Innholdsfortegnelse for True Crime 2nd Edition i True Crime

Sing Sing had five executioners between 1890 and 1963, officially titled State Electricians. Edwin Davis, John Hurlburt, Robert Elliott, Joseph Francel and Dow Hover executed 614 inmates in New York alone. State Electricians had to be qualified electricians with no criminal record and good character references. The electricians earned $150 for single executions. Multiples paid $50 per additional inmate. A private contractor, New York’s executioner could also work for other states and usually did. Elliott, credited with 387 executions during his career, was employed by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. On 6 January 1927, Elliott performed a triple electrocution in Massachusetts, then visited Sing Sing for another triple execution the same day.…

“ If he hadn’t killed his mother, he would have kept going because it made him feel powerful” During one televised interview, Kemper begins to cry when he talks about his mother’s murder. Is this a sincere admission of guilt? What is he seeking to gain from this emotional display? In the videos, he cries for himself, mostly, not his victims. Other recordings show him as smug, self-centred and unrepentant. Kemper likes to present himself as an expert on serial murder, which does suggest his inherent lack of remorse. Kemper had a serious dependence on his mother but he also hated her for the way that she would criticise and belittle him, as well as abandon him. He might also have despised himself for being so dependent on her. Kemper…

In his brief life, Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly was one of the last bushrangers, runaway convicts who lived in the Australian outback robbing to survive. With bushranging flourishing in his time, he could easily have been just another desperado in the annals of crime. Yet his radical actions and controversial motives – as well as a homemade suit of armour – made him equally celebrated as a hero against injustice and reviled as a vengeful killer. Two events in 1866 when he was ten showed Ned Kelly’s strong sense of identity and proclivity for leadership. Shortly after finishing a sentence of six months’ hard labour, his Irishborn father, John ‘Red’ Kelly, died at Avenel in southeast Victoria and the young Ned completed his death certificate. Ned described a nation that had…

The Twenties and Thirties were often referred to as the lawless years, and John Dillinger was one of many gangsters that thrived. At a time when over a quarter of Americans were unemployed as a result of the Great Depression, gangsters and criminals were idolised, fulfilling the fantasies of many Americans at a time when money was scarce. But what was it that made Dillinger such a cultural icon? Born in Indianapolis on 22 June 1903, Dillinger’s mother tragically died when he was three years old, and he was brought up by his father and his sister, who was 14 years his senior. With an unreliable temperament, Dillinger’s father rapidly oscillated between brutal beatings, and handing out cash for sweets. As the teen grew, these mood swings became more extreme,…

Most school shootings – like the Columbine High School and the Virginia Polytechnic massacres (see pages 76–77 and 134–135) – are a case of disaffected teenagers turning guns on resented teachers and fellow students. The Dunblane massacre was something else altogether: a middle-aged man prowling through a primary school, killing small children. Thomas Hamilton was born in Glasgow and had a strange start in life. His father had abandoned him and his mother, Agnes, when Thomas was just 18 months old. Agnes then returned to live with her adoptive parents (she herself was illegitimate and had been put up for adoption at birth). To avoid the scandal that was still attached to divorce, they pretended that Agnes had never married. Of course that meant that Thomas could not be seen…

No jobs going The two years during which Bonnie and Clyde were on the run were the worst of America’s Great Depression. In 1932 there were 13 million unemployed Americans; stocks plummet, banks fail and there is a record fall in the GNP. Big business plans a coup One of the most bizarre incidents to occur during this time was the so-called Business Plot, an alleged scheme cooked up by some of the heads of America’s most powerful businesses to overthrow President Roosevelt. They went to General Smedley Butler, who promptly told Congress. Dust Bowl tears America apart A huge contributing factor to America’s financial crisis was the Dust Bowl, a series of terrible dust storms that ripped across the country devastating the nation’s farmland. Workers suddenly found themselves without…

The discovery of Australia’s worst known case of serial killing took place in Snowtown, a tiny place with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, about 161 kilometres (100 miles) north of the city of Adelaide. On 20 May 1999, police investigating a series of local disappearances searched a derelict building – a former bank – in the centre of Snowtown and found six black plastic barrels in the abandoned vault. The barrels contained the remains of eight corpses, some dismembered. The following day, investigating officers arrested three men in the northern suburbs of Adelaide: John Justin Bunting, aged 32; Robert Joe Wagner, aged 27, and Mark Ray Haydon, aged 40. A few days later they also arrested James Spyridon Vlassakis, aged 19. Excavation in Bunting’s garden uncovered two more corpses. As the…

The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, is a lovely town. Surrounded by beautiful snow-capped mountains, it has a thriving moviemaking industry and cultural life. Indeed, it has been ranked for over a decade by the Economist magazine as one of the world’s most “liveable cities”. But Vancouver has a dark side – the run-down, crime-ridden Downtown Eastside district – stalked for almost two decades by a homicidal monster. Perhaps it was actually the very pleasantness of Vancouver life that allowed one murderer to continue killing women for so long. The local police certainly seemed complacent about a growing number of disappearances from the Downtown Eastside – almost as if they couldn’t imagine that a town like Vancouver might harbour a serial killer. But between the early 1980s and the turn…

Summer of love In the Summer of 1967, around 100,000 people converged on San Fransisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, making it the undisputed capital of free love and flower power. Art and music blossomed, along with drugs, radical politics and alternative spirituality. Manson rolled into town the same year and gleefully stirred every ingredient in this cocktail. Fight the power Between student riots in Paris, anticommunist uprisings in Eastern Europe, and violently suppressed anti-Vietnam War marches in the US, in 1968 there was a definitely sense that the kids weren’t alright. Manson both exploited this fear in society and the sense of alienation his young followers felt. Hell of a trip A psychoactive drug usually taken orally on blotter paper, LSD could introduce a distortion in perception and thought, and is believed…

Arkell, like O’Hearn, had been bludgeoned to death, this time by a bedside lamp and an ashtray. However, Arkell fought back and there were lacerations to his face from the ashtray’s edges. Tie pins were stuck into Arkell’s eyes – one of them from the Rotary Club – while a third had been forced into his cheek. The wounds to his eyes initially led some to speculate on the symbolism, particularly the Rotary Club pin. The electrical cord from the lamp was found wrapped tightly around Arkell’s neck, as was a belt. Though sharpforce trauma to the head and neck was believed to be the cause of death, it may have also been ligature strangulation from the cord.…

None of the people really concerned in this trial can expect to come out of it unscathed. It is them, and them alone, whom I wish to address. PREFACE Difficult for me to speak when anything there is to say is no better than silence. But, the right to remain silent is not given to somebody who, having had to take the decision to boycott the trial, owed it to himself to come and expound the reasons that have left him with no choice. INTRODUCTION PUBLIC HEARING The public hearing of this trial would involve all the participants lending themselves to a theatricality that mocks the dignity of the families of the direct victims, the indirect victims of my actions. In particular: the presence of an audience of X times…

It was the morning of 2 March 1998, when ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped while walking to school in the Donaustadt district of Vienna. Another child, who saw her being dragged into a white mini-van, raised the alarm and a massive police hunt began. Every owner of a white mini-van in the Vienna area was interviewed and this dragnet approach later proved to have been partly successful, in as much as the police did interrogate the actual kidnapper. But investigators failed to follow up on the inconsistent alibi that he gave them, and only discovered years later how close they had been to solving the case. The result of this police blunder was that Natascha remained imprisoned by Wolfgang Priklopil, an Austrian communications engineer in his late 30s who fantasized…

For large parts of its history Colombia has been the scene of conflict and battles, from the 16th century when it came under Spanish rule to its war of independence, which resulted in the United States of Colombia in 1863, and then two years later the Republic of Colombia. In more recent times much if this conflict has not been with external forces, but internal, with competing ideologies and beliefs causing conflict and bloodshed. Known as La Violencia, a ten-year civil war occurred from 1948 to 1958 between the country’s Conservative and Liberal parties and it is believed that at least 200,000 people lost their lives in this period. In more modern times this internal conflict has continued and since the 1960s armed conflict in Colombia is thought to has…

Rise of the squattocracy Squatters took unoccupied Crown land for grazing livestock. After provisions allowing leased squatting from 1836, they became a wealthy and important ‘squattocracy’, able to influence authorities into ignoring their killing of Aboriginals occupying ‘their’ land. Ned Kelly admitted stealing 280 horses from James Whitty, a prominent squatter in Victoria. Gold fever In 1823, the government concealed the discovery of Australia’s gold, fearing destabilisation. With the secret out by January 1851, prospectors flocked to Victoria, causing turmoil that shaped immigration policy in favour of Europeans. Victoria’s population grew sevenfold, but by the late-1860s, gold production slumped because of the difficulty of mining at ever-greater depths. Outback outlaws The Victorian gold rush caused an epidemic of outlaw bushrangers to rob goldfields and banks for wealth that was easily…

In the summer of 1993, Frederick and Rosemary West – a builder and his wife living at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester – were accused of sexually assaulting a young woman. The charges were eventually dropped, but in the meantime the West children had been taken into care. It was during this period that foster-carers overheard them talking about their older sister Heather being “under the patio”. When questioned about this ominous-sounding phrase, the children said that they had been told she had been working in the Midlands for the past five years, but that their parents would still occasionally threaten them with being “put under the patio with Heather”. The police checked the records against Heather West’s National Insurance number, and became suspicious when they found that she had…

The roaring Twenties America in the 1920s epitomised the growth of industry and scientific advances. The nation was swept away in a tide of good fortune, with businesses thriving, which meant that many Americans had enough disposable income to spend on commodities. Socially, too, the country was liberated, and women gained the right to vote. Prohibition is introduced In January 1920 the Volstead Act was introduced, which effectively closed every bar, tavern and saloon across the United States, effectively making it illegal to sell alcohol. Despite this, the illicit trade was taken underground, where it thrived. Ultimately the National Prohibition Act of 1920 failed, and it was revoked in 1933. The Harlem Renaissance Despite the social and economical boom, culturally the United States was divided. With these developments came the…

On 28 May 1996, a 12-year-old Belgian girl, Sabine Dardenne, disappeared on her way to school. Two men, Michel Lelièvre and Marc Dutroux, had grabbed her and pulled her into a car. She was driven to a house belonging to Dutroux, where she was chained to a bed for three days. Then she was taken down to a homemade dungeon in the cellar and locked in. Over the next 80 days Sabine was repeatedly raped and underwent psychological torture by Dutroux. She later told police that Dutroux had tried to convince her that he was protecting her from a gang of felons who had demanded money from her parents. When she tried to resist his sexual assaults, he threatened to hand her over to these men who, she said, “...would…

There can be few living British criminals who have remained in the public eye as long as Kenneth Noye. He first came to the media’s attention following the Brinks Mat robbery at a Heathrow warehouse in 1983. Thieves, hoping to steal £3 million in cash, instead found and got away with £26 million in gold bullion and diamonds. Since they were simply thuggish armed robbers, they had no idea how to launder three tonnes of gold bullion, so they turned to Kenneth Noye – he had connections. On the surface Noye was a very successful businessman with all the right connections: he owned a road haulage firm, was a Freemason and moved in well-to-do circles. But he also had several convictions for receiving stolen goods. Noye had the gold melted…

In the autumn of 1998, police arrested a Manchester GP, Dr Harold Frederick Shipman, on suspicion of murder. At the time even the investigators found it hard to convince themselves that this pleasant mannered man, with a practice of over 3,000 patients, could be a killer. But as the evidence mounted, they began to suspect that he was actually the most ruthless killer in British legal history. Born in Nottingham, Shipman had struggled out of his working-class background to win a place at Leeds University Medical School. Sadly, he was a less than brilliant student and had a rather distant manner. Yet, despite these inadequacies, he had a pompously high opinion of himself, and behaved like a ruthless bully to anyone who didn’t dare stand up to him. If a…

Bonnie and Clyde were wanted all over America but it was a retired Texas Ranger who finally brought them down. The Rangers date back to 1823, when Stephen F Austin needed a group of men to defend his settlements from Mexicans and Native Americans. Throughout the 1830s, these Rangers became renowned for enforcing the peace throughout the state of Texas. They were generally required for protection, but were utilised by the state for both good and bad. During the Civil War, they served with the Confederates, and were charged with enforcing carpetbagging during reconstruction. Towards the end of the 1800s, the Texas Rangers shifted from soldiers to detectives. As they were limited by state, rather than local lines, they were called in to handle big cases that local law enforcement…

Born in the Lincolnshire town of Cleethorpes in the UK, Jane Andrews had a deprived upbringing. Her father, a carpenter, was often out of work, so the family mainly relied on her mother’s meagre income as a primary school teacher. For most of her childhood, Jane lived in a house with neither a bathroom nor an indoor toilet. In 1988, 21-year-old Jane was working as a clothes assistant in her local Marks & Spencer’s store and was in no doubt that she would be a poor nobody all of her life. Then she noticed an anonymous advert for a “dresser” in a genteel lifestyle magazine, The Lady. Jane applied for the job. She heard nothing more for six months, but then a letter arrived out of the blue: Her Royal…

On the morning of 1 May 2001, 24-year-old Chandra Levy dressed to go for a jog, turned on her walkman and left her apartment alone. She would never be seen alive again. Chandra’s parents failed to hear from her for almost a week and were concerned that something was wrong. The police obtained a warrant and visited her apartment, finding her ID, her mobile phone and her computer still switched on, but no sign of Chandra anywhere. The first officer on the scene attempted to access her last internet search, but inadvertently crashed the computer’s hard drive, leaving all of her files corrupt. The police also failed to access the security camera recordings nearby, which could have revealed the time she left home and whether or not she was alone.…

Revelling in the spotlight offered by his headline-grabbing trial, Manson transformed himself into a media icon. He frequently co-ordinated carefully scripted stunts with co-defendants Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patricia Krenwinkel (Charles Watson was tried separately), who would eerily enter the court hand-in-hand, smiling and singing his songs. Outside in the corridor, the rest of the Family maintain a constant, smiling vigil. He launched himself at the judge before being restrained and most famously carved an ‘X’ into his forehead to symbolise his complete rejection of society. This ‘X’ was later turned into a swastika. Manson shaved his head and trimmed his beard to a fork, telling the press, “I am the Devil, and the Devil always has a bald head.” Atkins, Kasabian and Krenwikel followed suit and shaved their…

It was the housekeeper who found her boss’s body. When Maria Subotic arrived at the home of Frank Arkell to deliver his newspaper on 27 June 1998, she discovered the 62-year-old dead in the bedroom of his granny flat in Wollongong, a coastal city in New South Wales. It was a shock for the woman who had worked for Arkell for more than 40 years and lived a few doors down from the address. It wasn’t natural causes that killed the former Lord Mayor of Wollongong. Arkell had been bludgeoned to death in an attack so vicious there was blood spattered all over the small unit. Arkell had been embroiled in child pornography and paedophilia scandals Wollongong was known for decades as “Steel City”. Steelworks owned by Broken Hill Proprietary…

In a shocking postscript, just ten days after Valera was sentenced to life imprisonment, his father Jack Van Krevel was murdered. The killer was Keith Schreiber, the good friend and former housemate of Valera and the boyfriend of his sister Belinda. While it was Schreiber who carried out the brutal murder – Mr Van Krevel’s head was almost severed – it was Belinda, the dead man’s 20-year-old daughter, who had orchestrated the whole thing. The young woman claimed her father had sexually and physically abused her for years, and had even been abusing her young daughter and she’d had enough. She had left a window open for her boyfriend so he could enter the house, and also left the killing instruments out for the deed – a fire poker, knife…

At 11:25 am on 26 April 2005, North Cornwall Emergency Services received a call from a payphone. The male caller told the switchboard: “There’s been a murder. She’s been beaten around the head. The baby’s had a plastic bag put over its head.” He then gave the crime scene as Trewinnick Cottage in the tiny village of St Ervan. When the police operator asked what exactly had happened, the man simply said: “I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue. I found her in the back bedroom. She’s lying on the bed. There’s blood everywhere. She’s my girlfriend and fiancée.” Then he rang off. The first emergency vehicle to arrive was an ambulance, driven by paramedic Mike Ford. It was only as he pulled up outside that he realized with…

“ Escobar gained control of the cocaine business by taking leading drug lord Fabio Restrepo out of the game” On a hillside above Medellín, a neighbourhood of 12,000 people is affectionately called Barrio Pablo Escobar by its inhabitants. Built in the 1980s, the brick houses have plumbing, electricity and gardens, there are schools and hospitals, and for a decade no one had to pay a single peso in rent. All of this was funded by Pablo Escobar, Colombia’s world-famous ‘drug lord’. The King of Cocaine. The head of the Medellín Cartel. The billionaire. The murderer, tyrant and corrupter. The Colombian Robin Hood. At the height of his powers, Escobar’s Medellín Cartel controlled almost 80 per cent of the global cocaine trade and he was the seventh richest man in the…

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (known as “VA Tech”, for short) is as large as a medium-sized town, housing over 30,000 students and 1,300 lecturers. With such a big population it’s hardly surprising that serious crimes occasionally disturb the otherwise tranquil academic atmosphere. So VA Tech has its own dedicated police force – and it was this that was called out at 7:15 am on Monday 16 April 2007, when shots were heard from the West Ambler Johnson Hall of Residence. They found two victims: Ryan Christopher Clark, aged 22, and Emily J Hilscher, aged 18. Clark was already dead and Hilscher was dying, both from gunshot wounds. It appeared that Hilscher had been attacked first – in her room – and Clark, who lived next door, was shot…

There are certain people – usually, but not always, men – who have a driving need to dominate others. Since this urge springs mainly from their own deep-felt insecurity, they bully people whom they believe are no threat to themselves – such as their spouse or children. In extreme cases such petty tyrants are so obsessed that any sign of rebellion from those they dominate can drive them to the most insane reactions. Such a man was Josef Fritzl, whose method of controlling his daughter horrified the entire world. Fritzl was born in the Austrian town of Amstetten. He married Rosemarie in 1956 and they went on to have two sons and five daughters. In 1967, he served a sentence of 18 months for raping a 24-year-old woman in Lintz.…

Sing Sing. The name alone implies violence, hard labour, harder punishments, misery and death. Even the very words are foreboding, coming from the Native American phrase ‘Sinck Sinck’ meaning ‘stone upon stone’. Nowadays known by the more anodyne name of the Ossining Correctional Institution, Sing Sing is one of the world’s most notorious prisons, and there’s one part that earned more notoriety than any other. The ‘Death House’. New York State abolished capital punishment in 1969. Its last execution was of murderer Eddie Lee Mays on 15 August 1963. Before abolition, New York hanged, shot and burned criminals at different times until, in 1889, the state adopted something new: the electric chair. Between 1890 and 1963, 614 inmates walked their ‘Last Mile’ between their cell and the death chamber. Once…

With a near-genius IQ score, Edmund Kemper towers at more than two metres tall and weighs approximately 136 kilograms. To the outside world he was viewed as the ‘gentle giant’. But just beneath the surface he harboured a turbulent and violent rage towards his alcoholic and abusive mother that festered into a mass of perverse, horrific homicides. Eventually giving himself up for his crimes, he freely gave every chilling and gruesome detail of the fate of his eight victims. Was this a sign of remorse? Or did the notorious Co-ed Killer feign a pattern of behaviour that would portray the disturbed maniac as a victim of his matriarchal upbringing? Born on 18 December 1948 in Burbank, California, Kemper certainly had a less than happy childhood. His parents’ relationship was unstable…

With the ‘Bloody Code’ of 222 crimes eligible for the death penalty by the late-18th century, a punishment many judges considered too harsh, and with prisons full to bursting mostly with minor felons, Britain started deporting criminals to Australia in 1787. The First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney to establish Australia as a penal colony is now celebrated as National Australia Day, 26 January. Van Diemen’s Land (modern-day Tasmania) was settled as a penal colony in 1824. It was where Ned’s father, John ‘Red’ Kelly, was transported from Tipperary in 1841. His crime: stealing two pigs. It wasn’t unusual for petty crimes such as this to lead to deportation. Most convicts were employed in public works gangs for building infrastructure and prisons, and after a period were freed to live and…

Since its inception in 1908, the FBI underwent multiple changes before it was officially recognised as a federal department. Originally named the Bureau of Investigation, it was a controversial decision, and many people were sceptical about its necessity. Initially the division wasn’t overwhelmed with cases; the Bureau investigated bankruptcy, peonage and land fraud. In June 1910, the Mann Act was passed, effectively enabling the Bureau to flex its muscles. Over the next few years the number of agents steadily grew to over 300, and as the United States entered World War I, the Bureau assisted in investigating enemy aliens. Often referred to as the lawless years, from 1921 to 1933 the Bureau was put through its paces. Having previously been seen as a redundant division of the government by many…

“ Capone soon put his feared reputation to work as a debt collector in Chicago” The needle skipped as the gun barked twice in the killer’s hand, the record player screeching into the silence of the restaurant’s corridor as its owner crashed to the floor, blood pooling. Giacomo ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo, his body cooling from its exit wounds, had recently left his wife, filing for divorce and skipping town to marry a 19-year-old cabaret singer. His ex-wife, Victoria Moresco, or one of her brothers, was the prime suspect in this crime of passion, but the police knew enough to pay a visit to two of Colosimo’s associates – Johnny Torrio and his sidekick, the disquieting Alfonse Capone, three nasty scars on his cheek contorting as he smiled. “Big Jim and…

STEP 1 GIVING THE NOD Mobster and boxer ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn, a survivor of an attack by the rival North Side Gang, approaches Al Capone in his Miami winter home with a plan to take out the North Side leader, George Clarence ‘Bugs’ Moran and his lieutenants. STEP 2 THE SET-UP On 13 February 1929, McGurn has a booze hijacker approach Moran about selling him some top-end whisky for a bargain price. They arrange to meet in the morning. He adds the whisky is stolen from Detroit’s Purple Gang – suppliers to Capone’s mob. STEP 3 THE LOOK-OUTS McGurn stations lookouts – the brothers Harry and Phil Keywell, both members of the allied Purple Gang – in an apartment opposite Moran’s headquarters, a nondescript garage behind the offices of…

“Despite the public turning against them in their final months, the legend of Bonnie and Clyde lives on” Bonnie and Clyde were superstars months before their car was ventilated by more than 130 shots. They were outlaws, wanted fugitives, impossible to catch, lovers on the run. They were glamorous, they were alluring, and they were dangerous. Their story was tabloid gold that found its way into the hearts and minds of a generation. They weren’t Robin Hood, Jesse James or John Dillinger. They would die for each other and they died together. Bonnie grew up in Cement City in Texas, where life was as hard as the name suggests. She was a devoted daughter and a strong student, showing a talent for poetry that would go on to be a…

“The Tate and LaBianca murders shocked America, but the man responsible had barely lifted a finger” Sharon Tate had everything. 26-year old sex symbol, fashion icon and star of cult classics like Valley Of The Dolls and Fearless Vampire Killers, the latter directed and co-starred by her husband, infamous auteur Roman Polanski. They’d been married for just over a year and she was already pregnant. While their private life was as complex and unconventional as her husband’s films – rife with tabloid-baiting love affairs (We have a good arrangement,” Tate was once reported to have said. “Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him.”) – they were part of the Hollywood elite. The night of 8 August 1969 began as many might have, with Tate entertaining some of…

Ten-year-old Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went for a walk on the evening of 4 August 2002 and disappeared. The chances that two apparently happy girls might choose to run away with no coats and no money seemed slim, but few liked to contemplate the obvious alternative – that they had been kidnapped, taken. The population of the girls’ village, Soham in Cambridgeshire, rallied around their frightened families, and many locals helped the police search the surrounding countryside. A photograph of the smiling pair, taken just moments before they went on their fateful walk – dressed in bright red Manchester United football shirts – stared out from every news programme and national newspaper. However, over the following days, hopes of finding the children alive fell lower and lower. Then, on…

O’Hearn had been killed by nine blows to the back of the head from a wine decanter, causing gross skull fracturing. Mercifully the mutilation of his body occurred posthumously. O’Hearn’s hand had been roughly hacked off and used to daub messages in blood on the walls. The discarded hand was found tossed on the couch. One of the victim’s eyes had been gouged out. The eye was found in the partially filled kitchen sink. The victim’s stomach had been slashed open and his innards had been pulled from his body, with one length of intestine stretched across the kitchen bench and his bowel placed in a silver serving tray. O’Hearn was found with his pants around his ankles and his genitals mutilated. The handle of a hammer had been inserted…

Michel Fourniret first came into contact with Monique Olivier in 1986 through an advertisement seeking a pen pal he had placed in a religious magazine. At the time he was not in a position to offer any greater intimacy than the back and forth of letter writing, as he was serving a prison sentence for sexual assault. The 44-yearold French forest warden was cautious in explaining his circumstances, but things went so well in their correspondence that he eventually admitted his obsession with virgin girls… and how much he wanted to rape and kill them. Monique apparently remained impassive, admitting that she herself daydreamed about murdering her ex-husband. Letters found later by the police showed that the pair entered a written pact: Michel would kill Monique’s ex (the one murder,…

‘La Violencia’ Between 1948 and 1958, Colombia was ravaged by a civil war between the main political parties. Paramilitary and guerrilla forces loyal to each party fought one another, which led to between 200,000 to 300,000 deaths and more than a million people being displaced. The political stability that existed beforehand was eroded and many of the paramilitary and guerrilla groups formed during this decade continued to plague Colombia up until the 21st century. Poverty When Pablo Escobar was born, Colombia was a very poor country. Over half of the population lived in rural areas, less than half of children went to school and the life expectancy was below 50 years old. The majority of people lived in houses with earth floors and worked as agricultural labourers or peasant farmers.…

Most Westerners imagine modern Japan to be a place of order and polite behaviour – a society that is well regulated to an almost bizarre degree – and in many ways this is indeed true. Yet it is also a fact that Japan is home to one of the world’s largest organized crime syndicates, the Yakuza. According to the Japanese National Police Agency there are an estimated 84,000 members, which is a considerably higher figure than the American Mafia ever managed to field, even in their 1930s’ heyday. Identifying themselves with large and elaborate body tattoos, Yakuza members indulge in all the criminal activities traditionally associated with branches of the Mafia around the world: extortion, pimping, armed robbery, blackmail, people trafficking, drug dealing and the occasional murder or gangland turf…