World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (7 page)

A Gruesome Task

So for nearly a month investigators scoured the location where Craft had been seen using the shredder during the snow storm and brought back a small mountain of wood chippings and human tissue to Lee’s laboratory. There the team sifted through the debris, putting plant material to one side and human hair, tooth fragments and tissue in another.

Each hair had to be analyzed to see if it was animal or human and, if it was human, which race and gender it belonged to. Hair that had been pulled had to be separated from hair that had been shed naturally and then those that had been torn out had to be matched to a specific part of the body. Hair that had been cut had to be subjected to further examination to see if it had been cut cleanly by scissors or ragged by a shredder. After separating body fragments from the wood chippings, Lee and his team were left with just a few ounces of body parts, a fingernail, a dental crown, a bone fragment and pieces of plastic bag in which the body parts had been transported to the site.

Tooth fragments proved sufficient to positively identify the rest of the remains as belonging to the missing woman and when Dr Lee identified a bone fragment as part of the skull it proved conclusively that Mrs Crafts was dead. Moreover, the tissue on the chainsaw matched tissue found at the site; hair taken from Mrs Crafts’ hairbrush was matched with hair recovered from the chippings and, if that wasn’t enough, a sliver of nail polish was analyzed with a sample obtained from a bottle at the Crafts’ house and found to be identical. But the final flourish in Henry Lee’s exemplary investigation was his decision to consult R. Bruce Hoadley, a forensic tree expert. By examining the chippings found at the river and those taken from the hire truck, Hoadley was able to state that they were from the same tree and that both chippings showed the distinctive cut marks made by the chipper that Crafts had hired.

If Richard Crafts had entertained hopes of evading arrest and prosecution for murder, he had seriously underestimated the dedication and dogged persistence of the forensic investigators on his case, who had spent almost three years putting their evidence together.

When his case came to trial in 1989, Richard Crafts’ defence was systematically demolished by Dr Lee and his team of expert witnesses. Crafts was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

The Chicago Cult Killings

That one lone killer might abduct, rape, torture and kill a string of young women is horrifying enough. That four men should get together to carry out such crimes as a team almost beggars belief. That, however, is exactly what Robin Gecht, Edward Spreitzer and the Kokoraleis brothers, Andrew and Thomas, did. Known as the ‘Chicago Rippers’, they were responsible for at least seven and conceivably as many as eighteen murders of women, all of them carried out with dreadful savagery and without any apparent motive, beyond the basest of sadistic urges.

The first murder to be carried out by the gang was that of twenty-eight-year-old Linda Sutton. On 23 May 1981, she was abducted. Ten days later her body was found in a field, in the Villa Park area of the city, not far from an establishment called the Rip Van Winkle motel. Sutton’s body had been mutilated and her left breast amputated. This was evidently the work of a sexual sadist but, as yet, the police had no clues to go on.

It was almost a year before the Rippers struck again. On 15 May 1982 they abducted another young woman, Lorraine Borowski, as she was about to open up the realtor’s office in which she worked. This time, however, it was five months before the body was discovered in a cemetery in Villa Park.

By this time, the Rippers had struck several more times. On 29 May, they abducted Shui Mak from Hanover Park, a little way to the north of Villa Park. Her body was not found for four months. Two weeks after the abduction of Shui Mak, a prostitute known as Angel York was picked up by a man in a van, who handcuffed her and slashed her breast before throwing her out, still alive.

More Breast Amputations

York’s description of her attacker failed to produce any leads, and two months passed before the Rippers struck again. On 28 August 1982 the body of Sandra Delaware, a prostitute, was discovered by the Chicago River. She had been stabbed and strangled and her left breast amputated. On 8 September thirty-year-old Rose Davis was found in an alley, having suffered almost identical injuries to Delaware. On 11 September, Carole Pappas, whose husband was a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, vanished, never to be seen again.

A month later, the killers committed their last crime, one that was to prove to be their downfall. Their victim, a prostitute named Beverley Washington, was found by a railway track on 6 December. In addition to other injuries, her left breast had been cut off and her right breast severely slashed. Amazingly, she was still alive and was able to offer a description of her attacker and the van he had used to abduct her.

Cult

This description led the police to Robin Gecht, a twenty-eight-year old carpenter. Gecht, as a teenager, had been accused of molesting his sister and had a long-term interest in satanism. At first, police had to release Gecht for lack of evidence, but after investigating further, they discovered that the previous year he had rented a room at a motel along with three friends – each of them with adjoining rooms.

The hotel manager said they had held loud parties and appeared to be involved in some kind of cult. Detectives then traced the other men, the Kokoraleis brothers, and Edward Spreitzer, a man of subnormal intelligence.

Satanic Chapel

Under interrogation, Thomas Kokoraleis confessed that he and the others had taken women back to Gecht’s place, to what Gecht called a ‘satanic chapel’. There they had raped and tortured them, cutting off their breasts with a wire garrotte. He further alleged that they would eat parts of the severed breasts as a kind of sacrament, and that Gecht would masturbate into the breasts before putting them into a box. Kokoraleis claimed that he once saw fifteen breasts in the box.

Police arrested the three men and Gecht. They searched Gecht’s apartment and found the satanic chapel. Both Kokoraleis bothers confessed, as did Spreitzer. Gecht, however, protested his innocence. After a series of trials, Andrew Kokoraleis was convicted of murder and put to death in 1999. Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Edward Spreitzer was sentenced to death but had his sentence changed to life imprisonment. In the absence of evidence linking him to the crimes, Robin Gecht was convicted only of the rape and attempted murder of Beverley Washington. He was sentenced to a 120 years in prison, where he continues to maintain his innocence.

Code of Honour

Carmine Galante’s Mafia nickname was ‘Lillo’ – for the little cigars he constantly smoked. He was short, fat, bald – and immensely violent; and when he came out of federal prison in 1978 he had two ambitions: to make money – by taking over the immensely lucrative New York heroin trade; and to become the ultimate man of respect: the Boss of All Bosses.

Galante grew up in East Harlem, New York, the son of Sicilian immigrants; and he was to remain at heart a Sicilian, out of tune with the pliable Italian-Americans who gradually took over the Mafia – and were willing to keep a low profile for the sake of business. He was a man of vendettas; he lived by the gun and the code of honour; and as such he became in the early days a trusted member of the Bonanno family.

In 1957, he travelled as consigliere to his boss Joe Bonanno to the Palermo summit of Sicilian and American Mafia leaders, organised by ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He then organised the American end of the so-called ‘Montreal Connection,’ by which perhaps 60 per cent of all America’s heroin illegally crossed the border from Canada. But when the ‘Connection’ was rolled up by the FBI and its Canadian counterpart, and he himself was imprisoned, all he could do was watch, powerless, from behind bars as boss ‘Joe Bananas’ became increasingly eccentric and his family was forced to yield power to others. Once out of prison, he wanted revenge.

His timing was spot on. For Carlo Gambino, the most powerful of the New York dons, had recently died; and the newly elected boss of the Bonanno family, Phil Rastelli, was himself behind bars – and stood aside when Galante hit the streets. He’d also planned well. For he’d gathered around himself a large group of old-country Sicilian hit-men who had no allegiance to anyone but himself – and to the Mafia code he believed in. They quickly muscled and killed their way to control of the heroin business.

Equally quickly, though, they and their boss became a ‘business problem’ to the New York Commission, especially to one member, Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, who, in the absence of any real leadership in the Bonanno family, had taken over many of its interests. No one, though, wanted a bullying throwback, a ‘Moustache Pete’ from the past, to rock the boat. So the Commission ordered Galante’s assassination – and the job was handed, as per custom, to a member of his own family, underboss Salvatore Catalano.

On 13 July 1979, as Galante was enjoying an after-dinner cigar with two friends on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant in Brooklyn, three men wearing ski-masks and shotguns walked in through the back door. Galante was dead so fast, his cigar was still in his mouth as he hit the patio floor. The traditional .45 bullet was then fired into his left eye; and his guests were finished off by his own trusted bodyguards – who then calmly walked out with his killers.

That same day, at a meeting in prison, Phil Rastelli was reconfirmed as head of the Bonanno family, and Mafia bosses met in a social club in New York’s Little Italy to celebrate. But Galante later came back to haunt them. For as the result of wiretaps installed during the investigation into the so-called ‘Pizza Connection,’ Salvatore Catalano and the members of the New York Commission were eventually charged with his murder.

The Colombian Connection

During the 1970s and 1980s, the illegal drugs industry expanded massively in size. What had once been a very marginal industry, selling only to those on the fringes of society, now became a multi-billion dollar business selling to everyone from bankers and politicians to suburban teenagers. The drug at the heart of this expansion was cocaine. The marijuana industry remained relatively small, due to the ease of growing and preparing the product. Cocaine, however, is the product of a particular climate and needs a larger scale production system to process it.

The prime sources of the coca leaf are in South America. For years, cocaine had been manufactured in small quantities and sold at a high price.

During the 1970s, however, demand began to build and a few criminal masterminds in South America saw that there were huge profits to be made if they began to control not just the growing, but also the refinement, distribution and sale of cocaine on a much larger scale. Chief among these criminals was a Colombian called Pablo Escobar, who in little more than a decade would become the first of the billionaire drug dealers.

The Medellin Cartel

Escobar was born on a small farm in Rionegra, near Medellin in Colombia, on 12 January 1949. In his teens he gravitated towards petty crime. He stole gravestones, of all the unlikely commodities, for resale. He also helped steal cars. Before long, he became involved with a small Mafia-run cocaine-producing operation, and then developed his own small business.

He soon became aware that this was a business with an almost limitless market. He approached other cocaine growers in the Medellin area and offered to pay them double what they were receiving for their crop from the Mafia, who were their main buyers. They agreed. He used friends and relatives to take the drugs into the United States and establish distribution networks.

Escobar’s business grew with extraordinary speed. His strategic business plan mimicked that of legitimate multinational companies.

There were a whole host of separate cocaine operations – franchises if you like – all manufacturing and distributing cocaine, and all wired into a network that was organized by Escobar to give him a handsome share of their profits. The organization was known as the Medellin cartel, with Escobar its CEO.

To ensure his continued dominance in a competitive and murderous world – a big business regulated not by law but by machine guns – Escobar used an individual mixture of extreme brutality and surprising philanthropy.

The Colombian Necktie

Escobar himself was a hands-on leader who carried out many murders himself. He was even credited with inventing the ‘Colombian necktie’ – this referred to his predilection for cutting his victims’ throats, then pulling their tongues through the open wound. At the same time as terrorizing his enemies, Escobar ploughed a lot of his ill-gotten money into social improvements. He built sports facilities and new housing, and even created Colombia’s first ever welfare programme in his home town. These charitable acts made him an enormously popular figure in Medellin. He was even elected to a seat in Congress in 1982. A useful side effect was that his popularity made it very difficult for rival cartels to assassinate him.

His political career did not last long, but his criminal career continued to flourish. The US appetite for cocaine continued to grow, entirely unaffected by Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign. By the late 1980s, Forbes magazine ranked Escobar as the seventh richest man in the world, worth over three billion dollars.