100 Most Infamous Criminals (23 page)

They never took big money: the biggest haul they ever came up with was $3,500 from a filling-station in Grand Prairie – and it didn’t take them long to blow that on tour of the best hotels and restaurants they could find. The rest was penny-ante stuff, and increasingly they killed for it. Bonnie gunned down a Texas butcher for small change; and even sixteen-year-old William James got in on the act: he shot to death the owner of a car he was caught stealing.

By now they were notorious and in April 1933 in Missouri, joined by Clyde’s brother Buck and sister-in-law Blanche, they had to shoot their way out of the apartment building they were staying in, killing two policemen in the process. Later, after a car accident in which Bonnie was badly burned, the farmer who took them in became suspicious and called the police; again they had to come out firing. Finally, in July, while resting up in a tourist-camp in Missouri – and once again surrounded – they fought yet another running battle in which Buck was killed and Blanche taken. Only Bonnie and Clyde got away.

In her poem, Bonnie predicted that she and Clyde would die, and after another ten months of running they did. Their V-8 sedan was ambushed by six heavily armed policemen who pumped eighty-seven bullets into it. They hadn’t stood a chance.

Bonnie and Clyde are probably the most famous criminal couple in history

When the remains of twenty-three-year-old Bonnie and twenty-five-year-old Clyde were buried in Dallas, huge crowds flocked to their funeral. The flowers were snatched from the top of their coffins and taken as souvenirs. Long before Arthur Penn’s rosy-eyed film version of the brief career of the two young killers, they were already stars.

Richard Ramirez

T
he problem with Richard Ramirez was the pattern of his crimes – or rather the absence of pattern. For almost all serial murderers fixate on a particular type of prey: prostitutes, say; young women; children; adolescent boys or girls – and Ramirez was an equal-opportunity killer. His thirteen victims included men and women, whites and blacks; they ranged in age from 30 to 83. All they had in common was that they died in their homes at the hands of the so-called ‘Night Stalker’.

Ramirez, a high-school dropout and loner, was 22 by the time he got to California from his native Texas in 1982, and by then he’d already had two arrests for drug possession. In Texas, it had been mostly marijuana and glue-sniffing, but in Los Angeles, he began shooting up cocaine and stealing from cars and houses to feed his habit. He slept wherever he found himself; he lived out of a back-pack; and ate junk food to stay alive. Pretty soon his teeth were rotting.

He did one stint in jail and it may have been this that in 1984 pushed him over the edge into murder, into making sure that seventy-nine-year-old Jennie Vincow, whose house he’d broken into, would never live to finger him. He raped and almost decapitated her and once he’d done that, he seemed to get a taste for murder. He slipped at night into people’s houses and variously ripped off, raped or killed whoever he happened to find there, depending, it seemed, on his mood. In addition to the thirteen murders and thirty felonies he was eventually charged with, he’s thought to have racked up at least three more murders and any number of sexual assaults, some of them on young children.

Richard Ramirez became known as the ‘Night Stalker’

There seemed to be no pattern to the victims Ramirez singled out

He was caught, almost prosaically, by technology in the end. For three minutes after a new state-wide computerised fingerprint system was set up in Sacramento, Los Angeles police sent through a print found in a stolen car linked to ‘the Night Stalker.’ The system quickly came up with a match: Richard Ramirez. He was arrested two days later.

His trial dragged on for four years, largely because of Ramirez’s disruptive behaviour. In continual court outbursts and long tirades, he kept referring to his worship of the devil. On at least one occasion he appeared in court with a so-called satanic pentagram drawn on his palm. The jury was unimpressed: in November 1989, he was sentenced to death, and sent to San Quentin Prison’s Death Row.

Gary Ridgway

O
n July 15th 1982, two boys riding their bicycles around Kent, Washington peered into the waters of the picturesque Green River. There, caught on a snag, was the body of a woman, naked but for a pair of jeans wrapped tightly around her neck. It was the body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, the first official victim of a terrifying sexual predator who became known as the Green River Killer.

Gary Ridgway was born in 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The middle child in a family of three boys, he struggled at school and his childhood was marked by his domineering and violent mother. At the age of 13, he was still a bed-wetter. His father drove a city bus and regularly voiced his vehement disapproval of the prostitutes who worked along his route – an attitude his son Gary was also to adopt.

By 1980, Ridgway had already clocked up two failed marriages and had begun to frequent prostitutes along the very strip his father used to drive. He was arrested on soliciting charges on a number of occasions, and was once accused of having tried to choke a prostitute.

In July and August 1982, five females aged between 16 and 31 were found in or near the mouth of the Green River. Most were prostitutes; all had been raped and strangled to death. The police wasted no time in linking the deaths and pronouncing them the work of a serial killer. By April 1983, the body count had risen to 20.

That summer, a dozen or so more women disappeared. Under mounting pressure, and inundated with tips, the police team solicited advice from all quarters, including serial killer Ted Bundy, who from his prison cell helped to form a profile of the Green River Killer.

It was all to no avail. Months, then years, passed, with more women meeting brutal deaths. Ridgway, one of numerous individuals of interest to the police, was twice given polygraph tests, in 1984 and 1986. He passed both. In 1987, his house was searched and a DNA sample taken. After police searched his locker at work, co-workers joked that he was ‘Green River Gary’. No one gave any serious thought to the notion that he might be the serial killer.

By 1986, the killing seemed to have stopped. Bodies were still being found, but the victims had died several years earlier. By 1991, the police unit investigating the case had been reduced to a single person. The case was all but dormant. But new DNA testing methods led to a breakthrough in 2001. A connection was made between semen found on the bodies of several of the victims, and the DNA taken from Ridgway in 1987. He was arrested and charged with the murders of Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills and Carol Ann Christensen, four of the women whose bodies had been found with his DNA.

On 5th November 2003, Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to the aggravated first-degree murder of 48 women. His plea was part of a bargain to spare him the death penalty. He also agreed to cooperate in locating the remains of his victims.

Ridgway claimed that all of his victims had been killed in and around the Seattle area, though he disposed of some of them elsewhere in an attempt to confuse police. He also admitted to occasionally contaminating the dump sites with gum, cigarettes and written materials that belonged to others, to throw investigators off the scent. He confessed to killing 44 women between 1982 and 1984, but claimed to have killed only four thereafter – in 1986, 1987, 1990 and 1998.

Ridgway was given 48 life sentences. Since sentencing, he has confessed to yet more murders – a total of 71, although some speculate the true figure is closer to 150. It was a price, he claimed, worth paying for the betterment of society:

‘I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight. I wanted to kill as many women that I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.’

Charles Schmid

I
n November 1965, a nineteen-year-old from Tucson, Arizona called Richard Bruns flew to stay with his grandmother in Columbus, Ohio, and went to the local police. He said he had information about murders that had taken place in Tucson, and was worried for his girlfriend whom he’d had to leave behind there and who knew the murderer well. The name of the killer whom he wanted arrested was Charles Schmid.

Schmid, known as Smitty, was a rich kid of twenty-three, whose parents owned a nursing-home and had given him a cottage of his own at the bottom of their garden. He was also short – and bothered by it. At high-school, he’d been a gymnast – he’d even won a state championship. But now he wore high-heeled boots, which he stuffed with paper to make himself look even taller. The fact that this made him walk somewhat bizarrely he explained by saying he’d been crippled by Mafia hoods. This was fairly typical of Smitty, who felt inadequate with people of his own age, but who attracted local teenagers with his fantasies. He even got them to join his so-called sex club.

The first girl to disappear, on May 31st 1964, was fifteen-year-old Alleen Rowe, whose mother found her ‘out on a date’ when she got back late at night. She never returned, and her mother was later to remember a conversation she’d had with her daughter. Alleen had talked about being invited to join a sex club. ‘You’ve got to be in, or you’re a nobody,’ she’d said.

Then, fifteen months later, the two daughters of a Tucson doctor, Gretchen and Wendy Fritz, 17 and 13 respectively, also disappeared – followed a few weeks later by a fifteen-year-old called Sandra Highes, who failed one day to return from school. Though the police did what they could, and talked to everyone who knew them, they failed to turn up any evidence.

The fact is that the fascinated teenagers who’d gathered around Schmid weren’t talking, either to their parents or to the police, though it was more or less common knowledge among them that he’d killed at least Alleen Rowe. With a girlfriend he’d put to work in his parents’ nursing home and a teenager called John Saunders, he’d inveigled Alleen out of her mother’s house and had driven her off into the desert, where the two men had raped her, beaten her head in with rocks and buried her in a shallow grave. As for the doctor’s daughters, the elder one, Gretchen, had been Smitty’s girlfriend, but had become too possessive, so he’d strangled them both at the cottage and had then dumped their bodies outside town.

The reason that Richard Bruns knew this was because Schmid had boasted to him about it and he had called what he thought was Schmid’s bluff. ‘Show me!’ So Schmid had driven him to where he’d left the bodies, and had then forced Bruns to help him bury them.

Even before Bruns’s testimony, though, the police had begun to believe that Schmid had to be involved. For in a bizarre episode he’d been arrested on the beach at San Diego, California, interviewing girls in bikinis while posing as an FBI officer.

The story he’d given was equally odd: he said he’d been helping a couple of ‘Mafia heavies’ – who’d been hired by the Fritz family – in their investigations into the disappearance of Gretchen and Wendy.