Sex Crimes

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. 12, 2011

A Predatory Priest by David Margolick is available as a Kindle Single on Amazon.com

by David Margolick

Hard by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks on the outskirts of Belen, New Mexico, on a rutted gravel driveway flanked by scrubby brush and lonely cottonwoods, Tommy Deary’s three youngest brothers walked side by side. They’d traveled a long way from Putnam, Connecticut, the small New England mill town where they’d grown up, the last three sons in a succession of 13 children, but no farther than the man they’d come to see, the man they believed to be in the house barely visible in the distance. That man had grown up only a few miles from them, but had spent the last 30 years in a strange ecclesiastical exile. Thirty years earlier, in fact, at St. Mary’s Church in Putnam, to which the Dearys, like so many Catholic families in town had flocked every Sunday, he’d briefly been one of the priests. Very briefly, it turned out, though for longer than long enough.

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.

November 22, 2010

Rodney Alcala

A registered sex-offender, Rodney Alcala got his 15-minutes of fame as a successful contestant on "The Dating Game" in 1978.  Before that appearance, he had already been convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl and had murdered four women. He would go on to murder a 13-year-old girl.

By Denise Noe

Bachelor Number One

Airing in the 1960s and 1970s, “The Dating Game” was a popular show about singles finding romance. Usually, a young woman would be on one side of a partition asking a series of quirky and often sexually suggestive questions of a trio of bachelors on the other side of it. Without seeing them, and not being allowed to ask their names, occupations, ages, or incomes, she would think over their answers during a commercial break and then select one of the three for a date.

Occasionally, the roles were reversed and a man would do the selecting from a group of three “bachelorettes.” The show did not use the term “spinsters” for its unmarried female guests probably because that word, so strongly associated with starched gingham and hair-in-a-bun prudishness, would have been out of place in the time period.

“The Dating Game” was hosted by Jim Lange who began every episode by stepping through a flower-speckled partition that suggested the “flower power” that would become a cliché in that hippie era.

In 1978, a program aired in which Lange introduced “Bachelor Number One” as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13 – fully developed.”  Lange paused while the audience laughed appreciatively at the double entendre. Then the host continued, “Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling. Please welcome Rodney Alcala.”

The audience saw Bachelor Number One, a handsome, dark-haired young man with a ready smile.

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.

The case of Dr. Edward F. Jackson combined the elements of a lurid crime novel with an almost Shakespearean theme – a brilliant, prideful physician brought down by a fatal flaw. He was a man with a Jekyll-Hyde personality. By day, he was a respected internist. At night, he was a rapist, breaking and entering women’s apartments. 

by Barbara Kussow

Dr. Edward F. Jackson’s respectable life began to unravel shortly after 6 a.m., on September 5, 1982. Jackson, a 38-year-old, prominent black physician in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested in the home of two women who were not at home at the time. In Dr. Jackson’s possession were a flashlight, ski mask, rope, gloves, pry tool, and a plastic bag. He was charged with possession of criminal tools and aggravated burglary. He was held in the Franklin County Jail on $75,000 bond, and then freed on a reduced $25,000 bond.

Three days later, local papers reported that Dr Jackson was being investigated in connection with a number of rapes occurring throughout Franklin County since the mid-1970s – rapes attributed to the so-called “Grandview Rapist,” who had worn surgical gloves during some of his attacks. (Grandview is a suburb of northwest Columbus.)

The next revelation was even more damning. Dr. Jackson was said to possess a list of 65 women and dates in his own handwriting. Many of the names on the list were known rape victims. (In a later report, the Columbus Dispatch (July 10 1984, 1B) reported that the list was disguised as a list of patients with the heading “P.I.D non GC (pelvic inflammatory disease, no gonorrhea).”