100 Most Infamous Criminals (27 page)

Then, though, in 1986, Aileen, by now known as Lee, met twenty-two-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Moore in a Daytona Beach gay bar and she turned out to be the love of her life – all the love that she’d never had. They rented an apartment together; they worked at motels and bars while Aileen turned tricks on the side. Her looks, though, weren’t getting any better – and at some point Aileen decided that Ty shouldn’t have to work any more: she, after all, was Ty’s ‘husband.’ That’s when she started to kill.

Beginning at the end of 1989, there was a string of deaths that soon had police baffled. All were men; some were found naked; and they’d all been killed by the same small-calibre gun. They included a trucker, a rodeo worker, a heavy-machine-operator, even a child-abuse investigator. A sixty-year-old missionary had disappeared.

There was only one clue to the killer’s identity. For shortly before the missionary’s car was identified as having been involved in an accident, two women were seen hurt, walking away. The police released sketches to the press and Ty and Lee were identified by several people. By now, Lee had also pawned the possessions of many of her victims, and she’d left her finger- or thumb-prints – as per Florida law – on the pawn-shop receipts. Once the police identified what she’d pawned as belonging to the victims, it was only a matter of time.

There was one final betrayal. Ty, to save herself, went to the Florida police, and then, via a taped call to Aileen after she’d been arrested, persuaded her to confess. She did, but she said that every one of her victims had beaten and raped her. She wasn’t believed. In two trials, first for one of the murders, and then for another three, she was condemned to death, even though her defence had tried to present her as terminally damaged, with a borderline personality disorder.

Almost immediately, her story was told in a made-for-TV movie. Feminist writers defended her; an Aileen Wuornos Defence Group was set up. However, in 1999, she admitted that the claims she had made about beatings and rape had been entirely made up. But she also said that the police had delayed five months before arresting her, because they were negotiating a movie deal with Hollywood producers who were desperate for the real-life story of a female serial killer. There is perhaps some truth in this. In his 2003 documentary
The Selling of a Serial Killer
, Nick Broomfield claims that there was a meeting to discuss exclusive rights to the police investigation a month before she was arrested.

On Death Row, Wuornos seems to have had a religious conversion. She said:

‘I believe I am totally saved and forgiven by Jesus Christ,’

and added that there were angels waiting for her on the other side. She was executed in late 2002.

Britain

Brady and Hindley – the Moors Murderers

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

I
an Brady and Myra Hindley did everything they could to co-opt Hindley’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law David Smith. For he was promising raw material: he’d been in trouble with the law from the age of 11 and he liked to drink. So they fed him booze and the books of the Marquis de Sade. They took him out onto the moors for target-practice shooting and Brady continually dropped hints to him there: about murder, and the photography and burial of bodies.

Then, in October 1965, they decided finally to pull him in. The twenty-three-year-old Hindley used a pretext to get Smith late at night to the house where she and Brady lived on a public-housing estate in Manchester; and then she pushed him into the living room as soon as she heard Brady starting to attack Edward Evans, a young man they’d picked up earlier in the evening, with an axe. Smith, confused by drink, was a terrified witness to his eventual murder. But Brady and Hindley wanted more. So they passed him the axe, and told him that, with his fingerprints now on it, he was far too involved to be able to retreat. He was forced to help in trussing up the body and cleaning the blood from the floor, furniture and walls.

Brady pleaded not guilty but was given three life sentences

By the time he left, Smith had been persuaded to bring round a pram the next day to move the body to Brady’s car. But when he went home, he told his horrified wife what had happened and the next day, shaking with fear, and armed with a knife and a screwdriver, he went to a telephone box to call the police.

The young victim’s body was still in the house; and first Brady, then Hindley were arrested. But then, little by little, as the police searched both the house and Brady’s car, the full extent of their murderous exploits emerged. For in the house was a collection of books on Nazism, sadism and torture – as well as dozens of photographs of Brady and Hindley on the moors. Three sheets of paper discovered in the car seemed to contain instructions about how to bury a body, and in a notebook kept by Brady, amid a list of seemingly random and made-up names, there was one that stood out: that of John Kilbride. Kilbride was a schoolboy who’d disappeared two years before; the police became convinced that Brady and Hindley had killed the twelve-year-old and buried him on the moors.

Worse, though, was to come. For, while the police were digging up the moors, looking for Kilbride’s body, a careful search of the books in the house produced a hidden left-luggage ticket for two suitcases which – once retrieved – were found to contain ammunition, coshes, pornographic books, photographs and a number of tapes. One collection of photographs proved to be pornographic pictures of a gagged, naked child: of ten-year-old Leslie Ann Downey, who’d disappeared thirteen months after Kilbride. One of the tapes contained, buried amongst Christmas music, a live sixteen-minute recording of her rape, torture and murder.

The bodies of both Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey were found on the moors; and the tape was played, to the horror of all those present – indeed of the entire country – at the subsequent trial of Brady and Hindley. Both pleaded not guilty. They had given the police no co-operation at all. But there could be no doubt of their guilt, and the strong suspicion remains that they also killed two other children, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, who disappeared in 1963 and 1964 respectively.

For the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Leslie Ann Downey, Ian Brady was given three life sentences; Myra Hindley two, with an extra seven years for ‘receiving, comforting and harbouring’. Later denied both appeal and release, she died in prison in late 2002. Brady – easily the more sinister figure of the two – is still alive behind bars.

William Burke and William Hare

W
illiam Burke and William Hare will always remain linked, like Laurel and Hardy or (for British readers) Marks and Spencer. Alone, living in Edinburgh in the late 1820s, they were nothing: just a labourer and the keeper of a disreputable boarding house. But together they were Burke and Hare, the most famous body-snatchers of them all – even though they ended up differently. For Hare, who turned King’s Evidence and was a witness at Burke’s trial, died later in London, after living under an assumed name; and Burke went the way of their joint victims. After he was hanged, his body was dissected at a public lecture by the Professor of Surgery at Edinburgh University, and his skeleton can still be seen today in the University’s Anatomical Museum.

It was in 1827 that the pair first met, when Burke, who’d been working on the building of the Union Canal, moved to Edinburgh with a woman called Helen Dougal. As fellow Irishmen, Burke and Hare had much in common; and when one of Hare’s lodgers, an old army veteran, died – and Hare had it in mind to sell his body to an anatomist – who better to help carry it off to the house of the celebrated anatomist Dr. Robert Knox than his new friend William Burke?

Until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, every dead person, by law, was required to have a Christian burial. So it was extremely difficult for practising anatomists and their students to get hold of the necessary raw material, except from so-called body-snatchers, who dug up newly-buried corpses from churchyards. Otherwise the bodies of executed criminals were the best they could get. Knox, then, was delighted to accept the body from Burke and Hare, with few questions asked, and he paid more than seven and a half pounds for it. He also said that he’d take any more they might be able to get their hands on, with over ten pounds to be paid for a really fresh specimen in good condition.

Burke and Hare, thrilled by their windfall, spotted a gap in the market and, like good capitalists, soon filled it. They began to lure travellers, usually to Hare’s boarding house, and ply them with drink. Once befuddled, they simply smothered them. At least fifteen people went the same way, at prices ranging from eight to fourteen pounds, until a couple who’d been staying with Burke and Helen Dougal one day spotted the body of a woman hidden under a pile of straw. They went to the police with what they’d seen.

Burke, after turncoat Hare gave evidence against him, was hanged on January 28th 1829 – and the others disappeared, Hare to London and Helen Dougal, it’s said, to Australia. Dr. Knox’s house on Surgeon’s Square was invaded by a mob – two of the victims had been well-known on the city’s streets – and his University lectures were constantly interrupted by heckling. In the end he left Edinburgh and, unable to get another university position, ended his days as an obscure general practitioner in east London.

John Christie

I
n 1949, John Christie, then 51, and a resident of 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill in London, gave evidence at the Old Bailey against his upstairs neighbour Timothy Evans, who was on trial for murdering his baby daughter. The judge congratulated Christie on the clarity of his testimony, and Evans, a semi-literate truck-driver, was duly hanged. It was taken for granted that he had also killed his wife Beryl Evans, whose body had been found in a wash-house at the property. In fact, he’d earlier said as much when giving himself up.

John Christie made 10 Rillington Place an infamous location