In April 1974, two blacks, Dale Pierre, twenty, and his friend William Andrews, robbed a Hi-Fi store in Ogden, Utah. The assistants, twenty-year-old Stan Walker and nineteen-year-old Michelle Ansley, were tied up. Cortney Naisbitt, a sixteen-year-old youth, walked into the shop and was tied up. So, later, were Stan Walker’s father and Cortney Naisbitt’s mother Carol, who came looking for them. The bandits then forced everyone to drink a caustic cleaning fluid, which burned their mouths and throats. Then they were shot. The girl was raped before being shot. One of the bandits pushed a ballpoint pen into the ear of Mr Walker and kicked it into his head. Carol Naisbitt died after being admitted to hospital, but Cortney survived; after many operations, he was able to resume normal life, although badly impaired. The two killers were careless, and were quickly arrested. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
In a book about the case, Victim, The Other Side of Murder by Gary Kinder (1982), one interesting point emerges. The killers got the idea of making the victims drink cleaning fluid from a Clint Eastwood film called Magnum Force, in which a prostitute dies within seconds of being forced to drink cleaning fluid by her pimp; Pierre obviously expected the victims to die immediately. Magnum Force is one of Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ films about a San Francisco cop who, sick of the way that a modern criminal can get away with murder, shoots to kill. Like the Bologna and Oktoberfest bombings, the Ogden case seems to show that a violent reaction against violence can be counter-productive.
In the summer of 1974, three teenage delinquents known as the ‘nice boys’ gang committed a series of robberies, rapes and murders in Vienna. The leader, Manfred Truber, was seventeen. In late June they kicked to death an elderly man and kicked a seventy-year-old woman unconscious, ripping off her underwear. In July, a twenty-year-old girl was dragged into bushes and raped by all three, being made to sit astride them and move up and down. A Yugoslav construction worker was stabbed twenty-seven times and his nose almost severed from his face. In August, another girl was raped in the park, and then tortured and humiliated for over an hour. On 30 August a sixty-eight-year-old woman was infuriated when one of the boys punched her on the side of the head, and fought back with her handbag. Police arrived and arrested all three. Their score had totalled two murders, two rapes and twenty-two robberies with violence. Under Austrian law, it was possible to pass only short sentences on the gang.
On 2 July 1976, four-year-old Marion Ketter was playing with friends when a mild-looking elderly man persuaded her to go away with him. A few hours later, police searching a nearby block of flats found that a lavatory was blocked up with a child’s intestines. In a bubbling saucepan on the stove of a lavatory attendant, Joachim Kroll, the police found the child’s hand boiling with carrots and potatoes; the rest of her, wrapped in plastic bags, was in the deep freeze. Kroll admitted that he had been committing rape murders since 1955, and that in most cases he had taken slices of flesh from the victims’ buttocks or thighs and later eaten them. The total number of victims is unknown, but Kroll could recollect fourteen. He seemed to have no appreciation of the seriousness of his crimes, and confidently expected to be allowed home after medical treatment.
A case with overtones of a James Bond thriller occurred in California in August 1976. The school bus of Chowchilla, Madera County, was held up by three men, who forced twenty-six children and the bus driver into two vans. They were then driven a hundred miles or so and, in the early hours of the morning, ordered to climb down a shaft in the ground. It led to a large underground room – in fact, a buried truck-trailer. They were given water and potato chips, and left.
When the sun rose, the van became overpoweringly hot. By standing on a pile of mattresses, the driver succeeded in reaching the steel plate overhead, but it refused to budge. Hours later, they succeeded in levering it aside, only to discover that the top of the shaft had been sealed with boards that were apparently immovable. Eventually, in the late afternoon, they succeeded in digging past the boards, and were able to climb out into the blazing heat of a California afternoon. A man working in a nearby gravel pit stared at them in amazement; then, when they explained who they were, rushed off to phone the sheriff. Frantic parents, convinced that they would never see their children again, heard of the escape over the television.
The quarry proved to be in Livermore, and security guards had seen the van being buried – by a bulldozer – and had taken the names of three young men. One of them proved to be Frederick Woods, son of the quarry owner; his companions were two brothers, James and Richard Schoenfeld. In spite of wealthy parents, the three had decided to make five million dollars by holding the children to ransom; the children had escaped before they had time to make the ransom demand.
Between July 1976 and August 1977, New York was terrorised by a series of shooting attacks on young women and courting couples, often sitting in cars late at night. In eight attacks, there were seven killings and eight woundings, many serious. The police began to receive letters from someone who called himself ‘Son of Sam’, who explained that he was a monster and that his father, Sam, had ordered him to go out and kill.
On 31 July 1977, Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz were sitting in a car in Brooklyn when the windscreen shattered; Stacy Moskowitz died later in hospital; Robert Violante recovered, but was blinded. After the shooting, a woman walking her dog saw a man leap into a car and drive away; she had also noticed earlier two policemen putting a parking ticket on the car. A check revealed that the parking ticket had been placed on a car registered to David Berkowitz, who lived in Yonkers. Police located the car and watched it; as twenty-four-year-old Berkowitz approached, a detective stepped forward, and Berkowitz said: ‘You finally got me.’ He also confessed to two knife attacks seven months before the first shooting. Berkowitz proved to be an inadequate personality who lived in a dream world, and was too shy to approach women. He was sentenced to a total of 365 years in prison.
On 30 September 1978, a fifteen-year-old girl named Mary Vincent set out to hitch-hike to Los Angeles; her third lift was with a heavily built man, who attacked her, raped her, then hacked off both her arms at the elbows and threw her out of the van. His description was broadcast, and brought a tip-off that led to his arrest; he was fifty-year-old Larry Singleton, who admitted to being drunk at the time he attacked the girl; he insisted he had no recollection of harming her. An axe found in his home showed traces of human blood.
In January 1979, two girl students – Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder – disappeared from the small house they shared in Belling-ham, Washington State. The following day their bodies were found in the back of Karen Mandic’s car. Karen had confided to a friend that she had been offered some kind of ‘detective’ job by a security guard named Kenneth Bianchi, who had recently moved to Belling-ham from the Los Angeles area. And in that area, between October 1977 and February 1978, ten girls had been raped and murdered by a man who became known as the Hillside Strangler.
Bianchi, who was living in Bellingham with his mistress and child, was soon picked up, and at first denied all knowledge of the murders. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-seven, and all the evidence pointed to him as the killer of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder.
Investigators in Los Angeles discovered that Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono – a man in his forties – had been involved in procuring prostitutes. In court in Bellingham, Bianchi confessed to the killing of the two Bellingham girls, and also admitted to five of the Hillside Strangler murders. But, in a surprising development, his defence alleged that his was a case of dual personality, and that the killings had been committed by his alter-ego ‘Steve’. In later confessions, Bianchi stated that his cousin Angelo Buono had also been involved in the murders. Police examining the sites where the naked bodies of girls had been dumped in the hills around Los Angeles had, in fact, concluded that two men had been involved.
Psychiatrists were convinced by Bianchi’s claim to be a dual personality; nevertheless, at his trial in October 1979, he was sentenced to six life terms in prison. (At the time of writing, proceedings against Angelo Buono are still going on.)