100 Most Infamous Criminals (20 page)

Four months later, on September 14th, he picked up a fifteen-year-old high-school student, and again drove her, at gunpoint, up into the mountains. He taped her mouth and suffocated her by sticking his fingers up her nostrils. Then, as earlier, he raped her, took her home and cut off her head, had sex with her again and dismembered her. His mother noticed nothing unusual as he took her remains out to the car in garbage bags for disposal.

After another four-month interval, in January 1973, he struck again, and again his victim was a student, this time at Cabrillo College. Claudia Schall was shot on a quiet road near Freedom, California, dumped into the trunk and then hidden in a closet in Kemper’s bedroom. The following morning, after his mother had gone to work, he violated her corpse and then cut it up with an axe in the shower. Parts of her body were later discovered and identified after he’d thrown them off cliffs at Carmel.

Ed Kemper picked up hitch-hikers before brutally slaying them

A month later, he picked up two more students after a particularly vicious row with his mother. He shot them both in the head and drove their bodies back, only to find that his mother was still home. Unable to wait, he decapitated both bodies in the trunk; the next morning, after his mother had gone, took the headless corpses upstairs and had sex with at least one of them. Then, after cutting off the hands of one of the students and getting rid of both heads, he dumped the bodies in Eden Canyon, Alameda – where they were found nine days later.

Kemper’s killings can be seen to have been caused – at least in part – by his hatred of his mother; and on Easter Day, 1973, he went to the source: he killed her in her bedroom with a hammer and cut off her head with ‘the General’. Then he invited one of her woman friends, Sara Hallett, to dinner, knocked her unconscious, strangled, decapitated and had sex with her. The next morning, after sleeping in his mother’s bed, he took the money from Mrs. Hallett’s handbag and drove off in her car, expecting that the police would be after him.

In the end, when nothing happened, he gave himself up, after finally persuading the police that he really was the so-called ‘Co-Ed Killer’. Now there could be no doubt. He’d cut out his mother’s larynx, he said, and tossed it into the garbage,

‘because it seemed appropriate after she had bitched me so much.’

Kemper was found sane and despite his request to be executed, was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Meyer Lansky

M
eyer Lansky, born Maier Suchowjansky in Grodno, Poland, is the most shadowy and indistinct of all the great American Mafia bosses of the twentieth century. But it was he more than anyone else who was responsible for creating the structure and outreach of the modern Mafia – first by masterminding the alliance between New York’s Italian and Jewish mobs that created the central commission, the Syndicate, and then by expanding the Syndicate’s reach and influence across the United States and beyond. It was he, the grand strategist, who moved the Mafia’s money and power into Las Vegas, movies and legitimate businesses all across the country. He said in the 1970s – and only he perhaps knew:

‘We’re bigger than US Steel.’

In about 1918, sixteen-year-old Lansky arrived in New York and seems to have taken a job as an engineering apprentice. But he was soon part of the rough-and-tumble of the Lower East Side’s streets, running with the Jewish gangs and fighting for both territory and survival. The turning point came when he met and outfaced another tough street kid called Charlie Luciano, who took him under his wing. Many of the underground rackets in the city were then run by Jewish gangsters, and Lansky became in time Luciano’s bridge to their operations and muscle. ‘We had a kind of instant understanding,’ Luciano later said.

‘It may sound crazy, but if anyone wants to use the expression “blood brothers”, then surely Meyer and I were like that.’

Meyer Lansky masterminded the alliance of the Jewish and Italian gangs in New York

Both Luciano and Lansky in due course made it to the big time: they went to work for the visionary Arnold Rothstein, the first great bootlegger of the Prohibition era – and the first man, it’s said, to recognise the potential of dope. Rothstein – Lansky is said to have met him at a bar mitzvah – taught both men a good deal about style, and gave Lansky his first taste of what was later to become his main operation: casino gambling.

Rothstein was assassinated in 1928 and left the field open to the fastest learners among his apprentices, Luciano and Lansky. They largely sat out the score-settling wars that followed. But then, in 1931, Lansky organised the Jewish hit-men who disposed of the first self-styled
Capo di Tutti Capi
, Salvatore Maranzano, who’d set himself up the ultimate authority over what came to be known as ‘the five families.’ He and Luciano took over Maranzano’s five-family structure, but instead of appointing a boss of all bosses, they created a board of directors, the Syndicate, backed by the enforcement arm of Murder Incorporated. Both sat on the Syndicate board, and met every day they could, it’s said, for breakfast at a delicatessen on Delancy Street. Luciano and Lansky: they were the real power.

Lansky was one of the first bosses to move the Mafia into dope smuggling

They moved the Mafia into dope – it’s said that Lansky himself got hooked on heroin after his son was born crippled, and then did cold turkey in a hide-out in Massachusetts, watched over by a hood called Vincent ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes’ Alo, ever after a close friend. They became the ultimate authority in policy and peace, ruling Mafia activity nationwide. But then in 1936, Lucky Luciano was tried on a trumped-up charge of prostitution and sentenced to thirty to fifty years in jail. After that, Lansky more and more took to the shadows, living apparently quietly in a tract house in Miami, as he moved the Mafia into gambling operations in Las Vegas, the Bahamas and Cuba.

Leopold and Loeb thought they had committed the ‘crime of the century’. They were wrong

In 1970, after hearing that he faced taxevasion charges, Lansky, by now 68, fled to a hotel he owned in Tel Aviv, before being extradited, by order of the Israeli Supreme Court, back to the US. In the end, he was acquitted, and in the late-70s and early-80s, he could be seen walking his dog along Miami’s Collins Avenue or else having a meal in a diner with his old friend ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes.’ He died from a heart attack in 1983, at the age of 81.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb

I
t was called at the time the ‘crime of the century’, a ‘superman’ murder. But in reality the 1924 killing of Bobbie Franks by two young University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, was both senseless and lazy. Far from being the ‘perfect’ murder, a secret demonstration of how much ‘better’ and ‘less bourgeois’ they were than their friends and relatives, it only proved that even intellectuals can be supremely cack-handed.

Leopold and Loeb were jailed for life, despite the best efforts of their lawyer, Clarence Darrow

Fourteen-year-old Bobbie, the son of a millionaire, was abducted outside his school on May 21st 1924 and soon afterwards his mother received a call saying that he’d been kidnapped and that a ransom note would arrive through the post. The next day it came, demanding $10,000. But before anything could be done, the police announced that they’d found a body that matched Bobbie’s description. It had been discovered by maintenance men – strangled and with a fractured skull – in a culvert near the railway. Nearby lay a pair of hornrimmed spectacles.

It took a week for the spectacles to be traced to a rich nineteen-year-old law student and amateur ornithologist called Nathan Leopold. Leopold immediately agreed that they were indeed his, and he claimed that he must have dropped them while bird-watching in the area some time before. But the spectacles showed no sign of having been left outside for long and when Leopold was asked what he’d been doing on the afternoon of May 21st, all he could come up with was that he’d been with his friend, fellow student Richard Loeb, and two girls called Mae and Edna. Loeb soon corroborated this, but neither man could give any sort of description by which the two girls could be traced. Besides, Leopold’s typewriter, when tested, was found to be exactly the same model as the one which had written the ransom note.

It was, oddly, Richard Loeb – easily the more assured and dominant of the two men – who first confessed under questioning. But he was soon followed by Leopold, whose younger brother, it turned out, had been a friend of Bobbie Franks. The fourteen-year-old had been chosen as their victim, it transpired, not because of any particular enmity, but for a much simpler reason: he’d be easy to get into their car.

Two months after the killing, defended by famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, they came to trial. Darrow did his best, claiming that both his clients were mentally ill, either paranoiac (in Leopold’s case) or schizophrenic (in Loeb’s). This defence probably saved their lives, but they were imprisoned for life for Bobbie’s murder, and given a further ninety-nine years’ sentence for his kidnapping. Twelve years later, Loeb was killed by a fellow inmate. But Leopold, who’d been throughout his term a model prisoner, was finally released in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, got married, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.