the cemetery at Mauvezin in south west France. The hope was that forensic traces on the body might yield DNA leading to the murderer. The Gardai, who had come under heavy criticism for their perceived failures, made their files available to a new French-led investigation team.

SOS Unanswered

Twenty-eight-year-old Julie Ward was a keen amateur photographer. Her brutal murder in a Kenyan wildlife reserve in 1988 remains unsolved.

The young woman had been in Africa for three months when she left Nairobi on 2 September heading for the Masai Mara game park. She was accompanied by a marine biologist friend and they were driving a Suzuki jeep. When the vehicle broke down they decided that her friend would make his way back to Nairobi and return with a necessary spare part. Meanwhile, Julie managed to fix the jeep and decided to drive back to Nairobi on her own.

When she did not reappear, alarm bells started to sound, and after her father failed to contact her by telephone on 10 September, Julie was reported missing. John Ward flew out to Kenya and organized a search for his daughter. Her abandoned jeep was located three days later bogged down in the Sand River. The distress call letters, SOS, were visible on the vehicle’s roof where they had been marked out with mud.

The search continued and, at a place called Keekovok, Julie Ward’s remains were found; she had been hacked and burned.
Her father believed she had been kidnapped and murdered but the Kenyan authorities suggested she had been attacked by wild animals.

The dead woman’s remains were returned to Britain for forensic examination. Pathologists concluded that she had been killed with a machete. An inquest into Julie’s death was held in Nairobi in August 1989. The Kenyan pathologist said his report confirming that she had been killed with a machete had been altered by his superiors. Clearly there had been mistakes in procedure, but in October, the Kenyan government acknowledged there had been foul play.

John Ward was determined to keep up the pressure to establish the truth of what had happened to his daughter. In 1990 Scotland Yard detectives travelled to Kenya to carry out further enquiries. Witnesses were re-interviewed and the evidence re-examined. At one of the huts at the park rangers’ camp at Makari, investigators found traces of hair which matched that of the dead woman.

The two rangers who used the hut were Peter Metui Kipeen and Jonah Tajeu Magiroi. They explained that they had found Julie after her vehicle became bogged down. There were suspicions that she had been taken hostage and probably raped. A possible scenario was that the two men panicked when they realized a massive search for her was under way, so they killed her and hacked the body to pieces to suggest an attack by wild animals.

Kipeen and Magiroi were tried for murder at Nairobi in February 1992. In acrimonious proceedings, the police were accused of a cover-up and the Scotland Yard detectives were criticized for pressurizing witnesses. The outcome was that the two accused were acquitted.

John Ward pursued his quest with gritty determination and, in March 1993, the Kenyan government agreed to reopen the case. In April 2004, an inquest held in Britain re-examined the case after the failure of the Kenyan authorities to establish who had murdered Julie Ward. The pathologist acting for the Kenyan government admitted signing false postmortem reports in accordance with the official line which was
to treat the death as an accident and not as a murder. There were rumours that a highly placed Kenyan citizen had been involved in the young woman’s death and a cover-up was instigated to protect him.

In 2005, Kenya once more re-opened the investigation and, in 2008, John Ward offered a cash reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer. In the twenty years since his daughter’s death, he is reported to have spent a million pounds in his attempt to solve the case. He remained optimistic that new information would help find those responsible.

Rush Hour Killing

The driver of a sports car was killed with two bullets to the head in central London during the morning rush hour on 9 November 1970. A great deal was known about the dead man but his murderer has never been found.

A young woman cycling to work noticed a red TR5 sports car parked at an odd angle in South Carriage Road near the Albert Hall with its engine still running. Looking through the windscreen, she saw a man slumped over the steering wheel and fetched help.

Unfortunately, in a crime scene blunder, the police moved the car before it could be forensically examined. Consequently, the circumstances in which the driver was shot were unclear. What was certain was that he had been killed with two shots from a small calibre weapon fired at close range.

The dead man was identified as forty-eight-year-old Andre Mizelas, a well-respected Mayfair hairdresser. His movements on that fateful morning were easily reconstructed. He left his home close to Kensington High Street at around 9 a.m., saying goodbye to Betty Warburton, his partner, and climbing into his red sports car. His route took him through Knightsbridge towards his hairdressing salon in Grafton Street. He stopped his car for some reason in South Carriage Road. As the rush hour traffic swirled around him, an unknown gunman shot him dead. No one saw the assailant nor heard the sound of gunfire.

In partnership with his brother, Bernard, Mizelas had set up a hairdressing business, trading as Andre Bernard, with twenty salons and a distinguished list of clients. Despite his relative celebrity status, Mizelas did not mix socially with the Mayfair set. He liked boxing and often attended bouts at the Albert Hall. He was prosperous, owning a town house in Kensington and a holiday home in Portugal, happy in his relationships and, as far as anyone knew, without enemies.

The police questioned many of his friends and business associates without establishing any leads. Reconstructing the crime proved difficult as Mizelas’s car had been moved prematurely and many would-be helpers had left their fingerprints on it. The nature of the fatal shots also posed intriguing questions. It appeared that the two killing bullets had entered the driver’s left temple, travelling from front to rear. This suggested the gunman fired from inside the car and pre-supposes that Mizelas had stopped to pick up a passenger.

Four years after the shooting, and with the killer uncaught, a theory emerged that Andre Mizelas had been killed by a hit man for some obscure reason. There was talk of a man of Mediterranean appearance wearing blue clothing and sunshades who had been seen in the vicinity of the shooting by several motorists. An identikit picture was issued but the individual was never traced. An ITV “Police Five Special” programme on the shooting favoured the theory that Mizelas knew his killer and stopped his car to pick him up.

A development of this theory was the idea that the killer was a woman whose attentions Mizelas had scorned. As a successful hair stylist, he was acquainted with many women and those close to him said he had a quick temper. Perhaps a confrontation in the car got out of hand, ending in violence. That is as good as any other explanation of this unsolved murder.

“Bandits, Bandits!”

On the evening of 24 May 1957, seventy-five-year-old Countess Teresa Lubinska, alighted from a tube train at Gloucester Road on her way home from a visit to friends in
Ealing. A few minutes later, she lay dying from stab wounds in the lift. Her last words were, “Bandits, bandits . . . I was on the platform and I was stabbed.” She had sustained five stab wounds, two of which penetrated her heart. She died before reaching hospital.

The police ruled out robbery as a motive because the Countess was still wearing her jewellery. Her attackers were presumed to have escaped by way of the emergency staircase. Appeals for witnesses to come forward produced no response.

Teresa Lubinska had lived through the Russian Revolution, the German invasion of Poland and survived the horrors of Ravensbruck. Her husband had been killed during the 1917 Revolution and she became strongly anti-Communist and was a staunch Catholic. As an exiled member of the Polish nobility in London, she used every opportunity to criticize the Communist rulers of her homeland.

Over a thousand mourners attended her funeral and detectives mingled with them in the hope of gleaning useful information. For the most part, her friends believed she had been killed because she was an embarrassment to the Polish Communist regime.

Detective Chief Inspector John du Rose and police colleagues staged an experiment at Gloucester Road tube station to test their theory about the attacker’s escape route. They proved that someone running up the stairway could beat the lift by several seconds. Their theory was that the Countess was stabbed while on the platform and collapsed into the lift, which arrived at street level after the attacker had made good his escape.

After an investigation that lasted four years and involved thousands of interviews, detectives concluded that the Countess’s murder was a mugging that went wrong. The murder weapon, described as a penknife with a two-inch blade, hardly sounded like an assassin’s weapon of choice.

The key to the mystery probably lay in the dead woman’s character. She was known to hate bad manners and discourteous behaviour and she was also outspoken. It is possible that she was jostled by someone when she got off the tube train and gave him a piece of her mind. In the confrontation that ensued, this
individual threatened her with a penknife, possibly demanding money. Resistance would have been in her nature and she paid a grim price. It was a sad end for the woman who had been described as “The Angel of Ravensbruck”.

Not One More!

In 2005, Amnesty International estimated the number of women murdered since 1993 in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez as 370.

During that time, young women had been systematically raped, beaten and murdered in and around Ciudad Juarez, which is situated close to the US border. Because of its proximity to the USA, the city had become a centre for migrant workers employed in the sweatshops making cheap goods for export. The city’s population of around one million, doubled with the influx of low-paid workers, as well as drug-dealers, shady businessmen and criminals.

The first victim in what was to become a series of serial killings was Alma Chaviva Farel. She had been beaten, raped and strangled and her body dumped on waste ground. Other victims, usually aged between eleven and thirty-five followed, and were variously stabbed, beaten, strangled and burned. By the end of 1993, there were nineteen such murders. Not all the victims were identified.

Public outrage focused on corrupt policing and confessions extracted by torture from innocent suspects. The official explanation was that a serial killer was at large. What initially appeared as a breakthrough came in 1994 with the arrest of Abdul Latif Sharif. He was a man with a chequered history of violence towards women, including rape and assault in the USA. He plea-bargained his way out of charges and, in May 1994, crossed the border into Mexico and settled in Ciudad Juarez.

Sharif was accused of rape in 1995 and allegedly made a confession. He was tried for rape and murder, found guilty and sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. Although he was named as the Juarez serial killer, the murders continued
unabated, with nineteen victims in 1995. The police admitted that hundreds of people, mostly women, had disappeared in less than a year.

The FBI were called in to review the murders in 1999. In May of that year it was reported that nearly 200 women had been murdered over a ten-year period. Experts in serial killing and criminologists from the USA and Canada pooled their knowledge and concluded that two or three serial killers were at work. As a footnote to their deliberations, a mass grave was found in December 1999 containing nine corpses, three of which were identified as US citizens.

Further mass graves were found in 2001 and 2002 and the body count seemed endless. New suspects were charged and their lawyers received death threats. Various motives for the killings were suggested. These included the idea that the women were used as drug mules and executed by gangs when they had completed their tasks; that the women were murdered by organ harvesters; and that the killings were attributable to a satanic cult.

In February 2004, Jane Fonda, the Hollywood film actress, led a protest in Ciudad Juarez demanding action against the murderers. Their demand was
Ni Una Mas
– not one more. Allegations implying that the police, apart from being inept, were either involved in the killings or covering up for the perpetrators were rife. The police investigation was riddled with incompetence; many victims remained unidentified, others were misidentified. DNA evidence was botched, files were destroyed, suspects were framed and innocent people were tortured into making confessions. And still the killing went on, leading to the conclusion that a powerful cartel existed that exploited young women for its own ends and which was protected by a combination of drug barons and political and business interests.

“Started With A Bang . . .”

The murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell, the “Wizard of Whist”, in his home while he sat reading his mail has been an abiding mystery for over eighty years.

Forty-seven-year-old Elwell was an acknowledged expert at cards and had written books on the subject of playing bridge. His expertise had earned him a good living and he enjoyed a stylish life in his three-storey house in New York. He was divorced and devoted to female companionship for which he had a specially furnished bedroom.

During the evening of 10 June 1920, he dined out with friends and went to the theatre, returning home at around 2.30 a.m. When his housekeeper arrived for work at 8.10 a.m., she was startled to see her employer, dressed in pyjamas and sitting in a chair in the living room. More distressing was the bullet wound in his forehead between the eyes. Elwell was still breathing and an ambulance was called. He died later in hospital.