At about five o’clock on the morning of November 9th, Darlene unlocked the gun cabinet in their living-room, and carried all the weapons out onto the front lawn where she laid them neatly in a row. She kept behind the .22 pistol Keith’s father had given him on his 21st birthday, and crept back upstairs
The first time Paul Bernardo saw Karla Homolka was in the lobby of the Howard Johnson hotel in Scarborough – a classic first meeting between a sadist and a masochist. She was staying overnight in the hotel, attending a convention about pets, and within a few hours of their meeting she had taken him to
Cynthia Vigil ran naked and blood-spattered down the road, her long brown hair matted with dirt, semen and human faeces. “Help me, please help me!” she cried hysterically, as she approached the entrance of a mobile home in Elephant Butte, New Mexico. To her great relief the door was open. She bounded over and rushed inside, slamming
Fishing should have been better than it was on that early spring afternoon of April 19th, 1975, in Salem, Oregon. The fisherman decided to try one more spot in the slough near the Brown’s Island Sanitary Landfill south-east of the state capital. He moved to a stony bank beneath a wooden bridge and prepared to
It began for the police as a routine “missing person” report. The two daughters and the two sisters of Bernard Hettier went to the local gendarmerie in Nancy, eastern France, to report his disappearance. A bored gendarme took down the details. Hettier had last been seen alive leaving a post office in the suburbs of
Unemployed, bored and frustrated, Daniel Gonzalez, 24, sought excitement through excessive drinking and taking drugs including Ecstasy, cocaine and amphetamine. After attending a rave party in Hackney, east London, the weekend before the killings, the court was told, Gonzalez took a variety of drugs and ran naked through the street on his return home. On
Supermarket shelf-filler Alexander Pichushkin had one ambition in life – he wanted to be the world’s most successful serial killer. He was determined to pass the total number of murders committed by his Russian compatriot Andrei Chikatilo – known as the Rostov Ripper. Chikatilo’s “score” was 53. Pichushkin claimed he killed 63 before being caught.
The boy-meets-girl story that would end in horror began when a Swedish-born American GI deserted and met an unemployed striptease dancer in wartime London. He was Karl Gustav Hulten, 22, who boasted, untruthfully, of having once been a bodyguard to Al Capone. She was Betty Jones, 18, going under her stage-name of Georgina Grayson. She
Inside the home of James D. Worley in Delta, south-west of Toledo, police found handguns, a shock collar, handcuffs, ropes and tape. But their next find was much more worrying. In a historic Dutch barn close to the house, known as the north barn, they found a secret room which was described as “like something
A huge boar weighing 600lbs patrols Robert “Willie” Pickton’s pig farm at Port Coquitlam, 20 miles east of Vancouver. It lumbers round the perimeter with a snarling pit-bull, lunging and snapping at unwanted visitors. Locals say dog and boar have AIDS. A stink of mud, manure and offal hangs over the 17-acre pork factory where