100 Most Infamous Criminals (19 page)

James was arrested and brought to trial, with the snakes on display in a glass case in the courtroom. The only real witness against him was Charles Hope, who turned state’s evidence in return for a lesser sentence. Hope said that Lightning and Lethal were actually the third pair of rattlers he’d bought – the other two couldn’t even kill a rabbit between them. On the night in question, he’d taken them to James’s bungalow in a box; then when Mary James had passed out from drink, he’d helped her husband lay her on the kitchen table and undress her. At that point he’d opened the rattlers’ box enough for her left leg to be shoved in.

Though she was bitten several times, it wasn’t enough; she began to come round. So James, growing impatient, took her upstairs and drowned her in the bath. They then dressed her and staged the unfortunate accident in the lily-pond, pushing her face-first into the water.

‘Rattlesnake’ James – as he was by now known in the newspapers – was sentenced to death. He appealed several times, but was turned down each time and he was finally executed on May 1st 1942, the last man in California to be hanged. After him came the gas-chamber era.

Reverend Jim Jones

I
t’s hard to know the point at which the Reverend Jim Jones went bad – the dynamics of power and its effects are hard to read. But little by little he turned from being an idealistic young pastor into a fire-and-brimstone flim-flam man – and from there it only got worse. By the end, near Port Kaituma in Guiana, he’d become a paranoid Messiah, preaching a demented millenar-ianism that was to kill almost a thousand men, women and children.

James Warren Jones was born in 1931 in the heart of America’s Bible Belt, in Lynn, Indiana and by the age of 12 he was already preaching impromptu street sermons to children and passers-by. When he was 18, he took a job in nearby Richmond as a hospital porter, so that he could pay his way through Indiana University as a religious-studies student. He got married to a nurse and when he graduated, he started an outreach programme for poor blacks at an Indianapolis Methodist church.

From the outset he faced often violent opposition from racists both inside and outside his Methodist congregation. So in 1957 he bought a building and opened his own church, the People’s Temple, in an Indianapolis ghetto, preaching a message of racial integration and equality. He and his wife adopted seven children, black, white and Asian and he took to describing himself as ‘biracial,’ pointing up his mother’s Cherokee blood. He became, in effect, an ‘honorary black,’ and his style of preaching owed a lot to black holy-roller showmen like Father Divine.

In return he soon secured the undeviating loyalty of a black congregation that rapidly grew as he defied the threats and attacks of white bigots – some of which, it’s been suggested, he made up. Like Divine, he became a faith-healer, putting on shows at the Temple in which the ‘sick’ were cured and the ‘disabled’ walked. Some of his church elders even began to claim that he’d raised people from the dead.

In 1963, at the height of American fears about nuclear warfare, he suddenly announced that he’d had a vision of a future holocaust in which only two places would be spared: Okiah, California and Belo Horizonte, Brazil. (The ‘vision’ probably came from a 1960 magazine article.) He told his congregation to get ready by selling their houses and withdrawing their savings. Then he flew to Brazil to take a look, and on his return journey stopped over for a few days in the socialist republic of Guiana.

Brazil failed the test. So in 1965, he and three hundred followers from Indianapolis settled in Redwood Valley near Okiah, California. They were hard-working, charitable and seemingly deeply religious. They took in problem children and orphans and impressed the local community enough for Jones to be appointed foreman of the county grand jury and the director of its free legal-aid services.

In 1970, Jones moved his tax-exempt People’s Temple to downtown San Francisco, where his congregation’s reputation as a willing and energetic army for good quickly followed him. The church’s membership soon swelled to 7,500, both black and white; and the city turned over part of its welfare programme to it. Jones also carefully nurtured its public image, by making donations to the police welfare fund and awards to the press ‘for outstanding journalistic contributions to peace and public enlightenment’ in its name. He was even invited to President Carter’s inauguration in Washington in 1976.

By 1976, though, defectors from the People’s Temple were beginning to tell the press about Jones’s obsession with sex: about how he preached sexual abstinence, but treated female members of the church as his harem; about how he forced grown men to confess to imagined sins of homosexuality and browbeat married couples into divorce, so that they could then be reassigned to whoever he chose. There was worse: there were public beatings of children to make them show respect – a cattleprod was even used on the most recalcitrant; and there were sinister congregation-wide rehearsals – so-called ‘White Nights’ – for what Jones termed ‘revolutionary mass suicide.’

By the following year, pressure from the press and public censure had become so intense that Jones put into effect his escape plan. Using the money provided by his congregation, he had already bought a lease on 20,000 acres of jungle and swamp in Guiana, where a pavilion and dormitories had been built. In November 1977, he and a thousand loyal members of the congregation moved there. According to a 1978 report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the new community at Jonestown was surrounded by armed guards and subject to ‘public beatings’ and ‘a threat of mass suicide.’

When California Congressman Leo Ryan read this, he made it his business to talk to the relatives of the people at Jonestown who were afraid they were being held there against their will. He then asked the federal authorities to intervene with the Guianan government, and shortly afterwards flew to Jonestown himself with a team of newspaper and television journalists.

When they arrived at Jonestown, they found Jones holding court at the pavilion, with 1,000 American passports locked in a strongroom at his back. At first, the interviews with him and with members of the congregation went well. The armed guards were there simply ‘to keep out the bandits;’ and yes, Jones did have a number of mistresses, but the idea that his followers were not permitted to have sex was ‘bullshit: thirty babies have been born since summer 1977.’ The citizens of Jonestown still seemed fanatically devoted to their leader; the only sour note that was struck was when Ryan offered to put under his personal protection anyone who wanted to leave.

The next day, when Ryan – who had stayed in Jonestown overnight – was picked up by the reporters, they found twenty congregation-members who wanted to leave with him. There was a scuffle when one of the church elders tried to stab Ryan. So the press, Ryan and as many defectors who could get on board an earth-moving machine took off to the airstrip where their chartered plane was waiting. There they were later ambushed by Jones and his armed guards. Ryan, three journalists and two of the defectors were killed.

Back at the settlement, Jones immediately gave orders for mass suicide. Babies had cyanide squirted into their mouths with syringes. Older children drank cups of Kool-Aid laced with poison from huge vats, followed shortly by their parents. When the Guianese army arrived at the settlement the next day, they found whole families embraced in death, and the Reverend Jim Jones with a bullet through his brain.

After the mass suicide, a white professor who’d been a member of Jones’s congregation in its Okiah days said that it had been based on the idealistic Oneida community, which also allowed multiple marriages. A dark hint of this – and a reminder of what it had become – was left in a suicide note, addressed to Jones, found at the scene. It said in part:

‘Dad, I can see no way out, I agree with your decision. Without you the world may not make it to Communism. . .’

Ted Kaczynski

I
t took almost eighteen years to link loner Ted Kaczynski to the killer known only by his FBI code-name, Unabomber. By then his bombs had become more and more sophisticated and deadly – and there was a million-dollar reward on his head.

His beginnings, in Chicago, had been modest. In May 1978, a package carrying the return address of a professor at Northwestern University’s Technological Institute exploded while being opened by campus police. Shortly afterwards, a Northwestern graduate student opened an unaddressed cigar box he found and also sustained minor injuries. Bomb number three was found in the hold of an American Airlines plane outward bound from O’ Hare Airport after its cabin had filled with smoke; bomb number four was in a parcel addressed to the president of United Airlines in Lake Forest. All were relatively crude affairs – though the airline bomb had been triggered to go off at a certain altitude – and did little damage.

There was then a lull of more than a year. But another bomb was found – and successfully defused – in a business classroom at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in May 1982; it was followed a year later by a parcel bomb apparently intended for a professor of electrical engineering at Brigham Young. Less than two months later, another electrical-engineering professor, this time at the University of California at Berkeley, picked up a can of some kind in the faculty lounge and was seriously injured when it exploded.

By now the FBI had a tentative idea of who the bomber might be: an educated, intelligent white male, possibly an academic, from the Chicago area, with a grudge against authority in general and universities in particular. It was also clear that he was learning on the job, for his bombs were getting more and more sophisticated. Then, though, for three years the trail went cold, nothing happened – until suddenly bombs started appearing again on the West Coast, in Salt Lake City, Utah and Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1985.

The targets, this time, were computers, behaviour-modification and, once again, aircraft. Bombs were hand-delivered to two computer stores and a computer room at Berkeley and sent by post to the Boeing Aircraft Fabrication Division and a psychology professor in Ann Arbor. Four people were injured, two of them seriously; one of the computer-store operators was killed.

Once again there was a lull, this time for six years. Then, one after another, a geneticist at the University of California, a computer scientist at Yale and a vice-president of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency in New York were all hit. In a long, rambling letter sent to the New York Times a few months later, the Unabomber railed against computers and genetic engineering and claimed that the adman – who’d been killed instantly – had been part of a conspiracy, involved in ‘manipulating people’s attitudes.’ On the day the letter was received, he struck again: a parcel bomb killed the president of the California Forestry Association in Sacramento.

This immediately suggested that the Unabomber was now playing games. For the surname and second name of two of his early victims had been Wood; the bombs had mostly been found in wooden containers. And, sure enough, when another letter was subsequently sent, this time to the San Francisco Chronicle, it carried as a return address ‘Frederick Benjamin Isaac [FBI] Wood, 549 Wood Street, Woodlake, California’.

By this time the Unabomber was in regular communication with the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
; he finally announced to both newspapers that he would give up his bombing campaign if they published in full a 35,000-word manifesto he’d written, spelling out his hatred of modern, technology-driven America. They agreed and it was read by a social worker in upstate New York called David Kaczynski.

Kaczynski was struck by the similarity of certain phrases in the manifesto to those written by his brother Theodore, a failed academic living in a tiny cabin without electricity outside Lincoln, Montana. After taking advice from friends, he finally went to the FBI with his suspicions. The cabin outside Lincoln was raided, and along with Ted Kaczynski, bomb-making equipment and early drafts of the manifesto were found.

Kaczynski was a fifty-five-year-old Harvard graduate who’d done post-graduate work at Ann Arbor, and had faced a fast-track career as professor of mathematics at Berkeley. Then, unable to cope with the pressures of life, he’d simply dropped out. He started sending and laying bombs for ‘personal revenge,’ he wrote in his diary in 1971, because he was ‘superior to most of the rest of the human race’ and yet had been subject to ‘rejections, humiliations and other painful influences.’ He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole on January 22nd 1998.

Ed Kemper

E
d Kemper, whose parents separated when he was seven, grew up troubled and sadistic. He tortured animals; he once cut the hands and feet off his sister’s doll. But with people he was painfully shy. When his sister teased him about secretly wanting to kiss his teacher, he said:

‘If I kissed her, I’d have to kill her first.’

And this is precisely what the adult Ed Kemper – 6 feet 9 inches tall and weighing almost 300 pounds – did. But first there was a teenage prelude. For in 1962, when he was 13, he ran away from the mother he hated to join his father – and his father promptly sent him back. Unwanted by either, he was despatched to live with his grandparents on a ranch in California and two years later he shot them both dead. He was, in other words, a serial time-bomb which had already begun to go off.

After five years in a hospital for the criminally insane, he was released into the care of his mother, who was then living in Santa Cruz. It was a bitter household. But Kemper got a job as a labourer, and finally bought himself a car. He began to pick up hitch-hikers.

On May 7th 1972, he picked up two women students from Fresno State College, Anita Luchese and Mary Anne Pesce, held them at gunpoint and drove them out to a wooded canyon. He stabbed them both to death and raped their corpses, before taking the bodies back home in the trunk of his car. Upstairs in his room, he took off their heads with his hunting knife – nicknamed ‘the General’ – had sex again with their corpses and then dissected them. He buried what was left in the mountains.