100 Most Infamous Criminals (18 page)

Heidnik was by now checking his victims every day to see if they were pregnant – which was his aim. But he soon became obsessed by the idea that they could hear from below whether he was in or out. So with the exception of his first harem-member, Josephina Rivera – whom he was beginning to see as an ally – he one by one bound up their heads with duct tape and drove a screwdriver into their ears. When Deborah Dudley remained difficult, he took her upstairs to show her Sandra Lindsay’s head in a pot and her ribs in a pan on the stove, as a warning. Later, during a group torture session, he electrocuted her to death, and dumped her body in a New Jersey park.

Gary Heidnik acquired a ‘harem’

At this point, he forced Josephina Rivera to sign with him a joint confession to Lindsay’s murder and, with the confession in hand as an insurance policy, he began to give her more freedom. He took her with him when he got rid of the body and then out to meals in fast-food restaurants. During one of these expeditions, he even picked up another prostitute she knew and added her to the harem.

The next day, though, saying that she needed to see her family, Rivera escaped. She went to see a former boyfriend, and together they went to the police. Within minutes the police had all the evidence they ever needed against Heidnik. He was picked up a few blocks away.

Was Heidnik sane? At his trial, a broker gave evidence of his considerable shrewdness: at the time of his arrest, as well as owning several showy Cadillacs and a Rolls-Royce, his ‘church’ had over half a million dollars in its investment account. The jury decided that his defence’s plea of legal insanity wouldn’t wash, and convicted him of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on July 6th 1999.

William Heirens

W
illiam Heirens, who grew up in Chicago in the 1930s and early 40s, was a quiet, introverted boy who had an obsession with women’s underwear, which he would steal from apartments, wear and then keep in the attic at his parents’ house. So intense was this fetish of his – which seems to have begun abnormally early in life, at the age of about nine – that even climbing in through a window could soon bring him to orgasm.

At the age of 13, after being caught breaking into a store-room, he was sent to reform school, where he’s on record as having been well-behaved, if almost unnaturally quiet. Once out, though – and enrolled at the University of Chicago at 14 – he went back to burglary; and a year later, he committed his first murders. A forty-three-year-old divorcée was found in bed at her North-Side apartment, her throat cut and with a multitude of stab wounds. The strange thing was that the body, when it was found and examined, had been washed clean with wet towels.

A year later, a nurse who interrupted a burglar at her apartment was beaten with an iron bar and tied to a chair before Heirens left. Then, in December 1945, another murder victim was found. A maid at a residential hotel opened the door to the bathroom of a sixth-floor apartment to find its occupant, Frances Brown, slumped over the bath. She’d been shot and stabbed. On the wall over her bed had been written in lipstick:

‘For God’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.’

Once again, the body of the victim, who the police believed had come out of the bathroom naked and had interrupted her attacker, had been carefully washed.

A month afterwards, on January 7th 1946, a third body was found, this time of a six-year-old girl. At first all the police knew was that someone had kidnapped her from her apartment-bedroom and had left a note – saying ‘Burn this for her safety’ – demanding a $20,000 ransom. Then, though, when the sewers in the area were searched, first her head and then other parts of her body were found. Her unknown killer had taken her to a nearby basement, strangled and dismembered her, before washing every part of her clean.

He was finally caught in June 1946 when a janitor called the police about a burglar he’d spotted in a North-Side apartment-building. He and one of the tenants gave chase and were fired on. But with the help of the police, William Heirens was finally overpowered and taken to a precinct-house, where he began to tell his story. He confessed to all his crimes, but said that they’d been committed by an alter ego called ‘George,’ who was too powerful for him to be able to resist, however hard he tried. While a burglary was in progress, he – i.e. ‘George’ – was at such a pitch of intensity that he erupted into violence if interrupted.

When later examined by psychiatrists, Heirens, aged 17, was found to be sexually perverted and emotionally insensitive but not psychotic. He was, they said, a suggestible, hysterical and egocentric personality who showed not the slightest remorse. He was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment. Once convicted – as if to endorse the court’s verdict – he said that he’d made up the story of ‘George’ so that he could plead insanity. But some criminologists believe that it might be true and that Heirens really did want to get caught and end ‘George’s’ domination. Why else would he have written his famous lipstick message? And why else would he have made no efforts at all, at any of the crime-scenes, to clean up his fingerprints?

Jesse James

I
n the Civil War, Jesse James, his brother Frank and his cousin Cole Younger fought – nominally, at least – for the South. They joined Quantrill’s Raiders, led by William Clarke Quantrill, riding with him on raids into Kansas and attacks on wagon trains further south. After Quantrill was killed in Kentucky and the war ended, they simply continued his work. Still wrapped in the Confederate flag – and joined by other ex-members of the Raiders – they robbed banks by day, held up trains at night – and killed anyone who stood in their way. For sixteen years, protected by ordinary Missourians, they terrorised a vast area in and around their home state – until Jesse was shot in the back of his head while hanging a picture in his front room.

Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri on September 5th 1847, and walked into legend twenty-two years later, when his horse was taken and recognized in the aftermath of a bank raid in Galatin, Missouri. From that point on, newspapers and word of mouth turned him into the baddest of all bad men, not only the leader of the famous James Gang – which was probably led in fact by his elder brother Frank – but responsible for every major robbery that took place in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and beyond.

He also acquired a reputation – probably just – for devil-may-care boldness. When in 1871 a robbery of the county office in Corydon, Iowa failed – the treasurer, who had the combination of the safe, was out at a meeting – Jesse simply walked across the street to rob the bank opposite, holding out a $100 bill and asking for change. He and the gang got away on this occasion with $15,000.

With money like this, the James Gang could afford to be choosy about the jobs they took on – probably no more than about twenty-six over sixteen years. They committed their first train robbery in 1873, on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad near Council Bluffs, Iowa, killing the engineer, looting from the passengers and escaping with a large pile of cash from the express car. The following year, this time on the Mountain Railroad, they flagged down another train and took off with $10,000. In the aftermath of this robbery, Jesse and another Gang member kidnapped and killed a Pinkerton detective sent after them. They left his body, as a warning, at a crossing of yet another railroad company.

Jesse James was a member of Quantrill’s Raiders in the Civil War

In 1875 and 1876, the Gang mounted two more major train robberies, netting $55,000 and $17,000 respectively. But then they went back to robbing banks – with disastrous consequences. In July 1876, in Northfield, Minnesota, after they’d killed a cashier, the townspeople opened fire on them as they were escaping. Three of the Gang members were killed; Cole Younger and two of his brothers were surrounded and captured a few days later; and Jesse James, who’d been wounded, only escaped back to Missouri through the resourcefulness of brother Frank.

The Gang’s glory days were finally over. However there was still a reward out for both the James brothers, either dead or alive. On April 1, 1882, two men, Charles and Bob Ford, friends of the Jameses, shot Jesse from behind for the money; six months later Frank gave finally himself up to the Missouri authorities.

There are two extra wrinkles to the Jameses’ story, though. For Frank James was actually acquitted; and the Missouri governor who’d put a reward on his head refused to extradite him to Minnesota, where he faced more charges. From then on, he lived a peaceful life as a rancher; and almost 20 years later joined a tent show with Cole Younger – after Younger’s release from a Minnesota prison – to reminisce in public about the bad old days. He died in 1915.

Rumours persist that Jesse James wasn’t shot and actually lived to a ripe old age

And the second wrinkle? In November 1889, Martha Jane Canary – Calamity Jane, no less – wrote in her diary:

‘I met up with Jesse James not long ago. He is quite a character – you know he was killed in ’82. His mother swore that the body that was in the coffin was his but (I know) it was another man they called either Tracy or Lynch. He was a cousin of Wild Bill [Hickok].’

Jesse James, she wrote, was ‘passing under the name of Dalton’ and said that if he turned 100, he would give himself in. In the mid-1940s, a very old man called J. Frank Dalton claimed to be Jesse James. . .

Robert James

I
t must be one of the oddest remarks in the history of crime. In August 1935, a Los Angeles barber’s assistant called Charles Hope brought back two rattlesnakes he’d bought two weeks earlier at a Long Beach snake-farm, and asked for his money back on the grounds that ‘they didn’t work.’ He was, in fact, lying: Lightning and Lethal both worked – but they hadn’t been enough to kill the wife of his boss, Robert James, without assistance.

On August 5th, Mary, James’s wife, had been found dead in a lily pond in the garden of their Los Angeles bungalow. The pond wasn’t deep, but police assumed that she’d fallen, concussed herself and then drowned. It was simply a tragic accident. No one paid any attention at the time to the swelling on her left leg, which was assumed to have been caused by an insect bite.

A few weeks later, though, Robert James was accused of accosting a woman on the street and police began to take a greater interest in him. He was a native Alabaman, it turned out, with a taste for sado-masochism. He’d also been married five times. This in itself didn’t necessarily mean much, but his third wife had also drowned – this time in the bath – a short while after they’d been married. James had collected thousands of dollars in insurance from a policy on her life – just as he was now going to do from Mary’s.

By this time they’d also found out about Hope’s curious purchase (and return) of two rattlesnakes, and when questioned, Hope soon broke down. He said he’d bought them for his boss, who’d intended to use them to murder his wife, but had then had to find another way.