100 Most Infamous Criminals (12 page)

He’d done more or less the same with his next three victims, except that he’d photographed one of them during the fitting session. He’d also cut off one breast of his second victim, and both breasts of the third. The fourth he had given electric shocks to, just to see if her dead body would twitch.

Brudos was charged with three of these four murders, and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment.

Ted Bundy

E
veryone liked Theodore Bundy. Even the judge at his Miami trial in July 1979 took to him. After sentencing Bundy to death, he said:

‘Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely. It’s a tragedy to this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d
have made a good lawyer. . .’

Even the judge liked Ted Bundy, a ‘charming and personable young man’

But Bundy’s good looks and intelligence were murderous. For between January 1974 and January 1978, when he was finally arrested in Pensacola, Florida, he brutalized and killed perhaps as many as thirty-six girls and young women in four states.

The first of these states was Washington, where the disappearances began in the Seattle area at the beginning of 1974. One after another, within six months, seven young women vanished, seemingly into thin air. One of them had been abducted from a rented room; another had left a bar with a man at two in the morning. But the others had simply been out for a walk or on their way somewhere: a cinema or a concert or home. Except for bloodstains in the rented room, they left no trace at all.

In the summer of that year, there were more disappearances, including two in one day from a Washington lakeside resort. But there were also, for the first time, clues. For a good-looking young man with his arm in a sling – and introducing himself as Ted – had been going around the resort asking young women if they could help him load a sailboat onto the roof of his car – and one of the disappeared had been seen going off with him. The scattered remains of both women – and of yet another unknown victim – were found by hunters a few miles away two months later.

Bundy always protested his innocence, right up to his execution

A massive manhunt began, producing huge numbers of calls from the public and more than 2,000 potential suspects – among them, thanks to a woman’s call, Theodore (Ted) Bundy. But by that time he’d moved to Salt Lake City in Utah to study law; it was there that the disappearances resumed. There were three in October 1974; one the teenage daughter of a local police chief, who was later found – raped, strangled and buried – in the Wassatch Mountains. Then, at the beginning of November, one of his Salt Lake City victims – whom ‘a good-looking man’ posing as a police officer had lured into his car and had then attacked with a crowbar – managed to escape and to give a description to the police.

Bundy was lucky this time for she failed to recognise him in a photograph the police later showed her. But after one last abduction and murder in Salt Lake City, he from then on began to operate only out-of-state, over the border in Colorado. Between January and July, five more young women disappeared, though this time two of the bodies were discovered quickly. One, with her jeans pulled down, had been beaten to death with a rock. The other had been raped and then bludgeoned.

Bundy, in the end, was picked up by accident, as a possible burglary suspect. But police at the scene found a crowbar, an ice-pick and a ski-mask in his trunk; and in his apartment, maps and brochures of Colorado. Hairs from the interior of the car were found to match those of the police-chief’s dead daughter. He was extradited to Colorado to stand trial, but then he escaped – twice. The first time he was quickly found hiding out in the mountains. But the second time it took police more than forty days to catch him, and by then – this time in Florida – another three young women were dead, one of them with teeth marks on her body; three others had been savagely beaten.

The subsequent trial did little to uncover Bundy’s reasons for killing – for the sheer viciousness and voracity of his sexual attacks. But in an interview with a detective after his arrest, he remarked,

‘Sometimes I feel like a vampire,’

and later, on Death Row, though never confessing to the murders, he speculated to two writers about an early career as a Peeping Tom and a massive consumer of pornography. He also talked about an ‘entity’ inside him that drove him to rape and murder…

It was the marks of his teeth – so experts confirmed – on a Tallahassee student’s body that finally undid Bundy. After numerous, lengthy appeals, he was electrocuted on January 24th 1989, still protesting his innocence.

Al Capone

P
rohibition, which came into force in the United States in 1920, was a monumental act of political stupidity. For it was never backed by the ordinary man and woman in the street, and it was they, who by exercising what they saw as their right to go on drinking, handed power to the rum-runners and those who controlled them: men like Al Capone. They voted them, in effect, into office as a sort of underground government. Capone, at his height in the Chicago area, was known as the ‘Mayor of Crook County’.

Alfonso Caponi was born in 1899 in New York and grew up into a resourceful small-time hood, working in the rackets and as a bouncer in a Brooklyn brothel – where a knife-fight gave him his nickname: ‘Scarface.’ In New York, if he’d stayed there, he might never have amounted to much. But in 1920, when on the run from the police, he got an invitation from a distant relative of his family’s to join him in Chicago.

The relative was Johnny Torrio, the ambitious chief lieutenant of an old-style Mafia boss called ‘Diamond Jim’ Colosimo, who controlled most of the brothels in the city. After the passing of the Volstead Act that brought in Prohibition, Torrio had tried to persuade Colosimo to go into the liquor business, but Colosimo’d wanted no part of it. So now Torrio made his move. He despatched Capone, his new personal bodyguard, to Colosimo’s restaurant-headquarters one night, and Capone gunned him down.

Torrio, with Capone as his right hand, took over Colosimo’s brothels and moved heavily into bootlegging. This brought them into direct competition with the mainly Irish gang of ‘Deanie’ O’Bannion, a genial ex-choirboy and ex-journalist who served only the finest liquor and ran his business from the city’s most fashionable flower-shop. But for a while both sides held their hand. Then in November 1924, in revenge for a trick which got Torrio a police record (and eventually nine months in jail), O’Bannion was killed by three of Torrio’s men in his shop, after they’d arrived asking for a funeral wreath.

Capone was a ruthless and ambitious gangster

The death of O’Bannion, who was buried in high style, triggered an all-out war for control of the liquor trade in Chicago, with Torrio and Capone pitted against O’Bannion’s lieutenants and heirs, Hymie Weiss and ‘Bugs’ Moran, and also against the four brothers of the Sicilian Genna family. The going soon got too hot for Johnny Torrio, who in 1925 retired to Naples, taking $50 million, it’s said, with him. But Capone was made of sterner – and more cunning – stuff. He gradually eliminated the Genna family and, as he did so, he bought politicians and judges, journalists and police brass, until he was in effect in control, not only of all enforcement agencies and public opinion, but also of City Hall. He made massive donations to the campaigns of Chicago Mayor ‘Big Bill’ Thompson and he held court to all comers in fifty rooms on two floors of the downtown Metropole Hotel.

In 1929, having already got rid of Hymie Weiss, he was finally ready to move against his last surviving enemy, ‘Bugs’ Moran. Word was passed to Moran that a consignment of hijacked booze could be picked up at a garage on North Clark Street on St. Valentine’s Day, but soon after his people arrived, so did Capone’s torpedoes, two of them in police uniform. Six of Moran’s men died in what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, along with an unfortunate optometrist who liked hanging out with hoods; Moran himself only escaped because he was late for the appointment. As for Capone, he was on holiday that day in Biscayne Bay, Florida and at the actual time of the slaughter at the SMC Cartage Company garage, was on the phone to the Miami DA.

Capone in jovial mood

The St Valentine’s Day Massacre, said to have been carried out on Capone’s orders

In the end Capone was brought to book, not by the cops, but by the internal revenue service. In 1931, he was tried for tax evasion and sentenced to jail for eleven years. By the time he came out eight years later, the Mafia had moved on, had become more sophisticated; and he himself was not only old hat but half mad from tertiary syphilis. He died in his bed eight years later on his Florida estate. ‘Bugs’ Moran outlived him by ten years.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

B
utch Cassidy, whose parents were both British Mormons, was born George Leroy Parker in Beaver, Utah in the spring of 1865. As a teenager, he hung out with a cowboy called Mike Cassidy at a ranch his mother was working on; he began calling himself George Cassidy after getting in trouble with the law at 18. A few years later, after joining a cattle-drive, he robbed his first bank at Telluride, Colorado on June 24th 1889, perhaps in company with a twenty-one-year old Pennsylvanian called Harry Longabaugh – already known to the law as the Sundance Kid.