The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (65 page)

Sinister And Deadly

Phil Spector, the 1960s music producer, was found guilty of murder by a Los Angeles court six years after the crime was committed at his rock-star mansion, the “Pyrenees Castle”.

On 3 February 2003 Spector’s chauffeur drove him to a local nightspot. There, he talked to the actor, Lana Clarkson, and invited her back to his mansion for a nightcap. They watched the James Cagney movie,
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
, which proved to be prophetic.

While sitting in his employer’s car, the chauffeur thought he heard a gunshot from within the house. When he went to investigate, he encountered Spector who was holding a gun and declaring, “I think I killed somebody.” The chauffeur called the police who found forty-year-old Lana Clarkson slumped in a chair, dead from a gunshot fired through her mouth. A .36 revolver lay on the floor.

Spector appeared to be disorientated and when he resisted police attempts to question him, he was felled by a charge from a tasergun. He was arrested and charged with murder. In an e-mail to a friend, he described Lana Clarkson’s death as “accidental suicide”.

Investigators discovered that Spector was obsessed with guns and owned many weapons. His behaviour at times was described as outlandish, possibly due to the effects of medication, lack of sleep and general depression.

Phil Spector was born in New York and moved to Los Angeles when still a teenager. He formed a band called the “Teddy Bears” and began a successful musical career. In the early 1960s he made his mark with his innovatory pop music productions and his Wall of Sound. His career began to decline in the next decade and his behaviour grew more eccentric. He had been married three times and survived a serious car crash in 1974.

When in 2007 Spector was tried for Lana Clarkson’s murder, the prosecutor described him as “Sinister and Deadly”. He was alleged to have put a loaded revolver into his victim’s mouth and killed her with a single shot. He pleaded not guilty and his defence emphasized the lack of motive. When the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict, the judge declared a mistrial and Spector was released on bail of one million dollars.

A retrial was ordered in 2009 when he again denied murder and his defence claimed that Clarkson was depressed and shot herself. Several women with whom he had been acquainted testified about his erratic behaviour and incidents when he confronted them with guns to reinforce his wishes. Spector spent millions on lawyers but refused to give testimony himself. He did though find time to tell a magazine that Lana “kissed the gun” before using it on herself.

The trial judge rejected demands to call another mistrial and on 13 April 2009, Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of nineteen years.

A Leg Of Pork

On 23 November 1776, Cheshire farmer Newman Gartside was out on his land checking the boundaries. At a local beauty spot with a stream running close by he noticed something floating in the water. He fished it out and determined that it was a woman’s garment stained with blood.

Helped by the young lad with him, he delved further into the water and to their horror retrieved a woman’s head. A constable was sent for and further searches were made, resulting in the discovery of more body parts including an arm and a leg. These appeared to have been disarticulated with some skill.

The question everyone was asking as the news of the discovery spread concerned the identity of the woman. A shopkeeper from the nearby village of Astbury volunteered the information that a young woman dressed in blue had been in her shop. She knew her as Annie Smith, a singer of ballads who was supposed to perform at Congleton Fayre on 20 November
but failed to turn up. The fact that copies of ballads had been found among the clothing dredged up from the stream, along with the body parts, confirmed the identification.

Gossip and various theories tended to focus on Sam Thorley, a man in his fifties who was thought by some to be simple-minded and observed to have a quick temper. He was also a butcher. More information came in from public sources including the discovery of blood on a stile leading to a cottage where Thorley had once lodged. One of the locals took on the role of sleuth and visited widow Hannah Oakes who lived in the cottage.

The widow related that Thorley had visited her on the night of the murder, furiously knocking on her door. He was wearing his trademark butcher’s apron and his clothes were wet. He explained that he had fallen in the stream. From the folds of his apron, he produced a joint of meat, which he put on the kitchen table, declaring that it was a piece of pork. He urged Hannah Oakes to cook it straight away. She demurred, believing that it looked “off”.

Thorley reappeared at the cottage the next day when he cooked the meat himself and sat down to eat it. The result was that he fetched it up, confirming the widow’s opinion that it was indeed “off”. She did not throw it away but kept it in store to render it down for the fat.

The amateur sleuth, now hot on the trail, examined the remains of the meat and thought it had the shape of a human leg muscle. A surgeon who scrutinized the flesh determined that it was of human origin.

Thorley appeared at an inquest held in Congleton Town Hall when Hannah Oakes, the star witness, retold her story. The jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Sam Thorley and he was arrested and taken into the cells at Chester Castle. After spending four months in custody he was brought before the Chester Assizes in April 1777 and made a confession that sealed his fate. He said that he had been told human flesh was similar in taste to pork and decided to put theory into practice.

Thorley was sentenced to death and was hanged before a large crowd on 10 April 1777. Part of his punishment was that
his dead body would be hung from a gibbet. The butcher, in death, provided carrion for the crows.

Not A Friend

John Tawell survived transportation to Australia as a young man where he established a successful business and returned to England as a man deserving respect. He aspired to be a Quaker and adopted The Friends’ form of dress. He had a house in Berkhamsted, married and gave to charity.

But the would-be Quaker had a secret; he had made Sarah Habler his mistress. He set her up with lodgings in Paddington in London and he paid her maintenance. For her part, Sarah did everything to protect Tawell’s reputation. She changed her name, cut herself off from her friends and family and moved from place to place. In due course, however, she became pregnant and thus an embarrassment to her lover.

Tawell decided to eliminate his mistress by getting her to drink stout laced with poison. In September 1843, Sarah, now living in Slough, was taken ill but survived. He made another attempt to kill her in January 1845 and prepared an elaborate alibi for himself. He was seen in a businessman’s club in London and made a show of leaving his overcoat there. His next move was to make a dash to Paddington railway station where he took a train to Slough. He took some stout for Sarah, having laced it with prussic acid (cyanide), made a brief visit and hurried back to London by train. He arrived in time to retrieve his overcoat from the club at about 9 p.m., no doubt congratulating himself on having an alibi that placed him in London at the time Sarah Habler was succumbing to poisoning.

Unfortunately for him, a person wearing Quaker dress was seen leaving Sarah’s house shortly before she was found dead. This description was telegraphed to the stationmaster at Paddington who related it to the police. Detectives observed his arrival by train from Slough and followed him to a coffee shop and thence to his lodgings.

When he was questioned the next day, Tawell denied having been in Slough and said he had not left London. His lies were
easily disproved and he was arrested, the first murder suspect to be detained by means of a telegram. Enquiries showed that Tawell had bought a quantity of prussic acid on the morning of the murder from a chemist in Bishopsgate.

A post-mortem examination confirmed that Sarah Habler had been poisoned with prussic acid. Tawell’s rather inadequate defence was that the poison had come from eating apples, the pips of which contained cyanide. He then claimed that she had taken her own life. A guilty verdict was returned at his trial for murder and he was sentenced to death.

He left a confession in which he stated his motive for poisoning Sarah was his constant dread that his association with her would become known and damage his exemplary character. He was executed in March 1845.

A Dying Declaration

Louisa Jane Taylor married a man considerably older than herself and became a widow at the age of thirty-six. In the spring of 1882, she moved into rented accommodation but was soon in trouble over rent arrears. As she sank deeper into debt, she visited friends who lived in Plumstead in south-east London.

Mary and William Tregillis were both in their eighties and Mary was not in the best of health. Louisa asked if she could stay with them while she sorted out her life following the loss of her husband. She intimated that she had come into money and planned to move into a new house.

The quid pro quo was that Louisa would act as nurse to Mary and indeed she slept in the same room as the old lady whom she called mother. About this time, Louisa began buying supplies of sugar of lead (lead acetate), a poisonous substance that also had a medicinal use in the treatment of skin rashes.

The purchases of sugar of lead coincided with a deterioration of Mary Tregillis’ illness. Suspicion of Louisa also began to grow in William Tregillis’ mind when he noticed that some of their possessions had disappeared. More significantly, the debt-ridden Louisa had designs on his pension money.

With his wife’s health declining, Tregillis decided to call in the doctor who had been in regular attendance but now began to suspect poisoning. He involved the police and Louisa was asked some serious questions once it was known she had been buying sugar of lead from the local pharmacist.

On 10 October 1882, as Mary Tregillis was too ill to attend the magistrate’s court, the proceedings were held in the sitting room of her home. Directing the focus of attention at Louisa she said, “I was always in good health till she came.” Two weeks later, she was dead. In the meantime, Louisa had been charged with attempted murder and robbery.

Louisa Taylor, now charged with murdering Mary Tregillis, was tried at the Old Bailey in December 1882. The victim’s deathbed statement was allowed in evidence and it was clear from this that she had been given white powder in her medicine every night. When she complained that the medicine made her throat burn, she was told it was good for her.

Having heard the evidence, the jury retired and came back within twenty minutes to deliver a guilty verdict. Mr Justice Stephen, describing Louisa Taylor’s crime as a “treacherous murder”, sentenced her to death. Still maintaining her innocence, she was executed at Maidstone on 2 January 1883.

Slept Like A Baby

Twenty-five-year-old Gerald Thompson worked as a toolmaker at a factory in Peoria, Illinois. Between November 1934 and June 1935, he committed sixteen rapes and possibly more. His technique was to pick up lone women and drive them out into the countryside. He kept his victim captive in his car by ensuring she received an electric shock if she touched the door handles. When he was ready he cut the victim’s clothes off and tied her to the front of the car where he raped her. He took photographs of himself with the victim by means of a camera equipped with a self-timer.

In June 1935, rape turned to murder when Thompson picked up Mildred Hallmark as she waited at a bus stop near Peoria. It was a wet night and he offered her a lift. He drove to Springfield Cemetery where he parked his car intending to embark on his usual rape routine. But he had reckoned without his victim’s fierce resistance. She fought him off and in the struggle he beat her and stabbed her. He left her, raped and dead, in the cemetery.

Peoria was shocked at this latest outrage and an anonymous tip off from an earlier rape victim led investigators to Thompson. He lived with his grandmother and a search of his room revealed the scope of his activities as a practised rapist. Detectives found a horde of obscene photographs featuring Thompson with his various victims. There was also a diary in which he had recorded the identities of the women he assaulted, together with descriptions of what had taken place. Blood-stained clothing was discovered which irrefutably linked him to the murder of Mildred Hallmark.

Following his arrest, there was an outburst of public anger and mobs demonstrated in Peoria threatening to string him up. Prior to his trial, Thompson had to be moved to a secret location to ensure his safety. There was extensive press coverage of his trial and his boast made to a friend that he averaged better than one rape a week for a year was revealed. He was also alleged to have said that after killing Mildred, he “slept like a baby”.

Thompson’s trial at Peoria was a formality. The evidence against him, most of which he had provided, including a confession, ensured his conviction. He was sentenced to death and the only question was whether he would reach the electric chair before the lynch mobs got their hands on him. The man who liked to confine his victims with electricity felt the full force of the massive charges sent through his body when he sat in the electric chair at Joliet State Penitentiary on 15 October 1935.

“We Shall Overcome”

Stanley “Tookie” Williams was a former Los Angeles gang leader and convicted murderer who spent twenty-four years in Death Row at San Quentin Prison. He won international
recognition for his stand against violence and was judged by many to have earned redemption.

“Tookie” Williams was co-founder of the Crips gang in Los Angeles in 1971. Gang members were blamed for scores of killings in urban wars disputing control of the streets and drug business. He was convicted of killing a store clerk during a robbery in 1979 and, several days later, of killing three people in a motel robbery. He strongly protested his innocence but was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection.