EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (19 page)

His trial was a circus, the case taking four years to come to court with the defence team throwing in as many delaying tactics as they could. Meanwhile, the Night Stalker played to the gallery where a bevy of female fans watched his every move, reminding some of the trial of Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ a number of years previously. He dressed in black and wore sunglasses, shouting ‘Hail to Satan!’ on occasion and displaying to the court a pentagram that had been tattooed on his palm.

The verdict was inevitable, however, and he was found guilty unanimously on each of forty-three charges. Nineteen of them had ‘special circumstances’ that made him eligible for the death penalty. He received, therefore, nineteen death sentences.

‘Dying doesn’t scare me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in hell, with Satan.’ He has been on death row at San Quentin ever since.

In an astonishing postscript, Richard Ramirez was married in prison in October 1996 to a forty-one-year-old freelance magazine editor, Doreen Lioy. The bride wore a white wedding dress with long lace sleeves while the groom was clad in a freshly starched set of prison clothes with the shirt-tail hanging out. The bride described herself as a virgin, the essential accessory for the self-respecting Satan worshipper.

Part Five: 20Th Century European Psychopathic Killers

Bela Kiss

The call to the local police station was innocent enough. It was July 1916 and a landlord had been clearing out one of his properties, his tenant having gone off to fight in the First World War and not returned, letting the lease lapse. No one knew what had happened to him – he might be a prisoner of war or even dead. The landlord had found half a dozen large steel drums at the house and thought they might contain gasoline which would be useful, given that it was in short supply. The police had in fact investigated the drums before the war when local people thought that they might contain illicit alcohol. When their owner was questioned about them, he had said that with the inevitability of war in the very near future, he had merely been stocking up on gasoline.

The owner of the steel drums, Bela Kiss, had arrived in the small Hungarian town of Cinkota, not far from Budapest, in 1900, moving into a house at 9 Kossuth Street. A good-looking and cultured man, he earned his living as a tinsmith and soon became the town’s most eligible bachelor. He had a steady stream of female companions over the years, women who seemed to come and stay with him for a few days before leaving again. By the time he was called up for the army in 1914, however, he was thirty-seven years old and still unmarried.

The landlord had become concerned about the steel drums after puncturing one. A dreadful smell emanated from inside and the chemist who had a shop next door told him that the smell was very similar to that of human decomposition.

Dr Charles Nagy, head of the detection branch of the Budapest Police, travelled out to Cinkota with another couple of detectives. There he met the landlord and Mrs Jakubec, who had been employed by Bela Kiss as a housekeeper. She was furious that these men were present on her employer’s property. Nagy, however, paid her no attention, ordering the opening of one of the drums. Inside they discovered a woman’s body, wrapped in a sack, with the rope that had been used to strangle her still around her neck. The drum was also filled with wood alcohol. In all there were seven drums, each containing the body of a woman. Each of them had been strangled and although they had been in the drums for a while, the wood alcohol had preserved them sufficiently for them to be identified. They then searched the house and garden where they were horrified to find another seventeen bodies buried. Twenty-four women had been strangled and hidden on Bela Kiss’s property.

Dr Nagy immediately contacted the army, launching a huge manhunt. Word of the grim discovery spread rapidly through Cinkota and before long the Budapest newspapers were screaming about the ‘Monster of Cinkota’. It was not going to be easy to locate Kiss, however. Thousands of Hungarian soldiers had been taken prisoner and the army was in a state of chaos, scattered and disorganised. Furthermore, there would be many men with the name Bela Kiss. It was not an uncommon name.

In the search of the house, Nagy noticed that there was one door that remained locked. Mrs Jakubec described it as Bela Kiss’s secret room, telling him indignantly that he had ordered that no one be allowed to enter it. Against her wishes, Nagy forced her to open it and inside he found walls lined with books – mostly about poisons and methods of strangulation. There was a desk in the drawer of which he found an album of photographs of around a hundred women. There were also bundles of correspondence, filed in seventy-four packets. It seemed that Bela Kiss had placed adverts in the Budapest newspapers, looking for a wife and these were the replies he had received. In all, Nagy estimated, he had received about 174 proposals of marriage, seventy-four of which he had accepted. He corresponded regularly with many of the women with some of the letters dating back as far as 1903.

Marriage, however, was not Kiss’s objective. It soon became clear that he had swindled many of these women out of their savings, sometimes taking everything they had.

Mrs Jakubec admitted that many women came to the house on Kossuth Street, but she had no idea what became of them. She did not live there and when the women were gone next time she visited, she just presumed they had gone back home again. Nagy was suspicious that she might somehow have been involved, especially when he discovered Kiss’s will leaving a substantial sum to the housekeeper.

Dr Nagy began to work out Bela Kiss’s method. It transpired that he would place his advert in the matrimonial columns of newspapers, always asking for information about a respondent’s financial status. When he received a reply from a likely woman, he would pay her a visit, lavishing money and attention on her. He always made sure to enquire about her family. He was interested only in women who would not be missed if they disappeared. The women sent him substantial sums of money, sometimes their life savings but if they began to question what he was up to or threatened to go to the police, he simply murdered them.

Katherine Varga was typical of Bela Kiss’s unfortunate victims. She had been a good-looking woman who owned a dressmaking business. She made contact with Kiss, met him, agreed to marry him, sold her business and moved to Cinkota to be with him. She had no close family and was not missed when he eliminated her.

Two women came forward, Mrs Stephen Toth and her daughter-in-law. In 1906 Mrs Toth’s daughter had gone to Budapest to work and she introduced her mother to Bela Kiss during a visit. Kiss promised Mrs Toth that if she gave him money, he would marry Margaret. She gave him the money but the marriage never took place. Mrs Toth travelled to Cinkota to confront Kiss about his broken promise and to ask for her money back. Kiss, charming as ever, explained to her that he had only wanted to delay the marriage – but that it was all academic now as Margaret had become angry with him and moved to America. Mrs Toth even received a letter written by Margaret claiming that she could not bear the pain of rejection and was leaving to find a new love in the United States. The letter had, of course been written under duress before Kiss had strangled the unfortunate girl and put her into one of his drums.

In October 1916, Nagy received information from a Serbian hospital that a soldier called Bela Kiss had died of typhoid the previous year. Then, confusingly, he heard from the hospital that Kiss was not dead. He was alive and a patient there. Nagy hotfooted it to the hospital but when he arrived in the ward in which Kiss was said to be recuperating, there was a dead man in his bed and it was not his quarry. He had heard of the approach of the policeman, had placed the body of another man in his bed and fled.

In the years to come, sightings of the Monster of Cinkota flooded in from every part of the world. In 1920, a member of the French Foreign Legion reported that he believed that a fellow legionnaire was Bela Kiss. The man, known as Hoffman, an alias that Kiss was known to use, boasted about his skill at garrotting, a skill that Kiss had put to use in Cinkota, of course. Police rushed to the barracks, but Hoffman had disappeared.

A Hungarian soldier told the authorities that Bela Kiss had been imprisoned in Romania for burglary. Someone else claimed to have seen him strolling along a Budapest street in 1919.

He was spotted in New York by a detective named Henry Oswald who was nicknamed ‘Camera Eye’ because of the particular skill he possessed for remembering faces. He claims to have seen Kiss, now in his late sixties, emerging from the Times Square subway station in 1932 but lost him in the crowds of people thronging the square. Many became convinced that the killer had fled to the United States. Some had him working as a janitor in an apartment building but once again when police officers turned up to investigate, the subject of their enquiries had vanished into thin air and that was where he stayed.

Henri Landru

The legend of Bluebeard is one that is present in many cultures – the man who marries numerous women and then kills them. In late 19th century France, a modern-day Bluebeard emerged, Henri Landru, a fraudster who ensnared eleven women and killed them, selling their possessions and cashing in their savings.

He was born in Paris in 1869, the son of a fireman at a local ironworks. He studied at the School of Mechanical Engineering before enlisting in the army where he achieved the rank of sergeant.

In 1893, he married a cousin with whom he already had a daughter and in 1894 he left the army and returned to civilian life. He was then convicted of fraud, being sent to prison for the first of seven times, reportedly attempting to commit suicide during his incarceration.

By the beginning of World War I he and his first wife had separated although they remained married. This, however, did not prevent Landru from embarking on a series of liaisons with generally vulnerable women which resulted in their disappearances and his own personal enrichment. Although not a handsome man, he seemed capable of sweeping women off their feet with his intelligence, quick wit and silver tongue. And while he was killing and robbing his female victims, he continued to defraud recently discharged soldiers of their pensions with a variety of scams and cons.

He usually found his victims through an advert placed in a newspaper. The first of these appeared in 1914 and read, ‘Widower with two children, aged forty-three, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.’ Thirty-nine-year-old Madame Cluchet, who had a sixteen-year-old son, André, answered his ad. He introduced himself to her as Monsieur Diard and she saw an opportunity to escape her life of drudgery working in a lingerie shop in Paris.

Their relationship was not without its problems and on one occasion when they had fallen out, she arrived at his house in the company of some members of her family to try to sort things out. ‘Diard’ was not home, but they went into the house anyway and had a look round. Her brother-in-law opened a chest that he found to contain numerous letters from women to Diard. He tried to persuade her sister-in-law that this was proof that her paramour was a fraud, but she would not listen. She chose Diard over her family, becoming estranged from them and moving to a villa outside Paris. She and her son were never seen again after January 1915 and around this time Landru deposited 5,000 francs – undoubtedly taken from Madame Cluchet – in his bank account.

Madame Laborde-Line was the widow of an Argentinian hotelier. She had informed friends that she was going to re-marry. Her fiancé was a Brazilian engineer. Then she announced that the wedding was taking too long to organise and that she was moving in with him anyway. She was never seen again after arriving at Landru’s villa at Vernouillet and Landru was seen at her house collecting her furniture, some of which he kept and the remainder of which went into storage.

It was a busy time for Landru. Just a month later Madame Marie Guillin, a fifty-one-year-old widow, answered an advert and travelled to Vernouillet to meet him. She moved out of her apartment shortly after, putting her furniture into storage, and moved to Vernouillet. Two days later, a furniture removal van moved her furniture to Landru’s garage at Nouilly. On this occasion, he was calling himself Georges Petit and claiming to be her brother-in-law. She had become paralyzed, he told people, and had asked him to take care of her affairs. He sold her bonds and used forged documents to get his hands on the 12,000 francs in her account at the Banque de France.

In December 1916, he moved to a new villa in the northern French village of Gambais. The first thing he did was to have a huge cast-iron oven installed and order a large quantity of coal. Then, using the name Dupont, he became acquainted with a widow nine years older than him, Madame Heon. Nine months later he was arranging the sale of her furniture. She had not been seen since December, but her friends had received postcards from her through Dupont.

Another advertisement brought him Madame Collomb. She thought she was meeting a Monsieur Cluchet. This one did not work out, however, and they separated for a year. Meeting again, she persuaded him to meet her family who took an instant dislike to the man in her life. She moved in with him but after Christmas the family lost contact with her. She had vanished.

In 1917, he disposed of a nineteen-year-old servant girl, Andrée Babelay, but it is unclear why. She had no money and had disappeared en route to her mother’s house. He found her crying on a Metro platform and she told him she had had a row with her mother and was about to lose her job. He took her back to his room in Rue de Mauberge and a couple of months later she told her mother that she was getting married. She travelled out to Gambais at the end of March and the stove was lit. She was never seen again.

Soon he was courting a Celestine Buisson, a wealthy widow. They had been writing to each other for two years before she finally met him. Using the name of Fremyet, he manipulated her affairs in such a way that she became estranged from her family in a similar way to his first victim, Madame Cluchet. She moved to be with him at Gambais, abandoning her son, who went to live with an aunt. After April 1917 Madame Buisson was never seen again and his bank account had been augmented by 1,000 francs.

Louise Leopoldine Jaume disappeared in September 1917 and around this time neighbours began to complain about the thick, smelly smoke that often emerged from his chimney. He had met her through a matrimonial agency and benefited to the tune of almost 2,000 francs from her disappearance.

Ann Marie Pascal moved in with him, calling him ‘Forest’. Before long, he was selling her furniture and even had help from Madame Pascal’s son to do so.

In spring 1918, it was the turn of Marie Therese Marchadier who had been a performer on the stage, known as ‘La Belle Mythese’. Now retired, she was running a small guesthouse at 330 Rue St. Jacques which she wanted to sell for 7,000 francs. The two having become friends, he proposed to her in January 1919. They moved out to Gambais where he persuaded her to sell her possessions. She sold her furniture in Paris for 2,000 francs and returned to Landru in Gambais where he had placed a large order for coal. She vanished as did her two dogs.

Meanwhile, he maintained a pretence that his victims were still alive, sending postcards and letters to family members and associates. In the case of Madame Jaume, he presented himself as her lawyer, claimed she was divorcing her husband and closed her bank accounts, withdrawing the money for his own use, of course.

When Madame Buisson’s son died two years after his mother had gone off with Landru, the Buisson family wanted to contact her to inform her of his death. Recalling that she had said she was running off to Gambais with a Monsieur Guillet, her sister, Madamoiselle Lacoste, wrote to the mayor of the village asking for help in finding either Madame Buisson or Monsieur Guillet. The mayor, of course, had never heard of them, but suggested that she make contact with the family of a Madame Collomb who had disappeared in similar circumstances. Madame Collomb had, of course, met Landru shortly before her vanishing trick early in 1917.

Suspicions were aroused and the police paid a visit to Landru’s estate, Villa Ermitage. He had fled, however, leaving behind a series of aliases – Messieurs Diard, Dupont and Fremiet.

Madamoiselle Lacoste was a determined lady, however. She had actually met her sister’s boyfriend and thought she would recognise him if she were to see him again. She began looking for him in the streets of Paris, close to where he used to live. Finally, in 1919 she saw him coming out of a dry goods shop with twenty-seven-year-old Fernande Segret. She followed them, but lost them in the crowds thronging the streets. Returning to the shop where she had seen him, she learned that his name was Guillet and that he lived on the Rue de Rochechouart. She informed the police who went immediately to his apartment and arrested him. When they picked him up, they noticed that he tried to keep possession of a black notebook. It was not surprising that he did not want to part with it. It was filled with notes on all his victims.

They searched the grounds of the Villa Ermitage and the house, but found only the bones of some dogs and in the ashes in the oven some bone splinters turned up, but they did find clothing and legal papers belonging to his victims.

His trial, which begun two and a half years later on 7 November 1921 at the Court of Versailles, was one of the most sensational in the history of French criminal law. Landru, who had been determinedly unco-operative with police in their investigations, maintained his innocence throughout. The women, he claimed, had merely been business clients of his and that anyway, as not one body had been found, how could he possibly be tried for murder? His neighbours gave an indication of what had happened to his victims, however, describing in court the acrid black smoke that used to swirl out of his chimney at regular intervals.

One neighbour said that he had seen Landru throw something into a pond near his house while another claimed that he had been fishing in the pond and had caught something that resembled putrid human flesh on the end of his line.

Meanwhile, Landru repeatedly refused to answer questions, claiming that it was no one’s business what he knew about the women’s disappearances. He also believed that because he had been judged sane, he would be acquitted. ‘I have nothing to say,’ he would say over and over during days of questioning in front of the jury.

The jury reacted badly to his evasions and the sarcasm with which he greeted some questions, taking only two hours to reach their verdict that he was guilty of the murder of eleven women. He was sentenced to death by guillotine.

In February 1922, he made his farewells to his legal team and presented them with a drawing he had done while awaiting the date of his execution. He knelt down and the blade fell on the head of one of the coldest-hearted mass murderers in France’s history. He never admitted to his crimes, did not explain how he had carried them out and expressed not a scintilla of remorse for the weak and vulnerable women whose lives he had taken.

Forty years later, the daughter of one of Landru’s defence lawyers, was examining the picture that Landru had given her father all those years before and that had been hanging on the wall of his office ever since. She spotted some words scribbled on its frame. They read, ‘I did it. I burned their bodies in the kitchen stove.’ Finally, Henri Landru had confessed.