Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (18 page)

He became violent and unpredictable, and he focused more of his attention on his collection of guns. The family were relieved when they heard that Michael was about to get married. The date was set, then the wedding was called off.

‘He doesn’t know whether he wants to be married or not,’ his mother told relatives. ‘First of all it’s on and then it’s off.’

Many doubt that there was a girl at all. He had certainly never been seen with one and was unnaturally close to his mother. Next-door neighbour Linda Lepetit said: ‘It’s unbelievable that he shot her. They got on so well. We could often hear them laughing and joking together. He had a natter to me and my children several times, but he was a bit of a loner.’

But others tell a different story. Dennis Morley, a friend of the family, claimed that Ryan used to beat his mother up.

‘He used to hit his mother a lot,’ said Morley. ‘But he would not pick on a man.’

During his long conversations with the police from John O’Gaunt school, Ryan claimed to have been a member of the Parachute Regiment. He was not. But he was an avid reader of military and survivalist magazines, and he had fantasies about being a paratrooper.

Along with his usual attire of a brown jacket and slacks, he wore a pair of Dutch parachuting boots. He also wore sunglasses in all weather and was self-conscious about going prematurely bald. Even his only drinking buddy described Ryan as ‘extremely quiet, he never gave anything away about himself’.

Apart from walking his labrador, Ryan’s only recreation had been shooting. He belonged to two shooting clubs where he spent an hour twice a week. Andrew White, a partner in the Wiltshire Shooting Centre in Devizes, said: ‘He’d come in for a chat, pick up his targets, go down to the range for an hour’s shooting, come back, have another chat, and then go.’

But White did notice that, unlike some of the other riflemen at the 600-member club, Ryan would not use targets that showed a human figure or a soldier’s head. He would insist on the standard circular accuracy targets.

During his negotiations with the police, Ryan confessed to the murders he had committed. Although he could shoot other people, he could not kill himself, he said. But at about 6.30 p.m. a muffled shot was heard from inside the school. Ryan did not answer any more. He had finally found the courage to kill himself.

The armed police still held back though. There were fears that Ryan had been holding hostages and they could not be sure what had happened inside the school. It was only at 8.10 p.m. that armed officers finally burst into the classroom to find Ryan shot with his own gun – and the Hungerford massacre was over.

Britain was so shocked by Michael Ryan’s murderous outburst that the BBC quickly dropped several films they had scheduled which depicted gratuitous violence or gun play. The first casualty was an American film called
Black Christmas
which was due to go out on BBC 1 at 11.50 on the night of the massacre. It depicted a psychopath killing college girls and was replaced with the Dick Emery comedy
Oh You Are Awful!
.

The BBC’s own film
Body Contact
, described as a ‘stylish pastiche with echoes of
Bonnie and Clyde
’, was also dropped. The ITV company Anglia dropped the western
Nevada Smith
and switched an episode of police drama
The Professionals
for a less violent one.

The day after the Hungerford massacre a fund was set up to provide support to the injured and the families of the dead. Local millionaire Peter de Savary gave £10,000. He had employed Ryan as a labourer when he was building his medieval theme park at nearby Littlecote House and about 80 per cent of the people who worked at his theme park lived in Hungerford. Another anonymous donor gave £10,000 and Newbury District Council gave £5,000. Local radio stations GWR Radio and Radio 210 launched appeals. Soon smaller donations poured in and within a couple of days, the fund topped £50,000. Ryan’s victims would also be eligible for compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation board. Murder victims’ spouses and children under 18 would also be eligible for a bereavement award of £3,500 and a ‘dependency’ award.

Hardly a single person in Hungerford’s small population was unaffected. In a community of that size everyone knew someone who had been killed. Quickly the Hungerford Family Unit was set up, giving 90-minute grief therapy sessions. It was staffed by social workers who had counselled victims’ families from the Zeebrugge ferry disaster and the Bradford tragedy where football fans had been burnt to death in a football stand.

The local church also played a role, offering prayers for the victims and flying its flag at half-mast. They also offered prayers for the soul of Michael Ryan. However, the church soon found itself in an awkward position. While Michael Ryan’s mother Dorothy had asked to be buried at Coine in Wiltshire, close to the village of Cherhill where she was born, Ryan himself was to be buried in Hungerford alongside his victims. Some residents of Hungerford muttered darkly that, if he was buried there, his body would be dug up and thrown out.

The Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher was on the streets of Hungerford two days after Michael Ryan. She visited the area where 14 people had been gunned down and the four houses that had been gutted when Ryan set his mother’s house on fire. At the local vicarage she met some of the relatives of Ryan’s victims and was soon close to tears. After visiting the wounded in the Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon, Mrs Thatcher described the incident as ‘not an accident in which we get a terrible tragedy, it is a crime, an evil crime’.

Chapter 15

Lesbian Vampires and Satanic Cults

Name: Tracey Wigginton, Kim Jervis, Lisa Ptaschinski, TraceyWaugh

Nationality: Australian

Number of victims: 1

Favoured method of killing: stabbing

On the night of Friday 20 October 1989, four women met at the Club Lewmors, a lesbian dive, where they sipped champagne. Wigginton and Jervis were carrying knives – but Wigginton bragged that she would kill with her bare hands if she had to. Around 11.30 p.m., they left the club and began cruising the streets in Wigginton’s green Holden sedan looking for a likely victim. On River Terrace, they spotted 47-year-old Edward Baldock, clinging drunkenly to a lamp-post. He had been out for a few beers and a game of darts with his mates in the Caledonia Club and was now slowly making his way home to his wife of 25 years. The women stopped and asked him if he wanted a lift home. He thought it was his lucky night, accepted and climbed in the back with Wigginton. They held hands. Wigginton instructed Ptaschinski to drive down to Orleigh Park, which was near Baldock’s home. Ptaschinski parked under a fig tree near the deserted South Brisbane Sailing Club. Wigginton asked Baldock whether he wanted a good time. He was all for it. They got out of the car and walked down to the river bank, where they both undressed. A few minutes later Wigginton returned to the car, complaining that Baldock was too strong. Ptaschinski said she would help and Jervis handed her her knife. The two lesbian lovers walked back down to the river where Baldock sat, naked except for his socks. Wigginton urged Ptaschinski to creep up on him and stab him, but she did not have the nerve. She could not kill a poor old drunk. Instead, she collapsed in the sand in front of him and began to gabble. Wigginton had no such qualms. She stabbed Baldock repeatedly in the neck and throat until his head was nearly severed, then she drank his blood. She returned to the car satisfied and the elated women drove back to Jervis’s flat, convinced that they had committed the perfect murder. It was only when they arrived at the macabre apartment that Wigginton realised that she had lost her bank card. She had dropped it while she was undressing.
Panicked, the women drove back to Orleigh Park and scoured the area, but they could not find the card. They decided that Wigginton must have lost it elsewhere. On the way back to Jervis’s flat, they were stopped for a routine check by a patrol car and Ptaschinski was breathalysed. The breath test was negative, but she had come out without her driving licence and the police took down the details of the car.
The next morning, Baldock’s naked body was discovered by two women out on an early morning walk. They called the police. Within minutes of their arrival, detectives found Wigginton’s bank card in Baldock’s shoe. They quickly discovered that the green Holden that had been stopped by a patrol car in the area was also registered to a Tracey Wigginton and put two and two together. At this point, they assumed that Wigginton was Baldock’s mistress and she had murdered him in an argument over money.
In the morning, the loss of Wigginton’s bank card began to worry the four women more and more. If the card was found and any of them were questioned, they decided to say that they had been out fooling about in that area earlier the day before and that that’s when Wigginton must have lost the card. However, the story had one major flaw. It did not take into account that they had been stopped in that same area by a patrol car that night.
Acting on the theory that Wigginton was Baldock’s aggrieved mistress, the police picked her up. But under questioning, she began to change her story from the one that they had agreed upon. She began to elaborate on it, mentioning that they had seen a suspicious-looking couple in the park. Later, she said that she had gone to the park in the evening and had fallen over a dead body in the dark, but had been too frightened to report it.
Ptaschinski’s nerve had gone the night before. With Wigginton in custody, it went again. She could not stand the waiting. She left the flat and began walking about in a confused state. As she wandered about aimlessly, the guilt gradually ate into her. She turned herself in at a nearby police station. Jervis and Waugh were arrested the next day.
Under relentless questioning, Tracey Wigginton admitted that she was a ‘vampire’. She was sent for detailed psychological examination. The doctors discovered that Tracey had been abandoned by her father and mother when she was a baby and was brought up by her grandparents George and Avril Wigginton. George was a profligate womaniser and Avril took out her hatred of her unfaithful husband on the children in her care. She beat Tracey mercilessly and poisoned her mind against men. Tracey turned to her genial grandfather for affection, but claimed that he had demanded sex with her after she had turned eight. At Catholic school, she became a lesbian and was known for her strange and evil behaviour. When she left school in 1982, she began calling herself Bobby and she went round to beat her grandmother up. She had a sado-masochistic relationship with a woman called Jamie who beat her with a strap and demanded total submission. She later underwent a lesbian ‘wedding’ performed by a member of the Hare Krishna sect and became a bouncer at a gay night club.
After the ‘marriage’ broke up, she asked the club’s owner, a man named John O’Hara, to help her have a baby. They had sex in front of six close friends. Tracey fell pregnant, but later miscarried. She began a stormy relationship with a woman named Donna Staib and although they lived together, they were both enormously promiscuous with other women. Around that time, Tracey dyed her hair ‘midnight blue’ and had her body tattooed with mystical signs. She and Staib shared a taste for horror videos. The night before Baldock’s murder they had watched a sequence of a man being shot in the forehead and his skull exploding over and over again in slow motion.
The police feared that Wigginton’s warped upbringing might be used in an insanity plea. But 24-year-old Wigginton took responsibility for her acts and was aware of their consequences. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The other three women pleaded not guilty. They claimed that they had not thought that Wigginton was serious when she talked of killing and drinking people’s blood and that they had been forced to go along with her because of her overbearing personality. Under cross-examination though, Ptaschinski admitted that she had been fascinated by the ‘thrilling and chilling plan to murder a man to drink his blood’. In court, the three women claimed that Wigginton had occult powers. They said that she claimed to be the Devil’s wife and practised mind control. They also insisted that the cross around Kim Jervis’s neck had been broken by Wigginton’s diabolical power, and she could disappear leaving only the eyes of a cat.
Ptaschinski, 24, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life. Jervis, 23, got 18 years for manslaughter. Only Waugh, 23, walked free from the court. Although she was the brightest of the four women and stayed in the background, the jury decided that she was completely under the evil sway of Tracey Wigginton.

Name: Rodney Dale

Number of victims: 1 killed, 7 injured

Favoured method of killing: shooting

Nickname: Satan’s laughing hitman

Rodney Dale, a 26-year-old Australian carved the satanic number ‘666’ on the palms of his hands before he went on his rampage.
On the afternoon of 17 April 1990, he shot eight people – one of whom died – in just thirty minutes in the Burleigh Heads district of Australia’s Gold Coast. And the ‘666’ in the palm of his hands earned him the sobriquet ‘Satan’s laughing hitman’ in the Australian press.
With no warning at all, Dale went out on the balcony of his flat overlooking Tweed Street which was packed with Saturday afternoon shoppers at around 4 p.m. He was wearing a balaclava and carrying a rifle and a pump-action shotgun, and he started shooting.
By the time the first police car arrived, one woman was lying badly wounded on the nearby Gold Coast Highway and the gunman was out on the road shooting randomly at anything that moved. A bridal party happened to be driving through the area at the time. A bridesmaid was hit in the leg and the driver of the bride’s car was hit in the right hand, left arm and shoulder. But he managed to drive his passenger out of the area before he was rushed to hospital. The wedding went ahead, but the shooting, it is said, did put something of a damper on the proceedings.
Seven more police cars and five ambulances rushed to the area. But another six women were wounded before 38-year-old Sergeant Bob Baker from Burleigh Police Station took decisive action. He pulled his Magnum pistol and walked straight across the road at the crazed gunman.
‘Police! Put your gun down,’ he shouted.
In response, Dale turned his gun on the courageous policeman and started firing. What followed was something out of a western. The gunman loosed off bullet after bullet, but none found their mark. Sergeant Baker stood his ground and responded in kind. His fourth shot hit the gunman in the arm. He dropped his gun and surrendered.
In Dale’s flat was a note for his girlfriend saying he was ‘going out hunting’. Neighbours described him as friendly, nice and happy. There were rumours that he was involved with a satanic cult. He never explained why ‘666’ – the number of the Beast – was carved in his palms.