100 Most Infamous Criminals (16 page)

Dillinger was gunned down outside a cinema in Chicago

Dillinger survived six shootouts before the one that finally killed him

In July 1934, then, a friend of Dillinger’s, a brothel-keeper called Anna Sage, came to claim it, and on the 22nd, by previous arrangement, she went with him to the Biograph Cinema in Chicago.

As they came out after the show, a halfhearted attempt was made to arrest him. He resisted and was shot; he died before reaching hospital. J. Edgar Hoover, who was on hand to grab the limelight cast by his Public Enemy Number One, later described Dillinger as,

‘a cheap, boastful, selfish, tight-fisted plug-ugly.’

It’s worth remembering that it was this same J. Edgar Hoover who announced that the Mafia – a much more difficult target than Dillinger – simply did not exist in America.

Albert Fish

A
lbert Fish was a harmless-looking old guy, but when he came to trial in White Plains, New York in 1935, the judge wouldn’t let any female spectators into the courtroom. After the grisly evidence had all been heard and he’d been condemned to death, one of the jurors said:

‘I thought he was insane, but I figured he should be electrocuted anyway.’

He first appeared in the light of day – and history – on June 23rd 1928, when he appeared at the New York house of a family called Budd in the guise of ‘Frank Howard,’ who claimed to have a large farm in Farmingdale, Long Island. Eighteen-year-old Edward Budd had placed an ad in a newspaper asking for farm work, and this was his potential future employer. After a friendly lunch, ‘Howard’ said he’d be back later to drive Edward out to the Island. But in the meantime why didn’t he take Edward’s nine-year-old sister Grace to a children’s party his sister was having?

Grace never returned. The address that the party was supposed to have been given at was non-existent – and so was the Long Island farm. All the police had to go on was the writing on a telegram-form that had been sent to Paul from mid-town New York. There were no other clues.

Then, though, six and a half years later, the Budd family received a letter in the same handwriting, saying that he, ‘Frank Howard’, had murdered Grace and had,

‘feasted on her flesh for nine days… I learned to like the taste of human flesh many years ago during a famine in China,’

‘Howard’ went on.

‘I can’t exactly describe the taste. It is something like veal, then again it resembles chicken, only it is tastier than either. The best flesh, that which is most tender, is to be had from children. Little girls have more flavour than little boys.’

This time the police were able to trace the letter through the envelope that ‘Howard’ had used; in December they arrested the culprit, sixty-four-year-old Albert Fish, in a New York rooming-house. He quickly confessed, saying that he’d originally intended Paul as his victim but had changed his mind as soon as he’d seen Grace. He led police to what remained of her body, buried in woods in Westchester County.

Fish, a house-painter with six children, turned out to have a long record of arrests for, among other things, writing obscene mail. But in prison he confessed to a string of other crimes, among them the murders of six children, whose flesh, he said, he ate in stews. In all, he is believed to have attacked over a hundred young people and to have committed at least fifteen murders.

Albert Fish looked like a harmless old man

He was tried for the killing of Grace Budd in March 1935 and, though his defence pleaded insanity, he was found guilty. He was executed at Sing Sing prison on January 16th 1936, after helping his executioner position the electrodes on his chair.

John Wayne Gacy

W
hy John Wayne Gacy, the so-called Killer Clown, was never suspected of involvement in the disappearance of a succession of young men in the Chicago area in the 1970s, remains a mystery. The baby-faced, twice-married – although homosexual – had, after all, been earlier sentenced to ten years in an Iowa facility on charges including kidnap and attempted sodomy. On probation in Chicago after his early release, he’d been accused of picking up a teenager and trying to force him to have sex, and of attempting the same thing, at gunpoint, with an older man at his house. His name had even appeared on police files four times between 1972 and 1978 in connection with missing-persons cases.

To cap it all, a full eight months before his final arrest in December 1979, a twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan called Jeffrey Rignall told police that, after accepting a ride from an overweight man driving a black Oldsmobile, he’d been attacked with a rag soaked in chloroform, and then driven to a house, where he’d been re-chloroformed, whipped and repeatedly raped, before being dumped, unconscious, in Lincoln Park hours later. When the police said his evidence was too little to go on, Rignall spent days after leaving hospital sitting in a hired car at motorway entrances. Finally he spotted the Oldsmobile, followed it and wrote down the number. It belonged to thirty-seven-year-old John Wayne Gacy.

At this point the police did issue a warrant, but they failed to act on it. It was three months before they arrested Gacy – and then only on a misdemeanour. He was set free to go on killing.

The reason the police were so lax was probably because Gacy, on the face of it, was prosperous, active in his community and well-connected. He had a construction business with a large number of employees, an expensive house – and was something of a local celebrity. Dressed up as Pogo the Clown, he was a regular entertainer at street parades and children’s parties. He was also active in Democratic Party politics. He gave donations to the Party, organized fêtes for it and on one occasion co-ordinated a Party event for 20,000 people of Polish descent, at which he was photographed with First Lady Rosalyn Carter.

The truth was, though, that it was all front. Gacy used his construction company as, in effect, a recruiting-agency, a way of getting close to his victims. He gave jobs to young men and boys from the surrounding Chicago suburbs, and he picked up others at the local Greyhound station, luring them to his house with the promise of work. He was also a regular cruiser in Chicago’s gay district, preying on yet other young men whose disappearance would not be much noticed. They, too, would end up among the whips, handcuffs and guns at Gacy’s house.

He was caught in the end more by accident than design – simply because a mother came to pick up her son one night from his job at a Des Plaines pharmacy. The teenager said he had to go off for a few moments to see a man about a high-paying summer job. He never returned. When the police later visited the pharmacy they noticed it had recently been renovated – and the pharmacist told them that the renovation company’s boss was probably the man who had offered the kid a job: a man called Gacy…

Gacy, the Killer Clown

When the police called at Gacy’s house to question him about the teenager’s disappearance, they opened a trapdoor leading to a crawl space below the house and found the remains of seven bodies. Another twenty-one were subsequently found, either dug into quicklime or buried in the area around the house. Gacy quickly confessed to their murders, and to the murder of another five young men, whose bodies he’d simply dumped into the river because he’d run out of space. He’d sodomised and tortured them all. One eerie detail of Gacy’s modus operandi emerged in the coming months. He’d offer to show his victims what he called ‘the handcuff trick,’ promising that if they put on a pair of handcuffs they’d be able to get out of them within a few seconds. Of course they couldn’t. Then he’d say:

‘The way to get out of the
handcuffs is to have the key. That’s the real trick…’

Gacy was married twice and was a well known figure in his community

He was given life imprisonment in 1980.

Carmine Galante

C
armine Galante’s Mafia nickname was ‘Lillo’ – for the little cigars he constantly smoked. He was short, fat, bald – and immensely violent. When he came out of federal prison in 1978 he had two ambitions: to make money – by taking over the immensely lucrative New York heroin trade; and to become the ultimate man of respect: the Boss of All Bosses.

Galante grew up in East Harlem, New York, the son of Sicilian immigrants. He was to remain at heart a Sicilian, out of tune with the pliable Italian-Americans who gradually took over the Mafia – and were willing to keep a low profile for the sake of business. He was a man of vendettas; he lived by the gun and the code of honour; and as such he became in the early days a trusted member of the Bonanno family.

In 1957, he travelled as consigliere to his boss Joe Bonanno to the Palermo summit of Sicilian and American Mafia leaders, organized by ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He then organized the American end of the so-called ‘Montreal Connection,’ by which perhaps 60 per cent of all America’s heroin illegally crossed the border from Canada. But when the ‘Connection’ was rolled up by the FBI and its Canadian counterpart, and he himself was imprisoned, all he could do was watch, powerless, from behind bars as boss ‘Joe Bananas’ became increasingly eccentric and his family was forced to yield power to others. Once out, he wanted revenge.