World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (17 page)

In March 2001 Brandes wrote a will leaving everything to his unknowing gay partner, had it notarized, and took the train westwards. According to Meiwes, Brandes met him at the station with the words: ‘I am your Cator, I am your flesh’.

Back at the house, they stripped off and discussed what they were about to do. After Brandes had consumed twenty sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps to dull the expected pain, Meiwes removed his new friend’s penis and testicles with a kitchen knife. This, like everything else which happened that evening, was faithfully recorded on his camcorder.

He then put the genitalia into the frying pan, and opened a bottle of white wine. The two men then ate as much of the sautéed flesh as they could manage, washing it down with the wine. By this time Brandes was losing a lot of blood, and Meiwes suggested that he take a bath. While Brandes bled out in the tub, Meiwes read part of a Star Trek novel and watched a Disney film on TV. ‘It took so terribly long’ he said at his trial.

Eventually a close-to-unconscious Brandes gave Meiwes permission to hang him up and finish him off. Meiwes did so, stabbing him several times. He then cut the fresh corpse into meal-size portions and stacked them – neatly wrapped and labelled – in his freezer. Parts like the head, which he considered inedible, were buried in the back garden. He then slowly worked his way through the frozen portions, cooking them with olive oil and garlic.

Meiwes would probably never have been caught if he had not tried to relive the experience. A new internet advertisement was reported to the police, who turned up at his door, searched the house, and found what was left of Brandes in the freezer and garden.

Meiwes was only too willing to admit the killing and the eating. Both had been at the victim’s request, he told the authorities, and he had the video evidence to prove it. Since cannibalism is not illegal in Germany, he was not charged with it, and, it seemed, Brandes’ clear connivance in his own death made a conviction for murder unlikely.

In May 2006, however, a court in Frankfurt convicted Meiwes, nicknamed
der Metzgermeister (
or master butcher), of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The smile, and teeth, of a convicted cannibal – Armin Meiwes.

If The Glove Fits

The O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1995 was lost, as the prosecution would see it, through a combination of incompetence and carelessness on behalf of the Los Angeles police, who gave a textbook example of how not to process a crime scene.

The case against the former American football star and one-time TV actor was compelling. His ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman had been brutally murdered at her Brentwood home on the night of 12 June 1994, and there appeared to be indisputable physical evidence linking O. J. to the crime scene.

A bloodied glove found in the grounds appeared to match another recovered from O. J.’s house in Rockingham just five minutes’ drive away, together with a sock which also had traces of Nicole’s blood. Near the bodies detectives bagged a discarded hat which was later found to have hair and fibres which matched O. J.’s. And most compelling of all, there was a trail of bloody footprints leading away from the scene and bloodstains on the gate. The killer had evidently been wounded in the frenzied knife attack. When detectives called at O. J.’s home they noticed blood on a vehicle parked outside and a trail of blood from the car to the front door. Analysis proved that the blood on the glove found at O. J.’s home and the blood on the car were from three people, the two victims and O. J.

But O. J. couldn’t be questioned. He had taken a flight to Chicago earlier that night and, when interviewed over the phone, appeared curiously uninterested in his ex-wife’s death. On his return to LA the next day he was questioned by detectives, who commented on the fact that he had a bandage on his hand which he claimed was the result of having cut it accidentally on a glass in his hotel room.

He was allowed to remain at liberty for the next couple of days while the police concluded their examination of the crime scene, but on 15 June they lost patience with the star, who had gone into seclusion, and issued a warrant for his arrest. It was then that he attempted to evade capture during the now-famous slow-motion freeway chase which was televised live around the world.

It looked like the case against O. J. couldn’t be lost. But it was.

O. J. hired a dream team of top-drawer defence attorneys who raised serious doubts as to the validity of the evidence, which they intimated might have been planted by over-eager or even racist detectives to frame their man. They even managed to secure a recording on which Detective Mark Fuhrman was heard to refer to Simpson as a ‘nigger’ no fewer than 41 times, which tainted the validity of his testimony and all the physical evidence he had accumulated. But the defence didn’t have to work too hard. The police had undermined their own case.

On the night of the murder they had failed to secure the scene, allowing numerous personnel to trample through the bloody footprints and carry crucial trace evidence from room to room and out of the house on the soles of their shoes. Video footage of the police walk-through of the scene shows investigators working the scene without protective overalls or gloves and one policeman is actually seen to drop a swab then wipe it clean with his hands. During the trial Detective Philip Vannatrer proudly testified to the fact that old-school experienced officers of his generation did not wear protective clothing and evidently saw nothing wrong in handling evidence without gloves like a cop in a 1950s TV show.

The prosecution case was compromised still further by Vannatrer and his colleagues’ insistence on going straight from the crime scene to O. J.’s home without changing their clothes or processing the evidence from the first location, which could have allowed transference of trace evidence from the crime scene to the second location.

And then there was the evidence which was captured on film by the police photographer, but which had not been logged in and could not be found in the archive. This included a bloody note seen in one particular shot near Nicole’s head. It may have been irrelevant to the case, or it may have been crucial. We shall never know because it was presumably ‘tidied away’ with whatever else seemed like rubbish at the time and was lost. Incredibly, no photographs were taken inside the house, only of the immediate area where the bodies were found. So there is no record of any signs of a struggle or of any other relevant features or items that were later put back in their place.

Error Upon Error

More critically, the bodies of the victims were left as they lay for ten hours without being examined by a medical examiner, who would have been able to determine the time of death and recover vital trace evidence from the bodies. But after Nicole’s body had been photographed someone had turned her over onto her back, eliminating the blood splatter that can be seen on her skin above her halter top in the official police photographs. It was the coroner’s opinion that this splatter came from her assailant who had been injured in the attack, but no swabs were taken before she was turned. After she had been moved it was too late to do so. The coroner is also responsible for making a search of anything at the crime scene which might have a bearing on the cause and time of death. So a dish of melting ice cream in Nicole’s house which the police ignored might have provided a vital clue as to the time of death, but no one considered it worth photographing.

As if this catalogue of blunders were not enough to seriously compromise the prosecution case, the police also failed to bag the hands of the deceased, they neglected to use a rape kit, and they did not examine or photograph the back gate, which was the likely exit point for the killer. It was only weeks later that blood was found there, prompting accusations that it had been planted, when in all likelihood it had simply been yet another crucial clue that had been overlooked. These incredible errors and omissions were compounded after Nicole’s body was removed to the morgue.

Instead of being examined in detail, it was washed, thereby eliminating the last vestiges of trace evidence that might have given a clue to the identity of her killer. It was only two full days later that an autopsy was performed.

After a protracted nine-month trial O. J. was predictably found not guilty. The jury could have done nothing else, since the police errors cast more than ‘reasonable doubt’ on the proceedings. But in a subsequent civil case brought by the families of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman the circumstantial evidence was deemed to be overwhelming. O. J. was found guilty and ordered to pay $33 million compensation to the bereaved families.

The Irish Bushranger

The Irish bushranger Jack Donohoe was probably twenty-four years old in 1830, when he was killed by police and a volunteer posse at Bringelly, near Campbelltown outside Sydney. But his memory still endures, kept alive through a popular ballad. He became through the ballad the symbol of resistance both to the old convict system and to the British colonial yoke.

Sentenced to transportation in Dublin in 1823 at the age of 17, ‘Bold’ Jack Donohoe was a short, blond, freckle-faced man who, after he arrived in Sydney, seems to have found nothing but trouble. After a stint in a punishment gang, he took off into the bush. In the words of the ballad:

‘He’d scarcely served twelve months in chains upon the Australian shore,When he took to the highway as he had done before: He went with Jacky Underwood, and Webber and Walmsley too, These were the true companions of bold Jack Donohoe.’

Donohoe’s gang held up the carts that carried produce to and from the Sydney settlement, along the Windsor Road. He and two of his henchmen were soon caught and condemned to death. The other two were hanged. But Donohoe made a run for it – further boosting his reputation.

After stealing horses from settlers, a new Donohoe gang began to roam through a huge swathe of territory, holding up travellers, thieving from farms and selling off whatever booty they got to whoever would have it. Back in Sydney, he became a stick with which the newspapers could beat the Governor’s head.

The Governor was forced to act. The price on Donohoe’s head was raised; and more police and volunteers were sent into the field. Finally, at Bringelly, they caught up with him. According to the ballad, Donohoe shouted out his defiance and killed nine men with nine bullets before being shot himself through the heart and asking, with his dying breath, all convicts to pray for him. The truth is, of course, more mundane. He did not kill nine men; he screamed nothing but obscenities; and he was shot in the head by a trooper called Muggleston. But it didn’t matter.

For ‘Bold’ Jack Donohoe was already passing into legend. When his body was laid out in the Sydney morgue, the Colony’s distinguished Surveyor-General came in to draw his portrait; and a Sydney shopkeeper produced a line of clay pipes, featuring his head with a bullet-hole at the temple. They sold out fast.

Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper is the definitive serial killer. His brief and monstrous career established the serial killer in the public mind as the most terrifying of all criminals. So why does this killer, whose crimes were committed over a century ago, still haunt us? Partly, it is the sheer ferocity of his crimes: the disembowelling, the removal of body organs. Partly, it is the setting: Victorian Whitechapel is fixed in our minds as a seedy location for murder. Mostly, however, what has made the Ripper an immortal among murderers is the simple fact that he was never caught.

Who Was He?

For that reason, his crimes provide endless scope for speculation. Scarcely a year passes without another book being published that promises to name the real killer – a trend that reached its zenith when the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell spent a reputed $8 million of her own money in an effort to prove that the Victorian painter Walter Sickert was the murderer, a claim that remains tenuous at best.

The killer we know as Jack the Ripper announced himself to the world on 31 August 1888 with the murder of a prostitute named Mary ‘Polly’ Nichols. This was the third prostitute murder of the year in London’s East End and did not initially attract too much attention, even though it was an unusually brutal killing: her throat and torso had been cut, and there were stab wounds to the genitals. At this stage, of course, there was nothing to suggest a serial killer at large.