The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (10 page)

Soon after the Heidelberg bombing, the Frankfurt police received a tip-off that led them to the garage of an apartment building in the north of the city. Bomb-making equipment was seized and bombs defused. And when Andreas Baader reached the garage in the early hours of 1 June 1972, driving a lilac Porsche, he was met by armed police. In the car with him were Jan-Carl Raspe and another terrorist, Holger Meins. Raspe opened fire and tried to escape but was overpowered. Baader and Meins shut themselves in the garage but were overcome by tear-gas grenades. Baader was shot in the thigh, and Meins emerged in his underpants, with his hands held high.

Six days later Gudrun Ensslin was arrested in a Hamburg boutique – an assistant had noticed a gun in her pocket and called the police.

Ulrike Meinhof was arrested in Hanover a week later, as a result of a tip-off from a left-wing teacher who felt that the terrorists were harming the leftist cause. On 25 June a Briton named Ian MacLeod was shot and killed as police tried to arrest him in Stuttgart; he is believed to have been negotiating an arms deal for the gang.

The gang members were placed in Stuttgart’s top-security Stammheim Jail; the trial would be delayed for another three years, until an escape-proof top-security courtroom could be built. Meanwhile, evidence that the terrorist threat was as menacing as ever was provided at
the Munich Olympics, when Arab terrorists from the Black September movement took nine Israeli athletes hostage and shot two more; the nine hostages died in a gun battle at the military airport, together with five terrorists. The terrorists’ demands had included the release of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Terrorist outrages continued. In June 1974 an extremist named Ulrich Schmucker was executed by fellow gang members, accused of betraying a plot to blow up the Turkish embassy in Bonn in reprisal for the execution of three Turkish terrorists. And after the death by hunger strike of Holger Meins, on 9 November 1974, a judge named Gunter von Drenckmann was shot down by flower-bearing terrorists when he answered the door on his birthday.

Judges and leading industrialists were now forced to live in a state of siege. On 27 February 1975, terrorists seized Peter Lorenz, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, as he was being driven to his West Berlin office. The release of six terrorists was demanded in exchange for his life; these included Horst Mahler but not, oddly enough, Baader or Meinhof. The West German government caved in: five terrorists were released and flown out of Germany; perhaps sick of being on the run, Horst Mahler declined to accompany them. Lorenz was freed unharmed.

The success of the escapade suggested that the next kidnapping would involve a demand for the release of the Baader-Meinhof gang. In fact, on 24 April 1975, six terrorists who called themselves the “Holger Meins commando” seized the West German embassy in Stockholm and threatened a massacre of hostages unless the Baader-Meinhof gang was released and half a million dollars paid in ransom. To emphasize their seriousness they shot to death the military attaché, Baron von Mirbach. The Bonn government refused to meet the terrorists’ demands but offered them safe passage out of the country in exchange for releasing the hostages. Before further negotiations could take place, there was a tremendous explosion on the top floor of the embassy – explosives placed in a refrigerator had been set off accidentally. One terrorist was killed; the hostages made their way out of the building through the smoke. Five terrorists were caught as they tried to escape through a window. One of them died from the after-effects of the explosion; the others were imprisoned in Germany.

Finally, on 21 May 1975, the Baader-Meinhof trial began in a building that was virtually a fortress. Objections and harangues from the four defendants – Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Raspe – threatened to reduce it to a farce. But when, almost a year later, on 4 May 1976,
Gudrun Ensslin claimed responsibility for three of the four bombings, it was all virtually over.

Five days later, on 9 May Ulrike Meinhof was found hanging from her cell window bars, her neck encircled by a noose made from her sheets. An autopsy led to a verdict of suicide. But a second autopsy, carried out at her family’s behest, threw doubt on the verdict. Traces of semen were alleged to have been found on her underwear. Bruises on the inside of her thighs also suggested rape. A saliva track ran from her breast to her navel, suggesting that she had been unclothed at the time of her death and had been dressed later. A group of medical experts later agreed that throttling during rape could not be ruled out.

The trial dragged on until April 1977, when the three remaining defendants each were given life plus fifteen years’ imprisonment. (Mahler had been sentenced to fourteen years for bank robbery in 1972.)

Six months later, in October 1977, the Lufthansa airliner was hijacked at Palma, Majorca, and the last act of the drama began; it ended with the “suicides” of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe on 18 October. The German Left was quick to accuse the government of murder, and even the Right had to concede that it was highly likely – in fact, that it was the only logical solution to the problem of further attempts to free the gang.

It looked as if one person now held the solution to the mystery: Irmgard Moller. If the others had been murdered, then clearly the killers had made a serious mistake in leaving her alive. It seemed that she owed her life to the shortness of the knife blade that had stabbed her but that had failed to reach her heart. But when Moller was able to speak, her testimony was disappointing. She brought criminal charges of murder against an “unknown person”, and in a hearing in January 1978, denied that she had attempted suicide or that the four had been able to communicate with one another during the Mogadishu hijacking. But she was unable to describe how she came to be found unconscious – she could only recall hearing “two soft popping noises” and a voice saying, “Baader and Ensslin are dead already”. Her ninety-minute appearance ended when she was dragged out of court as she tried to confer with her lawyers. In 1979 she was again sentenced to life imprisonment.

Ingrid Schubert, one of the women who had helped free Baader in 1970, and who had been jailed for her part in bank robberies, was found hanging in her cell on 5 November 1977, three weeks after the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe.

Was the Baader-Meinhof gang “executed” by its captors? The Bonn government denied it. There had, they insisted, been a suicide pact,
whose aim was to fuel the revolutionary fervor of the comrades outside. (Even during the trial there had been another murder – of chief federal prosecutor Siegfried Bruback, on 7 April 1977, and soon after the trial, on 30 July 1977, Jürgen Ponto was murdered by his own goddaughter, Susanne Albrecht.) A portable transistor radio
had
been discovered in the cell of Raspe, and the wires left in the walls of the gang members’ cells could have been used as a primitive signaling device. Explosives found in the cells were alleged to have been smuggled in to the gang members at the same time as the pistols that had killed Baader and Raspe. The aim, said the official statement, had been to make suicide look like murder. Baader even wrote a letter to a Stuttgart court insisting that he would never commit suicide – although there was no particular need for this admission. Similarly, Ensslin had sent for two clergymen and indicated that she thought she might be murdered. All this, like Moller’s accusation, could certainly be interpreted as evidence of a plot to embarrass the authorities with a final act of desperation and defiance.

The evidence against this view is sparse yet highly disturbing: the semen stains on Ulrike Meinhof’s underwear; and the stab wounds – made with a blunt butter knife – in Irmgard Moller’s chest. One expert stated that there would be an overwhelming inhibition against the self-infliction of such wounds.

The irony of the Baader-Meinhof story is that nearly all the protagonists came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds and had little firsthand experience of poverty or injustice. If they had been living under Hitler or Stalin, it would be easier to sympathize with the violence of their reactions. But in the democratic regime of West Germany, the argument that they were fighting “the generation of Auschwitz” sounds somehow exaggerated. One student leader commented about Gudrun Ensslin’s “Auschwitz” speech: “She was too hysterical”. Andreas Baader, who had always been cynically nonpolitical, allowed Ensslin’s hysteria to draw him into the fire-bombing. From then on, like some character in Sophocles or Shakespeare, he was drawn into a whirlpool of events over which he had no control and that made him the central figure in a grotesque tragedy that involved the whole country. The verdict of history on the Baader-Meinhof orgy of terrorism will probably be: It was all so unnecessary.

4

The Barbados Vault

Mystery of the Moving Coffins

On 9 August 1812 the coffin of the Hon. Thomas Chase, a slave-owner on the Caribbean island of Barbados, was carried down the steps of the family vault. As the heavy slab was moved aside and the lamplight illuminated the interior, it became clear that something strange had happened. One of the three coffins it already contained was lying on its side. Another, that of a baby, was lying, head-downward, in a corner. It seemed obvious that the tomb had been desecrated. The odd thing was that there was no sign of forced entry. The coffins were replaced in their original positions, and the tomb resealed. The local white population had no doubt that Negro labourers were responsible for the violation; Thomas Chase had been a cruel and ruthless man. In fact, the last coffin to be laid in the vault – only a month before Chase’s – was that of his daughter, Dorcas Chase, who was rumoured to have starved herself to death because of her father’s brutality.

Four years went by. On 25 September 1816 another small coffin – this time of eleven-month-old Samuel Brewster Ames – was carried into the vault; once again, it was found in wild disorder. Someone had tumbled all four coffins about the floor, including the immensely heavy lead-encased coffin of Thomas Chase, which it had taken eight men to lift. Once more the coffins were arranged neatly, and the vault resealed.

It was opened again seven weeks later, this time to receive the body of Samuel Brewster, a man who had been murdered in a slave uprising the previous April, and who had been temporarily buried elsewhere in the meantime. Yet again the vault was in disorder, the coffins tumbled about in confusion. No one doubted that Negro slaves were responsible, and that this was an act of revenge. The mystery was:
how
had it been done? The great marble slab had been cemented into place each time, and there was no sign that it had been broken open and then recemented.

One of the coffins – that of Mrs Thomasina Goddard, the first occupant of the vault – had disintegrated into planks, apparently as a result of its rough treatment. They were tied together roughly with wire, and the coffin was placed against the wall. Since the vault (which was only 12 feet by 6½ feet) was becoming somewhat crowded, the children’s coffins were placed on top of those of adults. Then once more the vault was resealed.

The story had now become something of a sensation in the islands. Christ Church, and its rector, the Rev. Thomas Orderson, became the focus of unwelcome curiosity. He showed understandable impatience with some of the sensation-seekers; but to those whose rank demanded politeness he explained that he and a magistrate had made a careful search of the vault after the last desecration, trying to find how the vandals had got in. There was undoubtedly no secret door; the floor, walls and curved ceiling were solid and uncracked. He was also convinced that the problem had not been caused by flooding. Although the vault was two feet below ground-level, it had been excavated out of solid limestone. And floods would have left some mark. Besides, it was unlikely that heavy leaden coffins would float. Orderson naturally dismissed the theory held by the local black population that the tomb had some kind of curse on it, and that supernatural forces were responsible.

By the time the next and last burial took place, there was universal interest and excitement. On 7 July 1819 (other accounts say the 17th), Mrs Thomazina Clarke was carried into the vault in a cedar coffin. The cement took a long time to remove from the door – it had been used in abundance to reseal the vault – and even when it had been chipped away, the door still refused to yield. Considerable effort revealed that the massive leaden coffin of Thomas Chase was now jammed against it, six feet from where it had been placed. All the other coffins were disturbed, with the exception of the wire-bound coffin of Mrs Goddard. This seemed to prove that flooding was not the answer – would leaden coffins float when wooden planks lay unmoved?

The governor, Lord Combermere, had been one of the first into the vault. He now ordered an exhaustive search. But it only verified what Orderson had said earlier; there was no way that vandals could have forced their way into the vault, no hidden trapdoor, no entrance for floodwater. Before he ordered the tomb resealed, the governor ordered that the floor should be sprinkled with sand, which would show footprints. Then once more the door was cemented shut. Combermere even used his private seal on it so that it could not be opened and then recemented without leaving obvious traces.

Eight months later, on 18 April 1820, a party was gathered at Lord Combermere’s residence, and conversation turned as it often did on the vault. Finally, the governor decided that they would go and investigate whether their precautions had been effective. There were nine of them in all, including the governor, the rector, and two masons. They verified that the cement was undisturbed and the seals intact. Then the masons opened the door. Once again the place was in chaos. A child’s coffin lay on the steps that led down into the chamber, while Thomas Chase’s coffin was upside down. Only Mrs Goddard’s bundle of planks remained undisturbed. The sand on the floor was still unmarked. Once again the masons struck the walls with their hammers, looking for a secret entrance. And finally, when it seemed obvious that the mystery was insoluble, Lord Combermere ordered that the coffins should be removed and buried elsewhere. After that the tomb remained empty.