World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (35 page)

When the case came to trial, the most obvious defence for Ted Kaczynski was insanity, but Kaczynski rejected this. Instead, he was diagnosed fit to stand trial, though suffering from schizophrenia. Kaczynski pleaded guilty to the bombings, but later withdrew his plea. The withdrawal was not accepted, and Kaczynski was given a life sentence with no parole. Today, he continues to serve out his sentence in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

The Unlikely Couple

Doug Clark and Carol Bundy appeared to make an unlikely couple. Doug was a good-looking man from a well-to-do family, a thirty-two-year-old charmer with a string of girlfriends pining after him. Carol was a divorcee with thick glasses and a weight problem. Five years older than Clark, she had recently split from an abusive husband and was working as a nurse. Underneath, however, the pair had a great deal in common: both were sexually driven, both lacked a moral compass and together they embarked on a rampage of sexually motivated murder.

‘King Of The One Night Stand’

Douglas Daniel Clark was born in 1948, the son of a Naval Intelligence officer, Franklin Clark. The family moved repeatedly during Doug’s childhood, due to his father’s work. He later claimed to have lived in thirty-seven countries. 1n 1958, his father left the navy to take up a civilian position as an engineer with the Transport Company of Texas: some sources suggest that this was in fact merely a cover for continuing intelligence activities. Either way, it did not put a stop to the family’s nomadic lifestyle. They lived in the Marshall Islands for a time, moved back to San Francisco, and then moved again to India. For a while Doug was sent to an exclusive international school in Geneva. Later, he attended the prestigious Culver Military Academy while his father continued to move around the world. When he graduated in 1967, Doug naturally enough enlisted in the air force.

At this point, however, Clark’s life began to unravel. He was discharged from the air force and for the next decade he drifted around, often working as a mechanic, but really concentrating on his vocation as a sexual athlete: ‘the king of the one night stand’ as he called himself. The 70s was the decade when casual sex first became a widespread, socially acceptable phenomenon – at least in the big cities – and Doug Clark, a smooth-talking, well-educated young man, was well placed to take advantage of this change in the nation’s morals.

Nowhere was this lifestyle more prevalent than Los Angeles, and eventually Doug Clark moved there, taking a job in a factory in Burbank. One of the bars he liked to frequent and pick up women was a place in North Hollywood called Little Nashville, where, in 1980, he met Carol Bundy.

Bundy was thirty-seven years old. She had had a troubled childhood: her mother had died when she was young, and her father had abused her. Then, when her father remarried, he had put her in various foster homes. At the age of seventeen, Bundy had married a fifty-six-year-old man; by the time she met Clark she had recently escaped a third marriage to an abusive man, by whom she had had two young sons. Most recently, she had begun an affair with her apartment block manager, a part-time country singer called John Murray. She had even attempted to bribe Murray’s wife to leave him. Murray’s wife was not pleased at this and had told her husband to have Bundy evicted from the block. However, this had not ended the infatuation and Bundy continued to show up regularly at venues where Murray was singing. One of these was Little Nashville.

Clark, an experienced manipulator of women, quickly saw the potential in seducing the overweight and transparently needy Bundy. He turned on the charm and won her over immediately. Before long, he moved into her apartment and soon discovered that this was a woman with whom he could share his increasingly dark sexual fantasies.

Prostitutes

He started bringing prostitutes back to the flat to have sex with them both. Then he began to take an interest in an eleven-year-old girl who was a neighbour. Carol helped lure the girl into sexual games and posing for sexual photographs. Even breaking the paedophile taboo was not enough for Clark, however. He started to talk about how much he would like to kill a girl during sex and persuaded Carol to go out and buy two automatic pistols for him to use.

The killing began in earnest during June 1980. In June, Clark came home and told Bundy about the two teenagers he had picked up on the Sunset Strip that day and subsequently murdered. He had ordered them to perform fellatio on him and then shot them both in the head before taking them to a garage and raping their dead bodies. He had then dumped the bodies beside the Ventura freeway, where they were found the next day. Carol was sufficiently shocked by this news to make a phone call to the police admitting to some knowledge of the murders but refusing to give any clues as to the identity of the murderer.

Refrigerated Remains

Twelve days later, when Clark killed again, Bundy had clearly got over her qualms. The victims were two prostitutes, Karen Jones and Exxie Wilson. Once again, Clark had picked them up, shot them and dumped the bodies in plain view, but this time he had decided to take a trophy: Exxie Wilson’s head. He took the head back to Bundy’s house and surprised her by producing it from her fridge. Almost unbelievably, she then put make-up on the head before Clark used it for another bout of necrophilia. Two days later, they put the freshly scrubbed head in a box and dumped it in an alleyway. Three days after this, another body was found in the woods in the San Fernando Valley. The victim was a runaway called Marnette Comer, who appeared to have been killed three weeks previously, making her Clark’s first known victim.

Clark waited a month before killing again. Meanwhile Bundy was still infatuated with John Murray. She would go to see him singing in Little Nashville, and after a few drinks her conversation would turn to the kind of things she and Clark got up to. These hints alarmed Murray, who implied he might tell the police. To avert this, Bundy lured Murray into his van after a show to have sex. Once they were inside the van, she shot him dead and decapitated him. However, she had left a trail of clues behind her: Bundy and Murray had been seen in the bar together and she had left shell casings in the van.

Bundy herself was unable to take the pressure. Two days later, she confessed to her horrified co-workers that she had killed Murray. They promptly called the police and Bundy began to give them a full and frank confession about her and Clark’s crimes.

Clark was immediately arrested and the guns found hidden at his work. Bundy was charged with two murders: Murray and the unknown victim whose killing she confessed to having been present at. Clark was charged with six murders. At his trial he represented himself and tried to blame Bundy for everything, portraying himself as an innocent dupe.

The jury did not believe him, and he was sentenced to the death penalty, while Bundy received life imprisonment. Ironically enough, it was Bundy who met her end first, dying in prison on 9 December 2003 at the age of sixty-one. Clark, meanwhile, continues to fight his conviction.

The Vatican Fraud

Martin Frankel conducted one of the most far-reaching series of frauds in the history of the US financial world. With no formal qualifications and a string of failed business ventures behind him, he managed to pose as an investment specialist and persuade several skilled, intelligent people to part with their money and involve themselves in his scams. He showed no moral scruples whatsoever, and for many years got away with his crimes. However, his insecurity and paranoia finally got the better of him, and he was eventually brought to justice when his trail of lies was uncovered.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1954, Frankel’s father was a well-respected Lucas County judge, Leon Frankel. Martin was the second child of the family. He was a bright pupil at school and did well at his studies, but socially he was a misfit. After leaving high school, he went on to study at the University of Toledo, but dropped out of his course before finishing it. He had developed a crippling fear of taking tests, and was also completely unable to discipline himself to work. It seems that his early success at school had been achieved without trying very hard, and he had later become anxious about any situation in which he had to make an effort, or in which there was a chance of being seen to fail.

After dropping out of college, Frankel began to take an interest in the world of finance. He believed that by researching and playing the securities market, he could earn a great deal of money very quickly – which, fortunately, proved to be the case. Unfortunately, however, he did not also take into account that he could also lose it just as quickly, especially if he had gained it under false pretences.

Fear Of Failure

Frankel took to hanging around brokerage houses, learning as much as he could about the finance business. He took a particular interest in big fraud cases, such as that of Robert Vesco, who had masterminded one of the largest swindles in US history. He met many business people, befriending a couple named John and Sonia Schulte, who owned a securities business affiliated to the New York company of Dominick & Dominick. Frankel impressed the couple with his extensive knowledge of the market and with a scheme that he said could help him predict which stocks would yield a great deal of money in future.

Sonia Schulte persuaded her husband to take Frankel on as a consultant analyst, but it was not long before John Schulte regretted his decision. Frankel was not a good employee. He refused to conform to the company’s dress code, turning up for work in jeans rather than a suit and tie. His money-making scheme was also failing to yield any good results. One of the problems was that, although Frankel knew how to analyze the market, he did not actually have the confidence to trade. As with taking tests at school, he feared that he would be seen to fail.

The final straw for Schulte was when Frankel posed as an agent working for the larger affiliated firm of Dominick & Dominick, a move that could have put his boss out of business. Schulte lost patience with his new employee and fired him. However, that was by no means the end of his relationship with Frankel: for, by this time, Frankel had become Sonia’s lover.

The Vatican Fraud

Now unemployed and living at his parents’ house, Frankel set up his own bogus investment business, which he named Winthrop Capital. He advertised in the yellow pages, and gained the trust of several clients, telling all sorts of lies to do so. However, his investments were not sound, and he lost a great deal of money on his clients’ behalf. Not deterred, he set up another business, Creative Partners Fund LP. He was joined by Sonia Schulte, who by this time had left her husband. Together, the pair set up another company, Thunor Trust, and began buying failing insurance companies, doing shady deals to fund their ever more lavish lifestyle.

Frankel’s next, and most bizarre, scam was to mastermind a fraudulent charity scheme with links to the Vatican. Posing as a wealthy philanthropist, he set up a body called the St Francis of Assisi Foundation, and made several important contacts: with Thomas Bolan, founder of the Conservative Party of New York; and with two well-known New York priests, Peter Jacobs and Emilio Colagiovanni. It was a complicated fraud, involving the buying and selling of insurance companies with funds certified to belong to the Vatican, but the lure for all parties was a simple one: money.

Sadomasochistic Orgies

By 1998, Frankel’s assets were over four million dollars. He and Sonia moved to a large mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, together with Sonia’s two daughters. However, the new family home was not a happy one. Frankel began to show a greedy sexual appetite and a cruel streak, surrounding himself with young women and hosting sadomasochistic orgies in the house. Sonia soon left with her daughters. In 1997, one of the young women living in the house, who had apparently been rejected by Frankel, hanged herself there.

By 1999, Frankel’s many nefarious dealings were finally attracting the attention of the authorities. His companies were put under state supervision, and it seemed only a matter of time before his rackets would be revealed for what they were. Frankel became extremely anxious and decided to make a run for it. He assumed several false identities and hired a private jet to fly him to Europe, taking with him millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds. He also took with him two of his girlfriends, who later baled out and were replaced as companions by an employee called Cynthia Allison. He hid out until he was finally found, along with Cynthia, in one of the most luxurious hotels in Hamburg, Germany. He was immediately arrested.

Indicted For Fraud

Frankel was indicted by the US federal government for frauds worth over two million dollars. The German authorities also accused him of using a false passport and smuggling diamonds into the country. He pleaded guilty to the German charges, but came up with several far-fetched excuses, including the claim that he had smuggled in the diamonds so that he could feed the poor and hungry of the world. Not surprisingly, the German courts were not impressed with this story, and at his trial Frankel received a three-year sentence. While serving out his sentence, he attempted to escape from prison, but failed. In 2002, Frankel was charged with twenty-four federal counts of fraud and racketeering in the US, and finally sentenced to more than sixteen years in prison.

The Voodoo Killings