The Krays: Brotherhood of Evil

For most of the 1950s and 1960s, Ronnie and Reggie Kray were a terrifying legend in the pubs and drinking clubs of London’s East End, ruling their ‘manor’ like feudal warlords. Anything said or done against them reached their ears within hours, and reprisals were swift and bloody.

The East End of London has always had a reputation for producing hardened villains. But on 24 October 1933 two boys were born who would grow up to become the undisputed ‘kings’ of the underworld. They were the Kray twins.

Reggie and Ronnie, together with their brother Charlie who was seven years older, were brought up in a terraced house in Vallance Road, Bethnal Green. Ironically, the streets were they played had been the hunting ground of Jack the Ripper some 50 years before.

The brothers grew up tough. In the hurly-burly of East End street life, in the heart of what was then the thriving rag trade district, they learned to fight and they learned to steal. They quickly earned a reputation as gutsy streetwise boys with whom you didn’t take liberties. They were fast with their fists and were soon revered for taking on and beating other street toughs who were bigger and older.

Professional boxers

Once into their teens it was second nature to follow brother Charlie into the ring and become professional boxers. Reggie was considered the better of the twins, winning all his fights. On one notable night in 1951 all three brothers fought on the same bill at London’s Albert Hall. Charlie, a talented welterweight championship contender, was beaten by another famous East Ender, Lew Lazar. Reggie won on points; Ronnie was disqualified.

Army national service put paid to their boxing careers, but not to their fighting. Most of their two-year compulsory stint was spent in the glasshouse for assaulting NCO’s or for desertion. Eventually the army threw them out and they came home to the East End, looking for a living. Their options seemed limited, but then an ideal post came along.

The owner of a snooker hall was having trouble with rowdy customers. The twins offered to ‘mind’ the place for £5 a night.

They enjoyed beating up the troublemakers and throwing them out. They found that putting the fear of God into people was both profitable and fun, and they took to their new careers with relish. By the mid 1950s they were fully fledged protection racketeers, ‘putting the arm’ on dozens of pubs, drinking clubs, restaurants and betting shops in the East End.

The protection game was simple. If a publican had a thriving place, it was good business to pay the twins and their cronies to have their protection. Because if you didn’t pay, a gang of thugs would enter the pub one night with coshes and razors, beat to the customers, and smash all the glasses and furniture, and that was very bad for business.

The Krays were making a fortune. They didn’t even collect the rake-off each week; they paid other heavies to do it for them. They drove the latest status-symbol cars, Jaguars or big American jobs. They had wardrobes full of elegant suits.

They saw themselves as show-business celebrities and liked to be seen out in West End clubs with stars like Barbara Windsor and Diana Dors, or boxing heroes like Henry Cooper and Freddie Mills. They were photographed posing with American singing star Judy Garland and famous aristocrats like Lord Boothby. They opened their own cabaret club, named after their initials, the Double R. They upheld all the East End ideas of the time. They dressed in Savile Row style, had commanded respect, though in truth it was fear.

To try to balance their gangster image they made a big show of giving money to local boy’s clubs or old folks charities, and they doted on their mum, Violet. But under the sharp suits, the champagne and the showbiz pals, nothing could hide the fact they were still as dangerous, violent villains who settled most disputes with their fists, a bottle or a knife.

The Krays court

Some businessmen chose to defy the brother’s demands for money. The punishment was swift and vicious. Heavies were sent out to grab the unfortunate victims and bring them to the Krays ‘court’, usually held in the back room of one of their favourite pubs. There, those who had dared to stand up to the twins were ‘tried’ and found guilty. Then their buttocks were slashed with a razor. Ronnie told friends: “It’s so every time the bastards sit down they remember me.”

By this time Ronnie in particular was showing signs of being highly unpredictable. He was diagnosed as suffering from psychiatric instability and was prescribed tablets to try to control his violent mood swings.

Underworld characters

The brothers surrounded themselves with a network of underworld characters who became known as the Krays ‘firm’. Many of these were hardened robbers and thieves and several were murderers. Many more were hangers-on wishing to ingratiate themselves.

Many of these bit-part players were employed by the Krays in another money spinning racket known as ‘long firm’ frauds, or simply LFs. These involved renting a warehouse, buying goods on credit, then selling them and returning for a still larger stock of goods. This operation was repeated several times until the ‘sting’. Having built up confidence with the supplier and banks, the largest-yet load of goods would be bought sold off quickly and the whole operation closed overnight without a penny paid to the suppliers or the banks. Police estimate that the Krays got away with more then 50 of these operations in the early 1960s.

In 1960 they took over a Mayfair casino club, Esmeralda’s Barn. The Kray twins had made it to the top. But a series of ugly incidents was to add to the sheer fear they struck in people. One gambler, David Litvinoff, had run up a debt of around £1,000. Others had done the same and had been allowed to get away with it. But for a reason never explained, Litvinoff’s debt offended the twins, who considered him ‘a liberty taker’.

One night during a party at the club, Ronnie dragged the unfortunate man to an alley at the back of the building, placed a sword crossways in his mouth and pushed it, slicing open Litvinoff’s face on both sides. Despite the gruesome injuries, which needed plastic surgery to repair, it was several years before the police heard of the incident. Even then, Litvinoff told detectives he could not remember who had wounded him.

No-one was safe

In another incident a crook who had displeased the twins was held down and branded with a hot iron. Another gangster had his face slashed by Ronnie for the sin of telling him he had put on weight.

Even friends were not safe. Albert Donaghue, a huge Irishman who worked for the twins, once had an argument with Ronnie in a pub. Ronnie settles the row by producing a pistol and shooting Donaghue in the foot. Amazingly, the two men made up their differences and remained friends.

At least two other men, a nightclub owner from north London called Jimmy and an east London their known only as Nobby, were to suffer the same fate, a bullet in the foot for daring to upset Reggie.

By 1964, Fleet Street newspapers had started to talk openly about the scandal of the gangster family which now openly ruled London. The Krays were not named but the Daily Mirror made it clear their identities were known to thousands of people in London. Scotland Yard had to act. Detective Superintendent Leonard Read, himself a former amateur boxing champ nicknamed ‘Nipper’, was assigned to investigate their activities.

At first Read ran up against the familiar wall of silence that had led even many of his colleagues to believe the Krays could never be cracked. But in 1965 Read got enough evidence to charge the twins with blackmail and demanding money with menaces. His elation was short-lived. The Old Bailey trial was a disaster. The jury could not reach a verdict and the twins walked from the dock to freedom, laughing.

The humiliation of Scotland Yard in court convinced the Krays more than ever that they were all-powerful. Within a short time, confident they could get away with literally anything, they moved into a new ear of violence, even more dreadful then before.

Ronnie decided that people need to be reminded of what happened to those, who challenged his authority or showed any sort of disrespect. By this time, he struck terror into the hearts of even his closest friends, he was seen as a dangerous nutter, eaten up with paranoia, and prone to manic rages and instant, horrifying violence.

He planned to murder a man in the most public way possible, in the certain knowledge that no-one on his ‘manor’ would ever dare speak of they they had seen. He cold-bloodedly shot a rival gangster and old enemy, George Cornell, in a crowded pub in Mile End Road. Police were quickly on the scene but, as Ronnie had expected, none of the many witnesses would tell them anything.

Stabbed to death

Elated by this ‘success’, Ronnie wanted his twin brother to prove he could be just as cold and ruthless. “I have done my one,” he told Reggie. “Now you do yours.” The victim, chosen on little more than a whim, was Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, a fellow villain who had once accepted £1,500 from the twins to carry out a ‘contract’ but had failed to follow through. This had not troubled the twins much at the time, but now it was used as a reason to sign McVitie’s death warrant. He was taken to the flat of a woman friend of the Krays and stabbed to death. His body was never found.

A few months later, the Krays were involved in another killing, that of ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell, who they ‘sprang’ from Dartmoor, probably to use as a hitman, but whose presence soon became a liability. He was shot and his body disposed of, again in a mysterious fashion.

Rumoured killings

Despite his setback in failing to get the Krays convicted first time around, Nipper Read was a tenacious detective. He soon heard the rumours that the Krays had shot Cornell and done away with McVitie. He was convinced that many people were so much in fear of the Krays they would be glad to see them behind bars for life. He was sure the Krays would fall if only he could get the right people to talk.

In 1967 Read was reassigned to start investigating the ‘firm’ once again. Most approaches drew a blank, until he approached Leslie Payne, the crooked accountant whom Jack McVitie had failed to kill.

Payne agreed to talk as long as he could be protected. He led Read to another former ‘firm’ member, Freddy Gore, who also talked. Lenny Hamilton, the man branded with a hot iron, also answered questions. Then Read had meetings with an informant who gave details of McVitie’s murder.

Things were looking up for the police. The Krays were rattled. Read learned the brothers had put out murder contracts on both him and Leslie Payne.

A vital breakthrough came when a telephone tap on one of the ‘firm’, Alan Cooper, revealed he was sending a courier to Glasgow to pick up a dodgy parcel. Detectives followed the courier, Paul Elvey, and arrested him as he prepared to board a plane for London carrying a small case. To their shock, the detectives found that the case contained 36 sticks of dynamite. Elvey was in big trouble. Now he talked. The Krays, he explained, had ordered the dynamite from a contact in the Glasgow underworld to blow up a rival London club owner. They planned to wire it to the ignition in his car. But what Elvey said next had the detectives really gasping.

Elvey had also been given a specially constructed briefcase containing a hidden hypodermic needle that was to be used to inject a victim with cyanide at the Old Bailey. The case was to be pressed against the victim’s leg. At the same time a trigger in the handle would release a spring, causing the needle to shoot through the side of the case into the victim.

When Home Office pathologist Dr Francis Camps examined the case he described it as “the most lethal murder weapon I have ever seen.” Anyone being pierced by the needle would die within eight seconds.

The arrest

Elvey said he did not know who the victim was to be. The briefcase had been made by ex-speedway star ‘Split’ Waterman, who admitted his part but denied knowing who the proposed victim was.

Read decided he had enough to make his arrest. At 6 a.m. on 7 May 1968, Read’s team used a crowbar to force open the door of the Krays flat in Shoreditch. Ronnie was with a girl. At the same time, a dozen more members of the ‘firm’ were raided, arrested and told that they would be facing charges of conspiracy to murder.

Now Read set to work trying to get them to come over to his side. The Kray twins were charged with conspiracy to murder Cornell and McVitie plus numerous ‘long firm’ and blackmail related charges relating to protection rackets. A week later, with detectives still searching to other suspects, read had a major breakthrough. Lennie Dunn, known by the nickname ‘Booksy’, gave himself up. It was his flat that had been used to hide ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell.

‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell

Up to this point the public and the police had no idea what had happened to Mitchell: he had simply vanished. At first Read was disbelieving, but he got corroboration he wanted when Billy Exley, another ex-Kray ‘firm’ member in fear of a bullet from the brothers, admitted he had helped look after Mitchell. Now the police tracked down Liza, the hostess presented by the Krays as a ‘gift’ to Mitchell to keep him happy. Read listened to her story with bated breath.

Many of the Krays gang now asked to see Read. Some wanted to help: others remained cagey.

Then came another breakthrough. A barmaid who had been working in the Blind Beggar when Cornell was shot said she was prepared to tell all now the twins were locked up.  She also said that the man who accompanied Ronnie on the shooting was one of the Krays ‘minders’, Glasgow-born Ian Barrie. He was found and arrested. He denied knowing about the murder, but the barmaid unhesitatingly picked him out on an identity parade.

On 31 May 1968, all three Kray brothers, plus another 25 of their cronies, appeared in the dock on remand. Reggie Kray and the man his brother once shot, Albert Donaghue, were now charged with murdering Mitchell. Three weeks later Ronnie and Charlie Kray, plus another East End ‘face’, Cornelius Whitehead, were charged with the Mitchell murder.

Within a few days another mainstay of the Kray ‘firm’ was starting to crack under pressure. Donaghue, already charged in the Mitchell murder, asked to see Read in secret. He told him: “I have been asked to volunteer to take the rap for Mitchell on a promise that my family will be looked after. I can tell you all about who did Mitchell Cornell, McVitie, the lot.”

Donaghue, totally convinced that the Krays were planning to have him ‘silenced’, told the police the whole Mitchell saga, right from the point where he had gone to Dartmoor to help Mitchell to escape.

Next asking to see Read was Carol Skinner, who owned the flat in Evering Road, Stoke Newington, where McVitie had been slaughtered. She had been interviewed before, steadfastly denying she knew anything about the crime. But now, as the tears flowed, she named all those who were present and described the horrific events.

From information given, police divers went to the canal where the dud gun that failed to kill McVitie had been dumped. Then detectives arrested Ronnie Hart, another leading light in the ‘firm’. Hart, in desperate fear of the Krays, had actually witnessed McVitie’s murder and was prepared to make a full statement.

The police finally had enough evidence to finish the Krays empire.

The trial for the Cornell and McVitie murders started on 8 January 1969 in the world-famous Court One at the Old Bailey. It was full of drama. All the witnesses and the jury were under protection to prevent them being ‘got at’ by friends of the Krays. On day three, ‘Miss X’. the barmaid from the Blind Beggar, was asked to point out the man she had seen shoot George Cornell. Without hesitation she pointed to Ronnie Kray. One by one, former Kray men gave their accounts of what they had seen and heard.

The trial lasted 39 days. On the last day, one man was acquitted, but Ronnie Kray was found guilty of murdering Cornell with Reggie convicted as an accessory. Both twins were convicted of killing McVitie. Older brother Charlie was convicted as an accessory. Both Ronnie and Reggie got life with a recommendation that they serve 30 years. Charlie for 10 years.

On 15 April 1969, all three brothers stood trial at the Old Bailey again, this time in the Mitchell case. Albert Donaghue, the huge bodyguard once wounded by Ronnie, had his murder charge dropped. Now he was a prosecution witness, together with Liza the hostess.

Despite their compelling stories it was impossible to say for sure who killed Mitchell. This time the jury found everyone innocent except Reggie, who was convicted of harbouring Mitchell. He was given a further five years.

MURDER 1: George Cornell

George Cornell was a fearless, hardman. He was a south London gangster, suspected by the Yard of being a contract killer. He was a member of an equally dangerous firm of villains, the Richardson gang, who had tortured some of their victims with electric wires attached to their private parts.

Cornell had nothing but contempt for the Krays. In one notorious incident he had called Ronnie a ‘poof’ when they crossed swords at a famous West End gangster hang-out, the Astor Club. Ronnie was struggling to come to terms with the fact that he was homosexual. He has seethed about the remark for two years. In his circle, even to mention the incident was to provoke him into a wild rage in which he was capable of anything. He let it be known that if Cornell ever set foot in the East End, Ronnie would even the score.

The Blind Beggar

On the evening of 9 March 1066, the twins were drinking in the back-street pub with a bunch of friends when word came in that Cornell had brazenly walked into their territory. He was coolly sitting at the bar of the Blind Beggar, a large Victorian pub in Mile End Road, almost opposite the London Hospital.

Ronnie ordered two of his ‘minders’, John Dickson and Ian Barrie, to take him to the pub immediately. It was 8.30 p.m. and several dozen people were in the bar when Ronnie strode in. Cornell was sitting at the bar stool drinking Scotch. “Well, look who’s here,” he said mockingly.

Shot through the head

They were the last words he ever spoke. From under his coat Ronnie drew a black luger pistol, and in one motion pressed it to the side of Cornell’s head and shot him. Kray turned smartly on his heel and strode out as Cornell slumped on the floor, dying.

The juke box was playing the Walker Brothers hit ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ as Cornell gasped his last.

Detectives were on the scene within 10 minutes. But, as usual with any incident involving the Krays, no-one had seen anything.

No witnesses

One detective said: “We knew that 30 or so people had seen what happened, yet there was no one prepared to talk. The bar staff’s version was that Cornell had been the only customer. The staff themselves had all been ‘out the back’ when the shooting happened and hadn’t seen a thing.”

MURDER 2: Jack the Hat

Nicknamed ‘Jack the Hat’ because of the pork-pie hat he wore all the time to cover his premature baldness. Jack McVitie had been a long-time associate of the Krays. On one occasion he had even been a hitman for them, accepting £1,500 to shoot Leslie Payne, a man who had helped the twins set up their ‘long firm’ frauds but who had turned his back on them because of their violence. McVitie, armed with a revolver, had gone to Payne’s house to kill him, but Payne was out and McVitie never bothered to complete the job. He never bothered to give the Krays their money back either. At the time the brothers had not worried about retrieving their cash. Now, two years on, it was used as an excuse for murder.

The Regency Club

One evening in November 1966 the twins, fired up with alcohol, went to one of their regular haunts, the Regency Club in Stoke Newington, looking for McVitie. When they found he was at the bar they decided to shoot him there and then. But the club owner, an old friend of the Krays protested so much that they decided to find a different venue for McVitie’s execution. While two trusted heavies were left to make sure McVitie did not leave the club, the twins went instead to a flat belonging to a friend, Carol Skinner, in Evering Road, Stoke Newington.

Practical joke

At about 1.30 a.m. they sent two more heavies to fetch McVitie from the club. As soon as they arrived inside the house in Evering Road, Reggie pulled a gun, put it to McVitie’s head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had misfired. McVitie, shocked, at first thought he was the victim of a cruel practical joke. But when Reggie pulled the trigger again and again without a result, he began to struggle for his life. In desperation he tried to jump through a window. But Ronnie Kray dragged his back into the room, taunting: “Come on, Jack, stand up and die like a man.” McVitie, now pleading for his life, begged: “But I don’t want to die like a man.”

Ronnie grabbed him and pinned his arms behind him while Reggie, who had thrown down the useless gun and picked up a large kitchen knife, stabbed him in the face and stomach. When McVitie finally fell to the floor Reggie stood over him and plunged the blade into his neck. Afterwards McVitie’s body was wrapped in a candlewick bedspread and carried outside to a car. What happened to it is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Kray story.MURDER 3: Mad Axeman Mitchell

Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell was a huge, powerful and violent man, but that did not save him when he became an embarrassment to the Krays.

Within a few months of the McVitie murder, the twins not convinced they were invincible, carried out yet another bizarre killing. The victim this time was to be an old friend. Frank Mitchell. Mitchell was built like a bull. He was six feet four inches tall and weighed 17 stone. But his brainpower did not match his physique. Although he was a daring East End bandit, he kept getting caught.

Feared by staff

Catching him was one thing; holding him was another. A fanatical bodybuilder and weightlifter, one of his party tricks was to lift two of the biggest members of the Kray ‘firm’ off the ground together, one in each huge hand. In jail he was feared by the staff, and was once flogged for beating a prison officer senseless. In 1955 he was declared mentally defective and sent to Rampton, a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Two years later he escaped, broke into a house and attacked the owner with an iron bar. When he was recaptured he lashed out at police with a pair of meat cleavers.

Sent to Broadmoor, he again escaped, broke into another house and attacked the occupants with an axe. He was quickly recaptured and sentenced to life. The newspapers dubbed him the ‘Mad Axeman.’

He was sent to Dartmoor, where his behaviour suddenly improved dramatically. He started breeding budgerigars in his cell, treating them with gently live and care. He was allowed out on work parties and was so docile that by September 1966 he was transferred to the Honour Party, working outside the jail every day.

Mitchell became legendary, casually strolling off to local pubs for a pint or two and once taking a taxi to and from Travistock, 10 miles away, to buy a budgie from a pet shop.

But Mitchell was unhappy because the Home Office refused to give him a date for his eventual release.

When the Krays heard this, they decided to ‘spring’ him and bring him to London. It had never been clear why they did this. One theory was that it was another demonstration of their absolute power. Another is that they wanted Mitchell to kill someone on their behalf. Whichever it was, it was a plan that went badly wrong.

Easy escape

On 12 December 1966 Mitchell went on a work detail with four other prisoners and just one guard to repair a fence at a firing range on Bagga Tor. At 3.30 p.m. Mitchell asked if he could walk across the moor to feed some of the wild ponies. His request was granted. He never came back. Members of the firm were waiting with a car on a quiet road nearby to whisk him back to London. 

His escape made headlines. While police set up roadblocks throughout the West Country, Mitchell was already sipping Scotch with some of his old pals in a flat prepared for him in Barking Road, East Ham.

But Mitchell had the mind of a 10-year old boy and was soon bored with with being cooped up in the flat. The Krays sent over a blonde nightclub hostess called Liza to keep him company. Mitchell fell madly in love and announced to his minders that he planned to marry her.

Several days after the escape, two letters in his childish scrawl were sent to the Times and the Daily Mirror asking the Home Secretary for a release date. Each letter had his thumbprint on the bottom to prove his identity. The Home Secretary appeared on TV, saying nothing could be done until Mitchell surrendered.

The ‘Mad Axeman’ was now becoming a real liability. Rumours were spreading that the Krays had organised his escape. If he was caught, he might talk in order to get a release date and be able to marry Liza. Ten days after his escape he was visited at the flat by Reggie, who told him he was going to be moved to the country. The next day other members of the firm arrived in a van to take Mitchell ‘to the country’.

They’ve shot him

John Dickson, a member of the firm who later gave evidence against the Krays and who had been helping to mind Mitchell, later said: “Just after we shut the door, as Frank walked out to the van, there was the sound of three gunshots. Liza went hysterical, shouting ‘They shot him. Oh, God, they’ve shot him.’ Then we heard two more shots.

Later Dickson confronted Ronnie Kray about Mitchell. He said: “Ronnie lost control. He shouted ‘He’s f***ing dead. We had to get rid of him; he would have got us all nicked. We made a mistake getting the bastard out in the first place.

Strangulation: The bully’s method of murder

It’s a brutal form of killing, to take someone by the neck and to squeeze the life from them. Yet it is one of the most common forms of murder.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the detective inspector. “If I found the body of a big man who had been manually strangled, I’d start to worry. I’d know that we were looking for a killer who was built like King Kong. In strangling, you see, the victim is almost invariably weaker then the killer. Guns have been called equalisers, and a small woman could stab and bludgeon her much bigger husband to death, but strangulations is a bully’s method of murder.

Personal violence

Even the word is brutal. It implies a highly personal act of physical violence. It is not surprising the strangulation is frequently encountered in sex crimes and serial killings, which are more likely to be about power and domination than sex. Such murderers would often have had less trouble using other methods to dispatch their victims. Strangulation is a wilful and deliberate form of killing. Unlike shooting or stabbing, it can take several minutes to throttle someone. A strangler will often take sadistic pleasure in his grisly business, during which time he is exercising the ultimate control over another human being: deciding whether they will live or die.

However, it is not always like that. Very, often, a victim is strangled as part of an aggressing act which genuinely was not intended to result in death. The detective inspector explains: “A rapist will sometimes say, ‘Honestly, I only squeezed her neck to shut her up. I didn’t mean to kill her.’ In which case I say, ‘Tough, you’re in the frame for murder anyway.’”

Occasionally an accident

Strangulation is usually a criminal act, thought it is a fairly common cause of accidental death encounters in masochistic sex-play. It can be done by hand or ligature, a cord or similar constricting device around the neck.

Multiple killers like the Boston Strangler often spring to mind when considering this type of murder, but they constitute only a small proportion of people who use strangling to settle their differences. Statistically, strangulation is the second most used method of murder after stabbing, and had remained so since records were kept. Most of the time it is a domestic crime. “Sex crimes apart,” the detective says, “it’s usually a family affair. It is rarely premeditated, being more likely to occur in moments of rage or high passion, husbands strangling wives, wives strangling children, or grown children strangling aged parents.”

Strangulation is an unpleasant but efficient method causing death. What happens is not the the windpipe is blocked, but that the pressure constricts the carotid artery, cutting off the oxygen simply to the brain. The victim quickly loses consciousness and, if the pressure if maintained then death will follow.

Consultant anaesthetist Nigel Robson says: “The standard time of death from strangulation is about three minutes. That’s when severe and permanent brain damage starts to occur. However, I don’t think that you would ever get any group of pathologists to agree on survival parameters. It is an odd fact that children tend to survive longer than adults starved of oxygen, and that cold people have a better chance of survival than those who are warm.”

The thing to watch for is smothering, which might create some of the same effects as strangling. Smothering is caused by a cushion or similar soft object being placed over the mouth and nose. However, while it is of course a method that had been used for murder, it is also a common cause of accidental death.

Death by choking

Choking, again a cause of death which the victim is deprived of oxygen, is almost always accidental. Professor Alan Usher, who for many years ran the Sheffield Medico-Lethal Centre, says: “Victims most likely to die from choking are portly middle-aged businessmen, half fuddled over a business lunch, who wedge a portion of steak and kidney pie into their throttles.”

However, neither smothering nor choking will leave the marks on the neck characteristic of strangling. This can be bruising caused by the pressure of the throttling fingers, or the bruising and laceration left by the ligature is non-manual cases. The marks on the neck will often to clear enough to be matched to the actual ligature which was used in the attack.

When performing an autopsy on a suspected strangling case, the pathologist departs from his usual practice of opening the body from chin to pubis.

“You take the top of the skull off first,” explains Professor Usher, “and remove the brain. Then you open the body as far as the breast bone and remove the trunk organs. By following this procedure, the neck is drained of blood at the top and bottom, so what remains is coagulated blood forming bruises in the neck. To examine these, you slice down the line of the sterno-mastoid muscles, the two large muscles on either side of the neck, and lift off the flap of skin. This rather roundabout way of doing things scotches any possible future claim that the bruising has been accidentally caused during the autopsy itself.”

The telltale bone

An important confirmation that someone had been strangled is the snapping of the hyoid, a delicate horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck. It is almost always broken in strangling cases, but as Professor Usher says: “It’s a popular forensic fallacy that the hyoid has to be broken in every case of strangulation. Sir Bernard Spilsbury appeared in a case where a girl had been murdered, and said in court that it was obvious that she had been strangled. The defence counsel tried to trip him up by asking if the hyoid bone had been broken. ‘No,’ replied Spilsbury with a smile. ‘If it had, that would have made the strangling even more obvious,’ A class act, was old Spilsbury.

An early example of a case solved by forensic science involved the great French investigator Edmund Locard. In 1911, a young woman named Marie Latelle had been found strangled. The chief suspect was her fiancé, and a jealous young bank clerk named Emile Gourbin. However, he appeared to have an alibi that was difficult to prove one way or the other.

Examine the body, Locard noticed that the fashion-conscious Marie had been heavily made up; he also noticed that the fingernails of the strangler had bug into the back of her neck, as the thumbnails had done in a similar fashion at the front of the throat. Locard took scrapings from Gourbin’s nails, he had been held in custody since his arrest and had had no opportunity to wash, and examined the results through an elaborate two-and-a-half-meter-long microscope of his own invention, through which he could also take photographs.

The make-up clue

The nail parings contained epithelial tissue, skin cells, which could have got there through Gourbin scratching himself. However, mingled with these substances was a granular dist which, on analysis, was found to contain powdered rice, zinc oxide, iron oxide, bismuth and magnesium stearate. All where ingredients of pink face powder. The police had already found a pot of face powder made for Marie at the local chemist, and the powders matched.

Faced with this evidence, Gourbin confessed, so Locard was not required to put his pioneering photo-micrographs to the test in court.

Flaming Murder

The fatal fire was an accident, or so everybody thought. But the victim in the garage had not died in an accident. He had been murdered. It was an almost perfect crime.

It was just after nine, on a warm Miami evening in May. At her house on SW 138 Street, Mrs James Kell heard an explosion. Looking outside of the window, she saw black smoke billowing from behind the closed doors of a garage across the street. It belonged to a ranch-style three-bed-roomed house that had been rented some months previously by a Lebanese man called Ezzat Aboul-Hosn.

Mrs Kell telephoned the fire brigade immediately, while her husband and a passing jogger ran across to the scene of the fire. Putting their ears to the door of the garage, they thought they could here feeble cries. Within minutes, the street was full of firefighters. They were joined by Bassam Wakil, a wealthy Syrian friend of Aboul-Hosn, who had to be forcibly restrained from running into the blazing garage in search of his friend.

When the flames were extinguished a charred body was found pinned under the 1972 Chevrolet Vega in the gutted garage. The car had to be jacked up to free it. The body’s fists were clenched, with the limbs drawn up in the ‘pugilistic’ attitude of the typical fire victim.

“Even if I had known him, I wouldn’t have been able to identify him.” Said Fire Lieutenant Pratt. “I believe he was alive at the time of the fire.”

Sequence of events

The sequence of events pieced together by the investigators seemed pretty clear. At about 5.30 on the afternoon of the fire, Aboul-Hosn had crossed the street to borrow a pair of pliers from his neighbour, James Kell. He said that he was working on the faulty fuel line of his Chevrolet Vega. It was perhaps a little odd that a man who had declared that his hobby was tinkering with old cars should have to borrow a pair of pliers, but it was not enough to comment on.

Soon afterwards, according to the report submitted by the investigating officers, Bassam Wakil called and found his friend working under the car behind the closed doors of the garage. It must have been hot and sticky, but the investigators reckoned that the Lebanese preferred the Miami heat to being dive-bombed by the mosquitoes that were all too common at that time of year. At about 8.30 p.m. Wakil left in his car to pick up a pizza for the two of them. Aboul-Hosn was never again seen in Miami.

Police and fire brigade investigators at the scene accepted that all the evidence pointed to the death being non-criminal. They fiddled with the jack from which the car appeared to have fallen, and the crime laboratory took some photos. The preliminary report by the Dade County Medical Examiner’s office stated:

“The deceased jacked up the vehicle and began to work under its rear with an extension light … It appeared from the deceased’s broken arm that the jack holding the rear of the vehicle slipped, pinning the deceased while the stand under the vehicle punctured the fuel tank. The deceased was burned beyond recognition.”

Police enquiries established that Aboul-Hosn had arrived in the USA as an exchange student in 1976. He had apparently come from a mountain village outside Beirut. He took a general course in civil engineering at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky, and married an American girl there, but the marriage lasted only until he obtained his green alien resident’s card, and the couple where divorced in 1978.

Luxury home

In 1979 Aboul-Hosn moved to Miami, where he worked first as a waiter and cab driver while attending Miami-Dade Community College. Subsequently he became a salesman for Scharf Land Development Co. A month before the fatal fire, he had rented the luxury home at 9901 SW 138 Street, with its lavishly landscaped garden and oval swimming pool.

The problem facing the police was that of formal identification of the body. Wakil notified Aboul-Hosn’s sister Ghada, who was a nursing student in nearby Tampa. Next day the detective in charge of the case, Ray Nazario, asked her if she knew of any dental or medical records that might be of assistance in identifying her brother’s body; she said that she did not. Nor did she have any photographs of him smiling.

As there seemed no doubt that the death was an accident, the police accepted the circumstantial evidence of identification of the body as Aboul-Hosn’s, and it was released to the Vista Funeral Home in Hialeah, to be prepared for shipping back to Lebanon. But the Medical Examiner’s office, dissatisfied at the lack of formal identification, retained the blackened upper and lower jaws, in the hope that further evidence might later arise to clinch the case. Ghada was given her brother’s few possessions and she flew to Lebanon to await the arrival of the body.

Unfortunately, Israel chose that moment to began ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ and war broke out immediately after she arrived. The body remained in the Florida funeral home. After a month, with the situation in Lebanon unimproved, Bassam Wakil reluctantly gave permission for the body to be cremated and he was given the ashes in a wooden box. When Ghada eventually returned, the ashes found their last resting place in the waters of Biscayne Bay. Curiously, none of Aboul-Hosn’s friends and family commented on the fact that in the Druze faith, the Muslim sect to which the victim had belonged, cremation if forbidden.

Private investigations

Six months later, John J. Healy arrived in Miami. Healy, a private investigator from New York, had news that caused Ray Nazario to reopen the case. Aboul-Hosn had taken out life and accidental death policies with six different companies over the previous two years. The sum involved totalled $1,270,000. His sister, the named beneficiary, had already received $550,000 frim Mutual of Omaha, most of which had already been transferred to Lebanon. In view of the large sums of money involved, and the lack of formal identification of the body, Healy had been retained by the insurance companies to confirm that the dead man was in fact Ezzat Aboul-Hosn. If he was not, then the police would have to start looking for the perpetrator of a massive fraud. More to the point, if the body had not been that of Aboul-Hosn, they were dealing with a murder case.

Healy proceeded to make his own enquiries in Florida. He discovered that Aboul-Hosn had bought the old Vega, saying that he wanted to work on it, only five days before the fatal fire, although he already owned a new white Gran Prix and had the use of a company Cadillac. Healy interviewed Ghada, who was about to return once more to Lebanon: she confirmed that her brother liked to work on old cars.

Dental search

Since the only surviving evidence in the case, apart from the pathologist’s samples, was the jaws taken from the body, Healy set about searching for a dentist who might have treated Aboul-Hosn. He thought that he succeeded when his enquiries brought to light a set of dental x-rays labelled ‘Abdul-Hussan’, but the eventually discovered that these belonged to a student at the university of Miami with a similar name.

In Key West, Healy ran to earth Aboul-Hosn’s girlfriend. She was still very distressed by the death, which had occurred soon after he had telephoned to arrange to visit her in Key West at the weekend. She said that Ezzat was healthy and never ill, and had “a nice smile”; she did not know of any dentist or physician who might have treated him. Reluctantly, she allowed Healy to take away a single colour Polaroid photograph that showed Aboul-Hosn seated with his sister during a graduation ceremony.

Due to the fact that the winter season was starting in Florida, and that hotel space and reservations were becoming unavailable Healy returned to New York. But he had not given up. A little later on he flew to Louisville, where Aboul-Hosn had attended college, and there he discovered a full set of Aboul-Hosn’s dental x-rays in the possession of Dr Wood Currens at the University of Louisville Dentistry School.

Meanwhile, the Dade County police had been pursuing their own enquiries. On 11 January 1983 the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Joseph Davis, alerted dental examiner Dr Richard Souviron, who had examined the jaws of the body, and a week later Ray Nazario was told to make sure that the Louisville x-rays were obtained from Dr Currens “before Mr Healy for a hold of them.” Aboul-Hosn’s driving licence, which he had renewed only a week before the fire. On 21 January Dr Souviron declared that the dead man was certainly not Ezzat Aboul-Hosn.

A case of murder

There was no doubt about it: this was no longer a case of accidental death, but one of murder. But who was the dead man, and what had happened to Ezzat Aboul-Hosn? Scenting an exciting story, reporters from the Miami Herald began their own investigation. And on 3 March 1983 Dan Goodgame filed a long report from Btekhnay in Lebanon.

“Ten months after he supposedly burned to death in Miami, backyard mechanic Ezzat M. Aboul-Hosn is home again, a rich man in a small Lebanese mountain village,” it began. “He owns two new cars and a truck. His $250,000 villa is under construction. He maintains a fat savings account at a local bank. He pays his bills from a book of fancy oversized checks.” Goodgame supported his assertion with a photograph of the villa under construction, next door to Aboul-Hosn’s family home in the village of Btekhnay.

Ghada confirmed that her brother had faked his death. “I was so hurt and angry that I had been used. I don’t want any of the money. I gave it to him. It’s dirty money.” She said that Ezzat had fled only hours before Goodgame arrived. He had taken a taxi to Damascus in Syria, and intended to fly “to Europe, for two years, maybe longer.” But villagers suggested that he was in hiding nearby.

Family shame

Unravelling the family connections in the village is impossible, every single one of the 2,500 inhabitants is named Aboul-Hosn, but many expressed concern for the family name said Adnan Aboul-Hosn, an airline pilot: “Some of us think we should turn him over to the US Embassy so he can be tried. And if he did kill someone for this money, he should get the electric chair.” But there is no extradition treaty between the USA and Lebanon and Ezzat Aboul-Hosn has apparently remained in contented possession of his ill-gotten gains.

And, 10 years later, the identity of the murdered man had not been established. Police made considerable efforts to match the jaws taken from the body with known dental records of missing persons. But without success. Dr Souviron had pointed out “the detail and thought that criminals will extend in committing such a crime.” The victim placed under the car was the same age, race and sex as Aboul-Hosn; great ingenuity was shown in setting up the jack so that death was plausibly an accident; and there is the possibly (suggested by the absence of soot in the victim’s airways) that he had been asphyxiated with carbon monoxide before the fire was started. “It’s such a fantastically interesting situation,” said Dr Davis the Medical Examiner. “If they ever do find out what happened, I want to know how it was done.”

Beast of the Andes

He doesn’t look much, middle aged, wiry; you would pass him without comment in the street. But Daniel Camargo is one of the most brutal mass murderers in history.

“I killed 71 young girls in just over a year,” said Daniel Camargo. “Some one who’s really careful could no doubt kill a person everyday.”

Camargo was 55 years old when two policemen stopped him on the street in Ecuador, idly suspicious of his behavior. He ran, and when they caught up with him they discovered to their horror that his scruffy suitcase contained a pile of bloodstained women’s clothing.

Plague of bodies

For 15 months Ecuador had suffered a reign of terror: not a week had passed without the disappearance of a young girl or the discovery of decaying bodies, some savagely mutilated, in a hidden charnel-house. But the police could scarcely believe that this weedy, unprepossessing street vendor from the neighboring state of Colombia was the beast they had been hunting.

As Dr Roberto Echeverria Murilli, the psychiatrist who examined the prisoner, pointed out: “Camargo evaded police for over a year. In people’s minds, that means the following: since they couldn’t catch him, he is a man who is powerful, intelligent, who can hold his own in court, who is rich. It’s the image of power that remained in their minds. When it was revealed that this semi-vagabond, without a penny and very shabby, had massacred 71 adolescents, they were very disappointed. They could not believe the truth.”

Who was this nobody, and what in his life had caused him to develop into the horrific ‘Beast of the Andes’? Camargo’s own account of his upbringing bears a striking resemblance to that of Henry Lee Lucas, the American serial killer. His story may be true, but homicidal psychopaths are notorious fantasists, and Camargo was a highly intelligent, well-educated man, speaking three languages. Before his interview in prison he could well have read accounts of Lucas’s childhood, and even come to believe that his own life had followed the same path.

Above-average intelligence

As Oliver Pighetti, a journalist who interviewed Camargo in prison, has written: “Camargo knows the value of words. He listens to questions seriously, waits a while, looks pensive then starts speaking in an educated voice.” Judges, psychiatrists and policemen were astonished at the intellectual faculties of this psychopath. “Of greatly above-average intelligence!” “A surprising amount of education, from God knows where…” “He had the gift of leading discussion in the direction where he feels most as ease.” Daniel Camargo explains this with modesty: “In prison, reading is the only escape possible, or almost so…”

Distressing family life

He was born on 22 January 1931 in a small village in the Colombian Andes, and a year later his mother died. His stepmother Dioselina Hernandez, he claimed, regularly beat him and humiliated him; his uncle was a drunkard, and when Camargo questioned his stepmother about men who visited her she sent him to school dressed like a girl. His father, who was frequently away from home, one day stole all the painfully accumulated pesos from his piggy bank. “They destroyed my youth,” he said.

He recalled violent fits of rage. “I became so angry that anything could have happened. I even tried to slash one of them with a razor blade.” His sister, who was five years older than Daniel, also bullied him. “My stepmother was always praising her, so that I began to hate her just as much.”

At the age of 12, Camargo left home for the Leon XIII College in Bogota. There might well have found a vocation in the Church, but the sexual proclivities of the priests so sickened him that he left in his second year and took to selling in the streets.  The Ecuadorian judge in charge of his case in Quite, Edgar Salazar Vera, confirmed Camargo’s account of his education and disillusionment: “He is a brilliant man. A many-sided individual. But I find him cynical.”

Quiet marriage

Ten years after leaving the college Camargo, with his persuasive salesman’s tongue, seduced, and then married Alcira Castillo. They led a quiet domestic life for seven years, and had two sons. But one day Camargo found his wife in bed with another man. Immediately, blind with rage, he packed his bags and left for good.

He met another young woman, and fell in love with her. But he has a psychotic obsession with virginity, and then he discovered that she was not a virgin he told her: “Since I did not have your virginity, you will have to give it to me by another woman.” He made her drug young girls with sleeping pills and bring them to him. Soon he had raped a dozen or more unwitting adolescents. But one identified him, and he was given a six-year jail sentence, being released after five for good behavior. He was 39 years old.

Wave of destruction

Over the next four years a wave of rape and murder swept first through Bogota, the Colombian capital, and then through the city of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast. But Camargo denied responsibility. As soon as the first bodies were discovered, he claimed, people thought of him. “I got frightened. I was accused of deeds I had never committed. I fled to Brazil.”

There, he said, he found such sexual tolerance that he could not satisfy his needs without recourse to violence. But he was imprisoned for eight months for robbery, and then returned to Columbia. Alberto Uribe Gomez, a Colombian journalist who tool a close interest in Camargo and won a prize for his writings on the case, refused to believe this story. “Camargo never set foot in Brazil. I couldn’t find his name in the lists of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice. Everything accuses him: the physical similarities between the girls he killed and those he had previously raped, the methods of persuasion he used, the agreement between the events and the periods of imprisonment, the murders cased when he was behind bars… Unfortunately, he is too intelligent to have left traces.”

Whatever the truth, Camargo was caught red-handed in Colombia in May 1974 just after he had raped and strangled a young girl. He was sentenced to 25 years for the single crime, but Alberto Uribe Gomez remained convinced that Camargo was responsible for at least 80 more murders.

The convicted man was imprisoned on the island of Gorgona, the Devil’s Island of Colombia, 160 km from the mainland and considered impossible to escape from. His educated background soon revealed itself, and he became the prison librarian and a trusted aide to the governor. After nearly 10 years in prison he discovered an abandoned canoe on the beach and buried it in the sand. A fortnight after, he put to sea in it and three days later he reached the coast of Ecuador. It was 26 November 1984.

Savage revenge

Fifteen months or terror followed. “I took my revenge for several years of humiliation. I took revenge on women’s unfaithfulness. I hated them for not being what woman is supposed to represent… I wanted virgin. Woman is born with the hymen, symbolizing purity, innocence, sweetness. I raped them more in order to possess the hymen than for the act itself… I don’t think the ideal woman exists. Society would destroy her.”

But why did he kill? “After I spent five years in jail for rape, the only thing I feared was to return there. So I had to kill without leaving traces… I had an extra shirt with me… When I had blood on my hands I pissed on them. I was always aware of the way I had to protect myself.

Justification for rape

But some of his victims had been tortured and mutilated. “Through rape I freed myself from a sexual and psychological impulse that I inherited from the years of my humiliation during childhood… If I sometimes did extra violence to my victims, it was out of revenge. Some of them fought so violently that they set off my impulse to violence and I couldn’t control it. It was a natural prolongation of the sexual impulse I had felt earlier and which had not always been satisfied through rape.

‘I had to kill another one’

It was reported that one of his victims was found without a heart, lungs or kidneys. “That’s an entirely invented story… At best I might have taken out the heart, or organ of love… “And how did it feel after a murder? “Rather relaxed. Freed, maybe. As if I had destroyed a sort of anguish inside me. I swore never to start again. And then it came back. A desire inside me, like a drug. I had to kill another one…”

Maximum sentence

Camargo was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment, the maximum sentence that Ecuadorian law allowed, although his crimes excited public demands for the restitution of the death sentence. And he remained unrepentant: “If the Colombian authorities had carried out an adequate treatment instead of throwing me in jail, you can be sure that all my victims would have been saved. I insist on that, it’s they who are the guilty ones.” Camargo, who had read Freud, regarded himself as a victim of his upbringing, even if the account he gave of it was distorted to justify his assertions. But there is a suggestion in the evidence that this was not all: that he suffered from a real or imagined sexual inadequacy that he attempted to resolve by the rape of young and innocent girls. And the violence suggests that (however much he denied it) he had a deep-seated sense of guilt, a guilt that he transferred to his tragic victims, and took his revenge.

The End