EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (26 page)

Javed Iqbal

In just five months, Javed Iqbal lured 100 boys to his run-down three-bedroom apartment in Lahore. There, he raped them, strangled them using an iron chain and then disposed of their bodies by dumping them in a vat of acid.

The worst thing is hardly anyone even noticed they had disappeared and only twenty-five were ever reported missing. It seemed that no one cared. The first the authorities knew of it was when Iqbal wrote to them to tell them what he had done. He had already confessed to a newspaper. But still nothing happened because the police were incompetent and unable to locate him. Eventually, he walked into a police station and handed himself over to them.

It was a terrible indictment of Pakistani society. Bad enough to have nurtured a psychopathic killer like Iqbal, the worst paedophile and serial killer in Pakistan’s history, but worse still to have created a society that let such a thing happen unchecked. That uncaring society and its bungling, corrupt police force were accused of being complicit in the murders of his hundred young victims.

Javed Iqbal was well-known in the markets, a twice-divorced man in his mid-forties with white hair and glasses. He would take teenage boys back with him to his flat to work as servants and even lovers, a practice not uncommon in the subcontinent, although homosexuality is forbidden by the Koran.

Iqbal called himself a journalist and a social worker and insisted that he was looking for boys because he was lonely and that he did not take them home for sex, but in order for them to work in his flat. He said that he felt sorry for them, wanted to help them. But he had also been exploited by them. He claimed in a statement following his arrest that a couple of street kids had brutally beaten and almost killed him. His memory had been affected by the beating, he claimed, and he had to go into hospital to undertake surgery on his head. During that time, he said, he lost his home and his car. His mother had become ill with worry about him and had died. The police refused to help him and instead accused him of practicing sodomy.

With no help available, Iqbal decided to take matters into his own hands and wreak the most terrible vengeance on the street kids and on Pakistani society. He recruited four young men to help him in his gruesome task – Nadeem, Shabir, Sajid and Ishaq Billa.

In early November 1999, a good-looking young boy named Ijal was plying his trade, offering massages to the men in the square. The earnings were meagre but it was the only way he knew to make enough to enable him and his younger brother, Riaz, to eat.

That day, he was approached by Iqbal and a couple of his cohorts. Iqbal offered him fifty rupees for a massage, a king’s ransom to Ijal who considered it a good day if he earned twenty rupees. Iqbal said he suffered from paralysis and hoped that a massage could ease it a little. The two brothers followed him and his friends along the Ravi River to a dark building with a courtyard. Arriving at the house, Ijal sent his brother home, arranging to meet him later. The younger boy’s last view of his brother was of him lounging in his tattered white shirt in the house’s front room.

Ijal did not come home that night and when Riaz went to Iqbal’s house the next morning, he was told that he had left immediately after the massage.

Of course, Ijal never left the house and the next time Riaz saw his brother was in a photograph Iqbal had taken of him. He was proudly wearing a new blue shirt and on the picture was written ‘Number 57’. A few minutes after it had been taken, Iqbal had strangled him after giving him a sedative and quizzing him exhaustively about his family. Iqbal was different to most serial killers who tend to objectify their victims, removing all thought of them as people from their minds. He wrote down all the details he could glean from them. It has been suggested that he did this simply to make the victim let down his guard. After a life of not being of particular interest to anyone, the boy would be flattered to be so interesting to this man. Others say that it was just an example of the depraved nature of the man – a cruel travesty that he perpetrated just before murdering his victim. He, himself, would claim that he was preparing a document that would detail the abuses and deprivation suffered by these children, and allowed to continue by an uncaring society.

He detailed every killing he carried out in a diary. The method was always the same. After the victim had become groggy from the drug he had fed him, he would rape him. As the boy lay on the floor, he would wrap the iron chain around his neck and gradually pull it tight, slowly strangling his victim. The corpse would then be dissected and the pieces would be submerged in a vat of hydrochloric acid. He even costed the killings, claiming to police later that each murder cost around 120 rupees, or about £1.70.

He was unhurried and always waited until every last piece had been dissolved – hair and bone took longer to dissolve than flesh. The liquid was initially poured down a drain, but when neighbours began to complain about the smell, he had his young friends pour it into the river.

When Iqbal had sexually assaulted and murdered his hundredth victim, he sent a copy of his confession to an Urdu-language newspaper, having already delivered it to the police. He had also ensured that the remains of two of his last victims were not poured away. They stayed at his house, as proof of his horrific activities. Astonishingly, the police disregarded his confession. It was only when they heard that the press had received a copy that they made their way to Iqbal’s house.

It was a horrific scene at the house and even hardened journalists were horrified by what they saw. Blood stained the walls and floor and the iron chain lay there. A gallery of photographs of Iqbal’s victims decorated the walls, victims, some as young as nine, snapped smiling, moments from death. A bag in a corner contained eighty-five pairs of shoes as well as children’s clothing. A card on the wall, near to the bubbling tank of acid explained in Iqbal’s handwriting that ‘The bodies in the house have deliberately not been disposed of so that authorities will find them.’

The police were themselves put in the dock again when it emerged that Javed Iqbal had been arrested three times for sexually abusing young boys, but on each occasion had bribed his way out of any charges being brought. In June 1988, for instance, he had paid two boys for sex. He was immediately freed on bail but it is unlikely anything further would have happened if his murders had not come to light a year later. His neighbours had ganged up on him, trying to persuade him to control his lust for young boys, but he had simply moved to another part of town where nobody knew him.

The one thing missing when reporters and police officers arrived at his house was Iqbal himself. He had left a note claiming that he was going to tie a rock around his neck and throw himself into the Ravi River but after the river had been dragged, it seemed obvious that his suicide threat had been an empty one.

The biggest manhunt in Pakistani history was launched and before long it unearthed his four accomplices who were taken as they attempted to cash a traveller’s cheque for 18,000 rupees in Sohawa. When one was reported to have committed suicide by jumping from a third-floor window, many did not believe it and there was more public outrage and a shake-up of the Lahore Police Force followed.

Pressure mounted but suddenly, out of the blue, Javed Iqbal walked into the offices of the Urdu newspaper, Jang. He and his three accomplices were charged with murder and the trial that followed was surrounded by a media frenzy.

It was all very surreal. His three young helpers giggled as they were led into the closed courtroom, pointing at newspaper photos of themselves. Iqbal, meanwhile, maintained that he was innocent and that he was the real victim in this case. He claimed to have staged the entire affair to highlight the plight of Pakistan’s street-children and poor families who become victims of evil, corrupt individuals. He said that the missing boys were all actually alive, some living with people and some returned to their families. He claimed he had confessed because he was afraid that he too would be thrown from a window.

Nonetheless, he and his three accomplices were found guilty after a grueling trial featuring 102 witnesses. Two of the younger boys were sentenced to life imprisonment, but Iqbal and Sajid, who was now twenty, were sentenced to die in a way that the judge thought best suited their crimes.

He ordered that they be taken to the market square and there, in front of the families of their victims, they were to be strangled with the same iron chain that had been used to dispatch the boys. Their bodies would then be chopped up and dissolved in acid. The punishment would, indeed, fit the crime.

There was outrage around the world at the barbarity of the sentence but before it could be carried out it was announced that Iqbal and Sajid had been found dead in their adjoining prison cells. One version has it that they had been poisoned. Another says that they had been beaten and then strangled with their bed sheets.

The plight of Pakistan’s street kids remains unchanged.

Part Seven: Psychopathic Child Killers

Gilles De Rais

Gilles de Rais learned from experts. Following the death of his father, Guy de Rais, he was brought up by his grandfather, the ruthless, scheming nobleman, Jean d’Craon who had fought to have the right to care for Gilles and his brother, not because he cared what happened to them, but because he wanted to get his hands on the property that they had inherited on their father’s death.

True to form, d’Craon was a bad influence. The boys were taught the things necessary to being a young lord – morals, ethics, religion and the humanities, but beyond that, they were given little guidance and were allowed to run free with little supervision. D’Craon was an arrogant man who believed himself to be better than any other man and certainly above the law, traits that the young Gilles appropriated from him.

Not long after his arrival at d’Craon’s chateau at Champtoce, d’Craon negotiated a marriage between the thirteen-year-old boy and Jeanne de Peynel, daughter of the Norman Lord de Hambye. It was a marriage that would bring together two wealthy families and that would make the d’Craons the most powerful family in France. That proved too much for the Parlement de Paris, the governing body of the region. It ordered that the marriage be postponed until Jeanne was older. Jean d’Craon could not wait that long. Ten months later, Gilles was betrothed to Beatrice de Rohan, niece of the Duke of Burgundy, another marriage that did not come to pass. Eventually, aged sixteen, Gilles was married to Catherine, daughter of Milet de Thouars, whose family owned estates that neighboured the de Rais lands. She had to be kidnapped first and three of her uncles were thrown into Champtoce dungeons, but the young couple were married in 1420.

By 1429, a remarkable figure had emerged in France. A nineteen-year-old girl, Joan of Arc, who seemed to possess magical powers of leadership and was given an army of 10,000 men by French King, Charles VI, with which to fight the English. Beside her rode Gilles de Rais, now a general in the French army and principal adviser to Joan. They liberated Orleans from the English and conducted the Dauphin – the heir to the French throne – to Reims for his coronation, Gilles de Rais charged with carrying the holy chrism, or anointing oil from Paris to the site of the coronation.

De Rais was appointed France’s highest-ranking soldier when he was promoted to Marshal of France. He remained in that position for only two years, however. When Jean d’Craon died in, expressing remorse for all his evil deeds, de Rais effectively removed himself from public life and began to indulge the fantasies of his private life. In 1432, he killed a child for the first time. He would carry on killing for some time.

His first victim was a twelve-year-old apprentice furrier who was carrying a message from de Rais’ cousin, Gilles de Sille, to the chateau at Mahecoul on France’s west coast. He disappeared and his master, Guillaume Hilairet, approached de Sille, to be told that he had been taken by thieves in the village of Tiffauges. De Rais would later be charged with the boy’s death. He kidnapped him, with the help of an accomplice, Etienne Corrillaut, raped him and then hung him by the neck on a hook. As he was dying,

de Rais took him down, raped him again and then either killed him himself or ordered someone else to kill him.

On other occasions, victims were decapitated, or had their throats cut. They were sometimes dismembered and at other times their necks were broken with a stick. His henchman, Poitou, would later testify that de Rais often sodomised the children shortly after they were dealt the fatal blow. He raped them as they died.

De Rais later told how he much admired the most handsome of his child victims, having their bodies cut open so that he could look at their internal organs. He was also said to have often sat on the stomachs of the children as they died, laughing at them as they breathed their last. The bodies were then cremated, the ashes being disposed of in a cesspit or the moat of the castle.

De Rais did not kill alone. In fact, as the death tally rose, it became impossible for him to do so. His cousins, Gilles de Sille and Roger de Briqueville, were early participants in his deadly sport, providing him with his first two victims and although they did not take part in the sexual part of the acts, they were very active in planning and disposing of the evidence of his crimes.

As children began to disappear from the vicinity of the castle, the inhabitants of the nearby village naturally became suspicious of de Rais, but there was little they could do. They lived in fear of what he would do if they voiced their suspicions or complaints publicly. At the very least they would face imprisonment. Rumours about the village spread far and wide and its reputation grew. One man from a neighbouring village was heard to say to a man he encountered from Machecoul, ‘They eat little children there!’

One of de Rais’ princial helpers was a woman called Perrine Martin who was nicknamed ‘La Meffraye’ (the Terror). She was reputed to wander the countryside looking for any children out tending their family’s animals or working alone in the fields. She would convey them to the castle. One witness at the later trial testified that he bumped into La Meffraye one day and she was accompanied by a young boy. She told him they were going to Machecoul. When the man met her again a few days later she was alone. When he asked about the boy, he was told that she had left him with a ‘good master’ in Machecoul.

Eventually, the disappearances were becoming so commonplace that de Sille was forced to invent an explanation for them. He admitted that the children had indeed been kidnapped, but it had been done by order of the king. They were handed over to the English, he added, to train as pages. It is unlikely that the parents of his victims were taken in by this obvious nonsense.

Gilles de Rais also began to take an unhealthy interest in the black arts. He had dabbled in alchemy and had even been conned out of substantial sums of money in his pursuits of the transmutation of base metals into gold and summoning the devil. He became involved with a twenty-two-year-old French conjurer and charlatan, Francois Prelati, who claimed to have control over the netherworld.

One of their many failed efforts to raise the devil saw de Rais bring into their presence a large, leather-bound book of spells and incantations that was sealed with a huge metal lock. Inside the pages were covered with writing in red ink, that was rumoured not to be ink at all, but blood, the blood of de Rais’ many young victims. On another occasion, Prelati told de Rais that the devil had asked for the sacrifice of a child’s heart, eyes and sex organs. De Rais had little trouble in providing him with what he asked for.

Soon, however, things began to get tricky for him and his henchmen when his brother began to take an interest in his affairs. René became very concerned about his brother’s spending and succeeded in getting the King to issue an edict preventing Gilles from selling off any of the family property. In the process, René gained control of the estate of Champtoce. Gilles began to worry that soon René would move to take over Machecoul as well. This would be disastrous for him as he had over forty children’s bodies hidden in one of the castle’s towers. He immediately sent two of his men to clear them out and dispose of them, but as they were doing so, they were seen by two noblemen. Incredibly, they failed to report what they had seen, considering the victims to be merely peasant children who were not worth bothering about.

Several weeks later, René and a cousin, André de Laval-Loheac, occupied Machecoul castle as Gilles had anticipated, but the clean-up operation had been botched by de Sille. Two children’s skeletons were discovered in the grounds of the castle and the men that de Rais had sent to clean up the tower, Poitou and Henriet, were interrogated about them. Naturally, they denied that they knew anything about the bodies, but by this time the family, fearing disgrace, had decided to erect a wall of silence.

The problem was, however, that Gilles was quite mad and, feeling cornered, reacted violently. One Sunday in 1440, during High Mass, he and a gang of outlaws burst into the church of St. Etienne de Mermorte. De Rais was in a state of high anxiety, wild-eyed and carrying a double-headed axe. The priest was the brother of the treasurer of Brittany who had occupied a castle owned by Gilles and the murderer kidnapped him demanding that the property be returned to him.

At last, some action was taken against a man who was clearly out of control and highly dangerous, as everyone already knew. Some of his most powerful enemies came together to bring him down. Jean V, the Duke of Brittany, who had long cast coveting glances at de Rais’s land, allied himself with the Bishop of Nantes, Jean de Malestroit, another enemy of the de Rais family. Of course, the deaths of so many peasant children never entered into their considerations. Their decision to act was made for purely financial reasons.

The Bishop began by gathering information about de Rais. He was horrified by what he heard. Witnesses came forward in droves to testify about missing shepherd boys and sinister men, their faces hidden behind dark veils prowling the countryside and kidnapping innocent children. The Bishop published his evidence, asserting in the document that ‘Milord Gilles de Rais, knight, lord, and baron, our subject and under our jurisdiction, with certain accomplices, did cut the throats of, kill and heinously massacre many young and innocent boys, that he did practice with these children unnatural lust and the vice of sodomy, often calls up or causes others to practice the dreadful invocation of demons, did sacrifice to and make pacts with the latter, and did perpetrate other enormous crimes within the limits of our jurisdiction.’

De Rais was unmoved. He was, after all, Marshal of France, an important and powerful man. He could not conceive of anyone accusing him of heresy or murder. Soon, however, he found himself distressingly alone as his accomplices de Sille and de Briqueville fled, not sharing his confidence.

In August, 1440, the Constable of France seized de Rais’ castle at Tiffauges. Meanwhile, the King of France was hearing the evidence against him and prepared the documents to have him arrested and brought to justice. Finally on 14 September, Bishop Malestroit issued a warrant for the arrest of de Rais and his henchmen – Poitou, Henriet, Prelati and Blanchet. De Rais was conducted to Nantes where he appeared initially before the secular court on the charges connected with his attack on the church at St. Etienne. At this point his black magic experiments and the murders were not dealt with.

The investigation into the murders began a few days later. One mother told of handing her young son over to de Rais who said he would care for him and provide him with an education. She never saw the boy again. In all, ten families who suspected de Rais of killing their children, gave evidence. On 13 October, he was formally charged with thirty-four charges of murder, sodomy, heresy and the violation of the sanctity of the church. It was said that, in reality, de Rais and his gang had murdered 140 children in the past fourteen years.

When asked to make a plea, de Rais ranted at the court, calling the judges names and saying he would rather be hanged than answer to them. The Bishop of Nantes excommunicated him and adjourned the hearing. A few days later, it was a different Gilles de Rais who appeared before the court. This time, he was contrite, having realised that he was being denied Communion and all other rites of the Church. He feared for his soul. He confessed to his crimes and asked forgiveness for his earlier behaviour. He was readmitted into the Church.

He then went on to make a full confession of everything apart from his efforts, with others, to summon Satan. His lie was exposed, however, by the testimony of his accomplices and it was decided to torture him to make him confess. The judges ordered that he be taken to the torture chamber in the dungeon at La Tour Neuve. Before he got there, however, he agreed that he would answer whatever questions they had for him. He could use torture but was reluctant to be on the receiving end of it.

He made a full, detailed and explicit confession before the Bishop and Pierre L’Hopital, the Chief Justice of Brittany. Interestingly, heresy was considered a more grievous crime than murder. His confession, therefore, was at pains to emphasize that he killed purely for pleasure and carnal delight rather than as a sacrifice to the devil. He could be pardoned for murder – even 140 murders – but not for heresy.

He was eventually sentenced to death, following another excommunication that was rescinded after he fell to his knees and pleaded with the Bishop. Poitou and Henriet received the same sentence.

When they went to the gallows on 26 October 1440, de Rais gave a long speech to the large crowd that had gathered to witness the spectacle, admitting his sins and at last displaying the humility he had so clearly lacked throughout his life.