Serial Killers: Murder Without Mercy

By Nigel Blundell

Charles Manson, Aileen Wuornos, Burke & Hare, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, and other remorseless serial murderers whose crimes made history.
 
From Victorian era graveyards to a rented room in Paris to an isolated Indian farm and the California hills, the shocking murders collected in this true crime anthology span the century and the continents. The motivations are just as varied: sex, greed, bloodlust, hatred, and the sheer thrill of it all. But the more than thirty serial killers profiled here share one perverse trait: they killed without conscience, regret, or shame.
 
Money did it for dapper French ladykiller Henri Landru, homicidal housewife Nannie Doss, Lady Bluebeard Belle Gunness, and Lonely Hearts Killers, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. Deadly desires moved Green River Killer Gary Ridgway, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, and John Christie, whose Notting Hill home was a burial ground. And rage was the trigger for Edmund Kemper, who used his mother’s head for a dart board, and for nomadic prostitute Aileen Wuornos who turned her tricks into road kill.
 
In crime journalist Nigel Blundell’s criminally fascinating collection, you will meet the loners, outcasts, lethal lovebirds, twisted fetishists, pleasure seekers, body snatchers, and angels of death who are the very definition of cold-blooded.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848847392

Nigel Blundell

NIGEL BLUNDELL is a journalist who has worked in Australia, the United States and Britain. He spent twenty-five years in Fleet Street before becoming a contributor to national newspapers. He is author of more than 50 factual books, including best-sellers on celebrity and crime.

Book preview

Mercy.

Raymond Fernandez … Martha Beck

Unlikely lovebirds who became the ‘Lonely Hearts Killers’

She was a nurse, dedicated to preserving life. He was a war hero, credited with also saving lives. Together, they should have been a power for good. But when these two lovebirds teamed up, their liaison was an emotional powerhouse of pure evil. The unlikely couple were Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, and they became notorious as the ‘Lonely Hearts Killers’.

Raymond Martinez Fernandez was born to parents of Spanish descent on the island of Hawaii on December 17, 1914. At the age of 17, he sailed to Spain to work on an uncle’s farm. Two years later he married a local girl and fathered a son but left the farm at the outbreak of World War II when recruited by British Intelligence. Neutral Spain was a hotbed of espionage and little is known about Fernandez’s exploits, although a post-war report from Britain’s spy base in Gibraltar described him as an operative who was ‘entirely loyal to the allied cause and carried out his duties, which were sometimes difficult and dangerous, extremely well’. After the war, Fernandez left his wife and child in Spain to return to the US but on the voyage across the Atlantic an accident occurred that changed his life irrevocably. A steel hatch fell on him, fracturing his skull and causing permanent brain damage. He lost his thick dark hair and wore a toupee to hide the scar on his head. His personality was altered for the worse. He became distant, moody and quick to anger. He grew obsessed with black magic and voodoo. The accident, it is believed, also turned him into a potential murderer.

The background of his eventual partner in crime was as different as could be. Martha June Seabrook was born on May 6, 1920, in Milton, Florida, and suffered childhood taunts because of her obesity, caused by a glandular condition. Reclusive, friendless, and cowed by a domineering mother, Martha became sexually precocious after being raped by her brother when she was just 13. After attending nursing college in Pensacola, in 1942 Martha took a job at an Army hospital in California, where she became pregnant by a soldier on leave. Upon hearing the news, the father rejected her and even attempted suicide–so, upon returning to Florida, she reinvented him as a ‘dead war hero’. The story of her tragic romance appeared in the local press and Martha briefly became a local celebrity. She became pregnant again in 1944, and this time the father, bus driver Alfred Beck, married her. Six months later, however, they divorced.

By contrast to her private life, Martha Beck’s professional career was a success story. As a dedicated, well-qualified nurse in the children’s unit at Pensacola Hospital, she wrote at the time: ‘I chose this profession without thought of self, not for material gains but for the purpose of aiding humanity and rendering service to others.’ She was promoted to superintendent. But away from the hospital, her romantic disappointments caused her to immerse herself in a dream world of slushy movies, bodice-ripping books and cheap true romance magazines. She also joined a lonely-hearts club and placed an advertisement in the hope of finding a partner–though she failed to mention her 250-pound weight and her two young children. She received a reply from a correspondent living in New York City, describing himself as a lonely businessman seeking a wife. After a further flurry of correspondence–in which Martha was told ‘I know you have a full heart with a great capacity for comfort and love’–her ardent penfriend took a bus to Pensacola in December 1947.

The first meeting between Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez must have been a strange occasion. She was fearful that the sight of her vast bulk would be immediately off-putting to her suitor. She could not have known that her appearance mattered not a jot to Fernandez–because he was a smooth-talking confidence trickster who made his living by poring over lonely-hearts columns, callously flattering the gullible advertisers, then fleecing them. Beck was to have been just another of his victims but when he discovered she was too poor to be worth conning, he returned to New York and wrote a letter ending the romance. Besotted Martha was having none of it, however, and pursued him to New York with her two children. Fernandez would only allow her stay at his apartment if she dumped them, so in January 1948 she dropped them off at a Salvation Army home. Then the pair began a strangely passionate liaison, no doubt helped by the fact that Beck was romance-obsessed and that Fernandez was into kinky sex.

Despite all the odds, the pair fell in love and became a killing team. The con-artist and his 200-pound lady love travelled the USA targeting vulnerable women, stealing from them and murdering as many as 20 in little over two years. Just as before, Fernandez would pick out women from the lonely-hearts column of local papers, charm them and con them. But now, with Martha’s help, he would also murder them.

The pair posed as brother and sister to befriend their victims, the first of whom was Janet Fay a 66-year-old widow, whom Fernandez met in New York. In December 1948 Fernandez promised marriage but, having stolen her savings, invited her to a Long Island flat he shared with his ‘sister’. There she was bludgeoned unconscious with a hammer and strangled by Fernandez. The couple cleaned up the mess together then calmly went to sleep. Next day they bought a large trunk, stuffed Janet’s body in it, rented another, ground-floor flat, buried the trunk in the cellar, covered it in cement, waited four days for it to harden, then moved out.

Other wealthy widows were targeted, with Beck generally staying in the background as Fernandez entrapped them. He would eventually introduce the starry-eyed victim to Beck, pretending that she was his sister. In many cases, Beck would move in to the woman’s home along with Fernandez as marriage plans were made. This was the case with widow Delphine Dowling, 28, who in 1949 allowed Beck to stay with her and her two-year-old daughter, Rainelle, at their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. However, she delayed marrying Fernandez until she ‘was sure of Raymond’s affections’.

As the phoney romance progressed, Martha became incredibly jealous. After robbing Delphine of what money and possessions they could, the pair forced sleeping pills down her neck before Fernandez shot her in the head and buried her in the cellar. When little Rainelle would not stop crying for her mother, Martha drowned her in a washtub and buried her alongside her mother.

The double murder proved their undoing. Police, tipped off by suspicious neighbours, called at the house and found Martha and Fernandez in the process of packing their bags to leave. After uncovering the bodies from under a concrete slab in the cellar, they arrested the killers and linked them with the deaths of 17 other lonely-hearts throughout the country. Awaiting trial, both confessed to the Fay and Dowling murders yet stubbornly denied the string of other killings. Fernandez suddenly recanted his confession when told that he was being moved from Michigan, which had no death penalty, to New York State, which did. There, the couple were tried for the Albany murder.

The trial at the Bronx Criminal Court caused a sensation with its lurid details of sex and cold-hearted killing. In a statement, Beck said: ‘I can still hear it. The blood was dripping, dripping, dripping and sounded like it could be heard all over the house.’ There was a further sensation when she detailed kinky voodoo-style sex acts in which she and Fernandez had indulged. From jail, she also sent a series of steamy letters to newspapers with further details of their sexual exploits. On one occasion, when called to the witness stand, Beck strode forward in bright green shoes, her massive body swathed in bright silks, and suddenly detoured towards Fernandez. She pulled his face towards her and kissed him on the mouth, leaving him smeared in lipstick.

Defence attorneys for the couple submitted pleas of insanity but on August 22, 1949, Judge Ferdinand Pecora handed the impassive pair sentences of execution. As they awaited execution at Sing Sing prison, they were visited by Elmer Robinson, the principal detective on their case, who told them: ‘My life is a never-ending sewer of maggots like you but in a year or two I won’t even remember your name; you’ll just be another case file stamped Closed.’

He was wrong, for their story of perverted love and merciless murder is still one of the most infamous cases in American criminal history and has been the subject of two Hollywood movies. But the real-life story of the Lonely Hearts Killers is more sensational than most Hollywood scripts. Voicing their last words from Death Row, Fernandez said: ‘What do the public know about love? I wanna shout it out: I love Martha!’ Beck responded: ‘My story is a love story–but only those tortured by love can know what I mean. Imprisonment in the Death House has only strengthened my feeling for Raymond.’

They were both electrocuted at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951. Although Fernandez had not felt up to enjoying his proffered last meal, Beck had no problem tucking into a double portion of fried chicken and potatoes. Possibly as a consequence, she had difficulty fitting into the electric chair, so died squeezed across the arm rests.

Peter Sutcliffe

The terrifying trucker who ‘felt an innercompulsion to kill’

When it was first revealed that Peter Sutcliffe, who butchered 13 women in a five-year reign of terror, was attempting to regain his freedom, there was nationwide outrage. The man once known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ but now hiding under his mother’s maiden name Peter ‘Coonan’ had, for more than a year, been the subject of a legal challenge that had been secretly proceeding through the courts. When in July 2010 it was finally ruled that Sutcliffe could never seek parole but must spend the rest of his life in custody, relatives of his victims welcomed the decision which, said a judge, was based on the ‘brutality and gravity’ of his crimes. That the Ripper had even been allowed to pursue a legal challenge to his lifetime sentence had horrified the families because, as they volubly pointed out, Sutcliffe had been the subject of the biggest manhunt in British criminal history and it had taken 13 deaths and five years of untold misery to get him locked up in the first place.

Sutcliffe, a married truck driver, conducted his murder spree in Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1970s, claiming that God had called on him to kill women. As he subsequently explained to his younger brother Carl: ‘I were just cleaning up the streets, our kid. Just cleaning up the streets.’ In 1981 Sutcliffe received 20 life sentences for the 13 murders and for seven attempted murders, and the judge’s recommendation was that he serve a minimum of 30 years behind bars. Three years later, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and transferred to Broadmoor secure hospital, Berkshire. The move meant that the clinically insane killer could be held indefinitely. More than 25 years later, however, his lawyers claimed he had recovered and was fit to return to society.

Peter William Sutcliffe, the eldest of five children, was born on June 2, 1946, into the tough environment of a council estate in the northern industrial town of Bingley. In contrast to his father John, who was a famed local footballer, cricketer and actor, Peter was shy, self-conscious and timid. Small and weedy, he was destined to be close to his mother for many years. Bullied at school, he finished his education at 15 and took several menial jobs such as labouring and as a gravedigger at the local cemetery. He joked at the time about having ‘thousands of people below me where I work now’.

Deeply introverted, Peter showed no interest in girls until meeting the equally reserved Sonia Szurma, daughter of Czech refugees, and the pair embarked on a seven-year courtship until they married and moved in with Sonia’s parents in the more upmarket Heaton area of Bradford. What drove this quiet ‘mummy’s boy’ to become a merciless serial killer? No clues emerge in his close, almost secretive, relationship with Sonia. According to other members of the Sutcliffe family, the couple seemed to live in a private world of their own and tried to cut themselves off from his more outgoing siblings. Before their marriage, Peter had been shocked to discover that Sonia had already had a relationship with one former boyfriend. But the greatest trauma in his young life appeared to be the revelation that his attractive mother, Kathleen, had been having an affair with a neighbour, a local policeman. Upon discovering the relationship, John Sutcliffe shamed his wife by dragging Peter and Sonia along to confront her publicly in the lounge of the Bingley hotel that had become her love nest.

John Sutcliffe later said he believed that the shock of Kathleen’s affair could have been the trigger that turned son Peter into a woman hater. ‘It shook him rigid,’ said his father. ‘He worshipped his mother and I think now that what I did turned his mind.’ If that were the case, it might begin to explain why later that same year, 1969, the mild mannered Peter Sutcliffe carried out his first known attack–placing a stone within a sock and coshing a Bradford prostitute over the head in a row over a disputed payment. The girl survived, and it is not known how many other similarly violent forays Sutcliffe may have made into the seedy red-light districts of Northern England’s old industrial heartland. But in 1975, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ struck in earnest. On the chill morning of October 30, the half-naked body of 28-year-old prostitute Wilma McCann was found on a playing field in Leeds. She had been battered and stabbed and, judging by the extent of her numerous injuries, the killer had carried out his grisly task with relish.

A pathologist’s report subsequently revealed that Wilma had been struck twice on the back of the head with a hammer, shattering her skull. Her clothes had been pulled apart and 14 stab wounds inflicted to chest and stomach–all after death. What had first appeared to have been just another routine murder, the fatal attack upon a prostitute by one of her sick clients, now became something more sinister. Leeds CID put out a memo to all divisions asking for help in trapping the killer, part of which read: ‘The motive appears to be a hatred of prostitutes.’ That was a rare prescience on the part of detectives. For the hunt for the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was to become infamous not only for its unprecedented scale but for a string of police blunders that allowed the murderer to retain his freedom to kill and kill again.

The stabbing of Wilma McCann was to be the start of a series of murders by a maniac with the avowed aim of sweeping prostitutes from the streets. As Sutcliffe later explained: ‘I felt an inner compulsion to kill a prostitute. I knew from the outset that I didn’t want intercourse with her. I just wanted to get rid of her.’ The Yorkshire Ripper had begun his grisly mission and, in doing so, he had women throughout the North of England living in terror for five years.

It was almost three months before the Ripper struck again, on January 20, 1976. This time the target was 42-year-old prostitute Emily Jackson, found dead with horrific injuries in the Chapeltown red-light area of Leeds. The post-mortem examination found more than 50 stab wounds inflicted with a heavy-duty Phillips screwdriver, which left a distinctive star shaped penetration mark. There was also the imprint of size-seven Dunlop boot on her thigh, as though the murderer had stamped on her. But the injuries which killed Emily Jackson, and presented the police with crucial clues, were the two crushing hammer blows delivered to her head.

On May 9, a prostitute who picked up a client in Roundhay, Leeds, was attacked with a hammer. Through the fog and pain of semi-consciousness, she recalled seeing him masturbate nearby and then slipping a £5 note into her hand, warning her not to tell anyone what had happened. She also gave what would later be recognised as an excellent description of the Ripper. But because she had been diagnosed as educationally sub-normal, little heed was paid to her vital evidence. By now the police incident room was working flat out to process the hundreds of snippets of information flowing in. But as the weeks and the months passed with no further attacks, detectives became puzzled. All the psychological advice they had received was that the murderer would not be able to resist the compulsion to strike again. Why was he laying low? Had he perhaps been killed or even taken his own life?

In fact, Sutcliffe had other things on his mind. In October 1976 he came home to Sonia with the news that he had secured a well-paid job driving a truck for the haulage firm T … WH Clark, based on an industrial estate near Bradford. It gave him the opportunity to explore more distant killing grounds. His next attack, however, was close to home. On Sunday, February 6, 1977, a jogger discovered 28-year-old Irene Richardson’s body on open ground at Roundhay, Leeds. It bore all the hallmarks of a Ripper killing: body face down, death caused by hammer blows to the skull, stab wounds to the stomach. Bizarrely, her boots had been arranged carefully between her open thighs. The Ripper was back and he wanted the police to know it. Next to die was 32-year-old Patricia Atkinson, found dead in her Bradford flat on April 23. She would be the only one of the 13 victims killed indoors. Her bedsheets bore the distinctive size-seven boot mark and she died from four heavy blows to the head. There were six chisel marks found on her abdomen.

On June 26, the Ripper murdered his youngest victim, 16-year-old shop assistant Jayne MacDonald. She was not a prostitute