World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (18 page)

It was little more than a week, however, before the murderer struck again. The victim was another prostitute, Annie Chapman, known as ‘Dark Annie’. Like Polly Nichols, she had been killed by a knife slash to the throat, but this time the killer had disembowelled her, pulled out her entrails and draped them over a shoulder, and then cut out her vagina and ovaries. What struck investigators, apart from the sheer horror of the scene, was the precision of the cuts; it seemed possible that the killer had medical training and was familiar with dissecting bodies in the post-mortem room.

Twice In One Night

This gruesome crime already had the public in an uproar, but it was as nothing compared to the reaction that followed the murderer’s next atrocity on 30 September. This time, he killed not once but twice on the same night. The first victim was Elizabeth Stride, ‘Long Liz’, a seamstress and occasional prostitute. She had been killed by a knife wound to the throat, but there was no other mutilation. One can only presume that the killer was interrupted in his work, and thus dissatisfied, because, before the night was over, he also killed prostitute Catherine Eddowes – and this time the attack had all his characteristic savagery. In addition, someone had written on the wall the strange message: ‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’ The police were not sure if the killer had written it, or what it meant, so the investigating officer ordered it to be removed to avoid anti-Jewish hysteria developing.

Letters

Just before the double murder, the Central News Agency had received a letter that purported to be from the killer. There had already been many such letters, most of them obvious hoaxes, but when a second letter came from the same writer within hours of the double murder, the agency passed them on to the police. The writer signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’, which caused a sensation in the press. Now, the murderer had a name.

Two weeks later another letter arrived, sent to George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. It appeared to have a different author from the previous ones – this correspondent was far less literate – but was even more chilling. In place of a return address it simply said ‘From Hell’. Enclosed in it was a piece of human kidney, which the writer claimed belonged to Eddowes. Eddowes had indeed had a kidney removed by her killer.

Unimaginable Carnage

Three more weeks went by, and then the Ripper struck again. Once again, the victim was a prostitute, Mary Kelly. In a change she was killed indoors, in her room in Miller’s Court. Mary Kelly’s body was utterly destroyed; she was partially skinned,disembowelled, grotesquely arranged and numerous trophies were taken, including her uterus and a foetus taken from it (Kelly had been pregnant at the time). It was a scene of unimaginable carnage and one that left Whitechapel – and the world – bracing itself for the Ripper’s next atrocity.

However, the next killing never came. There was a knife murder of a prostitute two years later, and another two years after that, but neither had any of the hallmarks of a Ripper killing. As mysteriously as he had appeared, the Ripper had vanished.

Since that time, detectives – both amateur and professional – have speculated about who he (or even she in some far-fetched accounts) was. To date, suspects have included Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Eddy, in a rage against the prostitute who supposedly gave him syphilis; Sir William Gull, the Queen’s surgeon, as part of a conspiracy to cover up the fact that Prince Eddy had conceived an illegitimate child with a Whitechapel girl (another theory sadly lacking in evidence); and Liverpool businessman James Maybrick, supposed author of
The Ripper Diaries
, published in 1994 and generally deemed to be fake.

The truth is that we shall probably never know who he was, or why he killed so brutally. However, there is a likely explanation for the sudden end to his reign of terror, put forward at the time by Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

He speculated that ‘the murderer’s brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller’s Court, and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations that they confined him to an asylum’.

Just a Gigolo

In 1946, in post-war London, Neville Heath looked just like the man he claimed to be: a dashing ex-Royal-Air-Force officer, a war hero. He had fair hair and blue eyes, an air of romantic recklessness; and, like a man who has successfully cheated death, he loved to party. To women hungry for men he must have seemed made to measure: an embodiment of the gallantry that had led to victory – and of the newly carefree spirit of the times.

This nightclub Lothario, though, was not at all what he looked like. For not only was he a gigolo with a criminal record, but he also had the distinction of having been court-martialled by three separate services: by the British Air Force in 1937, the British Army in 1941, and the South African Air Force in 1945. His offences – for being absent without leave, stealing a car, issuing worthless cheques, indiscipline and wearing medals to which he wasn’t entitled and the like – all pointed in one direction: Neville Heath was a con man and poseur.

He used women for money after he’d got them into his bed – as he could all too easily. But he preferred – when that palled – to beat them.

In March 1945, after guests at a London hotel reported hearing screams, a house detective burst into a bedroom to find Heath brutally whipping a girl, naked and bound hand and foot, beneath him. Neither the hotel nor the girl wanted publicity, and within two months Heath was at it again – though this time with a more willing participant, a 32-year-old occasional film extra known in London clubs as Ocelot Margie. In May, security in another hotel intervened late at night as she lay under Heath’s lash.

Ocelot Margie, though, had no complaints to make. For she was a masochist, haunting the clubs in search of bondage and domination by any man she could find willing. She obviously found Heath to her taste. For a month later she arranged to meet him at a club, and then returned with him to the same hotel for a further session. She wasn’t to make it out alive.

In the early afternoon of the following day, a chambermaid found her naked dead body. She had been tied at the ankles and murderously whipped, and she had extensive bruising on her face and chin, as if someone had used extreme violence to keep her mouth shut. Her nipples had been almost bitten off, and something unnaturally large had been shoved into her vagina and then rotated, causing extensive bleeding.

The police quickly issued Heath’s name and description to the press. But by this time he was in the south-coast resort town of Worthing, meeting the parents of a young woman he had earlier seduced after a promise of marriage. He quickly told her – and later her parents – his version of the murder: that he had lent his hotel room to Gardner to use for a tryst with another man and had later found her dead. He sent a letter to the police in London to the same effect, adding that he would later send on to them the murder weapon he’d found on the scene. Then he disappeared.

The murder weapon, of course, never arrived. But the police still failed to issue a photograph of Heath, and so he was free on the south coast for another thirteen days, posing, rather unimaginatively, as Group Captain Rupert Brooke – the name of a famously handsome poet who died in the First World War. During that time, a young woman holidaymaker vanished after having been seen having dinner with ‘Brooke’ at his hotel; and it was suggested that the ‘Group Captain’ should contact the police with his evidence. He finally did so, but was recognised and held for questioning. In the pocket of a jacket at his hotel police later found a left-luggage ticket for a suitcase, which contained, among other things, clothes labelled with the name ‘Heath,’ a woman’s scarf and a blood-stained riding-crop.

On the evening of the day Heath was returned to London and charged, the naked body of his second victim was found in a wooded valley not far from his hotel. Her cut hands had been tied together; her throat had been slashed; and after death her body had been mutilated with a knife before being hidden in bushes. Heath, though, was never tried for this murder. He came to the Old Bailey on September 24th 1946 charged only with the murder of Margery Gardner – and he was quickly found guilty by the jury. He was hanged at London’s Pentonville Prison the following month.

The Killings of a Clown

Why John Wayne Gacy, the so-called Killer Clown, was never suspected of involvement in the disappearance of a succession of young men in the Chicago area in the 1970s, remains a mystery. The baby-faced, twice-married homosexual had, after all, been earlier sentenced to ten years in an Iowa facility on charges including kidnap and attempted sodomy. On probation in Chicago after his early release, he’d been accused of picking up a teenager and trying to force him to have sex, and of attempting the same thing, at gunpoint, with an older man at his house. His name had even appeared on police files four times between 1972 and 1978 in connection with missing-persons cases.

To cap it all, a full eight months before his final arrest in December 1979, a twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan called Jeffrey Rignall told police that, after accepting a ride from an overweight man driving a black Oldsmobile, he’d been attacked with a rag soaked in chloroform, and then driven to a house, where he’d been re-chloroformed, whipped and repeatedly raped, before being dumped, unconscious, in Lincoln Park hours later. When the police said his evidence was too little to go on, Rignall spent days after leaving hospital sitting in a hired car at motorway entrances. Finally he spotted the Oldsmobile, followed it and wrote down the number. It belonged to thirty-seven-year-old John Wayne Gacy.

At this point the police did issue a warrant, but they failed to act on it. It was three months before they arrested Gacy – and then only on a misdemeanour. He was set free to go on killing.

The reason the police were so lax was probably because Gacy, on the face of it, was prosperous, active in his community and well-connected. He had a construction business with a large number of employees, an expensive house – and was something of a local celebrity. Dressed up as Pogo the Clown, he was a regular entertainer at street parades and children’s parties. He was also active in Democratic Party politics. He gave donations to the Party, organized fêtes for it and on one occasion co-ordinated a Party event for 20,000 people of Polish descent, at which he was photographed with First Lady Rosalyn Carter.

The truth was, though, that it was all front. Gacy used his construction company as, in effect, a recruiting-agency, a way of getting close to his victims. He gave jobs to young men and boys from the surrounding Chicago suburbs, and he picked up others at the local Greyhound station, luring them to his house with the promise of work. He was also a regular cruiser in Chicago’s gay district, preying on yet other young men whose disappearance would not be much noticed. They, too, would end up among the whips, handcuffs and guns at Gacy’s house.

He was caught in the end more by accident than design – simply because a mother came to pick up her son one night from his job at a Des Plaines pharmacy. The teenager said he had to go off for a few moments to see a man about a high-paying summer job. He never returned. When the police later visited the pharmacy they noticed it had recently been renovated – and the pharmacist told them that the renovation company’s boss was probably the man who had offered the kid a job: a man called Gacy.

When the police called at Gacy’s house to question him about the teenager’s disappearance, they opened a trapdoor leading to a crawl space below the house and found the remains of seven bodies. Another twenty-one were subsequently found, either dug into quicklime or buried in the area around the house. Gacy quickly confessed to their murders, and to the murder of another five young men, whose bodies he’d simply dumped into the river because he’d run out of space. He’d sodomised and tortured them all. One eerie detail of Gacy’s modus operandi emerged in the coming months. He’d offer to show his victims what he called ‘the handcuff trick,’ promising that if they put on a pair of handcuffs they’d be able to get out of them within a few seconds. Of course they couldn’t. Then he’d say,

‘The way to get out of the handcuffs is to have the key. That’s the real trick. . .’

He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1980.

Gacy, the Killer Clown.