EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (25 page)

Pol Pot

He called himself ‘Brother Number One’ when the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Pen, the Cambodian capital, on 17 April 1975. As his
nom de guerre
, however, the name by which history would remember him, he coined Pol Pot – a shortened version of the French words
Politique Potentiale
that the Chinese had used for him.

From 1975 until 1979, Pol Pot, leader of the communist Khmer Rouge, imposed a kind of collective national psychopathic behaviour on his country in pursuit of political ideals. It was a programme of extermination, torture and ethnic cleansing that resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 750,000 and 1.7 million people, around twenty-six per cent of the entire Cambodian population. In fact, some estimates put the numbers even higher – it may, according to these sources have been as many as three million.

Interestingly, although Pol Pot attempted to impose an agrarian and social revolution on Cambodia, of which the peasant class was the heart, he was himself a member of the landowning class, having been born as Saloth Sar in 1925, in Kampong Thom Province, to a fairly well-off family of Chinese-Khmer origins. He attended a Catholic school in Phnom Penh but was often a visitor at the royal palace where his sister was a concubine of the king, Sisowath Monivong.

He was not the best of students during his time at an exclusive school in the capital and moved to a technical school where he earned a scholarship that sent him to France to study radio electricity in Paris. He remained in France from 1949 until 1953 during which time he joined the French Communist Party (FPC), espousing its anti-colonial stance.

Once again, he did not progress in his studies, returning to Cambodia in 1954. In France he had become a member of a secret Marxist cell that had taken control of the Khmer Student’s Association. On his return to his homeland, he began working for this fledgling Cambodian Communist group, evaluating groups in South-east Asia engaged in rebellion against their governments.

When Cambodia was given independence by the 1954 Geneva Conference, the Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk began playing the different parties off against each other, suppressing what he believed to be extremist groups with force. The elections of 1955 were corrupt and many leftists realised that they would never gain power by peaceful means. While teaching French history and literature at a private college, Saloth worked closely with the parties of the left.

A purge by the king of elements of the left, put Saloth in a position where he could become leader of the party. In 1963, he was elected Secretary of the Central Committee and was forced into hiding. He hid on the Vietnamese border, making contact with North Vietnamese units who were fighting the war against South Vietnam.

The Vietnamese helped Saloth establish a base camp where he worked with his lieutenants on devising an ideology for the Khmer Rouge, as he called his party. To some extent, he followed the example of Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, declaring the rural peasant farmer to be the true working class proletarian and the starting point of the revolution. His movement increased its membership as the king imposed more and more repressive sanctions on the country.

In January 1968, Saloth launched a national uprising, attacking an army base at Battambang. The attack was seen off by the Cambodian army but Saloth’s men captured a number of weapons.

His leadership style began to change at this point. Decisions were no longer made on a collective basis. He began to act like an absolutist ruler of his party and had his own compound and private staff.

In 1970, Sikanouk was removed by his government as head of state but the North Vietnamese persuaded him and Saloth to work together to bring down the government. The North Vietnamese played a large part in the insurgency, invading Cambodia with 40,000 men and advancing to within fifteen miles of Phnom Penh. Saloth and his men did not participate in a major way in North Vietnam’s war against the Cambodian government, but while it was going on, he was building his own army and carrying out political indoctrination and education programmes in Cambodian villages. By early 1972, he had an army of 35,000 troops that could be supplemented by 100,000 irregulars, funded with $5 million a year provided by the Chinese.

The first signs of his need for absolute control became evident around this time when he forced minorities to abandon their traditional styles of dress and adornment in favour of Cambodian styles. He also endorsed a programme of making all land holdings the same size. All means of public transport were banned, such as bicycles and mopeds. They were policies designed to please the peasants who had none of these things anyway and to disenfranchise the wealthier town and city dwellers.

As the Vietnamese began to withdraw, the Khmer Rouge began to make progress. Many lives were lost during efforts to capture Phnom Penh in 1973 but by the middle of the year, he controlled two-thirds of the country. He besieged the city and launched a series of purges of government officials and educated people.

An uprising by the Cham minority in regions the Khmer Rouge controlled was followed by Saloth’s orders to torture rebels. It was an experiment that would later be extended to the entire population of the country.

Between 1969 and 1973, the Americans had been bombing Vietnamese bases in eastern Cambodia, the result of which was an influx of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian peasants into Phnom Penh. It played into Pol Pot’s hands, of course, as the country became increasingly destabilised, both economically and militarily. When the Americans finally withdrew from Vietnam, the corrupt and incompetent Cambodian government also lost its American support. Pol Pot and his army of teenage peasant guerrillas marched into the capital. On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia and, renaming the country the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, Pol Pot began his revolution.

His first step was to declare: ‘This is Year Zero’. He announced that he was going to purify Cambodian society. Where once western cultural influences, city life, religion and capitalism had featured, he was introducing an extreme form of peasant communism.

Foreigners were immediately expelled from the country, embassies closed, religion banned, and all foreign medical and economic aid was prohibited. Newspapers, radio, and television stations were closed and mail and the use of the telephone were limited. Money was withdrawn from circulation and businesses were wound up, education halted, health care banned and parental authority was done away with.

As he had been taking over the country, Pol Pot had discovered that it had been difficult to force the inhabitants of towns and cities to adhere to socialist tenets. They would quickly revert to their old capitalist habits. He concluded that the only answer was to send the entire populations of the country’s conurbations into the countryside to work. Remarkably, all of Cambodia’s towns and cities were forcibly evacuated. The 2,000,000 inhabitants of Phnom Penh were sent into the countryside on foot and at gunpoint. It was done under the pretext of a threat of American bombing raids and it is thought that in this one action, Pol Pot was responsible for around 20,000 deaths.

The fields in which these vast numbers of people had to work became known as the ‘Killing Fields’. They effectively became slaves and overwork, malnutrition and disease accounted for tens of thousands of deaths. People had to survive for two days on just a 180-gram tin of rice. Work began at four in the morning, ending at ten at night, with little rest and armed guards watching over them, ready to open fire at the slightest opportunity. They were allowed a day off every ten days. They were often harvesting fruit and rice, but were forbidden to eat any.

But life was cheap to the Khmer Rouge. To build their new agrarian communist utopia, they estimated they would need around two million people. The rest were superfluous. As they chillingly announced, ‘To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss.’ Hundred of thousands were forced to dig their own graves in shackles and were then beaten to death with iron bars and farming implements. The soldiers had been warned not to waste bullets.

Pol Pot now launched a series of purges in an effort to exterminate remnants of the society that had existed before Year Zero. Before his seizure of power, he had compiled a list of people to be killed following a Khmer Rouge victory. It originally contained seven names and then expanded to twenty-three, incorporating all senior government leaders and the leadership of the army and police force. It spread much wider, however. The wealthy and the educated were killed. Buddhist monks, teachers, doctors, lawyers and government officials were murdered alongside their families. The crippled and disabled were targeted and he even had many of his own colleagues, who had fought alongside him, shot or axed to death.

People were forbidden to gather in groups of more than two and children were taken from their parents and forced to live in communes. Mass arranged marriages were held.

As many as 20,000 people were tortured at a school in Phnom Penh, but often just being a suspect was enough to have someone shot, without the need for any questioning. Victims suffered the removal of toenails, suffocation and the horror of being skinned while still alive.

Ethnic groups fared just as badly just for being different. Of the 450,000 people of Chinese origin living in Cambodia at the time, fifty per cent were killed.

By 1977, relations with Vietnam had begun to deteriorate, leading to clashes along the two countries’ border. In May, Vietnamese planes attacked Cambodia and in the autumn Cambodian troops were making forays into Vietnamese territory. In December, 50,000 Vietnamese troops invaded but were driven back. Negotiations broke down and Vietnam invaded again in late 1978 with the objective of unseating the Khmer Rouge government. When the Cambodian army was defeated, Pol Pot fled from Phnom Penh to the border with Thailand where he lived for the next six years, trying to regroup.

He resigned from the party in 1985, due to asthma, but remained de facto leader of the Khmer Rouge. Day-to-day power was transferred to the successor he had hand-picked – Son Sen. In 1986, Pol Pot, now sixty-one years old, had to travel to China for treatment for cancer of the face. Returning to Cambodia, he refused to talk peace and continued the struggle against the coalition government now ruling the country. In 1995, he had a stroke that left him paralyzed down his left side.

The government had a policy of encouraging individuals in the Khmer Rouge to defect or make peace. When Son Sen tried to make a settlement with the government in 1997, Pol Pot had him executed and also ordered the killing of eleven members of his family.

Eventually, he was arrested in November 1997, presented to the world in a show trial and sentenced to house arrest for life.

On 15 April, it was announced that the Khmer Rouge had agreed to hand Pol Pot over to an international tribunal. Later that same night, he died in bed. It was claimed that his death was due to heart failure, but there were inevitable suspicions that he had either committed suicide or been poisoned. No one would ever find out. He was cremated within days of his death before his body could be inspected.

Ivan Milat 

And the Backpacker Murders

Englishman Paul Onions was one of the thousands of backpackers who arrive in Australia annually from around the world, eager to explore its vast wastes and exciting cities. He was having the time of his life, but despite living modestly and staying in a backpacker’s hostel in Sydney’s Kings Cross area, his funds were disappearing fast and casual work was not easy to find. Someone told him that fruit picking paid good money and, determined to prolong his stay in the country, he headed for the Riverina area, a few hundred miles southwest of Sydney. To save money, he took a train to the city of Liverpool and started hitchhiking from there. The Hume Highway that runs for around 550 miles from Sydney to Melbourne would take him where he wanted to go and before long he was standing by the side of the road, sticking his thumb out.

After a while he walked to a small shopping centre to buy a drink. As he was standing there a fit, well-built man approached and enquired whether he wanted a lift. Paul climbed into the stranger’s four-wheel drive and they headed south. The man told him his name was Bill and asked him a lot of questions about his trip and where he was from. He was pleasant enough at first, but as the journey progressed, he seemed to become angry, making racist comments. Then he turned morose and clammed up.

After they left the town of Mittagong, Paul noticed that Bill’s driving was becoming erratic and became edgy when he saw him constantly looking in his rear-view mirror. Bill suddenly brought the vehicle to a stop, announcing that he was going to get some cassette tapes from the back. Paul was puzzled because there were tapes in a space between the seats. He decided to get out as well, but as he did so, Bill snarled menacingly at him to get back in the car. He did so but when Bill climbed back in he reached down beneath his seat and pulled out a large black revolver which he pointed at the Englishman. ‘This is a robbery,’ he said, also pulling out a length of rope. Paul asked him what he thought he was doing before grabbing the door handle, throwing open his door and jumping out.

He ran out into oncoming traffic, cars swerving to avoid him. A van approached and he threw himself in front of it, forcing the driver, Joanne Berry to stop. He jumped in beside her, shouting that the guy in the four-wheel drive had a gun. She thought for a moment – she had her sister and her four children in the back of the van, after all – but seeing the terror in the Englishman’s eyes, she put her foot down on the pedal and sped off in the direction of the nearest police station.

Astonishingly, no one acted on Paul Onions’ story. He made a statement and waited to hear something, but no one contacted him and he returned to England where he tried to forget about the day a gun was pulled on him.

He had been lucky, though. The man who had given him a lift was Ivan Milat, one of Australia’s most prolific serial killers, a man known to have killed seven times, but actually believed to have possibly been responsible for around thirty.

Ivan Robert Marko Milat was born in 1944 into a large Yugoslavian immigrant family. Not much is known about his childhood, apart from the fact that his family life was isolated and rural and he had thirteen siblings. He developed a love of hunting and guns from an early age and along with his brothers gained a reputation in the neighbourhood for wildness and lawlessness. The local police became very familiar with the road to the Milat farm.

In 1971, Ivan was charged with the rape of two female hitchhikers, but when the prosecution failed to produce enough evidence, he was acquitted.

However, he had, undoubtedly, got a taste for the kidnapping and assaulting of backpackers. By the early 1990s, it was a taste he was indulging in regularly.

Belango State Forest is located south of Berrima in the Southern Highlands, a couple of miles west of the Hume Highway. On 20 September 1992, two men taking part in an orienteering competition were running near a spot called Executioner’s Drop when they both noticed a terrible smell. They had a look at what appeared to be a pile of debris and to their horror found human remains.

There was immediately speculation that the two bodies that were uncovered might belong to some of the backpackers who had mysteriously vanished during the past few years. There were four Germans missing, a couple of British girls and two Australians, from Victoria.

Police confirmed that the bodies were actually those of the English girls, Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters who had disappeared in Sydney’s Kings Cross district in April. Joanne had been viciously stabbed in the heart and lungs. The killer had been powerful; her spine had been cut and two ribs had been completely severed. As well as being stabbed, Caroline had also been shot in the head a number of times. It was later established that the bullets in her skull had been fired from three different directions. The killer, it seemed, had used her head for target practice.

A fireplace had been built with bricks and six cigarette butts were found; the killer had spent a considerable amount of time there. They were certain that the killer was familiar with the area and was, therefore, likely to be a local man. The killing of Caroline was not sexual, but more like an execution, carried out by someone who liked to exert control over people. They also believed that there might have been more than one person involved. Joanne’s attack, however, had been frenzied and was thought to have had more of a sexual element – her shirt and bra had been pushed up and, strangely, the zipper of her jeans was undone, but the button was still fastened. Her underwear was missing, believed to have been taken as a ‘trophy’ by the killer. Chillingly, the profiler involved believed that the girls had been killed for pleasure.

A massive search of the area revealed nothing further and the police stated that they were confident there were no more bodies in the forest.

A few months later, as the investigation was scaling down without any further developments, Bruce Pryor was driving on an unfamiliar road in the forest. He came to a bare, rocky area where he noticed a small fireplace built from rocks. Getting out to have a look, he was shocked to see a bone lying on the ground that looked surprisingly like a human thigh-bone. Investigating further, he noticed something white in the undergrowth. It was a human skull.

There were two bodies, a man and a woman, police thought. A black floppy felt hat found in the vicinity told them that the victims were most likely James Gibson and Deborah Everist, a couple from Victoria who had been missing since 1989. Curiously, however, Gibson’s backpack and camera had been found seventy-eight miles north of the Belangalo Forest. It seemed that the killer had been trying to divert their attention from the forest in their search for the young Victorians.

Although only the couple’s skeletons remained, it became apparent that both had been stabbed a number of times. Deborah Everist’s skull had been fractured several times and she had slash marks on her forehead. A bra was found with a stab wound through one of the cups and it looked as if a pair of tights that were found had been used as a restraint of some kind.

The forest was now exhaustively searched by forty officers as well as specially trained sniffer dogs.

Meanwhile, it was established that bullets and casings found at the scene were from a Ruger repeating rifle but it was estimated that there were probably around 50,000 such rifles in Australia at that time. Gun clubs and local gun-owners were questioned. One man contacted them and gave a detailed description of two vehicles that he had seen in the forest the previous year. In them, he claimed he had seen a man and a woman who appeared to be bound. The man’s name was Alex Milat.

Twenty-six days after the discovery of the bodies of Everist and Gibson, a search team reached a small clearing where they found a pair of pink women’s jeans and a length of blue and yellow rope. They also found a fireplace, as in the other two locations. An officer stopped and raised his arm above what looked like a bone lying on the ground. A little further on lay a human skull, wearing a distinctive purple headband.

Simone ‘Simi’ Schmidl was an adventurous German backpacker who had travelled the world and had then fallen off the edge of it on 20 January 1991, last seen hitchhiking out of Liverpool in the direction of Sydney.

She was partly clothed, her shirt and underclothes were pushed up around her neck and she had multiple stab wounds. Strangely, the pink jeans belonged not to her, but to another missing German girl, Anja Habschied, and it was not long before they found her, as well as another body, that of her companion, Gabor Neugebauer. The two had gone missing from Kings Cross just after Christmas 1991.

Gabor had been strangled and shot with the same type of bullets used in the other murders, but there was one striking difference with Anja’s remains. Her head and top two vertebrae were missing and she had no other wounds. Forensic scientists chillingly concluded that her head had been cut off using a sharp instrument like a sword or machete. She had been kneeling when it was done and they concluded that the killer had attempted to re-create a ritual execution of some kind.

It was an extraordinary case in which it seemed almost as if the murderer was experimenting with different types of torture and killing. The seven victims had died in a variety of ways – beaten, strangled, shot and decapitated. Both men and women victims had been sexually assaulted in some way – often their zippers were down although the top buttons of their trousers were always fastened. The killer also seemed to spend time with his victims. Police described the killer as cruel and sadistic as well as calculating and confident.

The authorities were swamped with information, but gradually they began to develop suspicions about the Milat family. Then, they got the break they had been waiting for when Paul Onions’ escape from a gun-wielding man in 1991 emerged. They flew him over from Britain and he identified Ivan Milat as his attacker.

In the early hours of 22 May 1994, police surrounded Milat’s property and ordered him to come out. Inside they found a huge amount of evidence linking him to the killings – sleeping bags, clothing and camping equipment belonging to the victims. They also found an arsenal of weapons and ammunition. A long, curved cavalry sword was discovered in a locked cupboard at Milat’s mother’s house. It was probably used to behead Anja Habschied.

Before long, ballistic results proved that one of his guns had been used in the attacks and Milat was charged with the seven murders as well as with the attack on Paul Onions.

At his 1996 trial, the most sensational in Australian history, Milat took the extraordinary step of claiming that he had been set up by other members of his large family. The jury did not believe him, however, and, found guilty on all charges, he was sentenced to seven life sentences.

Incarcerated in the maximum security wing of Goulburn prison, Milat swore that he would seize every opportunity to escape, almost succeeding in May 1997. The prison authorities foiled the breakout and Milat’s accomplice was found mysteriously hanged in his cell the next morning.

It is thought that Milat started killing long before 1989 and he has been questioned about many other disappearances although no charges have yet been brought in those cases. Nonetheless, his brother, Boris, in hiding from the other members of his violent family, has told the media, ‘the things I can tell you are much worse than what Ivan's meant to have done. Everywhere he's worked, people have disappeared, I know where he's been.’