Foreign Crimes

Nov. 21, 2011

Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman

During the last quarter of the Twentieth century, Dr. Harold Shipman killed his patients and got away with it.  In the process, he became the most prolific serial killer not just in Great Britain but in the Western World.  It eventually became known that he had murdered 215 patients and that he was probably responsible for killing another 69, bringing his ghastly total to 284 victims.  He may have actually murdered many more. 

by Mark Pulham

It could have been a scene from a horror movie. Men were standing in the shadows, gathered around an open grave as a heavy rain lashed down. Some light showed what they were doing. Night staff at a local nursing home watched as a coffin was raised from the black hole in the ground and taken away.

The exhumation was the first ever carried out by Greater Manchester Police, though it would not be the last.

Kathleen Grundy was 81-years-old when she had died five weeks earlier, on June 24, 1998. Though in general a woman of that age suddenly dying would not be considered unusual, for the people of Hyde it was quite a shock.

Kathleen was a fit and active woman who worked two and a half days a week at an Age Concern shop, handling their banking, and on three days of the week, she volunteered at Werneth House, a social center for pensioners, where she helped with the lunches.

For this former Lady Mayor of Hyde to have suddenly died was unthinkable.

Nov. 14, 2011

Marie Besnard

In France, in the 17^th Century, alchemists became wealthy grinding arsenic rock into a colorless and odorless powder and selling the powder to their countrymen who wanted to do away with a wealthy old parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt. There was even an “epidemic” of arsenic poisonings in the year 1670 so that the substance became known as the “succession powder.” Three centuries later, kind and homely Marie Besnard amazed her female friends when she described arsenic as an excellent substitute for divorce. They thought she was joking. But was she? 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Illness and death were no strangers to Marie Antigny, yet, cradling Auguste, her dead husband, in her arms she sobbed uncontrollably.

Marie was 31 years old and she and Auguste, who was two years her senior, had been married for seven years. The two were first cousins – her mother was his father’s sister – and Marie had fancied Auguste since she was 17 years old, but it was not until she was 18 that her parents allowed the two to step out together, and another six years had to pass before they’d given their consent for the two to walk down the aisle. By then Marie was 24 and Auguste 26, and what doctors had described previously as his weak constitution had been diagnosed as tuberculosis. It was 1920 and tuberculosis was an incurable, even untreatable illness, but in Marie’s own words, “We were in love!”

Marie was born Marie Josephine Philippine Davaillaud in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé, 200 miles south-west of Paris, in the Vienne department close to the beautiful Loire valley.  Her parents, well-to-do farmers, adored her because before she arrived, they lost two infant sons to long illnesses. Her father Pierre Eugène used to cuddle her when he came in from working his fields, and her mother Marie-Louise never failed to tell her that she loved her “for three,” including the girl’s two dead brothers in her affection.

Sept. 27, 2011

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley was, for the British public, evil personified, and was the most hated woman in Britain from the time of her arrest in 1965 until the day she died in 2002 for murdering children with her boyfriend and burying them on the Moors.

by Mark Pulham

At around 8:40 on the morning of Thursday, October 7, 1965, Bob Talbot knocked on the back door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. He wore a long white coat and carried a basket of bread under his arm. A woman opened the door and looked at him. He wasn’t the usual bread delivery man, and she told him he’d got the wrong house. The woman was tall and square-jawed, with honey-platinum hair and thick black eyebrows. Talbot would have put her age as around 35-years-old, but he would have been wrong, she had only turned 23 a few months before.

Talbot dropped the pretence. “I’m a police officer.” he said, as he stepped through the door, “Is the man of the house in?”  The newly promoted Superintendent Bob Talbot followed the woman through the kitchen and into the living room, as behind him, his Detective Sergeant Jock Carr slipped into the kitchen through the back door.

In the living room was a bed, and a man was lying on it, writing a letter. He looked up as they entered. It was a neat and tidy room, with a couple of dogs and a budgie. It was not the superintendent’s idea of what a crime scene looked like. He looked at the man and said that he believed that a murder had been committed there.

It had started less than three hours before, when a frantic call had come into Hyde Police Station. It was just after 6 a.m. when the young police constable picked up the telephone and heard the called say, “Is this Hyde Police Station?” The caller was stammering with nervousness, but told the constable his name was David Smith. He said he was speaking from Hattersley, his broad Manchester accent causing him to drop the ‘H’. There’s been a murder, Smith told him, and that he was phoning from the call box on Hattersley Road West.

March 14, 2011

John Paul Getty III

By the time John Paul Getty III died on February 5, 2011 – at age 54 – he had lost far more than the ear his Italian kidnappers had sliced off when he was 17 years old.

by Denise Noe

The old saying that “money can’t buy happiness” may never have been more dramatically illustrated than by the life of the recently deceased Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of the wealthiest man on earth. His father was scion Jean Paul Getty II and his mother was former actress Gail Harris. Paul, as Jean Paul Getty III would be called, was the oldest of four children.

It was quite unlikely that when he was born in England on November 4, 1956 that he would become best known for a crime committed against him. Grandfather J.  Paul Getty, a billionaire oil tycoon, described Paul during his early boyhood as “a bright, red-haired little rascal” and called him “most cheerful and cute.” The Los Angeles Times reported that as a toddler Paul “was said to be one of his grandfather’s favorites.” 

J. Paul Getty was often described by the moniker of The Richest Man in The World. Despite his vast fortune, he continued being a workaholic into his elderly years, putting in hours each day to try to make his almost unimaginable wealth even larger. He was also known for certain eccentricities such as an intermittent phobia of the telephone.

March 6, 2011

Mata Hari

To protect its deep infiltration into French intelligence during World War I, German intelligence conned the British and French into believing that Mata Hari was its superspy.  

by Robert Walsh

Dawn, Vincennes Barracks, October 15 1917.

Brought from her cell at the Saint-Lazare Prison less than an hour after hearing that her final appeal had been denied by the President of France, alleged superspy Mata Hari faced her firing squad seemingly calm and unafraid. She may well have led a somewhat ethically questionable life, but in death she seems to have shown considerably greater courage, fortitude and integrity than those who had conspired to place her there.

Mata Hari has long been the stuff of legend and myth, the glamorous, sexy superspy effortlessly using her feminine wiles and her physical charms to extract the highest level secrets from foolish, lecherous and indiscreet Allied officers through pillow talk before daringly passing the stolen secrets on to her German handlers. But how much spying did she actually do? What level of secrets, if any at all, did she manage to extract? Was she really the stuff of legend, a female James Bond with an equal talent for high-level espionage and flagrant promiscuity? Did she really cause the deaths of 50,000 Allied soldiers as her prosecutors claimed? Was she really, as has long been believed by so many, deserving of a place in the Pantheon of espionage legends?

November 29, 2010

Hawley Harvey Crippen

Dr. Hawley Crippen was small, balding, and meek, with large watery eyes that peered from behind gold-rimmed spectacles.  When he fled England for Quebec in the summer of 1910 with his mistress aboard the S.S. Montrose, he was wanted for the murder of his wife. Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Walter Dew was in pursuit aboard the speedier steamer, Laurentic. 

by Mark Pulham

One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1910, the world became enthralled by a transatlantic chase between two steamers. One was the White Star liner Laurentic, the other, the Canadian Pacific S.S. Montrose. Both were heading for Quebec. The world waited with excitement as each day the newspapers reported the progress of the two ships. The public’s interest was not about the ships themselves, but about who was aboard. On the Laurentic was Scotland Yards Chief Inspector Walter Dew. On the Montrose, fleeing with his lover Ethel Le Neve, was suspected wife murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.

The famous barrister Frederick Edwin Smith would later describe Crippen as “one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived in this century…A compelling and masterful personality who feared neither God nor man.”

Nov. 1, 2010

Johann "Jack" Unterweger

With the help of future Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek and other prominent Austrian literati, Jack Unterweger wrote his way out of a lifetime sentence for murder. Paroled in 1990, and now a famous crime writer himself, he embarked on a wide-ranging killing spree, murdering women in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Los Angeles. 

by Mark Pulham

Vienna. People sitting in cafés eating Sachertorte, listening to the music of Mozart and Strauss, walking through the Vienna Woods, and if you are a film buff, thinking about The Third Man. Vienna is synonymous with culture. It is not the first place anyone thinks of when you mention serial killers. Yet in the spring of 1991, particularly in the red-light district, the fear of a killer on the loose gripped the city.

It began on April 8, 1991, when a young prostitute named Silvia Zagler vanished. When last seen, she had been standing on her regular corner around 10:30 p.m. Sabine Moitzi worked in a bakery during the day. At night, unknown to her husband, she occasionally boosted her income by working as a “secret prostitute,” which meant that she was not, as is required by the laws of Vienna, registered with the Office of Health. Eight days after Zagler’s disappearance, Sabine’s friend, Ilse, dropped the 25-year-old woman off near the rail yard of the West Train Station. A short while later, she disappeared.

Sept. 23, 2010

An excerpt from the opening chapters of Marilyn Z. Tomlins’s Die in Paris, published in the United States in September of 2010 by Raider Publishing International. The book is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and borders.com.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In the early evening of Saturday, March 11, 1944, the telephone rang on the desk of the duty officer at the Porte Maillot police station house. Until that moment, Rue le Sueur in Paris’ elegant sixteenth arrondissement had made it into the news just once. That was in April 1912. That month, the French singer and actress, Léontine Pauline Aubart, from Number 17, had set sail from Southampton for New York with her lover, Benjamin Guggenheim, but she had returned to Rue le Sueur, alone and grieving. The ship she and her Ben had boarded in Southampton for the Atlantic crossing was the Titanic. Guggenheim had gone down with the ship.

Rue le Sueur would yet again be in the news.

On the phone was Jacques Marçais, a retired clerk. Jacques and Andrée, his wife, lived in an apartment at Number 22 Rue le Sueur. He was calling to report that for the past six days pestilential smoke has been pouring from the chimney of a townhouse across the street.

The duty officer did not understand why someone would think that a smoking chimney needed investigating. In 1938, world war had broken out and France had capitulated to the enemy – Nazi Germany – and, since June 1940, when the Germans had occupied northern France, which included Paris, they’d been imposing frequent power cuts on the Parisians.  It might have been spring, but it was still cold in Paris, and the Parisians had to light fires for heat. Consequently, in just about every Paris living room, a fire was roaring, and, from every Paris chimney, poured smoke.

Jacques explained. It was the chimney of an uninhabited house, and that was certainly not normal. The duty officer promised to send a patrolman over as soon as possible.