100 Most Infamous Criminals (13 page)

At the age of about 18, looking for adventure, Longabaugh had travelled with relatives by covered wagon to Colorado; his first nickname-cum-alias had been Kid Chicago. But in 1888, he’d been arrested for rustling near Sundance, Wyoming and forever after he was known as the Sundance Kid. As for Butch, he seems to have worked briefly as a butcher in Rock Springs between bank- and railroad-heists – and the name stuck.

Butch was a charmer; the Kid, more aloof; both were accomplished escape artists. They each served just one prison stretch, the Kid after the 1888 rustling, and Butch in 1894 for – of all things – stealing a horse. For a while they went their separate ways. The Kid seems to have worked solo. But that was not Butch’s way: when he came out of Laramie State Penitentiary after a two-year sentence, he formed a gang which soon became famous as the Wild Bunch. He and a shifting membership, which included Elzy Lay and Harry ‘Kid Curry’ Logan, went after banks and mine payrolls – and between jobs holed up, first in Robbers’ Roost, Utah and then in the more celebrated Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, a hideaway that had been used by Jesse and Frank James, among others.

It was at Hole-in-the-Wall that Butch and the Kid seem to have joined forces again. In 1899 and 1900, with a series of brilliantly planned hold-ups – beginning with a train robbery at Wilcox, Wyoming which netted between thirty- and sixty-thousand dollars – they became both celebrities and very much wanted men. At some point Butch tried to make a deal with both the law and the Union Pacific Railroad – his freedom in return for future good conduct. But when negotiations broke down, the Wild Bunch promptly struck again: they held up another train in Tipton, Wyoming in August 1900, followed swiftly by a bank hold-up in Winnemucca, Nevada, which yielded another $32,000.

To celebrate, the Bunch went south, to Fort Worth, Texas – and made the big mistake of having a group photograph taken there. For detectives from the Wells Fargo Company and the Pinkerton Agency soon seized on it and had it published both all over the country and as far away, ultimately, as Britain and Tahiti. Bounty hunters pursued them, and to escape the heat, Butch, the Kid and the Kid’s lover Etta Place, made their way, first to New York – where the Kid bought Etta a Tiffany watch – and then by steamer to Argentina.

They bought a ranch in Cholilo; Etta and the Kid went back twice to the US on visits. But then they began to run out of money and in March 1906 they started holding up banks again, first in San Luis Province and then in Bahia Blanca. In 1907, they robbed a train in Bolivia and then, swinging back into Argentina, another bank. Etta went back to the States and disappeared, and finally so did Butch and the Kid – either into death or oblivion.

The usual version of the story is that Butch and the Kid were cornered by the military in San Vicente, southern Bolivia, after holding up a mine payroll. There was a furious gun-battle; the Kid was fatally wounded and Butch, with his last two bullets, shot, first the Kid, then himself. Butch’s sister, though, swore that he paid a visit to his family in Utah in 1925 and that he died twelve years later somewhere in the northwest of the United States. There are also rumours that the Kid joined Etta in Mexico City and died there in 1957. A mining boss, with whom they were friendly, had deliberately misidentified the bodies.

Mark David Chapman

M
ark David Chapman wanted to be John Lennon. He collected Beatles records; he’d played in a band; he’d even married an older Japanese woman, just like his hero. But when it finally dawned on him he couldn’t be John Lennon, he first attempted suicide, and then he decided that Lennon himself couldn’t be John Lennon either.

At the beginning of December 1980, Chapman flew to New York, determined, he said later,

‘to go out in a blaze of glory.’

If he couldn’t get near John Lennon, he said, he’d shoot himself in the head on top of the Statue of Liberty, because ‘no one had killed themselves there before.’ But Lennon proved all too accessible. He regularly signed autographs for fans outside his home in the Dakota Building in Manhattan; Chapman joined them there on the morning of December 8th, holding up a copy of Lennon’s
Double Fantasy
album for his signature.

Mark David Chapman – ‘clearly not a sane man’

He might have left it at that, he later said. But he didn’t. For that night, when Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono got back from a recording session, Chapman, who’d waited for hours, calmly walked up to them as they were getting out of their limousine and fired five bullets from a Charter Arms .38 into Lennon’s body. Then he simply waited on the sidewalk, holding his signed album and reading a copy of J.D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
, until the police arrived.

At preliminary court hearings and at the eventual trial, the prosecution described the murder as a ‘deliberate, premeditated execution,’ pointing out that Chapman had not only stalked Lennon before killing him, but also had previous convictions for armed robbery, kidnapping and drugs offences. The defence painted Chapman as someone with an ‘incurable disease’ who had committed a ‘monstrously irrational crime’ – he was clearly ‘not a sane man.’ What neither side seemed to recognize was that in killing John Lennon, Chapman had actually solved the central problem of his life. For he had not only eliminated a role-model it had proved impossible to live up to, he had also made sure that his own name would be from now on inextricably linked to his hero’s.

When asked to say something in his defence, Chapman simply read out a passage from
Catcher in the Rye
. He was given a sentence of twenty years to life and recommended for psychiatric treatment. A year later, when visited by a British journalist, he was still reading
Catcher in the Rye
.

Caryl Chessman

C
aryl Chessman was famous, not for his life, but for his death. When he finally went to the gas chamber in 1960, after twelve years on San Quentin’s Death Row, editorials all over Europe denounced his execution as ‘appalling’ and ‘monstrous.’ There were violent demonstrations in front of American embassies in Portugal, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela and a cry of condemnation from public figures worldwide. In life, Chessman might have been a violent petty criminal. But in death – and in his preparation for it – his name was amongst the best-known on the planet.

Part of the reason for the outcry was that, so far as was known, Chessman had never killed anyone. Yes, he’d been a criminal from his teens: he’d served time for robbery and escape. But the crimes that had taken him to Death Row were acts of what were called, in the prim language of the times, ‘sexual perversion,’ forced on two young women he abducted from their cars in the hills above Hollywood in January 1948. The two victims provoked enormous sympathy, of course: one was a married polio sufferer who’d only recently come out of hospital; and the second, a teenager, was later consigned to a mental asylum as irredeemably troubled – she was still there when Chessman was executed.

The evidence, for its part, was more or less watertight. But Chessman had the whole law book thrown at him. He was convicted on seventeen charges in all, including two under what was known in California as the ‘little Lindbergh Law,’ which covered ‘kidnapping with intent to rob with bodily harm’. It was these that carried the death penalty.

For twelve years, from 1948 onwards, Chessman literally fought for his life – it became his career. He wrote a novel and three other books about his experiences – one of which,
Cell 2455 Death Row
, became a best-seller. With money from royalties and with the prison library as his basic resource, he launched suit after suit in state and federal courts, attempting to show that he’d been denied due process. The California attorney-general disagreed. But, though Chessman’s execution-date was seven times set, he was reprieved seven times by judges in different jurisdictions, including the US Supreme Court.

By the time of his seventh reprieve, Chessman had become famous, a hero, a totem of anti-American sentiment across the globe; and he even played a part, to some degree, in affairs of state. For his eighth reprieve – ten hours before he was again due to die in February 1960 – was granted on the grounds that President Eisenhower would have to face hostile demonstrations on an official visit to Uruguay if he were executed.

It’s hard now to imagine the crescendo of outrage that slowly built up around Chessman’s case. Telegrams poured in from across the world: from Belgium’s Queen Mother; from parliamentarians, Quakers, veterans, private individuals – at least one of whom offered to take Chessman’s place in the gas chamber. Two million Brazilians signed a petition; even the Vatican newspaper launched a withering attack. Cowed by all this, the governor of California called his legislators together in a special session to consider the outlawing of the death penalty, and even released a long letter from Chessman, in which he’d said he’d be willing to die in return for its abolition.

It wasn’t to be. There was no ninth reprieve, and Chessman was gassed to death, in front of sixty witnesses, on May 2nd 1960. In a statement released after his death, he said:

‘In my lifetime I was guilty of many crimes, but not those for which my life was taken.’

He added:

‘Now that the state has had its vengeance, I should like to ask the world to consider what has been gained.’

D.B. Cooper

‘Dan Cooper,’ said the man in the black raincoat when asked his name by the ticket agent. It was the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, and he was buying a seat on a flight between Portland and Seattle. He looked like a regular businessman – short-haired, neat, close-shaven, well-spoken – but whoever he was he turned out in the end to be anything but. For once the Boeing 727 had taken off, Dan Cooper – or D.B. Cooper, as he came to be known from mistaken early newspaper reports – handed a flight attendant a note, saying:

‘I have a bomb. Tell your captain I am taking charge of the plane.’

He opened his attaché-case, and showed her what appeared to be wired-up sticks of dynamite.

The note listed his demands: $200,000 in cash and four parachutes; these were got ready for him in Seattle where he had the plane land. The other passengers were then released; and the plane, now tailed by five military aircraft and a helicopter, took off for Reno, Nevada. D.B. Cooper was alone during the flight in the passenger-cabin.

Forty-five minutes in, when the plane was at 10,000 feet over Washington’s Cascade Mountains, a few miles from the border with Oregon, he jumped. The flight crew noticed a sudden drop in air pressure. The rear door under the tail had been opened: the only evidence Cooper’d left behind him, when they went to take a look, was a missing parachute and what remained of the parachute-cord of one of the others – he’d presumably used it to lash his attaché-case and the bag with the money in it to his body.

It was a rough night, with high winds, rain and sleet. The pursuing aircraft saw nothing; and many doubt that Cooper could have made it to the ground without injury. But though the authorities searched the area for five days, and in the spring sent in the army to search for another three weeks, no trace of Cooper, dead or alive, was found. Fortune-hunters over the years that followed had no better luck. In fact the only people who profited – apart from Cooper himself, perhaps – were the makers of ‘D.B. Cooper’ T-shirts, which became a national fad, and the people of Ariel, Washington, who launched a hugely popular annual D.B. Cooper party, at which he still fails to show up.

Only one trace of Cooper, in fact, was ever found, when more than seven years after the hijacking an eight-year-old boy, playing beside the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon, found three bundles of old $20 bills, amounting in all to $6,000. The serial numbers matched those on the twenties that had been handed over by the FBI. What happened to the rest of the money, no one knows. What happened to D.B. Cooper? In a sense it doesn’t matter. For Cooper – whoever he was – has become an American legend.

Dean Corll

S
ome crime investigations go backwards, not forwards – and this was the case with Dean Corll. For by the time Houston police found him, on the morning of August 8th 1973, Corll was already dead, with three frightened teenagers on the scene. What the police had to do was find out why, to look back into the past that had brought the thirty-four-year-old Corll and the teenagers together – and the past proved very scary indeed.

At first it seemed like a glue-sniffing-and-sex party that had got seriously out of hand, mostly because one of the teenagers, Wayne Hedley, had brought along a girl – and Dean Corll, a homosexual, didn’t like girls one bit. When Hedley recovered consciousness after their first big hit of glue, he’d found himself tied up and handcuffed, with a furious Corll standing over him holding a gun and threatening to kill them all. After pleading for his life, Hedley was finally released, on one condition: that he now rape and kill the unconscious girl while Corll did the same with the other boy.