The Killer Book of Cold Cases (24 page)
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
Another suspect, Roger Arnold, was cleared but suffered a nervous breakdown during the process. Another tragedy ensued out of Arnold’s belief that he had been turned in by a bartender named Marty Sinclair. In 1983 he shot and killed a man whom he mistook for Sinclair. Arnold was convicted in January 1984 and served fifteen years of a thirty-year sentence.
Another suspect was Laurie Dann, who shot and poisoned people in May 1988 in and around Winnetka, Illinois, but no direct connection was found.
Author Agatha Christie used thallium as a murder weapon in her 1961 novel
The Pale Horse
. Each victim in the novel suffered hair loss, which was a clue to discovering the type of murder. Her novel is credited with saving at least a few lives after readers recognized the symptoms of thallium poisoning that her novel describes.
The media gave Johnson & Johnson kudos for the way the company handled the Tylenol murders.
The Washington Post
said, “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster.” The article complimented the company for its honesty and for establishing good relations with the Chicago police, the FBI, and the Food and Drug Administration. Tylenol sales plunged in the aftermath but managed to rebound within a year.
A horrific event like this always brings its share of copycat psychos out of the woodwork, and a number of similar attacks occurred in the years after. Murder was involved in three Excedrin attacks, and fear of attacks brought one product, Encaprin, to an end. Additionally, the problem led the pharmaceutical industry to move away from capsules, and the FDA established stricter packaging requirements.
Years ago, I remember hearing about a guy who went berserk in a school and started shooting whoever he could. The police came and finally were able to put him down, but a few days later, a similar school shooting occurred, and a day or so after that, another.
When I looked through some records, I got a surprise. Violent acts like these tend to occur in threes, and the criminal act doesn’t necessarily have to be a school shooting. It can be one of a wide variety of acts, all violent.
I have a theory about why violent copycat behavior like this occurs. That is, other people filled with angst and rage are looking for a solution to their problems, just as the first person who went berserk in a school was. These people see the first person’s solution, which answers their need for violence, so they simply copy it.
Twenty-five years after the killings, in January 2009, investigators reviewed the Chicago Tylenol murder case. They had received numerous tips leading up to the anniversary. In a written statement, the FBI explained:
This review was prompted, in part, by the recent twenty-fifth anniversary of this crime and the resulting publicity. Further, given the many recent advances in forensic technology, it was only natural that a second look be taken at the case and recovered evidence.
In January 2010, both James W. Lewis and his wife submitted DNA samples and fingerprints to authorities. Lewis stated, “If the FBI plays it fair, I have nothing to worry about.”
- Whenever I came on staff in a hospital, the cold-case count—dead bodies—mysteriously went up, baffling authorities.
- I had a terrible relationship with my father. When he died in 1982, my mother gave me a book of his that bulged with all kinds of horrific stories involving violence and death. It pleased me greatly, and for the first time I thought my father wasn’t such a bad guy.
- The book inspired me to collect more ghoulish stories and photos, and when one of my father’s colleagues commented, I said, “If I’m ever accused of murder, this will prove I’m mentally unstable.”
- I went to medical school and did well when I graduated. Someone asked me why I loved the idea of being a doctor, and I said, “It gives me the opportunity to come out of the emergency room with a hard-on and tell some parents that their kid had just died.”
- On another occasion I gave a woman medication to increase her blood pressure and then had trouble getting her elderly mother out of the room. After her daughter died, it gave me great pleasure to tell the mother, “She’s dead now. You can go look at her.”
- I’ve always liked to read detective novels. And I liked making up stories for the various girlfriends I had. They though my stories were sick and sordid, which is exactly why I liked telling them.
- I also loved Jim Jones, the religious leader who made his congregation drink poisoned Kool-Aid.
- I once described a fantasy I had that went like this: “Picture a school bus crammed with kids smashing head on with a trailer truck loaded with gasoline. We’re summoned. We get there in a jiffy, just as another gasoline truck rams the bus. Up in flames it goes. Kids are hurled through the air everywhere, on telephone poles, on the street, especially along an old barbed-wire fence along the road. All burning.”
- I worked in a VA hospital where author Tom Philbin used to be treated.
Answer:
I am Dr. Michael Swango, a so-called angel of death who worked in a variety of hospitals. When I wasn’t treating people, I was murdering them.
Murderers, particularly female murderers, favor poison as a means of killing their victims. In some cases, the poison is not detected, either because of a lack of lab expertise or because the body is cremated before it can be examined. In those situations, the cases go cold and never will be solved.
The following are some frequently used poisons.
- Arsenic
. This tasteless, liquid-soluble solid can be added easily to and dissolved in liquid. Its popularity goes back to Roman times and perhaps even earlier. Arsenic is a by-product of lead and copper and became popular in the 1800s in Italy where it was known, almost comically, as “inheritance powder.” It later was used on flypaper and in controlling various rodents and weeds. From there, it became popular as a murder weapon. - Atropine
, also known as belladonna, is taken from the juice of the berries of the nightshade bush. It was a favored poison in medieval Europe. It causes flu-like symptoms, so if someone died, the assumption could be that the death was because of a disease. It also is taken in small amounts for its hallucinogenic qualities. - Strychnine
is extracted from the seeds of a Southeast Asian tree called the
nux vomica
, which was actually used by doctors as a tonic to help people who were convalescing. In large doses, it is a good poison for rats and other animals. While strychnine is not a well-known murder device, it is easily available and may have been a killer in murders that were never identified as such. - Cyanide
. Years ago, a contract killer named Richard Kuklinski used cyanide to kill people, but not by dropping it into food or drink. Rather, he sprayed victims in the face with it. Cyanide is the fastest acting of all poisons and can kill within minutes. Cyanide was used in the Tylenol and Excedrin murders, as detailed earlier in this chapter. It also was the poison the Nazis used to gas people in concentration camps. - Thallium
. This was the poison of choice years ago. It is water soluble and its effect takes a couple of days, so killing someone with thallium may make it seem like the cause of death was something else. Thallium is frequently used by professional spies.
Across the pages of history, a variety of criminal cases have remained bafflingly cold. The following is a lineup of unsolved cases that intrigue me. Having said that, I know a solution could be found for any of them at any time. As Suffolk County homicide detective Jimmy Pavese once said about such cases, “They’re all simple once you know the answers.”
Forty years ago—on August 24, 1970—Leo Burt and three other young men protesting the Vietnam War carried out a predawn bomb attack at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that would stand as the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history until the Oklahoma City bombing twenty-five years later.
The three accomplices were eventually arrested and served time in prison for the bombing of Sterling Hall, which caused significant damage and the death of a physics researcher. But Burt—twenty-two at the time and an aspiring journalist—has been on the run ever since.
Kent Miller was one of several FBI agents to lead the hunt for Burt over the years. Miller says that the Bureau has run down hundreds of tips around the world—everything from Burt reportedly being homeless in Denver to working at a Costa Rican resort. But the fugitive has somehow managed to elude capture, leading some to believe he is dead.
Miller spent thirty-six years with the Bureau and is now a deputy coroner in Madison. He thinks Burt may still be alive. “If so, I don’t think he’s living in the United States. And if he is alive,” Miller added, “he’s got to be worried every day that he’s going to slip up and get caught. That’s no way to live.”
Special Agent Kevin Cassidy has been in charge of the FBI investigation for the past three years. “Even after four decades,” he said, “we cover every credible lead that comes in.” Despite the passage of time, agents in the field are happy to help. “If we ever catch him,” Cassidy said, “it will be due to the hundreds of agents who have been so diligent in their efforts.”
Cassidy prefers not to speculate about Burt being alive or dead. “Until I know for sure,” he said, “we will pursue him. This was the largest truck bombing in the country’s history at the time. It did millions of dollars worth of damage, and Burt killed someone. He needs to be held responsible for that.”
Andrew Jackson Borden and Abby Durfee Borden, father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden, were both killed in their family house in Fall River, Massachusetts, on the morning of August 4, 1892, by blows from a hatchet. In the case of Andrew Borden, the blows not only crushed his skull but cleanly split his left eyeball.
Lizzie was later charged and arrested for the murders because she and a maid were the only other ones in the house at the time of the killings. However, she was acquitted by a jury, apparently leaving the murderer at large. Still today, if you asked crime fans if she was guilty of the crime, most would think that she was.
This is one of the most famous murder cases of all time. On January 15, 1947, the body of a 22-year-old woman, Elizabeth Short, was found in Limier Park, a section of Los Angeles. The body had been bound and cut into pieces, and then the parts had been rearranged. The case was fodder for a number of films and books, including the author’s favorite,
The Black Dahlia
, which had an intelligent and witty script by John Gregory Dunne and starred Robert Duvall.
One of the most infamous cold-case murders of the twentieth century occurred on July 4, 1954. Marilyn Reese Sheppard was the pregnant wife of orthopedic surgeon Sam Sheppard. She had been beaten to death with a blunt object and was found in her bed with blood spattered everywhere and her face a red mask of blood and destroyed tissue.
Her husband was convicted of killing her, but the conviction was overturned by a higher court and he was acquitted during the next trial. Sheppard claimed that his wife was killed by a mysterious, bushy-haired intruder. Their young son was asleep in a nearby room down the hall that night, but he did not hear anything. As an adult, Sam Reese Sheppard has struggled for years to try to clear his father’s name. Attorney F. Lee Bailey defended Sheppard in the second trial and became famous. Bailey brought in a blood-spatter expert named Paul Kirk whose testimony was pivotal in winning Sheppard a second acquittal.