Serial Killers

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.

Oct. 31, 2011 

Special to Crime Magazine:  An excerpt from David A. Gibb’s book, Camouflaged Killer: The Shocking Double Life of Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams.  By day Williams commanded the largest military base in Canada; by night he stalked single women in their bedrooms.  What began as a fetish to steal women’s undergarments grew into a compulsion to rape and murder. 

Chapter Ten

Enemy under Fire

With true military precision, Colonel Russell Williams arrived at the Ottawa police headquarters at 3 p.m. and reported for his scheduled interview.

He was introduced to Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth, a forty-something, slightly bookish, unassuming officer in a dark suit and tie. Mild-mannered in his approach and soft-spoken by nature, Smyth was not the type of fellow one would suspect of being a police officer. In fact, much like TV’s Columbo, he probably owed much of his success to people’s innate tendencies to underestimate his talents and resolve. At six feet two, Williams’s tall and lean build dominated the smaller-framed officer.

Smyth, who had started his policing career in 1988, was one of only a half-dozen certified criminal profilers in Canada. His success as a profiler and polygraph operator for the OPP’s Behavioral Sciences and Analysis Services unit had been well documented.[1] As far as cops went, he seemed to have the proverbial Midas touch, the kind of cop most case investigators would want holding their ladder.

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.

Aug. 1, 2011

Albert Fish

Albert Fish was the real life “boogeyman” of every parent’s worst nightmare. He kidnapped young children, viciously murdered them, and ate their flesh.

by Mark Pulham

There was a knock on the door. Delia Budd opened it and found a stranger standing before her.

He was an elderly looking man, with gray hair and a gray droopy moustache. It was around 3:30 p.m., on Monday, May 28, 1928. His name, he told the large woman, was Frank Howard, and he was looking for Edward Budd. He’d come about the advertisement. His watery blue eyes looked at Delia as he held out a copy of yesterday’s edition of the New York World. Delia told him that she was Edward’s mother, and invited him in.

June 14, 2011

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream

The United Kingdom has a long history of doctors who foreswore the Hippocratic Oath and opted instead to commit at least one murder. During the time of Jack the Ripper, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream was both a serial killer and a blackmailer.                          

by Robert Walsh

”First Do No Harm…’”– A fundamental part of the Hippocratic Oath sworn by all doctors.

“I am Jack The…” – The last words of the “Lambeth Poisoner,” Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, as the gallows trapdoors fell.

The United Kingdom has, for some unknown reason, a long history of doctors who foreswore the Hippocratic Oath and opted instead to commit at least one murder. William Palmer, William Pritchard, “Buck” Ruxton, George Lamson and, most notorious of all, Doctor Crippen, right through to Harold Shipman a few years ago (although Crippen’s medical credentials are at best somewhat dubious as he was a purveyor of quack remedies and, some say, involved in illegal abortions),. Dr. Crippen is by far the most notorious, but he’s merely one of many. But Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, AKA the “Lambeth Poisoner,” while largely forgotten except by true crime enthusiasts, was once as infamous as any of them.

May 23, 2011

Dorothea Puente (Photo LA Times)

Serial killer Dorothea Puente was charming and incorrigible. 

by Mark Pulham

Charles Willgues, a retired carpenter, had been out that Wednesday afternoon to a hardware store to buy a glass cutter. Now, he sat at the bar of the Monte Carlo Tavern, a short walk from his home where he lived alone, and nursed a beer. At around 2 p.m., the door opened, and a gray-haired woman walked in. Elegantly dressed in a red pleated skirt and red high heels, she walked to the bar, took a seat at the end and ordered a screwdriver from the bartender. Willgues called down to give her a friendly warning, “The heat from the refrigerator motor comes out right where you’re sitting.”

The woman thanked him, and moved to the seat next to him. She introduced herself as 55-year-old Donna Johansson and said she had just come down to Los Angeles from Sacramento. Her husband, she explained, had died just a month before, and to escape from her grief, she had decided to make a new life in Los Angeles. She hadn’t got off to a good start. She had taken a cab from the bus station to the Royal Viking Motel, and the cab had driven off with four of her suitcases and her overnight bag. To make matters worse, the heels of her shoes, the only ones she had, were worn down from the walking she’d done looking for a place to live.

April 27, 2011

An excerpt from Mel Ayton recently published book Dark Soul of the South – The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin

by Mel Ayton

November 22, 2010

Robert Diaz (photo from San Quentin warden's office)

Robert Diaz, the nurse who killed by injecting elderly patients with Lidocaine, evades the lethal injection execution awaiting him by dying at age 72.

by Ronnie D. Smith

Over the years I had thought how ironic it would be when they executed “Lidocaine Killer” Robert Rubane Diaz by lethal injection. On August 11, 2010, Diaz, 72, died of natural causes on California’s death row. Dying of natural causes was a luxury he never afforded the dozen, helpless old people he murdered in their hospital beds by injecting them with lethal doses of the heart drug Lidocaine three decades ago in Riverside County.

I first made contact with Diaz in May 1981 when he was a 43-year-old registered nurse and I was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Riverside, California. I had gotten a tip that investigators searched his home in the Mojave Desert town of Apple Valley, California -- known then for its most famous residents, cowboy movie stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

I didn’t know as I stood at the front door of the ranch-style home Diaz had rented from a county politician that six months later the soft-spoken, cardiac care nurse would be charged with twelve first-degree murders in a case that made national headlines and plunged Southern California into a health care crisis.