The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (18 page)

The trial in Orange County lasted four months, involved over 100,000 pages of evidence and cost $14 million. Ng employed delaying tactics, endlessly complaining about procedure and hiring and firing lawyers. He attempted to dissociate himself from Lake’s fantasies and denied having anything to do with the killings. Some of the videos shot in the bunker told their own story, although he continued to try to talk himself out of involvement. When he went on to the witness stand to defend himself he declared that he too was a victim. He explained that some of the behaviour seen on the videotapes was just bluff.

In February 1999, the trial jury convicted thirty-eight-year-old Ng of eleven murders and in a separate sitting, recommended the death penalty. It had taken fourteen years to bring Ng to justice but he finally ended up on death row. Prosecutors believed he and Lake may have murdered more than twenty people. His lawyers thought he sealed his fate when he decided to take the witness stand.

No Hiding Place

Justice caught up with Brian Field thirty-three years after he had murdered when a combination of chance and advances in DNA technology enabled a link to be established between victim and attacker.

Fourteen-year-old Roy Tuthill, who lived near Dorking in Surrey, in the UK, went missing in April 1968 on his way home from school. He was last seen alive attempting to hitch a lift. Three days later, his body was found in a copse near Chessington. He had been strangled and sexually assaulted. His attacker had folded the boy’s clothing and placed it over his body.

The police search for the attacker produced no immediate results. But, in 1972, suspicions began to form around Brian Field, an itinerant farm machine repairer. He was jailed for attacking and indecently assaulting a teenage boy in Scotland.
This flagged up an amber warning for Surrey Police and Field was questioned about Roy Tuthill’s death. No action resulted from this interview and Field went on to offend again in 1986 when he attempted to abduct two teenage boys. They escaped and Field was jailed for four years.

The breakthrough in the police investigation came by chance in 1999 when Field was routinely stopped on suspicion of driving under the influence of drink. New powers enabled the police to take a DNA sample from anyone convicted of a crime and check it on the DNA national database. Field’s DNA matched that found on Roy Tuthill’s clothing over thirty years previously.

Field eventually confessed to the Surrey murder and he was sent for trial at the Old Bailey in November 2001 where he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mr Justice Gordon said that, “advances in modern science techniques should stand as a warning that there is no hiding place for sexual and violent criminals”.

Killer Abroad

Volker Eckert was a truck driver who travelled the motorways of Europe trawling for women to murder. Over a period of thirty years, he killed at least thirteen times.

He was arrested in Cologne on 17 November 2006, after his truck was found in a car park at a football stadium in northern Spain. When the vehicle was checked out by the local police it was found to contain the body of a young woman. In the driving cab were incriminating photographs and a length of rope.

Eckert’s admission that he was responsible for six killings triggered police investigations throughout Europe and revealed a trail of death. It became evident that he had killed his first victim when he was a mere fourteen years of age. It was only when he qualified as a truck driver in 1999 that he perfected his modus operandi, regularly crossing borders, picking up his victims, killing them and dumping their bodies elsewhere.

Eckert had grown up in the town of Plauen, which at the time was in East Germany. As a child he was fascinated by
his sister’s toys and, particularly, by a doll with long hair. He practised strangling the doll and playing with her hair. This was an experiment which he turned into reality in 1974 when he fantasized over a schoolgirl and strangled her in a crime that remained unsolved for another thirty years.

A search of Eckert’s flat following his arrest revealed a collection of photographs depicting some of his murder victims with ropes around their necks. There were also notes describing some of the murders and, under the bed, a life-size rubber doll decorated with hair and trophies taken from his victims.

Apart from serving six years in prison for attempted murder, he joined the estimated thirty serial killers believed to be active throughout Europe. The E45 highway running from Austria south to Italy was a killing ground where over forty women had been murdered. Prostitutes, along with migrant workers, were successfully targeted by Eckert as being lone, vulnerable women with no fixed address and few family or friends to worry about them when they went missing.

For thirty years, Eckert got away with murder. He confessed to six killings, which was raised to thirteen following police investigations, and there are possibly more. While justice finally caught up with him, Eckert avoided a trial appearance by taking his own life. While awaiting trial at Hof, he hanged himself in his prison cell on 1 July 2007, on his forty-eighth birthday.

Procedural Delay

When a British Royal Navy officer was murdered in New Zealand in 1847, a local man was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. Only a procedural delay saved him from imminent execution and during that time he was shown to be innocent.

Lieutenant Robert Snow, based at North Shore, Auckland, was in charge of the naval magazine and stores depot at Devonport. He lived locally in a traditional Maori dwelling. On 23 October 1847 in the early hours of the morning, a seaman
on board HMS
Dido
at anchor in the harbour reported a blaze on the foreshore.

A cutter and crew were despatched to investigate and found Snow’s house on fire. Alert crew members noticed Maori canoes leaving the scene. Once the fire had been extinguished, a search of the remains revealed the bodies of Snow and his wife and daughter. They had been killed with knives and axes.

A naval raiding party rounded up a number of Maoris for questioning. The
New Zealander
reported that there was little doubt the murders had been committed by natives. It was noted that Lieutenant Snow had been involved in disagreements with Maoris who he accused of stealing his crops. Relationships between the Maoris and the authorities became strained and there was talk of war.

Further investigation of the murders led to the arrest of Thomas Duder, a signalman at Mount Victoria. He protested his innocence and, on the basis of very little evidence, he was tried and convicted. The sentence was death by hanging and he was held in custody while the necessary authority to carry out the execution was awaited from London.

During this delay the true facts behind the murders were revealed by chance. A couple brawling in the street at Devonport on a Sunday morning attracted the attention of the police. A man known only as Burns had stabbed his female companion, Margaret Reardon, and then attempted to take his own life. Both survived and information began to emerge about Burns, who was an ex-convict from Sydney.

Enquiries showed that he had been employed by a local Maori chief and, together, they hatched a plan to rob Lieutenant Snow of his monthly salary which he received on specified dates from the Auckland Treasury. Burns involved Reardon and the couple went to Snow’s house on the pretext of warning him about trouble brewing among the Maoris. They attacked and killed the Snow family and set fire to the house.

When the murderers fell out, Reardon threatened to inform on Burns. A confession followed and they acknowledged carrying out other murders. In the wake of this development,
Thomas Duder was released and Burns and Reardon were sent for trial. Found guilty, Burns was condemned to death while Reardon was sentenced to penal servitude for life.

Burns was taken to the scene of the crime after being publicly paraded in a horse-drawn cart sitting on his own coffin. On 27 June 1848, he was hanged on the same spot that the Snow family met their deaths. Thomas Duder, an innocent man spared by a trick of fate, went on to prosper in Devonport’s business life and a street in the town was named after him.

“Accidental” Murder

The conviction of David Greenwood for “The Button and Badge Murder” in 1918 seemed an open-and-shut case, but a recent review of the evidence suggests that he was an innocent victim of the system.

Sixteen-year-old Nellie Trew was reported missing from home by her father on 9 February 1918. The next morning, the girl’s body was found close by Eltham Common in southeast London. She had been raped and strangled. Detectives examining the crime scene found a military badge and a button near the body. The badge depicted the tiger motif of the Leicestershire Regiment and the button had a piece of wire attached to it.

Illustrations of the button and badge featured in newspaper reports of the murder. As a result of this publicity, a man who worked at a factory in London’s Oxford Street, spoke to a colleague who usually wore such a badge. He observed that David Greenwood was no longer wearing it. Greenwood’s explanation to his workmate was that he had sold it, but he took his friend’s advice and reported the fact to the police.

Twenty-one-year-old Greenwood lived in Eltham, a short distance from the spot where Nellie Trew had been found dead. When questioned and shown the badge found near the body, he admitted it was his but explained that he had sold it to a man he met on a tram. Police officers noted that the overcoat Greenwood was wearing had no buttons and that it had a tear as if a button had been torn off. When it was established that
the wire attached to the crime scene button was the same as that used in the factory where he worked, suspicion against him hardened.

Greenwood had served his country in the First World War trenches and been injured by an exploding shell when he was buried alive. He was invalided out of the army in June 1917, and was subject to fainting fits and with a weak heart. When discharged from hospital, he took a job as a metal worker.

Charged with the rape and murder of Nellie Trew, he was sent for trial at the Old Bailey in April 1918. The evidence against him was circumstantial. He claimed to have spent the evening of 9 February at the YMCA in Woolwich. Much hinged on the condition of the overcoat, which he had acquired as part of his discharge entitlement. It was established that he had been seen wearing the coat fully buttoned up four days after the murder.

In his defence, it was argued that in view of his physical weakness resulting from his war injury, he would not have been capable of overcoming a strong young woman. This view was supported by Sir Bernard Spilsbury who appeared as an expert witness at the trial. Nevertheless, the jury returned a guilty verdict with a recommendation to mercy in view of the ex-soldier’s service to his country. Greenwood spoke from the dock, declaring his innocence, before Mr Justice Atkin sentenced him to death.

An appeal against sentence was refused and it was left to the Home Secretary to consider a reprieve. There was considerable public disquiet about the verdict and a reprieve from execution was granted. In return for his life, Greenwood was given a sentence of penal servitude.

A new slant on the case emerged in 2007 in a book about Sir Bernard Spilsbury by Andrew Rose. During his researches, the author discovered that a man who had been committed to a mental institution in April 1918 confessed to having murdered Nellie Trew. At the time, Albert Lytton was an apprentice at Vickers in Erith where he worked the night shift and frequented Woolwich on Saturday nights. He suffered a mental breakdown and because of his violent behaviour spent most of the rest of his life in mental institutions. He admitted going out with Nellie and “accidentally” murdering her. He said he got blood on his trousers and lost one of the buttons. His mother gave his army greatcoat away. These admissions were made three years after the murder.

Following a sustained campaign to have Greenwood released, the former soldier regained his freedom in 1933, after serving fifteen years in prison. It would take another seventy-three years to establish his innocence.

CHAPTER 6

Final Journeys

The final journey made by many condemned murderers is to their place of execution. It may only be a few short steps from the death cell to the scaffold, gas chamber, electric chair or other designated place of judicial extermination. Historically, those who have made such journeys have done so with equanimity, stoicism, terror, defiance and even humour. And while most have been guilty of the crimes for which they paid the ultimate penalty, some were innocent victims of flawed justice or flagrant prejudice.

Whether administered as a deterrent or as retribution, the manner and procedure of executions exhibit some of the most bizarre aspects of society’s efforts to deal with those who transgress. The concept of a life for a life has a long and tortuous history, and executions are wrapped in public spectacle, bungled methods and rituals that may seem more reprehensible than the crimes for which they are the punishment.

Methods of execution in the twentieth century had odd national characteristics. The English preferred hanging, the French retained the guillotine, while the Spanish favoured garrotting. In the US, attempts to introduce new technology with the aim of making the process more humane have led to the introduction of the electric chair, the gas chamber and lethal injection, each with its own quirks and failings.

While many countries have rejected capital punishment in favour of long prison sentences, those that have retained it have yet to find a procedure that is both humane and foolproof. Worldwide, there were 2,390 judicial executions in 2008, more than half of which were carried out in China. The United States called a moratorium on the death penalty in 1967 as a response to public concern over the twelve years it took before the death sentence passed on Caryl Chessman was carried out. The Supreme Court lifted the ruling in 1976 and capital punishment was adopted in thirty-six states. In 2007, there were forty-two executions in the US, which is fewer than in previous years. In Europe, most countries have abolished capital punishment, with the possible exception of a penalty for treason at times of war.