100 Most Infamous Criminals (17 page)

Carmine Galante, the cigar smoking king of violence

His timing was spot on. For Carlo Gambino, the most powerful of the New York dons, had recently died and the newly elected boss of the Bonanno family, Phil Rastelli, was himself behind bars – and stood aside when Galante hit the streets. He’d also planned well. For he’d gathered around himself a large group of old-country Sicilian hit-men who had no allegiance to anyone but himself – and to the Mafia code he believed in. They quickly muscled and killed their way to control of the heroin business.

Equally quickly, though, they and their boss became a ‘business problem’ to the New York Commission, especially to one member, Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, who, in the absence of any real leadership in the Bonanno family, had taken over many of its interests. No one, though, wanted a bullying throwback, a ‘Moustache Pete’ from the past, to rock the boat. So the Commission ordered Galante’s assassination – and the job was handed, as per custom, to a member of his own family, underboss Salvatore Catalano.

On July 13th 1979, as Galante was enjoying an after-dinner cigar with two friends on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant in Brooklyn, three men wearing ski-masks and shotguns walked in through the back door. Galante was dead so fast, his cigar was still in his mouth as he hit the patio floor. The traditional .45 bullet was then fired into his left eye; his guests were finished off by his own trusted bodyguards – who then calmly walked out with his killers.

That same day, at a meeting in prison, Phil Rastelli was reconfirmed as head of the Bonanno family, and Mafia bosses met in a social club in New York’s Little Italy to celebrate. But Galante later came back to haunt them. For as the result of wiretaps installed during the investigation into the so-called ‘Pizza Connection,’ Salvatore Catalano and the members of the New York Commission were eventually charged with his murder.

Ed Gein

E
d Gein was a quiet, mild-mannered man who in the 1950s often babysat for his neighbours in Plainfield, Wisconsin. When they discovered, though, who he really was – the prototype for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
and of Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs
– they burned his house, at 17 Rákóczi Street, to the ground.

On November 16th, 1957 the family of a fifty-eight-year-old Plainfield widow realized that she’d gone missing, leaving nothing behind her but a pool of blood in the store she ran – and the possibility that farmer Ed Gein might have been her last customer. Her son, deputy sheriff Frank Worden, set off to ask him what he knew. Gein, though, wasn’t at home; his farmhouse was empty. So Worden opened the door to the woodshed outdoors, and there saw his mother’s naked, decapitated corpse, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It had been ‘dressed’ for butchery, like a deer- or cow-carcass, the intestines and heart – later found, with the head, inside the house – removed.

Gein, who was at dinner with a neighbour, was quickly found and arrested. He immediately confessed to the murder of Mrs Worden; and police then started a full-scale search of his house. What they found was a place of horror. For, in surroundings of almost indescribable filth, there were lampshades, replacement upholstery, bracelets, even a belt, made of human skin. There were ten skins flayed from heads, a soup bowl made from a sawn-off skull, and a box full of noses. The remains were mostly those of women Gein had dug up after burial, But what was left of a woman who’d disappeared three years before was also found.

Ed Gein lived in a ‘house of horror’

Gein, who was fifty years old, had been living alone in the farmhouse since 1945, when his mother, for whom he seems to have had an incestuous passion, died after a stroke suffered a year earlier. She had been, by Gein’s own account, a fiercely religious woman: she’d forbidden him from having any contact with the sort of ‘scarlet’ painted women who had already provoked God’s certain vengeance upon the world. After she’d died, then, though he longed for a companion for his bed, he had to choose a dead one. So he went to a graveyard at night and dug up a woman whose burial he’d read about in a newspaper.

Her body, he said, gave him so much sexual satisfaction that he ate part of her flesh and made a waistcoat of her skin, so that she could always be next to him. Once she’d been flayed, though, he needed replacements – so he took to digging in graveyards again. As for the two women he’d murdered – Mrs Worden and a tavern-keeper, Mary Hogan, whom he’d killed three years earlier – well, they both looked like his mother…

Ed Gein was declared insane, unfit to stand trial, and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions. He died in the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1984, at the age of 77. He had been throughout, it was said, a model inmate.

Belle Gunness

B
elle Gunness, known as ‘Belle of Indiana,’ was in fact no belle at all. By the time she got to Indiana from Chicago in about 1900, she was fat. Long gone were the days when she’d been a tightrope dancer in her native Norway. Now she weighed about 200 pounds. Yet not only did she marry for a second time in La Porte, Indiana, she slept with all the hired hands at her farm. After her second husband died, she even attracted men from Illinois, South Dakota, Wisconsin and elsewhere with offers of marriage to ‘a comely widow.’ They arrived at her farmstead with their hopes high and their money ready, with one exception: they never got out alive.

She seems to have started her career in the insurance business – in the claiming of insurance, that is. For her first husband, Albert Sorenson, died in Chicago of an ‘enlarged heart’ on a day on which two separate policies on his life happened to overlap. A house she then bought in Austin, Illinois, soon burned down, followed by a candy-store in Chicago; even her second husband, Peter Gunness, went the same way – for $4,000-worth of insurance this time – when a meat-grinder ‘fell’ on his head from a shelf as he sat in a chair.

In 1906, two years after Gunness’s death – and with four children, three of them adopted, to take care of – Belle found a new line of work. Taken care of sexually by a recent arrival, farm-labourer Ray Lamphere, she started advertising herself in provincial newspapers as the comely widow,

‘who owns [a] large farm in one of the finest districts of La Porte County, Indiana, [and who] desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman unusually well provided.’

No triflers would be brooked, she said, and each candidate would have to visit her in person. To one of them she subsequently wrote – beneath a line saying:

‘When I hear your name mentioned, my heart beats in wild rapture for you… be sure and bring the three thousand dollars you are going to invest in the farm with you and, for safety’s sake, sew them up in your clothes, dearest.’

Chloroform, strychnine and an axe, on arrival, did the rest.

Nobody knows how many she killed. But in 1908 – after she’d sacked Lamphere and told her lawyer that she was scared that he’d take revenge – the farmhouse burned down and four charred bodies were found in the remains: three children and a headless woman who wore Belle Gunness’s rings. At first there was some doubt it was really her, since the body seemed too small for a woman of her size. But three weeks later, her false teeth were found in the ashes, and that seemed to settle the matter – even though a witness claimed to have seen Belle driving out to the farm with a woman the afternoon before the fire.

By that time, traces of strychnine had been found in all four bodies and Lamphere had been arrested for arson and murder. (He was subsequently found guilty only of arson.) But then the brother of one of Belle’s victims arrived on the scene and encouraged the authorities to continue searching. The remains of twelve dismembered corpses were soon found buried near the farmhouse. More bones were discovered in a pit under its cement floor. As the digging went on, thousands of sightseers came out to picnic near the scene. Anyone at all who’d disappeared or left the area was widely reckoned to have been a victim of ‘Belle of Indiana’.

A year later, in prison, Lamphere admitted to having been Gunness’s accomplice in forty-three murders; and he also said that, before returning to torch the house on the night in question, he’d driven Gunness away disguised as a man. No one knows if the story’s true, though for a long while afterwards sightings of her were recorded in the newspapers.

Gary Heidnik

T
ransplanted Clevelander Gary Heidnik was the ‘bishop’ of a one-man, tax-registered Philadephia church, the United Church of the Ministries of God – and an extremely shrewd investor. But he had a fixation for women he thought beneath him. His congregation – and his lovers – were mostly derelicts and women from a nearby home for the retarded. In December 1978, when he was tried for the kidnapping and rape of a severely brain-damaged woman he’d abducted from a home in Harrisburg, the judge said:

‘He appears to be easily threatened by women whom he would consider to be equal to him either intellectually or emotionally.’

A court-appointed investigator agreed with the judge’s analysis. ‘[Heidnik] impresses me,’ he said,

‘as someone who sees himself as superior to others, although apparently he must involve himself with those distinctly inferior… to reinforce this… He is not only a danger to himself, but perhaps a greater danger to others in the
community, especially those who he perceives as being weak and dependent.’

He concluded – with prescience, as it turned out:

‘Unfortunately, it seems that he will not significantly change his aberrant behaviour pattern in the near future.’

Heidnik, who’d served as a medical corpsman in the Army and had trained as a practical nurse outside, spent almost four and a half years in prison on the kidnapping and rape charge. But he also tried to commit suicide three times while inside – continuing a pattern of schizoidal disorder that had had him discharged from the army in 1963, and in and out of hospitals, under medication, ever since. By April 1983, though, there was no longer any reason for the prison parole authority to go on holding him. So he was released, aged 39, to go back to his ‘ministry’, his investments, and what turned out to be his murderous career.

First, he moved house, to a stand-alone building on a street of row houses in north Philadelphia; then, a year later, he married a twenty-two-year-old mail-order bride from the Philippines the day after she got off the plane from Manila. He used her as his slave; he raped and assaulted her. She escaped – but failed to press charges. So he was free to move on to his next dark fantasy: the acquisition of a harem.

He dug a pit in his basement floor; and when he was ready, on Thanksgiving Day 1986, he picked up and took home his first victim, a part-time prostitute – half African American, half Puerto Rican – called Josephina Rivera. He choked her unconscious and then imprisoned her, naked and chained, in the basement – where he raped and sodomized and beat her daily.

By New Year’s Day 1987, Heidnik had abducted three other black women, all of whom were subjected to exactly the same fate. The latest addition to Heidnik’s harem, twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley, was feisty, though, and fought back. So she was given special treatment: beaten up and either confined to the pit with a heavy weight on top of her or else suspended by a handcuffed wrist from the ceiling. The others were threatened with, and sometimes given, the same punishment if they stepped out of line: if they resisted the continuing rapes, for example, or complained about the dog food they were increasingly fed on.

As the daily attacks on his four victims continued – with Heidnik now playing the radio constantly to drown their screams – the violence began steadily to escalate. He picked up a fifth victim, an eighteen-year-old prostitute, on January 18th, and immediately whipped her naked body as a taste of things to come. Less than three weeks later, he committed his first murder. After being starved and strung up to the ceiling by one wrist for several days, the retarded twenty-five-year-old Sandra Lindsay died after being cut down and kicked into the pit. Heidnik dismembered her body with a power saw, fed what he could to his dogs and to the women in the basement, and kept the rest in the freezer.