Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (16 page)

‘Good grief! How awful,’ Nilsen exclaimed.

Jay told him to stop messing about.

‘Where’s the rest of the body?’ he asked.

After a short pause, Nilsen said: ‘In two plastic bags in the wardrobe next door. I’ll show you.’

He showed Chief Inspector Jay the wardrobe. The smell coming from it confirmed what he was saying.

‘I’ll tell you everything,’ Nilsen said. ‘I want to get it off my chest, not here but at the police station.’

The police could scarcely believe their ears when Nilsen admitted killing 15 or 16 men. In the wardrobe in Nilsen’s flat, the police found two large, black bin-liners. In one, they found a shopping bag containing the left side of a man’s chest, including the arm. A second bag contained the right side of a chest and arm. In a third, there was a torso with no arms, legs or head. A fourth was full of human offal. The unbearable stench indicated that the bags had evidently been closed for some time and the contents had rotted.

In the second bin-liner, there were two heads – one with the flesh boiled away, the other largely intact – and another torso. The arms were still attached, but the hands were missing. One of the heads belonged to Stephen Sinclair. Nilsen had severed it only four days earlier and had started simmering it in a pot on the kitchen stove.

Under a drawer in the bathroom, the police found Sinclair’s pelvis and legs. In a tea chest in Nilsen’s bedroom, there was another torso, a skull and more bones.

The police also examined the gardens at 195 Melrose Avenue. They found human ash and enough fragments of bone to determine that at least eight people, probably more, had been cremated there.

Nilsen was eventually charged with six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. His solicitor had one simple question for Nilsen: ‘Why?’

‘I’m hoping you will tell me that,’ Nilsen said.

Nilsen intended to plead guilty, sparing the jury and the victims’ families the details of the horrendous crimes. Instead, his solicitor persuaded him to claim ‘diminished responsibility’.

One of the most extraordinary witnesses at the trial was Carl Stottor. Nilsen had tried to strangle him three times, but somehow his frail body had clung to life. Nilsen had then dragged him to the bath and held him under water. Stottor had found the strength to push himself up three times and beg for mercy. But Nilsen pushed him down again. Thinking he was dead, Nilsen took Stottor’s body back into the bedroom and smoked a cigarette. Then Bleep, Nilsen’s dog, began to lick Stottor’s face and the young man began to revive. Nilsen could easily have snuffed out his life then and there. Instead, he rubbed Stottor’s legs to stimulate his circulation. He wrapped him with blankets and nursed him back to life. When he was well again, Nilsen walked him to the tube station and wished him luck.

Nilsen had left another survivor to testify against him. Paul Nobbs had slept at Cranley Gardens one night and woke at 2 a.m., with a splitting headache. When he woke again in the morning, he found red marks around his neck. Nilsen advised him to see a doctor. At the hospital, Nobbs was told that he had been half strangled. He assumed that his attacker had been Nilsen, but did not report the assault to the police, assuming they would dismiss the attack as a homosexual squabble.

In November 1983, Nilsen was convicted of the attempted murder of Stottor and Nobbs, plus the actual murder of six others. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he serve at least 25 years.

He says he does not lose sleep over what he has done, or have nightmares about it. Nor does he have any tears for his victims or their relatives.

Chapter 12

The Dingo Case

Name: Lindy Chamberlain, Michael Chamberlain

Nationality: Australian

Number of victims: 1

Final note: both Lindy and Michael claimed that they were innocent and that a dingo took their baby daughter

Seventh Day Adventism is an apocalyptic religion. It was founded in the nineteenth century by former US Army officer William Miller. From his studies of the book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations, he worked out that Christ would make his Second Coming between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844. When Christ did not turn up between the appointed dates, Miller came up with a second date of 22 October 1844. His 100,000 followers, many of whom had sold up all their worldly goods, waited all night but Christ and his fiery conflagration did not turn up then either. This is known among Adventists as the ‘Great Disappointment’. Miller himself was so disappointed he died four years later.
In 1845, the Adventists got together to figure out what to do next. The Mutual Conference of Adventists decided that Miller had indeed got the date right, but that his interpretation was off. In fact, God started ‘cleansing the heavenly sanctuary’ on that date – in other words, he was spring-cleaning heaven ready for the righteous to turn up. After that he would have to go through all the names in the Book of Life and investigate all the sins listed. Only after that would he make his judgement and send Christ back to Earth to separate the righteous from the wicked. So he could be some time yet. Meanwhile those Adventists who had already died were in a state of ‘conditional immorality’ awaiting the judgement when they would either be extinguished with the wicked or live forever on Earth under Christ’s millennial reign.
Seventh Day Adventists also believed that celebrating the Sabbath as God ordained on the seventh day – that is, Saturday – rather than the first day – Sunday – would help speed the Second Coming. Refusing to work on Saturdays means that Seventh Day Adventists suffer some job discrimination.
One of the original Adventists who had suffered the Great Disappointment, Ellen Hamond White, found she had been given the gift of prophecy and was told by God to take the church to Australia, which she did in 1894. She introduced dietary laws that discourage the eating of meat and the intake of intoxicants. This leaves Seventh Day Adventists somewhat marginalised in the land of steaks, barbies and Fosters and was, no doubt, a contributing factor in the famous ‘Dingo Baby Case’.
In August 1980, 32-year-old Lindy Chamberlain and her 36-year-old husband Michael, a Seventh Day Adventist parson, were on a camping holiday near Ayers Rock in central Australia when a dingo entered their tents and dragged away their baby, nine-week-old Azaria. Despite an extensive search, no trace of the baby could be found. At an inquest, the coroner ruled that the Chamberlains were not to blame and took the unprecedented step of allowing the TV cameras into his courtroom to broadcast their innocence.
However, Ayers Rock is sacred to the Aborigines. At the base of it is the Cave of Fertility, said to be the birth passage of the world. The Rock is also a place of death, a burial ground guarded by stone warriors as the ancient ancestors sleep. The Australian public was intrigued by the child’s name Azaria. It had an Old Testament ring to it and rumours circulated that it meant ‘blood sacrifice’. The talk of Australian dinner tables was that Azaria was the product of an adulterous affair and had been killed in a bizarre religious rite at Ayers Rock. But search as they may, the newspapers could not find a single shred of evidence to that effect. However, the police did not give up. They contacted a forensic scientist in England, who had never even seen a dingo. He claimed that a dingo could not possibly make off with a child – despite the fact that 27 attacks had been reported in the area, several on the night that baby Azaria went missing.
The finding of the first inquest was quashed. A second inquest recommended that Lindy and Michael Chamberlain be sent for trial. The trial of the Chamberlains’ case was unique in the annals of modern murder trials. Here was a prosecution case where there was no body, no murder weapon, no eyewitness and no motive. In their opening statement, the Crown admitted that it was not even going to suggest a motive. But what prosecuting counsel Ian Barker QC did say attacked the very core of the defence case.
‘The dingo story was a fanciful lie, calculated to conceal the truth,’ he said.
Outside the court building, pretty girls wore T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan: ‘The dingo is innocent.’
The trial turned into a battle between forensic scientists. The defence effectively shredded the prosecution case. Their cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses demonstrated that the ‘experts’ were mistaken and incompetent. Even the judge in his summing up said that the jury must allow for the possibility that a dingo had indeed taken the baby. The jury was out for just three hours. When they filed back, they found Lindy Chamberlain guilty of murder and Michael Chamberlain of being an accessory after the fact.
The next morning, the judge sentenced Michael to 18 months’ hard labour, but under his powers as a judge in the North Territory he was able to suspend this sentence and bound Michael over for three years on a bond of AU$500. With Lindy though, he had no choice. For murder the sentence of life at hard labour was mandatory.
How did the jury make such a heinous mistake? An anonymous juryman explained later why they had reached such an astounding decision.
‘It really came down to whether you believed it was the dingo or not,’ he said. Plainly, the jury did not.
Lindy, who was eight months pregnant during the trial, went straight to Berrimah jail in Darwin where, less than three weeks later, she gave birth to a second daughter, Kahlia. The baby was taken from her after four hours and given into the care of Michael.
The defence were so shocked by the unexpected guilty verdict, they were ill-prepared for an appeal. There was little new they could say when the Federal Appeal Court convened in Sydney in February 1983. After a month’s hearing and two months’ deliberation, the three appeal judges unanimously rejected the appeal. In a final appeal to the High Court of Australia, the judges let the judgement of the lower courts stand on a majority verdict of two to one. Lindy turned to her faith and resigned herself to spending the rest of her life in prison. But Michael resigned the priesthood. A crisis of faith was rumoured. Many felt that if they had been through what Michael had been through they would have been atheists by then.
But letters of support still poured in. Pleas for Lindy’s release appeared in the press. A film was made showing two versions of the story – the prosecution’s and the Chamberlains’. Somehow they could not get the Crown’s case to hang together dramatically. A prison psychologist who examined Lindy publicly proclaimed that he found himself unable to account for any ‘criminal behaviour on her part’. Newspapers employed their own analysts, handwriting experts and the like, who all proclaimed Lindy innocent. Prominent scientists protested at the interpretation of the forensic evidence. A petition was organised. The Plea of Justice Committee was formed and travelled the country, campaigning on Lindy’s behalf.
Then, in February 1986, David Brett, a British tourist who was climbing on Ayers Rock, slipped and fell to his death. When it was found, his body had been partially eaten by dingos. Near his body a baby’s jacket was found. It was identified as Azaria’s. Organic material that could have been the remains of Azaria’s body was also found. This was all consistent with a dingo taking the baby.
That should have been an end to it, but there were rumours that Brett had Azaria’s name tattooed on his arm. His mother believes that both her son and baby Azaria were victims of black magic. His parting words when he left Britain, she said, were: ‘If anything happens to me, I have been made a sacrifice.’
Nevertheless Lindy was granted parole and was released. T-shirts began appearing in Australia bearing the slogan: ‘Watch out, Kahlia – Mummy’s home.’
A judicial inquiry set up under Federal judge Mr Justice Trevor Morling in 1988 exonerated the Chamberlains. His 380-page report blamed erroneous and unreliable forensic evidence.

Chapter 13

The Night Stalker

Name: Richard Ramirez

Reign of terror: 1984–86

Number of victims: 28

Favoured method of killing: rape, strangulation, stabbing, shooting, beating

Pseudonym: would have preferred the name ‘the Night Prowler’

Calling card: an inverted pentagram

Final note: ‘I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil’

Devil worshipper Richard Ramirez was the Night Stalker who terrorised Los Angeles for two years in the 1980s. A scrawled pentagram – a Satanic symbol – was his calling card and he made his victims declare their love of Satan before he slaughtered them.

The Night Stalker’s murder career began ordinarily enough. On the night of 28 June 1984, the mutilated body of 79-year-old Jennie Vincow was found spread-eagled on the bed of her one-bedroom apartment in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles. She had been raped and her throat had been slashed so violently that she had almost been decapitated. There was blood on the walls of the bedroom and bathroom and her flat had been ransacked. But in LA, it was just another murder.

Nine months later he attacked again. Maria Hernandez had just parked her car in her garage in the Rosemead suburb of Los Angeles and was walking towards her apartment, when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned to be confronted by a man with a gun. He shot her but, miraculously, the bullet ricocheted off her car keys and hit her with only a glancing blow.

Even so, the impact of the bullet was enough to knock her to the ground. The gunman stepped over her, giving her a vicious kicking, and made his way into her apartment. From inside, Maria heard a gunshot. She staggered to her feet, only to be confronted by the gunman running from the house.

‘Please don’t shoot me again,’ she begged. The gunman froze, then took to his heels.

Inside the apartment Maria Hernandez found her boyfriend, 34-year-old Hawaiian-born Dayle Okazaki, lying on the kitchen floor, dead. He had been shot through the head.

There was only one clue to the murder. Maria said that the gunman had worn a baseball cap with the AC/DC logo on the front. The Australian heavy metal band AC/DC had recently released an album called
Highway to Hell
. On it, there was track called ‘Night Prowler’. This was the
nom d’assassin
Ramirez preferred. He was annoyed that the newspapers insisted on calling him the Night Stalker.

That night, his lust for blood had not nearly been satisfied. Less than an hour later, on his way home, Ramirez pulled 30-year-old Taiwanese law student Tsai Lian Yu from her car and shot her repeatedly. She died before the ambulance arrived.

Ten days later, Ramirez entered the home of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara, half a mile from the San Gabriel freeway. Maxine was a successful lawyer and Vincent had just fulfilled a lifetime ambition to open his own pizzeria. Both of them were shot at point-blank range and Maxine Zazzara’s naked body was mutilated after death. Ramirez stabbed her repeatedly, making a pattern of a large ragged T. He also gouged her eyes out. The bodies were found by their son Peter, when he called in at the house the next day.

On 14 May 1985, Ramirez broke into the home of William and Lillie Doi. He shot 66-year-old William in the head while he lay sleeping. His wife, 63-year-old Lillie who was in bed next to him, was beaten repeatedly around the head until she told the intruder where the valuables were hidden. Then he handcuffed her and ransacked the house. Later he returned to rape her.

A fortnight later, Carol Kyle was awoken in her Burbank flat by a torch shining in her eyes. A man pointed a gun at her and dragged her out of bed. In the next room, Carol’s terrified 12-year-old son was handcuffed and locked in a cupboard. His mother was then raped. Even then, she was sympathetic.

‘You must have had a very unhappy life to have done this to me,’ she said.

Ramirez shrugged off her sympathy.

‘I don’t know why I’m letting you live,’ he spat. ‘I’ve killed people before.’

He ransacked the apartment for valuables. Satisfied with the jewellery he found, he went away, leaving both Carol and her son alive.

Around the same time, two elderly women, 83-year-old Mabel Bell and her 80-year-old sister Florence Long, an invalid, were attacked in their home in the suburb of Monrovia. On 1 June, Carlos Venezuala, a gardener who did chores for the sisters, dropped round. The house was unusually silent and he let himself in. He found Florence lying on her bed in a coma. There was a huge wound over her ear and a bloodstained hammer was lying on the dressing table. Mabel was lying barely conscious on her bedroom floor in a pool of her own blood. Both women had been beaten with the hammer. They had been cut and tortured. There were even signs that Ramirez had tried to rape the older sister Mabel. The police concluded that the two sisters had been left that way for two days.

The house had been ransacked but this time, the attacker had left some clues. Along with the hammer, he had left a half-eaten banana on the dining table. He had also left what was to become his trademark – an inverted pentagram, the encircled five-point star that is used in witchcraft. One was scrawled in lipstick on Mabel’s thigh. Another was drawn on Florence’s bedroom wall.

Six weeks after the attack Mabel Bell died. But Florence eventually regained consciousness and survived.

Then the Night Stalker’s onslaught began in earnest. On the night of 27 June 1985, Ramirez slashed the throat of 32-year-old Patty Elaine Higgins in her home in Arcadia. The same fate befell Mary Louise Cannon five days later Three days after that, again in Arcadia, Ramirez savagely beat 16-year-old Whitney Bennett with a crowbar. She survived.

On 7 July, Ramirez turned his attention back to Monterey Park, where Tsai Lian Yu and the Dois had been attacked. Sixty-one-year-old Joyce Lucille Nelson was found beaten to death in her home and 63-year-old Sophie Dickmann was raped and robbed in her apartment

On 20 July, Ramirez murdered 66-year-old Maxson Kneiding and his 64-year-old wife Lela in their Glendale home, then went on to murder 32-year-old Chainarong Khovananth at his home in Sun Valley. After shooting him as he lay asleep in his bed, Ramirez raped and beat Chainarong’s 29-year-old wife Somkid. He forced her to perform oral sex on him and stole $30,000 in cash and jewellery. Then he forced her to swear in Satan’s name that she would not cry out. After that he raped her eight-year-old son.

The police were aware that they had a serial killer on their hands but the problem was that he had no clear modus operandi. He killed with guns, hammers and knifes. He raped young and old, both children and women, orally, anally and genitally. Sometimes he mutilated the bodies after death, sometimes he didn’t. In a moment of dark humour the LAPD quipped that he was an equal-opportunity monster.

But some patterns were emerging. The killer stalked quiet suburbs away from the city’s main centres of crime where homeowners were less security conscious. He tended to pick houses painted in beige or pastel yellow. They were usually close to a freeway, making his escape easier. Entry was usually through an open window or an unlocked door. Although burglary was one of his motives, rape and sheer brutality seemed to figure highly. Pentagrams and other satanic symbols were also commonly left by the killer.

On the night 5 August, postal worker Virginia Petersen was awoken by the sound of an intruder. She sat up in bed and cried out: ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

The burglar laughed, then shot her in the face. The bullet entered the cheek just below her eye and went clean through the back of her head. Miraculously, she survived.

Her husband Christopher, who was lying beside her, was woken by the shot. He leapt to his wife’s defence. This earned him a bullet in the temple. But Christopher Petersen was a tough guy, a truck driver. It took more than one small-calibre bullet to put him down. He dived out of bed and chased his attacker. The intruder was unprepared for this. He panicked and ran.

Christopher Petersen also survived the ordeal, though he has suffered partial memory loss and has had to live ever since with a bullet lodged in his brain. But, for the second time, the Night Stalker had been put to flight.

It did not end his violent rampage though. Three days later, he shot another 35-year-old Asian man and beat and raped his 28-year-old wife. Again she was forced to swear by Satan that she would not cry out, but this time he left their two young children unharmed, though their three-year-old son Amez was tied up.

By this time, public terror was at fever pitch in Los Angeles. In the affluent suburbs, locksmiths and burglar alarm salesmen were doing a roaring trade. Gun shops quickly sold out and local residents set up neighbourhood watch committees.

So Ramirez took a vacation. He travelled north to San Francisco. There on the night of 17 August, he attacked 66-year-old Asian accountant Peter Pan and his 64-year-old wife Barbara in their home in the suburb of Lake Merced. Both were shot through the head. An inverted pentagram was painted in lipstick on the bedroom wall, and under it, Ramirez wrote ‘Jack the Knife’. At first, the police thought it was a copycat killing. But the bullets that he killed the couple with matched the small calibre rounds found in the Los Angeles’ murders.

A week later, Ramirez travelled 50 miles south of Los Angeles to the small town of Mission Viego. He shot 29-year-old computer engineer William Carns three times in the head and raped his fiancée Inez Erickson, also 29, twice.

‘You know who I am, don’t you,’ Ramirez taunted. ‘I’m the one they’re writing about in the newspapers and on TV.’

He also forced Inez to say ‘I love Satan’ during her ordeal.

William Carns survived the shooting, but suffered permanent brain damage and the couple never married. However, Inez provided a vital clue. She spotted Ramirez’s rusty, old orange Toyota after he left the house. This would put an end to the reign of the Night Stalker.

A sharp-eyed kid, James Romero III, had also spotted the orange Toyota as it cruised the area and had noted down its licence-plate number. The police put out an all-points bulletin. Two days later, the car was found in a car park of Los Angeles’ Rampart suburb.

When examining the car, forensic scientists used a new technique. They put a dab of Superglue in a saucer in the car and sealed the doors and window. Fumes from the Superglue would react with moisture in any fingerprints and then turn them white. The interior of the car was then scanned using a laser. This technique should pick up any fingerprints, including those that the culprit had tried to wipe off.

The scan yielded one fingerprint. It was computer matched to that of 25-year-old Richard Ramirez, who had been arrested three times for marijuana possession in El Paso. Soon Ramirez’s photograph was on the front page of every newspaper in California.

Ramirez was quite unaware of this when he stepped down from the Greyhound bus at Los Angeles’ main bus station. He had been out in Phoenix, Arizona, to score some cocaine and was high. He had killed 13 people and felt good. Surely by now he must be Satan’s favourite son.

He went to a drugstore to buy himself a Pepsi. Then at the checkout desk he saw his own face splashed across the Spanish language paper
La Opinion
. The checkout clerk recognised him too, so did the other customers. Ramirez made a run for it.

In the street, someone cried out: ‘It’s the Night Stalker.’ Soon he heard the wail of police sirens behind him. He knocked on a door. Bonnie Navarro opened it. Ramirez shouted ‘Help me!’ in Spanish. She slammed the door in his face.

On the next block, he tried to pull a woman from her car, but bystanders rushed to her rescue. Ramirez jumped a fence into a backyard where Luis Muñoz was cooking a barbecue. He hit Ramirez with his tongs. In the next garden, he tried to steal a red 1966 Mustang, but 56-year-old Faustin Pinon, who was working on the transmission, grabbed him in a headlock. Ramirez broke free, but across the street 55-year-old construction worker Jose Burgoin heard Pinon’s shouts. He picked up a steel rod and hit Ramirez with it. Ramirez stumbled on but Burgoin soon caught up with him. This time he clubbed him to the ground.

In the nick of time, Deputy Sheriff Andres Ramirez pulled up in a patrol car.

‘Save me!’ yelled the Night Stalker.

As his namesake handcuffed him, Ramirez said: ‘Thank God you came. I am the one you want. Save me before they kill me.’

Only the arrival of more police patrol cars prevented the angry mob taking the law into their own hands. Even at the police station, a crowd gathered, calling for him to be lynched.

Ramirez showed no contrition. He told the police: ‘I love to kill people. I love watching them die. I would shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm all over the place, and then just stop. Or I would cut them with a knife and watch their faces turn real white. I love all that blood. I told one lady one time to give me all her money. She said no. So I cut her and pulled her eyes out.’

In court, Ramirez made Satanic signs and even appeared with the inverted pentagram scratched in his palm. He told the judge: ‘You maggots make me sick. Hypocrites one and all. You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil.’

Ramirez was found guilty on 63 counts, including 13 murders. He was sentenced to death penalties on 19 counts and over 100 years’ imprisonment. On death row, many women wrote to him, sending provocative pictures, pledging undying love and proposing marriage. When Ramirez accepted divorcée Christine Lee over nude model Kelly Marquez, it made headlines.

Christine, a mother of two, bombarded Ramirez with pin-up pictures of herself and visited him over 150 times. She was undaunted by the fact that her fiancé was a perverted killer, declaring, ‘We really love each other and that’s all that matters. From the moment I saw him in prison, I knew he was special. I couldn’t believe he was the evil monster people were calling him. He’s always been sweet and kind to me.’

But it did not work out. In October 1996, in a simple ceremony in San Quentin, Ramirez married Doreen Lioy, a 41-year-old freelance magazine editor with an IQ of 152.