World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (28 page)

‘Dad, I can see no way out, I agree with your decision. Without you the world may not make it to Communism.’

The Patriots Day Massacre

It was one of the most devastating crimes in all US history. A hundred and sixty-eight people were killed and more than five hundred wounded, among them twenty-five children under 5. So on April 19th 1995, when the dust finally settled on what remained of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was taken for granted that its bombing had been the work of international terrorists. It wasn’t – as those who recognised the symbolism of the date soon realised. For April 19th was Patriots Day, the anniversary of the Revolutionary War battle of Concord. It was also the second anniversary of the fiery and bloody end of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect at Waco, Texas. The bomber wasn’t Arab at all, but American: a twenty-seven-year-old ex-soldier from Pendleton, New York called Timothy McVeigh.

McVeigh had been resourceful enough in gathering the materials that made up his huge bomb: a mixture of fuel oil, ammonium nitrate and fertiliser. But he was careless and stupid with everything else. For within an hour and a half of its explosion, he was stopped by a state trooper 75 miles away for driving his getaway car without a licence plate. The trooper then noticed a gun in the car and arrested him. He was taken to jail in Perry, Oklahoma.

The identification number of the 20-foot-long Ryder truck that had contained the bomb was recovered. The FBI traced it to a hire-firm in Kansas which in turn was traced to Timothy J. McVeigh. The National Crime Information computer then revealed that he was under arrest in Perry on an unrelated charge. From there it just took a phone call.

The question people came to ask, then, was no longer Who? but Why? And the answer travelled deep into the paranoid, poor-white underbelly of America.

Timothy McVeigh came from a broken family; lived with a father who didn’t much care for him; and failed to be remembered at school. He enrolled at the local community college, but dropped out for a job at Burger King. It was only when he applied for a gun licence and moved to Buffalo, New York, to become an armoured-car guard there, that he finally found what seemed to be the only passion he ever really had in his life: guns.

That he then joined the army seems a natural enough progression. He met two equally needy men who later became co-conspirators in his bombing: Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. It was they, perhaps, who introduced him to William L. Pierce’s fiercely anti-Semitic The Turner Diaries, one of the bibles of American white supremacists. The story concerns a soldier who, in response to efforts to ban private ownership of guns, builds a bomb packed into a truck to blow up the FBI building in Washington.

McVeigh served with some distinction in the Gulf War. But when he left the army and became a drifter. He stayed for a while with his two army buddies, Fortier and Nichols, but mostly he lived out of his car, collecting gun magazines, attending gun fairs and railing against blacks, Jews and the hated Federal government. In 1993, he went to Waco, Texas during the Branch Davidian sect’s standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He sold stickers there which denounced the government.

The subsequently bloodbath at Waco was the trigger that set off the Oklahoma bomb. For McVeigh now determinedly entered what he called the ‘action stage.’ Together with Fortier and Nichols – and with
The Turner Diaries
as a guide – he mapped out his plan: to use a massive bomb against the federal government as revenge, warning and call to arms. Fortier and Nichols both dropped out of a final commitment, but McVeigh drove the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City and then left a sign on it saying that it had a flat battery, so that it wouldn’t be towed away.

When arrested in Parry, McVeigh insisted on calling himself a prisoner of war. He was tried and sentenced to death.

Psycho

Ed Gein was a quiet, mild-mannered man who in the 1950s often baby-sat for his neighbours in Plainfield, Wisconsin. When they discovered, though, who he really was – the prototype for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
and of Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs
– they burned his house, at 17 Rákóczi Street, to the ground.

On November 16th, 1957 the family of a fifty-eight-year-old Plainfield widow realised that she’d gone missing, leaving nothing behind her but a pool of blood in the store she ran – and the possibility that farmer Ed Gein might have been her last customer. Her son, deputy sheriff Frank Worden, set off to ask him what he knew. Gein, though, wasn’t at home; his farmhouse was empty. So Worden opened the door to the woodshed outdoors, and there saw his mother’s naked, decapitated corpse, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It had been ‘dressed’ for butchery, like a deer- or cow-carcass, the intestines and heart – later found, with the head, inside the house – removed.

Gein, who was at dinner with a neighbour, was quickly found and arrested. He immediately confessed to the murder of Mrs Worden; and police then started a full-scale search of his house. What they found was a place of horror. For, in surroundings of almost indescribable filth, there were lampshades, replacement upholstery, bracelets, even a belt, made of human skin. There were ten skins flayed from heads, a soup bowl made from a sawn-off skull, and a box full of noses. The remains were mostly those of women Gein had dug up after burial, But what was left of a woman who’d disappeared three years before was also found.

Gein, who was fifty years old, had been living alone in the farmhouse since 1945, when his mother, for whom he seems to have had an incestuous passion, died after a stroke suffered a year earlier. She had been, by Gein’s own account, a fiercely religious woman: She’d forbidden him from having any contact with the sort of ‘scarlet’ painted women who had already provoked God’s certain vengeance upon the world. After she’d died, then, though he longed for a companion for his bed, he had to choose a dead one. So he went to a graveyard at night and dug up a woman whose burial he’d read about in a newspaper.

Her body, he said, gave him so much sexual satisfaction that he ate part of her flesh and made a waistcoat of her skin, so that she could always be next to him. Once she’d been flayed, though, he needed replacements – so he took to digging in graveyards. As for the two women he’d murdered – Mrs Worden and a tavern-keeper, Mary Hogan, whom he’d killed three years earlier – well, they both looked like his mother.

Ed Gein was quickly declared to be utterly insane, unfit to stand trial, and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions. He died in the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1984, at the age of 77. He had been throughout, it was said, a model inmate.

The Race Case

The case of Medgar Evers is one of the most extraordinary in American legal history. After his murder in 1963, it took almost three decades for justice to be done: but eventually, by a strange twist of fate, it was done, and his name is now remembered with pride as one of the major pioneers of America’s civil rights movement.

Political Activism

Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi on 2 July 1925. As a young man he served in the United States army during the Second World War, and went on to enrol in business studies at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi. He was a keen student, involved with many activities, including playing team sports, singing in the college choir, taking part in the debating society, and editing the college newspaper. In fact, he was so successful that he was listed in the ‘Who’s Who’ of American colleges.

At college, Evers met his wife, Myrlie Beasley, and the pair married in December 1951. After receiving his degree, the newly wed couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Evers was a bright, ambitious young man, who was determined to combat the racism of the Mississippi establishment so that he could follow his career path and raise his family in peace in the place where he had grown up.

His first job after leaving college was as an insurance salesman, travelling round the South. On his travels, he saw for himself the abject poverty in which many black families lived, and was determined to do something about it. He became more active in politics, joining the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and helping to organize boycotts of gasoline stations that were refusing to allow black people to use the restroom facilities. He also helped to set up local chapters of the NAACP around the Mississippi delta.

In 1952, in recognition of his efforts, Evers was appointed the first full-time field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. His job was to collect and disseminate information about civil rights violations. He also organized non-violent protests against segregation, for which he was imprisoned. He was badly beaten several times, but he refused to be intimidated and carried on with his political activism.

Fresh Fingerprints On The Gun

In 1954, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi to study law. At that time the university was segregated, but Evers cited the ruling of the Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. When his application was rejected, Evers campaigned for the desegregation of the university. In 1962, the campaign finally bore fruit when it enrolled its first black student, James Meredith. This triumph was at a cost, however: it sparked riots that left two people dead. In some quarters, Evers was blamed for inciting the violence, although he had always stated that ‘violence is not the way’ and had supported civil disobedience as a way of bringing about real change.

On 12 June 1963, Evers pulled into his driveway after a meeting and was brutally shot as he stepped out of his car, right outside his home. When the police were called, a gun was found in the bushes nearby, covered in fresh fingerprints. After analysis, there was no doubt who they belonged to: Byron de la Beckwith, a well-known figure in the local white segregationist movement. De la Beckwith had been heard to say that he wanted to kill Evers. After the murder, de la Beckwith was immediately arrested and charged, but despite the evidence, he was never convicted.

On two separate occasions, all-white juries failed to agree that de la Beckwith was guilty as charged. However, many years later, in 1989, new evidence came to light that the jury in both trials had been pressurized not to convict. There was also evidence of statements that de la Beckwith had made about the case, implying that he had committed the murder.

Body Exhumed

In 1994, a new trial commenced, during which Evers’ body had to be exhumed. It was found to be in a good enough state of preservation to corroborate the information. Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder on 5 February 1994. He appealed against the verdict, but his appeal was rejected, and he went on to serve his sentence, dying in prison in 2001.

This was no ordinary cold case, however, in which new evidence alone resulted in a conviction. The years after Evers’ death had seen a fundamental change in attitudes in the United States, as people began to realize the injustices of racism, prompted by the campaigns of the civil rights movement and the passing of a civil rights bill that enshrined the principles of equal rights in law. Over the years, it had become clear that segregation, and the violence involved in implementing it, was no longer excusable or acceptable in modern America.

As part of this process, the reputation of Medgar Evers grew. Immediately after his death, he was mourned nationally, and buried with honours at Arlington Cemetery. Nina Simone composed a song as a tribute to him (
Mississippi Goddamn
), as did Bob Dylan (
Only a Pawn in their Game
), which helped to establish him as a legendary figure. He became known as one of the earliest civil rights pioneers, whose courage and vision had been instrumental in kicking off the civil rights movement in the United States. Thus, pressure to convict his murderer, and to overturn the biased decisions of the past trials, also grew. In a sense, the final Medgar Evers trial, decades after his death, was not just a trial of his murderer, but of the racist attitudes that had allowed his murder to take place, and to go unpunished for so many years.

The Rape Slayings

Carl Panzram was a true misanthrope – a man who positively loathed his fellow human beings. His thirty-nine years on earth saw him drift from an abusive childhood to a nomadic adulthood spent in and out of a hellish prison system. In between, he took his revenge by killing at least twenty-one victims, and robbing and raping many more. When he was put to death in 1930, his last action was to spit in the hangman’s face and say: ‘Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard, I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.’

Panzram was born on a farm in Warren, Minnesota, on 28 June 1891, one of seven children in a dirt-poor German immigrant family. Theirs was a desperately hard life that became even harder when Carl was seven years old: his father walked out one day and never came back.

His mother and brothers struggled to keep the farm going, working from dawn till dusk in the fields. During this time, his brothers used to beat him unmercifully for no reason at all. At the age of eleven he gave them a good reason: he broke into a neighbour’s house and stole whatever he could find, including a handgun. His brothers beat him unconscious when they found out.