100 Most Infamous Criminals (10 page)

It was Fred and Alvin Karpis, when they came out of jail together, who first set the ball rolling. A few days after a robbery, they killed a sheriff who was inspecting the De Soto they’d used for it. So they took it on the lam from Ma’s shack in Thayer, Missouri to a furnished house in St. Paul, taking Ma and her live-in lover, Arthur Dunlop, with them. Dunlop, though, wasn’t to last long. For after living quietly for a while, they narrowly escaped a police-raid on their new headquarters. They must have decided that it was Dunlop who’d betrayed them. For a day later his naked, bullet-riddled body was found by a lake near Webster, Wisconsin. There was a blood-stained woman’s glove beside it.

Ma Barker headed a family of criminals

From now on Ma seems only to have trusted ex-cons and escapers from one or other of her three boys’ jails. Several of these now joined Fred, Alvin Karpis and her; when the growing gang took a bank in Fort Scott, Kansas in June 1932, they used the proceeds to stage a welcome home party for one of Fred’s ex-cellmates. Three months later, with some of the $240,000 that they heisted from the Cloud County Bank in Concordia, Kansas, they bought ‘Doc’s’ parole from the Oklahoma Pen – and even ‘two years of absence’ for his partner-in crime, Volney Davis. Leavenworth, though, proved a more difficult proposition. Hermann stayed behind bars.

December 1932: Minneapolis, Third Northwestern Bank – two policeman and a civilian killed. April 1933: Fairbury, Nebraska, Fairbury National Bank – one gang member killed. June 1933: Minneapolis, Arthur Hamm Jr, of the Hamm Brewing Company kidnapped – yield, $100,000. The kidnappings, the bank-heists and the killings went on through 1933. In South St. Paul, one policeman was killed, another crippled for life. In Chicago, a traffic cop was gunned down while enquiring about an accident with the gang’s car, unaware that bank messengers had been recently been held up nearby. The pressure on Ma’s boys and the offers of rewards, though, began to pile up; and it was because of this, perhaps, that they decided in January 1934 to go for the big one.

They’d first decided simply to rob the Commercial State Bank in St. Paul. Then they decided to kidnap the bank’s president. After a month’s negotiations about the ransom and conditions, they took the enormous sum of $200,000 – enough, they thought, to buy them new identities and new lives. Fred and ‘Doc’ Barker, Alvin Karpis and a few of the others had their fingerprints shaved off and their faces surgically altered. And then they all scattered to locations across the United States, from Montana to Florida, Nevada, Ohio and elsewhere.

A year after the kidnapping, for all this, ‘Doc’ was picked up in the apartment of his Chicago girlfriend and in it was found a map of Florida, with the area around Ocala and Lake Weir circled. This coincided with a tip the Feds had had: that Ma and Fred were hiding somewhere in the south, where there was a famous alligator known to locals as ‘Old Joe’. Within days, then, they raided a cottage on the shore of Lake Weir. Ma and Fred put up a fight, but by the time the shooting was over, they were both dead, Ma with a machine gun still in her hand. There were enough weapons in the cottage, J. Edgar Hoover later said,

‘to keep a regiment at bay.’

The rest of the gang were soon picked up, in ones and twos, in Toledo, Ohio and Allandale, Florida; and finally Alvin Karpis was run to ground in New Orleans. Years later, after being sentenced to life imprisonment, Karpis, whose real name was Francis Albin Karpavicz, taught Charlie Manson the guitar.

David Berkowitz

O
n April 17th 1977, a letter was found on a Bronx street in New York from a postal worker called David Berkowitz. It was addressed to a police captain and read in part:

The ‘Son of Sam’ terrified New Yorkers

‘I am deeply hurt by your calling me a woman-hater. I am not. But I am a monster… I am a little brat… I am the Son of Sam.’

Nearby was a parked car in which Berkowitz’s latest victims, a young courting couple, had been arbitrarily gunned down. Valentina Suriani had died immediately; Alexander Esau died later in hospital, with three bullets in his head.

No one, of course, knew then that the ‘Son of Sam’ was the pudgy twenty-four-year-old Berkowitz. But for nine months he’d been terrorizing the late-night streets of Queens and the Bronx. He’d killed three people and wounded four, seemingly without any motive at all. New York City Mayor Abe Beame had held a press conference to announce: ‘We have a savage killer on the loose.’

The first attack had come out of the blue on July 29th 1976 at about one o’clock in the morning, when two young women, one a medical technician, the other a student nurse, were sitting chatting in the front seats of an Oldsmobile parked on a Bronx street. A man had walked up to them, pulled a gun out of a paper bag and fired five shots, killing one of them and wounding the other in the thigh. Four months later, the same gun had been used, again after midnight, against two girls sitting outside a house in Queens. A man had walked up to them and asked directions; then he’d simply opened fire. Both young women had been badly wounded, and one of them, with a bullet lodged in her spine, paralysed.

Berkowitz seemed to choose his victims at random

In between these two shootings, there had been yet another one – it turned out later from forensic evidence – using the same .44. Another young couple had been sitting in front of a tavern – again at night and once more in Queens – when someone had fired shots through the back window. The man had been rushed to hospital, but had recovered; the woman had not been hit.

The panic really began, though, with the mysterious killer’s fourth and fifth attacks. On March 8th 1977, a young Armenian student, Virginia Voskerichian, was shot in the face at close range only a few hundred yards from her home in Queens, and instantly killed. Forty days later, with the deaths of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau and the discovery of the letter, it became clear that the killings weren’t going to stop. More than that, the killer now had a name – and it was a name to stir up nightmares.

‘I love to hunt. Prowling the streets, looking for fair game – tasty meat,’

wrote the ‘Son of Sam’.

Restaurants, bars and discos in Queens and the Bronx were by now closing early for lack of business. People stayed home and kept off the streets at night, despite the deployment of 100 extra patrolmen and the setting-up of a special squad of detectives. For no one had any idea when ‘the Son of Sam’ might strike again, and the nearest description the police had been able to come up with was that he was a ‘neurotic, schizophrenic and paranoid’ male, who probably believed himself possessed by demons…

He could, from that description, be any man at all – that was what was so frightening. He could even be a policeman himself – which might explain why he’d proved so elusive. This idea began to take hold when he struck yet again in the early hours of a late-June morning, shooting through the windscreen of a car in Queens and wounding another young couple. All the police could do in response to the gathering panic was once more to beef up foot-patrols in anticipation of the anniversary of his first murder a year before.

Nothing happened, though, on the night of July 29th 1977; and when he did strike again, it wasn’t in his usual hunting-ground at all – but in Brooklyn. In the early hours of July 31st, he fired through the windshield at a pair of young lovers sitting in their car near the sea-front at Coney Island. The woman died in hospital; the man recovered, but was blinded.

This time, though, the ‘Son of Sam’ had made a mistake. For a woman out walking her dog at about the same time not far away saw two policemen ticketing a car parked near a fire hydrant and then, a few minutes later, a young man jumping into the car and driving off. As it happened only one car, a Ford Galaxie, was ticketed that night for parking at a hydrant – and it was registered to a David Berkowitz in Yonkers.

When approached the next day by the police officer in charge of the search, Berkowitz instantly recognized him from the TV, and said,

‘Inspector Dowd? You finally got me.’

As a figure of nightmare, Berkowitz was something of a let-down: an overweight loner with a moronic smile who lived in squalor, was pathologically shy of women and probably still a virgin. He later said he heard demons urging him to kill, among them a 6,000-year-old man who had taken over the body of a dog he had shot. On the walls of his apartment he’d scrawled a series of demonic slogans:

‘In this hole lives the wicked king’; ‘Kill for my Master’; and ‘I turn children into killers’.

Berkowitz was judged sane, and was sentenced to a total of 365 years in prison. His apartment became a place of pilgrimage for a ghoulish fan-club; and he himself has since made a great deal of money from articles, a book and the film rights to his life.

Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono

K
enneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono were cousins – and in their way opposites. Still, they made a good team. For Buono was all macho, a street-tough, hanging out with hookers and forever parading his Italian connections, while Bianchi was a lot more subtle and plausible. He read books on psychology, applied to join the LA Police, and even rode in patrol cars with cops who – though they didn’t know it – were out there looking for him. He was also, no doubt, keeping an eye at the time on exactly how the cops approached people on the street. For it was almost certainly Bianchi who persuaded the women they killed that he and his cousin were undercover cops – and sweet-talked them into their car.

Bianchi, who’d been raised by foster parents in the east, arrived in Glendale, California in 1977, to stay with cousin Buono, who ran an upholstery business out of his garage. In October of that year the first victim of a killer who came to be called the ‘Hillside Strangler’ was found near Chevy Chase Drive; and within two weeks there was another, this time dumped among the gravestones of Forest Lawn Cemetery. Both women were naked, and the body of the second had been carefully washed – apart from the marks of ropes tied round her wrists, ankles and neck, there were no clues at all.

By the middle of December, seven more bodies had been found, all women and young girls between the ages of 12 and 28. Most, though not all, had been part-time prostitutes. They were naked and most had been tied up, raped and sodomized before they’d been strangled and then carefully washed. All of them had been dumped in places where they could be easily found, often close to police precinct-houses – as if the ‘Strangler’ were making fun of the cops’ inability to find him.

There was one more killing, in February 1978, when the body of yet another young woman was found, this time in the trunk of a car. But then they stopped. It was only much later that the police discovered that all ten bodies had been placed in a rough circle round Angelo Buono’s house.

They discovered it because almost a year later, in January 1979, Bianchi, who’d moved to Bellingham, Washington because of the mess in Buono’s house, raped and strangled two co-eds and made the mistake of shoving their bodies into the trunk of one of the coeds’ car. They were found relatively quickly, and Bianchi had been seen with one of them. He was brought in for questioning.