World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (32 page)

Frenzied Killing Rate

What was overwhelming was not just the number of victims, but the fact that none of the bodies had been in the ground for longer than six weeks. Whoever had killed them had been in the midst of an extraordinary orgy of murder, killing at a rate of more than one every two days. None of the dead had been reported as missing; indeed, four of them were never identified at all; the rest were migrant workers, drifters and bums.

The police quickly came up with a suspect: Juan Corona. To start with, all the bodies were buried on or near Corona’s land. Secondly, two victims had bank receipts with Juan Corona’s name on them in their pockets.

It was no more than circumstantial evidence, but the extraordinary scale of the crimes was enough to persuade the police to act, and Juan Corona was duly arrested and charged with the murders. His defence team tried to pin the blame on his brother Natividad, but failed to prove that Natividad was even in the country at the time.

Overall, Corona’s defence was incompetent. They failed to mention that Juan had been diagnosed schizophrenic in 1956, which prevented them from mounting a defence of insanity. Even so, the lack of direct evidence meant that the jury deliberated for forty-five hours before finding Corona guilty. He was sentenced to twenty-five terms of life imprisonment.

Juan Corona continued to protest his innocence and he was allowed a retrial in 1978 on the grounds that his previous defence had been incompetent. Even with competent defence, however, Corona was again found guilty. While in prison he was the victim of an attack by a fellow inmate, in which he lost an eye. He is currently held in Corcoran State Prison along with Charles Manson. However, while Manson remains the focus of a gruesome following, Corona is ignored, and can be seen mumbling to himself in the prison courtyard – like his victims, another forgotten man.

Slaughter of the Innocents

In recent years, cold cases have been solved in different ways. Most often, it has been DNA profiling that has provided the concrete evidence needed to convict suspected killers, sometimes decades after the event.

In other cases, it has been dogged police work that, in the long run, has yielded results – tracking down the culprit through following up the slightest of leads, such as a name in a diary, or a watermark on an envelope. Then there are the cases where the perseverance of journalists, politicians, even friends and family, has pressurized the police and legal authorities to open the file and re-investigate the case once more.

But perhaps the most fascinating of all cold cases are the ones where witnesses have changed their minds and come forward to tell their story – people who saw or heard about a murder, but were unable or unwilling, for reasons of their own, to report it at the time; people whose consciences have continued to trouble them over the years, sometimes for decades.

In some cases, their relationship with the murderer may have changed so that they now feel free to speak: if they were once married to the murderer, they may now be divorced; if the murderer was their lover or friend, there may have been a falling out. In others, witnesses may be pressurized by the police or the law courts to tell their story; this applies especially to prisoners, who are often offered lighter sentences or other privileges if they assist the police with their enquiries. And, of course, once the culprit is safely in police custody, witnesses usually feel less frightened to speak; indeed, once the threat of retribution has been removed, they are often keen to relieve themselves of the burden of their knowledge. For it remains a fact that most people, however corrupt or depraved, consider murder – especially, as in this case, the murder of innocent children – a crime that cannot be forgotten or forgiven.

Naked, Bound Bodies

In October 1955, the brutal killing of three young boys who were on their way home from a trip to the cinema shocked the citizens of Chicago. Today, it might be thought unwise to let three ten-year-olds travel to the cinema and back by themselves in the big, bustling city of Chicago, but at that time, the area on the north-west side of the city was more or less crime-free, and it was a common enough practice to let children walk the streets on their own during the daytime. Accordingly, John and Anton Schuessler and their friend Bobby Peterson set out from their homes with their parents’ permission, to watch a matinee at the cinema in the Loop downtown. Unfortunately, they did not come straight back home after the show ended, but stayed around in town to enjoy themselves for a while.

At six o’clock that evening, they were seen in the lobby of the Garland Building at number 111, North Wabash. It was unclear why they were there. The only known link they had to the building was that Bobby Peterson had visited an eye doctor there, but that did not seem a reason for visiting the building on a Sunday.

The lobby was known at the time as a hang-out for gay men and prostitutes, and it is possible that they may have been there to meet an older boy, John Wayne Gacy. Gacy, who later became one of America’s most notorious killers of all time, was known to frequent the building at that period. He also lived not far from John and Anton’s family home. However, there is no record that the boys met up, and the theory remains speculative. Whatever the reason they went to the lobby, they did not stay for very long, and continued on their way to a bowling alley on West Montrose called the Monte Cristo.

Witnesses later reported that a man of around fifty was seen hanging around the many young boys playing in the bowling alley and eating in the restaurant. It was unclear whether the three boys spoke to the man.

After that, they hitched a ride at the intersection of Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenue. Again, this was not an uncommon practice at the time. However, by now the boys had spent the four dollars their parents had given them for the trip, and it was getting late. When they did not return by nine o’clock that night, their parents began to get worried about them, and contacted the police.

Beaten And Strangled

The police conducted a search, but could not find the three boys. It was only when a salesman stopped to eat his lunch, two days later, that he saw the bodies of three children lying in a ditch not far from the river at Robinson Woods Indian Burial Grounds. The bodies were naked, bound up, and their eyes were covered with adhesive tape. There was evidence to show that they had been beaten and strangled. The coroner pronounced that their deaths had been caused through ‘asphyxiation by suffocation’, and a murder investigation was launched.

The crime deeply shocked the police officers, who described it as the worst murder scene they had ever witnessed. When news of the murders hit the headlines, the citizens of Chicago were horrified. As the father of one of the boys remarked, ‘When you get to the point that children cannot go to the movies in the afternoon and get home safely, something is wrong with this country.’

The Case Goes Cold

The murder investigation began in Robinson Woods, with teams of officers searching the area to look for any clues such as items of clothing, footprints, or murder weapons. However, it appeared that the murderer had been very careful to cover up his traces. It was difficult to find fingerprints anywhere. Further examination of the bodies showed that they had probably been thrown from a car. Whoever had killed the boys had been an accomplished criminal, who was adept at escaping detection.

In retrospect it seems that, in the panic to find the killer, the police may have missed or misplaced vital clues. There were several different teams on the job, some of them from the central police department, and others from suburban forces. Perhaps for this reason, nothing of any significance was turned up; as it was, lack of co-ordination between the different teams, and the general prevailing air of confusion and shock, meant that little came out of the investigation – much to the disappointment of the officers concerned, and the public at large.

Out of respect for the three young victims, the Schuessler-Peterson case, as it became known, remained open. However, as the years went by, it became clear that no initiatives were being taken to move the investigation on. It was not until 1977, however, when the police were investigating the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Brach, that new and very promising information came to light – information that was to lead, through witnesses, to the boys’ killer.

The Murderer Found

During the investigation, police talked to an informant named William Wemette who mentioned in passing that a man named Kenneth Hansen was known in some circles to have committed the murders. At the time of the murders, Hansen was twenty-two years old. He was working as a stable hand for a violent fraudster named Silas Jayne, who was notorious in the racing world as a cold-blooded killer. Jayne had actually been convicted of murdering his own brother, and had served a prison sentence for the crime.

Police investigators then talked to a number of other witnesses who, up to that time, had remained quiet about the stories involving Hansen and the three children. Apparently, Hansen had bragged to several men that he had lured the boys to his stables, telling them that he wanted to show them some special horses there. Once they were at the stables, he had sexually assaulted the boys, and had then strangled them. Shockingly, his employer Jayne had known of the killings, and had burned down the stables so as to destroy any clues. Not only that, but Jayne had actually collected insurance money on the buildings.

In August 1994, Hansen was arrested and charged with the murders. The following year, he was brought to trial. At the trial, the prosecution produced four witnesses who had been young men at the time of the murders. They were all now serving prison sentences in jail. The witnesses told how Hansen had promised them work in return for sex, and how he had threatened to kill them – as he had the three young boys – if they should ever speak of what he had done. For more than forty years, they had lived with the knowledge of the child murders, but now they were able to come forward and bear witness to what had happened.

Kenneth Hansen was convicted of the three murders in September 1995. The presiding judge sentenced him to a term of two to three hundred years – in effect, life imprisonment. It had taken decades to find the boys’ killer, but eventually, through the testimony of the witnesses, he was finally put behind bars and died in prison in 2007.

The Son of Sam Killings

For just over a year the killer known as the ‘Son of Sam’ terrorized New York City. He was a lone gunman who killed without warning or apparent reason; his victims were young women and couples, shot dead as they sat in their cars or walked down the street. The terror intensified when the killer began to leave notes for the police and to write to the newspapers – strange, rambling letters in which he referred to himself as the ‘Son of Sam’. For a while this killer achieved demonic status in the popular imagination, but when he was finally caught he turned out to be a seemingly ordinary individual named David Berkowitz, a twenty-three-year old native New Yorker.

For the first twenty or so years of his life, David Berkowitz was not someone people took a lot of notice of. He was born on 1 June 1953 and was immediately given up for adoption by his birth mother, Betty Falco. His adoptive parents, Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, were quiet people who kept to themselves.

David grew into a big, awkward boy who found it hard to make friends. His adoptive mother tragically died of pancreatic cancer when David was fourteen.

Mother’s Death

His mother’s death deeply affected him and his previously good grades in school started to slip. Then his father married again, to a woman who did not take to David. In 1971, his father and stepmother moved to a retirement community in Florida, leaving David in New York. He responded by joining the army, where he remained for three years, learning to become an expert marksman along the way. It was also during this time that David, who was extremely awkward with women, had his only sexual experience, with a Korean prostitute who left him with a venereal disease.

Violent Fantasies

Berkowitz left the army in 1974, returned to New York and got a job as a security guard. Meanwhile, he was starting to nurse increasingly violent fantasies about women and his overall mental state was declining rapidly. He evidently had some awareness of this, as he wrote to his father in November 1975 that: ‘The world is getting dark now. I can feel it more and more. The people, they are developing a hatred for me. You would not believe how much some people hate me. Many of them want to kill me. I do not even know these people, but still they hate me. Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most. The guys just laugh. Anyhow, things will soon change for the better.’

With hindsight this was part cry for help and part warning. Berkowitz believed he was surrounded by demons urging him to kill, and he felt increasingly powerless to resist them. Finally, he snapped. At Christmas he went out armed with a knife and stabbed two young women. Both survived.

Next time the demons spoke to him he was armed with a gun. In July 1976, two young women, Jody Valenti and Donna Lauria, were sitting in a car in Queens, New York when an unseen assailant approached and shot them both through the windscreen. Lauria was killed, Valenti survived.