Couples Who Kill (3 page)

But the following year (1979) Larry, who had become increasingly strange, attacked his college room-mate in the middle of the night, battering the innocent boy numerous times with a hammer. Other students heard the screams and intercepted nineteen-year-old Larry before he could leave the campus. Meanwhile his semi-conscious victim was taken to hospital where he had to have three operations on his head and a metal plate put in his skull. He was also temporarily paralysed down one side.

Larry claimed that alpha waves had made him do it – and his student friends testified that he’d become so odd during the previous months that they feared for their safety. He was diagnosed as being schizophrenic and it was found that in the past he’d suffered from ‘burnt out child reaction’ where an abused child simply can’t take any more.

Larry was full of violent hate but, instead of recognising these feelings, he projected them on to others and believed he was the one who was in danger. As such, he refused to see his room-mate as the victim and showed no remorse for the horrendous attack. He was put into psychiatric care – though at one stage he escaped and went back to his mother. She promptly phoned the police and he was recaged within hours.

Frances now had her wonderful upmarket home and she became a patron of the arts, giving vast sums to the New York ballet. Her daughter Lavinia showed real dancing talent and was given several significant roles. But one day Frances and Lavinia arrived very late for a public performance. As a result, the ballet had had to substitute another child dancer for Lavinia and Frances became hysterical, threatening to kill the terrified child.

Frances now worried that the net was closing in on Marc so she insisted that he leave her house. The teenager obligingly booked himself into the YMCA under a false name and spent his days watching porn at the cinema and his nights with prostitutes. He would sometimes dress scruffily and go to burger joints but at other times he invented a wealthier persona for himself, dressed up and went to upmarket restaurants. He set up a post office box where he received regular cheques from his grandmother. It was a lonely and unstructured existence, but he would later say that these months of freedom were the happiest of his life.

And indeed, mother and son would have probably gotten away with the crime if Frances hadn’t made herself a very bad enemy. The friend who had originally introduced her to a hitman had set up a joint account with her – and she’d taken his money. It was a tiny sum for her (but a lot of money for him) which she could have paid back but for some unfathomable reason she refused. He contacted her lawyers about the missing cash but they couldn’t help so he went to one of her sisters and hinted that Frances and Marc were implicated in Franklin’s death. He continued to phone the sister and eventually admitted
that he was still keeping the murder weapon for Frances. The police were informed and the YMCA-based Marc Schreuder was soon tracked down.

Awaiting trial, he was suicidal as he believed he had nothing to live for. But the authorities explained that he could enrol in various educational courses from prison and his spirits revived.

Four years after he’d shot his grandfather dead, Marc went to trial in Utah where he potentially faced death by firing squad. But the jury soon heard about the mitigating circumstances, the defence explaining that his mother was completely self-centred and that her tirades at him had lasted for days. They asked for a manslaughter charge as he’d been so repeatedly badly treated and had the emotional maturity of a child.

In turn, the prosecution noted that he’d been at college so could safely ignore her threats to make him homeless. This was true – but she still influenced him hugely, phoning for up to three hours a night, demanding that he do whatever as necessary to bring her money. Sometimes his college friends heard him crying as she berated him on the phone. She said that if he didn’t do what she wanted he couldn’t come home that summer – or ever again.

Marc had taped her ranting at Lavinia for four hours because the child didn’t understand a complex grammar lesson – and it was clear that she ranted in a similar way at Marc. A more stable teenager could perhaps have coped with such lengthy verbal onslaughts but Marc had never known stability. He was terrified of being left completely alone. It was easy for outsiders to suggest that the
seventeen-year-old simply sever the connection with his mother, but she was the only parent he had and the closest thing to love that he had ever known.

That said, he was aware that he was deliberately ending the life of a man who had done him no harm, a man who had paid for much of his accommodation and schooling. And he’d shot Franklin a second time and had been sufficiently calculating to go through the dead man’s pockets and scatter items about to make it look like a robbery. The jury took all of this into consideration and on 6th July 1982 he was sentenced to five years to life.

Meanwhile, having heard more and more about Frances’ involvement in her father’s death, the police went to her apartment to arrest her. She refused to answer the door for hours and when they did gain access they found her in bed. She said she couldn’t leave the house until she’d finished writing her poetry but they insisted she come with them and she went into another room to get dressed. There she started to climb out of the sixth floor window but the police were alerted by her daughter Lavinia’s screams and found the child desperately clinging to her leg.

Frances’ trial opened in September 1983. The main witness against her was Marc, who’d decided to testify in order to keep her away from Lavinia. The jury heard that Frances had given money to a hitman and told him where to find her grandfather. When the hitman backed down, she’d sent Marc off to buy a gun and had ranted at him so relentlessly that she knew he’d use it. She’d told him that if he didn’t kill Franklin that she would commit suicide. As
she’d taken overdoses in front of him before, he knew that she was telling the truth.

Now forty-five years old, Frances opted not to take the stand in her own defence. She wore a large crucifix throughout the trial and scribbled copious notes. One witness suggested that a patron of the ballet could never encourage a murder – but more clear thinking observers noted that an appreciation of culture doesn’t necessarily make a woman incapable of inciting violence.

She was found guilty of criminal homicide, murder in the first degree on 27th September 1983. Six days later she was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Utah State Prison. There she told the authorities that she only had one son, Larry. She had clearly disowned Marc, the fate he most feared.

Sadly, the family remained divided after the trial, with Bernice saying that Frances had been a wonderful mother but that little Marc was ‘a born thief’. She blamed his and Larry’s psychiatric problems on their father – but he hadn’t seen them since they were toddlers. She was also enraged at one of her other daughters who had told the police about the gun.

By the time of the trial, Marc’s father had come back into his life and he was very glad of his support. Meanwhile Lavinia was cared for by a nursery nurse, aided by Bernice. Larry was eventually freed from psychiatric care and set up home alone.

In 1987, film star Lee Remick played Francis Schreuder in an ABC mini series called
Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder. The Chicago Sun-Times
noted that it was ‘a powerful characterisation of a woman trapped within a warped and steadily deteriorating mind – incapable of love
and distant from reality,’ whilst
Rivadue
said that it was ‘steeped in psychotic grandeur.’

Asked to comment on Francis Schreuder, Lee Remick said ‘In my view, the sickness about this woman is that she was totally narcissistic. Only her needs in this world mattered.’

Frances Schreuder’s needs simply weren’t met when she was a young child, a negligence for which others paid a very heavy price.

Worldwide there are proportionately probably as many black serial killers as there are white – but white killers are the ones reported on at length by a largely white media. As Pat Brown of the Sexual Homicide Exchange has written, ‘Minority serial killers in the United States more than likely exist at the same ratios as white serial killers for the population.’ And South Africa is currently experiencing an epidemic of black serial killers. But Alton Coleman and Denise Brown are unusual in being a black male/female pairing – rather than a solo operator or male duo – who killed multiple times.

Alton was born in 1956, the third child of an alcoholic prostitute who would go on to have another two children. She alternated between rejecting him and having sex with clients when he was in the same room. Worse, she insisted he cater to those of her clients who preferred boys. He suffered this sexual abuse throughout his formative years, repressing his fear and anger, but his disturbance showed in that he regularly wet his pants. As a result, he was teased mercilessly at school by the other children until he started to rob and assault them. By puberty he was stealing cars.

He was originally christened Elton but hated the name and changed it to Alton. As he matured and began to run with a street gang, his nickname became Big Al.

His mother died when he was thirteen, by which time he was living with his grandmother in the projects. He
remained deeply disturbed and regularly sexually assaulted his girlfriends. His IQ was borderline retarded and he harboured a deep hatred for almost everyone, but as he matured he hid his rage behind a charming façade. Both men and women were initially drawn to the handsome youth with the appealing manner and winning smile. It was only when he had them alone and vulnerable that he dropped his act.

At eighteen he and a male accomplice abducted a
middle-aged
woman, drove her out of town, robbed her and raped her. The naked woman ran screaming from the scene and bystanders swiftly called the police. But, embarrassed and frightened, she refused to testify about the rape so Coleman was only given six years on the kidnapping and robbery charge. Two years later he was released and almost immediately raped again. He was also arrested for molesting an eight-year-old relative but it’s likely that he intimidated her mother for the charges were suddenly withdrawn.

However, he was found guilty of other violent assaults and by his mid-twenties he’d spent a total of three years in prison. There, he regularly beat and sodomised younger inmates and was widely feared. He left prison and married but his wife left him after six months of sexual brutality. She had to seek police protection before she felt safe.

Coleman now raped several girls and young women but juries often found him so plausible that they returned a not guilty verdict. Other cases didn’t even go to court because Coleman intimidated the victims or the witnesses.

In 1984 – aged twenty-eight – he jumped bail charges for raping a fourteen-year-old and fled to Waukegan in Illinois where he met twenty-one-year-old Debra Brown in
a Waukegan bar. He was attracted to younger women with a poor sense of their own identities so she was tailor-made for him.

Debra was born in November 1962 in Waukegan, Illinois, the fifth of eleven children. Hunger and poverty ruled their lives. Children from large families tend to have lower IQs than children from small families but Debra was actually diagnosed as being simple. This mild retardation may have been exacerbated by a head injury she suffered as a child.

Bored, the pretty teenager dropped out of high school and took a range of menial jobs. At home she remained exceptionally quiet. Her employers noticed that she was a passive girl who was easily led.

Yet she wasn’t entirely without free will, breaking off her engagement to a nice young man at age twenty-one when she met the outwardly more charismatic Alton. Her family begged her to reconsider but she fell quickly in love with Coleman who offered excitement with his tales of other cities and his flashy stolen cars.

They quickly moved in together and he introduced her to his increasingly violent brand of sex. She remained devoted to him even though he was often cruel to her, and she tolerated his need to dress in women’s clothing: men who’ve survived life with an abusive mother often feel the need to crossdress.

But even having this willing sex slave wasn’t enough for Coleman – he wanted to hurt and humiliate men, women and children just as he’d been hurt and humiliated himself.

Alton and Debra befriended a Mrs Wheat and her
nine-year
-old daughter Vernita from Kenosha, introducing themselves with false names. On 29th May 1984 they took Vernita on an outing to nearby Waukegan. Her mother happily waved the trio off.

When they had the nine-year-old alone, Alton beat, raped and strangled her. (Her body wouldn’t be found until 19th June, dumped in a derelict building.) When the police began to investigate the child’s disappearance, Debra and Alton went on the run. She’d spend much of the next two months helping her lover to hold up and kidnap various victims for money or for sexual thrills, though, seated in the abduction car, she often stared blankly into space.

On 17th June twenty-five-year-old Donna Williams, a beauty therapist residing in the town of Gary, became their next victim. Coleman and Brown asked her to show them her local church and she obligingly drove them in its direction. But they kidnapped her and Alton Coleman raped her and strangled her with her own tights. They drove around with her body in the boot, later dumping it in an abandoned Detroit house. (Despite an intensive search, her body wouldn’t be found until the following month.)

On 18th June, the day after murdering Donna Williams, they killed again. Seven-year-old Tamika Turks and
nine-year
-old Annie were on their way back from the sweet
shop when Debra and Alton stopped and offered them a ride home. (Most journalists have described the girls as cousins, but nine-year-old Annie was actually Tamika’s aunt.) The children had been warned not to go off with strange men but were happy to accept a lift when they saw Debra in the car.

But the couple drove to the nearby woods then bound and gagged the children. Tamika kept crying so Debra held her down and tried to suffocate her with her hand whilst Alton stamped on her face and chest. He raped her then strangled her to death with a strip of bedsheet that he’d brought from the house.

Both Debra and Alton now made nine-year-old Annie perform oral sex on them. Afterwards, Coleman raped and stabbed the child so viciously that her intestines protruded from her vagina. He beat her about the head, strangled her and believed that he’d killed her – but she revived after the couple had left and was able to identify them from police photographs.

The psychological peace that killing brings to the pathological mind didn’t last for very long, so the lovers varied their acts of violence. Throughout the next few weeks they would commit numerous armed robberies for money and would terrorise and rape other victims in order to feel powerful and have fun. They sometimes stayed with friends for a few days, then tied them up and beat them before fleeing the area in the victim’s car.

So far all of their victims had been black people killed or assaulted in black neighbourhoods where neither Coleman
or Brown stood out from the crowd, therefore the police weren’t hunting a deadly duo. The couple remained free to kill again and again.

The duo’s next victims that June were a mother and daughter. They knocked on the Temples’ door, pretending they were hitchhikers who needed a place to stay.
Thirty-year
-old Virginia Temple felt sorry for the weary travellers and let them in and they ate and drank together but later that night the couple beat and strangled her then raped and strangled her ten-year-old daughter Rochelle. They continued to enjoy the Temples’ hospitality, eventually leaving their bodies in the crawl space under the house.

Reaching Indianapolis, they got talking to a fifteen-
year-old
girl called Tonnie Stewart and abducted her. She was repeatedly tortured. Alton Coleman sexually assaulted her, stabbed then strangled her. In yet another act of overkill, she was also shot twice. The couple dumped her body in a disused building then drove on towards Cincinnati.

Two days later they killed again. The couple had started by targeting their own race but now they moved across racial lines in their desire for increasing stimulus or perhaps a subconscious desire to be caught. Both motives are equally valid for Alton would say that he enjoyed killing and Debra would concur that she ‘had fun out of it’ yet they were becoming increasingly underweight and malnourished through living rough.

This time they chose a middle class white couple who were selling their camper van. Harry and Marlene Waters invited the potential buyers inside, only to be violently attacked. Over the next few hours, the Cincinnati couple were beaten with a wooden candle stick, pliers, a crowbar and a knife. Marlene Waters died of her bludgeon wounds but her husband recovered – albeit permanently disabled – and was able to describe the pair to the police. Meanwhile the couple had stolen the Waters’ car and they continued their victim-hunt.

They drove into a car wash and realised that they could kidnap Eugene Scott, the seventy-seven-year-old owner. The unfortunate man was stabbed repeatedly and shot four times in the head. Debra Brown would still be carrying the .38 calibre pistol when she was arrested and had ammunition for it, though there are conflicting reports over whether the weapon was loaded or not.

The destructive couple dumped Eugene Scott’s body in a ditch just outside Indianapolis and drove off in his car, returning to their favourite locale of Illinois. He would be their last victim in a pointless killing spree which lasted fifty-three days.

Luckily an Illinois resident now recognised Alton Coleman as he’d been on America’s Most Wanted. He called the police and the couple were found watching a baseball game. Tired and unkempt, they didn’t put up a struggle when arrested and taken into custody, though both gave false names.

Several trials followed. In Cincinnati in May 1985 the couple were tried separately for the murder of Marlene Waters. In court, Debra Brown said ‘I killed the bitch and I don’t give a damn.’ Strangely, she was merely given life imprisonment for this murder whilst Alton Coleman was given the death penalty.

The following year they were taken to Indiana to face trial for the murder of Tamika Turks. Debra Brown slipped the judge a note which said ‘I’m a more kind and understandable and lovable person than people think I am.’ Fortunately he judged her on her trail of carnage rather than her words, and both she and her co-killer got the death sentence. Two months later they were tried separately for Tonnie Stewart’s murder and both given the death sentence again. But an Ohio governor commuted one of Brown’s death sentences to life imprisonment in 1991 saying that she was retarded and had been under Coleman’s spell.

Moments before the Vernita Wheat trial started in January 1987, Debra signed a legal document saying that she was now Alton’s common law wife and he immediately reciprocated. He was subsequently found guilty of Vernita’s kidnapping and murder and sentenced to death.

They weren’t tried for all eight murders as prosecutors decided to concentrate on the cases with the most damning evidence and those in states which still had the death penalty.

In 1997 Debra Brown launched an appeal to get her Indiana death sentence overturned. Predictably, her cause was picked up by the feminist movement who believe she
murdered eight people solely because she feared her man. But she had relatives who cared for her so wasn’t completely dependent on him – and her own testimony in court suggests she enjoyed terrorising their victims, killing two of them and forcing at least one child to give her oral sex.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, Alton Coleman worked his way through the appeals process but on 26th April 2002 he entered the execution chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He asked to speak to Debra Brown but this request was refused. One of his sisters spoke to him on the telephone as his execution neared but none of his relatives were present at the prison.

So many survivors and relatives of his victims wanted to watch him being put to death that closed-circuit television had to be installed in an ante room. But, one of the survivors who got to view his death in person was Harry Waters who was accompanied by two of his son-
in-laws
. Mr Waters had watched his forty-four-year-old wife being bludgeoned to death by the couple – and his own head injuries have left him permanently disabled, with fragments of bone lodged in his brain.

The witnesses watched as the forty-six-year-old serial killer was strapped down and began reciting the 23rd Psalm. At 10am the lethal cocktail of drugs was administered and at 10.13 he was pronounced dead.

Meanwhile, the nine-year-old who was beaten and sexually assaulted by Coleman & Brown still has nightmares and appalling headaches. The traumatic experiences have left her unable to trust anyone, and one
of her close relatives has since attempted suicide.
Anti-death-penalty
supporters continue to champion Debra Brown who is currently the only woman on Death Row at the Ohio Reformatory For Women.