The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (64 page)

On 19 November, Chrissie met her brother and they drank considerable quantities of beer and whisky. The following day Chrissie stayed at home and when Queen returned from work, she was quite drunk. Her in-laws came round and advised Queen to fetch a doctor. They left at about 11 p.m., no doctor was available and a few hours later Queen reported that Chrissie was dead.

The dead woman lay in her bed with the sheets pulled up around her. The ligature around her neck was plainly visible and secured with a half-knot. The room was remarkably well ordered. There were no signs of a struggle; nothing seemed to have been disturbed and Chrissie was still wearing her night bonnet. Post-mortem examination confirmed death by strangulation with sufficient force to break the cricoid cartilage. Two pathologists concluded that she had been murdered.

Peter Queen was put on trial at Glasgow in January 1932. He denied saying the words attributed to him by the police. The prosecutor made much of the fact that he had not attempted to loosen the cord around Chrissie’s neck, did not take her pulse and did not call for a doctor. Queen had two leading forensic experts on his defence team; Sir Sydney Smith and Sir Bernard Spilsbury. They believed the death was suicidal, because in their opinion, there was little evidence to support homicidal strangulation.

Suicidal strangulation is relatively uncommon but cases have been recorded even with a ligature tied in a half-knot. The key issue is whether the knot is strong enough to hold the ligature after consciousness is lost. In homicidal strangulation, injuries to the neck are usually extensive as assailants apply more force than is necessary to cause death. Sydney Smith, writing in his memoirs, wryly remarked, “. . . in the only case where Spilsbury and I were in pretty complete agreement, the jury believed neither of us.”

The jury returned a majority guilty verdict but added a recommendation to mercy. A death sentence was passed on Peter Queen but this was later commuted to one of life imprisonment. Sydney Smith said that when a person is found strangled, there is a strong presumption that it is murder. He thought there were very few indications of homicide in the circumstances of Chrissie Gall’s death and believed that, although it was unusual, she had strangled herself.

When he was released from his life sentence, Peter Queen returned to his job as a bookmaker in Glasgow. He died in 1958 but he had been spared a death sentence, and in a strange way, justice was served.

War Of The Clinics

For two decades, the French city of Marseilles has been consumed with what the press have called “The War of the Clinics”. A sequence of events has brought together doctors and the criminal underworld in a combination of avarice and murder.

Crisis point was reached on 16 January 1990 when the Mayor of the city’s seventh district, Dr Jean-Jacques Peschard, was shot dead in his car after dining at a restaurant. Peschard, a prominent surgeon, was part of a syndicate in the lucrative private health sector.

The doctor was known to the police for his part in the disappearance of his girlfriend in 1984. Christine Barras worked as his clinical assistant and they lived together in his house. The couple had disagreements over their future and Peschard tried to dump Christine. Her family were aware of the arguments and she told her mother that if Peschard threw her over she would tell the world about his money-laundering activities. She claimed to have smuggled money for him into France from Switzerland.

Christine’s family became concerned when their attempts to talk to her on the telephone were blocked by Peschard. His excuse was that she was unwell. Eventually, her mother was admitted to his house and she immediately realized something was wrong. The doctor appeared unnerved and he told her that Christine had moved out. This was strange because she had not taken her make-up and jewellery and, most important, bearing in mind that she was diabetic, she had left her insulin behind.

Christine’s car was found by the police on 11 March 1984 in one of the poorer parts of the city. Peschard gave some elaborate explanations, saying that Christine had talked about joining a religious sect. Then he said she had been kidnapped.

In an extraordinary twist to the story, Christine’s sister, Beatrice, took a job working for Peschard in his clinic. She used her position to question the doctor in unguarded moments. What she heard only increased her suspicions that he was involved in Christine’s disappearance. In October
1985, investigators dug up Peschard’s garden but nothing was found. Indeed, Christine was never found and enquiries were dropped in 1989. Nine months later, Dr Peschard was gunned down by an unknown assassin.

Police had made a connection between the death of Peschard with that of another doctor earlier. In May 1988, Dr Léonce Mout, director of the Polyclinique du Nord, was murdered late at night when he went to his car parked near the clinic. His way was blocked by another car and a gunman shot him through the windscreen, killing him with two bullets. The murder of Dr Peschard nearly two years later was almost identical in its execution.

The police arrested an Algerian businessman, Jean Chouraqui, who had been negotiating with Dr Mout to buy his clinic and add it to the four he already owned. After Peschard’s murder, a man called Marcel Long came forward and said he had been the gunman’s driver. He named Roger Memmoli as the hitman and said they had been instructed by Chouraqui. When questioned, Memmoli confessed to killing both doctors.

Fears of an influx of drug money have not been substantiated, although it was rumoured that General Manuel Noriego, former dictator of Panama, had connections at a high level in the civil administration of Marseilles. Meanwhile, Memmoli, self-confessed assassin remains in police custody as murky rumours continue to circulate.

“. . . Order To Execute”

A drifter who travelled on the French rail network without buying a ticket confessed to killing three women, two of them on trains.

When Isabel Peake, a twenty-year-old university student, boarded a train at Limoges on 13 October 1999, she was beginning her return to England after an exchange visit in France. The overnight express passed through Chateauroux on its way north. It was near that town that Isabel Peake’s semi-clothed body was found beside the rail tracks; she had evidently been thrown from the moving train.

The investigation into the young woman’s death was sloppy. The train compartment used by Isabel Peake was cleaned before the police mounted a forensic investigation and it was over a week later before they decided a murder had taken place. Several witnesses described a man of North African origin wearing a baseball cap back-to-front seen boarding the train at Limoges. He was one of two passengers on that journey travelling without a ticket.

Police issued a photofit image of this individual and began a manhunt for him. The search was given fresh impetus in December when the body of Corinne Caillaux was discovered in a toilet on the sleeper service from Calais to Ventimiglia. She had been stabbed fifteen times. A blood-soaked baseball cap was found on the train and ticket inspectors identified a male passenger travelling without a ticket.

A few days later, the body of Emilie Bazin, who had been missing since October, was found hidden in a cellar under a heap of coal at a house in Amiens. She was the former girlfriend of a man identified as Sid Ahmed Rezala who had stayed at the house. Rezala was picked up in Lisbon on 11 January 2000 as a result of a phone-tapping exercise. He was held in custody by the Portuguese authorities pending a request for his extradition to France.

Twenty-one-year-old Rezala, described by the French police as a lawless drifter, had been released from prison in May 1999 following a conviction for assault. He lost his appeal against extradition to France, and in May 2000, made a confession in an interview published in a French magazine. He admitted killing the three women and claimed he saw flashes that he interpreted as “an order to execute”.

When he murdered Corinne Caillaux he said he had been drinking whisky and taking drugs. He described his actions as “pure madness” and said he killed his ex-girlfriend, Emilie Bazin, to revenge her boyfriend. Again, he said he saw a “flash”, like an order that has to be carried out. Rezala said he had tried to commit suicide several times because he felt unwanted as a person.

On 29 June 2000, Rezala achieved his wish when he set
fire to the mattress in his cell and suffocated. He had been admitted to the psychiatric wing of the prison where he was being held in Lisbon. In letters to his parents and friends he said he wanted to end his life and he did not want to cause suffering. He was quoted in a magazine article as saying he had lost everything in life and his only escape was to return to his creator.

“Why Should I Want To Kill My Wife?”

A woman dying of a terminal illness in a sanatorium drew attention to the actions of her husband who she suspected was poisoning her in order to speed up her demise.

Marjery Radford had been ill for seven years with tuberculosis and was nursed at a sanatorium in Godalming, Surrey in the UK. She was visited regularly by her father and her husband, Frederick, who worked as a laboratory technician at nearby St Thomas’ Hospital.

Frederick was in the habit of taking his wife various food and drinks to stimulate her appetite and provide an alternative to the sanatorium’s catering. He sometimes gave things to his father-in-law to take in, including soft drinks and fruit.

A few days before she died, Marjery Radford had a visit from a woman friend in whom she confided some of her concerns. She said she thought she was being poisoned because she had experienced vomiting after eating some of the things brought to her by her husband. Referring to a fruit pie she had eaten, she said, “I am sure it has been poisoned.” She had been vomiting several times a day.

Mrs Radford asked her friend to send the fruit pie to Scotland Yard for analysis. Her wishes were carried out but not to the letter. What her friend did was to send the fruit pie to the superintendent of the sanatorium with an explanation in a following letter. This course of action was to have a dramatic outcome.

Unaware of the provenance of the fruit pie that had landed on his desk, the superintendent took it home, thinking some well-intentioned person had sent it to him for his enjoyment.
After eating a few mouthfuls, he was ill with vomiting and became extremely unwell. He lost no time in calling the police.

Marjery Radford died on 12 April 1949, the same day that analysts found arsenic in the pie eaten by the sanatorium’s superintendent. Post-mortem examination of the dead woman showed that her body, already weakened by illness, was riddled with arsenic.

When he was interviewed by the police, Frederick Radford asked, “Why should I want to kill my wife? I knew she was going to die anyway.” He pointed out that he was a laboratory technician and would not have been so foolish as to use arsenic as it was easy to detect. He challenged the police to charge him and let a jury decide the outcome.

Radford had asked a very good question, but his motive probably lay in his desire to speed up his wife’s demise because he was having an affair with another woman. But for Marjery’s suspicions that she was being poisoned, her eventual death would have been put down to tuberculosis and her murder would have gone undetected.

The day after he was questioned by the police, Frederick Radford was found dead in bed. He had taken his own life, opting for fast-acting prussic acid (cyanide) rather than a lingering death with arsenic.

Bearing A Grudge

The irony of a military marksman who trained US soldiers to kill, turning his weapon on fellow workers and killing fourteen of them, was not lost on the US anti-gun lobby.

On 20 August 1986, just before seven on a hot summer’s day as rush-hour traffic began to build up, Patrick Sherrill reported for work. He entered the post-office building at Edmond, Oklahoma, where he was a part-time employee. He was dressed in his postal worker’s uniform and he joined eighty colleagues in the building. Then he locked the exit doors before producing two .45 calibre automatic pistols and starting to shoot.

He first shot dead his supervisor at close range and began pursuing people who, as one eyewitness described it later, “scattered like flies”. He chased them through the various work-stations and booths, firing as he went.

FBI and police SWAT teams surrounded the building but it was two hours before they entered the premises. They found fourteen dead postal workers and also Sherrill’s body with three handguns and a mailbag full of ammunition lying close by. His final act had been to kill himself.

As reports of the shooting reached the news networks, the tragedy was described as the third worst one-day massacre in US history. Comparison was made with the McDonald’s restaurant shootings in 1984 and the killings at the University of Texas in 1966. As always on these occasions, the bitter controversy over gun ownership was debated.

The Oklahoma shootings seemed to have a clear motive. It appeared that on the previous day, Sherrill had been warned by his supervisor that his work was unsatisfactory and he was threatened with dismissal. He had been suspended before and there was a history of disciplinary problems.

Sherrill, aged forty-four, was a marksman in the Oklahoma National Guard and had visited Britain a few weeks before the massacre to instruct soldiers in the use of the M16 rifle. As a member of the National Guard’s shooting team, Sherrill was permitted to carry weapons for competition purposes. He checked out two .45 handguns at different times and 300 rounds of ammunition.

Following the massacre, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns commented that, but for the accessibility of handguns, Sherrill’s disagreement with his supervisor might have been settled with a fist fight instead of the loss of fifteen lives.

Ronald Reagan, US President at the time, was not in favour of stricter gun controls. In 1985 the House of Representatives had voted to ease restrictions on gun control. This was against a background of an annual death toll using handguns of 21,000 shootings, including 8,000 homicides and 12,000 suicides. Patrick Sherrill, while described as a loner, had no history of
mental instability and there was no evidence that he had been drinking or taking drugs. As events unfolded it seemed he was a man with a grudge.