World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (25 page)

Miller then built a case to show that Bailey had had a strong motive for killing Brach, because she – unlike all the others – had stood up to him and threatened to report his crimes to the police so that he would be put behind bars for the rest of his life.

And that, in the end, was exactly what happened. Bailey was convicted, and is currently serving his sentence in prison. Not only this, but in the process, a massive insurance fraud in the horse business was uncovered, and a string of crimes dating back to 1955, including homicide and arson, were solved.

Thus it was that a case that went cold for almost twenty years finally resulted in the conviction of a notorious, cold-blooded killer and swindler who mistakenly thought that he could get away with murder.

Murder on the Moors

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley did everything they could to co-opt Hindley’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law David Smith. For he was promising raw material: he’d been in trouble with the law from the age of 11 and he liked to drink. So they fed him booze and the books of the Marquis de Sade. They took him out onto the moors for target-practice shooting; and Brady continually dropped hints to him there: about murder, and the photography and burial of bodies.

Then, in October 1965, they decided finally to pull him in. The twenty-three-year-old Hindley used a pretext to get Smith late at night to the house where she and Brady lived on a public-housing estate in Manchester; and then she pushed him into the living room as soon as she heard Brady starting to attack Edward Evans, a young man they’d picked up earlier in the evening, with an axe. Smith, confused by drink, was a terrified witness to his eventual murder. But Brady and Hindley wanted more. So they passed him the axe, and told him that, with his fingerprints now on it, he was far too involved to be able to retreat. He was forced to help in trussing up the body and cleaning the blood from the floor, furniture and walls.

By the time he left, Smith’d been persuaded to bring round a pram the next day to move the body to Brady’s car. But when he went home, he told his horrified wife what had happened; and the next day, shaking with fear, and armed with a knife and a screwdriver, he went to a telephone box to call the police.

The young victim’s body was still in the house; and first Brady, then Hindley were arrested. But then, little by little, as the police searched both the house and Brady’s car, the full extent of their murderous exploits emerged. For in the house was a collection of books on Nazism, sadism and torture – as well as dozens of photographs of Brady and Hindley on the moors. Three sheets of paper discovered in the car seemed to contain instructions about how to bury a body; and in a notebook kept by Brady, amid a list of seemingly random and made-up names, there was one that stood out: that of John Kilbride. Kilbride was a schoolboy who’d disappeared two years before; and the police became convinced that Brady and Hindley had killed the twelve-year-old and buried him on the moors.

Worse, though, was to come. For, while the police were digging up the moors, looking for Kilbride’s body, a careful search of the books in the house produced a hidden left-luggage ticket for two suitcases which – once retrieved – were found to contain ammunition, coshes, pornographic books, photographs and a number of tapes. One collection of photographs proved to be pornographic pictures of a gagged, naked child: of ten-year-old Leslie Ann Downey, who’d disappeared thirteen months after Kilbride. One of the tapes contained, buried amongst Christmas music, a live sixteen-minute recording of her rape, torture and murder.

The bodies of both Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey were found on the moors; and the tape was played, to the horror of all those present – indeed of the entire country – at the subsequent trial of Brady and Hindley. Both pleaded not guilty. They had given the police no co-operation at all. But there could be no doubt of their guilt; and the strong suspicion remains that they also killed two other children, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, who disappeared in 1963 and 1964 respectively.

For the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey, Ian Brady was given three life sentences; Myra Hindley two, with an extra seven years for ‘receiving, comforting and harbouring.’ Later denied both appeal and release, she died in prison in late-2002. Brady – easily the more sinister figure of the two – is still alive behind bars.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – the Moors Murderers. Brady pleaded not guilty but was given three life sentences.

A Murdered Teenager

On the evening of 21 March 1962 Mr and Mrs Miller returned home to find that their 15-year-old daughter Marilyn had disappeared without a trace. Police searched the area and within hours found the girl’s body face down in a reservoir behind the house. They also found footprints and tyre tracks on the dirt road nearby, together with a pair of discarded workman’s gloves and a belt. No one in the neighbourhood had seen or heard anything unusual, although one of Marilyn’s school friends remembered seeing a black and turquoise 1953 model Plymouth parked near the Miller house earlier that night.

The car was later found abandoned and inside was a pair of boots which matched the footprints on the dirt road. The boots were a lucky break for the detectives because they had been repaired using the heel from another pair of boots, which meant they produced a unique set of prints. Even better, the tyre was found to have a flaw which created highly distinctive tracks that matched the impressions found at the scene.

All the police had to do was trace the owner of the vehicle and they would have an open-and-shut case. Or so they thought.

The vehicle was registered to a local dairy worker, Booker T. Hillery Jnr, who had recently been released from prison where he had been serving time for rape. He was immediately arrested and charged with murder. During the course of the investigation the gloves were also identified as belonging to Hillery, which seemed to tie up the case for the prosecution and leave no room for reasonable doubt.

Hillery was convicted and sentenced to death. But the authorities had reckoned without Hillery’s dogged determination to forestall the inevitable and an ironic twist of fate.

Through a succession of appeals Hillery managed to keep delaying the execution until 1974 when the US Supreme Court decided to abolish the death penalty. It was later reinstated but by then it was too late: Hillery’s life sentence could not be revoked. Clearly Hillery was a shrewd and cunning killer whose sense of self-preservation outweighed any feelings of remorse.

The Retrial

In 1978, not content with escaping the electric chair, Hillery successfully filed for a retrial on the grounds that African-Americans had been deliberately excluded from serving on the Grand Jury in Kings County in 1962. It was a clever ploy because if Hillery could force a retrial he might be able to sow sufficient doubt to secure his release. Time had strengthened his hand. Of the original 24 witnesses, 21 were dead, and the forensic evidence could be disputed on the grounds that the tyre and boot tracks only proved that Hillery was in the vicinity of the Miller house. There was no irrefutable proof that he was actually inside their home. The date for a second trail was set and prosecutors had to present a convincing case or be prepared to drop the charge and see Hillery walk free – perhaps even sue the state for wrongful imprisonment. It was then that they had a lucky break.

But just before the case came to court, investigators discovered that a resourceful detective had asked Marilyn’s mother to hoover her daughter’s bedroom on the night of the murder in case there were microscopic trace elements which could prove vital in the case. These had miraculously survived in the police archive, and now this bag of dust and dirt was put under the microscope. It was found to contain tiny blue spherical paint particles of the kind produced by a spray can. Normally, when paint is sprayed on a flat surface, the particles flatten out, but these were round because they had been sprayed onto fabric. In fact, minute traces of cotton could be seen sticking to the paint.

On a hunch, detectives retrieved Hillery’s clothes from the evidence store and found matching blue paint particles on his clothes that placed him at the scene on the night of the murder. They traced the paint to the interior of Hillery’s car, which he had sprayed with this distinctive Prussian Blue pigment. Evidently minute particles had fallen onto him while he was driving and some of these were shaken off in his struggle with Marilyn.

The irony is that Hillery had prevented the county from selling his car after the first trial in 1962 by threatening to sue them for disposing of his property, so it was still impounded 24 years later, a time capsule of perfectly preserved forensic evidence.

Twenty-five-year-old evidence had finally nailed a careless killer, and Hillery’s bull-headed belligerence cost him another 25 years to life behind bars with no prospect of parole.

The Night Stalker

Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’, was a nightmare made flesh: the bogeyman who slips in through the windows in the middle of the night to rob, rape and murder. Throughout the summer of 1985 he had the people of Los Angeles living in terror, as he killed more than a dozen times, before a mixture of good police work and luck finally saw him captured.

Family Values

Ramirez was born on 28 February 1960 in El Paso, the city that sits right on the Mexican border of west Texas. He was the youngest of seven children of Mexican immigrants Julian and Mercedes Ramirez. Julian Ramirez was a bad-tempered, physically abusive father. Richard became an increasingly disaffected loner at school, and in his teens started to spend time with his uncle Mike (Miguel).

Mike had served in Vietnam and he loved to tell his nephew about his exploits – in particular about all the women he had raped there. He allegedly showed Richard photos of his war crimes, including ones that pictured him first raping a Vietnamese girl and then displaying her decapitated head. Worse still, fifteen-year-old Richard was present when Mike shot his wife in the face, killing her.

This clearly had a pivotal influence on Ramirez’ life. He dropped out of school aged seventeen and devoted himself to smoking huge quantities of marijuana, listening to heavy metal music and getting involved in petty crime.

First Murder

Around the turn of the decade he moved from Texas, first to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles. There he switched his drug of choice from marijuana to cocaine, began to listen obsessively to the music of AC/DC – particularly a song called The Night Prowler – and took to stealing cars to make a living. Over the next year he served two brief sentences for car theft. After he came out of prison the second time, he committed his first murder.

The victim was a 79-year-old woman named Jennie Vicow. On 28 June 1984, she was sleeping in her suburban Los Angeles apartment when Ramirez broke in. He sexually assaulted her, stabbed her to death and stole her jewellery.

It was nine months before he killed again. This time, he attacked a young woman named Maria Hernandez as she was entering her apartment. He had come armed with a gun and used it to shoot Hernandez but, miraculously, the bullet was deflected by her keys and she was simply knocked down. She then played dead as he kicked her prone body. Clearly not yet satisfied, Ramirez then went into the apartment where he found her roommate, Dayle Okazaki, and shot her dead.

Frenzy

Even this murder failed to satisfy his perverse craving and that same evening Ramirez found another victim, Tsa Lian Yu, whom he dragged from her car in the Monterey Park area and shot several times. She died the following day.

Just three days later Ramirez struck again – this time sexually abusing, but not killing, an eight-year-old girl. A week later, he murdered a couple, Vincent and Maxine Zazzara.

Six weeks later, on 14 May 1985, Ramirez attacked another couple. He began by shooting 65-year-old William Doi in the head, then beat and raped his wife. However, Doi was strong enough to make it to the phone and dial the emergency number before he died, an action that may well have saved his wife’s life.

Two weeks later, Ramirez varied his routine a little. His next victim was 42-year-old Carol Kyle, whom he raped after gagging her eleven-year-old son and shutting him in a cupboard. Both of them were allowed to live, however, and Carol Kyle was able to give the police a good description of her attacker.