100 Most Infamous Criminals (25 page)

Speck on trial – he was found guilty of first-degree murder

Richard Speck was tried and sentenced – first to death, then after commutation to several centuries in prison – for first-degree murder. The seaman – who’d regularly worked the ore-barges in the Great Lakes – had a record of violence towards women and may have killed several times before the attack on the hostel. For there had been a rash of unsolved murders in Benton Harbor, Michigan earlier that year when Speck was in the area, and another in Monmouth, Illinois, where he’d gone on to stay with his brother. On July 2nd 1966, five days after he’d been let go from an ore-boat in Indiana Harbor, three girls who’d been swimming not far away had disappeared.

Brenda Spencer

T
eenaged Brenda, through no particular fault of her own, was trouble. Her mother was long gone, and she lived with her father who not only couldn’t get her in line, but was also feckless and irresponsible. She played hookey from school; she stole; she messed around with drugs. But she also loved guns. She liked to shoot birds and once used her BB gun to shoot out the windows of the elementary school opposite their house. So what does Brenda’s father do for his little girl? For Christmas 1978, he buys her a semiautomatic .22 calibre rifle and about 500 rounds of ammunition.

Within a matter of days, Brenda started digging a tunnel in the family’s backyard as a hiding-place. She also moved her collection of weapons to the garage. Then on the morning of January 29th, she struck. When the principal of the elementary school opposite arrived to open the gate for waiting children, she shot both him and the janitor. She wounded nine children and a policeman who tried to help out in a twenty-minute barrage.

Over the next several hours, hiding in the besieged house, she explained herself on the telephone to police and reporters. She said:

‘I just started shooting. That’s it. I just did it for the fun of it. I just
don’t like Mondays. . . I did this because it’s a way to cheer up the day. Nobody likes Mondays.’

After a six-hour standoff, she gave herself up; and America started one of its periods of soul-searching about guns and the ubiquity of violence on television – to which Brenda had been addicted. Then, after she was convicted of murder and assault – and given two concurrent sentences of forty-eight years and twenty-five-years-to-life – she was more or less forgotten. She did, though, leave one small enduring monument: Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats’ deadpan rock masterpiece based on her shooting spree,
I Don’t Like Mondays.

Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate

C
harles Starkweather, aged 19, wore thick spectacles. He was bow-legged, red-haired, just 5 foot 2 inches tall – and a garbageman in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was also extremely sensitive. And when the parents of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, said something he didn’t like as he waited for her one day at their house, he simply shot them with his hunting-rifle. Caril Ann, when she got back, didn’t seem to mind one way or the other, so he went upstairs and killed her two-year-old half-sister to stop her crying, before settling down with Caril Ann to eat sandwiches in front of the television.

Charles and Caril Ann – the inspiration for Terrence Malick’s
Badlands

It was January 19th 1958, and, having put up a sign on the front door saying ‘Every Body is Sick with the Flu,’ the couple lived in the house for two days. Then, just before the bodies were discovered, they took off in Starkweather’s hot rod, driving across America like his hero James Dean – and left a string of murders in their wake.

First to die was a wealthy seventy-year-old farmer, whose car they stole when theirs got stuck in the mud. A few hours later, another farmer found the body of a teenage couple in a storm cellar – the girl had been repeatedly raped before being beaten to death. Soon afterwards, there were three more corpses to add to the tally. A rich Nebraskan businessman had been stabbed and shot inside his doorway. Upstairs his wife and their housekeeper had been tied up before being stabbed and mutilated.

Starkweather took Caril Ann on a killing spree across America

There was one more death to come, that of a car-driving shoe-salesman in Douglas, Wyoming. But as the pair tried to make a getaway, one of the cars refused to start. A passer-by stopped and was ordered at gunpoint to help release the hand-brake. Instead he grappled with Starkweather, who wrenched himself free and drove off at speed, leaving Caril Ann behind him. A police car – part of the force of 1200 policemen and National Guardsmen who were by now searching for two killers – soon spotted him and gave chase. Starkweather’s windshield was shattered by gunfire and he gave himself up. The man known as ‘Little Red’ then made a confession, proclaiming his hatred of a society full of ‘Goddam sons of bitches looking for somebody to make fun of,’ before dying in the electric chair in Nebraska State Penitentiary on June 25th 1959.

Caril Ann claimed that she’d been kidnapped and was innocent, but she wasn’t believed. She was sentenced to life and let out of prison, on parole, twenty-eight years later.

The murderous couple were to inspire many artists, including Terrence Malick, the reclusive director, who made his debut film,
Badlands
, about the couple, and Bruce Springsteen, whose haunting song ‘Nebraska’ is based on their killing spree.

Robert Stroud

A
s a prisoner, Robert Stroud was unusually fortunate: at Leavenworth he had a double-size cell all to himself. But then he was a legend, perhaps the most famous prisoner in the entire United States penal system, the man who was to become known as The Birdman of Alcatraz.

Stroud was also, though, a murderer. In 1906, at the age of 19, he’d killed an Alaskan barman who’d refused to pay $10 for one of his whores. For this he was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison, first on Macneil Island in the pacific Northwest, and then at the Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. He was a solitary man who seems to have cared nothing at all for other prisoners – only for the canaries he was allowed to keep, about which he already had a vast knowledge; one can only imagine that it was some slur on, or threat to, them that caused him to kill again. For in March 1916, not long before he was to be released, he knifed to death a guard in the Leavenworth mess hall. He later said laconically to a fellow convict:

‘The guard took sick and died all of a sudden. He died of heart trouble. I guess you would call it a puncture of the heart… I never have given any reason for doing it, so they won’t have much to work on; only that I killed him, and… I admit that much.’

This time Stroud was sentenced to hang. But his mother petitioned President Wilson, citing his work on canaries and their diseases, about which he already knew as much as anyone in the country. Eight days before he was due to go to the gallows, the President’s wife Elizabeth Wilson – who had taken over most of the President’s duties after he’d had a heart attack – granted a reprieve. Stroud’s sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement.

And that’s how he spent the rest of it: in solitary, except for his birds. In 1943, he published a book,
Digest of Bird Diseases
, and he was later transferred to Alcatraz, where his work went on. He died of natural causes in Springfield, Missouri in 1963, at the age of 76.

Dr. John White Webster

D
r. John White Webster is perhaps the only Harvard professor ever to have been hanged in public, though there are many – particularly students – who might have wished others despatched the same way. He murdered a close friend of his, a rich benefactor of the Massachusetts Medical College, where White also lectured; and the eminence of the two people involved – and the reason for the murder – excited, in the language of the times, ‘much comment.’

The reason for the murder was debt. For Webster had often borrowed money from his victim, the eccentric Dr. George Parkman, known – because of his jutting jaw – as ‘Chin’. He’d pledged as security for the loans his well-known collection of minerals. But he’d also pledged it to another creditor, and when ‘Chin’ Parkman heard about this, he was furious. On the morning of November 23rd 1849, he went off to see Webster at his laboratory for a showdown.

He never returned. The river was dragged, but no trace of him was found – until, that is, the caretaker, who hated Webster, broke his way into his laboratory three days later and discovered in the light of his torch what looked like the remains of a human pelvis.

Webster’d done his best to cover his tracks. On the day of Parkman’s disappearance, he’d told the agent who collected his lecture fees that he’d paid Parkman all the money he owed him, and two days later he’d repeated the same story to the Parkman family, suggesting that he might have been killed after he left the laboratory for the cash he was by then carrying.

Unfortunately for him, though, the caretaker had by that time started wondering why Webster was up all night working in the laboratory, with his medical furnace constantly burning – and why he double-locked the lab doors whenever he went out.

The ashes in Webster’s medical furnace were subsequently raked out, and found to contain, not only the remains of human bones, but also a set of false teeth. Webster claimed they belonged to a corpse he’d been dissecting. He repeated the story that he’d paid off Parkman’s debt and he produced witnesses who swore that they’d seen Parkman alive well after the time of his supposed murder. It was the shape of Parkman’s jaw, however – and the evidence of the dentist who’d had to fit teeth to it – which finally did him in. He was found guilty of murder after a nine-day hearing.

The professor was not quite done yet. Though he now confessed to the murder, he said that Parkman had been so insulting he’d lashed out at him in rage: he hadn’t intended to kill him and he asked for the charge against him to be reduced to manslaughter. The Council of Massachusetts refused and the professor was hanged, in front of 150 people, on August 30th 1850.

Phillip Garrido

P
hillip Craig Garrido wats born on 5 April 1951 in Contra Costa County, California. His father Manuel, a forklift operator, provided a modest, yet comfortable home. Phillip’s anti-social behaviour began with a motorcycle accident as a teenager. Before the tragic event, claimed his dad, Phillip had been a ‘good boy’. Afterwards, he became uncontrollable and started to take illegal drugs.

The year was 1969, a time when American counterculture was pervasive. Phillip grew his hair, bought a fringed leather jacket and played bass in a psychedelic rock group. But in reality, the young high school graduate wanted little to do with peace and love. Eighteen years old, Phillip had already committed his first act of rape, and would regularly beat his girlfriend, Christine Perreira.