Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (4 page)

He quickly confessed to all the murders – except those of Clara Ward and her maid Lillian Fencl. As far as he knew, he maintained, they were alive when he left the house. Despite being charged with the murder of Merle Collison in Wyoming, Starkweather was quickly extradited back to Nebraska. He was ridiculed for being afraid of flying when he refused to go back to Lincoln by plane. In fact he thought that travelling by car he would stand a better chance of escaping.

Caril Fugate and Charles Starkweather were both charged with first-degree murder, making Caril the youngest woman to be tried on this charge in the US. They both pleaded not guilty and were tried separately. Starkweather’s lawyer tried to get him to enter an insanity plea. Starkweather refused.

‘Nobody remembers a crazy man,’ he said, insisting that all the killings had been in self-defence.

Starkweather’s trial for the murder of 17-year-old high-school student Robert Jensen began on 5 May 1958. The prosecution quickly established that the six bullets in Jensen’s head had all been shot from behind, demolishing Starkweather’s self-defence argument. Throughout the prosecution case, Starkweather acted cool, chewing gum and rocking back on his chair. The only time he showed any emotion was when an ex-employer said that Starkweather was the dumbest man who ever worked for him. Starkweather went crazy and had to be restrained.

The ex-employer’s testimony was part of the defence lawyer’s strategy to show his client was mentally incompetent. In fact, Starkweather had an above-average IQ. The defence attorney also read out some of Starkweather’s confessions, hoping to show that his state of mind was abnormal and confused.

When Starkweather took the stand, he was asked why he was mad at Caril when they were at the derelict school. He replied that it was because of what she had done.

‘What did she do?’ he was asked.

‘Shot Carol King,’ said Starkweather.

This was not the first time that Starkweather accused Caril of killing Carol King. During his time on remand he had begun to fall out of love with her. He had also accused her of finishing off Merle Collison when his gun jammed.

Three psychiatrists appeared for the defence. They claimed that Starkweather had a diseased mind. But, under cross-examination, they admitted that this did not amount to a recognised mental illness and none of them was prepared to have Starkweather certified insane. Prosecution psychiatrists agreed that Starkweather had an anti-social personality disorder, but was legally sane. The jury also agreed. They returned a guilty verdict and recommended the electric chair.

During his court appearance, Starkweather become a TV celebrity, appearing on the news each night. Many teenagers identified with the cool and unrepentant Starkweather. Fan mail flooded in, though some urged him to turn to God. Admirers overlooked the fact that one of his first victims was Caril’s stepsister, a two-and-a-half-year-old child.

Five months later Caril Fugate became the youngest woman ever to be tried for first-degree murder in the US. She was tried for being an accomplice in Jensen’s murder. Although there was no suggestion that she had actually pulled the trigger, her admission that she had taken Jensen’s wallet meant that this case would be easier to prove than one where it was simply her word against Starkweather’s.

Starkweather himself was the prosecution’s star witness. Taking the stand, he told the jury that he no longer loved Caril and did not care if she lived or died. At one time he was even reported as having said: ‘If I fry in the electric chair, then Caril should be sitting on my lap.’

He said that she had known he was involved in the murder of the filling-station attendant Robert Colvert and that she had been present when he had killed her family. She had gone with him willingly and had even expressed a desire to be shot down with him when the denouement came.

Caril’s attorney believed that she was innocent, but could not shake Starkweather’s story, which was partially corroborated by witnesses to their spree and early statements to the police. She was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

She continued to protest her innocence, but settled in to become a model prisoner at the state women’s reformatory at York, Nebraska. In 1972 she was the subject of a documentary called
Growing up in Prison
and in 1976 was released on parole. In 1983 she appeared on TV to protest her innocence once more and took a lie detector test on camera. It indicated that she was telling the truth. However, a public opinion poll in Nebraska showed that most people did not believe her.

On death row Starkweather spent his time writing. He also talked for more than eighty hours to James Melvin Reinhardt, a professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, explaining why he had taken to crime. His main motive was to take ‘general revenge upon the world and its human race’.

‘The people I murdered had murdered me,’ he said. ‘They murdered me slow, like. I was better to them. I killed them in a hurry.’

Poverty was another reason. ‘They had me numbered for the bottom,’ he said. He blamed the world and was sure that other people hated him ‘because I was poor and had to live in a goddamned shack’. But there was a way out of this class trap – ‘all dead people are on the same level,’ he said.

He saw his murderous spree as the only way out of a life of drudgery. ‘Better to be left to rot on some high hill, and be remembered,’ he wrote, ‘than to be buried alive in some stinking place.’

Now Starkweather had everything he wanted. He was going to die – but he was famous. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to see his name in the papers.

Professor Reinhardt published
The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather
, which alleged that Starkweather was paranoid and that this problem was self-inflicted. Starkweather’s own account was published in
Parade
magazine under the title ‘Rebellion’. The piece was heavily cut and ended up as a homily to wayward youth, advising commitment to God, regular church-going, and respect for authority. ‘If I had followed these simple rules, as I was advised to many times, I would not be where I am. today,’ it concluded.

In fact, Starkweather did have something of a change of heart in prison. His murderous rampage seemed to have quenched his hatred. A gentler side took over. One of his prison guards said: ‘If somebody had just paid attention to Charlie, bragged on his drawing and writing, all of this might not have happened.’

At the parole board Starkweather spoke of his remorse and his new-found Christian faith. It did no good. The execution was scheduled for 22 May 1959. He wrote to his father, talking of repentance and his hopes of staying alive. The execution was delayed by a federal judge, then rescheduled for 25 June.

When the prison guards came for him, he asked: ‘What’s your hurry?’ Then, in a new shirt and jeans, he swaggered ahead of them to the electric chair with his hands in his pockets. Outside, gangs of teenagers cruised the streets, playing rock ’n’ roll on their car radios. Fifteen years later the Starkweather story was retold in the 1974 cult film
Badlands
, starring Martin Sheen and Cissy Spacek. The story then formed the basis of Oliver Stone’s controversial 1994 film
Natural Born Killers
, starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.

Chapter 2

The Boston Strangler

Name: Albert DeSalvo

Nationality: American

Number of victims: 13 killed

Favoured method of killing: strangulation – he always tied the ligature in a bow on the victim’s body

Born: 1931

Reign of terror: 1962–64

Final note: he was never caught or formally identified

No one was ever prosecuted for the murders committed by the Boston Strangler, who terrorised the women of New England between 1962 and 1964. However, the Boston Police Department named the main suspect who they believed had brutally murdered 13 young women. His name was Albert DeSalvo.

DeSalvo was the son of a vicious drunk. When he was 11, DeSalvo watched his father knock his mother’s teeth out then bend her fingers back until they snapped. This was nothing unusual in the DeSalvo household.

When they were just children, Albert and his two sisters were sold to a farmer in Maine for nine dollars, but later escaped. After he got back home, his father taught him how to shoplift, taking him to the store and showing him what to take. His father would also bring prostitutes back to the apartment and make the children watch while he had sex with them.

Soon the young DeSalvo developed a lively interest in sex, making many early conquests among the neighbourhood girls, as well as earning a healthy living from the local gay community who would pay him for his services. In the army, DeSalvo continued his sexual adventuring, until he met Irmgaard, the daughter of a respectable Catholic family in Frankfurt. They married and returned to the US in 1954, where DeSalvo was dishonourably discharged from the army for sexually molesting a nine-year-old girl. Criminal charges were not brought because the girl’s mother feared the publicity.

DeSalvo pursued a career in breaking and entering, but at home he was the perfect family man. However, his sexual appetite was more than his wife could cope with. He demanded sex five or six times a day. This annoyed Irmgaard and finally repelled her. So DeSalvo found an outlet as the ‘Measuring Man’.

He began hanging around the student areas of Boston, looking for apartments shared by young women. He would knock on the door with a clipboard, saying that he was the representative of a modelling agency, and ask whether he could take their measurements. Sometimes his charm succeeded in seducing the women – sometimes they would seduce him. Other times he would just take their measurements, clothed or naked, and promise that a female representative would call later. He never assaulted any of the girls. The only complaints were that no one came on a follow-up visit.

About that time, DeSalvo was caught housebreaking and sent to jail for two years. The experience left him frustrated. When he was released he started a new career, breaking into houses throughout New England and tying up and raping women. At that time, he was known as the ‘Green Man’ because he wore a green shirt and trousers. The police in Connecticut and Massachusetts put the number of his assault in the hundreds. DeSalvo himself claimed more than a thousand – bragging that he had tied up and raped six women in one morning.

DeSalvo confined his activities to Boston and added murder to his repertoire, killing 55-year-old Anna Slesers in her apartment on 14 June 1962. DeSalvo had left her body in an obscene pose, with the cord he had used to strangle her tied in a bow around her neck. This was to become his trademark.

Over the next month he raped and strangled five women, including 85-year-old Mary Mullen, even though he said she reminded him of his grandmother, and 65-year-old nurse Helen Blake. Within two days he killed 75-year-old Ida Irga and 67-year-old Jane Sullivan. By this time, the Boston police force had realised that they had a serious maniac on their hands and had begun questioning all known sexual deviants. But DeSalvo was overlooked because he only had a record for burglary and housebreaking. The only official record of his sexual deviancy was in his army file.

DeSalvo cooled off for a bit and took a long autumn break. But by his eighth wedding anniversary on 5 December, his mind was so overheated with violent sexual images that he thought it was going to explode. He saw an attractive girl going into an apartment block. He followed her and knocked on her door. Using his usual ploy, he pretended to be a maintenance man sent by the landlord to check the pipes. She did not let him in. So he tried the next apartment. The door was opened by a tall, attractive, 25-year-old black woman named Sophie Clark. DeSalvo reverted to his Measuring Man routine. He remarked on her stunningly curvaceous body and, when she turned her back, he attacked her. Once he had subdued her, he stripped her and raped her. Then he strangled her. He left her naked body, like the others, propped up with the legs spread and the ligature he had used to strangle her tied in a bow under her chin.

Three days later, DeSalvo went back to one of the women he had previously visited as the Measuring Man, 23-year-old secretary Patricia Bissette. She invited him in for a cup of coffee and when she turned her back he grabbed her round the throat and raped her, then strangled her with her own stockings.

DeSalvo’s next victim escaped. She fought back so violently, biting, scratching and screaming that the Strangler fled. This seems to have been something of a turning-point in DeSalvo’s career. But she was so distraught after the attack that the description she gave was next to useless.

From then on the Boston Strangler’s attacks became even more violent. On 9 March 1963, he gained access to 69-year-old Mary Brown’s apartment by saying he had come to fix the stove. He carried with him a piece of lead pipe which he used to beat her head in. He raped her after he had killed her, then stabbed her in the breasts with a fork which he left sticking in her flesh. He maintained his
modus operandi
by strangling her, but this time the victim was already dead.

Two months later, DeSalvo took a day off work. He drove out to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spotted a pretty girl, 23-year-old student Beverley Samans, on University Road. He followed her to her apartment. Once inside he tied her to the bedposts, stripped her, blindfolded her, gagged her and raped her repeatedly. Then he strangled her with her own stockings. But this time, it was not enough. Before he left the apartment, he pulled his penknife from his pocket and started stabbing her naked body. Once he started he could not stop. He stabbed and stabbed her. Blood flew everywhere. There were 22 savage wounds in her body. Once the frenzy subsided, he calmly wiped his fingerprints from the knife, dropped it in the sink and went home.

DeSalvo killed again on 8 September, raping and strangling 58-year-old Evelyn Corbin with her own nylons, which he then left tied in a bow around her ankle. The city was in panic. The killer seemed to come and go at will. With no description of the man and no clues, the police were powerless. In desperation they brought in Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos, but he failed to identify the Strangler.

While America – and Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts particularly – was in mourning following the assassination of the president, he struck again. He raped and strangled 23-year-old dress designer Joan Gaff in her own apartment, leaving her black leotard tied in a bow around her neck

DeSalvo admitted later that he did not know why he had killed Joan Gaff. ‘I wasn’t even excited,’ he said. After he left her apartment, he went home, played with his kids and watched the report of Joan Gaff’s murder on TV. Then he sat down and had dinner, without thinking of her again.

On 4 January 1964, the Boston Strangler struck for the last time. He gained access to the flat of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, tied her up at knifepoint and raped her. This time he strangled her with his hands. Her body was found propped up on her bed, her buttocks on the pillow and her back against the headboard. Her head rested on her right shoulder, her eyes closed and viscose liquid was dripping from her mouth down her right breast. Her breasts and her sexual organs were exposed and there was a broom handle protruding from her vagina. More semen stains were found on her blanket. Between her toes he placed a card he found in the apartment which read ‘Happy New Year’.

Later that year, a woman reported being sexually assaulted by a man using the Measuring Man routine, but otherwise all the activity of the Boston Strangler stopped. This coincided with the arrest of DeSalvo for housebreaking. Held on bail, DeSalvo’s behaviour became disturbed and he was transferred to the mental hospital at Bridgewater, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Although they had him in custody, the police still had no idea that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. But in Bridgewater, another inmate, in for killing a petrol pump attendant and also a suspect in the Boston Strangler case himself, listened to DeSalvo’s manic ramblings and began to put two and two together. He got his lawyer to interview DeSalvo.

In these taped interviews, DeSalvo revealed facts about the murders – the position of the bodies, the nature of the ligature and the wounds inflicted – that the police had not revealed. He also admitted to two murders that had not already been attributed to the Boston Strangler.

DeSalvo was a mental patient, so he was not prosecuted for the rapes and murders he confessed to. But there was no doubt that he was, indeed, the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo was transferred to Walpole State Prison. He was found dead in his cell in 1973, stabbed through the heart.