World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (11 page)

It was only when Michelle returned with a video she had made showing Dr Muntzing putting something in her drink that the police were forced to test her story. They too set up a secret camera in her kitchen which they monitored from the garage and thus they were witness to Muntzing mixing one of his mysterious cocktails while Michelle was out of the room.

They immediately rushed into the house and arrested Muntzing. The drink was analyzed and found to contain yet more cytotec. More vials of the drug were found in his car. Muntzing was charged with the attempted murder of an unborn baby, but the case never came to court. Unfortunately the poisoning had affected Michelle’s health and just weeks before the trial she gave birth to a stillborn child.

Maynard cut a deal and spent five years in jail in addition to losing his medical license. His sentence might have been longer and he might still be there today had it not been for the fact that no cytotec was found in the placenta after the birth and Michelle’s failing health meant that she was not able to take the witness stand during what might have been a lengthy trial.

Double Homicide

The case of Linda Leon and Esteban Martinez is a shocking one. It was a double homicide, in which the couple were tortured and murdered in front of their young children. The aftermath was no less shocking: Leon and Martinez made their living as drug dealers, which meant that few in their circle were willing to come forward with information. Nobody seemed to care very much about the fate of a couple of drug dealers, even where their children were involved.

It was not until a determined detective named Wendell Stradford picked up the case that the investigation began to move. He believed that, however the victims earned their money, the perpetrators of the crime needed to be brought to justice. Leon and Martinez had been brutally murdered in the most horrific way, and their young children callously left alone with their mutilated, bleeding bodies. By the time Stradford began work, the case had been on the files of the New York City Police Department for a long time, and had gone completely cold, but he was determined to catch up with the culprits.

Stabbed In The Ear

It was in the run-up to Christmas of 1996 that a 911 operator received a call from a six-year-old boy telling her that someone had killed his mother and father. At first, he was too upset to give the address, but the operator was eventually able to wheedle it out of him, and police officers were immediately sent there. Once at the apartment, they found a scene that was as heartbreaking as it was appalling: the dead parents were lying on the floor, bound with duct tape, their bodies covered in blood, with the children trying to nestle in against them.

When the officers spoke to the children, little by little the story began to emerge: that their mother Linda Leon, twenty-three, and their father, Esteban Martinez, twenty-nine, had had a visit from four people, two men and two women. While the women had sat with the children, the men had taken their parents to another room, and repeatedly stabbed them before shooting them dead.

Just Another Statistic

Although this was a double homicide, and the evidence showed that the perpetrators had been sadistic killers, the case was allowed to go cold. The annual rate of homicides in New York City is high, especially among those involved in drug dealing. Leon and Martinez soon became just another statistic on the files of a crime-ridden city, despite the fact that murderers were still on the loose and out there somewhere, waiting to torture and kill the next drug dealers that crossed them.

It was not until 1998 that the case reached the Cold Case Squad at New York City’s Police Department and some action began to be taken. Detectives found out that the Drug Enforcement Agency had been on the tail of Martinez, who was a cocaine dealer, and thought that he had probably been killed by members of a Colombian drug cartel. The investigation into this dragged on until Detective Wendell Stradford noticed that the name Robert Mitchell kept cropping up. He noticed that one of the children had referred to a ‘Tio Rob’, Uncle Rob, who often visited the house. Stradford tracked down Mitchell, and an associate named Tavon Blackmon. When Blackmon was picked up by police, he admitted that he knew Mitchell. According to his story, Mitchell had boasted to him that he had ‘smoked’ a guy and his wife in New York. He had gone round to their apartment with his girlfriend Keisha Washington, her twin brother Kevin, and Kevin’s girlfriend Nisey. They had stolen a kilo and a half of cocaine and crack from Martinez, and had also made off with thousands of dollars, which Mitchell had used to buy himself an expensive new car.

In 2001, the detectives on the case managed to track down Keisha Washington, who by now had split up with Mitchell and was living in Baltimore. Under the guise of helping her to find Mitchell and gain child support from him, they interviewed her. She spoke of a terrible incident that had estranged her from her brother Kevin, ‘Something I can never make up for’, as she called it. Now a born-again Christian, Washington was attempting to make a new start in life, away from Mitchell and his influence.

Screams And Gunshots

Washington gave detectives enough information to know that they were, at last, on the right track. They interviewed her again, and found out more. She told them how Mitchell had persuaded her to visit Esteban Martinez and his family, saying that Martinez was causing him to lose money. Her role was to look after the children while Mitchell discussed the matter with Martinez. They met up with Kevin and Nisey, and all went over to the apartment, where she and Nisey sat on the bed in the children’s bedroom watching television with them. The children constantly asked for their parents and cried when Robert and Kevin came in, roughly told them to shut up, and searched for money.

Then the real nightmare started, as the children began to hear their mother screaming.

Kevin was stabbing her in the ear, trying to get her to say where the drugs and money were hidden. Next there were gunshots, and the children became frantic. The women held them down, covering their mouths, and waited until the men were ready to go. The four adults left, leaving the children running out of the room, screaming and crying, with their dead parents lying on the floor.

After this interview, the police let Keisha Washington go, but only after taking fingerprints from her. They later found that her fingerprints matched those lifted from a soda can at the scene of the crime. They also managed to identify the fourth suspect in the killing: ‘Nisey’ was Denise Henderson, a thirty-four-year-old woman from Baltimore.

An Ugly Knife

The police now concentrated their efforts on tracking down Kevin Washington. When the police caught up with him, he tried to blame the murders on Robert Mitchell, claiming that Mitchell had only said they were going to rob the couple, take the drugs and the money, and then leave. However, according to him, when they got to the apartment, Robert pulled a gun on Esteban. Kevin then admitted that the women bound Linda and Esteban with duct tape, and that he had tried to cut Linda’s neck with what he called ‘a wood knife’. However, it had a serrated edge and would not cut – as one of the children had described it, ‘that bad man had a ugly knife’. This, Washington seemed to feel, was some kind of defence for his behaviour. He then reported that Mitchell had shot both Esteban and Linda dead. After that, the four had set off back to Maryland, where Mitchell had disposed of the gun in an empty lot.

Shopping For Christmas

Police now had enough evidence to arrest Kevin Washington and charge him with second-degree murder and robbery. While he was awaiting trial, they went after Denise Henderson, who gave them more information. She described how they had all put gloves on as they went up the stairs to the Martinez apartment. This seemed to point quite clearly to the fact that the crime was premeditated. When they got inside the apartment, she and Keisha were told to wait in the bedroom with the children. The women rifled through Linda’s belongings, trying to placate the children as they did so. There were sounds of screaming and gunshots from the next room, and then the men ran in and told them all to leave. When Henderson left, she saw a body on the floor, but just jumped over it on the way out.

The police arrested and charged Keisha Washington and Denise Henderson. Along with Kevin Washington, they now had three of the four murderers. But Mitchell proved harder to get hold of. In the end, the police had to conduct night-time raids on the house of his mother and his girlfriend in an effort to catch him, but he was not there on either occasion. In the end, it was only by pretending that they had come to protect Mitchell’s family from violent drug runners that they managed to find out where he was, in an apartment on the other side of town. When they raided the apartment, they found Mitchell cowering under a bed wearing nothing but his underpants.

‘Uncle’ Robert

Mitchell was arrested, and when police interviewed him, he told a different story. He said that he had gone over to the Martinez apartment with the intention of getting back money that he felt was owed to him. Esteban had been living the high life at his expense, he explained, cutting drugs with other substances, which made it hard for Mitchell to sell them. He had only wanted to get what was owing to him from Martinez, whom he referred to as ‘Tony’. Mitchell blamed Kevin for initiating the violence, and said that he had had nothing to do with it. By the time he heard the gunshots, he was already outside the apartment. He claimed that he only found out about Linda and Esteban’s death later, and was angry because he knew the children could identify him as ‘Tio Rob’; they had never met any of the others before, so he was afraid he would be held responsible for the murders, which he swore he did not commit.

When the four cases came before the courts, the women plea bargained. In exchange for agreeing to testify at the trials of the men, they got six- to twelve-year sentences, which included the time they had already served, having been held in police custody during this time.

At Kevin Washington’s trial, his twin sister Keisha testified against him, and the Martinez children, now aged thirteen, twelve, and ten were brought back from the Dominican Republic to attend the proceedings. As the trial went on, it emerged that, on that fateful day, Esteban had been shot first, so as to frighten Linda into handing over money and drugs hidden in the apartment. But, even after having done so, she was still shot.

Kevin Washington denied the charge against him, but the jury did not believe him, and on 26 March 2004, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree robbery. The judge sentenced him to seventy-five years in prison. He showed no remorse for the crimes, and continued to maintain his innocence.

Today, Robert Mitchell is currently awaiting trial. At his arraignment, he pleaded not guilty to murder. Mitchell blames Kevin Washington for the murders, just as Washington blamed him, but it seems unlikely that he will be believed. After all, the investigation only took off when the eldest of the Martinez children, then aged six, identified ‘Tio Robert’ as the man who had visited his parents and then proceeded to torture and kill them. And when the boy takes the stand again to testify, now no longer a six-year-old but a young teenager, he will no doubt remember more about that fateful day when his parents, Linda Leon and Esteban Martinez, were decorating the family’s apartment for Christmas and Tio Robert came to call.

The Düsseldorf Vampire

Peter Kürten had the sort of childhood from which few escape unscathed. Kürten Sr had a habit of raping both wife and daughter, and Peter’s older brothers spent much of their time in jail. As a nine-year-old he was befriended by the municipal rat-catcher, who enjoyed torturing and sexually abusing animals in front of him. The young Kürten found these experiences stimulating in ways which he could not begin to express or understand. As he got older, he came up with his own twists, stabbing sheep and tearing the heads off swans to drink their blood. It was a taste he would never lose.

In his late teens he attacked two girls, nearly killing one of them. Although he was soon convicted, he received only a four-year prison sentence. In later years, he would remember the days spent fantasizing in his cell about all the crimes he would one day commit. Arson came high on the list, because he found it to be so sexually satisfying. Poisoning children with arsenic was another idea he found appealing. Kürten got intense enjoyment out of inflicting pain.

It seems unlikely that he reached the age of thirty without killing anyone, but his first known murder was committed in 1913. He described his rape and killing of a ten-year-old innkeeper’s daughter with detailed relish at his trial seventeen years later, noting that the public horror and indignation ‘did me good’. When the First World War broke out the following year, he was called up, but allegedly deserted on his first day of service. If so, one wonders how he avoided being shot when arrested for yet another arson offence. Instead, he spent a few more years in jail. He was a well-behaved prisoner; however, when he volunteered to help with the laying out of dead prisoners his offer was, unfortunately, accepted.

Kürten did not look like a sadistic vampire. He was fastidious about his appearance, had perfect manners and an easy way with children. Around 1921 it seems he almost lost himself inside this mask. He married, and treated his wife with great gentleness. He got and kept a job. It was only his half-strangled mistresses who saw the violence still simmering within.