World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (33 page)

There was not a huge reaction immediately: it was just another New York horror story. Then, three months later, in October, Berkowitz struck again. Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan were also sitting in a parked car when a shot rang out, hitting Denaro. The pair survived. The bullet matched the one that had killed Lauria.

A month later, Berkowitz shot his next victims, Donna DeMasi and Joanna Lomino, outside a house in Queens. Both survived, though DeMasi was left paralysed as the bullet had struck her spine. By now, police and public alike were aware that a deranged gunman was on the loose.

Berkowitz waited until the New Year before killing again. In January 1977 he shot Christine Freund dead as she sat in a car with her boyfriend John Diel. Next, in March, he shot Virginia Voskerichian dead as she walked home. A month later, he went for a couple again. This time, both Valentina Suriani and her boyfriend Alexander Esau were killed instantly. A note was found at the scene, addressed to the policeman leading the investigation:

‘Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli, I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon (sic) hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the “Son of Sam”. I am a little brat. When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. “Go out and kill,” commands father Sam.’

The note was leaked to the press in early June and public anxiety mounted. Then, in June, Berkowitz struck again, shooting Salvatore Lupo and Judy Placido as they sat in their car. Fortunately, both survived.

More letters from the ‘Son of Sam’ followed, both to the police and to the press. It was a boiling hot summer but New Yorkers, especially those living in Queens, were afraid to go out. The police investigation was drowning in too much information, too little of it concrete. Among the leads they did not have time to follow up was a tip from Yonkers resident Sam Carr, who had been receiving anonymous letters about his dog, followed by his dog being shot. Carr had come up with a suspect, a neighbour called David Berkowitz.

The police did not act in time to prevent Berkowitz from striking again. In July, Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz parked their car, feeling safe because they were in Brooklyn, not Queens. Berkowitz shot them both, killing Moskowitz and blinding Violante.

Following this assault, the police were told that a man had been seen fleeing the scene in a car that had received a parking ticket. A check on parking tickets produced the name of David Berkowitz, among others. Cross-referencing this with the tip from Sam Carr, the police were confident they had found their man.

They staked out Berkowitz’s house and found his car parked outside with a rifle lying on the front seat. When Berkowitz emerged they arrested him and he immediately confessed. Though evidently a paranoid schizophrenic, he was found sane and guilty and sentenced to 365 years in prison, a sentence he is still serving.

While in prison he has become an evangelical Christian and his church maintains a website on which Berkowitz publishes his, mostly religious, thoughts. In recent years, the Spike Lee film
Summer of Sam
has reminded New York of the time when one paranoid loner held the entire city to ransom.

Straight a for Murder

Charlie Whitman was to all appearances a straight-A American. At one time he’d been the youngest Eagle Scout in the World. He’d graduated seventh in his class at a Catholic School in Lake Worth, Florida; and he’d won a Navy and Marine Corps scholarship to the University of Texas in Austin. Yet in one morning, on August 1st 1966, this 6-foot-tall, twenty-five-year-old killed fifteen people and wounded another twenty-eight in the bloodiest single rampage within living memory.

What exactly was in his mind when he took the service elevator up to the observation-deck on the clock tower next to the University of Texas’s administration-building, we will never know. But he was carrying six rifles and pistols with more than 700 rounds of ammunition, not to mention three hunting knives, a machete and a hatchet.

He had already stabbed to death first his mother and then his wife, leaving notes beside their bodies saying how much he loved them. He also said that he hated his father and that life was no longer worth living.

He meant, then, to die. But first there was business to attend to. So at the entrance to the observation deck he killed the receptionist and two visitors. Then he went out onto the deck itself and, protected by 4-foot high stone parapets, he started shooting anyone he could see. One of the people he hit was crossing a street 500 yards away.

When the police arrived they knew there was little they could do from the ground. While a police marksman in a light aircraft distracted Whitman, an team of police and volunteers entered the tower unseen and then climb up to the deck. Whitman fought back, but died in a hail of shotgun fire, just an hour and a half after he’d arrived.

A Taste for Flesh

The most infamous white cannibal of the American West was Alferd [sic] G. Packer. Famous ‘60s folk-singer Phil Ochs wrote a song about him, and Colorado University students named their dining room in his honour. He was also the recipient of a wonderful comic epitaph: ‘There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County,’ his trial judge told him, ‘and you ate five of them, you depraved Republican son of a bitch!’.

In the autumn of 1873, Packer agreed to guide a party of nineteen gold prospectors into the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado. He was in his mid-twenties, already a veteran of the Union Army, and supposedly knew the area inside out. If so, his decision to leave for the high country in autumn seems rather strange.

For several weeks the party headed south-eastwards from their Salt Lake City starting point. They found no gold, but did manage to lose some of their supplies in a botched river-crossing. Winter was fast approaching, and the whole party was close to starvation when they stumbled, by luck, into Chief Ouray’s Gunnison Valley camp. Ouray gave Packer and his party all they could spare, and earnestly entreated them to give up their folly while they still could. Ten listened, and headed back to Salt Lake City. The nine who refused to abandon their gold fixation were advised to follow the course of the Gunnison River.

Packer had other ideas. The party’s intended destination was near the source of the Rio Grande, and he claimed he knew a short cut across the mountains. Four of his nine followers decided they should stick with Ouray’s advice, but five took the fatal decision to follow Packer. They only had two days’ worth of food, and a blizzard soon brought them to a hungry halt. For a while they lived on rosebuds and pine gum, which probably taste worse than they sound. Either way, they were not enough to live on.

Of the four who followed Ouray’s advice, two died of starvation. The other two reached the Los Pinos Indian Agency in February 1874. The Agent Charles Adams supervised their recovery before sending them back down to civilization. Packer showed up a month later, alone. He also pleaded for food, but he did not look that hungry. When Adams asked him what had happened to his companions, he said they had deserted him. Adams was suspicious, but he had no way of disproving the story. He fed Packer and let him go.

The evidence Adams needed trickled in over the next two months. Packer himself was one witness. He failed to discard guns and knives which were later recognized as belonging to the other members of his group, and he let slip a stream of interesting details while drunk in public.

This was enough for Adams to have him arrested, but a second piece of evidence was provided by Indians. Just before reaching the Agency, they noticed some pieces of what looked like strips of human flesh. Adams put two and two together – Packer had dumped his supply before coming in. Adams confronted Packer with the pieces of flesh.

Packer may not have been the brightest person ever, but he had had plenty of time to work out a story. The other five had indeed been killed, he said, but he had only killed one of them, and that in self defence. The first man, Swan, had been killed while he, Packer, was out gathering wood, and was already being cut up for consumption when he returned. The food had not lasted long, and Packer himself had suggested that another man, the corpulent Miller, should be next. One of the others had split his skull with a hatchet. Two more men had gone the same way, leaving only Packer and a man named Bell. ‘One day Bell said: “I can stand it no longer!” and he rushed at me like a famished tiger, at the same time attempting to strike me with his gun. I killed him with a hatchet’.

It seemed like a good story until a painter named Reynolds came across the five bodies during a search for picturesque slices of wilderness. Five of them were lined up in a row. Four of the men had been shot in the back of the head; the fifth, Miller, had had his skull smashed in with a rifle butt. Packer’s story had been a tissue of lies.

He escaped before charges could be brought, and spent at least some of the next nine years living the outlaw life in Wyoming. He was eventually recognized by another gold prospector, arrested, and brought back to Lake City, Colorado for trial. His story had been rearranged to accommodate the known facts, but he still insisted that he had only killed the one man, and that in self-defence. The jury found him less than credible, and voted for the death penalty, but Packer was not finished yet.

An appeal was granted, the execution stayed, a retrial ordered. This time he was sentenced to forty years on five counts of manslaughter, but only served seventeen. He always swore he was innocent, but when forensic scientists re-examined the skeletal remains in 1989, they found that the four men had all been shot with the same gun – Packer’s.

This Charming Man

Everyone liked Theodore Bundy. Even the judge at his Miami trial in July 1979 took to him. After sentencing Bundy to death, he said:

‘Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely. It’s a tragedy to this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer.’

But Bundy’s good looks and intelligence were murderous. For between January 1974 and January 1978, when he was finally arrested in Pensacola, Florida, he brutalised and killed perhaps as many as thirty-six girls and young women in four states.

The first of these states was Washington, where the disappearances began in the Seattle area at the beginning of 1974. One after another, within six months, seven young women vanished, seemingly into thin air. One of them had been abducted from a rented room; another had left a bar with a man at two in the morning. But the others had simply been out for a walk or on their way somewhere: a cinema or a concert or home. Except for bloodstains in the rented room, they left no trace at all.

In the summer of that year, there were more disappearances, including two in one day from a Washington lakeside resort. But there were also, for the first time, clues. For a good looking young man with his arm in a sling – and introducing himself as Ted – had been going around the resort asking young women if they could help him load a sailboat onto the roof of his car; and one of the disappeared had been seen going off with him. The scattered remains of both women – and of yet another unknown victim – were found by hunters a few miles away two months later.

A massive manhunt began, producing huge numbers of calls from the public and more than 2,000 potential suspects – among them, thanks to a woman’s call, Theodore (Ted) Bundy. But by that time he’d moved to Salt Lake City in Utah to study law; and it was there that the disappearances resumed.

There were three in October 1974; one the teenage daughter of a local police chief, who was later found – raped, strangled and buried – in the Wassatch Mountains. Then, at the beginning of November, one of his Salt Lake City victims – whom ‘a good-looking man’ posing as a police officer had lured into his car and had then attacked with a crowbar – managed to escape and to give a description to the police.

Bundy was lucky this time for she failed to recognise him in a photograph the police later showed her. But after one last abduction and murder in Salt Lake City, he from then on began to operate only out-of state, over the border in Colorado. Between January and July, five more young women disappeared, this time two of the bodies were discovered quickly. One, had been beaten to death with a rock. The other had been raped and then bludgeoned.

Bundy, in the end, was picked up by accident, as a possible burglary suspect. But police at the scene found a crowbar, an ice-pick and a ski-mask in his trunk; and in his apartment, maps and brochures of Colorado. Hairs from the interior of the car were found to match those of the police-chief’s dead daughter. He was extradited to Colorado to stand trial; but then he escaped – twice.

The first time he was quickly found hiding out in the mountains. But the second time it took police more than forty days to catch him, and by then – this time in Florida – another three young women were dead, one of them with teeth marks on her body; three other women had been savagely beaten but survived.

The subsequent trial did little to uncover Bundy’s reasons for killing – for the sheer viciousness and voracity of his sexual attacks. But in an interview with a detective after his arrest, he remarked:

‘Sometimes I feel like a vampire’

and later, on Death Row, though never confessing to the murders, he speculated to two writers about an early career as a Peeping Tom and a massive consumer of pornography. He also talked about an ‘entity’ inside him that drove him to rape and murder.