World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (8 page)

Assassination Attempts

By 1989, however, the US started to put extreme pressure on the Colombian government to clamp down on the cocaine moguls; the billions at stake also meant that there were other criminal gangs – in particular the Cali cartel – determined to murder Escobar and take his business.

After several near-miss assassination attempts, Escobar decided on a novel survival plan.

In 1990 he turned himself in to the government and agreed to plead guilty to a relatively minor drug-dealing charge for which he would receive an agreed sentence of nine years. What Escobar was able to demand in return for this is remarkable. Firstly, he received a guarantee that he would not be extradited to the United States as the US government wanted.

The second and perhaps more astonishing condition was that he would build his own private prison in which to serve his time. The prison itself, nicknamed the ‘Cathedral’, was a luxurious fortified abode designed less to imprison Escobar than to keep his enemies out.

Walking Out Of Jail

After a year, Escobar was growing very tired of his imprisonment. At the same time, he was worried that changes in the government might change his terms of imprisonment, and his erstwhile minions were taking advantage of his absence to siphon off huge amounts of money. So in 1991, he went back to running his organization from a succession of safe houses.

Escobar had been right to fear the change in government policy. For the first time, the authorities began to make serious attempts to put an end to his reign. On 2 December 1993, he was trapped in a Medellin apartment block by the secret police, who killed him during a rooftop gun battle.

However, his legacy remained: the worldwide trafficking of cocaine continued to expand at full speed.

The Crack House Murders

One of the most shocking multiple murders to occur in the 1990s was that of five black women, who were stabbed to death in a crack house in the north-east area of Oklahoma City. The murders occurred in 1992, but it was not until five years later that the authorities caught up with the perpetrator, who had managed to steer clear of the law, evading all responsibility for such a terrible crime up until that time.

On 16 May 1992, police were called to a crack house to find a horrifying scene. It was one of carnage: five women lay dead, butchered by an unknown assailant. They were all found naked, lying in pools of blood; and four of the victims were also found to have been sexually assaulted. The victims were 47-year-old Phyllis Adams, 35-year-old Sandra Thompson, 37-year-old Carolyn Watson, 30-year-old LaShawn Evans, and 34-year-old Fransill Roberts.

Butchered In A Crack House

Samples of blood were taken from some of the women’s clothing, including two shirts and a jacket, as well as a bloody handprint that was found on a curtain. However, the murder investigation launched at the time yielded no results, and no suspect was named. The multiple murders shocked the local community, and the police were criticized for failing to find the killer. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) accused the law enforcement agencies of racism, saying they were not making enough effort to find the culprit because the victims were black and were frequenting a crack house. The house was known as a place where penniless drug addicts, mostly women, came to sell sex in return for drugs. Many commentators from the black community felt that because of the house’s bad reputation, very little was being done to bring the killer of these women to justice.

It was not until five years later that police ran the DNA profile of Danny Keith Hooks into their computer database. Hooks had been picked up on a charge of rape. To their surprise, it matched the samples taken from the scene of the crime at the crack house. The evidence was compelling, and Hooks was soon brought to trial and charged with the five murders.

At the trial, Hooks claimed that the bloody handprint on the curtain was the result of a cut on his hand that he had sustained from riding his bicycle. He admitted that he had smoked crack at the house earlier that day with the five women, and that he had had sex with two of them. However, he said that he had then decided to leave the house and it was only when he returned later that he had found the dead bodies.

During the trial, Hooks testified that he was innocent. He repeated the story told to police that he had smoked cocaine and had sex with the women during his first visit and later found the bodies in a bedroom, as well as describing the finger allegedly cut when he fell off his bicycle.

‘It’s a plausible explanation,’ said defense attorney Irven Box, who ridiculed the idea that one man could have controlled five ‘streetwise women.’ He called the idea ‘baloney.’

But prosecutor Brad Miller called Hooks’ testimony ‘high-gear silliness’ and impossible. He listed some 16 problems with Hooks’ account, including where Hooks’ blood was found.

Miller pointed out Hooks had no explanation for why he would return to the house since he claimed he’d spent all his money the first visit. Prosecution witnesses, including one of Hooks’ former co- workers, said Hooks had talked before of his desire to have orgies.

The prosecution alleged that to the contrary, Hooks had killed the women in a frenzy of violence. He was a crack addict who had become mentally unstable as a result of his addiction. The prosecution suggested that he had tried to force the women into a sex orgy with him. When Adams, who he knew, tried to flee he had stabbed her some 10 times after cornering her in a closet.

‘Once it went bad, everybody had to go. He wasn’t going to leave any witnesses,’ Miller said.

Death Penalty

Jurors were heard arguing – shouting at times – as they began deliberations. At the end of the first day, the jurors reported they were split 10-2 after six hours of discussion. On the second day of deliberations they spent eight hours arguing.

What held their deliberation up was the fact that it was hard to understand how five women could have been killed – apparently easily – by one man, but in the end they decided that that was what had happened. They therefore returned a verdict of guilty. On hearing the verdict, Hooks showed no reaction. He was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Commenting on the death penalty for Hooks, the daughter of victim Phyllis Adams, Barbara Booker, said ‘I don’t think he deserves to live because those women did not have a choice’.

The Crime of the Century

It was called at the time the Crime of the Century, a ‘superman’ murder. But in reality the 1924 killing of Bobbie Franks by two young University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, was both senseless and lazy. Far from being the ‘perfect’ murder, a secret demonstration of how much ‘better’ and ‘less bourgeois’ they were than their friends and relatives, it only proved that even intellectuals can be supremely cack-handed.

Fourteen-year old Bobbie, the son of a millionaire, was abducted outside his school on 21 May 1924; and soon afterwards his mother received a call saying that he’d been kidnapped and that a ransom note would arrive through the post. The next day it came, demanding $10,000. But before anything could be done, the police found a body that matched Bobbie’s description. It had been discovered by maintenance men – strangled and with a fractured skull – in a culvert near the railway. Nearby lay a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

It took only a week for the spectacles to be traced to a rich nineteen-year-old law student and amateur ornithologist called Nathan Leopold. Leopold immediately agreed that they were indeed his, and he claimed that he must have dropped them while bird-watching in the area some time before. But the spectacles showed no sign of having been left outside for long; and when Leopold was asked what he’d been doing on the afternoon of May 21st, all he could come up with was that he’d been with his friend, fellow-student Richard Loeb, and two girls called Mae and Edna. Loeb soon corroborated this, but neither man could give any sort of description by which the two girls could be traced. Besides, Leopold’s typewriter, when tested, was found to be exactly the same model as the one which had written the ransom note.

It was, oddly, Richard Loeb – easily the more assured and dominant of the two men – who first confessed under questioning. But he was soon followed by Leopold, whose younger brother, it turned out, had been a friend of Bobbie Franks. The fourteen-year-old had been chosen as their victim, it transpired, not because of any particular enmity, but for a much simpler reason: he’d be easy to get into their car.

Two months after the killing, defended by famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, they came to trial. Darrow did his best, claiming that both his clients were mentally ill, either paranoiac (in Leopold’s case) or schizophrenic (in Loeb’s). This defence probably saved their lives, but there could be no doubt of their guilt. They were imprisoned for life for Bobbie’s murder, and given a further ninety-nine years’ sentence for his kidnapping.

Twelve years later, Loeb was killed by a fellow-inmate. But Leopold, who’d been throughout his term a model prisoner, was finally released in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, got married, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.

Leopold and Loeb thought they had committed the ‘crime of the century’. They were wrong.

The Custom-Built Dungeon

As individuals, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng were both unsavoury characters. Together, they were a deadly combination. In the space of little over a year, they killed, tortured and raped at least twelve and perhaps as many as twenty-five people, including men, women and two baby boys. The men were mostly killed for money; the women, for sexual thrills; and the babies simply for being in the way.

Interest In Guns

Leonard Lake was a fat old hippie obsessed with survivalism. Charles Ng was a young ex-marine from Hong Kong, with an addiction to stealing. What brought the two of them together initially was an interest in guns.

The sexual enslavement of women had long been a fantasy of the older of the two men, Leonard Lake. Lake was born in San Francisco on 20 July 1946. His parents by all accounts had a dreadful relationship and, when Lake was six, his mother left, leaving him with his grandmother. As a child, Lake collected mice and enjoyed killing them by dissolving them in chemicals (a technique he would later use to help dispose of his human victims). In his teens, he sexually abused his sisters.

At eighteen, Lake joined the US Marines and made the rank of sergeant. He served two tours in Vietnam as a radar operator. Following a spell in Da Nang, he suffered a delusional breakdown and was sent home before being discharged in 1971. He was already married by this time, but his wife left him because he was violent and sexually perverted.

Lake became part of the hippie lifestyle centred around San Francisco. He also became increasingly obsessed with the idea of an impending nuclear holocaust, and for eight years lived in a hippie commune near Ukiah, in northern California. There he met a woman named Claralyn Balazs, or ‘Cricket’, as he nicknamed her. A twenty-five-year-old teacher’s aide when he met her, Balazs became deeply involved in Lake’s fantasies. She starred in the pornographic videos he began to make, the latest manifestation of his sexual obsession. His other obsession was with guns – part of his survivalist paranoia – and through a magazine advert he placed in 1981, he met Charles Ng.

Arsonist

Born in Hong Kong, Ng, or ‘Charlie’ as Lake called him, was a disruptive child, obsessed with martial arts and setting fires. His parents sent him to an English private school in an effort to straighten him out, but he was expelled for stealing. Next, he went to California where he attended college for a single semester before dropping out. Soon after that he was involved in a hit-and-run car crash and to avoid the consequences he signed up for the US Marines, fraudulently claiming to be a US national. It was at this time that he met Lake. They came up with a plan to sell guns that Ng would steal from a marine arsenal. However, Ng was caught stealing the guns and was sentenced to three years in prison.

When he was released in 1985, he immediately contacted Lake, who invited him to his new place, a remote cabin near Wilseyville, California, that he was renting from Balazs. He had custom-built a dungeon next to the cabin ready for his friend Charlie to come up and have fun. It is thought that by then Lake had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, in order to steal their money and, in Gunnar’s case, his identity.