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  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE: LIFERS

  George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly

  John Straffen

  Albert DeSalvo: The Boston Strangler

  Charles Manson

  David Berkowitz: Son of Sam

  Peter Sutcliffe: the Yorkshire Ripper

  Dennis Nilsen

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  Rosemary West

  Ian Huntley

  Steve Wright

  Josef Fritzl

  PART TWO: HIGH PROFILE EXECUTIONS

  William Kemmler

  Bruno Hauptmann

  Sacco and Vanzetti

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  Derek Bentley

  Eric Edgar Cooke: The Night Caller

  Timothy Evans

  Charles Starkweather

  James Hanratty

  Gary Gilmore

  Ted Bundy

  Ruben Montoya Cantu

  John Wayne Gacy

  Timothy McVeigh

  PART THREE: DEATH ROW USA

  Ray Krone

  Nick Yarris

  Richard Allen Davis

  Kenny Richey

  Michael Morales

  Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker

  Krishna Maharaj

  Karl Chamberlain

  PART FOUR: WOMEN ON DEATH ROW

  Ruth Snyder

  Ruth Ellis

  Velma Barfield

  Blanche Taylor Moore

  Karla Faye Tucker

  Judi Buenoano

  Christina Marie Riggs

  Aileen Carol Wuornos

  Lynda Cheryl Lyon Block

  Betty Lou Beets

  Darlie Lynn Routier

  Frances Elaine Newton

  Linda Carty

  Introduction

  To take the life of another human being is the ultimate act of betrayal of the very principles that separate us from the animal kingdom, a step into a place where dignity, humanity, compassion and reason are absent and can never again be found. The murderer gives up all right to be a part of the world and he or she is rightly punished with great severity, sometimes with the ultimate sanction of death, but more often by having his or her liberty removed for the remainder of his or her natural life.

  Punishment for murder is, of course, a vexed and complicated issue. The urge to execute killers has waxed and waned over the years, particularly in the United States where they still anguish over methods and ethics. California has not executed anyone for a number of years as judges argue about it and medical personnel refuse to participate in anything that might be in breach of their ethical code. Meanwhile, hundreds of people join the queue for death on death row. In fact, of the fully developed countries, only Singapore, Japan and the United States have retained the death penalty.

  Murder, nonetheless, continues to flourish.

  In Britain, capital punishment was ended in 1964 and finally banned in 1969, but many wonder if to spend the rest of your life in a prison cell might not be a worse punishment. Feeble-minded child killer, John Straffen was British legal history’s longest serving prisoner, spending fifty-six years in prison; although he also spent a considerable part of his life in other institutions. There are other prisoners for whom, as they say, life means life. Men such as the Soham murderer, Ian Huntley and the Suffolk Ripper, Steve Wright, the killer of five prostitutes in the east of England, are unlikely ever to be released. Nor will Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, a vicious and merciless murderer, ever be freed. These men are just too dangerous. Denis Nilsen, killer of fifteen young men in Cricklewood and Muswell Hill between 1978 and 1983 has acknowledged that he should not be freed and one shudders to think what an individual who kept bodies in his small flat for months to assuage his terrible loneliness, might do if released. For some, of course, life meant a very brief life. The Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, was stabbed to death at the age of forty-two by persons unknown only five years into his life sentence. American cannibal/killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, served only two years of his 957-year sentence before being bludgeoned to death by a deranged fellow inmate while Fred West, the evil serial killer of young girls and women at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, hanged himself before his case even came to court. Few mourned.

  Many, of course, have paid the ultimate penalty over the years, some of them at the end of high-profile cases where the justice of the verdict has been called into question. The Italian anarchists, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, may just have been the scapegoats the American public was looking for at a time when it was frightened out of its wits by the global upsurge of communism. Their fates were sealed from the moment they were arrested on a trolley car in Massachusetts and they were duly electrocuted in 1927 on very little evidence. Ruben Cantu was executed in 1993, but almost certainly did not commit the murder for which he died. The police were unable to pin anything else on him but they made this one stick. Was Bruno Hauptmann really the kidnapper and murderer of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932? The jury thought so, but many people did not agree and they argue about it to this day. Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and daughter was in fact victim to the cunning of English serial killer, John Reginald Christie, and it took decades to eventually clear Evans’ name. Other cases such as those of Derek Bentley and James Hanratty add uncertainty to the unbending process of the law. Perhaps we should listen carefully to the words of exonerated American death row inmate, Ray Krone, released after ten years of hell: ‘There is a serious problem with the death penalty and there are serious mistakes made. The punishment is irreversible, irrevocable. We can’t bring back someone when we execute them…’

  Others, however, have gone to the gallows, or the electric chair or have lain down on the gurney for the lethal injection, accepting their guilt and, sometimes, glad to finally be making their exit from a world that has been a struggle from the beginning. In 1977, Gary Gilmore, the first man executed in America following the US Supreme Court’s 1972 declaration that capital punishment was cruel and unusual, had to argue his way to the firing squad that dispatched him in Utah. He wanted to end the unequal struggle that had been his miserable existence since birth and finally got his wish. Men such as Ted Bundy, killer of thirty young women and John Wayne Gacy, murderer of thirty-two young men, however, went to the electric chair fully aware of what they had done. Their depraved urges had meant that the consquences of their actions became less important to them than the actions themselves. The last man to hang in Australia, Eric Edgar Cook, declared himself to be a cold-blooded killer who just wanted to hurt people. His one-man crime spree in Perth, during which he randomly murdered eight people and terrorised the population of an entire city, is an example of just how far
a person can stray from normal, acceptable behaviour.

  Of course, the living hell of death row could be looked upon as worse than anything. The appeals process drags on for many years in America, and people sit in their prison cells counting down the days until the last appeal has been exhausted, the appeal to the governor for clemency is denied, and the warden and the priest turn up at the cell door. At that moment, after long years of struggle against the system, the short walk to death will begin. Of course, before that, the rituals of execution will have been carried out. The last meal request, endlessly fascinating, will have been released to the press. None, of course, will ever be as extensive as that ordered by Karl Chamberlain, murderer of thirty-year-old Felecia Prechtl in 1991. His order ran for pages and was a veritable banquet. It is not reported how much he actually ate. Chamberlain had waited seventeen years for death. Michael Morales committed murder when he was twenty-one years old. He is now fifty-one and still waiting to take that last walk. In 2006, he was just hours from being executed by lethal injection when California started a year-long argument about capital punishment. He still sits in his cell at San Quentin, waiting. Kenny Richey, a Scottish-born man convicted in Ohio in 1987 of killing a little girl in a fire it was alleged he started, also came close, but eventually, after a worldwide series of protests, was released a few years ago when forensic evidence came under close scrutiny. He had sat on death row for twenty-one years. Another British man, Krishna Maharaj hopes the same thing might happen to him. He spent fifteen years on death row before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. A millionaire when he was convicted in 1987 at the age of forty-eight, Maharaj has spent his entire fortune on legal costs and now languishes in prison in Florida, aged seventy-one, for a crime he insists he did not commit. And many agree with him.

  Again, however, there are those killers for whom death is almost too good. Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’, a power-freak for whom age, gender and sex seem to have been irrelevant, killed thirteen men, women and children on America’s west coast between June 1984 and August 1985. The terror he inflicted on his victims was unimaginable and he still waits for execution on death row all these years later. Richard Allen Davis, killer of innocent twelve- year-old Polly Klaas and serial attacker of women, is similarly beyond the pale, existing in a world outside the normal. Many will cheer when Davis is finally wheeled out of the execution chamber, his life gone in a haze of drugs from the lethal injection that will kill him.

  These days, women are of course the equal of men in many areas. Murder is no different, although sometimes it is for different, more practical reasons. Insurance, for instance. Husband killers, Betty Lou Beets, Judi Buoenano and Velma Barfield, were serial insurance claimants as well as serial killers, although it took the authorities some time to put two and two together. Barfield killed other family members too, and finally paid for it with a lethal injection. Of course, there are also women killers who were just plain bad, although it could be argued that their evil deeds were the result of dreadful childhoods, violent and abusive parents and bad decisions. Prostitute Aileen ‘Lee’ Wuornos killed 7 men between 1989 and 1990 in Florida. When the brutality of her childhood is taken into account, however, there is an inevitability about the way she turned out. Her family story contains incest and terrible violence, and her father was a child rapist who hanged himself in prison.

  As you read this, there are countless men and women shuffling in handcuffs and shackles from one part of a prison to another, some into a room where their lives will finally end. They are paying the ultimate penalty or are waiting to make that payment. They are Dead Men Walking.

  PART ONE: LIFERS

  George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly

  His name sits comfortably with some of the most notorious characters of the epoch that was host to the phenomenon known as the Mid-West Crime Wave – names such as ‘Baby Face’ Nelson, ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd and John Dillinger. But he was one of the lucky few of those cold-blooded killers to survive that era. While most of the most infamous gangsters of the time died in a hail of bullets fired either by the police or by other gangsters, George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly lived until 1954, his last twenty-one years spent behind bars, seventeen of them in the notorious Alcatraz.

  He was also unlike other gangsters of the era, in that he went to college. Born George Barnes in 1895, into a fairly well-to-do family living in Memphis, he grew up in Chicago after his family moved there when he was two years old. He never got on with his father and was even able to make his hatred for him pay, foreshadowing the gangster he was growing up to be. Once when he was a teenager, he saw his father go into the house of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Rather than run home and tell his mother, the young George brazenly walked into his father’s office the next day and blackmailed him into increasing his allowance and giving him the use of the family car.

  He made good use of the car too, in the boot-legging activities he had first got into while still attending high school. He was arrested at one point but was released after a judicious phone call from his father who still had influence in the city.

  When his mother died, however, George Barnes was devastated, blaming his father’s infidelity for her poor health.

  Graduating from high school, he enrolled at college in Mississippi to study agriculture – but it was to be a brief stay in academia. His college career was a disaster, with a poor academic performance and a catalogue of rule-breaking. He returned to Memphis where he met the woman who would become his wife, Geneva Ramsey, daughter of a wealthy local businessman, George F. Ramsey. Geneva’s father was understandably concerned about the reputation of the young man who was pursuing his daughter and forbade her from seeing him. Barnes was nothing if not persistent, however, and one night persuaded Geneva to elope with him. They went to Mississippi to return a few days later as man and wife.

  George Ramsey had little option but to offer his new son-in-law a job in his business building levees and railroads in the Mississippi River Valley and soon it looked like Barnes was at last turning his life around. He and Ramsey began to treat each other with mutual respect, the older man becoming the father Barnes never really had. Disaster struck in the mid-1920s, however, when George Ramsey was killed in an accidental explosion.

  From then on, everything started to go wrong. Geneva’s mother sold her husband’s business, but tried to help her daughter and son-in-law make a new start. Everything they touched failed, however, forcing Barnes to return in desperation to bootlegging. Geneva was furious, especially when he was arrested and she had to bail him out with $200,000 borrowed from her mother. She threatened to divorce him.

  When his first son, George Jr – known to them as Sonny – was born, Barnes showed that he had learnt nothing from his experience of his own father by being a poor parent, once actually throwing the infant across the room during a heated argument with Geneva. His drinking was making it impossible to hold down a legitimate job and he took his frustration out on his wife and his son. Thankfully, when his second child arrived, a boy named Bruce, he was entirely different towards him.

  Eventually, when the marriage finally fell apart, Barnes left for Kansas City where he found work in a grocery store. Soon, however, he was pleading with Geneva for another chance and before long she and the boys joined him. When she discovered he was stealing from the store, she threatened to leave him again. They argued and he beat her. She left him for good.

  In Kansas City, under the name George R. Kelly, he developed a small bootlegging business which grew until he was operating in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Mississippi. But the law caught up with him in Santa Fe in 1927, when he was arrested and sent to prison for a few months. Released, he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where he was arrested for vagrancy and then for selling alcohol on an Indian reservation, a serious federal crime which earned him three years in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

  He was out again in 1930, making for St. Paul in the company of Kathryn Kelly, a woman he ha
d met and fallen in love with while working as a bootlegger in Oklahoma City. A three-times married thief and prostitute, she is credited with buying him his first tommy gun and creating the ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly image, handing out spent cartridges to friends and relatives as souvenirs. In September 1930 they were married in Minneapolis.

  Before that, however, George R. Kelly had launched a new career, as a bank robber. A couple of former inmates at Leavenworth, Francis ‘Jimmy’ Keating and Thomas Holden, whom Kelly had helped to escape, showed their gratitude by inviting him to be part of a gang planning to rob the Bank Of Willmar in Minnesota. Amongst other gang members were the notable hoods, Verne Miller, Sammy Silverman and Harvey Bailey. They escaped with $70,000, but it was a heist notable for the level of violence used; a cashier was viciously pistol-whipped and one of the gang callously fired his machine gun into a crowd of onlookers, wounding two women.

  Other bank robberies followed. In September 1930, he helped divest a bank in Ottumwa, Iowa of a substantial sum of cash and with Fred Barker, Holding, Keating and Larry DeVol grabbed $40,000 from the Central State Bank of Sherman, Texas.

  Albert L. Bates was a career criminal with whom Kelly hooked up in 1932. Together, they earned a huge payday when they robbed a bank in Colfax, Washington State, of $77,000. The police were onto them, however, and Kelly and Kathryn narrowly escaped when their home in Fort Worth, Texas, was raided.

  Machine Gun Kelly’s last bank robbery took place on 30 November 1932. With Bates and Eddie Doll, a gangster from Chicago, they hit the Citizen’s State Bank of Tupelo, Mississippi, netting $38,000. Following the robbery, the bank’s chief teller said of Kelly, who had disappointingly only brought along a .38 calibre revolver, ‘He was the kind of guy that, if you looked at him, you would never have thought he was a bank robber.’

  Kidnapping was another of his specialities. By 22 July 1933, he and his associates had kidnapped several people and won substantial ransoms. Their next target was Charles F. Urschel, a wealthy oil man who lived in a mansion in Oklahoma City. Kelly and Bates simply strode onto the front porch of the Urschel mansion where the oil magnate was playing bridge with his wife and another man. Kelly, machine gun in hand, and unsure which of the men was the target of their kidnapping, ordered the two men into his car. When they had left the city, they looked in the men’s wallets and threw out the one who was not their prey.