The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

Where America leads, the rest of the world surely follows. The Earth, now, is overflowing with killers at large. Britain, which has always prided itself on the quality of its crime, if not its quantity, is still full of unapprehended murderers. In the 1960s, London produced Jack the Stripper, a rival to Jack the Ripper, who killed six women, but was never caught.

In England and Wales, the 43 police authorities launched Operation Enigma, looking into over 200 unsolved murder cases involving young women. In Glasgow, the police are searching for a current killer who has been butchering prostitutes, while a cold-case unit is still trying to identify Bible John, a killer from the late 1960s who has yet to be caught. Even sleepy old Ireland has a serial killer on the loose.

But then nowhere is safe these days. Canada has pig-farmer Robert Pickton. He denies all charges against him, and he has only been charged with a fraction of the murders he is suspected of, and even those are a fraction of the outstanding murders in Vancouver, let alone the whole of British Columbia. There are certainly more killers at large. Particularly vulnerable are “First Nations”—that is, Inuit and Native American—women. There are allegations of racism—first by the killers who do not value Inuit and Indian lives, then by the authorities who do not investigate the cases with quite the alacrity they exhibit when the victim is white. This mirrors the situation in the United States, where it is possible to murder African-American prostitutes—particularly those lured into the sex industry by drug addiction—seemingly with impunity. Many are not even identified.

Killing has become an international enterprise. One murderer seems to have been at large in the US, then moved his activities on to Portugal and at least four other European countries. This has a long history. Suspects in the Jack the Ripper case went on to kill in the US and Australia. Indeed, one even seems to have commuted back and forth across the North Atlantic.

It is not just free societies that are prone to having killers on the loose. Countries that have suffered political oppression seem to have spawned a particularly vicious variety. Russia has its own serial killers, with several at large. And in South Africa there seems to have been an epidemic. Again the police force, perhaps still infused with the old ethos of apartheid, has a poor record when it comes to dealing with killers who seek out black women as their victims.

In Latin American counties, particularly those that have suffered divisive civil wars, it is almost open season in women. In Guatemala, for example, almost every murder case goes unsolved. The police neither have the resources nor the incentive to investigate. In fact, some of the killers at large seem to be in the police force itself.

But worse is Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. The pandemic of murders there has come to the attention of the English-speaking world because Juarez is just over the border from El Paso, so the killings are reported the papers in Texas. In Juarez so many vulnerable young women have been raped and killed in the most horrible ways that the term “femicide” has been coined. The allegation is that Latin machismo culture and general border-town lawless had combined to create a murderous war on women. In the eyes of women’s rights activists, all men in Juarez are potentially killers at large.

Argentina’s Highway Maniac

Since 1996 a serial killer has been at large in Buenos Aires State, Argentina. Known as the “Highway Maniac”, he has killed at least five times. The victims—largely prostitutes—all had their throats slit or were strangled. Their naked bodies were found along the main road around the eastern city of Mar del Plata, on the Atlantic coast some 240 miles from the capital. One victim had the word “puta”—prostitute—carved on her body. Some had their genitals mutilated. Police had several suspects, but not enough evidence to lead to an arrest. Another seven prostitutes have disappeared and it is feared that they are also victims of the killer.

The first victim was 27-year-old Uruguayan Adriana Jacqueline Fernandez. She was strangled with a cable and her naked body was found in a culvert alongside Highway 226 on 1 July 1996. She worked as an artisan in Mar del Plata and was the only victim who was not thought to be a prostitute.

The next victim was 35-year-old Maria Esther Amaro. She too had been strangled and her naked body was found alongside Highway 55 on 29 November 1996. Marks on her wrists indicated that she had been manacled and those on her knees showed that she had been forced to kneel. She had worked as a prostitute in the La Perla district of Mar del Plata and, after she was dead, the killer had carved the word “puta” in her flesh.

In mid-January 1997, 26-year-old Vivian Guadalupe Spindola disappeared from La Perla. On 20 January, two legs and an arm, severed at the wrist, was found near Los Acantilados, eight miles south of Los Acantilados. Two days later and ten miles further down Highway 88 a lorry driver found a torso. A tattoo in the pubic region identified the corpse as that of Vivian.

The mutilated body of 27-year-old Mariela Elisabeth Giménez was also found along Highway 88, around 30 miles from Mar del Plata. She had last been seen boarding a bus on 4 May. Her thighs had been cut open and her left arm was missing. A post mortem revealed that these mutilations had been made after she was dead, but other wounds indicated that she had been tortured before she had been killed.

The bodies of these first four victims had been carefully posed, but after that the killer changed his modus operandi. From then on, he sought to conceal the bodies. On 20 October 1998, two kids found a bag under a black coat on a vacant lot on the outskirts of Mar del Plata. In it were the thighs of a woman, neatly severed at the knee and hip. Two ligatures—one of nylon, the other cotton—were found nearby. The following day, three bags of bloody clothes were found less than 50 yards away. It was quickly established that these belonged to 26-year-old Maria of Carmen Leguizamón, who worked as a prostitute in the port area of the city. She was a native of Rosario, 175 miles north of Buenos Aires and 400 miles from Mar del Plata, where her parents thought she was a waitress. Chief investigator Jorge Luis Acosta thought the killer had changed his MO because he had almost got caught.

Around that time, a number of other prostitutes had simply gone missing. Mother of four Ana Maria Nores, aged 26, was two months pregnant when she disappeared on 19 July 1997. After she disappeared, someone called the police and told them to look along Highway 88, but nothing was found. Another anonymous call to the local newspaper, the Clarin, said that Ana Nores “would not be the last one”.

She had told colleagues in the La Perla district where she worked that she feared that she would be the next victim of what the Clarin had dubbed the “Highway Maniac”. And three days after she vanished, working girls from the district marched on the local police station, demanding better protection.

Checking their records, the police discovered that another prostitute was also missing from the area. On 23 February, 36-year-old Patricia Prieto—aka Dark Patricia and La Dominguera—had left her five-year-old daughter at home and never returned. But she was only reported missing in July when the child’s father asked for custody.

On 20 October, 26-year-old Silvana Paola Caraballo was reported missing by the superintendent of her apartment block after he discovered her six-year-old daughter alone and crying because her mother had not returned from work. Silvana Caraballo was working as a prostitute in La Perla to support her family and put herself through an architectural course.

On 14 January 1998, 25-year-old Verónica Andrea Chávez’s mother reported her missing when her daughter did not return from work. Verónica Chávez had no arrest history for prostitution and her mother said she worked as a cleaner for a law firm and a hat-check girl at a club. The police discovered that she did not work in either place and, although friends denied that she worked as a prostitute, she was friends with a number of the girls from La Perla.

On 1 March 1999, 30-year-old Claudia Jaqueline Romero vanished from her usual patch. Her husband said that she had had problems with some of the other girls, but would not have run away voluntarily as she loved her family. She left a three-year-old daughter and was three months pregnant when she disappeared. Soon after, 39-year-old Mirta Adela Bordón also vanished.

On 11 September, 26-year-old Sandra Carina Villanueva, a prostitute with a history of arrests, disappeared from the centre of Mar del Plata. Then on 30 October, 33-year-old mother-of-four Mercedes Almaraz went missing from La Perla. That Saturday night she left home in the barrio Las Américas on the outskirts of the city at midnight, wearing a denim miniskirt, violet top and sandals. She was last seen on the corner of España and 11 de Setiembre in La Perla in daylight. She often left her four boys, aged between one and five, in the care of a babysitter for days on end as she also worked as a mule for a drug-smuggler.

The city prosecutor Fabian Fernandez Garello blamed his own policemen for not catching the killer. Prostitution is one of the sources of greater police corruption, he said. He also denounced District Attorney Marcelo Garcia Berro, who became a “person of interest” in the case when his name was found in Veronica Chavez’s phone book. She had also been seen getting into his car the night before she disappeared. Berro admitted knowing her but could not explain why she had called him over 20 times on his mobile phone and in the office over the preceding days.

Veronica had dealings with three other policemen, two of whom were involved in the investigation of the cases of Ana Nores and Silvana Carabello. Nores’ mother claimed that the police wanted her daughter to act as bait to catch the killer. The families of the two women also alleged that the police used their daughters to sell drugs. There is also speculation that the killer is a policeman who extorts protection money from the prostitutes.

In March 1999, the governor of Mar del Plata offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the Highway Maniac. Soon after, an anonymous informant accused the son of a wealthy family who had been locked away in an insane asylum 30 years before after he had killed three prostitutes in Buenos Aires, dressed in women’s clothing. Although diagnosed as a dangerous schizophrenic, the man had been released shortly before the first murder and the doctor who had signed his release was sacked.

Australia’s Claremont Killer

In September 2006, the task force investigating the abduction and murder of three young women ten years earlier in Claremont, a well-to-do suburb between Perth and Fremantle, Western Australia, had its manpower trebled after an international panel of experts lead by South Australian Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm, veteran of over a hundred murder enquiries, declared that the case could yet be solved.

“We believe that by careful, incremental gathering of further information there are still opportunities for this to be successfully resolved,” he said.

At one time the biggest serial-killer investigation in Australia, the Claremont task force had dwindled from a peak of about 120 officers to a handful of detectives and, in the months before the panel was set up, Police Commissioner Barry Matthews indicated that the task force would have to be disbanded.

All three women disappeared in similar circumstances from night spots in Claremont, around six miles from the centre of Perth, leading police to believe that a serial killer may be responsible. The first victim was 18-year-old secretary Sarah Ellen Spiers. On Australia Day—26 January—1996 she went with friends to the Club Bayview on St Quentin Avenue in Claremont. At around 2 a.m. the following morning she left, saying she was going to get a taxi home. Last seen in a phone booth, she then vanished. Her disappearance was completely out of character and attracted massive publicity in Perth.

A taxi driver named Steven Ross came forward with information. He said he remembered picking her up twice. On the night before she disappeared, he had driven her from Wellington Street, Mosman Park, to the Club Bayview. Later, he had driven her from Claremont to South Perth and remembered, from her call, that she had lived in Mill Point Road.

Ross told the police they should be looking for a fellow passenger, a man who had shared the taxi with Ms Spiers. The man did not appear to know her. Another woman, also a stranger, had doubled up in the cab that night. After he dropped the second woman in Dalkeith, he had taken the man and Ms Spiers to the Windsor Hotel, in South Perth. The man had pushed Ms Spiers out of the cab then paid the fare.

“I think he came back to Claremont the next night, found her and killed her,” Mr Ross said.

However, the woman from Dalkeith never came forward. Police raided the taxi driver’s home in August 2004, armed with a search warrant that listed personal items belonging to the missing women. They probed the garden and searched both dwellings, but found nothing. Sarah Spiers is still missing.

On 9 June, 23-year-old child-care worker Jane Louise Rimmer disappeared from a night spot called the Continental Hotel on Bayview Terrace, just 150 yards from the club where Sarah Spiers went missing. She had been drinking. Friends said that she declined a companion’s offer to share a taxi home when the pub closed at midnight. Her body was found by a mother and children in bush land in the south of Perth eight weeks later.

Early in the morning of Saturday 15 March 1997, 27-year-old lawyer Ciara Eilish Glennon also disappeared from the Continental Hotel. She had only returned to work that Monday after travelling abroad for a year. That Friday, there had been drinks in the office and one of the partners in the law firm had offered her a lift to Claremont, which was just about ten minutes from her home. She arrived at the Continental Hotel at about 10.45 p.m. She stayed there with friends for a short time, but she said she wanted to have an early night and left on her own to catch a cab home. She was never seen alive again. Her body was found on 3 April, off a track in scrub 28 miles north of Perth. Her silver Claddagh brooch was missing. With this murder police admitted that they were searching for a serial killer and Western Australia’s Premier Richard Court offered a reward of A$250,000. The Continental Hotel changed its name to The Red Rock and is now known as The Claremont Hotel.

For operational reasons, the police kept the details of the case to themselves. However, they were very forthcoming about their chief suspect, a man named Lance Williams who has not been charged or found guilty of anything. Williams was a civil servant in his forties and lived with his elderly parents in the neighbouring suburb of Cottesloe. Police stopped him on the streets of Claremont at 3 a.m. on 8 April 1998. They had been conducting an intense surveillance operation over some months and said that they had observed him in his car regularly following women as they left nightclubs.

That night, detectives questioned Lance for several hours, then released him. Afterwards, police had his parents’ home and a vacant beachfront unit he owns searched, twice. His car was subjected to a thorough forensic examination and the police tried to entrap him in a sting operation using an undercover female officer. She asked him for a lift to Mosman Park, only for uniform officers to surround his vehicle. Nevertheless, Williams co-operated with the police. He supplied DNA samples. At his own request he underwent a lie detector test and, later, he consented to a day-and-a-half of psychological analysis.

Williams denied anything to do with the killings. He said that he only picked up the plain-clothed woman police officer as a good Samaritan and the only evidence the police can come up with against him is circumstantial.

The police openly followed his every move 24 hours a day for over a year. Until October 1999, they sat outside his house in an unmarked car, followed him to work and home again. This became such a cosy arrangement that Lance would phone the police to let them know when he was doing something outside his normal routine, such as attending to a leaving party for a workmate.

While Williams was under surveillance, and since then, no other woman has gone missing in Claremont. However, four other women have disappeared without trace in Western Australia, but police insist that these cases are not related. One other case does seem to be related though.

According to ABC Radio journalist Liam Bartlett, Sarah Spiers was not the killer’s first victim. He claimed that police had told the father of a fourth missing woman, 22-year-old Julie Cutler, that his daughter was probably the first victim of the Claremont killer. Ms Cutler was a university student from Fremantle, who vanished after leaving a staff function at the Parmelia Hilton Hotel in Perth at 12.30 a.m. on 20 June 1988. Her car was found two days later in the surf near the breakwater at Cottesloe Beach. Her body has never been found. She was last seen wearing a black evening dress with a high collar and gold buttons on the shoulder, and black patent shoes.

There may have been other attacks by the same man. In October 1994, a man hiding in the back of a taxi grabbed a 31-year-old woman when she got in near Club Bayview. She leapt out, breaking an ankle. The following New Year, a man dragged a woman from her car after she left Club Bayview. He attempted to sexually assault her but she fought him off. Then in February 1995, a 17-year-old girl was abducted in the early hours of the morning while walking home from the Club Bayview along Gugeri Street, near Claremont subway. She was trussed up with electrical cord, raped and left for dead in Karrakatta Cemetery nearby

At 2 a.m. on 3 May 1996—after Sarah Spiers’ abduction and before Jane Rimmer’s murder—a 21-year-old woman was indecently assaulted in the lane behind Club Bayview. The assailant ripped her skirt off and banged her head against a wall six times before she fled. And on 8 November 2000—after Ciara Glennon’s death made the search for a serial killer official—20-year-old Sarah McMahon disappeared after leaving her workplace on Stirling Highway at 5 p.m. Her car was found abandoned at Swan Districts Hospital in Middle Swan, a small town just inland of Perth. In all the disappearances of 16 women have fallen within the scope of the Claremont investigation.

The police are also investigating the possibility that Bradley John Murdoch, the convicted killer of British backpacker Peter Falconio in 2001, may have been involved, although Murdoch was in jail from November 1995 until February 1997. Murdoch has also been questioned over the disappearance of 17-year-old Hayley Dodd, who was last seen in 1999 north of Perth, and an unidentified woman missing since 1996 from Broome, Murdoch’s home town a thousand miles to the north of Perth.

There has also been some scrutiny of Peter Weygers, who was the mayor during the time of the disappearances. His 12-year tenure of office ended in 1997. Weygers had bought a house from taxi-driver Steven Ross, but had allowed him to continue living there in a mobile home in the back yard. Weygers had also been seen driving the Ford station wagon that Ross had used as a taxi when he had picked up Sarah Spiers in 1996.

Weygers was a controversial political figure and leading libertarian who once agreed to launch a book written as a guide for Australian males who wanted to get themselves a virgin Filipina bride. The launch was abandoned amid public outcry. He created more controversy in April 2004 by defending the three-time convicted serial rapist Gary Narkle, describing him as an artist and claiming Narkle had more to fear from his victims than they had to fear from him.

As a politician Weygers made a career this way by thrusting himself into the public spotlight, a trait which would appear to be at odds with the behaviour of a serial killer. He owned 19 investment properties around Perth, mostly inherited from his mother, with whom he lived until her death. He has since married Vicki, a Filipina. Nevertheless in September 2004, the police staged a very public search of his home and, despite his objections, forced him to give a DNA sample.

“This is a gross invasion of privacy. This is a gross invasion of rights. I have no idea what their excuse is for this absolutely disgraceful conduct,” he told a journalist, claiming the police scrutiny was part of a State Government plot to discredit him.

In office, Weygers had questioned the mass DNA testing of taxi drivers by investigators in the Claremont case and, later, took up the issue of the human rights of Lance Williams, then still under day-and-night surveillance.

Steven Ross then further muddied the waters by handing out an unsigned 44-point statement to the media. He claimed police had tried to coerce him into making false admissions about Weygers the day before the raid on the civil libertarian’s home, including suggesting that Ross delivered girls to the former mayor. Weygers had a reputation, when mayor, for making flirtatious or suggestive remarks to female reporters.

“The police made derogatory remarks about Peter Weygers and implied that I was involved in a homosexual relationship with him,” Ross wrote. “I denied that I was in a homosexual relationship with Peter Weygers and that he was not my boyfriend. The police alleged that Peter Weygers exerted an abnormal influence over me, which I denied. The police alleged that Peter Weygers gave me orders that I carried out, which I denied. The police then stated words to the effect that Peter Weygers ‘wanted’ young girls.”

The inability to apprehend the Claremont Killer is seen as a major embarrassment to the Western Australia Police and the “Macro Task Force” set up to investigate the murders has been disbanded and reformed several times. Public confidence has not been helped when several senior officers were implicated in corruption allegations by the Western Australia Police Royal Commission.

In October 2006, it was announced that Mark Dixie, a man on trial in the United Kingdom over the murder in 2005 of the 18-year-old model Sally Anne Bowman, is a prime suspect in the killings, and the Macro Task Force has requested DNA samples from Dixie to test against evidence taken during the enquiry.

Belgium’s Butcher of Mons

On 20 May 1998, Belgian police in the city of Ranst, outside Antwerp found the skeletal remains of what was thought to be seven bodies in a container, along with five human heads. They feared that this might be the reappearance of the “The Butcher of Mons”, a unidentified killer who had dumped 30 bags containing body parts of at least three women, possibly six, in places around the city of Mons, 60 miles away, in 1997.

The killer left police scientists a gruesome anatomical jigsaw puzzle. Some of the remains were so badly decomposed it was an almost impossible task to discover how many victims there were. The authorities were under intense pressure to solve the murders from Belgian Justice Minister Stephane de Clerck after the outcry that followed the bodies of four young girls discovered 20 miles away, victims of paedophile Marc Dutroux.

The killer, who plainly savoured their discomfort, played a grisly game with his pursuers, dumping the bags filled with body parts in places with chillingly evocative names. The first bags, containing 12 neatly-severed parts of an indeterminate number of arms and legs, were found on 22 March 1997 on the banks of the Fleuve Trouille—the River Jitters—a canal bordering Mons and neighbouring Cuesmes.

Two days later, a limbless upper torso was found on the banks of a tributary of the Fleuve Haine—River Hate—next to a road called Chemin de l’Inquietude—the Path of Worry. The limbs had been severed in the same way as those of another torso found floating in the Haine the previous July. The police have established that it was the work of the same killer.

The gendarmerie began an intensive search of Mons, using helicopter, sniffer dogs and infra-red equipment. Then on 12 April another two bags were found in a lay-by on the Rue du Depot—Deposit Road. A week later another was found on the Rue St Symphorien—Symphorien was a Christian martyr who was beheaded in AD 200—at a place called La Poudrière—the Powderkeg—near Havré.

The killer left numerous clues which allowed a team of specialist psychiatrists to compile a profile. He is thought to be an intelligent, methodical, calculating and obsessive man, who takes pleasure in the ritualistic dismemberment of his victims and the careful distribution of their remains. Detectives believe that there might be a perverse religious motive for the killings. Mons is an ancient religious town with connections to a number of saints associated with decapitation.

A stone head of St John the Baptist can be found over the door of the oldest inn in Mons, which dates back to 1776. The inn was built by a monk, a member of the Catholic Brotherhood of St John the Beheaded. The order was established in the Middle Ages to escort condemned men to the scaffold. It still exists today. The head looks out over the Rue de la Clef—Road of the Key—a fact that investigators feel could be significant, given the clues the killer is volunteering. It may also be significant that relics of the decapitated St Symphorien are kept in a nearby church.

Two of the three victims whose names are known disappeared on a Sunday, and the third may also have done so, though no one seems to have noticed that she was missing.

“We have not ruled out that he is a member of a satanic sect,” said Didier Van Reusel of the public prosecutor’s department. “The treatment of the bodies is very methodical, which is often the case with Satanists involved in ritualistic killings.”

A song about the Butcher of Mons called “Bowels of Murder” appears on Lovecraftian Dark, the second album of the heavy-metal band Dawn of Relic.

It was initially thought that the killer was a surgeon or a butcher, due to the precision of the dissection. But further investigation revealed that the killer had not dismembered the bodies by hand. He ran his victims through an automatic sawing machine with several circular blades at 12-inch intervals—the kind of machine normally used for slicing chopping logs into planks. The severed limbs were exactly one foot long.

“There are not that many places you can carry out that operation, with the blood and the smell,” said Van Reusel. “And there are not that many people who own a machine like that.”

The killer appears to have chosen his victims from a group of transients, who congregate around Mons station and the string of cheap bars opposite. One of the victims was 43-year-old transexual Martine Bohn, a retired prostitute who had worked out of the bars. Having lost contact with her family years before, she disappeared on Sunday 21 July 1996 and it was her torso found floating in the Haine. Her breasts had been sliced off. It is thought that the killer may have been angry at discovering she was not a real woman.

A second victim was 33-year-old Jacqueline Leclercq, a mother-of-four who had separated from her husband. After losing custody of her children, she drifted into the station scene. She had disappeared on Sunday 23 January 1997.

A third victim was 21-year-old Nathalie Godart, who lived in a bedsit in Mons. Her young son had been taken into care. No one had reported her missing. The staff at the Intercity, the Metropole and the Café de la Gare, the bars opposite the station, knew her well.

“She was promiscuous, but not a prostitute,” said one bar owner.

The police are aware that the killer is playing a complex game with them. Tests indicate some of the first bags found on the bank of the Trouille had lain there undiscovered for months. They were only discovered only when the last bag dumped there hung conspicuously on a tree, drawing attention to it. The remains they contained were between one week and two years old which indicated that the killer had access to an industrial refrigeration unit.

The killer plainly enjoyed the publicity their discovery brought and he became more audacious. Succeeding bags were placed in highly visible places, with evocative names, at a time when the police search was already fully underway.

Psychiatrists believe the perpetrator relishes not just the killing but also the handling of the corpse. Each of the body parts found had been wrapped individually in its own white plastic bag which is then knotted tightly at the top. These white bags are then placed in the larger grey bags. Each grey bin liner has been tied tightly in the same fashion, and the top of the knot then snipped off with scissors—“very neatly, very precisely, the work of an obsessive,” said Van Reusel.

One man was questioned, but was released. He has since left Mons, and is no longer a suspect. All the authorities could do was await the next piece of the puzzle and keep Rue des Sinistres, or Sentier des Morts under surveillance.

The Butcher of Belize

In May 2006, Channel Five, a local television network in Belize, offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a paedophile serial killer who abused and killed at least five schoolgirls during a 16-month binge.

The first victim was 13-year-old Sherilee Nicholas, who disappeared in September 1998. A month later authorities found a body partially submerged in a ditch of water beside a feeder road near Mile 13 on the Western Highway. The body suffered more than 40 knife wounds and showed signs of rape. Investigators believe the girl tried to fight off her attacker. The child’s mother identified the body, but no clues could be found to identify the killer.

Soon after, 9-year-old Jay Blades disappeared. Then, in the northern town of Corozal, 13-year-old Rebecca Gilharry was found raped and strangled. Another child’s body was found in northern Belize and another girl was raped, beaten with a rock and left to die in the southern town of Dangriga. She lived to tell her tale to the police.

Fears grew in Belize City when 12-year-old Jackie Fern Malic vanished on 22 March 1999. Jackie’s sister told police that a family friend, 40-year-old mechanic Mike Williams, had offered to take the two girls for a ride before school, but they turned him down. Police questioned Williams and released him, only to arrest him later. Two days after she had disappeared, Jackie Malic’s body was found on a side road, a few miles away from where Sherilee Nicholas’s body was found. She had multiple stab wounds to the face, buttock, knee and upper left arm, and one of her arms had been severed. The coroner drew attention to the many similarities between the two deaths.

On the day of Jackie’s funeral, children lined the streets with signs demanding that the killer be caught. A Children’s Summit was convened and, in a phone-in programme on the radio, a little boy asked Prime Minister Said Musa: “Why are there special police to protect the tourists, but not the children?”

A week later, the curfew was imposed. No one under 17 was allowed out between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Wardens were stationed at all schools to monitor children and watch for suspicious characters. Parents began walking their children to school. This was quite a readjustment for the citizens of Belize. With a population of just 200,000, the quiet central American country had long been relatively free of sex crimes and murder. But with Williams now in jail charged in Jackie Malic’s death everyone thought the nightmare was over.

In June, a child’s skull and a few bone fragments were found along the Western Highway, near where the other victims had been located. It was assumed that Jay Blades been found at last. But next to the body was Sherilee Nicholas’s school bags. Fearing an error in identification, authorities exhumed Sherilee’s body against her mother’s wishes.

Meanwhile, in June, 10-year-old Karen Cruz disappeared from her home in Orange Walk, just north of Belize City, while her mother was on the front veranda. Her body was found the next day near her home. Newspapers reported suspicions regarding her uncle 38-year-old Antonio Baeza, who lived next door, and suggested he had been stalking the child. Baeza was arrested and charged with murder. But still the killings did not stop.

At the end of the month, nine-year-old Erica Wills went missing. Her body was found three weeks later. She too had been butchered. Found behind a quarry near Gracie Rock, a village 20 miles west of Belize City, her bones had been picked clean by vultures, but her mother recognized her daughter’s hair band and her Tweety Bird ring, and was able to identify the body. A thousand people turned out in Belize City late Monday for a candlelight vigil in memory of the victims and Williams was then released.

Then on 15 February 14-year-old Noemi Hernandez disappeared after her grandmother sent her to collect rent money from a tenant. Nine days later her mutilated remains were fished out of the water near the mouth of the Belize River by a Belize Defence Force Maritime Wing patrol boat. She was found headless and her entire left arm was missing. Like the other victims, she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed repeatedly. The similarities between the murders were very striking and lead police to believe it may have been the work of a serial killer, now dubbed Jack the Butcher. As this is the first case of serial killing to hit Belize, the police lacked the experience to deal with the situation and called on Scotland Yard and the FBI for help. It was hoped that Channel 5’s reward might help bring the culprit to justice.

The Boy Killers of Brazil

A Brazilian man accused of killing 42 boys in a series of macabre Satanic murders was sentenced to 20 years and eight months in jail on 25 October 2006 for one of the killings. Forty-one-year-old Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was found guilty of killing 15-year-old Jonathan Silva Vieira who disappeared in northern Brazil in December 2003. The bicycle mechanic still faces numerous other charges of murder killings and sexual abuse. The police in the Amazonian states of Maranhao and Para maintain that Chagas has confessed.

However, human rights groups following the case were reluctant to accept the police’s version of events and expressed reservations over the tactics used to secure Chagas’ confession. They also questioned previous police work and the future of three people already jailed or awaiting trial for carrying out some of the killings.

“We’ve been questioning the police’s work on this for 13 years, so we are naturally still a little suspicious,” said Nelma Pereira da Silva, head of a local children’s rights group who took the case to the Organization of American States in Washington. “We need to wait and see if this is for real.”

The police believe that Chagas performed black magic rituals before killing some of the boys. He sexually abused his victims and, in some cases cut off their genitals, before decapitating them and burying the bodies.

During the trial, Jonathan’s mother, Rita de Silva, told the court her son had said he was going to pick fruit with Chagas on the day he went missing.

“The monster tried to help out the mothers of the children he killed because he was looking for victims,” she said.

She said she had shown Chagas a photograph of her son after he disappeared, and the killer laughed and told her he had not seen him.

“It seemed like he was laughing at my suffering,” she said.

The trial was held in the auditorium of a club in Sao Jose de Ribamar, 1,400 miles north-east of Rio de Janeiro, because the courtroom was not big enough to hold the hundreds of victims’ relatives.

Prosecutors say they charged Chagas with Jonathan Silva Vieira’s murder first because it was the case in which they had the most evidence.

Chagas was arrested in April 2004 after neighbours complained of a stench coming from his ramshackle house on the outskirts of the Maranhao state capital of Sao Luis. Officers secured a search warrant and dug up a dirt floor to find two skeletons. One was identified as a four-year-old boy named Daniel and the other of a child Chagas said was called Diego. Daniel’s father recognized scraps of clothing as a T-shirt he was wearing when he disappeared in February 2003.

According to police, Chagas quickly confessed to the killings and those of at least 18 other young boys. The methods he used were similar to those used in the spate of murders that ravaged Maranhao and the neighbouring state of Para between 1989 and 2003. The police said that Chagas lived in both states at the times the killings took place.

The series of killings shocked even Brazil, where violence is common and the murder rate is one of the world’s highest. Reports that Chagas sexually assaulted the boys and then castrated them added to the outrage, as did allegations that some of the earlier killings that took place in Para between 1989 and 1993 were related to a satanic cult. Such things are not uncommon in Brazil.

On 27 November 1998, Brazilian police arrested six members of the United Pentecostal Church of Brazil, who had beaten and kicked to death six people, including three children, purportedly so that the perpetrators would be taken to heaven “after wiping out the enemies of God”. The cult practiced their bizarre rituals on a remote rubber plantation where men, women and children were subjected to vicious ritual beatings. Among those arrested was Francisco Bezerra de Moraes, aka Toto, who was believed to be the leader of the 30-member sect.

The killings began two weeks before the arrests when Bezerra announced during a sermon that he could hear “voices from Jesus Christ” telling him that the former pastor of the group and all his followers must be punished. Bezerra, his wife and two other men then began beating, whipping and kicking other worshippers. For the next several days “disciplinary” torture continued in nearby shacks.

“Each day began with a ceremony venerating of Toto’s wife,” said a survivor. “Then came the torture.”

Torture were accompanied by prayers and chants of “Out, Satan!” Among the dead were two brothers aged three and four, who were allegedly killed by their father, and another 13-year-old boy. The mother of the dead brothers was also murdered. The former pastor of the sect escaped and raised the alarm. When police arrived, they discovered the bodies of the dead out in the open, decomposing, torn apart and being eaten by animals.

Then in August 2003, five men went on trial in the Brazilian city of Belem accused of sexually mutilating and murdering young boys in Altamira, a town in the Amazon. They were said to be members of a satanic cult who murdered and mutilated for ten years before being caught. One of the five, Valentina Andrade, was the leader of an occult sect based in Argentina and two were doctors.

Chagas originally told police he did not remember attacking the boys or castrating his victims because his memory was erased at the moment of the killing. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to the murder charge. In mitigation he and other witnesses, including his sister, testified that he had been abused as a child by his grandmother and a man named Carlito. Chagas told the court that when he murdered Jonathan Silva Viera, he felt a pent-up rage stemming from those childhood experiences.

“I was seeing Carlito in front of me,” he said.

The killings were so brutal and the inaction of the local police so shocking that the Organization of American States launched a campaign to pressure local authorities into more rigorously investigating the cases. Several foreign and Brazilian human rights groups also petitioned the federal government to intervene in the investigation.

As result, the police in the northern state of Maranhao announced that Francisco das Chagas confessed to the mass killing of 18 boys around Sao Luis from 1991 to 2003. They believe the bicycle mechanic may have killed three others during the same period. Police in neighbouring Para state want to question him concerning the whereabouts of 10 youngsters who were either killed or disappeared there.

In spite of the concerns from human rights groups, the state’s attorney general said the detailed evidence provided by Chagas showed “strong signs” he was responsible, based on his own confessions. But there are concerns. The Organization of American States criticized the state government for failing to cooperate with their inquiry. Children’s rights activitist Pereira da Silva said her organization would focus its attentions on identifying the officers responsible for the imprisonment of Roberio Ribeiro Cruz, who was sentenced to 19 years after supposedly admitting to killing an 11-year old in 1998, and the arrest of two others who are awaiting trial for the slaying of another child in 1996.

According to the police Chagas has now confessed to the killings of 30 boys in Maranhao state and 12 others in Para state between 1991 and 2003, but then retracted his confession again. If convicted of all murders, Chagas would be Brazil’s most prolific serial killer. However, most people involved in the case have their doubts that he is guilty of all the murders he is charged with and are concerned that other child killers are at large.

Brazil’s Killer Beach

Brazilian police said they are hunting another serial killer who has tied up, raped and repeatedly stabbed four women before dumping their bodies in a field close to a motorway. Sergeant Marcelo de Jesus Bispo said officers found the four corpses in Itabuna in the northeastern state of Bahia, 282 miles south of the beach resort of Salvador.

Then in 2005, the police in Maranhao began combing the state’s beaches for more clues to the identity and whereabouts of a middle-aged man suspected of killing two women, from Spain and Germany. A Brazilian woman was also missing, believed she could be a victim of the same killer.

“Everything indicates we are dealing with a serial killer,” Maranhao’s public secretary, Raimundo Cutrim, said. “The women were travelling alone, were beaten to death and were found buried.”

Police said the tourists had all been seen with a man answering the same description.

The body of 27-year-old Nuria Fernandez from Spain was found on an island off the coastal city of Sao Luis on 25 March 2005. Eight days before, the body of 46-year-old German Marianne Kern was found at a nearby beach. The Brazilian Valeria Augusto Veloso disappeared from the same place at around the same time.

On 26 March, police arrested a man who allegedly used Kern’s credit card after her body was found. He said he got the card from a man whose description fitted that of the suspected killer.

Canada’s Beast of British Columbia

In a series of letters to 27-year-old Thomas Loudamy of Fremont, California, accused murder Robert Pickton asserted his innocence and praised the British Columbian judge for dropping 21 of the 27 murder charges against him. He has pleaded not guilty to the remaining six and has expressed his concern about the expense of the investigation which he claims is an attempt to make him a fall guy for all the missing women in British Columbia. There are at the very least 65 women missing from Vancouver’s Downside Eastside alone, the area where Pickton is said to have selected his victims.

The ten blocks of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside comprise not just the poorest area in British Columbia, but the poorest in the whole of Canada. They call the neighbourhood “Low Track”. At its centre is the intersection of Main and Hastings, called “Pain and Wastings” by locals. Its shabby hotels, rundown bars and dilapidated pawn shops are home to 5,000 to 10,000 at any one time. Crack cocaine and heroin are supplied by Asian gangs and bikers who are frequently involved in turf wars. Most of the women addicts support their habits by prostitution, giving Low Track the highest HIV infection rate in North America.

Low Track became famous for its “kiddy stroll”, which featured prostitutes as young as 11. Some underage girls work the streets; others are kept by pimps in special “trick pads”. New “twinkies”—runaways lured by the bright lights—arrive every day. Over 80 percent of the prostitutes in Low Track were born and brought outside Vancouver. A survey in 1995 showed that 73 percent of the girls had started in the sex trade as children. The same percentage were mothers with an average of three children each. Some 90 percent had had their children taken into care. Most did not know where their children were. In 1998, on average, there was one death a day from drug overdoses among these women.

But there were other dangers. In 1983, women began to go missing from Low Track. The police did not notice the trend for nearly 14 years. That was hardly surprising as most of the inhabitants were transients, and runaways change their names and addresses regularly. Some simply moved on. But by 1997, the police began to fear that more than two dozen had been murdered. It was then that they began to compile a list.

The first of the 61 names to be put on the list was that of 23-year-old Rebecca Guno, a prostitute and drug addict last seen alive on 22 June 1983. She was reported missing three days later. Such rapid reporting is unusual. Forty-three-year-old Sherry Rail—the next on the list—was not reported missing until three years after she disappeared in January 1984.

Elaine Auerbach, aged 33, told friends she was moving to Seattle in March 1986 but she never turned up and she was reported missing in mid-April. Teressa Ann Williams, the first First-Nations woman on the list, was 15 when she was last seen alive in July 1988, but was not reported missing until March 1999. Thirty-year-old Ingrid Soet, a schizophrenic on medication, disappeared on 28 August 1989 and was reported missing on 1 October 1990. The first black woman on the list was Kathleen Dale Wattley. She was 32 years old when she vanished on 18 June 1992 and was reported missing 11 days later.

There was then a three-year hiatus. But in March 1995 47-year-old Catherine Gonzales, a drug user and sex-trade worker, disappeared. She was reported missing 9 February 1996. In April 1995, 32-year-old Catherine Maureen Knight went missing. Her disappearance was reported to the police on 11 November. Dorothy Spence, a 33-year-old First-Nations woman, vanished on 6 August 1995. Her disappearance was reported earlier on 30 October. Then 22-year-old Diana Melnick disappeared two days after Christmas and was reported missing two days later.

There was another hiatus until 3 October 1996 when 22-year-old drug user and prostitute Tanya Holyk disappeared. Her family knew something was wrong when she didn’t come home to see her son, who was about to turn one, after a night out with friends. Pickton has since been charged with her murder. She was reported missing on 3 November. Olivia Gale Williams, aged 21, disappeared on 6 December 1996 and was not reported missing until 4 July the following year.

Twenty-year-old Stephanie Lane left her two-year-old son with her mother along with an uncashed welfare cheque, though she continued to call on birthdays and holidays. Then on 11 March 1997, she was released from hospital after an episode of drug psychosis. She was last seen alive at the Patricia Hotel on Hastings Street later that day. She has not been heard of since.

Twenty-two-year old Helen Mae Hallmark was last seen alive on 17 June 1997 and reported missing on 23 September 1998. Her sister wrote a poem to her memory.

Janet Henry, who also went missing in June 1997, came from the KwaKwaQueWak Nation in Kingcome Inlet in British Columbia, the youngest in a family of thirteen. She had a happy childhood until her mother fell ill and her father died. The children were sent to residential schools and foster homes, losing all ties to their native culture. Her sister Lavina was raped and murdered when she was 19. Another sibling killed himself.

A bright young woman, Janet graduated from high school, became a trained hairdresser, married and had a daughter, who she was devoted to. But when the marriage broke up in the late 1980s, her husband was given custody of their daughter. Janet was devastated and her life went into free-fall. She moved to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and begun attending parties where she exchanged sex for drugs.

She had already had one brush with a serial killer. In the early 1980s, she met Clifford Olson, who drugged and raped her, but her life was spared. Olson pleaded guilty to 11 murders in 1982. All too aware of the dangers of her profession, Janet would phone her brothers and sisters frequently to let them know she was okay. She was reported missing on 28 June 1997, two days after her last contact with her siblings.

Marnie Lee Frey, 27, was last seen alive in August 1997, though she was not reported missing until 4 September 1998. She had a baby at 18 and asked her parents to adopt the child.

“She said, ‘Mom, this is the only thing I can do for her. I love her dearly, but I know I can’t look after her as a mom,’” her mother recalled.

Her parents pretended that the child, Brittney, was Marnie’s younger sister but were forced to tell her the truth in the light of the publicity surrounding the case.

Jacqueline Murdock, aged 26, was last seen alive on 14 August but was not reported missing until 30 October 1998. Thirty-three-year-old Cindy Louise Beck disappeared in September 1997 and was reported missing on 30 April 1998. Andrea Fay Borhaven, aged 25, had no fixed address until she vanished sometime during 1997, it is thought. Her disappearance was only reported to the police on 18 May 1999. Thirty-eight-year-old Kerry Lynn Koski disappeared in January 1998 and was reported missing on the 29th of the month.

Four more women would disappear before Vancouver police were prompted to take an interest in the case. Twenty-three-year-old Jacqueline McDonnell disappeared in mid-January 1998 and was reported missing on 22 February 1999 and 46-year-old Inga Monique Hall was last seen alive in February 1998 and reported missing on 3 March.

Twenty-nine-year-old mother-of-two Sarah Jane deVries was last seen on the corner of Princess and Hastings in the early morning of 14 April 1998 and reported missing by friends later the same day.

“This started when she was 12,” said her mother Pat. “She has HIV, she has hepatitis C. What I do for her now is look after her kids the best I can.”

When Sarah went missing, her children were seven and two.

“It’s very hard to tell a seven-year-old that somebody is missing,” said Pat. “It’s something you can’t come to terms with, you can’t work through, because there’s never an end to it.”

Nobody has seen or heard from her since. This was unprecedented as she always called on her mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day and her own birthday.

Ex-boyfriend Wayne Leng said Sarah underwent “a lot of turmoil” in her 29 years, particularly as she was a child of mixed parentage adopted by an all-white family on the West Side. As Sarah herself observed in a diary she left behind: “I think my hate is going to be my destination, my executioner.”

Leng put up posters around the Vancouver’s Downtown East-side carrying Sarah’s picture and details of a $1000 reward. But three phone calls he got on his pager around midnight one Saturday night left him chilled.

“Sarah’s dead,” said a man’s slightly slurred voice, with music pounding in the background. “So there will be more girls like her dead. There will be more prostitutes killed. There will be one every Friday night. At the busiest time.”

The second message featured the same voice and had the same music playing in the background.

“You’ll never find Sarah again,” the man said. “So just stop looking for her, all right? She doesn’t want to be seen and heard from again, all right? So, ’bye. She’s dead.”

The final message said: “This is in regard to Sarah. I just want to let you know that you’ll never find her again alive because a friend of mine killed her and I was there.”

Leng said the mystery caller knew things about Sarah deVries not known by many others.

Sheila Catherine Egan was 20 when she vanished in July 1998. Her disappearance was reported on 5 August. She had been a prostitute since the age of 15.

In September 1998, a First Nations’ group sent the authorities a list of women they said had been murdered in Downtown East-side and demanded a thorough investigation. The police responded by saying that some of those listed had moved away and were still alive. Others had died from drug overdoses or disease. However, the complaint prompted Detective Dave Dickson to take a second look at the list of all the Low Track women who had simply disappeared without a trace. By now it had enough names on it to persuade Dickson’s superiors to allow him to set up a cold-case task force.

Throwing its net wide, the task-force started with 40 cases from all parts of Vancouver dating back to 1971. But in an effort to find a pattern, the roster was narrowed to 16 prostitutes from Low Track who had disappeared since 1995. By the time the task force made its first arrest the number had climbed to at least 54 women, who had vanished between 1983 and 2001. By then the task force had swelled to 85.

In the last three months of 1998, while the task force was compiling old cases, four more Low Track prostitutes vanished. Thirty-one-year-old Julie Louise Young was last seen alive in October 1998 and finally reported missing on 1 June 1999. Drug-addict Angela Rebecca Jardine was 28 when she went missing, but she was mentally handicapped and had the mind of a 10-year-old child. She had been working Low Track’s streets since she was 20. Last seen between 3.30 and 4 p.m. on 20 November 1998 at a rally of around 700 people in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, she was reported missing on 6 December. Twenty-nine-year-old Michelle Gurney, a Native American, disappeared in December 1998 and was reported missing on the 22nd. Twenty-year-old Marcella Helen Creison got out of jail on 27 December 1998. She was last seen at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning around the corner from the Drake Hotel and never returned to the apartment where her mother and boyfriend were waiting with unopened Christmas presents. She was reported missing on 11 January 1999.

The task force’s investigations were given added impetus in March 1999 when Jamie Lee Hamilton, a transsexual and former prostitute who went on to become the director of a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers, called a news conference complaining of the police’s lax attitude towards missing prostitutes.

First the task force had to decide if there was a serial killer at large in Vancouver. Inspector Kim Rossmo was convinced there was. The founder of the “geographic profiling” later used in the “Freeway Phantom” case, he was then working for the Vancouver Police Department. He mapped unsolved crimes in an attempt to highlight any pattern or criminal signature overlooked by detectives working on individual cases. Geographic profiles work on the premise that most serial criminals operate close to home. By analyzing the spatial patterns of the attacks, it is said to be possible to trace one serial killer to within two-fifths of a mile of his home. The idea came from studying the way African lions hunt, which almost perfectly matches the predations of a serial killer. Lions look for an animal that exhibits some indication of weakness—the old, the very young, the infirm, the vulnerable—then they go to a watering hole and wait, because they know their potential victim will be drawn there.

“We see that all the time with criminal offenders,” says Rossmo, now a Research Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. “They go to target-rich environments to do their hunting. Spatial patterns are produced by serial killers as they search and attack. The system analyzes the geography of these, the victim encounter, the attack, the murder and body dumpsites.”

In May 1999 Rossmo spotted an unusual concentration of disappearances in Downtown Eastside. However, his superiors dismissed his conclusions, insisting that some of the missing women had left Vancouver voluntarily. Rossmo resigned, but he went on to establish geographic profiling as a respected technique used worldwide to track serial killers.

The task force were further hampered by the fact that Canada’s “Violent Crime Linkage System” did not track missing persons unless there was some evidence of foul play—and none had been found in the cases of the missing women so far. And the data was incomplete. In some cases, the police did not even have a date when the woman had gone missing, and prostitutes and pimps were reluctant to co-operate with officers who would ordinarily put them in jail. However, in June 1999, investigators met with relatives of several missing women. They reviewed police and coroners’ databases throughout Canada and the United States, and checked drug rehabilitation facilities, hospitals, mental institutions, AIDS hospices, witness-protection programmes and cemetery records, looking for evidence that women on the list might still be alive or had perished from natural causes.

Disturbing news came from Agassiz, 60 miles to the east of Vancouver, where the bodies of four prostitutes had been dumped in 1995 and 1996. None of them were on the Low Track list. And in Edmonton, capital of the adjoining province of Alberta, the police believe a serial killer might be connected to the bodies of 12 prostitutes found around that city since 1986.

Some women who made the list were then discovered alive. Twenty-two-year-old Patricia Gay Perkins left Low Track and her one-year-old son in an effort to make a new life for herself. No one was concerned and it was 18 years before she was reported missing in 1996. She then appeared on the published list of the Vancouver’s missing prostitutes. On 17 December 1999, she phoned from Ontario to tell the police she was alive and drug-free.

Fifty-year-old Rose Ann Jensen was found in December 1999. She disappeared in October 1991. Reported as missing soon after, she made the list in 1998. The following year, police discovered that she was alive and living in Toronto when they were scanning a national health-care database.

Linda Jean Coombes was reported missing twice—once in August 1994 and again in April 1999. However, she had died of a heroin overdose on 15 February 1994. Her body arrived in Vancouver’s morgue without identification. She was so wasted that her own mother did not even recognize a photograph of her. But she was eventually identified in September 1999 by DNA and removed from the list.

Karen Anne Smith was reported missing on 27 April 1999, but was removed from the list when it was discovered that she had in fact died of heart failure in hospital in Edmonton on 13 February 1999. Twenty-four-year-old Anne Wolsey was reported missing by her mother on 1 January 1997. In March 2002, her father called from Montreal to tell police his daughter was alive and well.

Although five names were removed from the list of missing women, more were added and it became clear to the task force that some of the women must have been the victims of foul play. The police then began to look for suspects among men with a history of violence against prostitutes. Suspicion fell on 36-year-old Michael Leopold, who had been arrested in 1996 for assaulting a Low Track streetwalker. He had beaten her and tried to force a rubber ball down her throat, though was scared off when a passer-by heard the girl’s screams. Although he told a court-appointed psychiatrist about his fantasies of raping and murdering prostitutes, more went missing while he was being held. He was eventually absolved of any involvement in the disappearances, but was sentenced to 14 years in prison for aggravated assault.

Another suspect was 43-year-old Barry Thomas Neidermier, a native of Alberta. He had been convicted of pimping a 14-year-old girl in 1990, which seems to have left him with a grudge against prostitutes. In April 2000, he was arrested for violent attacks on seven Downtown Eastside prostitutes. The charges against him include abduction, unlawful imprisonment, assault, sexual assault, theft and administering a noxious substance. While none of Neidermier’s victims appeared on the missing list, he was considered “a person of interest”.

Then there was the unidentified rapist who attacked a 38-year-old woman outside her Low Track hotel in August 2001. During the attack, the assailant boasted that he had raped and killed other women in the Downtown Eastside. And there were others. The Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society compiled a daily “bad date” file, recording reports by local prostitutes of “Johns” who attacked or threatened them.

Towards the end of 1998, 37-year-old Bill Hiscox told the police of the goings on at the pig farm in Port Coquitlam just outside Vancouver owned by David Francis and Robert William “Willie” Pickton. The brothers also owned a salvage firm in Surrey, southeast of Vancouver. Hiscox got the job through a relative who had been a girlfriend of Robert Pickton in 1997. He had to go out to the pig farm to pick up his pay-cheques and described it as “a creepy-looking place”.

After reading newspaper reports on Vancouver’s missing women, Hiscox grew suspicious of the Pickton brothers, particularly as Robert Pickton was “a pretty quiet guy” who drove a converted bus with deeply tinted windows. The brothers also ran a registered charity called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. A non-profit society, its official mandate was to “organize, coordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups”. In fact, the Piggy Palace—a converted building at the hog farm—was a drinking club for local bikers which featured “entertainment” provided by Low Track prostitutes.

Police were already aware of the Pickton brothers. David Pickton had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992, fined $1,000 and given 30 days’ probation. Pickton attacked the victim in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. Soon after Piggy Palace opened, the Port Coquitlam authorities sued the Pickton brothers and their sister, Linda Louise Wright, for violating local zoning laws. Their farm was designated for agricultural use, but they had converted a farm building “for the purpose of holding dances, concerts and other recreations” that drew as many as 1,800 persons. After a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1998, the Picktons were served with an injunction banning future parties and the Piggy Palace Good Times Society was stripped of its non-profit status.

Robert “Willie” Pickton was charged with attempted murder on 23 March 1997 after Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a drug addict and prostitute with a wild and reckless past, was rescued from the roadside by a couple driving past the pig farm at 1.45 a.m. She was partially clothed, had been stabbed several times and was covered in blood.

Earlier in the evening, Pickton had picked her up and driven her to the pig farm, According to a police report, Pickton then “did attempt to commit the murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter, by stabbing her repeatedly with… a brown-handled kitchen knife”. She has been handcuffed at the time, but had managed to grab the knife, stab Pickton and escape. He later showed up at Eagle Ridge Hospital, where he was treated for one stab wound.

A provincial court judge released Pickton on a $2,000 cash bond with the undertaking that he stay at the farm and not have any contact with Ms Eistetter.

“You are to abstain completely from the use of alcohol and non-prescription drugs,” the judge ordered.

“I don’t take them,” Pickton replied.

A trial date was set, but the charges were stayed before the matter went to court because the attorney-general’s office decided “there was no likelihood of conviction”. Despite the grievous wounds Wendy Eistetter suffered, she was a prostitute and, therefore, an “unreliable witness”.

Though Pickton had walked free, the stabbing had convinced Hiscox that Pickton was responsible for “all the girls that are going missing… [Pickton] frequents the downtown area all the time, for girls”. Hiscox told the police: “All the purses and IDs are out there in his trailer.”

However, when the police searched the pig farm—three times according to press reports—they found nothing. While the Pickton brothers would remain “persons of interest”, their farm was not put under surveillance. Meanwhile the list of missing women grew longer. By the year 2000, it had expanded to more than three times the number of missing women first listed in 1998. This was not just because women had continued to vanish from Low Track. Other women who had disappeared earlier were now coming to the attention of the authorities.

Forty-two-year old Laura Mah was last seen on 1 August 1985, but was not reported missing until 3 August 1999. Nancy Clark—aka Nancy Greek—was 23 when she was last seen on the evening of 22 August 1991 in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia on Vancouver Island across the strait from the city of Vancouver itself. Concerns about Clark’s well-being were raised one day after her disappearance because she had failed to return home to look after her two daughters—aged eight years and eight months—which was out of character.

“It was the birthday of her child that day and, for a sex street worker, she was a bit of a home-body,” said Victoria Policeman Don Bland. “That’s what was suspicious at the start, because she would never have done that.”

However, Officer Bland expressed her doubts that Nancy Clark should be on the Low Track list as she had no connection with Vancouver and only worked the streets of the capital.

Elsie Sebastian, another Native American, was 40 when she went missing on 16 October 1992. Leigh Miner, a 34-year-old heroin addict and prostitute, phoned her sister to ask for money on 17 December 1993. That was the last time anyone heard of her. She was reported missing on 24 February 1994. Seventeen-year-old Angela Mary Arsenault was last seen on 19 August 1994 and reported missing ten days later. Thirty-six-year-old Frances Ann Young was missing on 9 April 1996. Last seen leaving her home three days before to go for a walk, she was suffering from depression at the time of her disappearance.

Fifty-two-year-old Maria Laura Laliberte—alias Kim Keller—was last seen in Low Track on New Year’s Day, but was only reported missing on 8 March 2002. Forty-two-year-old Cindy Feliks was last seen on 26 November 1997 and reported missing 8 January 2001, while Sherry Leigh Irving was last seen in April 1997 and reported missing the following year.

Ruby Anne Hardy, mother of three, disappeared at the age of 33 some time in 1998, but was not reported missing until 27 March 2002. Native Americans Georgina Faith Papin and Jennifer Lynn Furminger vanished in 1999 along with Wendy Crawford, but did not make the list until March 2000. Thirty-year-old Brenda Ann Wolfe, who went missing on 1 February 1999, made the list a month later. Tiffany Louise Drew was 27 when she disappeared on 31 December 1999, but she was not reported missing until 8 February 2002.

Publicity surrounding the list encouraged the reporting of missing persons. Forty-two-year-old Dawn Teresa Crey was last seen on Main and Hastings on 1 November 2000 and was reported missing on 11 December. Debra Lynn Jones, aged 43, disappeared on 21 December 2000 and was reported missing four days later on Christmas Day. Twenty-five-year-old Patricia Rose Johnson went missing from Main and Hastings on 3 March 2001 but took three months to make the list. Heather Kathleen Bottomley, aged 24, made the list the same day she was last seen—17 April 2001—even though the police described her as a “violent suicide risk”. However, Tricia Johnson’s death had attracted more attention. Shortly before she disappeared she had been befriended by portrait photographer Lincoln Clarkes who was recording the lives of the drug-addicted prostitutes of Low Track for his books Heroines. She took time off from her revolving-door hustle for heroin and sex to talk to him about her world—how she had broken her boyfriend’s heart, abandoning him and their two young children to embrace heroin and crack cocaine instead of the family.

Throughout the project Clarkes stayed close to Johnson, who was his original “heroine”. They became friends. During that time she tried to quit drugs for the sake of her kids. But her father’s suicide sent her into a tailspin. She had quit rehab and had been repeatedly arrested for breaking and entering.

The last time Clarkes heard from Patricia was a message she left on his home answering machine in February 2001.

“Hey, it’s Tricia, Lincoln,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Trying to get a hold of you, trying to find what’s up! I wish I had a number you can call me back at, but I don’t. So all I can do is keep trying.”

Soon after she stopped cashing her welfare checks, stopped phoning her family and even stopped contact with her two children. Her mother, Marion Bryce, spoke of the terrible warning she had given her daughter who had already survived five years on the streets.

“She was here on New Year’s Day,” she told reporters, “and I told her, ‘Patty, you’re not even going to see 25 if you keep on—you’ll be missing like those women down there.’”

Bryce later contacted Clarkes, who gave her a photo of Patricia in shoulder-length hair, wearing a leather jacket, her lips puffy, burned by a crack pipe. Later, to attract attention to the plight of the missing women, Clarkes brought her another portrait, accompanied by a film crew.

Days after this blaze of publicity, Patricia Rose Johnson was listed as Missing Woman No. 44. After five years working the streets of Low Track, her last known possessions were recorded as “a book (title not given), a comb, condoms, water, a spoon, cigarettes, a lighter, belt, watch, rings and a chain”.

Weeks after Johnson disappeared, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police joined the case and promptly assembled a team of federal investigators that would grow to 30 members. But that did nothing to stem the growth of the list.

Thirty-three-year-old Yvonne Marie Boen was listed only five days after she disappeared on 16 March 2001. Her mother, Lynn Metin, began to worry when her daughter, who had three sons, failed to show up in March 2001 for a visit with her middle son Troy, whom Metin was raising.

“She was supposed to be here that Sunday to pick him up and she didn’t show up,” Metin told the Vancouver Sun in 2004. “She never contacted me. That just wasn’t her. Every holiday, Troy’s birthday, my birthday—it just wasn’t like her not to phone.”

Heather Gabriel Chinnock, aged 29, vanished the following month, followed by Andrea Josebury, aged 22, on 6 June. Her grandfather Jack Cummer said Andrea was straightening out her life and was providing a good home to her infant daughter in an East Vancouver apartment some time before she disappeared.

“She was working very hard, she needed a lot of things, but she was doing it all herself,” Cummer told the Sun. “Andrea was worn to a frazzle, but the baby was well cared for.”

However, he said, social services received a complaint about the well-being of the girl and seized her, which sent his granddaughter back into the downward spiral of drugs and prostitution.

“The thing is that she lost her whole reason to live,” Cummer said.

The child was adopted and the Cummers are not able to see her. Andrea, he said, either did not realize or would not accept the finality of the adoption, and would tell her grandparents that she was going to try to get her daughter back.

“She decided that she was going to straighten up and her prime objective was to get the baby back. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was never going to do that,” he said.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sereena Abotsway, went missing on 1 August. Adopted at the age of four, she had always been trouble.

“She was sweet and bubbly but she was very disturbed,” said her adoptive mother Anna Draayers. “She gave her teachers a headache and we tried to teach her at home but there was not much you could do. At that time we did not have a name for the condition, but it is now known as foetal alcohol syndrome.”

The Draayers never lost contact with the child.

“She was our girl, and we loved her a lot,” they said. “She phoned daily for 13 years since she left our home at age 17.”

And hope was at hand.

“She had come home in July,” said Mrs Draayers, “and she agreed to come home and celebrate her 30th birthday on 20 August, but she never showed up.”

Diane Rosemary Rock, aged 34, was last seen on 19 October 2001 by the owner of the motel where she was living and was reported missing on 13 December. Diane, her husband and three children moved to British Columbia in 1992 for a fresh start in life. But in their new home, Rock’s personal problems resurfaced and she was back using drugs again. After a while her marriage fell apart and she was on her own. The last member of the family to see her was her teenage daughter. That was in June 2001 when they met her to celebrate the teenager’s birthday.

Mona Lee Wilson, aged 26, disappeared on 23 November 2001 and made the list a week later. She was the last to vanish. Her common-law husband Steve Ricks told reporters he had last seen her get into a car with two men.

“She told me many times she’d like to die,” Ricks said. “She was sick of this hell, all the hooking and drugs.”

Disappearances had been going on for over two decades now, but even more disturbingly they were getting increasingly more frequent. Detectives looked back at the earlier cases to see if other known criminals could have been responsible.

The elusive “Green River Killer” had been killing runaways and prostitutes over the border in Washington State for much of the period. On 30 November 2001, 52-year-old Gary Leon Ridgway was charged with murdering four of the Green River victims. Two years later he pleaded guilty to 49 murders. There were reports that Ridgway had visited Vancouver, but the police could make no connection between him and the missing women.

Dayton Leroy Rogers was abducting, torturing and killing prostitutes in Oregon in 1987. He was arrested on 7 August 1987, after murdering a prostitute in a parking lot in front of witnesses. Only then did it become clear that he was responsible for the murder of seven women whose bodies had been found in a wooded area near Molalla, 20 miles outside the city. Some had had their feet cut off, possibly while they were still alive. But Rogers was soon cleared on any involvement in the earlier Vancouver abductions.

George Waterfield Russell Jnr—aka “The Charmer”, “The Bellevue Killer” and, coincidently, “The East Side Killer”—was also considered. He had killed three women in Bellevue, Washington in 1990. But he was discounted because he killed his victims in their own homes and then displayed them in elaborate poses, after he had raped and mutilated their corpses.

Other serial killers were suspected. In 1995, Keith Hunter Jesperson, a British Columbian, had been arrested in Washington State, for the murder of his girlfriend 41-year-old Julie Winningham. He had strangled her and dumped her body at the roadside. A long-haul truck driver, he then said he had murdered women widely across North America, dumping their bodies like “piles of garbage” along the roadside. At one point he boasted about 160 murders, though he has been convicted for just eight. But, again, the police could not find a link between the man the newspapers dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” and the missing women from Low Track.

Seemingly mild-mannered US Navy veteran and father of two John Eric Armstrong was arrested in April 2000 for the murder of a number of Detroit prostitutes and promptly confessed to killing 30 women around the world during his time in the Navy. However, his ship the USS Nimitz did not put into port near Vancouver when any of the women went missing.

Middle-aged father of five, Robert Yates was convicted of killing 15 women in Washington State in October 2000, but is thought to have killed at least 18, most of whom were drug addicts and prostitutes. The earliest killings he admitted to were those of two women in Walla Walla in 1975 and a woman in Skagit County in 1988, both close to the border. However, evidence could not place him in Vancouver at the time of any of the disappearances.

Vancouver had its own home-grown suspect in the person of Ronald Richard McCauley, a twice-convicted rapist. Sentenced to 17 years imprisonment in 1982, he was paroled in September 1994. In September 1995, he was arrested again after he picked up a prostitute at Vancouver’s Astoria Hotel in July and drove her to Hemlock Valley, where she was beaten, raped and dumped from his truck. The woman reported the incident to police and McCauley was convicted of rape and attempted murder in 1996.

McCauley came to the attention of the police again when the bodies of prostitutes Tracy Olajide, Tammy Lee Pipe and Victoria Younker were found that year near Agassiz and Mission near Hemlock Valley. He was also a suspect in the murder of Mary Lidguerre whose body was found in north Vancouver two years later, and the disappearance of Catherine Maureen Knight, Catherine Louise Gonzalez and Dorothy Anne Spence who went missing in 1995. Despite circumstantial evidence against him, he was never charged. Eventually he was cleared of the three Hemlock Valley murders by DNA evidence in 2001. But after telling a parole hearing that, had he not been arrested, he “would have become a serial killer such as Clifford Olson” he was declared a dangerous offender and jailed indefinitely.

On 7 February 2002, Robert Pickton was arrested for the possession of illegal firearms. Meanwhile the task force began scouring the pig farm once again. Pickton was released on bail, but arrested again on 22 February—this time on two counts of first-degree murder. The victims were identified as Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. On 8 March, it was revealed that DNA recovered from the farm had been conclusively identified as Sereena’s. Both had gone missing since Bill Hiscox had first reported his suspicions to the police

A month later, Pickton was charged with three more counts of murder—those of Jacqueline McDonnell, Heather Bottomley and Diane Rock. He was charged with the murder of Angela Josebury, six days later. Then on 22 May, a seventh first-degree murder charge was filed against Pickton when the remains of Brenda Wolfe were found on his farm. Again, all these women had gone missing after Hiscox first fingered Pickton.

This begged the question: if Pickton was the Low Track slayer, why had the searches of the farm in 1997 and 1998 not unearthed any evidence? And how could he have continued to abduct and murder victims afterwards, when he should have been under surveillance by the police?

The authorities were adamant that the evidence had been hard to come by as Pickton went to great lengths to dispose of the bodies. They were said to have been left out in the open to decompose or be eaten by insects. Otherwise they were fed to the pigs on the farm. Forensic anthropologists spent two years and $70 million shifting through the soil on the farm in an attempt to find traces of remains. Then in March 2004, the authorities said that the victims’ flesh may have been ground up and mixed with pork from the farm. This pork was never sold commercially, but was handed out to friends and fed to visitors to the farm—perhaps even visiting prostitutes themselves.

Meanwhile Pickton maintains his innocence of all charges. But even if he is guilty as charged, what happened to the other women who went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside? Their number is disputed. The task force maintain there are another 47 unaccounted for. However, when Pickton was arrested, the Prostitution Alternatives Counselling Education said that 110 streetwalkers from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland had been slain or kidnapped over the past two decades. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have 144 cases of prostitutes murdered or missing with foul play suspected across the province. So it is likely that there is another—or possibly several—killers at large in British Columbia.

Canada’s “Highway of Tears”

A serial killer, or killers, seem to be at work along Highway 16 in northern British Columbia. The stretch that runs the 450 miles from Prince Rupert to Prince George has become known at the “Highway of Tears”. It is regularly flanked by posters showing pictures of teenage girls and young women under the word “Missing”.

It is a lonely stretch of road, especially in winter—though it can be staggeringly beautiful when the sun comes out and rays of light coming through the clouds play on the frozen lakes, creeks and vistas of mountains that disappear in the clouds. Sometimes at sunrise and sunset, the snow on the mountain peaks glows neon pink.

On some parts of the road there is nothing but wilderness for miles, interrupted by the occasional ranch house with smoke trailing from the chimney. There are signs warning: “Caution: Moose Next 20 km.”

Travelling through the towns along the way—Vanderhoof, Fraser Lake, Burns Lake, Houston, Telkwa and Smithers—the car radio announces meetings of the local knitting circle and the snowmobile club. Young residents have few choices but to hitchhike when they travel from town to town.

There are many side roads off the highway, leading to remote logging sites, lakes and other rural recreational spots. It is the kind of sparsely-populated rural countryside that attracts tourists and sports fishermen from Europe and the US—including late-night talk show host David Letterman—and, it seems, murderers.

The disturbing pattern of disappearances was first noticed in 1995, but they seem to have started much earlier. The victims were young girls, mostly Aboriginal in origin, and aged 15 to their early 20s. They vanished after being seen hitch-hiking along the highway.

Fifteen-year-old Monica Ignas appears to be the first victim. She went missing near Terrace on 13 December 1974. Her partially clothed body was found in a gravel pit on 6 April 1975, about four miles from Terrace. She had been strangled.

One area resident, Janet Hultkrans, recalls that Ignas used to hitch-hike from Terrace to her home just past Thornhill, on the outskirts of town.

“Maybe she was the first [to disappear],” she says. “She wasn’t much older than my kids and I had picked her up once and driven her to school, so she is forever in my memory. She was a nice girl and doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.”

In the early hours of 27 August 1989 a 24-year-old “First-Nations” woman named Alberta Gail Williams disappeared from Prince Rupert. The police were notified and the family under took a frantic search.

“I just knew something was wrong,” said Alberta’s sister Kathy Williams.

“My father said, ‘It makes me so sad to see my kids out there looking through bushes,’” Claudia Williams, another sister, recalled. “He said, ‘If she’s not alive I want to know what happened.’”

Nearly a month later, on 25 September, some hikers came across a body near the Tyee Overpass on Highway 16, about 23 miles east of Prince Rupert. It was identified as that of Alberta Williams. The body was flown to Vancouver for a post mortem and the coroners there confirmed that she had been murdered, though the police never released details of how she had been killed.

Earlier in that summer, Alberta and Claudia had come to Prince Rupert to take a summer job at a local fish company. They had family in town. The season had drawn to a close and 26 August was their last payday. They intended to move to Vancouver. But first they went out to celebrate in Popeye’s Pub—now known as the Rupert Pub—with sister Kathy, cousins Carole and Phoebe Russell, along with Phoebe’s boyfriend Gordon McLean. At around 2.30 a.m., Alberta left first, followed by the rest of the revellers.

“When I got outside, she turned towards the old Greyhound building and I lost her,” said Claudia.

What happened next remains unclear. The local paper reported that Alberta attended “a local bar and then a house party”. The Williams family heard something similar.

“I heard she was at a party and some people saw her,” said Alberta’s uncle Wally Samuel. But the people with her did not come forward.

The local newspaper also reported that Alberta Williams was seen with an unidentified man later that night.

“She loved people,” said Claudia. “Out of all my sisters she’s the best. I really think she’d be around today if she wasn’t the friendly person she was.”

“Murder investigations such as this remain active until they are solved,” said Constable Jagdev Uppal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police some 15 years after the event. “The investigation into Alberta’s death, particularly at the time of the event, was extensive and includes over 200 tips. Due to the seriousness of the matter, and to protect the integrity of the investigation, details regarding the evidence are not being released.”

A new series of killings began with 16-year-old Ramona Wilson, who was last seen hitch-hiking along Highway 16 to visit a friend in Smithers, 130 miles east of Prince Rupert, on 11 June 1994. Her remains were found near Smithers airport in April 1995.

Ramona’s best friend Kristal said: “Ramona was such a dear friend and a young woman with more drive than anyone else I knew at age 15. She had hopes and dreams for her life… I still wonder what the purpose of her murder was, but I know that I have to look to the future as opposed to sitting back and wondering why things happen.”

Kristal was also one of the last people to see 16-year-old Delphine Nikal, who went missing while hitch-hiking east along Highway 16 from Smithers to her home in Telkwa on 13 June 1995. She has yet to be found. Delphine’s cousin Cecilia Anne Nikal had been missing since 1989 and another cousin Roberta Cecilia Nikal had been murdered.

Before Delphine Nikal disappeared, 15-year-old Roxanne Thiara went missing from Prince George in November 1994. Her body was found dumped near Burns Lake on 9 December 1994. Another murder occurred that same day.

Sixteen-year-old Alishia Demarah Germaine—also known as Leah Germaine or Leah Cunningham—had attended a pre-Christmas dinner hosted by the RCMP at the Native Friendship Centre on George Street, leaving at around 8.00 p.m. She was then seen at the Holiday Inn, on George Street, and at J. C. Funland.

At 11.45 p.m. that night, the police were called to Haldi Road School on Leslie Road. Three people who had taken a short cut through the schoolyard had come across the body of a young woman. It was Leah Germaine, dead from multiple stab wounds. The teenage had been a drug-user and supported her habit by working the city streets as a prostitute, though it seems she had plans to straighten out her life and finish her education. She never got the chance.

A composite drawing of the man Leah was seen with that night was produced. The police found the man, but this led them no closer to finding Germaine’s killer. The police were also on the look-out for the owner of a dark blue pick up truck with a homemade canopy on the back that was parked on Fifth Avenue downtown, near the Post Office the night Germaine was killed. Some of Germaine’s personal effects were found nearby—though the owner was considered a potential witness rather than a suspect.

Early on in the investigation, there were some suspicions that Germaine’s murder and those of Roxanne Thiara, Ramona Wilson and Delphine Nikal were connected. All the victims were between the ages of 15 and 20. Thinking that a serial killer might be at work, a team of investigators, including two FBI trained behavioural profilers, came to the area for a week in 1995. They dismissed the theory even though some made connections to an earlier murder of a First-Nations woman.

On 24 July 1990, the body of 21-year-old Cindy Angus Burk was found near a highway in Kiskatinaw Provincial Park outside Dawson Creek, 160 miles northeast of Prince George. She had been raised primarily in Regina, Saskatchewan and later moved to Carmacks, Yukon Territory. Cindy was new to northern British Columbia in the summer of 1990. She was last seen around mid-July in Prophet River, north of Fort St John and at that time was thought to be heading to Saskatchewan. At the time of the discovery of Cindy’s body an extensive search of the area was conducted, numerous people were interviewed and forensics were gathered and analyzed. Despite exhaustive efforts no one was arrested. But the file remained open and over 16 years later, on 16 November 2006, a 60-year-old man was arrested in Fort St John and charged with second-degree homicide in connection with Cindy’s death.

Despite the detectives’ scepticism, the disappearances continued. On 7 October 1995, 19-year-old Lana Derrick, a forestry student at Northwest Community College in Terrace, disappeared. She was last seen at a service station in Thornhill while home from school at the weekend. She has never been heard from since.

Things went quiet on Highway 16 for the next seven years. Then on 21 June 2002 a Caucasian woman went missing while hitch-hiking down Highway 16. Nicole Hoar was a 25-year-old young tree planter from Red Deer last seen hitching her way from Prince George to her sister’s home in Smithers. She was hoping to attend the Midsummer Music Festival, but never arrived.

Her family and friends got the story of her disappearance out to all the major news organizations. They organized a massive poster campaign and a reward was offered. The RCMP searched the area using helicopters and other aircraft. Two hundred volunteers including more than 60 members of trained search and rescue teams combed the highway. Despite everything, no sign of Nicole Hoar was ever found.

A campaign called “Take Back the Highway” was started. On 17 September 2005, there were marches, speeches and prayers to commemorate the dead in communities between Prince Rupert and Prince George. But four days later 22-year-old Tamara Chipman went missing somewhere between Prince Rupert and Terrace. She was last seen hitch-hiking eastbound on Highway 16 near Prince Rupert’s industrial park around 4.30 p.m. on 21 September 2005. She had been in Prince Rupert partying with friends for the previous three days.

She wasn’t reported missing by her family until 10 November as they thought she might have been visiting relatives in the Lower Mainland. It was also thought that she might have been hiding out from the law. She was facing three separate assault charges at the time, including one alleging forcible entry and assault with a weapon. Before she was reported missing, three warrants were issued for her arrest for failing to show up in court. She was also trained in judo, 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing 130 pounds, and it was not thought that an assailant could easily have overpowered her.

“She was pretty spunky,” her father said. “She took judo lessons for years, so she knew how to look after herself pretty good.”

Tamara Chipman was said to be very close to her father and stepmother, though she sometimes did not contact her family for a couple of days and it was not unusual for her to be gone for weeks. But after 21 September 2005, her rent was not paid and no use was made of her bank account.

She did not have a job and liked spending time on her former boyfriend’s boat, liked water-skiing and looking after her two-year-old son Jaden, who she left in the care of his father, 42-year-old Rob Parker, when she took off. Parker, Chipman’s ex-boyfriend, said he was one of the last people to talk to her in Terrace on 17 or 18 September. She called him despite there being a no-contact court order in place.

“That’s the last time I ever heard her voice,” he said.

Parker said he had heard about her being seen hitch-hiking from Prince Rupert back to Terrace.

“I don’t believe she ever got here,” he said and believes that she got lost like other women along Highway 16. He agreed to take a lie-detector test.

Ten RCMP officers were assigned to the investigation and Tamara’s family undertook an extensive search of the highway. Her father walked long stretches of the road looking in every culvert. Officers also contacted the major crimes unit in Prince George which continues to investigate the disappearance of numerous women along Highway 16 over the last decade.

Meanwhile, 24-year-old Crystal Lee Okimaw disappeared from a women’s shelter in Prince George on 16 January 2006. Foul play was suspected.

The remains of 14-year-old Aielah Saric-Auger were found by a passing motorist on the side of Highway 16 near Tabor Mountain 10 miles east of Prince George on 10 February 2006. She was last seen by her family on 2 February. At the time, family members said she stayed overnight with a friend, but there were report of a sighting of her getting into a black van the following day. Two retired RCMP officers who had worked on the earlier investigation told the Prince George Citizen that Aielah had been the victim of a serial killer who was also responsible for the deaths of Ramona Wilson, Roxanne Thiara, Alishia Germaine and, possibly, Delphine Nikal.

Retired RCMP officer Fred Maile, who helped crack the Clifford Olson serial killer case in British Columbia by getting Olson to confess to 11 murders, told the Vancouver Sun: “I am 100-per-cent certain that there’s a serial killer there. I went up there twice to look at the cases of Delphine Nikal and Ramona Wilson. We felt the same individual had grabbed them.”

He had been asked by the Calgary-based Missing Children Society to investigate these two Highway 16 cases and found too many similarities.

“They were both native, both about the same age and they were hitch-hiking in opposite directions,” Maile recalls. “The whole situation smacks of someone driving that highway and living there.”

The unusual thing about serial killers, he said, is that they can sometimes go years between murders.

“They look for an opportunity,” he said. “There’s usually not two or three individuals in the same area that do this.”

He also points out that a serial killer can appear normal and go undetected.

“They don’t stand out as monsters. They blend in with the rest of us. Look at the Green River killer.”

Arlene Roberts, a volunteer fire-fighter who lives on Highway 16 just west of Terrace, agrees that there is a killer who preys on young women at work. She often sees people hitch-hiking along the highway.

“It’s male and female, young and old,” she says. “But it’s only the young women who are going missing.”

Highway 16 also runs east to Edmonton, where the police have the unsolved murders of 12 prostitutes on their hands. In that case, RCMP have offered a reward of $100,000 and released a profile that suggests the killer or killers drive a truck or SUV which is cleaned at unusual hours. It is thought that the killer may be a hunter, fisherman or camper, who is comfortable driving on unmetalled roads, and is probably connected to towns south of Edmonton.

Some 175 miles south of Edmonton is Calgary where, in a 19-month period in the early 1990s, five women—four of whom were prostitutes—disappeared. Their bodies later appeared, dumped around the outskirts of the city.

The first woman to disappear was 16-year-old street urchin Jennifer Janz, who disappeared in July 1991. Her badly beaten body was discovered in a shallow grave on 13 August 1991 in the Valley Ridge district of northwest Calgary. Reported missing on 30 August 1991, the body of 17-year-old Jennifer Joyes was found in a shallow grave on 6 October 1991, just a mile south of where Janz had been buried. Both had reportedly been attempting to escape life on the streets. Keely Pincott, who disappeared three months later, was found nearby.

Tracey Maunder went missing in October 1992 and 20-year-old Rebecca Boutelier disappeared in February 1993. She was found stabbed to death on 11 March. Their bodies were found in fields east of the city rather than to the west like those of Jennifer Janz, Jennifer Joyes and Keely Pincott.

Then the killings stopped. Police believe that the perpetrator might have been jailed for another murder. During the same time period these five women were murdered city officials also have unsolved murder files on six other women.

Later Barry Thomas Neidermier became a suspect in the murders of Jennifer Janz and Rebecca Boutelier. A convicted pimp, he had become “a person of interest” in the case of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside’s missing prostitutes after being arrested in Lethbridge, Alberta, a hundred miles south of Calgary. Forty-three-year-old Barry Thomas Niedermier was charged with brutal sexual assaults from 1995 to 1997 against seven prostitutes working in downtown Vancouver, where he had been living. He was also questioned by police in Edmonton and Calgary in their own missing prostitute cases, including those who had gone missing in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1990 Neidermier had been sentenced to 14 months imprisonment for pimping a 14-year-old girl whom he brought from Calgary to Vancouver.

As if RCMP did not have enough unsolved cases on their hands, according to Amnesty International Canada, Tamara Chipman’s disappearance bought the number of missing or murdered women along the highway to 33—all but one were Aboriginal. This was based on information gathered for a report Amnesty released in October 2004 called Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada. This cited a 1996 federal government statistic that native women between 25 and 44 are five times more likely to die as the result of violence than other women in the same age group.

The report also included a figure gathered by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, which estimates that more than 500 native women may have been murdered or gone missing over a 20-year period prior to 2004.

The Amnesty International report also cited nine cases of violence against native women, including the murder of Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old Cree student from northern Manitoba who dreamed of becoming a teacher but was abducted from the street of The Pas, Manitoba by four men, raped and killed on the night of 12 November 1971. Her naked body was found later by the police.

It took more than 15 years to bring one of the four men to justice. The Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission conducted an investigation into the length of time involved in resolving the case and concluded that the most significant factor was racism. The Commission found that police had long been aware of white men sexually preying on native women and girls in the town of The Pas but “did not feel that the practice necessitated any particular vigilance.”

A formal apology from the Manitoba government was issued by Manitoba’s Minister of Justice in 2000 and a scholarship was created in Osborne’s name for aboriginal women.

But at least the case of Helen Osborne was resolved. Many more have not been—like that of 16-year-old Deena Lynn Braem of Quesnel, BC. She was last seen alive at around 4 a.m. on 25 September 1999, just two days before her 17th birthday. She was later reported as missing and the police immediately suspected foul play.

On 10 December 1999, human remains were found near Pinnacles Park, just west of Quesnel. A post mortem identified the body as that of Deena Braem. She had been murdered.

On Friday, 24 September, she had attended Correlieu Secondary in Quesnel, where she was just beginning her final year. She lived in Bouchie Lake, some six miles to the west of Quesnel, but her parents had given her permission to stay the weekend with a friend in the city to celebrate her birthday. Together they went to an outdoor party in the Quesnel area. It was well part midnight when they left. Deena had been drinking alcohol, but according to friends was not drunk. They got a lift back to Quesnel and were dropped off at a residence on English Avenue at around 2.30. But then, at Deena’s urging, they went out again.

Deena had decided she wanted to go home to her Mom and Dad instead of staying in town with friends. The two girls walked the short distance to the intersection of North Fraser Drive and Edkins Street, then up North Fraser Drive to Fuller, while they tried to hitch a ride. It was cold and Deena’s girlfriend went home, leaving Deena to hitchhike alone. Witnesses saw two males in their teens or early twenties in North Fraser Drive around that time and the case remains unsolved. But then in Quesnel there are a remarkable number of unsolved cases.

On 26 November 2004, the family of Barbara Anne Lanes, aged 57, reported her missing. She had not been seen for a week. The sightings were investigated but none were confirmed, and police have no clues about where she is or how she disappeared. Laurie Joseph Blanchard was last seen in Quesnel on 2 July 1972, when he was preparing to move to New Brunswick. His body was found on 13 August 1972. He had been murdered. Mary Agnes Thomas disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel on or about 10 September 1971. Her body has never been recovered. Herman Alec disappeared under suspicious circumstances near the Nazko Indian Reserve on 14 October 1977. His body has never been found. Santokh Kaur Johal disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel on or about 1 April 1978. Her body has never been recovered. Janice Ellisabeth Hackh disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel on or about 24 August 1979. Her body has never been found. Wayne Albert Taylor disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel in or around January 1976. His body has never been recovered. Mary Jane Jimmie was found murdered on the banks of the nearby Fraser River on or about 26 June 1987. Duncan Harris was found on a sidewalk in Quesnel on 6 July 1988, apparently the victim of an assault. He later died in hospital from these injuries. William Henry Terrico was found murdered in his home on 12 December 1989. Brian Mirl Chaffee was reported missing on 22 September 1990. He was last seen at his home on 18 September 1990. His body was found on 24 September 1990. Dale Melvin Johnson disappeared under suspicious circumstances on August 15, 1996. His body has never been recovered. Not bad for a city of around 10,000 people.

Thirty-one-year-old Melanie Dawn Brown, another First-Nations woman, was found deceased in a basement suite located in the 400 block of Olgivie Street in Prince George at around 4 p.m. on 8 December 2004. A post mortem confirmed that she had been murdered. Police have not released the exact cause of death. She is considered a candidate for a Highway 16 killing.

Nineteen-year-old Corrine Cunningham of the Katzie Reserve near Pitt Meadows, outside Vancouver, disappeared at 3 p.m. on 24 November 2005 after she left “New Transitions” in the Pitt Meadows Industrial Park. She had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old and a tendency to befriend older men. Her new black BMX bicycle was also missing.

Seventy-one-year-old Helena Jack, a member of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, was murdered on 29 July 2004 in the garage beside her cabin in Burns Lake, which is in the 600-block of Highway 16. Police believe a man named Vincent Sam followed her into the garage on the night of the assault. Sam was arrested in August 2004, shortly after Burns Lake Fire and Rescue discovered the severely beaten body of Helena Jack in a burnt-out garage beside a cabin on the 600-block of highway 16. Evidence found in the garage directed the police search to a local motel room. They believe their suspect tried to wash his body of evidence linking him to the crime, before returning to his residence later that night. But investigators found DNA in the motel room that matched DNA found at the crime scene. It belonged to Vincent Sam. Sam was charged with Helena Jack’s murder on 4 September 2004. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Belinda Ann Cameron—aka Belinda Ann Engen—disappeared in early May 2005, from Esquimalt near Victoria. She was a schizophrenic and needed daily medication to keep the condition in check. She was also a drug user thought to be involved in the sex trade. Foul play is suspected. She could have been the victim of Robert Pickton, like Victoria resident Nancy Creek, if he had not already been in custody.

Another possible victim of a second Low Track slayer is 24-year-old Doras Gail Shorson, who was last seen on 2 April 2005 when she left the family home on Larner Road, Surrey. She was a drug-user who worked in the sex trade in Surrey or Vancouver. And 14-year-old Lorna Ulmer-Billy was last seen home in the 15100 block of 86 Avenue in Surrey, BC, at around 9 p.m. on 7 January 2005 when her stepfather looked in to check she was still asleep. It was thought that she left home early the next morning to meet some friends. However, she has run away before to Squamish and Vancouver.

Twenty-year-old Rene Gunning has been missing since 19 February 2005 when she left Edmonton for her home in Fort St John in the company of another female from Dawson Creek. The pair were thought to be hitch-hiking.

Seventeen-year-old Lisa Paul disappeared from her home on 4 August 2005. Lisa was known to frequent the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Twenty-nine-year-old Charlene Kerr was found dead in a pool of blood in the Gastown Hotel in 1990. She was a prostitute and drug user.

Fourteen-year-old Tawyna Megan Lisk called a friend on 18 July 2004 and said that she was going to Calgary, Alberta. It is thought she planned to hitch-hike.

Sarah Strachan, aged 16, was last seen on 7 February 2004 from Coquitlam, just a few miles from Pickton’s pig farm. Also missing is her Caucasian friend Leah Nestegarde, aged 14.

Then there is the case of 39-year-old Ada Brown of Prince George who died three weeks after suffering a serious head injury during a beating. Her family said that she sought medical attention on three different occasions following the beating and was turned away.

“When she died, and we went to the funeral home, my sister and I didn’t recognize her,” said sister Terri Brown. “It was obvious she had been badly beaten several times yet the authorities had ruled she died of ‘natural causes’.”

Chelsea Acorn, aged 14, disappeared from Abbottsford, BC, late in the afternoon of 10 June 2005. It is believed that Chelsea has run away and could be in the Surrey area 25 miles away.

This is just a small sample of the mayhem in British Columbia. But the “Highway of Tears” seems to stretch right across Canada. There are countless unsolved cases out there and numerous killers at large. One even exploits Native Americans’ low tolerance for alcohol, takes First-Nations women to his hotel room and pours vodka down their throats until they die. He is still at large.

Costa Rica’s Psychopath

A serial killer known as El Psicópata—“The Psychopath”—has been stalking Costa Rica. Between 1986 and 1996 he has killed at least 19 people, though the police say that number could exceed 31, but then there are other killers at large in the small Central America state.

The Psychopath preys on young couples in the secluded wooded area to the south of the capital San José. He always attacks at night. It is thought that he is a hunter who plans his attacks, waiting and watching until a couple arrive. He usually waits until the couples start making love before shooting them with a 45-calibre weapon, thought to be an M3 machine gun, then mutilates the breasts and sexual organs of his female victims with a US Army knife. It is believed that he follows his potential victims for several days before killing them, leaving no tracks.

Most of the killings have been committed in a wooded area south of the Florencio Freeway that runs from San José out to Cartago. The area stretching south to Desamparados is now called the “triangle of death” by the locals. The killings often occur near a brook or river, also giving the perpetrator the nickname “The Psychopath of the Rivers”.

To start with, the killer also exhibited a unique pattern to his murders. After the murder of two couples, he then murdered a single women. But, in that case, he did not mutilate the bodies, though it was thought that he carried out acts of necrophilia. His attacks occurred every other month, on a full moon. However, the pattern has now become less clear. The authorities now think that killer began with a murder known as Alajuelita Massacre—the murder of seven women and girls on 6 June 1986 in the town of Alajuelita, which lies within the triangle of death. His last known attack was on 26 October 1996 when he found Ileana Alvarez and Mauricio Cordero parked in their Nissan Sentra. He forced them to get out of the car and walk 500 yards before he shot them. However, the police now think he may also be responsible for the disappearance of 12 other young people in 1996.

Several psychological profiles of the killer have been drawn up. One sees him as a “Rambo” type—a deranged former military or police official. Another theory is that he was a Nicaraguan guerrilla, or a Costa Rican who had gone to fight in the civil war there. Other theories say he could be the son of a wealthy politician or a landowner. Police believe the killer is probably in his thirties or forties, and could be highly intelligent.

On 26 June 1998, the Judicial Investigative Organization of Costa Rica announced they had arrested a serial killer who operated in the triangle of death. The killer was a 52-year-old construction worker, the father of 11 children whose favourite hobby is hunting. He sexually abuses his victims, then kills them with hunting rifles, and buries them under concrete. However, there seems to be no connection between this new unnamed killer and the Psychopath.

There is also another serial killer at large in Costa Rica known as El Descuartizador—“The Quarterer”. He specializes in killing drug addicts—usually defenceless youths and women. He then cuts up their bodies and then scatters the pieces. It is not known how many he has killed as his victims are usually estranged from their families and on the fringes of society.

At one time these various killings were thought to be the work of one man—the San José Ripper. He first struck on 20 April 1989, when the bodies of Edwin Mata Madrigal and Marta Navarro Carpio were found in a river. Then at 11.15 a.m. on 13 November 1989 human remains were discovered in a drain in San José. Police dogs located the body parts of two corpses, though their heads and hands were not found and only one of their feet was recovered. The victims, a man and a woman, were thought to be aged between 18 and 25.

Pieces of another two corpses of a similar age were collected between December 2000 and February 2001. This time the women had a bite mark made by the teeth of a man on her right breast, while the man had a piece of wood shoved up his anus. The corpses were badly mutilated and, again, the heads, hands and feet were missing.

Again they were in various waterways and had been tattooed. Both these cases exhibited the MOs of both the Psychopath and the Quarterer. The police believe that the San José Ripper may be toying with them.

England—Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper has never been caught, or even, convincingly identified—so, technically, he is still at large. Whoever he was, he killed five women for certain in a ten-week period from 31 August to 9 November 1888, though he may have been responsible for the deaths of four more. All five had their throats slashed and were disembowelled and mutilated. The killer paid special attention to the destruction of the breasts and female sexual organs. Interestingly, if you plot the five murders on a map, they mark out the points of a pentagram, the five-pointed occult star.

The murders all took place in the Whitechapel area of London’s East End, which was well known for vice at the time. In 1888, there were 62 brothels and 233 boarding houses catering to prostitutes and their clients in the narrow lanes there. Pox-ridden, middle-aged, alcoholic prostitutes hung around in alleyways and doorways, offering their sexual favours standing up. Usually they would simply bend down and hoist up their skirts so their client could enter them from the rear. This made it particularly easy for Jack the Ripper to pull a knife and despatch his victim before she realized what was happening.

Forty-five-year-old Emma Elizabeth Smith was possibly the first victim of the Ripper. On the night of 3 April 1888, she solicited a well-dressed gentleman. Later that night, she collapsed in the arms of a constable, saying that she had been attacked by four men. They had cut off her ear and shoved a foreign object up her vagina. She died a few hours later.

Then on 7 August 1888, Martha Tabram was stabbed to death. There were 39 frenzied wounds on her body, mainly around the breasts and sexual organs. Both Smith and Tabram, like the Ripper’s later victims, had their backs turned when they were attacked.

The first of the women known for certain to have been killed by the Ripper was 42-year-old Polly Nichols. Her body was found in Buck’s Row at 3.15 a.m. on 31 August 1888. She did not cry out. The attack took place under the window of a sleeping woman who did not wake. The body revealed that she fought for her life, but was overcome by her attacker. Her throat had been slashed twice, so deeply that she had almost been decapitated. There were deep wounds around her vagina, but no organs had been removed. Pathologists examining the corpse concluded that the killer had some medical knowledge. Polly had almost certainly turned her back on her killer for an assignation there on the street. While she was turned away from him, he pulled out a knife, put it to her throat and pushed her forward on to it as he slashed her. This explained the depth of the wound and would have meant that all the blood would have sprayed forward and not over the assailant, leaving him clean to make his escape unnoticed.

The police realized that they had a maniac on their hands. Detectives were sent out into the East End, searching for men who mistreated prostitutes. The name “Leather Apron” came up several times in the investigation. A shoemaker called Pizer was picked up. He used a leather apron and sharp knives in his trade, but his family swore that he was at home on the three occasions women had been attacked.

On 8 September 1888, 47-year-old Annie Chapman was bragging in the pubs of Whitechapel that the killer would meet his match if he ever came near her. She was wrong. Later, she was seen talking to a “gentleman” in the street. They seemed to strike up a bargain and went off arm-in-arm. Half-an-hour later, she was found dead in an alleyway. Her head was only connected to her body by a strand of flesh. Her intestines were found thrown over her right shoulder, the flesh from her lower abdomen over her left. Her kidneys and ovaries had been removed. The killer had taken them with him. He had also left a piece of leather near the corpse. The police realized that this was all too convenient. The killer was obviously an avid reader of the newspapers and had read of the arrest of Pizer. He also left a blood-soaked envelope with the crest of the Sussex Regiment on it. It had been reported that Martha Tabram had been seen in the company of a soldier shortly before her death and the newspapers said that her wounds could have been caused by a bayonet or army knife.

Three weeks after the death of Annie Chapman, the Central News Agency received a letter that gloated over the murder and the false clues. It regretted that the letter was not written in the victim’s blood, but it had gone “thick like glue” and promised to send the ear of the next victim. The letter was signed “Jack the Ripper”. On 30 September 1888, the Central News Agency received another letter from the Ripper, apologizing that he had not enclosed an ear—but promised that he was going to do a “double”.

At 1 a.m. that night, 45-year-old “Long Liz” Stride, a Swedish prostitute whose real name was Elizabeth Gustaafsdotter, was found in a pool of blood with her throat slashed. The delivery man who discovered her body heard the attacker escaping over the cobblestones. Around the same time, 43-year-old prostitute Catherine Eddowes was being thrown out of Bishopsgate Police Station where she had been held for creating a drunken disturbance. As she walked towards Houndsditch she met Jack the Ripper. He cut her throat, slashed her face and cut at her ear, though it was left still attached. He removed her intestines and threw them over her shoulder. The left kidney was missing altogether.

The murder of two women in one night sent London into a panic. Queen Victoria demanded action, but the police seemed powerless. East-End resident George Lusk set up the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee to patrol the streets. Two weeks later, Mr Lusk received a small package through the post. It contained half of Catherine Eddowes’ kidney. The other half had been fried and eaten, according to the accompanying note which was again signed “Jack the Ripper”. Queen Victoria concluded that the Ripper must be a foreigner. No Englishman would behave in such a beastly way, she said. A cabinet meeting was called to discuss the matter. They ordered checks on all the ships tied up in the London docks. This proved to be a huge waste of police manpower.

The last victim that was certainly the Ripper’s was unlike the others. She was young, just 24, and attractive. Her name was Mary Kelly and she only turned to prostitution occasionally to pay the rent. She was killed indoors and she also cried out.

On the night of 9 November 1888, she was seen on the street soliciting a “well-dressed gentleman”. Sometime between 3.30 and 4 a.m., the woman sleeping in the room above Kelly’s heard Kelly scream: “Oh, murder.” In the morning, the rent man found her mutilated corpse.

Being indoors and undisturbed, the Ripper had been able to spend more than an hour on his grisly task. Mary Kelly’s clothes were found neatly folded on a chair so it is thought that she took her “gentleman” back to her room and undressed herself ready for sex. It was then that he pulled out his knife. This time she had been facing him, saw the murder weapon and cried out. He slashed her throat, almost decapitating her, but blood splashed on his clothes, which were found burnt in the stove. Then he set about her corpse. Both breasts were cut off and placed on the table, along with her nose and flesh from her thighs and legs. Her left arm was severed and was left hanging by the flesh. Her forehead and legs had been stripped of flesh and her abdomen had been slashed open. She was three months pregnant at the time of the attack. Her intestines and liver had, once again, been removed and her hand was shoved into the gaping hole left. There was blood around the window where the Ripper was thought to have escaped, naked except for a long cloak and boots.

Other murders followed that may have been the work of the Ripper. The headless corpse of Elizabeth Jackson, a prostitute working in the Chelsea area, was found floating in the Thames in June 1889. In July that year, Alice McKenzie, a prostitute in Whitechapel, was found with her throat cut from ear to ear and her sexual organs cut out. And street-walker Frances Cole, also known as “Carroty Nell” because of her flaming red hair, was found in Whitechapel with her throat cut and slashed around her abdomen. A policeman saw a man stooped over the body, but he ran away before the constable could get a good look at him.

The description of the Ripper that has seized the public imagination comes from a friend of Mary Kelly’s who saw her with a man that night. He was five feet six inches tall, about 35, well-dressed with a gold watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket. Kelly was seen in conversation with him.

“You will be all right for what I have told you,” he said.

“All right my dear,” she replied, taking him by the arm. “Come along, you will be comfortable.”

A few hours later a chestnut vendor saw a man matching that description, wearing a long cloak and silk hat with a thin moustache turned up at the end and carrying a black bag.

“Have you heard there has been another murder?” he said.

“I have,” the chestnut seller replied.

“I know more of it than you do,” said the man as he walked away.

There are a huge number of theories as to the identity of the Ripper. The police had 176 suspects at the time. The most popular is the mad Russian physician Dr Alexander Pedachenko who worked under an assumed name in an east London clinic that treated several of the victims. A document naming him as the Ripper was said to have been found in the basement of Rasputin’s house in St Petersburg after the mad monk’s assassination in 1916. However, some have pointed out that Rasputin’s house did not have a basement.

A Dr Stanley is another popular suspect. He is said to have contracted syphilis from a Whitechapel prostitute and thus took vengeance on them all. He fled to Buenos Aires where he died in 1929, after confessing all to a student.

V. Kosminski, a Polish Jew who lived in Whitechapel, threatened to slice up prostitutes. He went insane and died in an asylum. East European Jewish immigrants, who were unpopular in London at the time, were regularly blamed for the Ripper killings. It was said that the murders were ritual Jewish slaughters performed by a shochet, a butcher who kills animals according to Talmudic law. This theory was given some little credence by the confused message “The juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing” that was scrawled on a wall in Whitechapel after the murder of Catherine Eddowes. “Juwes”, the Masonic spelling of“Jews”, also gave rise to the theory that the murders had been some Masonic rite. The police commissioner Sir Charles Warren was himself a high-ranking Mason. He had the graffiti removed to prevent inflaming anti-Jewish feelings in the area, he said. Sir Charles Warren resigned after the murder of Mary Kelly, admitting his utter failure to solve the case.

Another Polish immigrant, Severin Klosowich—alias George Chapman—was also suspected. He was a barber’s surgeon in Whitechapel and kept sharp knives for bloodletting and for the removal of warts and moles. He poisoned three of his mistresses and went to the gallows in 1903.

Thomas Cutbush was arrested after the murder of Frances Cole for stabbing women in the buttocks. He died in an insane asylum.

The insomniac G. Wentworth Bell Smith who lived at 27 Sun Street, off Finsbury Square, was a suspect. He railed against prostitutes, saying, “They should all be drowned.”

Frederick Bailey Deeming confessed to the Ripper’s murders. He had killed his wife and children in England, then fled to Australia where he killed a second wife. He was about to kill a third when he was arrested. It is thought that his confession was an attempt to delay, if not evade, the gallows in Australia.

Dr Thomas Neill Cream poisoned prostitutes in London and went on to murder more in the United States. He is said to have told his hangman “I am Jack…” as the trapdoor was opened.

The police’s prime suspect was Montague John Druitt, an Oxford graduate from a once-wealthy family. After failing as a barrister, Druitt became a school teacher, but he was a homosexual and was dismissed for molesting a boy. He moved to Whitechapel where he was seen wandering the streets. In December 1888, his body was fished out of the Thames. There were stones in his pockets and it is thought he had drowned himself.

Salvation Army founder William Booth’s secretary was also a suspect after saying “Carroty Nell will be the next to go” a few days before the slaying of Frances Cole. Alcoholic railway worker Thomas Salder was arrested after the murder of Alice McKenzie. He also knew Frances Cole, but was released due to lack of evidence.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed that the Ripper was a woman. His theory was that “Jill the Ripper” was a midwife who had gone mad after being sent to prison for performing illegal abortions.

The spiritualist William Lees staged a séance for Queen Victoria to try and discover who the Ripper was. The results frightened him so much he fled to the Continent. The Ripper, he believed, was none other than the Queen’s personal physician Sir William Gull. Gull’s papers were examined by Dr Thomas Stowell. They named the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, commonly known as Prince Eddy, the grandson of Queen Victoria who died of syphilis before he could ascend to the throne, as the Ripper, Stowell says. Another suspect is James Kenneth Stephen, a homosexual lover of Prince Eddy. The two of them were frequent visitors to a homosexual club in Whitechapel.

The painter Frank Miles, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, has also been named as the Ripper.

But Ripperology constantly moves on. In 1976, Stephen Knight published Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution airing the theory that the Ripper murders were not the work of a single mad man, but rather an establishment conspiracy to cover up a morganatic marriage entered into by the demented heir to the throne Prince Eddy.

In 1973, when Knight was working on a documentary about the Ripper murders for the BBC, a contact at Scotland Yard advised him to speak to a man named Sickert who knew about the secret marriage between Eddy and a poor Catholic girl, later divulging Sickert’s address and phone number.

The man was Joseph Sickert, son of the famous painter Walter Sickert. Joseph briefly outlined a tale in which Prince Eddy, while slumming as a commoner under the aegis of the artist, met a girl named Annie Crook in a tobacconist’s shop in Cleveland Street. Annie soon fell pregnant and she, Eddy and their daughter Alice were living quite happily in Cleveland Street until the Queen found out. She was furious. Not only was Annie a commoner, she was also a Catholic. Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, it was illegal for the monarch or the heir to the throne to marry a Catholic. And under the Royal Marriage Act 1772, royal children were prohibited from marriage without the specific consent of the monarch. Royalty was unpopular at the time and any scandal might risk revolution.

Queen Victoria handed the matter over to her prime minister Lord Salisbury, who organized a raid on the couple’s Cleveland Street apartment. With the aide of the Queen’s physician Sir William Gull, Annie was committed to a lunatic asylum where attempts were made to erase her memory, eventually driving her insane.

But Alice had escaped. When the raid had taken place, the child had been in the care of Mary Kelly, an orphan rescued from the poor house by Walter Sickert who was employed as Alice’s nanny. Forced back on her own devices, Mary left the child with nuns and returned the East End, where she fell into a life of drink and prostitution. However, in her cups, she often told her story and some of her fellow women of the night—notably Polly Nichols, Liz Stride and Annie Chapman—encouraged to her to pressure the government for hush money.

Learning of the threat, Salisbury called on Gull once more and coachman John Netley, who had often ferried Eddy on his forays into the East End, to get rid of the troublesome women. They performed the Ripper murders and built up the image of Jack with letters and the symbols of Freemasonry. Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Robert Anderson was employed as look-out, Joseph Sickert said. As Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, he was also in the perfect position to cover up the crime and hamper any investigation.

The women who knew the secret were duly despatched, along with Eddowes, whose murder, Sickert said, had been a mistake. She often went by the name of Mary Kelly and the conspirators thought that she was the woman they were looking for. When they discovered their mistake became known, they found the real Mary Kelly and killed her in a manner so gruesome that it would scare anyone else who had got a whiff of the scandal into silence. They had even organized a scapegoat in the person of poor barrister, Montague Druitt, who was chosen to take the blame and was, Sickert hinted, murdered for it.

The daughter Alice grew up quietly in the convent and, by an odd twist of fate, later married Walter Sickert and gave birth to their son, Joseph. Sir William Gull died shortly after the murders, but there were rumours that he had been committed to an insane asylum. Annie Crook died insane in a workhouse in 1920. Netley was chased by an angry mob after he unsuccessfully tried to run over Alice with his cab shortly after the murders. He was believed to have been drowned in the Thames.

Joseph said that his father Walter Sickert was tormented with guilt over the murders and, as a form of expiation, painted clues into several of his most famous paintings. Checking out the story, Knight found that a woman named Annie Crook lived at 22 Cleveland Street at that time and that she did give birth to an illegitimate daughter. This was also handy for the homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, centre of the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, in which the notorious bi-sexual Prince Eddy was thought to be implicated.

However, before Stephen Knight had finished writing Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, he had fallen out with Joseph Sickert. This is partially because he rejected Sickert’s story that Sir Robert Anderson was the third man in the killings. Instead Knight insisted that Joseph Sickert’s own father, Walter Sickert, was the third man. Joseph Sickert was not unnaturally offended by this suggestion, withdrew his co-operation and held back part of the story. From what Joseph Sickert told him, Knight concluded that Sir William Gull was the evil genius behind the Ripper murders. Sickert later claimed he kept back the name of the ringleader because he did not want to bring shame on the culprit’s family. But as Knight’s story came into general currency Sickert found that his omission had rebounded on him. The shame was now being heaped on his family. He was particularly upset when the 1985 TV film Murder by Decree portrayed Prince Eddy as the heartless seducer of the naïve Annie Crook, who he intended to dump. Sickert was offended by this, believing that his grandparents had shared a great love. They had suffered enough in their lifetime, he thought. It did not seem fair to him that they should be slandered after their deaths and he resolved to reveal the vital details he had withheld.

In doing so he confirmed everything that he had told Stephen Knight, though he continued to insist that Sir Robert Anderson, not Walter Sickert, had been the third man. But there were more men in the gang—maybe as many as 12. These included Lord Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, two of those who took the fall in the Cleveland Street Scandal.

The reason Stephen Knight concluded that Walter Sickert, not Sir Robert Anderson, was the third man was because Sickert knew too much simply to have been a bystander. When he had told his son what he knew of the Ripper murders, he divulged details that only someone who had been there when the murders happened would have known. But Joseph Sickert had withheld the source of his father’s information. Walter Sickert had been told the inside story of the Ripper murders by Inspector Frederick George Abberline, the policeman in charge of the investigation. Abberline, in turn, had been told the story by one of the men involved—the heir to the throne Prince Eddy’s tutor J. K. Stephen, one of the favoured suspects of the lone-madman theory of the murders. Stephen, Sickert said, was one of the Ripper gang and part of the conspiracy. Abberline had written down what Stephen had told him in three diaries which he had given to Walter Sickert, who passed them on to his son. Both father and son regularly referred to the diaries to keep the details of the Ripper murders fresh in their minds.

One of the reasons that Knight discounted Anderson as a member of the Ripper gang was that he had been out of the country at the time of the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. But Sickert maintained that Anderson’s role, as a detective, was able to collect and collate information on the whereabouts of Mary Kelly and the other blackmailers. The fact that Catherine Eddowes was not one of the blackmailers and was killed by mistake, because she had been unfortunate enough to use the pseudonym Mary Kelly, seems to confirm that whoever was in charge of tracking the women down had slipped up or was not available at the time.

Sickert continued to maintain that Sir William Gull and John Netley were the men who actually performed the murders and mutilations. However, he later revealed that Gull had not begun his murderous campaign on his own initiative. He was acting on the orders of more prominent men. His orders came from his Masonic superiors in the Royal Alpha Lodge No 16. The chief conspirator, Sickert maintained, was none other than Lord Randolph Churchill, father of wartime leader Winston Churchill. Although the Freemasons deny Lord Randolph Churchill was ever a member, Sickert maintained that he was Magister Magistrorum—the master of masters. There are other indications that he was a mason, but had joined under the alias Spencer. Like his son, he often used the double-barrelled surname Spencer Churchill.

Lord Randolph Churchill had a twisted reason to hate women. By 1888 he was already suffering from bouts of madness, caused by the tertiary syphilis that would kill him. He blamed his condition and the loss of his meteoric political career on the woman who had given him the disease. It seems that Sir William Gull, an expert on syphilis, was treating him. By 1886, because of his condition, Lord Randolph Churchill ceased having sex with his wife, the beautiful American Jenny Jerome. She began to take lovers. This left Lord Randolph Churchill alone and bitter. His condition left him reliant on drugs. Like his son, he was a big drinker. He was also audacious and brooked no opposition. He even defied the Prince of Wales, threatening to publish incriminating letters which would lose him the throne if the Prince did not back down in an affair involving Churchill’s brother Lord Blandford. The Prince of Wales did as Churchill demanded but refused to speak to him again for eight years. Lord Randolph Churchill believed that he had been robbed of the chance to be prime minister and did anything he could to exercise power behind the scenes. He saw himself as a second Machiavelli and was known to be unscrupulous. He was certainly a man who could have cooked up the Ripper conspiracy and would have had the expertise to pull it off.

Winston Churchill was a tireless defender of his father, whitewashing him in his biography Lord Randolph Churchill. As Home Secretary in 1910, Winston Churchill was in a perfect position to remove any evidence linking his father to the Ripper murders from the police files. When they were opened in 1988, the Ripper files were found to be far from complete. Soon after, Winston Churchill quit the Freemasons. There were other connections between Churchill and the conspiracy. Walter Sickert gave Winston Churchill painting lessons and Churchill had been induced into the masons by Lord Euston.

Joseph Sickert maintained that J. K. Stephen was related to Annie Crook and may have introduced Eddy to her. Sickert also believed that Lord Randolph Churchill got carried away with the power the Ripper conspiracy gave him. After killing Mary Kelly and the other blackmailers, he intended to finish the job by killing Annie Crook, her daughter Alice and Prince Eddy himself. It was then that Stephen broke with the other conspirators and, breaking his Masonic oath, talked to Inspector Abberline. Like so many others involved in the conspiracy, Stephen died in a lunatic asylum. He starved himself to death after being told of Eddy’s death in 1892. Four days later, Abberline retired from the police force.

As Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution points out, the conspiracy among the highest echelons of the police force and the establishment was so powerful that even though Abberline knew the truth there was nothing he could do about it. The Ripper case had to remain officially unsolved or it would have opened the very can of worms the conspirators had sought to conceal.

Joseph Sickert told the rest of what he knew to Melvyn Fairclough, who recounted it in his book The Ripper and the Royals published in 1991. The book confirms the thesis of Stephen Knight’s book and adds a myriad of detail. However, Fairclough’s book over-eggs the pudding, tying the Ripper conspiracy to an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria and the abdication crisis of 1936. Distraught at being forcibly parted from his wife, Prince Eddy intended to exact his revenge by killing his own grandmother. And, apparently, Prince Eddy did not die in 1892. Being thought unsuitable to ascend to the throne, he was proclaimed dead then hidden away in Glamis Castle—ancestral home of the Bowes-Lyons—until he died in 1933. In recompense, the master of Glamis, the Earl of Strathmore, was to see his daughter, a commoner, sit on the throne of England. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon—who later became Queen Elizabeth, then the longstanding Queen Mother—was romantically attached to the Prince of Wales who became Edward VIII before marrying his brother the Duke of York who became George VI. Apparently Edward—or David as he was known before ascending to the throne—had discovered the secret of Glamis and had decided to abdicate in protest at the treatment of Eddy, who was rightfully king, before he even met Mrs Simpson. Hence Ms Bowes-Lyon’s change of partner. For my money, this is one conspiracy theory too far.

But there are still more theories. In 1987, Martin Fido fingered “David Cohen”—the name given to an unknown Jewish madman incarcerated in Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in December 1888. He died there in October the following year. The last murder known for sure to have been the Ripper’s occurred on 9 November 1888. Fido believes that “Cohen” was identified by Joseph Lawende, a witness who had seen a man talking to the Ripper’s fourth victim Catherine Eddowes shortly before she was murdered. But Lawende refused to testify against a fellow Jew, knowing that he faced the hangman’s rope, so the police detained “Cohen” under the Lunacy Act instead to keep him off the streets. Fido also believes that the police were convinced of his guilt but rivalries between the Metropolitan and City Police have obscured his real identity. It is a nice theory but hardly satisfying as nothing more is known about “Cohen”—other than he was a foreign-born Jew, a tailor living in a homeless shelter in Whitechapel aged 23 in 1888, who was extremely violent and had to be kept in a straitjacket. However, his wild assaults on other patients, his shouting and dancing, his noisy acts of vandalism, his inability to take care of himself and his need for restraint all seem at odds with the Ripper who slipped unnoticed in and out of the shadows, cutting up his victims with the practised skill of a surgeon.

In 1991, Northamptonshire police officer Paul Harrison concluded that Joseph Barnett, the common-law husband of the Ripper’s last known victim Mary Kelly, was Jack. Harrison contends that Barnett was a sensitive man who thought he could save Mary from the streets. Instead she dragged him down into the gutter with her. An earlier, unrelated murder of a prostitute had persuaded her to suspend her activities as a streetwalker. When she started again, he was driven half-mad with jealousy. He tracked down other prostitutes she knew and killed them in the most gruesome way possible, hoping to scare her back off the streets. When this failed, he murdered and mutilated her. Having rid himself of the source of his psychological problems, Harrison maintains, Barnett had no reason to kill again. But Harrison draws a comparison between Barnett and the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Dennis Nilsen. Neither Sutcliffe nor Nilsen stopped killing until they were caught, but Barnett went on to live a long and untroubled life as a costermonger. As far as I am aware, there is little outlet for the Ripper’s raging bloodlust in the retail fruit trade.

In 1992, David Abrahamsen, a fellow of the American College of Psychoanalysts, brought his psychological insight to bear on theory that Prince Eddy and his Cambridge tutor J. K. Stephen were the murderers. From the psychological point of view, Stephen Knight had already explained how Prince Eddy and J. K. Stephen fitted into the Ripper plot.

Ripperology was revivalized in 1993 with the publication of The Diary of Jack the Ripper. This concluded that the author of the diary, said to be a 49-year-old Liverpudlian cotton-merchant James Maybrick, a substance abuser with a history of domestic violence, was Jack the Ripper. For several years Ripperologists debated whether the diaries were fake. However, in his 1997 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter, Paul Feldman, who believes the diaries are genuine, tied Maybrick into Stephen Knight’s conspiracy theory.

In 1994, Melvin Harris resurrected the story that the journalist and devil-worshipper Roslyn D’Onston—or Dr Roslyn D’O Stephenson—was the Ripper. D’Onston himself wrote to the police in 1888 accusing Dr Morgan Davies, a surgeon at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. A failed doctor and a drug addict, D’Onston was said to have killed the women to give his journalistic career a fillip. It was said that his stories in the newspapers carried details about the murders that were never released by the police. In 1890, he became involved with Mabel Collins, the editor of Lucifer, the magazine of the Theosophical Society. He later went into business with Baroness Vittoria Cremers, who revealed in the 1920s that she had found neckties caked with dried blood in D’Onston’s room. She said he had told her that they belonged to Jack the Ripper. They eventually found their way into the possession of the Satanist Aleister Crowley, who claimed that D’Onston was indeed the Ripper and that his ritual murders were done for magical purposes in an attempt to become invisible. Crowley himself claimed in court to have killed many times for the purposes of black magic. He was never prosecuted. The case against Onston was effectively dealt with and dismissed by Stephen Knight, but still it persists.

In 1995, Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey dismissed the Ripper diary and came up with a new suspect—Francis J. Trumblety, a Canadian woman-hater and fraudster who was arrested in America in connection with the assassination of President Lincoln. After his release, he moved to England. In 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, he was in London, lodging in Whitechapel, Evans and Gainey maintain. On 2 December 1888, he was arrested for unnamed sexual offences. Released on bail, he headed for Le Havre where he took a ship back to New York. The New York police were alerted and kept an eye on him. Detectives were also despatched from England. But Trumblety gave them all the slip and went on to continue his murderous campaign in Jamaica and Nicaragua. He returned to New York in 1891, where he killed again. All this was covered up, Evans and Gainey say, because the Metropolitan Police were embarrassed that they had had the Ripper and released him. Trumblety, they maintain, “killed for no apparent motive other than enjoyment”. In which case, after a couple of years of murderous pleasure, he must have stinted himself for the last 12 years of his life. He died in Rochester, New York, in 1903, without, apparently, sating his bloodlust again.

In 1996, former private eye Bruce Paley again accused Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly’s common-law husband, of the crime. Paley claims Barnett fits the FBI’s psychological profile of a modern serial killer. Most are white males in their twenties or early thirties. Barnett was 30 at the time of the murders. They come from dysfunctional families, though it would be hard to find a family that was not dysfunctional in the Whitechapel area in the late 19th century. According to top FBI psychological profiler Robert K. Ressler, serial killers come from families where the mother is cold and unloving, while the father is usually absent. Barnett was six when his father died and his mother had disappeared by the time he was 13. Paley says that she possibly abandoned her family. This fits with Ressler’s theory that the most important single factor in creating a serial killer is a sense of loneliness and isolation consolidated between the age of eight and 12.

Serial killers often suffer from a physical defect. Barnett had a speech impediment. Serial killers tend to be intelligent men, stuck in jobs below their capabilities. Barnett was a fish porter, though he was well spoken and had had some schooling. A serial killer’s first crime tends to be precipitated by a period of stress. Barnett had lost his job shortly before the killings started, forcing Mary to return to prostitution. This gave Barnett a motive for killing her, and it could have given him a reason for venting his wrath on other prostitutes. As a fish porter, he would have been a familiar figure on the streets of the East End in the early morning and, through Mary, he would probably have been known to all the victims. Being a fish porter also meant he was skilled with a knife, boning and gutting fish.

However, according to the FBI, serial killers tend to have been emotionally or sexually abused as a child and come from a family where drugs or alcohol were abused. It is not known if this was the case with Barnett. They also continue to kill until they are caught. But for following 38 years, Barnett led a blameless life. Although he certainly continued having relationships with women—electoral rolls show that he lived with a common-law wife for at least seven years—he never felt that murderous rage well up inside him again. And, it seems, in all that time he never ever felt the urge to tell anyone of his crimes or record the fact that he was the world’s most notorious killer for posterity.

In 1997, James Tulley used the same psychological profiling methods to identify the Ripper. But he absolved Barnett and picked one James Kelly instead. In 1883, Kelly had stabbed and killed his wife. He admitted the crime and was sentenced to death, but was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor. In January 1888, he escaped and hid out in the East End of London, before fleeing to France at the end of the year. He returned to England in 1892 to sail to the US. In 1896, he gave himself up at the British Consulate in New Orleans. Instead of having him arrested, the vice-consul arranged for him to work his own passage back to Liverpool. Arriving in England, he absconded again, this time heading for Canada. In 1901, he surrendered himself at the British Consulate in Vancouver, but again he gave the authorities the slip. For the next 26 years he travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, spending more and more time in England. Eventually in 1927, he turned up at the gates of Broadmoor, where he surrendered himself once more. He died in the asylum two years later. Tulley says the authorities kept quiet about Kelly because they had let the Ripper escape in the first place. The fact that they made no effort to apprehend him in North America or when he was back in Britain, Tulley says, was part of the cover-up. Once again, there is no indication that Kelly killed again in the 39 years he was at liberty after the Ripper murders, even though he was a dangerous fugitive from justice. It seems you can kill five prostitutes in a couple of months, then give it up just like that, cold turkey.

In 1998, South Wales magistrate Bob Hinton again used those self-same psychological profiling methods. But he came up with George Hutchinson, a witness who gave a detailed description of a man he said he saw with the Ripper’s last victim Mary Kelly the night she died. Again Hutchinson was a white male, at 28 in the right age group, and as a barman and labourer in the right sort of menial job. With those criteria, the East End of London in the 1880s must have been brimming over the serial killers. Hutchinson certainly knew Kelly and admitted giving her money—presumably for services rendered. His own testimony put him at the scene of the crime. Hinton also says that senior policemen discounted Hutchinson as a witness—a point that Stephen Knight covered in his book 22 years earlier. Hinton systematically trashed Hutchinson’s evidence and believes that he stopped killing because Mary Kelly “the object of his obsession [was] obliterated”. Hinton was not sure when Hutchinson died, but says he must have been either the George Hutchinson who died in Newark in 1929, the George Hutchinson who died in Bradford in 1934 or the George Hutchinson who died in Darlington in 1936. So again Hutchinson lived at least another 41 years without feeling the urge to kill again, or tell anyone that he was Jack the Ripper.

In 1999, Stephen Wright, reviewing all the literature from an American angle, concluded like others that the Ripper’s diary was a hoax. He dismissed all the other theories, then claimed to be the first to finger George Hutchinson as the Ripper. Maybe Hinton’s book had not crossed the Atlantic when Wright was at work, but Wright makes no more convincing a case than Hinton does. The most recent theory is that Walter, the pseudonymous author of the Victorian pornographic classic My Secret Life, was the Ripper. The clues, apparently, are all in the book. Walter is now thought to be Henry Spencer Ashbee, who left his huge collection of erotica to the British Museum.

In 2002, Patricia Cornwell published Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed. In it she dusted off the Stephen Knight theory, but concluded that Walter Sickert was the sole killer. The clues were all in his paintings. Although she spent a reputed $6 million on research, the book was widely discounted. She had hoped to prove her case with DNA taken from one of his paintings, which she cut up, but has failed to do so.

However, new books are being written about Jack the Ripper all the time. Each develops a theory more off the wall than the last. It is a wonder that no one has yet suggested that Jack the Ripper was an alien who abducted East End prostitutes to perform bizarre anatomical experiments on them. Perhaps it is coming.

England—Jack the Stripper

As in the case of Jack the Ripper, the file on Jack the Stripper has never been closed. He killed six women in 1964 and left their naked bodies in the River Thames or along its banks.

The first body was found under a pontoon at Hammersmith on 2 February 1964. The victim had been strangled and the remnants of her underwear had been shoved down her throat. She was small, five foot two, and apart from her stockings she was naked.

The body was identified as that of Hannah Tailford. She was 30 years old and lived with her boyfriend in West Norwood. She had a three-year-old daughter, an 18-month-old son and was pregnant at the time of death.

By day, she worked as a waitress or a cleaner. At night she supplemented her meagre wages by working as a prostitute on the streets of Bayswater. Her record showed four convictions for soliciting.

She had disappeared from her flat ten days before her body was found, though a man and his wife said they saw her on Charing Cross Road, just two days before. She was depressed and suicidal. They tried to cheer her up.

Forensic experts concluded that she had been dead for just 24 hours when she was found, and they believed that she may have been drowned in a bath or pond before she was dumped in the river. Tide tables showed that she must have entered the Thames at Duke’s Meadow in Chiswick, a popular spot for courting couples as well as for prostitutes and their clients.

By interviewing over 700 people in London’s underworld of vice, the police discovered that Hannah had been a star turn at sex parties and that she often attended kinky orgies in Mayfair and Kensington. A foreign diplomat known for his perverted tastes had been one of her clients, but he had been out of the country at the time of her disappearance.

This left the police with little to go on. They believed that Hannah had been attacked and sexually assaulted. Her knickers had been shoved in her mouth to stop her screaming as she was killed. But they could not even prove that she had been murdered and the inquest recorded an open verdict.

Hannah Tailford’s passing would have been mourned by those who knew her—and dismissed as one of the professional risks of being a prostitute by those who did not—and then forgotten about if a death with eerie similarities had not occurred two months later. On 8 April 1964, the body of 26-year-old Irene Lockwood was found among the tangled weeds and branches on the river bank at Duke’s Meadow. She was naked.

The pretty young redhead also worked the streets of Bayswater and Notting Hill. She, too, was small like Hannah and had attended kinky parties. She also performed in blue movies. Both girls solicited cab drivers late at night. And both were pregnant when they died.

In both cases, it was impossible to determine how they had died. Marks on the back of Irene’s head showed that she could have been attacked from behind and the police believed that she had been killed elsewhere, then brought to Duke’s Field.

The police also suspected that both girls were mixed up in a blackmail racket. In Hannah’s flat, they found an address book and photographic equipment. Irene’s flatmate Vicki Pender, who had been found battered to death a year earlier, had once been beaten up after trying to blackmail a client who had been photographed with her without his knowledge or consent.

But the most striking similarity between the two killings was that the victims were found naked. There was no sign of their clothes, which were never found.

On 24 April, another naked female body was found—this time in an alley off Swyncombe Avenue in Brentford. The victim, 22-year-old Helen Barthelemy, had been strangled, probably from behind.

Three of her front teeth had been extracted after death. It was also established that her body had been stripped of its clothing after her death and fresh tyre marks in the alley way indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped there.

Helen was also a prostitute. Educated in a convent, she had become a stripper in Blackpool. In Liverpool, she had served a prison sentence for luring a man into an ambush where he had been robbed. When she was released she came to London and went on the game. She was known to cater for any sort of perversions, though she would often entertain local black men for free because they were more sympathetic than her kinky clientele. One Jamaican man admitted being with her on the night she disappeared, but he had a strong alibi and was quickly ruled out as a suspect.

With three similar killings, the papers caught on to the story. The victims’ nudity was obviously the most sensational aspect and the Sundays quickly dubbed the mysterious murderer “Jack the Stripper”.

Looking back in their records, Scotland Yard found another case that fitted Jack the Stripper’s modus operandi. On 8 November 1963, three months before Hannah Tailford’s murder, the body of 22-year-old Gwynneth Rees had been found buried in a shallow grave in an ash tip near Chiswick Bridge. She was naked except for one stocking. At first, the police thought that she had been the victim of an abortion racket. Then it was discovered that she had been the target of a sexual attack. The body had lain there since May or June and it was thought that she may have been sunbathing when she was attacked. Now, though, it looked like she was another victim of Jack the Stripper.

Kenneth Archibald, a 54-year-old caretaker, walked into Notting Hill police station and confessed to the murder of Irene Lockwood. He was already a suspect. His card had been found in Irene’s flat. He said that he had met her in a pub on the night of the murder. On open land near Barnes Bridge they had quarrelled over money. He had lost his temper and put his hands around her throat so she could not scream. He had strangled her accidentally. When she was dead, he had taken her clothes off and rolled her into the river. Then he took her clothes home and burned them.

Archibald, however, said he knew nothing about the murders of Hannah Tailford, Helen Barthelemy or Gwynneth Rees. He was charged with the murder of Irene Lockwood. But when he appeared in the Old Bailey, he retracted his confession. As there was no other evidence against him the jury acquitted him.

The forensic scientists paid special attention to Helen Barthelemy’s body. It had not been buried like Gwynneth Rees’s, nor had it been in contact with water. However, it was filthy, as if it had been stored somewhere dirty before it had been dumped.

A minute examination of her skin showed that she was covered from head to toe in tiny flecks of paint. Home Office scientists concluded that her naked body had been kept somewhere near a spray-painting shop.

It was clear that the man who had killed Helen Barthelemy and the other victims sought the company of prostitutes in the Bays-water area. The police organized an amnesty for girls working the streets in that area and appealed for anyone to come forward who had worried about odd or eccentric clients, especially those who made them strip naked. The girls’ response was overwhelming.

Policewomen went out on the streets, posing as prostitutes. They carried tape recorders in their handbags. The experiences they recorded were often unpleasant, but they failed to move the enquiry forward.

On 14 July 1964, another body was found. At around 5.30 a.m., a man driving to work down Acton Lane had to brake hard to miss a van speeding out of a cul-de-sac. The police were called. At the end of the cul de sac, outside a garage, they found the naked body of Mary Flemming.

Again the murdered girl was a prostitute who worked in the Bayswater area. Her body had been kept for approximately three days after her death. Once more, her clothes had been removed after death and there were tiny flecks of paint all over her naked body.

Mary had been warned of the dangers of continuing to work the streets where Jack the Stripper was on the prowl. She took to carrying a knife in her handbag. It did her no good. Like the other victims, she had been attacked from behind. And no trace of her handbag, the knife or her clothes were ever found.

Pressure on Scotland Yard, by this time, was intense. Over 8,000 people had been interviewed, 4,000 statements had been taken, but the police were still no nearer to finding the culprit. Plain-clothes policemen blanketed the area the murdered girls had worked. But on 25 November 1964, the body of 21-year-old Margaret McGowan was found on some rough ground in Kensington. The hallmarks were unmistakable. McGowan was a prostitute and an associate of society pimp Dr Stephen Ward, who stood trial during the Profumo scandal. She had been strangled and her body was left naked. Her body had lain on the open ground for at least a week, but had been stored somewhere else before being dumped there. Again her skin was covered in tiny flecks of paint.

The evening she went missing, McGowan and a friend had talked about the murders in the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road. The two of them had gone their separate ways, McGowan with a client. McGowan’s friend gave a good enough description of McGowan’s client for the police to issue an identikit picture of the man. But no one answering the description was found. The police also noticed that McGowan’s jewellery was missing, but a check on all the pawn shops also drew a blank.

Christmas and New Year passed uneventfully, then on 16 February 1965, the naked body of 28-year-old Bridie O’Hara was found in the bracken behind a depot in Acton. Like the other victims, she was short, five foot two, and worked as a prostitute. Her clothes had disappeared along with her engagement and wedding rings. They were never found. Again, her body was covered with tiny flecks of paint. But this time there was a new clue. One of her hands was mummified. That meant it had been kept near a source of heat that had dried the flesh out.

Scotland Yard threw all their resources into the case. Every premises in an area of 4 square miles was to be searched and samples of any paint found compared to the flecks on the victim’s bodies. The police also worked out that all the victims had been picked up between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., and dumped between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. This meant that Jack the Stripper was a night worker, probably a nightwatchman who guarded premises near a spray shop.

They also worked out that he was a man of about 40 with a high libido and curious sexual tastes. The police dismissed an earlier theory that the culprit was on a crusade against prostitution. They now believed that the culprit could not satisfy his bizarre requirements at home, turning to prostitutes who would do anything for money in order to indulge his craving. Detectives now realized that, during orgasm, the man went into a frenzy which resulted in the girls’ deaths. He could not help himself and had learned to accept that murder was the price he had to pay for sexual satisfaction.

All this was little enough to go on. But the police held regular press conferences saying that a list of suspects had been drawn up. They were working their way through them and the killer would soon be behind bars. In fact, the police had no list and were not nearly as confident as they pretended, but they felt that it was best to keep up pressure on the culprit.

The murders fell into a ten-week cycle and the police were determined to prevent the next one. They threw a police cordon around a 20-square mile area of central London and every vehicle entering or leaving it at night was recorded. Anyone moving in or out of the zone more than three times was tracked down.

The police would visit their home under the pretext of investigating a traffic accident—to spare the embarrassment of those who were where they were not supposed to be. The suspect was then interviewed out of the earshot of his family.

Weeks of searching paid off. A perfect match was made between paint found under a covered transformer at the rear of a spray-painting shop in the Heron Factory Estate in Acton and the paint flecks on the victims’ bodies. The transformer itself generated enough heat to mummify flesh left near it.

Every car entering or leaving the estate was logged and all 7,000 people living in the vicinity were interviewed. At a specially convened press conference, the police announced that the number of suspects was being whittled down to three, then two, then one.

Despite the huge amount of man-hours put in, all Scotland Yard’s detective work was a waste of time. It was these press conferences that worked.

In March 1965, as the detectives continued their meticulous search, a quiet family man living in south London killed himself. He left a suicide note saying that he could not “stand the strain any longer”. At the time the police took little notice.

By June 1965, Jack the Stripper had not struck again. The ten-week cycle had been broken. The police wanted to know why. They began looking back at the suicides that had occurred since the murder of Bridie O’Hara in January.

This particular suicide victim worked at a security firm and his duty roster fitted the culprits. Despite an intensive search of his house and extensive interviews with his family, no evidence was ever found that directly linked him to the murders. Nevertheless, the murders stopped and the police were convinced, from the circumstantial evidence alone, that this man was Jack the Stripper.

By July 1965, the murder inquiry was scaled down. It was wound up the following year. In 1970, Scotland Yard confirmed that the South London suicide was Jack the Stripper. But they have never named him and, officially, the file on the Jack the Stripper case is still open.

England and Wales—Operation Enigma

In Britain the Police Standards Unit set up Operation Enigma to re-examine unsolved cases involving the murder of prostitutes and other vulnerable women. The files on numerous cases have been reopened and police will be harnessing the skills of criminologists at home and abroad, including the psychological profilers of the FBI.

One series of killings went back to January 1987 when the half-naked body of Marine Monti, a 27-year-old prostitute and heroin addict, was found on waste ground near Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. She had been beaten and strangled. Next the partially clothed body of 22-year-old prostitute Janine Downes was found in a hedge alongside the road leading from Telford to Wolverhampton in February 1991. She had also been beaten and strangled. The other seven victims over the next seven years followed a similar pattern. They too had been strangled or beaten to death. Nearly all were prostitutes and their bodies found partially clothed or naked on open ground. Cleverly, each had been dumped in a different police district, minimizing the chance that the authorities would tie them together.

According to FBI profiler Richard Ault a single killer is likely to be at work. The perpetrator is the type that the FBI categorizes as an “organized killer”. He would be someone of above-average intelligence, socially competent, often living with a woman and driving a well-maintained car but, after some stressful event, he kills.

“Such an individual is likely to be personable and not stand out,” he says. “He is able to blend in because he can approach and solicit victims.”

However, although the Assistant Chief Constable of Essex Police James Dickinson, who is co-ordinating Enigma, acknowledges some common traits in the nine murders, he points out that the investigating teams do not feel think there were sufficient grounds to link the nine inquiries formally. But nobody has been brought to justice for the murders of Gail Whitehouse from Wolverhampton in October 1900; Lynne Trenholme, who was found dead in Chester massage parlour in June 1991; Natalie Pearman from Norwich on November 1992; Carol Clarke, who was abducted from Bristol and found in Sharpness Canal, Gloucestershire in March 1993; Dawn Shields from Sheffield, who was found buried in Peak District in May 1994 and many, many more.

Ghana’s Assassin of Accra

A serial killer or group of serial killers have been at work in Ghana who may have political connections. In 1999 alone, some 21 women were slaughtered in cold blood in and around the capital Accra. By July 2000, the number had climbed to 25 and, when two murders occurred within a week, thousands of women took to the street in protest. Dressed in black with red armbands, they demanded the resignation of the Minister of the Interior and the Inspector-General of Police.

Angela Dwamena-Aboagye, executive director of the Ark Foundation, an organization that aims to empower women, led the protest after the body of an unidentified young woman wearing a blood-stained skirt and torn underwear was found at Asylum Down, a neighbourhood close to the centre of the city. A condom was found close by.

The previous week the body of a middle-aged woman was found in the same condition in another part of the city. Until then, most of the killing had taken place in Mataheko, a lower middle-class residential area to the southwest of the city. Until then Accra, with a population of just two million, had been considered safe.

The Ghana branch of the Federation of International Women Lawyers (Fida) wrote to the then President Jerry Rawlings and to parliament, asking them to treat the situation as “a national crisis”.

“We wish to state without hesitation that we’re deeply aggrieved, highly disappointed and extremely agitated by this unnecessary and unjustified shedding of innocent blood,” said Elizabeth Owiredu-Gyampoh, President of Fida.

The women protesters said that the situation would have been treated a lot more seriously if the victims had been men.

“As it is, it’s the lives of ordinary people that are being lost so the big men don’t care,” said Angela Dwamena-Aboagye.

The police were also being accused of lacking professionalism. Sylvia Legge, who made the initial report of the most recent killing at a nearby police station, says she was not treated seriously by the police.

“I made the report at 06:30, but the police officer in charge eventually saw me after 10:00, almost four hours later,” she told a local radio station.

But the police claimed that they are starved of resources. The equipment they have for testing blood samples pre-dates World War II.

In July 2000, Charles Ebo Quansah was arrested in the Accra suburb of Adenta for the murder of his girlfriend Joyce Boateng, but he was also charged with the murder of 24-year-old hairdresser Akua Serwaa who was found dead near the Kumasi Sports Stadium in the Ashanti region, 125 miles inland from Accra. He had previous served jail terms for rape.

In custody, he reportedly confessed to the murder of nine other women around Accra and Kumasi, though he was charged with only one. He was found guilty on the basis of a lie-detector test and sentenced to death. However, when he appealed to the High Court, the Commission of Police failed to respond to a subpoena to produce the polygraph machine and, later, denied that the police department had one—though there were hints that a lie-detector test had been administered by “white men” from the FBI. There was also evidence that Quansah had been tortured. Previously, when a list of suspects in the case had been read out in parliament, Quansah’s name was not on it.

Meanwhile the killings continued. In December 2000, a corpse was found in a bush in an uninhabited area off a major road in the south-east of the city bringing the total to 31. The dead woman was in her mid-thirties or early forties. She was lying face-up, naked except for a brassiere. A pair of leggings were lying near by. Police said there were abrasions on her hands, but otherwise there were no signs of struggle. It was thought that she may have been killed elsewhere and her dead body dumped where she was found. Police allowed scores of people to walk past the body, in the hope that someone would identify her. But no one knew her.

On Monday men and women alike called into radio phone-in programmes, alarmed at the sheer frequency of the murders.

“I’m not going to sell kenkey [a popular cooked milled-corn dish] late at night any more, I don’t feel safe; I’m going to close early and go home,” said Abena Nyarkoa, a food seller in Madina, a suburb where two women had been found dead that month.

The murders became a political issue and Interior Minister Nii Okaidja Adamafio and his deputy Kweku Bonful were voted out of office. In a TV broadcast, presidential candidate John Kufuor made finding the killer a plank in his 2000 election campaign. Jerry Rawlings had already stepped down and Kufuor won the presidency. However, in 2003, Rawlings alleged that 15 ministers in President John Kufuor’s cabinet had a direct hand in the women’s murders that had now climbed to 34—though the killings had taken place while Rawlings himself was head of state.

Police questioned Rawlings about his claims at his residence in Accra, but the former president refused to name names. He said he will only reveal the names of the ministers involved if the government would invite an independent investigator to administer a lie-detector test on him and those implicated in order minimize the telling of lies in the case.

Ghana’s Inspector General of Police, Nana Owusu-Nsiah, said he was “profoundly disappointed with the utterances and conduct of the former president”. He said that police had conducted thorough investigations over nine years, which eventually led to the arrest and capture of a serial killer, who pleaded guilty to murdering eight of the women. He pointed out, once again, that the Ghana Police Service did not have a lie-detector.

At the time former President Jerry Rawlings made the allegations against leading members of President Kufuor’s ruling New Patriotic Party, he was due to be called to give evidence before Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission about the alleged torture and murder of members of political opposition during his own period of nearly 20 years in power. Rawlings ruled Ghana for several months after leading a coup in June 1979. He came to power again in a second coup in 1982 and was subsequently elected president in 1992 and 1996. But he chose not to contest the presidential elections of 2000 which brought Kufuor to power.

Charles Ebo Quansah was only ever charged with 11 of the murders and the case against him in nine instances seems flimsy at best. Whether or not they now hold high office, the killers in the other cases are still at large.

Guatemala’s Plague of Death

Guatemala is a paradise for serial killers. In a population of just 15 million, two women are murdered there every day. Even more men are murdered, but the gap is closing fast.

In 2005, 665 women were killed—more than 20 percent up on the previous year. No one really knows why because the crimes are rarely investigated. According to the BBC, not one of those 665 murders has been solved.

The newspapers in the capital Guatemala City carry a regular tally of the number of female corpses found dumped in the streets. But these discoveries are so commonplace that a regular murder barely rates a sentence at the bottom of an inside page. A short paragraph may be given over to the story if the woman had been tortured, trussed naked in barbed wire, scalped, decapitated, dismembered, abandoned on wasteland or, as is common, dumped in empty oil drums that serve as giant rubbish bins. Some reports mention in passing that “death to bitches” or some other insult has been carved into the woman’s flesh. Rarely, though, is there any mention that the woman or girl—sometimes as young as eight or nine—has been raped. According to director of Guatemala City’s central morgue Dr Mario Guerra the majority have.

Little effort is made to identify the victims. They have often been taken far from the place where they were abducted and subjected to unimaginable tortures before being killed. Many are so badly mutilated they are unrecognizable. In Guatemala, there is no fingerprint or DNA database, no crime or victim profiling and no real forensic science. No one investigates and witnesses do not talk. It can take a woman’s family months to trace their daughter to the morgue. Some are never claimed. They are simply designated “XX”, or “identity unknown” and buried in unmarked communal graves.

Guatemala is a lawless country where people kill with impunity. This began in the 1950s when the United Fruit Company, fearful of losing its holdings under government land reforms, encouraged CIA efforts to foster a military coup, destabilizing the country. Left-wing guerrillas took to the hills. Civil war raged for 36 years. Large areas of the countryside were razed and the rural population, mainly Mayan Indian, were massacred. Villagers were herded into churches, which were set on fire. Whole families were sealed alive in wells. Politicians were assassinated with impunity. Women were routinely raped before being mutilated and killed. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open and foetuses strung from trees. Life became very cheap indeed.

By the time the UN brokered a peace deal in 1996, over 200,000 had been killed, 40,000 “disappeared” and 1.3 million had fled the country or became internal refugees—all this in a country of little over ten million. Today the graves of entire massacred villages are being exhumed, yet no one has ever been held responsible for these crimes.

In 1998 the Catholic Church published a report saying that 93 percent of those who had perished in the preceding decades of genocide had died at the hands of the armed forces and paramilitary death squads. Ronald Reagan described the accusation of genocide as a “bum rap” and the bishop who wrote this report was bludgeoned to death on his doorstep. To placate foreign outrage, three army officers were convicted of his murder.

Once the civil war was over, the paramilitary squads were stood down and those in the army responsible for the sadistic repression were eased out. Three generations of killers now walk the streets of a country awash with guns. There are at least 1.5 million unregistered firearms in Guatemala and an estimated 84 million rounds of ammunition were imported in 2005 alone.

Many former paramilitaries found employment in the police force, corrupting it. Drug traffickers have moved in and organized crime has moved into the highest ranks of the government. In 2003, Amnesty International labelled Guatemala “a corporate Mafia state” controlled by “hidden powers”—an “unholy alliance between traditional sectors of the oligarchy, some new entrepreneurs, the police, military and common criminals”.

In 2005, the ombudsman’s office issued a report saying it had received information implicating 639 police officers in criminal activities in the past 12 months. The crimes range from extortion and robbery to rape and murder. As most of the population is afraid to report crime committed by the authorities, this figure is almost certain to be a considerable underestimate of police complicity.

“A key element in the history of Guatemala is the use of violence against women to terrorize the population,” says director of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights Eda Gaviola. “Those who profit from this state of terror are the organized criminals involved in everything from narco-trafficking to the illegal adoption racket, money-laundering and kidnapping. There are clear signs of connections between such activities and the military, police and private security companies, which many ex-army and police officers joined when their forces were cut back.”

Guatemala also has a particularly “macho” culture. A man can dodge a charge of rape if he marries his victim—provided she is over the age of 12. A battered wife can only prosecute her husband if her injuries are visible for over ten days. Having sex with a minor is only an offence if the girl can prove she is “honest” and did not act provocatively. And in some communities it is accepted that fathers “introduce” their daughters to sex.

Then there are the pandilleros—the gangsters who live in the poorest barrios of Guatemala city. Vicious infighting takes place between rival street gangs—known here as maras, after a breed of swarming ants. This makes Guatemala City one of the deadliest cities in the world, with a murder rate five times higher than even Bogotá in war-torn Colombia, per capita.

The country’s largest gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, has now spread throughout Central America and northwards. From California, its tentacle have reached out across the United States. In 2005, it was held responsible for two killings in Long Island and is increasingly making its presence felt on the East Coast. In Guatemala, young women are often the victims of inter-gang rivalries. Usually the authorities dismiss the casualties as prostitutes.

But 19-year-old Manuela Sachaz was no prostitute. She was a baby-sitter, who had recently arrived in Guatemala City to look after Anthony Hernandez, the 10-month-old son of working couple Monica and Erwin Hernandez. Together they shared a small apartment on the second floor of a block in the Villa Nueva district of Guatemala City.

On 23 March 2005, the child’s mother Monica Hernandez came home from work. She had no key to the apartment and there was no answer from Manuela inside. She went to see her mother Cervelia Roldan to ask her if she had seen Manuela. She had not and together they went back to the apartment together and started calling out Manuela’s name, but there was no answer.

A middle-aged police officer lived in a nearby apartment. He came to the front door of his apartment block.

“It was about five in the afternoon,” Cervelia Roldan recalled, “but he was wearing just his dressing gown. He seemed very agitated and told us to look for Manuela in the market.”

When Erwin Hernandez arrived home and again got no answer, he broke a window and opened the apartment door. Inside he found the body of the baby-sitter and their child. Manuela was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The baby was sitting in a high chair, his breakfast still on the table in front of him. Both had been beheaded. The nanny had also been raped and mutilated. Her breasts and lips had been cut off, her legs slashed.

Three days later their police neighbour shaved off his beard and moved away.

“Neighbours told me later how he used to pester Manuela,” says Cervelia. She claims that, after the double murder, Manuela’s bloodstained clothing was found in the policeman’s house. The authorities dispute this. They say the blood on the clothing did not match that of the baby or his nanny.

Cervelia says she has seen the policeman in the neighbourhood several times since the killings.

“He laughs in my face,” she says. “What I want is justice, but what do we have if we can’t rely on the support of the law?”

In mid-December 2001 Maria Isabel Veliz was just a happy teenage girl with a part-time job in a shop. Earlier that year she had celebrated her 15th birthday by attending a church service wearing a white dress with flowers in her hair. She had a deep religious faith.

“Sometimes my daughter would visit me at work and pretend she needed to use my computer for her homework. But what she really wanted was to leave me a note telling me how much she loved me,” said her mother Rosa Franco, a secretary who had been studying for a law degree.

“She was proud of what I was trying to do,” said Rosa, who was left to raise her daughter and two younger sons alone. In a note written on Valentine’s Day that year, Maria told her mother to “always look ahead and up, never down”. That has been almost impossible since the day her daughter disappeared.

Rosa remembers every detail of the day her daughter vanished.

“As usual, she did not want breakfast—she wanted to stay thin—though I persuaded her to have a bowl of cornflakes before she left for work,” Rosa said. “I had given my daughter permission to work in a shop during the Christmas holidays, as she wanted to buy herself some new clothes. I wasn’t well that day and went to sleep early. When I woke up the next day and my daughter wasn’t there, I went to the police to report her missing. They said she’d probably run away with a boyfriend.”

That night, while watching a round-up of the news, Rosa recognized the clothing Maria Isabel had been wearing when she left for work the day before. The body of her daughter had been found lying face down on wasteland west of Guatemala City. Her hands and feet had been bound with barbed wire. There was a rope around her neck. Her hair had been cut short and all her nails had been bent back. Her face was disfigured from numerous punches, her body punctured with small holes. She had been raped and stabbed.

When Rosa went to the morgue and discovered the brutal details of her daughter’s injuries, she fainted.

“When I collapsed, they told me not to get so worked up,” says Rosa, who later suffered a heart attack.

Rosa then began pushing the authorities to find her daughter’s killers. She gave them telephone records showing that Maria’s mobile phone had been used after her death. And she tracked down witnesses who had seen her daughter being pulled from a car. The police accused Rosa of meddling and denounced her daughter publicly as a prostitute. Such smear tactics are often used to intimidate the families of murder victims.

Undeterred, Rosa continued to demand that the police investigate the death of her daughter. Instead they merely increased the level of intimidation. Rosa’s teenage sons are often followed home from school. Cars are parked outside her house day and night, their occupants watching—undeterred even when a journalist visited to check out her story. Human-rights workers told the Sunday Times that such surveillance was a sign that the murder had a connection with officialdom and organized crime.

“I’m afraid,” Rosa said. “But when I see reports of more and more murders of girls and women, I know what other mothers are going through. I vow I will not give up my fight.”

In 2006, BBC correspondent Olenka Frankiel went to Guatemala to investigate the killings there. She found 21-year-old Claudia Madrid lying dead in the gutter. She had been shot while out for a walk with her children.

“Investigators walk past her husband in the morgue as he waits to identify her body,” said Frankel. “They will never question him.”

The husband was phlegmatic.

“It’s the fashion here to murder women,” he said. “They never investigate such third class crimes.”

Also in the morgue were two refuse sacks containing the body of a woman cut into 19 pieces and found in the street.

“Her decapitated head lies in the road,” said Frankiel. “Police remove her limbs from the plastic bags to show the press. If no one comes to identify her she will be classed XX, and buried in an unmarked grave.”

Then there was the naked swollen body of another woman found in a dried up river bed.

“Her mouth hangs open,” said Frankel. “Her eyes and a gash in her skull have been pecked by vultures. An investigator says: ‘She was probably a prostitute.’ He points at her hands. ‘Red nail varnish,’ he says… In Guatemala, the victim is always to blame. Another XX.”

Olenka Frankiel came across a dental technician whose neighbours ran to tell him they had seen kidnappers force his 20-year-old daughter into a car. He went to the police and begged them to put up road blocks to help save her. They told him nothing could be done for 24 hours. By then she was dead. Her body was found, mutilated and covered in teeth marks. She had been shot numerous times.

“I don’t want to live,” he told human-rights activist Norma Cruz. “I wish someone would shoot me.”

“There is total indifference from the authorities to these crimes,” says Cruz.

Months later, the man returned to the home he and his family had abandoned in fear and found the blood-and saliva-stained clothes his daughter was wearing when she was killed. This treatment of vital evidence is commonplace. It is routinely contaminated and returned to the families, or buried with the victim.

The police were no more helpful when Nancy Peralta went missing just a few months after Maria Isabel Veliz. When Nancy’s younger sisters Maria Elena and Liliana reported that the 30-year-old accountancy student had not returned home from university in February 2002, the police told them to come back a few days later if she did not show up. The following day, their father read that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found on the outskirts of Guatemala City. He phoned the morgue but was told that it could not be that of his daughter as her physical description did not match. However an item of clothing on the body recovered was the same as one she had been wearing when she left home. When he went to the morgue to check, he found his daughter had not only been killed, but her body had been horrifically mutilated. She had been stabbed 48 times and her head was practically severed.

“When I talk to the police, they refer to my sister jokingly as ‘the living dead’,” says Nancy’s sister Maria Elena, who is now studying law in the hope of bringing her sister’s murderer to justice. “They insisted that she was not dead as some other student had assumed her identity to enrol on a new university course. They showed no interest in investigating what had happened.”

One complaint of the Peralta family and Rosa Franco is that even the most basic forensic tests that could help identify the murderers were never carried out at the morgue. Morgue chief Dr Guerra complains of the lack of a forensic laboratory on site and the absence of DNA-testing facilities in the country. If they were taken, sample would have to be flown to Mexico or Costa Rica for analysis.

“Until a few years ago, the US helped train our workers in forensic science,” said Guerra. “But now that help has stopped.”

Police Chief Mendez, who runs a special unit set up in 2005 to look into the murder of women, explained why less than 10 percent of cases are investigated and, of the 527 murders of women in 2004, only one resulted in prosecution.

“Women are coming out of their homes and participating in all aspects of society more,” he said. “Many men hate them for this—This is a country with many machistas.”

Nearly 40 percent of the women killed are listed as housewives and over 20 percent as students.

Mendez says that the mutilations of women killed are the result of “satanic rituals” used as initiation ceremonies for new gang members. The Ministry of the Interior claims that Manuela Sachaz and Anthony Hernandez could have been murdered because Manuela was a gang member—even though the 19-year-old had only recently arrived from the countryside and had little, if anything, to do with the barrios.

Believing that the Guatemalan authorities are being deliberately obstructive, the Peralta family and Rosa Franco are planning to take their cases to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights set up in 1959. But most victims’ families have neither the know-how or resources to launch such a legal fight. Instead they sit in queues waiting to talk to human-rights workers and beg for news about what is being done to bring those who murdered their loved ones to justice. The answer is usually nothing.

Despite the frequency of the killings, the Guatemalan police rarely admit that they have one or many serial killers on their hands. However, in 2000, they conceded that a man that they dubbed as “Guatemala’s Jack the Ripper” was at large on the streets. In three months he strangled five prostitutes and they believed that he may also have killed streetwalkers in El Salvador and even Los Angeles. The killer uses plastic sheeting to strangle his victims and is fond of scrawling angry, moralistic messages on their backs in blood-red marker.

The killer began his work in Guatemala City on 27 January when police discovered the body of an unidentified prostitute who had been strangled in a run-down, pay-by-the-hour hotel downtown. On the victim’s back, the killer wrote he “didn’t like it, but couldn’t help killing” and that his spree of murders had already taken the life of two prostitutes in Los Angeles. Authorities in California said they had no record of similar killings.

The body of Roxana Jamileth Molina was discovered two weeks later in a dingy hotel room on the western edge of Guatemalan capital. She had been strangled. On 6 March, the owner of a hotel nearby led police to the remains of another strangled unidentified prostitute.

Four days later, the killer’s fourth victim was found in downtown Guatemala City. On the woman’s body, etched on her back in flowery handwriting, was written: “Death to all the dogs. Seven down, three to go.” More had plainly died. Then on 29 March, the body of a fifth strangled prostitute was found in Huehuetenango, 80 miles northwest of Guatemala City.

For once, they put officers on the streets at all hours, warning prostitutes and passing out computer-generated composites of the man they suspect was behind the killings. The pictures was compiled from witnesses who said they had seen the suspect enter various hotels with prostitutes who were later found murdered. The killer was depicted as a short, olive-skinned, 35-year-old man with sunken brown eyes and closely cropped black hair. The police said he had a Salvadorean accent and uses the last name Blanco.

“Everyone is scared,” said Rosa, a prostitute who charges $5 a trick to support her two children. “They all say, ‘I wonder if the next man I go with could be this killer.’ What we do is dangerous… this killer is hunting us.”

Even so, the prostitutes refuse to co-operate with the police. Although prostitution is not illegal in Guatemala, they have as much to fear from the police as their clients.

At one time, Enio Rivera, the director of Guatemala’s national police force, claimed that the authorities were so close to an arrest that the suspect left the country.

“We’re afraid our suspect has fled to El Salvador,” Rivera told reporters in April 2001. “We have been in close contact with authorities there because we are convinced this man will kill again.”

He said that police did not know for sure how many women the serial killer had slain but that authorities in neighbouring El Salvador were ready to blame the same suspect for the murder of a prostitute there that March. Rivera also said the killer had used his red marker to mark his victims with the letters MS, the initials of the gang “Mara Salvatrucha”.

“If he returns to Guatemala, the prostitutes are the ones in danger,” police spokesman Faustino Sanchez said. “If we are going to catch this delinquent, we will have to do it with their help.”

It was only after this serial killer got away that murder statistics were compiled by sex and the number of women being killed became apparent. Human-rights workers, who are regularly subjected to death threats and intimidation, say blaming the murder of women on gang violence is a deliberate oversimplification of the problem. Women are not only being “killed like flies” because they are considered of no worth, they say, but also they are being used as pawns in power struggles between competing organized crime networks.

This problem, it seems, has been going on for millennia. In the rainforests to the north of modern-day Guatemala City, in the country’s northern rainforest, archaeologists recently entering a long-sealed Mayan crypt found the remains of two women. One was pregnant. They were arranged in a ritual fashion, making it clear that they had been sacrificed as part of a power struggle between rival Mayan cities.

An attempt by the UN to set up a commission with powers to investigate and prosecute the country’s “hidden powers”, which they hope would serve as a model for other countries recovering from civil was, was dismissed by the Guatemalan authorities as “unconstitutional”. A debate began about how the terms of the commission can be amended to make it acceptable. But as the talking continues, so does the killing.

On just one day in June 2006, 12-year-old Hilda Macario was eviscerated with a machete while resisting rape—Hilda survived, but was shunned by her community because of the stigma attached to sexual violence—and 21-year-old Priscilla de Villatoro was stabbed to death by her boyfriend for refusing to have an abortion.

“Women here are dying worse than animals,” says Andrea Barrios of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights. “When the municipality announced this summer that it was launching a campaign to exterminate stray dogs, the public took to the streets in protest and it was stopped. But there is a great deal of indifference towards the murder of women, because a picture has been painted that those who die somehow deserve what they get.”

Hilda Morales, the lawyer heading a network of women’s groups formed as the problem has escalated: “Neither the police nor the government are taking this seriously. Yet what we are observing is pure hatred against women in the way they are killed, raped, tortured and mutilated.”

The situation is unlikely to change, she says, unless international pressure is brought to bear. Meanwhile the murder figures, not just of women, but also of political dissidents, male and female, continue to soar.

“Despite these cruel figures,” says Guatemala’s President Oscar Berger, “I am optimistic. We have reformed the police and we have more radio patrols.”

No one is holding their breath.

Iran’s Spider Killings

A new gang of serial killers are at large in Mashhad, one of Iran’s holiest cities. They have been strangling the local prostitutes and drug users and dumping them into local streets and canals. Newspapers have dubbed these slayings “the spider killings” because of the way the women were found wrapped in their black chadors.

The first body was found on a roadside in July 2000. The dead woman was 30-year-old Afsaneh, a convicted drug user and suspected “truck woman”—a prostitute who services truck drivers and delivery men. The following week, two more prostitutes were found strangled with their own headscarves. In both their scarves were tied with two knots on the right side of the neck.

Five months later, three more women were killed. The police then formally acknowledged a link between the killings and set up a special task force. It was thought the killings could be the work of religious vigilantes; the reform-minded parliament in Tehran ordered an inquiry. The authorities were especially sensitive about the killings because they occurred in Mashhad—the name literally means Place of Martyrdom. Iran’s second biggest city, it is one of the most sacred sites for Iran’s Shiite Muslims, drawing more than 100,000 pilgrims a year to the burial and shrine of the caliph Harun ar-Rashid and Ali ar-Rida, the eighth Shiite imam. But right next to the shrine there is an area inhabited by prostitutes and drug addicts. The drugs come from Afghanistan which is just a two-hour drive away and the general poverty of the city is fuelled by the 200,000 refugees who fled there from Afghanistan.

On 1 April 2001, following the parliamentary inquiry, the local investigative team was replaced with a special squad from Tehran. Within two weeks, three more prostitutes were dead, suggesting that the killings had a political motive.

On 27 July 2001, 39-year-old Saeed Hanei, a married man and father of three, was arrested. He confessed to the murder of 16 of 19 dead prostitutes in Mashhad over the past 12 months. He claimed to have been doing God’s work. After he had despatched 12 women, the drought that had been gripping the region lifted. The rains, he said, were a sign that God approved of what he was doing, so he killed four more.

A volunteer in the Iran–Iraq war during the 1980s, Hanei declared that he was not a murderer, but rather that the deaths were a “continuation of the war effort”. He was an “anti-streetwoman activist” who was only doing God’s will by ridding Iran of moral corruption. He believed the spider killings were acts of piety, saying that when the drought ended: “I realized God looked favourably upon me, that He had taken notice of my work.”

He said he wanted to “clean his neighbourhood”, adding: “I would have killed 150 if I hadn’t been arrested.”

Hanei would lure prostitutes to his apartment in late afternoon while his wife was out of the house, posing as a customer and often strangling them with their own scarves.

“Fourteen of 16 victims were junkies,” Hanei claimed, “and two or three of them had drugs on them.”

Indeed, all but one had convictions for drug offences or prostitution. All forms of prostitution have been banned in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it has become more common in recent years. Hanei said that he began his murderous campaign after his wife was mistaken for a prostitute by a taxi driver. At first he went out looking for men who were soliciting prostitutes, but got beaten up, so he turned to killing the prostitutes instead.

Hanei’s slaughter of street drew support from religious extremists and the conservative press.

“Who is to be judged?” wrote the newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?”

Friends at the Mashhad bazaar said: “He did the right thing. He should have continued.”

And the hard-line paramilitary group Ansar-e Hizbollah warned that declining morality among women could lead to more such killings.

“It is likely that what happened in Mashhad and Kerman could be repeated in Tehran,” it said in its weekly publication.

However, within a few weeks of his arrest Hanei was charged with having “improper relationships” with his victims before strangling them, though Hanaei claimed that intelligence officers subjected him to psychological torture to force him to confess to adultery. As a result Hanei was charged with 13 counts of having sexual relations with married women as well as the 16 murders.

At his trial, Hanei insisted that the women he murdered were a “waste of blood”—a concept in Iran’s Islamic code that meant the victims deserved to die. As families of the victims looked on, Hanei said it was his religious duty to cleanse society of corrupt elements.

This was of little comfort to ten-year-old Sahar and eight-year-old Sara, the children of Hanei’s 14th victim. They recalled how their mother Firoozeh left home at about 5.30 p.m. one day to buy opium.

“We were all waiting for her but she never came home,” said Sahar.

Hanei was sentenced to death, but he was shocked and angry when the moment came for his hanging in April 2003. Unlike at his highly publicized trial, there were no cameras at his public hanging to record how he screamed in protest, baffled that his ideological allies never came to his rescue.

“Even until the last second before his execution, Hanei thought someone in the government would come to save him,” said young Iranian film-maker Maziar Bahari, who made the documentary And Along Came a Spider about Hanei.

Hanei’s most vehement defender is his own 14-year-old son, Ali, who said his father was “a great man” who was cleansing the Islamic republic of the “corrupt of the Earth”.

“If they kill him tomorrow, dozens will replace him,” Ali said before the execution. “Since his arrest, 10 or 20 people have asked me to continue what my Dad was doing. I say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’”

He was right. Police now fear that a gang of “spider killers” is now at work.

Ireland’s Dublin Death-Dealer

In October 1998, the Irish Garda set up a six-man squad to track down a suspected serial killer responsible for the deaths of six young women aged between 17 and 26 who disappeared in the historic Leinster region of Ireland to the south of Dublin. Known as Operation Trace, it had come up with no leads by 2001 and was slimmed down to a staff of two.

Information about the six missing women and other cases the team had looked at were put into the Canadian Violent Crime Linkage System and every detail was fed into a serial killer profile system set up in the British National Crime Faculty in Bramshill College, Lancashire, England. The geographic profiling developed by the Canadian Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo was also employed there. But in October 2006 a detective took the files to the FBI academy at Quantico to be analyzed by the bureau’s computer program ViCLAS—Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System. The FBI’s profilers would also run them though their specialist computer systems.

The bureau was also provided with information on suspects on suspects, such as Robert Howard from County Laois, who raped and killed at least one young woman in London, but had been cleared for the murder of 15-year-old schoolgirl Arlene Arkinson, who went missing after attending a disco at Bundorn in County Donegal with friends in August 1994. She was last seen in a car driven by Howard. She has never been seen again, but the defence argued that the prosecution had to show that she was dead and painted her as a troubled teenager who talked of running away. After more than 21 hours of deliberation over six days, the jury acquitted Howard. The court was never told of his previous conviction in England and there have been allegations that his activities were covered up by the security forces.

The Garda say that Operation Trace established that no single suspect could have been responsible for all six disappearances, but that in three cases the possibility of a serial killer exists and they are still appealing for any information from the public.

“They’re still out there,” said a spokesman. “There are still people who know and who are covering for the perpetrators.”

But definite leads have been rare. In September 2005, the Garda arrested the chief suspect in the disappearance of Fiona Sinnott, along with another man and three women. The arrests were made after fresh information about the possible location of her body came to light. None of those held was charged but the Garda excavated a field near Killinick in County Wexford. Nothing was found.

Fiona Sinnott was from Bridegtown, County Wexford, and has been missing presumed dead since 9 February 1998. She was last seen leaving the Butler’s pub in Broadway near Rosslare at closing time with her former boyfriend and the father of her baby daughter, Sean Carroll. Their daughter, Emma, was 11 months old at the time.

Carroll has told the Garda that he spent the night at Sinnott’s cottage in Ballycushlane, County Wexford, and that she was there next morning when he left.

In July 2005 two sites in the Mulrankin area, near her family home in Bridgetown, were excavated by the Garda after a clairvoyant contacted the Sinnott family. Again nothing was found.

“The one thing that marks the killer out is his ability to get rid of the body—which usually leaves us with no forensics, DNA or MO,” says Brian McCarthy, a veteran private eye who has been on the trail for nearly ten years, on and off.

McCarthy was hired by the family of missing 26-year-old Irish-American student Annie McCarrick, who was studying literature in Dublin. He suspects that the man who was responsible for the disappearance of McCarrick, who went missing after visiting Johnny Fox’s pub in Glencullen in the Dublin Hills on 3 March 1993, was also involved the cases of at least two other missing women—Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard. All three were of a similar age and were last seen on their own, and they all went missing in an area less than 30 miles in diameter covering counties Kildare, Wicklow and Dublin. But that it as far as the evidence takes him.

Eighteen-year-old Deirdre Jacob was last seen on 28 July 1998, walking to home to Roseberry, Newbridge in County Kildare. She was a trainee schoolteacher and described as a very balanced person—not the type of person who would disappear voluntarily.

Beautician Jo Jo Dullard, aged 21, vanished on 9 November 1995 after making a call from a public phone box in Moone, County Kildare. She had phoned a friend to say she intended to hitch-hike from there to her home in Callan, County Kilkenny after missing the last bus. She hung up, saying a lift had arrived. Around that time a woman answering Jo Jo’s description was seen leaning in the back door of a dark-coloured Toyota Carinatype car. The car and its driver have never been traced.

“There is linkage there, but no physical evidence—not even a piece of clothing,” says McCarthy.

The serial killer theory was scoffed at when the Garda originally began investigating the disappearance of McCarrick back in March 1993. However, her father John McCarrick was a retired policeman. When he went to a Garda station to report his daughter missing he was shocked. The officer who dealt with him did not have a notepad, so he wrote the details on the back of his hand.

Far from content with this approach, McCarrick pulled strings back in the US. Eventually, the American ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and Vice-President Al Gore lobbied the Irish government on behalf of the McCarrick family, prompting one of the largest missing persons investigations in Irish history. Meanwhile the McCarricks offered a $150,000 reward for information.

Five years after Annie McCarrick disappeared, Operation Trace was set up at Naas Garda Station. Soon they identified seven other missing people who fitted a similar disturbing pattern. They were young women, all from Leinster, of a similar age, leading busy, seemingly happy lives until they vanished without trace. They were not victims of suicide, accidents or organized crime. But the most troubling feature of all was that, as they were assumed to be dead, no trace of their bodies had ever been found.

“The facts speak for themselves,” says retired detective inspector Gerry O’Carroll. “For decades we had virtually no missing women; now we have up to ten in a relatively small area around the east coast, with various common threads. I believe these women were victims of one or two serial killers working together.”

O’Carroll has looked at the missing women’s cases as part of his investigation of the 1999 slaying of 17-year-old Dun Laoghaire schoolgirl Raonaid Murray. He became convinced that the suspected murders of Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jacob, Jo Jo Dullard and Fiona Sinnot were linked to those of 26-year-old part-time model Fiona Pender and 17-year-old Ciara Breen.

Fiona Pender, from Tullamore, County Offaly, was seven-and-a-half months pregnant when she disappeared on the evening of 23 August 1996. She was last seen leaving the flat she shared with her boyfriend in Church Street in the town. She had spent the previous day, shopping for baby clothes and was in good spirits, while Ciara Breen disappeared from her home in Batchelors Walk, Dundalk, in the early hours of 13 February 1997, taking no possessions with her.

Like Brian McCarthy, Gerry O’Carroll was intrigued with the fact that no bodies had been found. It then dawned on the detectives that there may have been earlier cases where the perpetrator was not so adept at concealing the evidence. Looking back through the files it appeared that the killer’s first victim may have been 23-year-old Phyllis Murphy, who was found raped, strangled and partially hidden in bushes in the Wicklow Mountains in 1980.

The body of 23-year-old Patricia Furlong was dumped in the Dublin Mountains only a few miles from Glencullen in July 1982. She had been raped and strangled. The late DJ Vinnie Connell was convicted of her murder ten years later, but the verdict was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Five years after Patricia Furlong died, 27-year-old mother-of-two Antoinette Smith from Clondalkin on the outskirts of Dublin vanished after attending a David Bowie concert at Slane Castle in Meath. She had returned to Dublin and went to the Harp Bar on O’Connell Bridge before moving onto a discotheque in Parnell Street. Nine months later ramblers discovered her remains in a shallow grave at Glassamucky Breakers, Kilakee in the Dublin Mountains. She, too, had been raped and strangled. Her head was reported to have been covered by a plastic bag.

Three years later, on the same stretch of mountain bog where Antoinette Smith’s body was found, a man unearthed a woman’s hand in the turf bank he was clearing. It belonged to 30-year-old mother-of-two Patricia Doherty from Tallaght, Dublin. She had last been seen alive six months before on 23 December 1991 when she left her home to do some Christmas shopping.

Patricia Doherty’s and Antoinette Smith’s remains were found not far from Johnny Fox’s pub, where Annie McCarrick disappeared fifteen months later. And Patricia Furlong’s body was dumped only a few miles away. Brian McCarthy suspects at least two other missing women, Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob may also be buried in the mountains.

His prime suspect is a married man with children who can be placed in or around the scenes where Annie McCarrick, Deirdre Jacob and Jo Jo Dullard went missing. According to McCarthy, the man had a history of sexual violence against women, but his killing spree has temporarily been halted by a spell in jail on another charge.

There are indications that the killer claimed another victim, though she was outside the age range of this other prey. This was Eva Brennan, age 40, from south Dublin, who disappeared after leaving her parents’ home in Terenure to return to her flat in Rathgar in July 1993. Perhaps her killer is in jail, but he may soon be at large again.

Italy’s Gay Killings

The murder of a man paid by opera singers to clap during their performances rekindled fears that a gay serial killer may be at large in Italy.

Although 57-year-old Salvatore Romano was not known to be gay, detectives believe that his suffocation and bludgeoning with a brandy bottle bore all the hallmarks of a killer who targeted figures connected with high culture. Romano was the last of the capoclaques, professional clappers who led the applause from the gods.

Mr Romano was found on Sunday 8 September 2002 in his home, where it is thought that he had dined with his killer or killers. One report said police found three plates and three glasses.

Police were looking for a young man seen running down the stairs with a cigarette in his mouth and for Mr Romano’s red scooter, which was used for the escape. A fingerprint on a glass was one of the few clues.

A neighbour said that, at about the same time, she heard someone screaming: “Help me, I’m dying.”

Mr Romano was gagged and his feet and hands were tied to his neck—a classic Mafia method of inducing suffocation and now typical of the homosexual murders.

There have been dozens of similar cases in Italy since 1990. There are more than 19 unsolved gay murders in and around the Italian capital. Two occurred in the Pigneto area of the city where Mr Romano lived.

On 5 January 1998, former senior assistant to the pope 67-year-old Enrico Sini Luzi was found in his home near the Vatican wearing only his underwear and socks, with his head beaten in. On his wrists there was adhesive left by sticky tape; a red cashmere scarf was tightened around his neck. His home showed no sign of forcible entry.

Luzi’s former position as a “gentleman of His Holiness” is a voluntary one, usually held by members of well-to-do families, which involves assisting visitors in papal ceremonies.

Franco Grillini of the Italian homosexual lobby group ArciGay/ArciLesbica told Agence France Presse: “The victim is a gentleman of the pope’s entourage, which confirms that the people at risk are those who hide and live among people where homosexuality is not acknowledged, like the curia.”

Until then the Italian police had discounted the idea that a gay serial killer was at work. But the modus operandi in the murder of Luzi bore a striking resemblance to that used in the case of the murder of New York Times food critic and university lecturer Louis Inturrisi, theatre critic Dante Livorno and former Sotheby’s Italia manager Count Alvise di Robilant, who was hit over the head with a candelabra as he played his piano in his Renaissance home in Florence. The 72-year-old Count, although widely celebrated for his female conquests, had begun a homosexual affair before he was killed.

A television director was also killed and an American Episcopalian chaplain was found in Milan by the local Anglican vicar. The victim was tied up and had been bludgeoned to death in his bathroom. Gay pornography was scattered around the apartment. Most of the murdered men were bludgeoned or suffocated, or both, and there is a theory that the killings are connected to homosexual prostitutes.

ArciGay/ArciLesbica believes that over 100 gay men are murdered in Italy every year, in what Grillini characterizes as “a terrifying massacre of homosexuals”. The group believes that police have made little attempt to stop the killings. Police say they have been hindered by a lack of assistance from the Italian gay and lesbian community, which is still largely closeted. At the time of the Inturrisi killing, one detective said: “We have found it easier to link up with elements from within the Mafia than we have with the gay community.”

Italy’s Monster of Florence

The case of the “Monster of Florence”—a serial killer who murdered courting couples over three decades—remains unsolved. The man charged with the murders, Pietro Pacciani, had his conviction overturned on appeal and was himself murdered before he could face a second trial. The police now believe that Pacciani was the head of a gang of killers, some of whom are still at large.

The killings began one hot night in the summer of 1968. Thirty-two-year-old Barbara Locci, from the town of Lastra in Signa, just to the west of Florence, and her lover Antonio Lo Bianco were found shot dead in his Alfa Romeo. Barbara was married with a child, but she was notoriously promiscuous housewife. She taken several lovers and was known locally as “Queen Bee”.

On the night of 21 August 1968 she had gone to the cinema with Lo Bianco and her young son Natalino. On the way home, the boy had fallen asleep in the back of the car so the couple seized the chance to stop at a secluded cemetery to make love. Antonio had just started removing Barbara’s clothing when the killer crept up on them and fired eight shots, killing them both. He then grabbed the boy—who must have been woken by the gunfire—and carried him to a nearby farm before fleeing into the darkness. The farmer was awakened by a knock on his front door. When he opened it, he found the young boy standing there with tears streaming down his face.

“My mother and my ‘uncle’ are dead,” the boy said.

The farmer called the police.

At the crime scene, the Carabinieri found a white Alfa Romeo Giulietta with licence plates from the neighbouring province of Arezzo. The car was registered to Antonio Lo Bianco. They also found eight .22-calibre shell cases beside the car.

From the state of the bodies, it was clear what was going on when the couple were shot. Detectives immediately suspected Barbara Locci’s cuckolded husband, Stefano Mele. They sent a patrol car which arrived as Mele’s front door between six and seven in the morning. At that moment, Mele came rushing out with a suitcase, as if making a quick getaway. When told of his wife’s murder, he showed little reaction and was taken to police headquarters.

At the stationhouse, Mele told detectives that he had not felt well the previous day, and had stayed at home. Two people had visited, Antonio Lo Bianco and Carmelo Cutrona, another of his wife’s lovers. Mele also mentioned a third lover of his wife, Francesco Vinci, who had been jailed briefly following an accusation of adultery by his own wife. Then it came out that Barbara had been the lover of Francesco Vinci’s two brothers Giovanni and Salvatore as well. Mele said that his wife’s killer could easily have been one of her numerous lovers. The police now had more suspects than they could easily handle.

But the following day, 23 August 1968, Mele confessed to the murder. But he also incriminated Salvatore Vinci who, he said, had given him the gun. Mele said that, when his wife and son had not returned home by 11.20 p.m., he went looking for them. When he reached the town square of Lastra a Signa, he met Salvatore Vinci, who told him that Barbara had gone to the cinema with Lo Bianco and Natalino. Vinci chided Mele for allowing his wife to cuckold him so publicly. He told him that he had to put a stop to the situation. Vinci had a gun with him, Mele said, and the two of them drove to the Giardino Michelacci movie theatre in Signa on the other side of the Arno.

They found Lo Bianco’s Alfa Romeo parked outside and waited for the couple to come out of the cinema. When Lo Bianco and Barbara, with Natalino in her arms, appeared and drove off in Antonio’s car, Mele and Vinci followed. They stopped at the cemetery just outside Signa. When they started to make love, Vinci pulled out the gun and handed to him, Mele said.

Mele then walked up to the car and started firing, continuing until the gun was empty. Afterwards they drove to the bridge in Signa and threw the gun in the Arno, then went home.

“I killed my wife and her lover because I was tired of continually being humiliated,” Mele concluded. “My wife had been cheating on me for a number of years, but it was only a few months ago that I decided to do away with her.”

There were great holes in this confession. The most glaring was that he had failed to mention how Natalino had turned up at the farmhouse. If the boy had been woken by the gunfire, surely he would have recognized his own father. Nevertheless Mele was formally arrested and held pending formal charges.

The police then tried to find the weapon, but when a prosecutor questioned Mele about the gun again, he changed his story. Instead of throwing it in the Arno, Mele said, he had given it back to Salvatore Vinci. Soon after Mele retracted his entire confession and began accusing Vinci’s brother Francesco of the double murder. It was Francesco who had owned the weapon, Mele said, and Francesco who had killed Barbara and her lover.

This change of story did not help him in court and, in 1970, Mele was found guilty of the double murder and jailed for 14 years—a lenient sentence was handed down on the grounds of partial insanity. And that was thought to be the end of it. Then there was another double murder.

On the moonless night of 14 September 1974, with Stefano Mele safely in jail, 19-year-old Pasquale Gentilcore and 18-year-old Stefania Pettini parked up in Pasquale’s father’s Fiat 127 overlooking the River Sieve in Borgo San Lorenzo, just north of Florence and 18 miles from Signa. They were enjoying a romantic moment when someone began firing at them. The next day a passer-by found the car and called the police.

Detectives found the half-naked body of Pasquale Gentilcore in the driver’s seat. He was peppered with gunshot wounds. Copper-jacket shell casings surrounded the scene and there was no evidence of a struggle.

Outside the car to the rear was the naked body of Stefania Pettini. She had been stabbed and mutilated. Her corpse was posed with her arms and legs spread-eagled, and a branch protruded from her lacerated vagina. Her handbag was found in a nearby field, its contents scattered.

A post mortem showed that Pasquale had been shot five times, killing him. Stefania had been shot three times, but she had still been alive when the killer carried her from the car and slashed her. She had died of one of 96 stab wounds inflicted on her naked body. The knife had a single-edged blade 1.5 cm wide and between 10 and 12 cm long. The gun was a model 73 or 74,. 22 automatic Beretta, while the bullets were of a distinctive Winchester type made in Australia in the 1950s.

A mentally unstable man named Giuseppe Francini walked into the police station and confessed to the murders, but he was unable to describe in detail how the killings were carried out. The police also suspected Guido Giovannini, a voyeur reported to have been spying on couples in the area, and 53-year-old self-proclaimed healer Bruno Mocali. But they could find no evidence linking either man to the crime, and they were eventually ruled out. The perpetrator was plainly a sexual deviant maniac, but the police, who had not yet made the link to the 1968 murder and with no clues or leads to pursue, filed the case away as unsolved.

Seven years later, on another warm summer’s night, there was another double murder. On 6 June 1981 an unknown gunman fired eight shots into a Fiat Ritmo. Inside were 30-year-old Giovanni Foggi and his lover, 21-year-old Carmela de Nuccio. The following morning, a police sergeant on a country walk with his young son spotted the copper-coloured Ritmo parked at the roadside. The sergeant then noticed a woman’s handbag was lying beside the driver’s side door with its contents scattered on the ground. Taking a closer look, he noticed that the driver’s side window had been smashed. At the wheel was a young man whose throat seemed to have been slashed.

When detectives arrived, they found the body of a female victim in a ditch some 20 yards away from the car. She had been stabbed in the abdomen and her T-shirt and jeans were slashed. Her legs were spread and her genital region cut out and removed. It seems the perpetrator had had plenty of time to perform this crude surgery. There were no witnesses and no tracks.

The post mortem demonstrated that both had died of multiple gunshot wounds while in the car. The young man had then been stabbed once in the chest and twice in the neck. The woman’s dead body had then been carried to the ditch. The medical examiner concluded that the girl’s genitals had been excised with an extremely sharp instrument, which the killer plainly had some knowledge of using.

Ballistics revealed that the bullets came from a .22-calibre automatic pistol. Again they were the same distinctive Winchester rounds. Veteran detectives quickly made the connection with the Gentilcore and Pettini case. The bullets from all four bodies matched. Florence, it seemed, had a serial killer on its hands—though still no one had made the connection with the 1968 crime.

The red Ford of peeping Tom Enzo Spalletti had been seen parked nearby. When questioned he gave a confused alibi. Detectives’ interest was further piqued by the fact that he mentioned a copper-coloured Ritmo and two dead bodies to his wife at 9.30 a.m. on the morning they had been discovered, telling her that he had read the story in the newspaper—though the papers didn’t report the murders until the following day. Spalletti was arrested and jailed pending trial.

Four months later Spalletti had to be freed when another couple were murdered in exactly the same way. As he was behind bars, this was plainly a crime he could not have committed.

On 23 October 1981, 26-year-old Stefano Baldi and his 24-year-old girlfriend Susanna Cambi decided to spend the evening parked in their Volkswagen at a beauty spot near Calenzano, five miles north of Florence. Later that evening, another courting couple found their bodies.

Stefano Baldi was found next to the car. Half-naked, he appeared to have been shot and stabbed many times. Susanna Cambi was lying on the other side of the car. Her wounds were similar to Baldi’s—only her genitals had been excised like those of Carmela de Nuccio.

The medical examiner concluded that both victims had been shot through the front windscreen of the car, but were both still alive when they were stabbed. The same .22 Beretta as before had been used. The knife used to stab the victims had a single-edged blade, between 5 and 7 cm long and approximately 3 cm wide.

The instrument used on Susanna Cambi’s genitals appeared to be the same as the one used on Carmela De Nuccio, but the murderer seemed to have been rushed. The killer had performed the operation with less precision and a larger area was excised. He had cut through the abdominal wall and punctured the intestine.

The press now dubbed the killer the “Monster of Florence” and two separate couples came forward and reported that they had seen a lone male driver speeding from the crime scene in a red Alfa GT. However, despite the growing press coverage no further leads were forthcoming.

The following summer another couple were targeted. On 19 June 1982, 20-year-old Antonella Migliorini and her boyfriend, 22-year-old mechanic, Paolo Mainardi, were making love in a parking spot off the Via Nuova Virgilio, near Montespertoli, 12 miles south west of Florence. They were just putting their clothes back on when the killer appeared out of the bushes and started shooting.

Antonella Migliorini died instantly but Paolo Mainardi survived the initial burst of gunfire. Although badly injured, he started the Seat, switched on the headlights and slammed the car into reverse. But he ended up in a ditch. The killer walked over, shot out the headlights and emptied the pistol into the wounded driver. Then he pulled out the ignition keys and threw them into the undergrowth.

When he left, Paolo Mainardi was still alive. Unfortunately he was not found until the next morning and died a few hours later, without regaining consciousness and before he was able to give the police any vital clues. However, Silvia della Monica, the prosecutor assigned to the case, persuaded the newspapers to report that Paolo Mainardi was alive when he reached hospital and that he had given a description of the killer before he died. All of the reporters agreed, and the information appeared in the afternoon paper.

The idea was to rattle the killer. It worked. After the afternoon paper hit the streets, one of the paramedics who had accompanied Paolo Mainardi to the hospital received two telephone calls from a person who first claimed to be with the prosecutor’s office. The second time he identified himself as the killer and he wanted to know what Mainardi had said before he died.

A few days later, police Sergeant Francesco Fiore made the connection to the 1968 murder of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco, when he had been seconded to Montespertoli from Signa, ten miles away. Francesco began to wonder if there was a connection with the crimes of the Monster. At his insistence, the bullets were compared. They matched. Not only had all the bullets been fired by the same .22 Beretta and were the same distinctive Australian batch, they all came from a single box of 50 shells. It was clear that the Monster of Florence had killed Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco in 1968 or, at least, was using the same weapon and bullets.

Plainly Stefano Mele, Locci’s jealous husband, could not be the Monster since he had been in jail ever since. But he was not released. The Carabinieri simply assumed that he had an accomplice in the original crime who had continued killing after Mele was imprisoned. They interviewed Mele again, but he continued to claim his complete innocence and refused to co-operate with the investigators. Nevertheless, in August 1982 police arrested Francesco Vinci, who Mele had first accused 14 years before.

On 9 September 1983, Wilhelm Horst Meyer and his friend Uwe Rusch Sens, both 24, were asleep in a Volkswagen camper van some 19 miles south of Florence when the Monster paid them a visit. He fired through the window, killing the German holiday-makers instantly. There were no mutilations to the bodies, so the police did not immediately associate the murders with the Monster. It was only when ballistics found that the bullets were from the same batch as those used in the other killings that the connection was made.

The police wondered whether the killer had changed his pattern. Or perhaps he had simply made a mistake. One of the victims had long blonde hair and could have been mistaken for a girl, especially at night. There were reports that the two men were homosexual lovers, though there is no evidence to that effect. It may also have been, when the killer realized that he did not have a dead girl on his hands, that he abandoned his plans to stab and mutilate the bodies.

However, the murder of Horst Meyer and Uwe Senes brought to light some other common features of the crimes. The killer usually struck on a Friday or Saturday night, when the moon was hidden by the clouds. The victims had all spent their last evenings at a discotheque—except Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco who had been to the cinema. The killer had also rifled through the woman’s belongings. Was he looking for something that might contect him to the victim? Or was he hunting for some macabre souvenir?

Although Francesco Vinci had been in custody at the time of the murder of Horst Meyer and Uwe Senes, his lawyer failed to persuade the judges to release him, even though he clearly could not have committed the latest murders. State Prosecutor Mario Rotella now believed that the crimes were committed by a gang of Sardinian-born peasants, of which Mele and Vinci were members. They arrested Mele’s brother Giovanni Mele and a friend Piero Mucciarini. Both remained in custody until a few months after the next murders.

Other bizarre theories were doing the rounds. Religious historian Massimo Introvigne pointed out that Florence, home of Dante’s “Inferno”, had long been linked to sorcery. Occult sects, he said, were stalking lovers’ lanes to commit ritual murders. Detectives had already toyed with the idea that the killer had taken the women’s genitals to be used as a trophy by some religious cult.

There was more unsettling news. Shortly after the murder of the two German campers, the paramedic who had accompanied Paolo Mainardi to the hospital in 1982 got another phone call from the killer, demanding to know that Mainardi had said before he died. Disturbingly, the paramedic was in Rimini at the time. How did the killer know he was on holiday and how did he know where to contact him?

At 9.40 p.m. 29 July 1984, 18-year-old sales girl Pia Rontini and 21-year-old university student Claudio Stefanacci were parked in a sky-blue Fiat Panda off a provincial road between Dicomano and Vicchio, just north of Florence. They were just about to make love when the killer began firing at them.

Claudio’s body was found on the backseat of his car wearing only underpants and a vest. He had been shot four times and stabbed ten times. Not far from the vehicle, behind some bushes, lay the naked body of Pia. She had been shot twice and stabbed twice in the head. The killer had then dragged her by the ankles some ten yards into the bushes. As before she had been left in a spread-eagled position and her genitals had been excised. This time the killer had also cut off her left breast and slashed her body more than a hundred times. The police then asked, did the removal of the left breast have any occult significance? Or was the killer becoming more sadistic?

Again the knife used was single-edged. Both victims had been shot through the car window. The weapon was the familiar .22 Beretta automatic and the bullets matched those used in the previous crimes. No fingerprints were recovered from the scene and detectives had come to believe that the killer wore surgical gloves during the murders. Sixteen years had passed since the first murder and, despite the arrest of four suspects, the police were no closer to stopping the “Monster of Florence”.

The killer struck again over a year later. On 8 September 1985, he murdered a French couple as they camped in the San Casciano area just south of Florence. The murderer slashed open their tent and fired several shots into the bodies of 25-year-old Jean-Michel Kraveichvili and 36-year-old Nadine Mauriot. According to the medical examiner, they had been making love at the time with the man lying on his back and the woman on top of him.

Nadine Mauriot had been shot four times. Three bullets had penetrated her skull; a fourth had passed through her throat. Kraveichvilj had also been hit four times—twice in the upper arm, once in the mouth and once in the right elbow. Even so, he managed to get to his feet and scrambled out of the tent but, after about 30 yards, the killer caught up with him and stabbed him to death. Then he pushed him down a bank into some bushes. The killer then returned to the tent, dragged out Nadine Mauriot’s body and began to mutilate it.

According to the medical examiner, the shots were fired at a close range—no more than 20 inches. Once again the woman’s genitals and left breast were removed. It was estimated that this would have taken around ten minutes. In that time, he was not disturbed.

Soon after detectives thought they had got lucky. A copper-jacketed Winchester bullet was found on the pavement in front of a hospital nearby. The idea that the killer used surgical gloves and his evident interest in dissection lead the police to question the hospital staff. But no suspect emerged and the trail went cold again.

The following day an envelope arrived at the office of assistant public prosecutor Silvia Della Monica. The address was made up of letters cut from a newspaper or magazine in the style of a ransom note. It contained a single spelling mistake. Inside the envelope was a folded sheet of paper that had been glued along its edges. Inside the paper was a small plastic bag. Inside that was a cube of flesh cut from Nadine Mauriot’s missing breast. The killer was now taunting the authorities.

In 1986 the police admitted their strategy of focusing on the Sardinian peasant gang was wrong. They began again from scratch and, over the next eight years, questioned over 100,000 people.

By 1991 several leads seemed to point in the direction of Pietro Pacciani, a 68-year-old semi-literate farm labourer in San Casciano whose hobbies included hunting and taxidermy. In 1951, Pacciani had killed a travelling salesman he had caught sleeping with his fiancée. He had stabbed the man 19 times. He had then stomped the man to death and sodomized his corpse. Released from prison after 13 years, he married, but was jailed again from 1987 to 1991 for wife-beating and the sexual molestation of his two young daughters.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that Pacciani was involved in the Satanic group with Giancarlo Lotti, Giovanni Faggi and Mario Vanni—all well known voyeurs who haunted local lovers’ lanes. Pacciani and Vanni were also said to have participated in black masses, using female body parts, at the house in San Casciano. Nurses at a clinic where Pacciani had worked as a gardener claimed he told them a mysterious doctor presided over these occult ceremonies.

Florence’s head of detectives, Michele Giuttari, had his doubts. He believed that the semi-literate Pacciani was not organized enough to have planned the crimes and too slipshod to have got away with them. Nevertheless, on 17 January 1993, Pacciani was arrested.

Pietro Pacciani finally went on trial on 1 November 1994 charged with 14 counts of murder—the 1968 murder of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco were left off the indictment. Determined to vindicate themselves, the prosecutors demanded that the trial be televized. It became compulsive viewing. Although the evidence was grisly—one police guard collapsed during a particularly gory session—the case against Pacciani was largely circumstantial. Throughout he protested his innocence. Nevertheless, he was convicted of 14 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. As he was dragged from court, he screamed: “I am as innocent as Christ on the cross.”

In February 1996 the court of appeal overturned Pacciani’s conviction after the public prosecutor admitted the evidence against him was unsound. But just hours before Pacciani was released, his friends 70-year-old Mario Vanni, 54-year-old Giancarlo Lotti and 77-year-old Giovanni Faggi were arrested for their involvement in five of the double murders.

Detectives had returned to the theory that the Monster of Florence was not just one killer but a gang. According to the police Lotti confessed that he and Pacciani were responsible for the killings. On 12 December 1996, the Court of Cassation cancelled Pacciani’s acquittal and ordered a new trial.

Pacciani never made it to his retrial for the Monster of Florence murders. On 23 February 1998, he was found dead, face down on the floor of his home with his shirt up around his neck and his trousers down around his ankles. His face was blue and disfigured, and the police thought that the 71-year-old Pacciani had died of a heart attack. But the post-mortem revealed that a combination of drugs had caused his death. The investigating magistrate, Paolo Canessa, believed that Pacciani was silenced in case he revealed more details about the murderous cult at his retrial.

On 24 March 1998, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti were sentenced for their involvement in five of the double murders. Vanni got life; Lotti 26 years. Giovanni Faggi was acquitted.

That should have been the end of it. But in 1994 Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, had attended Pacciani’s trial and he set his third Hannibal Lecter book Hannibal in Florence. While this was being filmed in the city, it stirred memories of the Monster of Florence and people began to ask, if Pacciani had been murdered, surely the Monster of Florence himself, if he was an individual, or another member of one of the gang, if he was not, was still at large. As it is, the case remains officially unsolved.

Mexico’s Juarez Ripper

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, directly across the border from El Paso, Texas, there is a killing spree that has lasted for more than a decade and shows no sign of abating. In February 2005, Amnesty International put the body count at over 370, with more than 400 potential victims listed as missing. That year alone the death toll topped 28, according to the BBC. Even so, in August 2006, Mexico’s Federal Government dropped its investigation.

The first official victim of El Depredador Psicópata—or “the Juarez Ripper”—was Alma Chavira Farel, whose body was found on 23 January 1993 in an empty lot in a middle-class neighbourhood of Campestre Virreyes. She had been raped both vaginally and anally, beaten and strangled. There was a bruise on her chin and she had a black eye. She was wearing a white sweater with a design on it and short blue pants. No mutilations were reported at the time, but later victims were said to have suffered slashing wounds to their breasts similar to those of Chavira. In all likelihood she was not the killer’s first victim at all. Juarez is a city of transients where disappearances exceed recorded homicides each year.

No one is sure how many people live in Ciudad Juarez. Official estimates hover around one million, while there are probably more like two million people there at any one time. Many are street people who don’t show up in the official statistics. For others, it is a stopping-off place on their way to the US which lies just across the Rio Grande. It is also home to numerous drug traffickers and other criminals who use it as a temporary base for cross-border operations.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has set up over 330 maquiladoras in Juarez. These are factories that use cheap labour to produce goods to sell over the border. The wages range between US$3 and US$5 a day. Nevertheless thousands of young uneducated female workers from southern Mexico, known collectively as maquilladoras, flock to work in these factories. The owners prefer hiring women because they are less trouble. They also put up with the squalid work conditions, sexual harassment and violent shanty towns where they are forced to live. Some 70 percent of the labour force is female.

This piques Mexican men’s traditional Latin machismo. It also drives men into crime or to find work in the other traditional male preserve—the police force. However, the police earn so little that bribery is an accepted practice and there is enough drug money flowing through the city to ensure that the legal system is thoroughly corrupt. Any offence can be overlooked for the right price. Largely individual murders are overlooked, but it was hard to hide that the overall murder rate for women in Juarez is twice that of Mexico as a whole. The rate for women aged between 15 and 24 in Juarez is five times that of the rate in Tijuana, another border town, and more than ten times that of El Paso on the US side.

In May 1993, a second victim was added to the Juarez Ripper’s list when a body was found on the slopes of Cerro Bola, a hill that carried a sign saying: “Read the Bible.” She had been raped and strangled. A third corpse appeared in June; she had been stabbed and the body set on fire. On the 11th, another anonymous victim was found partially naked in the playground of Alta Vista High School on the way to a dirt road at the edge of the Rio Grande. She had been tied to a stake, raped, stabbed and had her head beaten in.

By the end of the year, 16 more murders had been added. The last, on 15 December, was “solved”, along with three others—though the Juarez police had an unfortunate reputation for torturing confessions out of innocent suspects. In the dozen cases that remain unsolved, five of the victims remain unidentified. At least four were raped. Four had been stabbed to death and four strangled. One had been shot and one beaten to death. In two cases, the body was so badly decomposed that a cause of death could not be established.

The following year the Juarez police had eight unsolved murder cases involving women. In three other cases they named “probable suspects”, but none of them were arrested. Three of the victims remain unidentified today. The ages of those identified ranged from 11 to 35. In the cases where the cause of death could be determined, one was beaten to death, one burned alive, two were stabbed and six strangled. At least four of the victims were also raped. State criminologist Oscar Maynez Grijalva was already warning that, in at least some of the cases, a serial killer was at work.

His words would be remembered the following year when a killer began to reveal a signature. Three of the four bodies found in September 1995 had their left nipple bitten off or their right breast severed. By then, at least 19 women had been slain—making 1995 the worst year yet. Eight of the victims are still unidentified. At least four had been raped. Where the cause of death was established, one was shot, one stabbed and six strangled. Again in two cases, “possible suspects” were named and the police claimed to have “solved” one of the murders. In October, they arrested Abdul Latif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist living in one of Juarez’s wealthier neighbourhoods.

Sharif was arrested in 1995 after a prostitute accused him of raping her at his home. She claimed that Sharif also threatened to kill her and dump her corpse in Lote Bravo, a desert region south of town where the bodies of other victims were found. But these charges were dropped after the police had discovered that Sharif had dated 18-year-old Elizabeth Castro Garcia, who had been found raped and murdered in August.

In custody Sharif allegedly confessed to five El Depredador Psicópata murders. But publicly he has always maintained that he was innocent.

“They are pinning this all on me because I am a foreigner,” he claimed. “I’m just a drunk, I’m not a murderer.”

Sharif was born in Egypt in 1947. Later, he claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, sodomized by his father and other male relatives. In 1970, he emigrated to America and settled in New York City. He was known for drunken womanizing. Lovers thought him charming and funny. Years after the event, it was said he had an obsessive interest in young girls.

Sacked for suspected embezzlement in 1978, he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. A former friend there named John Pascoe claimed that, on a deer-hunting expedition, Sharif tortured a wounded buck. Pascoe also claimed that girls seen in Sharif’s company often disappeared later, though no missing person reports tied to Sharif ever surfaced. The friendship ended in 1980, Pascoe said, after he found possessions of a “missing” girl in Sharif’s home and a spade caked in mud on the porch.

By 1981, Sharif had moved to Palm Beach, Florida. A talented chemist and engineer, Sharif was hired by the oil company Cercoa Inc., who gave him his own department. But then on 2 May 1981 he beat and raped a 23-year-old woman neighbour, later claiming that it was consensual sex that got a little rough. Afterwards, he showed remorse, saying: “Oh, I’ve hurt you. Do you think you need to go to a hospital?”

Cercoa hired a top lawyer for Sharif’s defence who plea bargained the rape charge down to sexual battery and five years’ probation, though the law called for the deportation of aliens conviction of crimes involving “moral turpitude”. On 13 August, the night before he was to plead guilty, he attacked a second woman in her home in West Palm Beach. This time he kicked and threatened to kill her, before asking her to fix him a drink and for another date the following night.

The prosecutor of the first case was not informed of the second and, as soon as Sharif was paroled, he was rearrested, then bailed again. On 11 January 1982, Sharif was sentenced to 45 days in jail for the second attack and Cercoa finally sacked him.

Sharif moved to Gainesville, Florida, where he set up a company and was married briefly. The short-lived marriage ended in divorce when he beat his bride unconscious. On 17 March 1983, he beat and repeatedly raped a 23-year-old college student who answered his ad for a live-in housekeeper, telling her: “I will bury you out back in the woods. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” He was arrested and held without bail pending trial. Sharif escaped from the Alachua County jail, but was soon recaptured. However, other women who had told the police that he was terrorizing them now refused to co-operate further in case he escaped again. On 31 January 1984 Sharif was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for rape. The prosecutor told local reporters that Sharif would be deported when he was released, though the authorities were seeking to tie him to unsolved murders in Florida and New Jersey. In January 1977, the body of a pretty 30-year-old brunette called Sandra Miller had been found at the side of the road. She had been killed by a single stab wound. Sharif worked at a chemical plant just two miles from the remote farmhouse where Miller lived with her five-year-old daughter and Sharif and Miller used the same bar. He was a prime suspect in the case

However, when Sharif was paroled in October 1989, he was not deported. Instead, he moved to Midland, Texas, when he got a job with Benchmark Research and Technology. His work there was so exceptional that the US Department of Energy singled him out for praise, and he was photographed shaking hands with US Senator Phil Gramm.

Sharif was arrested again 1991, this time for drink driving. It then came to the attention of the authorities and Sharif was liable for deportation. Hearings dragged on for two years. Then Sharif was arrested for holding a woman captive in his home and repeatedly raping her. His lawyers cut a deal. Sharif would leave the country voluntarily if the charges were dropped and, in May 1994, Sharif moved across the border to the exclusive Rincones de San Marcos district of Ciudad Juarez and worked at one of Benchmark’s maquiladora factories.

On 3 March 1999 Sharif was convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia, though six other murder charges were dropped. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The police named Sharif as the Ciudad Juarez serial killer, but the murders continued—even escalated—after his arrest. Between Sharif’s arrest in October 1995 and the first week of April 1996 at least 14 more female victims were slain in Ciudad Juarez. Their ages ranged from ten to 30. In cases where the cause of death was established, one had been shot, one strangled and ten stabbed. At least four had been mutilated after death. Significantly, one—15-year-old Adrianna Torres—had her left nipple bitten off and her right breast severed. The scale of the slaughter was staggering. The police admitted that of the 520 people who had disappeared over the past 11 months, most were adolescent females. The populace was terrified.

The police then came up with a bizarre theory to explain why the killing continued while Sharif was in jail. After the raped and mutilated body of 18-year-old Rosario Garcia Leal was found in 8 April 1996, they picked up members of a street gang called Los Rebeldes—“The Rebels”. One of them, Hector Olivares Villalba, said that the gang’s leader Sergio Armendariz Diaz—aka El Diablo—had half a dozen Rebels rape and murder Rosairio Garcia Leal on 7 December 1995. Although Olivares’ confession was made under torture and he later recanted, the police used it to moved against Los Rebeldes, raiding their club and arresting some 200.

Armendariz, Juan “El Grande” Contreras Jurado, Fernando Guermes Aguirre, Carlos Barrientos Vidales, Romel Cerniceros Garcia, Erika Fierro, Luis Adrade, Jose Juarez Rosales, Carlos Hernandez Molina and Olivares were all accused of being in the pay of Sharif. The police said that he had hired them to rape and murder at least 17 women in copycat killings to make it look as if the original “Ripper” was still at large. Juan Contreras told police Armendariz had sent him to collect “a package” from Sharif in prison. It contained $4,000 in cash. Then, Contreras said, he had joined Armendariz and other Rebels in the rape and murder of a young woman known only as Lucy. Contreras also later recanted, and the charges were dropped against suspects Ceniceros, Fierro, Guermes, Hernandez and Olivares. However El Diablo remained in jail serving a six-year sentence for leading the gang-rape of a 19-year-old fellow inmate in February 1998.

It was said that the Rebels liked torturing their victims on a sacrificial slab before stoving their heads in. Several victims had bite marks on their bodies. Chihuahua’s medical examiner claimed that dental casts from Armendariz match bite marks found on the breasts of at least three of the victims. However, the Rebels claimed they were tortured by police and displayed burn marks on their bodies caused by cigarettes and cigars. And in 1999, a Mexican court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to charge Sharif with conspiracy in any of the murders attributed to Los Rebeldes.

By then the police theory was already looking distinctly threadbare as the murders continued despite the round-up of the Rebels. Between April and November 1996, at least 16 women were killed. Three were shot, five stabbed and one was found in a drum of acid. In some cases advanced decomposition made it impossible to determine cause of death or whether the victim had been sexually assaulted. Eight could not be identified.

The following year there were another 17 unsolved murders involving females aged from 10 to 30 years. Sexual assault was confirmed in only four cases, but other corpses were found nude and in positions that suggested that there had been a sexual motivation for their killing. Where the cause of death could be established, three were shot, three strangled, five were stabbed and two beaten to death. Seven of the dead were never identified.

The murder rate continued to climb. In 1998 there were 23 unsolved murders following the same general pattern. There was the usual mix of shootings, stranglings, stabbings, beatings and burnings. Six remained unidentified. Not only were the police helpless but complicit. On 21 September 1998, Rocio Barrazza Gallegos was killed in a patrol car in the parking lot of the city’s police academy by Pedro Valles, a cop assigned to the Ripper case.

The spate of murders in Ciudad Juarez was now attracting media attention internationally. In May 1998, the Associated Press reported more than 100 women raped and killed in Ciudad Juarez. In June they put the figure at 117, while the women’s advocacy group Women for Juarez said it was somewhere between 130 and 150.

On 10 June 1998 Mexico’s Attorney General Arturo Chavez told the Reuters news agency that, with Sharif still safely behind bars, “police think another serial killer may be at work due to similarities in three crimes this year”. The story was taken up again by AP who reported on 9 December 1998: “At least 17 bodies show enough in common—the way shoelaces were tied together, where they were buried, how they were mutilated—that investigators say at least one serial killer is at work. And 76 other cases bear enough similarities that investigators say one or more copycats may be at work.”

However a team of three profilers from the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, spent a week reviewing the cases and concluded that “the majority of the cases were single homicides… It is premature and irresponsible to state that a serial killer is loose in Juarez.”

The first quarter of 1999 began with eight more victims. Then while Sharif went on trial for the rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia in March 1999, another suspect emerged. Before dawn on 18 March a 14-year-old girl named Nancy arrived at a ranch on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. Sobbing and covered with blood, she said she had been raped, strangled and left for dead. Miraculously she survived. The attacker, she said, was the bus driver who had picked her up when she left work at the maquiladora at 1 a.m. When he had dropped off all the other passengers, he drove out into the desert and stopped, claiming the bus had mechanical problems. Then he grabbed her by the neck and asked her if she had ever had sex. The last thing she remembered before she lost consciousness was him telling her that he was going to kill her.

The bus driver’s name was Jesus Guardado Marquez, aka El Dracula. A check of the records revealed that 26-year-old Guardado had a previous conviction for sexual assault. But by the time police went to arrest him, he had fled with his wife. Guardado was arrested a few days later in Durango, some 550 miles to the south. He claimed that he was beaten by the police when he was returned to Ciudad Juarez. However, the police said that Guardado confessed to a number of the murders and named four accomplices who were also maquiladora bus drivers—Victor Moreno Rivera (El Narco), Bernardo Hernando Fernandez (El Samber), Augustin Toribio Castillo (El Kiani) and Jose Gaspar Cerballos Chavez (El Gaspy). Together they were called Los Choferes—“The Chauffeurs”. More sinisterly, they are also known as Los Toltecas—“The Toltecs”—who were the blood-thirsty forerunners of the murderous Aztecs. Moreno was the leader of the gang, the police said, and he too was in the pay of Sharif.

They were charged with 20 murders, but protested their innocence. The only evidence against them was their own confession which had been extracted by torture. Sharif denied having any contact with the Chauffeurs and maintained he knew nothing of any conspiracy.

Again, the arrest of Los Choferes did nothing to stem the murders. By May 1999 it was reported that “nearly 200 women” had been murdered since 1993—a substantial leap from October 1998’s figure of 117.

Celebrated profiler Robert Ressler, who heads the Virginia-based corporation Forensic Behavioural Sciences, visited Juarez at the invitation of the authorities and concluded that his former employer, the FBI, were wrong. He found that 76 of the murders fitted into a pattern. The victims were all women aged between 17 and 24. Most of them had been raped and strangled, and more than a dozen had been killed on their way to, or on the way home from, work at a maquiladora. But he concluded that the killings were not the work of a lone serial killer.

“I think it’s probably two or three,” he said. One of them, he thought, was an American coming across the border to take advantage of the situation in Juarez. The police had already demonstrated their inability to catch one killer. There were plenty of dark streets and abandoned buildings, and with a transient population of young women there were plenty of victims to choose from.

“It’s an ideal situation for an American with money,” said Ressler.

The founder of the Citizens’ Committee Against Violence Astrid Gonzales Davila said: “The failure to solve these killings is turning the city into a Mecca for homicidal maniacs.”

Candice Skrapec, the Canadian-born professor of criminology at California State University in Fresno, also identified 67 cases where she thought serial killers were involved. She told the Toronto Star she believed that three or four killers were at large in the 182 post-1993 cases she had studied and “there may be even more murders that could be tied to the three suspected serial killers, and that they were operating in 1992”.

Skrapec believed that “Railway Killer” Angel Maturino Resendez, was one of the perpetrators as he had lived in the barrios there and much of this family—including his uncle, Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, whose name he used as one of many aliases—still live in Juarez. On 13 July 1999, at the urging of his brother and his sister, Resendez crossed the Ysleta Bridge over the Rio Grande into the United States and surrendered to the Texas Rangers after a six-week televised manhunt that made him the most wanted man in America. The US authorities had held back on charging Resendez, fearing the Mexican government would prevent the suspect’s extradition if he was liable to face the death penalty—in Texas he would receive death by lethal injection. But a $125,000-reward had been offered for his capture and his family feared that he might be shot by a bounty hunter. Instead, they brokered his surrender and claimed the reward themselves.

Resendez was charged with nine counts of murder. The first was the murder of a 21-year-old college student who was bludgeoned to death while walking with his girlfriend along a railway line in Kentucky on 29 August 1997. After that eight more bodies were found in victims’ homes along a railroad track from Texas to Illinois as he travelled from state to state. His last two victims were a 51-year-old woman and her 79-year-old father who were found dead in their home near the line in Gorham, Illinois, on 15 June 1999.

Although Resendez could be a suspect in at least some of the Juarez killings, it is unlikely that he was responsible for the majority of the unsolved cases. Indeed, they continued after his arrest.

In December 1999, a mass grave was found outside Ciudad Juarez. It contained nine corpses—three belonging to three US citizens. This invited renewed attention across the border with some, again, suspecting the involvement of the Mexican police. The Dallas Morning News wrote: “Still a mystery is what happened to nearly 200 people, including 22 US citizens who, in many cases, vanished after being detained by men with Mexican police uniforms or credentials.”

These missing persons became known as Los Desaparecidos—“The Disappeared”. Some were thought to be victims of Juarez’s drug wars. But the Association of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons in El Paso believe they may have been kidnapped by the police.

Maquilladoras still went missing and on 6 November 2001 a mass grave containing the skeletal remains of eight women were found in employ plot just 300 yards from the headquarters of the Association of Maquiladoras, the organization that represents most of Juarez’s US-owned export assembly plants. Police then announced creation of a new task force to investigate the murders and a $21,500 reward for the capture of those responsible.

Three days after the grave had been opened bus drivers Gustavo Gonzalez Meza, La Foca, and Javier Garcia Uribe, El Cerillo, both 28, were charged with killing the eight women. The prosecutor claimed they “belonged to a gang whose members are serving time for at least 20 of the rape-murders”. The victims were identified as 15-year-old Esmerelda Herrera, 17-year-old Laura Ramos, 17-year-old Mayra Reyes, 19-year-old Maria Acosta, 19-year-old Veronica Martinez, 20-year-old Barbara Martinez (no relation to Veronica), 20-year-old Claudia Gonzales and 20-year-old Guadalupe Luna.

The suspects claimed that their statements were extracted under torture. Their lawyers received death threats. On 5 February 2002, one of them was killed by police after a high-speed chase. The police claimed they “mistook him for a fugitive” and a judge ruled that the shooting was “self-defence”. Meanwhile it was revealed that DNA tests had failed to confirm the police’s early identifications of the victims. New DNA tests apparently confirmed the identification of Veronica Martinez, though it threw no light on the other seven cases. Then Gonzalez died in jail, ostensibly from complications arising after surgery.

By now 51 suspects were in jail, but still the killing did not stop. Ten days after Garcia and Gonzalez and Garcia were arrested, the body of another young woman, stripped and beaten to death, was found in Ciudad Juarez. Maquilladoras protesters were reportedly harassed by police and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights moved in to investigate. The new Mexican President Vicente Fox sent in “federal crime specialists”. Resentful, local prosecutors told the Dallas Morning News that “27 of the 76 cases” were resolved, while “the other killings involving women have been isolated incidents”.

On 9 March 2002, member of the Texas state legislature joined a protest march through El Paso. Then a federal deputy attorney general in Mexico City claimed that the killings were committed by “juniors”—the son of prosperous Mexican families whose wealth and influence had protected them from arrest. He was quickly found another job. Later that year the FBI returned to lend a hand but have failed to further the investigation.

Juarez’s leaders are particularly conscious of the effect the killings are having on the image of the city. When a large wooden cross was erected as a memorial to the murdered women, the mayor received a letter from the chamber of commerce, complaining that this would damage tourism.

The day that letter was received—23 September 2002—the bodies of two more women were found in Ciudad Juarez. One victim was strangled and partially undressed; the other, the police said, had died of a drug overdose. Special investigator David Rodriguez was “sceptical” of that claim. Another young woman was found beaten to death two weeks later. Then Martha Sahagun de Fox, Mexico’s new first lady, addressed more than a thousand women dressed in black who marched through Mexico City in protest at the deaths.

In January 2003, residents of Lomas de Poleo reported finding three corpses, but the Attorney General Jesus Solis and the police refused to confirm or deny whether they were connected to maquilladoras murders. These were not the first corpses found in this desert area near a rundown suburb. Two others had been found nearby in October 2002. One of them identified as 16-year-old Gloria Rivas.

On V-Day, 14 February 2004, in Ciudad Juarez, busloads of female students from around the world calling themselves “vagina warriors” marched into town for special performances of The Vagina Monologues, performed by such film stars as Jane Fonda and Sally Field, to highlight and denounce what was now being dubbed “femicide”. It did no good.

On 17 February 2003, two teenagers searching the wasteland for cans and bottles found three more bodies. When the police turned in Mimbre Street at 2 p.m., they found the remains of three women dumped there. While the bodies were being removed, an onlooker found a fourth.

At a press conference two days later the police said that they had identified three of the victims—16-year-old Esmeralda Juarez Alarcon who had vanished on 8 January 2003, 17-year-old Juana Sandoval Reyna who had been missing since 23 September 2002 and 18-year-old Violeta Alvíedrez Barrios who had disappeared 4 February 2003. All three had last been seen alive in downtown Juarez. When asked about the fourth victim, the police refused to acknowledge that there was another body and called a halt to the press conference. With no end to the killings in sight, the authorities are in a state of denial.

There is no shortage of suspects. Along with those already in jail, a number are still at large. There is Armando Martinez, alias Alejandro Maynez, who was arrested in 1992 for the murder of a woman in Chihuahua City, some 220 miles to the south of Juarez. He was released “by mistake” and then conveniently vanished along with his police file. Ana Benavides, who was accused of killing and dismembering a couple and their child in Juarez in 1998, claimed that Martinez committed the triple-murder and framed her.

Then there is Pedro Padilla Flores. Convicted in 1986 for the rape and murder of two women and a 13-year-old girl, he confessed to other killings but was not charged. Padilla escaped in 1991 and is still at large.

The police themselves remain under suspicion. At least ten women have accused Juarez police officers of sexual assault and kidnapping over the past five years. No charges have been brought. But an unnamed policeman is sought in connection with the murder of 27-year-old Laura Inere and 29-year-old Elizabeth Gomez in 1995.

In April 1999, Julio Rodriquez Valenzuela, the former police chief of El Sauzal, Chihuahua, was accused of attempting to rape a 16-year-old girl near where two previous murders had been committed. Chihuahua authorities report that he fled to “El Paso or New Mexico”. He remains a fugitive.

Also on the run are ex-Mexican federal agents Jorge Garcia Paz and Carlos Cardenas Cruz. They are sought for questioning in the disappearance of 29-year-old Silvia Arce in 1998 and the death of 24-year-old Griselda Mares, who was allegedly killed in error by police in a dispute over stolen guns.

Former Chihuahua state policeman Sergio Hernandez Pereda fled in 1998 shortly after the murder of his wife. He is still at large.

Former Ciudad Juarez policeman Dagoberto Ramirez was fired in 1999 after he was accused of murdering his lover. He claimed that she had committed suicide and was released, but the police officials did not reinstate him.

Melchor Baca, a former federal policeman, has been on the run for eight years. He disappeared after killing a male friend of his wife at the courthouse where they both worked. And then there is Pedro Valles, the cop who was assigned to investigate the Ciudad Juarez murders and killed his girlfriend at the state police academy in 1998. He is still at large.

Then there are the conspiracy theories. Some maintain that the murders are the work of organ harvesters who are collecting spare parts for transplants. Others believe that they are the work of a satanic cult like that run at Matamoros by Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo who died in a shoot-out in 1989. Some of his cannibalistic followers are still thought to be at large.

As drug gangs are at work in the area, it had been mooted that the missing women were addicts or small-time mules, who were executed because they knew too much. In November 2004, the FBI report accused unnamed narcotics traffickers for the torture and death of 17-year-old Lilia Garcia in the February 2001. Her body was found 100 yards from the spot where eight other victims were discovered. Then there are the juniors, or perhaps a cabal of rich and powerful sadists whose wealth puts them above the law.

Meanwhile Abdul Sharif won a judicial review in the Elizabeth Garcia case. The murder conviction was upheld, but his 30-year sentence was reduced to 20. However, the prosecutors say that Sharif may be charged with other murders. But as he has already been in jail for over 11 years, fresh charges are hardly going to stop the killings.

In 2004, a federal special prosecutor was appointed. Her remit extends to investigating the incompetence of the local police. But so far she has drawn a blank. However, a $2.7 million fund to aid the families of the victims has been established. Amnesty International has criticized the Mexican government’s efforts to investigate these crimes and the United Nations has condemned Mexico’s record on violence against women. But nothing helped. There were more than 28 related murders in 2005.

On 15 August 2006 Edgar Alvarez Cruz was arrested by US Marshals in Denver, Colorado and charged with 14 of the murders. Jos Francisco Granados and Alejandro Delgado Valles, aka El Calá, have also been arrested in connection with these 14 murders. Two of the men are said to be drug addicts and the third a psychopath. Even if these men are found guilty as charged, it seems that there are plenty more serial killers at large in and around Ciudad Juarez.

Even if they are caught, many will escape justice as much crucial evidence has been lost, incinerated or even intentionally destroyed, some in exchange for money for suspects seeking to clear their names, according to a recent report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. In the winter of 2003, homeless men took refuge from the harsh cold inside the warehouse housing many of the case files. To keep warm, the men used the files as fuel, or so the story goes.

The following year, an official was appalled by the smell that permeated the warehouse. He discovered the source of the stench was clothing, caked with blood, worn by one of the victims, a ten-year-old girl whose corpse had been dumped in the desert. Nauseated by the odour, the official, a crime scene investigator, ordered the clothes washed and deodorized with fabric softener.

“I was aghast,” said an investigator for the Human Rights Commission. “We lost crucial hair, fibre, prints, semen and God knows what other vital potential evidence.”

Far from an isolated incident, this is part of a pattern of the mishandling of evidence that will make solving the killings even more daunting for a new crop of investigators and will ensure the perpetrators remain at large. In a review of the investigation by the special prosecutor’s office, some 177 state officials were found to have been responsible for negligence or omission in the original investigations. However, none of these officials has been brought to justice by the state authorities as the statute of limitations has been applied in their favour. Others have been forced to resign after refusing to fabricate evidence or documenting the use of torture in the investigation.

Portugal’s Lisbon Ripper

A Portuguese serial killer is being hunted across Europe. Known as the “Lisbon Ripper”, he is being sought by police in Portugal and other four countries where he has killed.

The Ripper first struck in Lisbon city in July 1992. The victim was found with her throat cut. She had been disembowelled. Soon after a second victim was found within 50 yards of where the first had been dumped and in March 1993 a third body was discovered.

The killer then seems to have travelled further afield. Over the next four years, victims appeared in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and the Czech Republic. All were young, drug-addicted prostitutes. In each case, the method of killing was identical. This has convinced the Portuguese police and Interpol that the same man was responsible. Victims have been strangled or had their throat cut. Then they have been disembowelled with a piece of glass. He does not appear to have raped his victims.

Detectives also travelled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in an attempt to link the Lisbon Ripper murders with a string of similar unsolved slayings there in 1988. The theory is that he was a member of New Bedford’s large Portuguese population who left the city and continued his twisted ways back in his native Portugal, then out across Europe. Police believe he may have been a long distance lorry driver. However, no solid link was ever established.

He is believed to be tall, white, and aged between 35 and 40 at the time of the European killings. He has a pathological hatred of women and is thought to be suffering from AIDS, perhaps contracted from a drug-addicted prostitute.

Russia’s Rippers

Police in the Altai administrative district of central Siberia have been searching for a serial killer responsible for the murders of at least five teenage female applicants to the Altai Technical University. Ksenia Kirgizova, Anzhela Burdakova, Yulia Tikhtiyekova, Liliana Voznyuk and Olga Shmakova disappeared between 26 June and 15 August 2000 after sitting entrance exams at the university campus in the Siberian city of Barnaul.

Two other women—the mothers of the university applicants—have also gone missing. Some bodies of women killed in the area have been found in ditches, in woods and in the Obj river near Barnaul, a city of 700,000. The police set up check points, questioned thousands and conducted widespread searches, but no trace of the five young women could be found. Then in October 2000, two bodies suspected of being those of students Ksenia Kirgizova and Anzhela Burdakova were found in a forest 25 miles from Barnual. Investigators later positively identified one of the bodies as Kirgizova’s.

Investigators believe the killer has been active around Barnaul for several years and has been responsible for an undetermined amount of unsolved murders. Forty-year-old Alexander Anisimov was arrested, but committed suicide in mysterious circumstances after several days in custody.

On 5 February 2001, a man identified only as Alexander, a 30-year-old driver for the Barnaul police department’s drunk tank, was arrested after a 22-year-old Barnaul University student told the police she had jumped out his apartment to escape. She said that Alexander had made sexual advances in his apartment the previous evening but she rejected him. In the morning, she managed to escape by jumping off a balcony while Alexander was in the bathroom. A recent police search of the suspect’s apartment found about 300 photographs of sexual orgies and a collection of women’s underwear. However, despite intense speculation, city prosecutor Nikolai Mylitsin dismissed him as a suspect in the abduction of the five girls.

“When a man is accused of sexual violence we check whether he had anything to do with all unsolved rape and murder cases,” he said.

Then on 10 February, the police in Novosibirsk, 120 miles north of Barnaul, arrested three men and one woman on suspicion of kidnapping and murder. An official said the suspects have confessed to abducting and killing a 16-year-old Barnaul resident named Irina Serova. But she was not one of the five girls who went missing while applying to enter Altai State Technical University. The three men, aged 20 to 27, and the 27-year-old woman were charged with kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution.

Roman Kuminov, a senior investigator overseeing missing person reports in the Altai district, said the gang is thought to have lured girls from across Altai with promises of well-paid jobs before selling them as prostitutes.

If convicted, the suspects face up to 15 years in prison, he said.

Kuminov did not say whether murder charges would be brought against the group, although two bodies believed to be the missing girls’ have been found. Kidnappings have become common across Russia and especially in Chechnya, but few suspects are detained.

Russian police in the city of Perm in the Urals had little more luck when hunting a serial killer who claimed seven victims in less than three months in 1996. On 28 August, Perm’s police chief Andrei Kamenev said: “His latest victim was a woman who was raped and stabbed in an elevator shaft in the same Perm neighbourhood where six other women have been attacked in recent months.”

Police believe that one person is responsible for all the crimes, but the only suspect was not recognized by victims who survived the attacks. This was all the more disappointing as in June the police had arrested a man in Perm who they charged with murdering and disfiguring six women. The murders took place over a single month. In each case, the attacker struck the victim in the head and mutilated her face.

Meanwhile a serial killer was stalking the streets of Moscow. Between dusk on 21 July and dawn on 22 July 2003, four women were murdered in the capital of the Russian Federation. That brought the body count to ten for that month.

The first six victims were strangled. At midday on 1 July, 28-year-old Yulia Bondareva had taken a walk with her boyfriend in the botanical gardens. After the couple parted, Yulia set off towards the underground. An hour later, her body was discovered. She had been gagged with a piece of her own shirt, beaten, raped and throttled.

Before dawn the following day, the police discovered the body of 17-year-old Kseniya Medintsevaya dumped in the courtyard of a kindergarten. Her face was smeared with blood and her dress was ripped open. Again she had been raped, beaten and strangled. She had last been seen alive at 11 p.m. in her apartment the previous night.

On 4 July, the naked body of 28-year-old Irena Gera was found several miles from the centre of Moscow where she lived. She had been raped and strangled with the strap of her handbag.

The next victim was a 25-year-old Ukrainian prostitute named Alexandra. She was found strangled in her apartment on 8 July. One end of a belt was tied around her neck. The other was attached to a door handle.

Near Alexandra’s apartment, the police found the partially clothed body of 32-year-old teacher Elena Tolokonnikova on 11 July. Last seen out with friends the night before, she had not returned home.

Then on 15 July, the decomposing body of a woman was found near a pond. The remains were not identified. However there were signs of the handiwork of the same killer. Like the other victims, she was short, slim, with a fair complexion and long, light-coloured hair.

The seventh victim was 17-year-old student Tatyana Nikishina. She was killed on 21 July. Her assailant had tried to rape her. Then he strangled her with her bra and left her body in the northwest of the city. Police did not release the names of the other three victims slain that night. However, the killer seems to have begun to adopted a variety of methods. One was bludgeoned as well as strangled, another purely bludgeoned, hit by a blunt object from behind, and the third was killed having her head smashed against concrete. The youngest victim was 17; the oldest 35.

Moscow police have organized a task force to investigate the murders, but did not, at first, admit a serial killer was at work, due to the various methods of strangulation and bludgeoning he had employed. Some victims were strangled with ligatures, others manually. Some were beaten; some sexually assaulted. Seven of the ten victims were found in the northern section of the city, but the other three were killed several miles away in the northeast. There was no single MO.

At least six were well educated. One, Alexandra the Ukrainian prostitute, was not. She was the only one to be found indoors. She had been soliciting in a nearby market that day and could have picked up what she thought was a client, or she might have been followed home. There were other inconsistencies. Yulia Bondareva, the first known victim, was attacked and killed in a public park in broad daylight, while the others were killed at night. Why had Irena Gera travelled from her home to the city’s northern section where she was attacked and murdered? And why did Kseniya Medintsevaya leave her apartment in the middle of the night?

Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said that the ten women were killed by different assailants, claiming that three men had already been arrested. And a senior police official characterized the bunching of murders as “coincidence”.

Then on 23 July, a man stepped from a wooded area and grabbed a female pedestrian by the throat. He pulled her to the ground and dragged her into the bushes. A woman looking out of the window of an apartment opposite called the police, who caught the man. He was an immediate suspect in Moscow’s string of unsolved murders. However, he was soon dismissed as a copycat. On 28 July, while he was in custody, the body of a 42-year-old woman was found in a schoolyard northwest of the city. She had been raped and strangled. As in the case of 17-yearold Kseniya Medintsevaya, she had been dumped outside a kindergarten. A pattern appeared to be emerging.

Investigators found three victims who had survived similar attacks. In each case the assailant had concealed himself in bushes or behind a fence, then sprang out on the unsuspecting victim as she walked past. They also provided detailed descriptions of their assailant. He was a white male with short hair, a thin face, small eyes, bushy eyebrows, a large nose and thick lips. Aged between 35 and 40, he was between five foot seven and five foot nine, and wore jeans and a dark T-shirt.

These details were never released to frightened Muscovites, who drew their own conclusions. Women remained indoors while the men were sent out to do errands. They knew that, if a serial killer was at work, he was killing at a terrifying rate. But he could not be found.

Then in mid-June, the body of a woman was found in Bitsa Park in the south of the city. The following day, her work colleague at a small grocery store in southwestern Moscow Alexander Pichushkin was arrested. A loader there, he confessed to killing the woman and said that he had planned to kill as many as 64 people.

In all Pichushkin has so far confessed to killing 62 people, beginning in 2000, but investigators say they do not have sufficient proof to believe everything he says. However, prosecutors charged him with 49 counts of murder on 14 December 2006. There are questions about his sanity and the killings in the north of the city were far from his usual patch, opening the possibility that a second killer is at large there.

Scotland—Glasgow’s Bible John

Bible John was the nickname given to a killer who murdered three women in Glasgow in the 1960s. He has never been caught or identified and as late as December 2004 the Scottish police were still actively investigating the case.

On the evening of 22 February 1968, Patricia Docker decided that she needed a night out. Her husband, a corporal in the RAF, was stationed in England, leaving the 25-year-old nurse and her young son lodged with her parents. It was a Thursday night and they were happy to babysit the toddler.

Patricia got dressed up for the occasion and it seems she went to a number of ballrooms that evening. She was seen at the Majestic, then moved on to Barrowland Ballroom. This was popular with her friends as, on a Thursday night, it catered to those aged 25 and over. It was busy. Patricia did not particularly stand out and it was difficult to identify all her dance partners. However, it seems that someone offered to walk her home. She never got there.

At dawn the following morning, a cabinet maker on his way to work found the naked body of a dead woman in a quiet lane a few yards from the Dockers’ house. She had been strangled with her own tights, but none of her other clothing could be found. The police determined that she had been dead for several hours. They came to believe that she had been strangled elsewhere and dumped there. When they heard that Patricia Docker had not returned home, the police came to the obvious conclusion and Patricia’s parents had the gruesome task of identifying the body.

In an attempt to find some clue to identify the killer, the police widened their search for Patricia’s clothes, handbag and other belongings. Divers even searched the river nearby, but nothing was found. One local resident told the police that she thought she had heard cries for help during the early hours of 23 February, but none of the journalist and photographers who had attended a colleague’s party near where the body was found that night remember anything. A photograph of a policewoman dressed in clothes similar to those Patricia was wearing that night was circulated in the area, but no one remembered seeing her after she left the dancehall.

Glasgow had had recent experience of serial killers. Ian Brady, who was convicted of the Moors Murders in 1966, had been born there. Ten years before Patricia Docker was killed, Peter Manuel became one of the last people to be hanged in Scotland. A sociopath and burglar, he had killed at least eight people around the city. So when Patricia’s naked body was found dumped in the street, Glaswegians feared the worst. But that did not stop them having fun.

A year and a half later, 32-year-old Jemima McDonald fancied a Saturday night out. On the evening of 16 August 1969, she dropped off her three kids with her sister Margaret for the night. Then Jemima headed for the Barrowland. High bouffant hairstyles were still in fashion in Glasgow in 1969, so she travelled across town with a scarf over her hair. Then, when she arrived at the ballroom, she headed straight for the ladies, where she took out her rollers and finished off her makeup.

On the dance floor Jemima attracted attention. Other dancers noticed that she spent much of the evening dancing with a tall man in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a blue suit. His red hair was cut short and his appearance was neat. Early the next morning, she was seen leaving the ballroom with him.

The next morning, when Jemima did not come to pick up her kids as expected, Margaret grew worried. Later she overheard street children talking about something grisly they had discovered in a derelict building nearby. Fearing the worst, Margaret got the kids to direct her to the building. There she found her sister’s dead body.

Jemima was fully clothed, but there were similarities to the Patricia Docker case. Both women had been strangled with their own pantyhose. Both had been found near their home. Jemima’s handbag was missing. Later the police found another similarity between the two cases. Both had been having their period when they were killed.

A search of the area rendered no new clues and an attempt to question those who had been at the Barrowland that night also proved fruitless. Many of them were married and were out with people who were not their spouse, so were less than forthcoming. An appeal from the stage also drew a blank. A policewoman dressed in Jemima’s clothes retraced her final steps. But eventually the police released a sketch of the tall man Jemina had been seen leaving the Barrowland with. Jemima’s family offered a reward of £100, a first in the history of Scottish murder investigations. But this, too, proved futile.

Despite all the publicity the murders were getting, it did not put people off going to the Barrowland. Twenty-nine-year-old Helen Puttock was hell bent on going there on the night of 30 October 1969. Her husband, who was going to stay at home with their two young boys, begged his wife to be careful. But Helen was not worried. She would not be alone. She was going with her sister Jean and said she was sure they would be safe together.

Helen spent most of her evening dancing with a tall young man with red hair. When they left the Barrowland, the three of them took a cab home together. During the journey, the man said that his name was John, he played golf badly, but a cousin had recently hit a hole-in-one. Jean also remembered he mentioned that he had a sister. He said they had been raised in a strict religious household and he was still able to quote long passages of the Bible—hence his pseudonym.

According to one account, John seemed upset by Jean’s presence. He wanted be alone with Helen. He also condemned the evil women who went to dancehalls like the Barrowland. Ignoring Jean for much of the ride, he did not even say goodbye when they dropped her off.

The next morning Helen’s fully clothed body was found in the street by a man walking his dog. Again she had been strangled with her own nylons and her handbag was missing. She, too, was menstruating when she was murdered. As if to draw attention to the fact, the killer had removed her sanitary towel and tucked it under her armpit. And this time he had left two clues that might help identify him—a semen stain on her dress and a bite mark on her wrist.

Thanks to Jean, the police now had an accurate description. The suspect was around six feet tall, of medium build. He had blue-grey eyes and light reddish hair, which he kept cut short. His watch had a military-style band and the teeth marks on the body confirmed that two teeth in the upper-right part of his mouth overlapped.

A new artist’s impression of the suspect was circulated—this one in colour. It culled over 4,000 calls from people who thought they had seen or knew the man in the picture. Jean was called to the police station over 250 times to see suspects, but none of them turned out to be the man she and her sister had shared a taxi with. Men who bore a resemblance to the killer and had been eliminated from the enquiry were issued cards by the police, showing they had been questioned and cleared. One of them was used in a reconstruction of Helen’s last evening, with a policewoman playing Helen, that was aired on the BBC. Helen’s husband made an appeal to his wife’s killer to turn himself in and offered his life savings as a reward for information leading to his arrest.

Over 50,000 statements were taken and over 100 policemen worked on the case, with younger officers in plain clothes mingling with the dancers in the Barrowland. Taxi drivers and bus crews received particular attention. One man said he had seen a young male with scratches on his face on the bus on 31 October. He had got off at a stop on Gray Street. Police combed the area, but found nothing.

The suspect’s military wristwatch band and his short hair lead the police to believe that he might be a member of the armed forces—or even a policeman. Dentists were questioned about patients with overlapping teeth and golf clubs were asked about anyone who had recently scored a hole-in-one. A Dutch psychic called in by a local newspaper drew a map, but a search of the area drew a blank.

Although psychological profiling had yet to be developed, in the mid-1970s, a Glasgow psychiatrist concluded that, although Bible John was sociable, he was prudish. He would read widely on subjects ranging from sorcery to the Nazis, and went to the cinema by himself. This did not help.

Although only three murders have been officially ascribed to Bible John, he may have committed others. In 1977 another young woman who spent her last night in a Glasgow dancehall was found strangled and without her handbag. This sparked a renewed round of interest in Bible John.

In 1983, a wealthy Glasgow man hired a private detective to find a childhood friend who he thought resembled Bible John. The man was found living in the Netherlands, but was cleared.

Another man who had been cleared was identified only as John M. He had been a suspect in the investigation in the 1960s. He bore a close resemblance to the sketch that was circulated, but Jean had failed to identify him. Nevertheless, he continued to be a prime suspect until, in 1981, he committed suicide.

In the 1960s, DNA fingerprinting was as yet undreamt of. But in 1996, DNA from the semen left on Helen Puttock’s clothes was compared to a sample taken from one of John M.’s siblings. The match was inconclusive. Nevertheless the police requested the exhumation of John M.’s body from a graveyard in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire.

The resulting publicity led to the harassment of John M.’s family. But when the test were completed it was found that the DNA did not match. Nor did his teeth match the bite-mark on her wrist. Jean said that she always knew that John M. was not the killer and she had repeatedly told Strathclyde Police they had the wrong man. John M. was reburied and his family finally left to grieve in peace.

But the investigation was still not over. In October 2000, Professor Ian Stephen, a leading criminal psychologist who is said to have inspired TV’s Cracker, passed the name of a new suspect on to the Lothian and Borders Police, asking them to forward it to Strathclyde. He said he obtained the new lead from an expatriate Scot living in the US who suspected a member of his extended family was Bible John. The suspect was the son of a policeman. He was married in the Glasgow area and lived in Lanarkshire with his wife and two children until he moved to England in 1970.

According to the file Professor Stephen passed to the police, the suspect’s behaviour changed dramatically in the late 1960s when he increasingly went out alone at night and sometimes failed to return until the following day.

Professor Stephen told the BBC: “I would like to think that his name has already been considered and ruled out but I am not hopeful. The police were looking for a stereotype, a known sex offender at the time. The profile appears to fit that of Bible John. While the information is circumstantial I think the police have got to have a serious look at it.”

The Strathclyde Police said they would look at the new information.

In December 2004, DNA taken from a Glasgow crime scene two years earlier was an 80 percent match to the semen found on Helen’s clothing. Samples are still being collected from a number of suspects in their 50s and 60s and, in May 2005, a spokesman for the police said: “Science will solve these killings. We have no doubt of that.”

That October Strathclyde Police set up a new Unresolved Case Unit to re-examine the evidence in the Bible John Killings. They are using new processes to identify traces of evidence that previously could not be found.

“Now with the advent of DNA profiling, someone who’s just held something for a brief period, or held someone, you’re going to transfer your DNA,” said Dr Adrian Linacre, a lecturer in forensic science at Strathclyde University.

Throughout it all, the Barrowland Ballroom had soldiered on and now proudly proclaims that it is “the best rock venue in Scotland”.

Scotland—Glasgow’s Sex-Worker Slayings

The night of Friday 27 February 1998 was one of the coldest nights of the winter in Glasgow. While it was freezing outside, it was warm inside Base 75, the prostitutes’ drop-in centre in Robertson Street. Other women remembered 27-year-old Margo Lafferty being there that night. She was trying on a new suit she’d bought. It was pale blue with a mini-skirt and a lacy top. The consensus was that suited her, though one of the girls said that Margo had put on weight. She was broadly liked. Some remember her as a kind girl, one who would lend another girl money if she needed to buy a pair of tights from the all-night garage down by the river, though others say she was violent.

Base 75 closed at 11.30 p.m. and Margo went to work. Early on Saturday morning she was in one of the lanes that run off the main streets in the shopping and business area. There were security lights on the buildings, but prostitutes entertained their clients in the dark doorways there. That night, though, a monster was on the loose. In the morning Margo was found dead in a disused builders’ yard on West Street, then utilized as a car park. Her body was curled up in the foetal position, her blood soaking into the mud. She had suffered repeated blows to the head, which was then beaten against a wall. Then she had been strangled. She was naked. This was a telling detail. Margo was not a girl who undressed for her johns.

In her stomach were the remains of her last hurried meal—cheap white bread, the orange segment she had gulped down, a cherry from a can of fruit cocktail. There was mud all over her skin as the killer had dragged her naked body through the puddles in the carpark. This was particularly distressing for her mother, who remembered Margo as a scrupulously clean girl.

“When people hear the word ‘prostitute’ they think, ‘dirty midden’,” she said. “But Margo used to do my head in with her showers and baths. She’d have three or four a day. She was so very, very clean. When she had her own wee house you could have eaten a meal off the floor. She was very particular about herself and her environment.”

Margo had six brothers, though her younger brother Billy had been killed in a road accident at the age of 18. He had been left brain-dead in a coma when they had to switch off the ventilator. Her father had died when she was just a toddler. After a night of drinking, he had choked to death in his sleep. His death left the family struggling and her mother would go without food so the children could eat. But they were a happy family and the house was always full of the children’s friends—there would be as many as 14 for Sunday lunch.

The others remember Margo Lafferty as a carefree child, full of laughter and charming enough to wheedle sweets from the man on the ice-cream van when she had no money. As a young girl she had been soft-hearted, always ready to help a pal in trouble. Once she brought home a school friend who’d lost her mother. The girl stayed with the family for six years and whenever Margo got something the other girl got the same.

Margo’s older brother Monty, who assumed the role of father figure, treated his little sister like a princess, always buying her frilly things. But she was a tomboy, who would wear her trousers right up to the school gate before changing into the uniform skirt she hated. She could play football better than most boys and captained a local team.

“She was never ’feared of anybody or anything in her life,” her mother said. “She was the only one that would face up to Monty. The rest of them would never answer him back, but Margo would stand and confront him.”

Curiously for a girl of her calling, she was not interested in boys. Local lads were crazy about her, but when they came on to her she would reject them.

“I can’t be bothered with it, Ma,” she would tell her mother. “They’re too serious.”

The family lived in Barlanark, then a run-down estate riddled with drugs. Margo started sniffing glue, then moved on to harder things.

“She was a daring lassie,” said her mother. “She wasn’t scared to try anything once. If only she’d realized where it was going to end up.”

As addiction took hold, her life became increasingly chaotic. She would spend the night out with one “friend” after another, selling her body to buy drugs. One minute she would be the life and soul of the party, the next she would crashed out on the sofa.

One day, her mother came home to find Margo lying on her bedroom floor in a coma. Her face and lips were blue, and there was a syringe sticking out of her groin. Her mother pulled the needle out and slapped Margo’s face to get her breathing. It took a quarter of an hour to bring her round. When her mother explained what had happened, Margo called her a liar. Her mother said: “I’m sorry, Margo. I can’t take any more of this.”

“Fine, Ma,” Margo replied and left.

“I didn’t put her out of the house,” said her mother. “The lassie knew herself she couldn’t go on like that. It had got to the stage where you were ’feared to leave her in the house. You didn’t know what was going to be missing when you got back. I told her I would keep her, but I wasn’t knocking my pan in to keep her drug dealers.”

She knew that Margo could look after herself. Although only five foot, she was tough, aggressive and knew how to use her fists. Many of the other girls on the streets would turn to her when they needed physical protection.

“I’ve seen her taking the jacket off her back and giving it to an old woman in the street, but she had a bad temper,” said her mother. “You needed to watch her because she’d hit you as soon as look at you. She was very brave physically. Not that she went out looking for bother, but she wouldn’t run away from it either. That was why I told the police that Margo fought, that whoever had murdered Margo had been well and truly scarred. She would fight for every minute of her life and every second.”

Indeed she fought ferociously with her killer, gouging the flesh of his face.

Margo was the seventh prostitute to be murdered on the streets of Glasgow in six years. Another would follow. But hers was the only case where the police secured a conviction. Men accused in two other cases were acquitted. Suspects in another were released. And in four cases no arrests have been made. But, as we have seen, prostitute murders are notoriously difficult for the police. Between 35 and 40 remain unsolved in England and Wales each year.

In Glasgow all the murdered women were drug addicts who had turned to prostitution to support their habit. Such women are often estranged from society and there is little pressure on the police to discover who was responsible for their fate. And by the nature of their calling, few admit knowing them.

The killings began in 1991 when 23-year-old Diane McInally was found dead in Pollok Park, near the Burrell Collection, Glasgow’s famous art gallery. On 15 October, her body, clad only in a black mini-dress and stockings, was dumped under a bush. She came from the Gorbals, where drugs were bought and sold openly on the streets. It was thought that she was killed because she owed drugs money. Two men were arrested for her murder, but later released due to lack of evidence.

In April 1993, 26-year-old mother-of-two Karen McGregor was found dead in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. She had been battered around the face and head with a solid object, strangled and sexually assaulted with a foreign object.

The police had an obvious suspect. Her husband, Charles McGregor, was arrested and charged with the murder. Two witnesses said that they had seen him beat his wife to death with a hammer, but retracted their statements in court. Another witness said they had seen Karen’s battered and bruised body, but grew fearful and ran off before observing the situation further. A woman testified that she had seen McGregor in the cemetery, crouching over his wife’s grave and saying: “I’m sorry, Karen. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” And a fellow prostitute gave evidence that Karen was fed up giving all the money she had earned to her husband to feed his drug habit.

However, when McGregor appeared in court, he did not look like a junkie. He wore a smart suit and overcoat, and had his hair neatly cut—looking every inch the thrusting young businessman. The jury were impressed and returned a verdict of “not proven”—a third option allowed by Scottish courts. He later died of a drug overdose.

On a warm summer evening in June 1995 the body of Leona McGovern was found in a Glasgow car park. She had been stabbed seven times with a screwdriver, then strangled. The petite 22-year-old, barely five feet tall, had been sleeping rough. Two weeks before her death, her boyfriend died of an overdose.

“He meant a lot to her,” said Detective Chief Inspector Nanette Pollock, who was leading the investigation. “When he died she really lost it.”

Then Leona had found her best friend dead in bed.

On the night she died she owed her dealer money and asked her brother to lend her £35, but he could not give it to her. About 7 p.m., a security guard said he saw a man stabbing something on the ground. At the time he thought it was a bag of garbage as he could not imagine witnessing a murder take place in the street in broad daylight—even in Glasgow.

A man was arrested and charged with Leona’s murder—but, again, the jury returned a not-proven verdict. He claimed the murderer was another man who had been seen with Leona in the last two weeks of her life. He was not her boyfriend, just another homeless person she hung around with. Inspector Pollock thought their relationship entirely innocent.

“Homeless people tend to stick together,” she said. “They’re in the same situation. She’d lost a lot in her life.”

The body of 34-year-old mother-of-two Marjorie Roberts was pulled out of the River Clyde in August 1995, four days after she drowned. Citywatch cameras taped her walking by the river with a man. A month later the same man was arrested after trying to push another prostitute into the river. She managed to struggle free and ran to a taxi driver for help. However, she did not want to press charges. As a prostitute and drug user, she did not want the glare of publicity.

“She was a drug addict,” said Marjorie’s younger sister Betty. “They don’t care about their own life.”

There were no witnesses and no marks on Marjorie’s body—nothing to indicate that she did not slip and fall into the water accidentally, perhaps, at night when it was pitch black, or even jump in and drown.

“She had Valium in her body,” said Betty. “When she went into that Clyde she had no strength to fight.”

It was Marjorie’s boyfriend who introduced her to drugs. At first, she took temgesics—a barbiturate used to treat withdrawal symptoms. Then people in the projects where she lived began selling heroin. Marjorie’s boyfriend left her and the children and she started letting prostitutes use the house to take drugs. By the time he came back Marjorie herself was on the game.

“He just went, ‘Well, hen. As long as you’re using plenty of protection.’ He didn’t care,” said Betty. “‘She was dead shy and quiet. She never had any confidence. That’s how we couldn’t believe she could go and do that.”

As her habit grew, her life slipped downhill. In her last few months, she slimmed down until she looked like a skeleton. She would sit motionless with her face covered for hours on end. Eventually, her doctor prescribed Valium.

Like Karen McGregor and Marjorie Roberts, 26-year-old Jaqueline Gallagher had only been on the game for five or six months when she died. Jacqui’s own mother did not even know her daughter was a prostitute.

“I know those girls,” she said. “See the way they’re dressed? When I saw Jacqueline she was never like that. She was always prim and proper. People used to say, my God, she’s beautiful. If she was a wee bit taller she could be a model.”

Like Leona McGovern and Margo Lafferty, Jacqueline Gallagher was only five feet tall. She had met her boyfriend when she was just a teenager. He was ten years older and already on drugs—but then, so were most of her friends. According to Gordon, they were very much in love.

“On our 10th anniversary she was running about and singing, ‘Our House in the Middle of the Street’,” he recalled. “She was happy. I came in with a big, massive card and I got her a gold necklace. She loved gold. I put bits of gold in her coffin, things that we’d given each other.”

Their idyllic life together was marred only by drugs and the periods he spent in prison for shoplifting. While he was inside, she wrote hundreds of love letters to him that he kept in a plastic shopping bag. One read: “Gordon, I know myself it’s not going to be long till you’re walking through the door, and baby I will be there for you. I always will be, Gordon, no matter what. You know that yourself, baby.”

However, on his last stint in prison Jacqui did not visit him as she had before.

“She knew I hated this,” said Fraser Gordon.

He knew the risk she was running, earning money as a prostitute.

“I told her, I worry about you from the moment you walkout that door to the moment you walk back in,” he said. “It’s frightening. You don’t know how much strain you’re putting on me.”

On the night she died in 1997, Jacqueline was picked up by car from the kerbside in Glasgow. Later her half-naked body was found on a grass verge near a bus stop in Bowling, a village four miles outside the city. She was hidden in shrubbery and wrapped in a home-made curtain. The fabric was pink and grey, and the lining white with blue polka dots. The police never managed to discover where it came from—even after it was shown on the nationwide TV programme Crimewatch.

The police had a suspect—43-year-old George Johnstone of Erskine, who was one of her clients. But he was cleared and the real killer is still at large.

“Somebody knows who killed my daughter,” said her mother. “I didn’t know she was a prostitute but it doesn’t matter what she was doing. She was a lovely girl and didn’t deserve to be killed.”

Gordon Fraser was devastated by Jacqui’s death. Six months later, he was found on the roof of his house, throwing down slates and threatening to kill himself by setting himself on fire.

Twenty-one-year-old single mother Tracy Wylde was the only victim to be murdered indoors. Like Marjorie Roberts and Jacqui Gallagher, she was new to the game and only went out on the street a couple of nights a week.

She lived in a top floor flat, which she kept impeccably. People were always trooping up and down the stairs to her flat, leading neighbours to wonder if she was a drug dealer. According to her friends she was not, just a timid girl who could not say no—though others say she was warm and funny, with enough confidence to talk to everybody.

“I was shocked when I heard about the prostitution,” said a neighbour who lived downstairs. “I said to her about the risks she was taking, but she said she’d rather go out and earn money like that than steal it off anyone else. She knew what that was like.”

But her work as a prostitute allowed to keep her three-year-old daughter Megan, who was always conspicuously well dressed.

Tracy had had a troubled upbringing. She had been raised by her grandparents and called her grandfather “Dad”. He came up to her flat nearly every day and even dropped her off in the city centre sometimes when she was working on the streets.

“I feel sad for her,” said her downstairs neighbour. “It couldn’t have been an easy life for her.”

Tracy was killed in the early hours of 24 November in her home. Strangely no one heard anything that night. Her block had poor soundproofing and residents could overhear neighbours’ conversations and footfalls. But not even her downstairs neighbour, a young mother who was kept up by her 11-week-old baby, heard a thing.

After Margo Lafferty died on 28 February 1998, the police discovered that she had gone with two violent criminals that night. On the dark piece of waste ground where she was found dead, they picked up two condoms. One contained the semen of Brian Donnelly, who had previously tried to set fire to the house of his former girlfriend and their son, and he had also mugged an old woman. The other contained the semen of Scarborough construction worker David Payne, a convicted sex offender who had been jailed for holding up a woman at knife point and indecently assaulting her.

That night Donnelly had been out celebrating his 19th birthday but went into a rage after being rejected by a couple of female work colleague. Instead he decided to go with a prostitute and was captured on CCTV with Margo before the pair went to the disused builders’ yard in West Regent Street for sex. The jury was also shown CCTV footage showing a man, who the Crown said was Donnelly, walking away wearing a leather jacket Margo had borrowed.

The following day, work colleagues noticed the gouges on Donnelly’s face. He told one he had been involved in a tussle with a woman whose boyfriend had tried to jump a taxi queue before him. But he told another colleague he had been scratched by a cat. His workmates did not believe him and gave his name to detectives investigating Margo Lafferty’s murder.

During the trial, Donnelly alleged that the murder was committed by David Payne, who had been working in Glasgow at the time. However, Payne was seen with Margo on CCTV before she was seen with Donnelly. Despite his previous conviction for a violent sex crime, Payne denied being the murderer.

At his trial in 1998, the prosecutor Calum MacNeill told Donnelly: “We will never know why you killed her, whether it was a disagreement over payment, or your anger which lacks self control, or out of shame or disgust or contempt that you had for the heroin addict prostitute you had just used. You punched and kicked her and she fought back, scratching you. You were incensed, you 6 feet 3 inches and her only 5 feet tall. You were fuelled with anger and got out of control and banged her head off the wall before strangling her and finally dragging her body along the yard.”

He was found guilty on a majority verdict, but in 2001 the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh overturned the conviction on the grounds that the trial judge, Lord Dawson, had misdirected the jury over the CCTV footage.

Lord Dawson had told the jury that they were entitled to consider any evidence that Donnelly had any of the dead woman’s property on him or in his possession, saying specifically: “You’ll remember in that connection the video tape evidence where you saw a young man wearing a dark jacket.”

Gordon Jackson, QC for Donnelly, told the appeal judges there had been no suggestion during the trial that the man caught on camera wearing a dark jacket was either young or was Donnelly.

Lord Allanbridge, who heard the appeal with Lord Cameron and Lord Caplan, said: “We consider that the trial judge did misdirect the jury in inviting them to consider ‘the video tape evidence where they saw a young man wearing a dark jacket’. This was an open invitation to the jury to consider the 3.14 a.m. video recording and to recollect their viewing of it, so that they themselves might speculate about the disputed identity of a male person shown on the recording. Such a procedure is incompetent.

“If the jury concluded that the recording showed the appellant wearing the deceased’s jacket after her death, this could have been a very persuasive factor in their deliberations on the murder charge. We are accordingly satisfied that the misdirection of the trial judge in this case has led to a miscarriage of justice.”

They quashed the conviction, but granted the Crown leave for a retrial. At a second trial in 2001, it took the jury under an hour and a half to bring in a unanimous verdict of murder.

After the trial, Margo’s mother said: “I always knew Donnelly was the monster who murdered my daughter… He wasn’t any innocent young boy. I hoped someone would kill him when he went into prison after the first trial. I was wishing retribution would be served in another way. There’s no closure in this for me. Not as long as he breathes. I believe in the Old Testament, in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth… She might have been a prostitute but she was still a lovely lassie with a heart of gold.”

And Mrs Lafferty still has to live with the consequences.

“You’re sitting in work and people are talking, new staff maybe, not the ones that were there at the time. And they always bring Margo’s name up if anything happens. They’ll maybe come across a wee caption in the paper and they go, ‘Look at that. These lassies deserve it.’ I just get up and walk away. Or occasionally I’ll say, ‘Look at it this way. They’re out there, taking the chance of being jailed, and there’s others sitting next to you that are giving it away for nothing.’ Margo could have been out mugging old folk or breaking into houses. But she didn’t do that. She went out and did a job of work.”

Margo’s brothers did not know what she did for a living and had to read about it in the newspapers as well as living with the grief of losing their sister. Mrs Lafferty was afraid they would get themselves in trouble if they came to the court and the jury voted for acquittal, but the verdict was heard in total silence.

When Margo died it was three months before the family could bury her. And they were not allowed to cremate her, in case the body had to be exhumed later to look for further evidence, though Margo herself would have preferred to be cremated.

“She was afraid of creepy crawlies, couldn’t bear the thought of worms going through her body,” said her mother, but she now thinks the bureaucrats did her a favour. “Now I know I can go up to her grave and just stand there and talk to her. I know she’s never going to stand in front of me or cuddle me, which she always used to do. But at least I know where she is.”

Margo’s mother also has a grandchild to bring up who reminds her of her lost daughter.

“She’s so full of confidence. So was Margo, full of her own importance,” she says. “I hope she keeps that.”

Meanwhile, the murder of Margo Lafferty led to the girls in Glasgow’s red light district being given lessons in self-defence by specially trained police officers. They were issued with personal attack alarms and leaflets offering practical safety advice. The leaflets provide advice on what clothes to wear, where to sit in a client’s car, how to deal with a violent client and how to protect their money.

But that did not help 27-year-old Emma Caldwell, who went missing on 4 April 2005. Her badly decomposed remains were found on 8 May in thick undergrowth near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, over 30 miles away. It was found by a member of the public walking their dog in woods at Kilnpotlees, Roberton, at about 1 p.m., near two service stations on the M74 motorway link to the south at Happendon and Abington.

Emma Caldwell grew up in Erskine, Renfrewshire. Her mother said: “She was just a happy, happy child—we had a happy life. She was a lovely child, full of fun. A magical child who loved horses. There used to be a thing in the family—we’d say, ‘What would you like, Emma?’ She’d say, ‘A horsy, a horsy’. We’d say, ‘When would you like the horsy?’ She’d say, ‘Right now, right now I’d like the horsy’.”

Indeed she had worked as a horse-riding instructor before her sister, Karen, died from cancer in 1998. Then her whole world seemed to collapse. She left home, because she was a heroin addict and became a prostitute to support her habit. At the time she went missing she was living a women’s hostel in the Govanhill area. It was been reported that Emma may have been forced to walk to the woods before being murdered, but the police said she almost certainly died very soon after the last sighting of her in Govanhill.

Officers studied CCTV footage and warned men who did not come forward that they would be visited by detectives. In any effort to jog the public’s memory, the police projected a 60-foot image of Emma on to the side of a semi-derelict tower block in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.

The BBC’s Crimewatch programme aired CCTV footage showing the last recorded moments of Emma’s life. It showed her leaving Inglefield Street women’s hostel for the last time, then talking briefly to two people outside before heading for the city centre. The driver of a BMW passed her, stopped and did a three-point turn in Inglefield Street. She was last seen at around 11 p.m. on 4 April, walking down Butterbiggins Road towards Victoria Road.

Later the police came across footage of a woman getting into a silver Skoda Felecia car outside the Riverboat Casino on the Broomielaw, Glasgow’s historic quayside. Detectives have traced every owner of a silver Skoda Felecia car in Scotland, but have been unable to track down the driver. This line of enquiry might even be a blind alley.

Detective Superintendent Willie Johnston of the Strathclyde Police said: “I am unable to say with any authority that the person who entered the car was Emma. However, I do know that she could have been in Broomielaw at that time.”

The charity Crimestoppers offered a reward of £10,000 to anyone who could help track down her killer. But a year after she went missing 50 officers were still working on the case. The police then released recordings of 999 calls she made the weeks before she disappeared, expressing her concern about children playing on a railway line.

The officer leading the inquiry said the calls showed the kind nature of the “caring” young woman and he hoped they would help to jog people’s memories.

“I want to demonstrate to the public, who may still have reservations about coming forward, that despite her lifestyle, Emma was a loving, caring individual who was genuinely concerned for the children on the railway line,” he said. “It may also prompt people who recognize her voice and know something that could be relevant to this investigation to come forward. I make no apologies for constantly reminding members of the public of this crime and will continue to do so until the person or persons responsible have been brought to justice.”

The murdered Glasgow vice girls may not be the victims of a serial killer. It seems likely that a different killer is responsible for each murder. But that makes life no safer for Glasgow’s prostitutes, as long as the killers are at large.

On 8 September 2006, 29-year-old Gillian Gilchrist, from Ibrox, was thrown from a car by a man who had picked her up in the red light district of Glasgow. She lost part of an arm.

She had been picked up by a man in a dark coloured car in Holm Street at Wellington Street, in the heart of the red light district. He drove to Arkleston Road near to Arkleston Cemetery, on the outskirts of the suburb of Paisley, where he threw her from the car at around 1.50 a.m. From there she stumbled 100 yards across a field and onto the westbound M8 motorway, where she was found by a man in a taxi who did not want to be named.

“Suddenly the taxi brakes and there was this woman in the road,” he said. “She was covered in blood. I ran to help her and called 999 and tried to get her off the motorway, it was then I noticed she had no arm. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen, I put my jacket around her and gave her first aid.”

Her arm was severed four inches above the wrist and doctors were unable to reconnect it.

Her sister Debbie, told the Scottish Sun: “I don’t understand why someone would want to do that to a lassie. In a way Gillian is lucky because she could well be dead.”

“We have tried so hard to get her off the streets,” said her stepmother Anne Gilchrist. “I just pray this is the wake-up call she needs—we will all be there to help her.”

The Glasgow edition of the Daily Record offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the attacker. The police are treating the attack as attempted murder and searching for a man in his forties with a full head of hair, driving a dark-coloured saloon.

South Africa’s Serial Killers

Since the end of apartheid there has been an explosion of serial killers in South Africa. Take the case of Lazarus Mazingane, who was given 17 life sentences for murder and rape, and over 700 years for other offences in Johannesburg High Court on 3 December 2002.

Dubbed the “Nasrec Strangler”, he preyed on women commuting between Soweto and Johannesburg. Many of the bodies were found near the Nasrec Exhibition Centre. His victims are black females, mostly between the ages of 20 and 35, who are lured from minibus taxis.

Judge Joop Labuschagne said Mazingane was a “cruel and inhuman person” who showed no remorse, and should be permanently removed from society to which he was a menace.

“He stalked defenceless women whom he robbed and raped before he killed them,” said the judge.

Mazingane was working as a taxi driver at the time and many of the victims were attacked along his route or when seeking transport. His first victims were throttled—not fatally—then raped. But as his vicious career progressed, he murdered by strangulation.

“All these women were young and in the prime of life,” said Judge Labuschagne. “I listened to the evidence of mothers… and loved ones who told me of their tragic losses. Nothing I do or say today can compensate them, but perhaps they can find some compensation in the conviction of the accused and these sentences I am imposing.”

The court also noted that some of the victims were men such as Gert Aspeling, who was shot dead when he refused to hand over his car keys after stopping to change a wheel. Mazingane then drove off with the dead man’s paralyzed wife in the car and dumped her in the veldt without her wheelchair.

The judge remarked that the chances of rehabilitation were “very poor if not non-existent”, noting that Mazingane had already been convicted of attacking his own wife.

In all, Mazingane was convicted of 74 charges, and was sentenced to life imprisonment on each of the 16 murder counts and life imprisonment for the most recent rape, which fell under the new legislation. He was sentenced to 18 years on each of the remaining 21 charges of rape. On the 20 counts of aggravated robbery he had been convicted of, he was sentenced to 25 years for the most recent one, and 15 years for each of the remaining 19. And he was sentenced to another 10 years on each of five counts of attempted murder. One victim had been shot three times but survived.

He received eight years for each of three counts of kidnapping, plus two years for assault, three years on each of the two charges of illegal possession of a firearm, and three years on each of the four charges of illegal possession of ammunition.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mazingane was already serving 35 years for a crime committed late in 1998—the kidnapping, rape and robbery of an attorney’s wife and an attack on a motorist who stopped to help. He was in jail for that offence when he came to the attention of Superintendent Piet Byleveldt, who was investigating the unsolved Nasrec killings. However, the charges eventually laid against Mazingane were only the tip of the iceberg. At the time Police Director Henriette Bester detailed the extent of the Nasrec offences: “There are 53 cases, of which 51 of the victims were killed. Of the 51 murder victims, 32 were female, all of whom were raped. Seventeen of the victims were children between the ages of five and eight, of whom 11 were girls.”

Mazingane was convicted of only 16 of the slayings. He may have committed more that he was not charged with, but the chances are that there is at least one other killer—maybe more—still at large.

Then there is the mysterious case of David Selepe and the murder of more black women in Cleveland, an industrial suburb of Johannesburg. On 3 September 1994, just four months after South Africa’s first multi-racial election, a woman’s body was found on in the bushes near the Jupiter train station next to the township of Heriotdale. Four days later, a second body was found next to the M2 freeway, on the other side of Heriotdale. Later that same day, the third body was found near a mine dump nearby. All three were partially naked and had been raped and strangled. There was nothing on the bodies or around them to aid in their identification. However, their clothes indicated that, before the attacks they had been neatly dressed. They were certainly not prostitutes—the usual prey of serial killers.

Once stories of a serial killer began to circulate in the press, the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit discovered that they had two similar cases, whose bodies had been found in the same area on 16 and 31 July. The first—that of a schoolgirl—had a curious message written on it. The murder had written in black ink on the inside of her left thigh: “We must stay here for as long as you don’t understand.” On her right thigh, he wrote: “She a beach and I am not fighting with you please.”

Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit took over the investigation from the local Heriotdale force. So when, on 19 September, a sixth woman’s body was found near a mine dump in Heriotdale, they went to investigate. Again the victim had been strangled. Her dress had been pushed up over her hips and her jumper had been pulled over her head.

What puzzled detectives was that none of the women they had found matched missing person reports. Although they were apparently respectable women, none of them had been reported missing. So identikits of the women were prepared to release to the press and television.

All six bodies had been found within a radius of just over three miles so, on 21 September, the police began to search Heriotdale and the surrounding area of Cleveland in earnest. They employed a police helicopter, two dogs and some 140 officers. They found the remains of two more bodies in an advanced state of decomposition. Their clothing had been pushed up under their armpits and they appeared to have been strangled with either their own belt or undergarments.

The police now had a total of eight dead women on their hands. All of them were aged between 18 and 30, black and well-dressed. Medical examiners established that at least two of them had been raped. And, disturbingly, there may be many more victims. The area was littered with numerous pieces of female underwear.

Also on the 21st, the body of the women found two months before was identified by her husband. Her name was Hermina Papenfus. Aged 25, she was a nurse at the Sandringham Clinic.

The search of the Cleveland area continued and, on 23 September, the police found a rock splattered with blood, a pair of women’s sandals and a bloodstained shirt in the bushes some 50 feet from a footpath that ran between the factories. The police believed that these belonged to the fifth or sixth victim. A search of the wider area discovered no more corpses.

On 26 September, the body of the woman found on 3 September near the Jupiter station was identified by her father. She was 23-year-old Ntombi Maria Makhasi, a resident of Orlando West in Soweto. A student of fashion design at the Elna Design School in Johannesburg, her teachers described her as friendly and responsible. She disappeared on 2 September after telling a classmate that she would not be at school that day because she was going to the province of KwaZulu-Natal a couple of hundred miles to the southeast to visit her mother who was ill. Her father told the detectives that she used buses and South Africa’s numerous taxis and minibuses for transport. Hermina Papenfus also used the taxis.

Dr Micki Pistorius, South Africa’s first psychological profiler, joined the investigation on 28 September. The similarities between the cases were manifest, she said. All the victims were black, young, attractive—women who took a pride in their appearance and were not destitute. The killer’s modus operandi was consistent. He had taken the women to an industrial area, raped them and strangled them with a piece of their own clothing—usually a belt, bra or pantyhose. Then he left the body totally or partially naked.

Pistorius concluded that the killer was a black man in his late twenties or early thirties. Based on the women’s appearance, he was charming, well-dressed and well off with an expensive car—it was unlikely that women like these would go with someone who did not have a winning personality and portray himself as a man of means. Investigators thought that he might have derived some of his income from fraud or theft. He was certainly self-employed—at that time, few black men with a regular job would have the means or the free time to go around picking up women. Pistorius also surmised that he was married.

The message left on the body of the first victim indicated that he had a profound hatred of women. He called his first victim, a schoolgirl, a “beach”—presumably meaning “bitch”. The written message also suggested that he had difficulty expressing his feelings. He could not tell the woman what he felt when she was alive, so he wrote it on her body when she was dead.

Pistorius told the Beeld that the killer “feels dead inside. He probably thinks about death all the time. He fantasizes about every murder and tries to commit the perfect murder, because he has a drive to kill, but he doesn’t understand it. To kill is the only way he can release his feelings and his identity.” Asked whether he would stop killing, she said: “He can’t.”

Another thing Pistorius noted was that Ntombi Makhasi’s body was found on 3 September in the exactly same place as Hermina Papenfus’ body had been found on 31 July. Then on 19 September, a third body was found there. Pistorius suggested that the police keep the area under surveillance. But the killer was one step ahead. His profile concluded that he was an arrogant and intelligent man who read the newspapers. He knew what was going on and switched his dumping ground.

On 8 October, another woman’s body was found near Geldenhuis train station, which is one stop from the Cleveland station, on the opposite side of Heriotdale from Jupiter station where Ntombi Makhasi had been found on 3 September. The new victim had clothing stuffed in her mouth and had been strangled with her pantyhose. There were some indications she had been raped, but the body had been lying in the veldt for several days and was badly decomposed.

It was plain that this was the work of the same killer, even though he had dumped the body in a new location. The police then looked back in their files and discovered that two other women’s bodies had been dumped near Geldenhuis station, one on 6 August, the other on 3 September. The modus operandi in the 6 August case was almost identical. The victim was found with her jumper pulled over her head. She had been strangled with her own blouse which was still tied around her throat and her panties and pantyhose had been stuffed into her mouth.

On 13 October, the police offered a reward of 200,000 Rand (£14,000) for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. Four days later, a man identified his daughter from a picture in the newspaper. She was 26-year-old Amanda Kebofile Thethe who was last seen leaving her parents’ home at 9 a.m. on 2 August. She was going to pay a bill in Johannesburg, then go on to Soshanguve, north of Pretoria, some 50 miles away, where she worked as a teacher. As her body had been found on 6 August, she had already been buried in an unmarked grave.

Although the police had repeatedly appealed to the public to report missing persons, Amanda Thethe’s aunt Nomvula Mokonyane spoke out about what had happened when the family had tried to report her niece’s disappearance to the police. A week after Amanda disappeared, they had gone to the police station at John Vorster Plain, Johannesburg, to report her missing, only to be informed that they could not do so due to “lack of stationery” and they were told to go to another station. So they went to the station in Krugersdorp, near where they lived. A week later, when they inquired if any progress had been made, they were told that the file had been mislaid. Plainly, little had changed in the police force since the old apartheid days. However, Mokonyane did praise Brixton Murder and Robbery for their handling of the case since Amanda had been identified.

On 20 October, another victim was identified by her parents. Her name was Malesu Betty Phalahadi. The 25-year-old had last been seen alive on 2 September and was thought to have been travelling by train to visit a friend in Mabopane, near Soshanguve, where Amanda Thethe worked as a teacher. But 2 September was the same day Ntombi Makhasi disappeared. Both Malesu Phalahadi’s and Ntombi Makhasi’s bodies were found the next day Malesu’s near Geldenhuis station; Ntombi’s near Jupiter station.

Curiously, Malesu’s parents had only been alerted to the fact that their daughter might have been the victim of a serial killer when a woman phoned Malesu’s mother Grace Lehlake on 19 October and asked if she knew where her daughter was. As Grace did not, she asked the woman the same question. She replied that Grace should call the police and hung up. Who this woman was remained an intriguing mystery. Was she the friend that Malesu was supposed to be visiting? If so, why did she hide her identity and why did she not contact the police directly? Or was it someone who knew the killer? If so, why wait two-and-a-half months before calling?

But there was another distressing discovery to be made in the case of Malesu Phalahadi. Her fiancé was a local policeman, who found out his lover was dead when he recognized her clothes among the evidence being examined at the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit.

Both Ntombi Makhasi and Malesu Phalahadi had been intending to head northwards through Pretoria when they had gone missing, so detectives began to throw their net a little wider. They then discovered that there had been two similar cases in Pretoria West, some 30 miles to the north. A woman’s body had found by a cattleman in a patch of open field on 19 August. The same man found a second body about 330 yards from the first on 7 October. Both women were black and neatly dressed. They had been strangled with their stockings and left partially clothed. Once again they had no possessions that could aid identification. One of them was later exhumed in the hope of finding evidence that would tie their cases to the Cleveland murders. Pretoria and Johannesburg are more than 30 miles apart. This reinforced the idea that the killer had a car.

Then two more victims were identified. One was 28-year-old Dikeledi Daphney Papo, whose body had been found in the search of Heriotdale on 21 September. It could not be established when she had gone missing or what she had been doing beforehand. The other was 25-year-old Dorah Moleka Mokoena. She had been found in Heriotdale on 19 September. Interestingly, she worked as a cashier at the Danville toll booth to the west of Pretoria and she had left home on the morning of 9 September to take a taxi to work, but had never arrived.

Three days after Dorah Mokoena disappeared, a man had phoned her boss, saying that Dorah had been in an accident and would not be returning to work. He asked for her salary to be paid into her account, as she was in a critical condition and needed money. Her boss then asked the man who he was. He fell silent for a minute, then said his name was “Martin”.

Then the body found on the M2 freeway in Heriotdale on 7 September was identified. This was 24-year-old Refilwe Amanda Mokale who went missing on 5 September. Her body was found two days later next to the M2 freeway in Heriotdale. She had been studying fashion design at Intec College in Pretoria. The day she disappeared, she was seen on Church Plain in Pretoria, talking to a man who, she said, offered her a job selling mobile phones. She had an appointment to meet him again the following day. The eyewitnesses said that he was a black man between 25 and 30 years old, who spoke Zulu. Other women who had been offered jobs by the man came forward. An identikit was drawn up and published on 10 November.

Meanwhile, the identification of the two victims found in Pretoria West lent more clues. One of the women was 30-year-old Peggy Bodile. She had an appointment with an unknown man on 4 October at the Paul Kruger statue on Church Plain in Pretoria, echoing the case of Refilwe Mokale. Her body was discovered three days later.

The other was 32-year-old Joyce Thakane Mashabela. She left home to visit her sister by taxi on 9 August. Her body was found on 19 August. But on 14 August, a man calling himself “Moses Sima” phoned Joyce’s employer, claiming he had found her identity papers while walking through a patch of veldt on his way to work. He handed them over to the family the next day, insisting that he had found only the papers and knew nothing more. But that begged the question: how did he know where Joyce worked or what the number was?

On 10 November the police identified the body of the girl found on 16 July, which they believe was the killer’s first victim. This was 18-year-old Maria Monene Monama, who was still at school. She was last seen on the morning of 14 July when she left home on her way to Pretoria. Although her body was found two days later, her parents did not discover what had happened to her for four months.

Then the last body, that of 24-year-old Margaret Ntombeni Ledwaba, was identified.

By 18 November, the police were closing in on a suspect. He was a 31-year-old black man, living in a house in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg and some 12½ miles from Cleveland. Although he was married, he did not live with his wife and he was often seen in the company of other women.

A suave and a flashy dresser, he drove a Mercedes-Benz, fitting the profile. He was also self-employed, owning and running a women-only computer school called the Vision English Girls College from offices he rented in Pretoria. And, like many independent businessmen in South Africa, he owned a number of taxis. But things had been going badly. The college’s four employees had not been paid their salaries. He owed 50,000 Rand (£3,500) in rent and utility bills. The Mercedes was not registered in his name, but that of a black woman. Although he was paying the instalments on the car, he was 20,000 Rand (£1,400) behind on the payments. He had come to the attention of the police when a woman had contacted them, complaining that the suspect had offered her a job, but had then tried to rape her.

The suspect’s name was David Abraham Selepe. The problem was that he had fled his creditors two weeks before, supposedly going overseas on business. He had not gone that far. On 15 December, he was arrested trying to sell the Mercedes in the port of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, 280 miles to the east. Detectives found newspaper clippings of the Cleveland killings in the boot. There were also footprints on the lid, suggesting that someone had been locked inside.

Returned to South Africa, he was questioned for the next four days. Apparently, he waived his right to legal representation. The police said that he confessed to the murder of 15 women in the Cleveland area—four more than they were investigating. They did not get around to questioning him about the women found in Pretoria West. While he was happy to make a verbal confession, the police said, he refused to sign a written confession.

The police also say that Selepe agreed to take them to the places where he had left the bodies. On 17 December, he took them to three places where bodies had been found. He then showed detectives the four previously unknown sites where he had said he had dumped bodies.

The following day, Selepe agreed to go to the place where Amanda Thethe’s body had been found on 6 August. Three officers investigating the case—Joseph du Toit, Timothy Mngomozulu and Felix Tiedt—accompanied him. From Geldenhuis station, they had to cross rough terrain so Selepe’s ankle chains were removed. The police said they did this to prevent Selepe from being injured—and later accuse them of brutality.

After Selepe had pointed out the place where Amanda Thethe’s body had been found, he told them that he had hidden her underwear in a plastic bag which had been shoved underneath some bushes nearby. His handcuffs were removed so that he could search for the bag. When he found the bag, Detective Tiedt bent down to recover it. He was then hit across the back with a stout branch, knocking him down. Detective Mngomozulu yelled, “Stop! Stop!” Then a gunshot rang out. Selepe fell to the ground. Bleeding profusely from a head wound, he was rushed to Johannesburg Hospital, where he died that evening.

The police claimed that this was a tragic accident that marred an otherwise brilliantly successful investigation. Since Brixton Murder and Robbery had taken over the investigation, only two months had passed before they identified the suspect and in another month they had arrested him, even though he had fled the country.

But there was a furore in the press. The Beeld said that three police officers should surely have been able to subdue a man only wielding a branch. And if they had to shoot to prevent him escaping, why had they not shot him in the legs? Other newspapers speculated that the police might have had ulterior motives and the Sowetan said that “an innocent man may have paid for the crimes of a monster who is still alive”.

On 20 December, the police were forced to issue a statement saying that Selepe had not admitted “in so many words” that he was the Cleveland strangler. However, he had “said things which strengthened our suspicion”. This cast doubt on Selepe’s so-called verbal confession. One of the Brixton police’s media officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Eugene Opperman, first told reporters that Selepe had been handcuffed at the time of the attack, and later changed the story. He was suspended in an effort to salvage the police’s image, which was further damaged when it came out that the police had failed to notify Selepe’s widow of her husband’s death. Linda Selepe had found out about it from neighbours who read about it in the papers. Although the couple had been estranged for more than a year, she said: “They killed the truth when they killed my husband. Had they brought him to court then, the South African public would have known the truth that David was not a killer.”

Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi tried to retrieve the situation. He held a press conference, stating that Selepe’s death did not mean the case was now closed. Then he spent four hours with the relatives of the Cleveland victims, assuring them that both the murder of their loved ones and Selepe’s death would be thoroughly investigated.

During Selepe’s “confession”, detectives said that there were two men—accomplices—named “Tito” and “Mandl” they should talk to. This became the investigators’ top priority. They located a man they thought to be Tito. He was questioned at length and volunteered to provide blood and hair samples for forensic examination, but he was cleared of any connection to the murders. The man identified as Mandl had been in jail awaiting trial when the murders took place. Even so he was questioned, then dismissed from the enquiry.

Even though this line of enquiry drew a blank, the police continued to insist that David Selepe could be tied to at least six of the Cleveland victims. Blood said to be Selepe’s was found on one of the victims’ panties. And human blood, supposedly from one of the victims, was found in Selepe’s car. But the police would furnish no further details. They said that more evidence linked Selepe to four more victims, but, again, would not say what it was. This was dismissed as a feeble attempt to save face.

On 7 February 1995, the investigating officer in David Selepe’s death Colonel Adrian Eager delivered the post-mortem report to the Attorney General, after it had mysteriously gone missing for a week. The Attorney General stated that the investigation into the death of David Selepe had been thorough and that no one would be held accountable. An inquest in nearby Germiston into David Selepe’s death found, unsurprisingly, that no one could be held criminally responsible for his death. Sergeant Mngomozulu, the coroner said, had acted in self-defence.

However, public confidence was shaken when Colonel Eager testified that he was not even sure that “David Selepe” was the dead man’s real name. When the suspect had been convicted of fraud on 2 May 1985, he had been caught carrying false identity papers in the name of David Selepe and, as they did not know his real name, he had been charged and sentenced under that name. The records of the Department of Internal Affairs revealed that Selepe had first obtained legal identity papers under that name in May 1992. Between then and 21 June 1994, five sets of papers had been issued to him.

Despite public misgivings about the Selepe affair, it was generally thought that the Cleveland killings were over. However, on 13 February 1995, the body of a young black woman was discovered in the veldt near Village Deep, some six miles from Cleveland. She had been strangled with her own underwear and her clothes had been pushed up to above her waist. The police claimed it was a copycat.

At the end of February, four women told the police that a black man had approached them the previous October and November offering them jobs. The man was attractive with large eyes. He had expensive clothes and spoke Sotho rather than Zulu. He also claimed to be a vegetarian and drank milk. When the Cleveland murders came up in conversation, he made off, although he did not match the description of David Selepe.

The brother of the woman found on 13 February identified her as 22-year-old Nelsiwe Langa. She had last been seen two weeks before her remains were found. Despite the obvious similarities with the Cleveland murders, the police maintain that a different man was responsible. However, other bodies found near Atteridgeville, outside Pretoria showed an almost identical modus operandi to the Cleveland cases.

The township of Atteridgeville has hosted an extraordinary concentration of serial killers. In 1956 the “Atteridgeville Mutilator” killed six boys over five months, mutilating their bodies. He was never caught or identified. In the 1960s Elias Xitavhudzi, known as “Pangaman”, murdered 16 white women and dumped their bodies around Atteridgeville, before being caught and executed. His sobriquet comes from the panga—an African version of the machete used for cutting sugar cane in KwaZulu-Natal—which he used to despatch his victims. Then in the 1970s, there was “Ironman” who robbed his victims late at night before bludgeoning them to death with an iron bar. Ironman took the lives of at least seven victims in this manner before disappearing. He has never been identified.

A half-naked woman’s body was found on 4 January 1995 in a field outside Atteridgeville. It was severely decomposed and she was never identified. On 9 February a second body was found. This woman was completely naked, though her clothes had been piled on her chest and held in place by rocks. Identified from her fingerprints, she was 27-year-old Beauty Nuku Soko, who had disappeared on her way to visit her sister in Klipgat, 20 miles to the north. Four days later Nelsiwe Langa was found.

On 6 March, workmen digging a ditch in Atteridgeville found a woman’s breasts poking out of the soil. They unearthed the body of 25-year-old Sara Matlakala Mokono, who was last seen three days before, on her way to see a potential employer.

On 12 April, another body was discovered in the veldt near the Skurweberg shooting range in Atteridgeville. She was partially naked. Her hands had been tied behind her back with a bra and she had been strangled with a ligature. Most of her clothes were found scattered around the area, but her panties were missing. She was later identified as 25-year-old Letta Nomthandazo Ndlangamandla, a black woman whose profile exactly fitted the victims of David Selepe. The police warned the media that another serial killer might be at large, possibly a copycat of the Cleveland killer.

Soon another disturbing discovery was made. Not 22 yards from the place Letta Ndlangamandla had been found, the police discovered the body of a child. It was Letta’s two-year-old son Sibusiso. Earlier in the month, when Letta went to meet a man in Pretoria North who had offered her work, she had no one to leave Sibusiso with, so she took the child with her. They had been dead too long to determine whether the mother or child had died first. Although Sibusiso showed signs of an injury to his head it was not possible to determine if this was the cause of death. This left open the chilling possibility that Sibusiso had died of exposure, alone in a field near his mother’s corpse, too young to summon help.

On 13 May, the body of 29-year-old Esther Moshibudi Mainetja was discovered in a corn field near Hercules, seven miles away in Pretoria West. Last seen the evening before when she left a café to go home, she had been strangled with her own clothing and the lower part of her body was left uncovered.

Over the next month, five women went missing. Then on 13 June the body of 25-year-old Francina Nomsa Sithebe was found. At first sight, she appeared to be sitting against a tree on June 13. She was still wearing her dress. But her panties and handbag strap had been fashioned into a halter that secured her neck to the tree.

The body count continued to rise. On 16 June, the naked body of 19-year-old Elizabeth Granny Mathetsa was found in the industrial district of Rosslyn, ten miles north of Atteridgeville. She had disappeared three weeks before.

Then on 22 June, the body of 30-year-old Ernestina Mohadi Mosebo was found in Rosherville, just outside Johannesburg. The killer had moved to the Cleveland strangler’s stamping ground. Like the Cleveland killer’s victims, Ernestina Mosebo had been raped and strangled. Her papers were found nearby, aiding her identification.

On June 24, the remains of Nikiwe Diko were found back in Atteridgeville. Her body had been torn apart by wild dogs. Her head was found over 40 yards from her trunk. Her hands had been tied together with her panties and she had been strangled with her pantyhose. They had been tied around her neck and wound so tightly with a stick that shards of bone punctured the nylon. Her killer had also shoved a stick up her vagina. Her husband identified her by the wedding ring that remained on her finger. He had last seen her on 7 April, when she had gone to meet someone about a job.

The Atteridge murders were now about to make another curious intersection with the David Selepe case. On 17 July 1995, Absalom Sangweni, who lived in a caravan in Beyers Park, outside David Selepe’s home town of Boksburg, watched as a man and a woman walked into the veldt some way away from his trailer. He called out to them as a fenced section would stop them going far. The man merely shouted back that he knew the area.

Some time later, the man reappeared. This time he was alone. He appeared furtive and ran off. Absalom went into the field to investigate and found the woman. She was lying still on the ground and had plainly been viciously assaulted. He rushed to fetch help. When Sergeant Gideon O’Neil arrived, he found the body still warm, but there was no pulse. Another policeman arrived with a first aid kit, but they could not revive her. The woman had been strangled with the belt of her own dress. There were few clues to the identity of the murderer and Absalom had been too far away to give a useful description of the man. The victim was later identified as 25-year-old mother-of-four Josephine Mantsali Mlangeni. Like the others, she had gone to meet someone about a job.

Although this murder had taken place 30 miles away in the townships of Johannesburg, it fell under the auspices of a special investigating team now set up by the Pretoria Murder and Robbery Unit under Captain Vinol Viljoen. Again profiler Micki Pistorius was brought in. When they combed through the files, they found a confusing picture. The killer showed no clear modus operandi. Some of the victims had their hands tied; others did not. And of those who had been tied, some had their hands behind; others in front. There was even a question whether they had all been murdered by the same man. Soon there was more material to work on.

On 18 July, 21-year-old Granny Dimakatso Ramela was found in Pretoria West, lying face down with a garrotte around her neck. Unusually, she was fully clothed. She had been missing for nine weeks.

On 26 July, the body of 28-year-old Mildred Ntiya Lepule was found in a canal near the Bon Accord Dam at Onderstepoort, just outside Pretoria to the north. Her panties had been drawn over her face and she had been strangled with her tights. She was last seen alive the previous day by her husband, who had taken her to Pretoria to meet a man about a job.

By this time Dr Micki had set up a board in the operations room and arranged the victims in order and spotted a pattern. Rather than killer’s modus operandi being haphazard, it was clear that he had been refining his technique. To start with, the victims had been throttled manually. Then the killer began to strangle them using a ligature, often a bra or some other piece of clothing. Lately he had garrotted them, using a stick to tighten a piece of their clothing around their necks. He was finding out which way worked best.

Early on, the victims had not been not tied up. Next, their hands had been tied in front with a part of their own clothing. Then, their hands were tied behind their backs.

Unfortunately Dr Pistorius would have ample opportunity to discover whether the killer’s sadistic techniques would develop further. On 8 August 1995, the body of 25-year-old Elsie Khoti Masango was found at Onderstepoort. Missing for three and a half weeks, she was identified from the contents of her handbag. Another body was found nearby the following day. The woman had been burnt beyond recognition and she was never identified. It does not seem that the incineration was deliberate and was probably the result of a veldt fire. It was not known how long the body had been there.

The killer then returned to Boksburg. On 23 August, the body of 30-year-old Oscarina Vuyokazi Jakalase, who had gone missing on 8 August, was found there. But there were more victims scattered around Onderstepoort. On 28 August, a woman’s body was found at the Bon Accord Dam. Two days later, a second body was found nearby, which seemed to have been there for some months. Neither could be identified.

The police were now crawling all over Onderstepoort, so the killer left his next victim in the Cleveland area. Another unidentified body was found there on 12 September.

Then on the evening of 16 September, a police reservist taking his dog to hunt rabbits in the veldt stumbled across a body at the Van Dyk Mine near Boksburg. Over the next two days, nine more bodies were found within a radius of some 900 feet. In her book, Catch Me a Killer, Dr Pistorius describes this as “one of the most horrific crime scenes I had ever seen”.

“Decomposed bodies were strewn over the veldt,” she says, “some only metres away from others. Maggots were feasting and the stench penetrated our nostrils and clung to our clothing.”

Despite the advanced state of decomposition, it was clear that the most recent victims had been murdered where they lay and Pistorius pictured the killer leading his latest victims into the field amongst the rotting corpses, where he raped and killed them. The poor women would have been paralyzed with fear. Indeed a stain on one victim’s jeans showed she had wet herself in terror.

More than 30 members of the East Rand Murder and Robbery Unit combed the area, along with forensic experts. Dogs and a helicopter were brought in. The head of the South African Police, National Commissioner John George Fivaz, surveyed the area from the air. The police even brought in Dr Mervyn Mansell, an entomologist at the Agricultural Research Council in Pretoria, who had developed a way to use maggots to estimate the time of death.

Then President Nelson Mandela came out to view the site and meet the detectives and forensic experts. With that amount of media attention, it was clear that the strangler would find a new killing ground.

It was soon clear that the Boksburg killer was the same man who had been at work in Atteridgeville and Onderstepoort, so Captain Frans van Niekerk of the East Rand Murder and Robbery Unit, the investigating officer at the scene in Boksburg, contacted Captain Viljoen in Pretoria to share information.

The multiple-murder scene itself yielded a number of clues. First, it was little more than three miles from Boksburg Prison where violent offenders were kept. There was a railway line nearby, as in the Cleveland murders. And between ant heaps across the nearby veldt, the police found knives, mirrors, underwear, feathers, black and red candles, and other objects related to traditional healing call muti. Particularly powerful in muti is the use of human body parts, especially the internal organs, the tongue, eyes and genitals hacked from a live victim. Over the years there have been numerous “muti-murders” in South Africa. Usually the victim is throttled until they are unconscious, the body part removed, then the victim is left to bleed to death.

But these were not muti murders. Dr Pistorius saw the hand of the Atteridgeville killer on every victim. Worse, his method of killing had developed again. The four last victims found at Boksburg were tied so that, as they struggled, they would strangle themselves.

Those found at the Van Dyk Mine included 26-year-old Makoba Tryphina Mogotsi, who went missing on 15 August, and Nelisiwe Nontobeko Zulu, also 26, who disappeared on 4 September on her way to look for a job. Forty-three-year-old Amelia Dikamakatso Rapodile was identified by the contents of her handbag, which was found on the murder site. She worked at Johannesburg International Airport and last seen alive on 7 September when she left work to see a man who had promised her a better job. Her cash card had been used at ATMs in Germiston three times later on the night she disappeared. Her hands were tied behind her back and then to her neck with her pantyhose. There was 31-year-old Monica Gabisile Vilakazi, who left her four-year-old son with her grandmother on 12 September when she went to look for work. Last seen by her parents in Germiston, 21-year-old Hazel Nozipho Madikizela was also found with her hands tied to her neck with her underwear. Forty-five-year-old Tsidi Malekoae Matela was only identified over a year later, in November 1996. She was originally from neighbouring Lesotho. The other four women remained unidentified.

A reward of 500,000 Rand (£35,500) was offered, but Commissioner Fivaz insisted that, although the Van Dyk Mine murders may be tied to those at Atteridgeville, they had no connection to the Cleveland murders—those had been committed by David Selepe.

Micki Pistorius called retired FBI profiler Robert Ressler, whom she had met at a conference on serial killers in Scotland, and he flew to South Africa on 23 September. Two days later, while a prayer service was being organized on the Van Dyk Mine site, they were already plying files. It became clear that the 10 women found at the Van Dyk Mine, the two others in Boksburg, the six found around Onderstepoort, the eight women and one boy found at Atteridgeville and the one found in Cleveland since the death of David Selepe were related. However, they believed that more than one killer was involved and that they may have worked together on at least some of the murders.

As before, the victims found at the Van Dyk Mine were middle-class black women, largely in their twenties and thirties, who took pride in their appearance. They seem to have been ensnared in almost every case by the offer of a job. The killing fields were carefully chosen. The killer or killers were very familiar with them. Although they were remote enough that the perpetrator was unlikely to be interrupted, they were easily reached by road and rail. The offender was organized and intelligent, leaving few clues at the murder site. He was also growing in confidence. The bodies of the first victims at Atteridgeville were widely scattered. Those at Onderstepoort were closer together, while the Van Dyk Mine victims were practically on top of one another and he made no attempt to hide them.

In his books I Have Lived in the Monster: Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Serial Killers, Robert Ressler said that the killer would have “a high sex drive and reads pornography. His fantasies, to which he masturbates, are aggressive, and he believes women are merely objects to be abused. He enjoys charming and controlling women. When he approaches a victim, it is done in a very calculating way, and he is very conscious that he is eventually going to kill the victim, and savours the thought while he softens her up.”

The general theory was that the killer had been hurt and rejected by a woman. He was raping and killing her over and over again in the guise of his victims, which was why they were all so similar.

Dr Pistorius, in her book Strangers on the Street, outlined the profile. The killer, she said, was a black male in his late twenties or early thirties. He was self-employed with access to money, possibly obtained by theft or fraud, and would drive an expensive car. He would wear ostentatious clothing and jewellery. Intellectually sharp, he would also be streetwise. Ostensibly a charming ladies’ man, he would be competent socially while, underneath it all, he would detest women. No loner, he was probably married, separated or divorced. He would enjoy socializing and would visit places where alcohol is sold. He was following reports of the story in the press and may even have told someone that he is the killer in a roundabout fashion. He would have a very high sex drive and use pornography. After the murders, he would masturbate over the crimes and collect mementoes, which he would dispose of. And he would have been exposed to sexual violence, probably when he was young.

The problem with this profile was that it also fitted the Cleveland killer. That would not normally have mattered, as serial killers often have similar characteristics. But in this case the modus operandi were almost identical and the killers were working in the same area. Once again, it cast doubt on the guilt of David Selepe. This concerned Commissioner Fivaz, who asked Robert Ressler to re-examine the case against David Selepe. With Dr Pistorius, Ressler combed through the files and they concluded that Selepe was involved in the Cleveland killings.

But, by now, the police had a suspect. They learnt from Amelia Rapodile’s colleagues at Johannsburg International Airport that her appointment on 7 September was with a man named Moses Sithole. Sithole had said he ran an organization called Youth Against Human Abuse. They found an application form for a job there that Amelia had completed. There was a phone number on it. It belonged to Kwazi Sithole who lived in Wattville, three miles southeast of Boksburg. She was Moses Sithole’s sister, but he did not live with her and she did not know where he was.

Detectives’ suspicions were confirmed when Tryphina Mogotsi was identified soon after. Tryphina had been a laundry worker at an organization helping street children in Benoni, three miles east of Boksburg, called Kids’ Haven. A man who said he was from Youth Against Human Abuse had visited Kids’ Haven and spoken to Tryphina Mogotsi about a job with his organization. They made an appointment to discuss the post. Moses Sithole had made other visits to Kids’ Haven. He once delivered two destitute teenage girls to the home, accompanied by a photographer from Johannesburg newspaper, The Star. A second occasion he came with the newspaper article and said he wanted to organize a fund raiser. Soon after, Tryphina Mogotsi disappeared.

Despite the publicity surrounding the discovery of the bodies near the Van Dyk Mine, the killings did not stop. Just a week later, Agnes Sibongile Mbuli, aged 20, was on her way to meet a friend when she went missing. On 3 October, her dead body turned up at Kleinfontein train station near Benoni. That day, a man who gave his name as Joseph Magwena called the office of The Star and spoke to reporter Tamsen de Beer who answered the phone. The man said his name was “Joseph Magwena” and claimed that he was the “Gauteng serial killer”—Gauteng means “place of gold” and is the name of the province containing both Johannesburg and Pretoria.

“I am the man that is so highly wanted,” he said, and told her that he wanted to turn himself in. The reporter contacted the police, who recorded three more calls from the man that month. In each conversation, he gave some detailed information about the murders that could not be gleaned from the media.

He said he had started killing because a woman had falsely accused him of rape. In jail, he suffered abuse by fellow prisoners. Now he was getting his revenge.

“I force a woman to go where I want and when I go there I tell them: ‘Do you know what? I was hurt, so I’m doing it now. Then I kill them’,” he said. He admitted using the victims’ clothing, particularly underwear, to strangle them because there would be no fingerprints. And he confirmed what Dr Pistorius had suspected—that the women killed near the Van Dyk Mine had seen the other victims before they died.

He accepted responsibility for the murders in Atteridgeville, Pretoria and Boksburg, but he said he had nothing to do with the Cleveland killings. He also vehemently denied killing Letta Ndlangamandla—and in particular her two-year-old son as he loved children. He convinced the police that he really was the killer when, on 9 October, he directed them to the body of an unidentified woman near Jupiter train station. Then on 11 October, he directed them to the body of Beauty Ntombi Ndabeni in Germiston, the day after she disappeared. This time he had used a comb to tighten her pantyhose around her neck.

In co-operation with the police, Tamsen de Beer arranged a meeting with the caller at a station, but he gave the police the slip. So on 13 October they released a picture of Moses Sithole to the media, and appealed for help.

But the killer would not, or could not, stop. The following day, the body of an unidentified woman was found at the Village Main Reef Mine near Johannesburg. Her neck had been tied to a tree by her shoelaces.

A few days later, Sithole contacted his sister’s husband, Maxwell, who worked at the Mintex factory in Benoni, saying that he needed a gun. Maxwell arranged to meet him at the factory. The police seized the opportunity and installed Inspector Francis Mulovhedzi as a security guard, but without telling his new work colleagues.

At 9 p.m. on 18 October 1995, Sithole arrived at the factory and asked for Maxwell. Mulovhedzi was told to go and fetch Maxwell as he was the new guy. But he was reluctant to go as he wanted to stay with Sithole. This made the suspect suspicious and he ran off. Inspector Mulovhedzi gave chase and cornered him in an alley. But it took gunshot wounds to the legs and stomach, before he could arrest him. Sithole was rushed to the Glynwood Hospital in Benoni, with the police terrified that, in a repeat of the David Selepe case, he would die before he could be convicted.

Operated on the following day, Sithole survived. Two days later he was taken to the Military Hospital in Pretoria, where security was much tighter even though Sithole was in no condition to escape. He was not even well enough to appear in the magistrates’ court in Brakpan, five miles south of Benoni, on 23 October, where he was charged with 29 murders.

He was born in 1964 in Vosloorus, a black township ten mile south of Germiston. The deprivation he experienced as a black man in apartheid South Africa was exacerbated by the death of his father. His mother, Sophie, was unable to support their five children and abandoned them at a local police station, telling them that they were not to tell the policemen that she was their mother. He was sent to an orphanage over 300 miles away in the homeland of KwaZulu, Natal. There he suffered systematic abuse. After three years, the teenage Sithole ran away, first seeking refuge first with his older brother Patrick, before going to work in the gold mines of Johannesburg.

A handsome and charming man, Sithole was sexually precocious from an early age, but his relationships were short-lived. There is speculation that his mother’s abandonment of her children might have sparked his aggressive attitudes towards woman. However, he told some of his rape victims who survived of bad experiences he had had at the hands of a girlfriend.

It is not recorded when Sithole raped his first victim, but his first known incidence was in September 1987. The victim was 29-year-old Patricia Khumalo, who appeared as a witness at his murder trial. Three other surviving rape victims came forward at that time. They included Buyiswa Doris Swakamisa, who was attacked in February 1989. She reported the assault to the police, Sithole was convicted and sent to Boksburg Prison for six years. Even though he maintained his innocence, he was released after four years for good behaviour. It is thought that his imprisonment taught him a brutal and perverse lesson—in future he would leave no victim alive to testify against him.

While Sithole was in jail, he met a woman named Martha who was visiting one of her relatives, another inmate. They began writing to each other and, when he was released in 1993, he moved in with her in Soshanguve. But when Martha fell pregnant, she returned to her parents in Atteridgeville. Sithole followed some months later. On 5 December 1994, Martha gave birth to a baby girl they named Bridget. In February 1995, after his killing spree had started, Sithole paid lobola—the traditional bride-price—for Martha. But soon they separated, leaving Sithole apparently to sleep at railway stations.

Nevertheless, Martha had visited her husband three times after he was arrested. But then on 28 October, it revealed that Sithole was HIV-positive. He had probably contracted the disease from one of his victims. After that, Martha would have nothing further to do with him. The police were lambasted for not telling Martha of his condition.

Meanwhile, the detectives began the laborious and unpleasant business of questioning Sithole in his hospital bed. Both Captains Frans van Niekerk and Vinol Viljoen visited Sithole in the Military Hospital, but Sithole was unforthcoming. It was only when a female detective was brought in that he began describing his crimes, masturbating while he did so.

According to The Star, Sithole told detective: “I can point out the place in Atteridgeville, as well as in Hercules. That’s where I started. Nearer to Johannesburg I did not kill people, because that’s where I stayed. I did not even count… Atteridgeville I killed many about 10. I caught them with my hands around the neck and strangled them. I thought of something to tie them up… I used stockings. I placed it around their necks.”

He chose the locations before the victims and claimed he raped only the pretty ones. He also said that he killed only during daytime, though he did not like the sight of blood.

According to the Beeld, he also said: “I heard fuck-all if they spoke to me and thought about other things.” And he forced the women to look down while he raped and killed them and he would masturbate while he watched them die.

There were certainly glaring disparities between Sithole and the profile of the killer Ressler and Pistorius had come up with. Sleeping on railway stations, he did not have an expensive car like David Selepe. And he denied working with an accomplice as they had speculated, though he claimed that some of the killings he had been accused of had been committed by copycats.

In court, all the confessions he was supposed to have made were disputed. Sithole’s lawyer said that he had been provided with a list of victims’ names and other details, then been forced to confess his “guilt” in interviews that were recorded. This is hardly an unusual courtroom ploy but, in this case, the police were their own worst enemies. According to the detectives, Sithole had waived his right to legal representation during the questioning. When public defender Tony Richard arrived at the hospital he was told this, but he insisted on speaking to Sithole himself, who told him that his wife was getting a lawyer for him. Nevertheless the police continued to question Sithole without a lawyer being present. The police then brought in a magistrate to record Sithole’s confession. However, Magistrate Greyvenstein noted that Sithole was in pain and, when she asked him why he had no lawyer, he said he had been not been able to get one because the police had not allowed him to see anyone. Consequently Greyvenstein refused to take his confession. At the trial Sithole claimed that the police were infuriated by this and told him that he would “see shit” if he did not give his confession to a second magistrate—which he duly did.

On 3 November, Sithole was moved to a solitary cell in Boksburg Prison. When he was taken out to identify the crime scenes, he complained of pain due to his injuries. He took the detectives to a number of locations where bodies had been left. And on 6 November, he took them to the Gosforth Park mine slag heaps west of Germiston, where they found the body of another unidentified—and, as yet, undiscovered—woman who would go to an unmarked grave.

On 13 November 1995, Sithole appeared on crutches in Brakpan Magistrates’ Court which was guarded by heavily armed police officers and sealed off with razor wire to protect him from relatives and other outraged members of the public. For further security he was shuffled through at 7.30 in the morning. On 5 December, he was transferred to the Krugersdorp Prison, so a psychiatric report could be prepared at the nearby Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital. It was determined that he was fit to stand trial.

In September, Sithole was provided with a new attorney named Eben Jordaan, a private practitioner whose discounted fees would be picked up by the state. Then it was finally announced that Moses Sithole would stand trial for 40 counts of rape, 6 counts of robbery and 38 counts of murder. As part of that total another murder had been added to the charge sheet. The new victim was 22-year-old Rose Rebothile Mogotsi. She had last been seen on 15 September when she went to look for work. Her body was found in Boksburg three days later.

Controversially, four of the murders were slayings Cleveland killer David Selepe had been charged with. The victims were 18year-old Maria Monene Monama, 24-year-old Refilwe Amanda Mokale, 32-year-old Joyce Thakane Mashabela and 26-year-old Amanda Kebofile Thethe—whose murder scene Selepe had been visiting when he had been shot. The newspapers, who had never accepted the police account of Selepe’s death, went wild.

Asked any of these four were included in the six victims police claimed were positively linked to Selepe at the turn of 1994, they refused to comment “as the Sithole case is considered to be sub judice,” according to the Cape Times. The names of the six supposedly connected to Selepe have never been released.

Sithole’s trial eventually began on 21 October 1996. He was now being called the “ABC Killer”—A for Atteridge, B for Boksburg and C for Cleveland—and pleaded not guilty to all of the charges with a grin on his face.

The first three charges to be heard concerned rapes that occurred in 1987 and 1988. Although the names of rape victims who survived to testify are usually suppressed, these brave women identified themselves in court in the hope that their attacker would be locked away forever.

Twenty-nine-year-old Patricia Khumalo was the first to testify. In September 1987, she was looking for work and her sister introduced her to a man named “Martin” who they both identified as Moses Sithole in court. Martin said he had work for Patricia and on the 14th she got on the train with him in Boksburg. Alighting at Geldenhuis station, Martin said that he knew a short cut through the veldt. There he attacked her.

“He grabbed me by the clothes in front of my chest,” she said. “I was frightened. He ordered me to lie on the ground and raped me.” He raped her more than once. “I pleaded and cried and asked him not to kill me. He said he wouldn’t, because I have the kind of eyes that makes him feel sorry.” It was the day before her daughter’s birthday.

Her attacker had tied her hands with her bra and pulled her dress over her head, then ordered her to stay there while he made his escape. Patricia Khumalo cried as she related this ordeal. In the dock, Sithole smiled.

Sithole’s attorney Eben Jordaan asked Patricia Khumalo whether her attacker had not rather been David Selepe. She said no. She had recognized the picture of Sithole in the newspapers after he had been arrested and she recognized him here in court.

In September 1988, Thembi Ngwenya was working in a clothes shop when she met a man who offered her a job that paid better. But before she handed in her notice, she thought of her friend 26-year-old Dorcas Kedibone Khobane, who was unemployed, and she put them in touch. On 28 September, Dorcas Khobane accompanied the man, who identified himself as “Samson”, to Cleveland. Again they stopped at Geldenhuis station and took a shortcut through the veldt. There he hit her and pulled a knife.

“He threatened to kill me with it and to cut me into pieces unless I did as he asked,” Dorcas said the court. “He pushed me on the ground and took my panties off. He dropped his pants to his knees and he raped me.”

Then he engaged her in conversation.

“He told me he had a girlfriend in Vosloorus named Sibongile. He said he wanted me to go look for him at her home because she had stolen some things from him, but did not say what. He then asked if we could sleep together again.”

When Dorcas Khobane refused, he raped her again. Even then he was in no hurry to leave, but someone was coming and he fled. In court, Dorcas Khobane identified Moses Sithole as Samson, the man who raped her.

Again, in the dock, Sithole seemed amused, but he buried his head in his hands when Sibongile Nkosi took the stand. She was 17 years old in 1988 when she got involved with the 24-year-old Sithole, who then called himself Martin. Sibongile told the court that she had been afraid of him then and was still afraid now. He had often hit her and had threatened to kill her family if she left him. She said he beat her in private, then when someone visited he would put on a show of affection. Eben Jordaan suggested that his client would deny that he ever laid a finger on her. Sibongile Nkosi asked if she should strip naked so that the court could see the scars.

Sibongile’s younger sister Lindiwe Nkosi then testified that, in October 1988, “Martin” had invited her to visit her sister in Soweto. She was 15 at the time. On the way, they got off the train at Geldenhuis station. Luring her into the veldt he asked Lindiwe if she wanted to have sex with him. When she said no, he pulled out a bottle of petrol and said he would kill her and burn her body if she did not have sex with him. Then he beat her, raped her and throttled her until she lost consciousness. When she came round, he said he would kill her and her niece if she told anyone what had happened.

Although the rape of Buyiswa Doris Swakamisa had been dealt with in 1989, she appeared in the 1996 trial to testify about his modus operandi. Her presence in court reinforced the point that Sithole’s subsequent victims seem to have been selected for their resemblence to Buyiswa Swakamisa and explained why there had been no crimes between 1989 and 1993, when Sithole had been in prison for her rape.

Buyiswa Swakamisa testified that she had met a man calling himself “Lloyd Thomas” in February 1989. He offered her a computer job and said he would take her to his business. Walking through the veldt near Cleveland, he produced a panga from a rolled-up newspaper he was carrying under his arm and said he was going to have sex with her. Then in a dramatic gesture he “threw the panga to one side and said if I did not want to have intercourse with him, I could run away, but had to make sure that he did not catch up with me or he would kill me. I just stood there. He came towards me and slapped me and ordered me to take off my clothes. When I did not he slapped me twice with his open hand.”

In the event, he could not get an erection. So he forced her to kiss his neck and stick her fingers in his ears. And when he was ready, he raped her. Afterwards he was in the mood for conversation again. This time he said that “he hated women because he once had a child with a girlfriend in Alexandra and that his girlfriend had poisoned the child”. Then he tied her up, took her money and left. Once freed she went to the police, but nothing happened until, months later, she saw him in the street. She called the police and he was arrested. Only then did he give his name as Moses Sithole.

This was apartheid South Africa and Buyiswa Swakamisa was forced to travel to the police station in the police vehicle with her rapist. He cursed her and himself for not having killed her.

The most controversial charges levelled again Sithole were the murder of Amanda Thethe and the theft of her cash card. David Selepe been charged with her murder and pointing out where it had happened when he was killed. Amanda’s cash card had then been used to withdraw money from a cashpoint three times after she was dead. The man using it had been photographed by a security camera. Earlier the police had identified the man in this photograph as David Selepe. Now they charged Sithole with the robbery as well as her murder.

Four weeks into the trial Siphiwe Ngwenya took the stand. She had worked at Kids’ Haven with Tryphina Mogotsi and identified the man on the security camera photo as the man who had offered Tryphina a job when she went missing. This was Moses Sithole who, for once, was not using an alias.

Even more damning was the testimony of Kwazi Sithole, Moses’ sister. She also identified the man in the photograph as her brother. What’s more, she said that women often phoned her house about jobs her brother had offered them.

It then came to light that Sithole had known Amanda Thethe. When he had visited her father’s home some months before she went missing, she introduced him as her boyfriend “Selbie”. In early August, the prosecution contended, her boyfriend had raped her, stuffed her underwear into her mouth, tied her blouse around her neck and strangled her. Amanda’s aunt saw “Selbie” again. He attended her niece’s funeral. This is not uncommon among serial killers, who like to relive the moment of killing.

Amanda Thethe was not the only women Sithole had a relationship with before he killed her. Dan Mokwena, a work colleague of 19-year-old Elizabeth Mathetsa, had been sitting outside their workplace with her in early 1995 when a man walked up. Elizabeth introduced him as her boyfriend “Sello”. Dan Mokwena said that he saw Sello again a week before Elizabeth Mathetsa went missing on 25 May 1995. She was found dead in Rosslyn on 16 June. In court Dan identified the man he knew as “Sello” as the prisoner in the dock, Moses Sithole.

The aliases continued to multiply. Mary Mogotlhoa knew Sithole as “Charles”. They had had a brief relationship shortly before his arrest. It lasted only two weeks, but he had given her a watch, which Tryphina Mogotsi’s mother identified as her daughter’s. Mary Mogotlhoa also said that, after they had broken up, Sithole had gone to the police, told them that she had stolen 500 Rand (£35) and accused her of raping him.

Otherwise he repeatedly used the offer of a job as a bait. In March 1995, Wilhelmina Ramphisa met a man calling himself “David Ngobeni” who offered her a job. She completed in an application form he gave her, but he failed to turn up to their next appointment. Months later, she saw her potential employer again on the TV news. It was Moses Sithole and she had had a lucky escape.

A lorry driver named Piet Tsotsetsi testified that he received a number of calls on the phone in his lorry from women about jobs they said he had offered them. He was completely mystified by this. However, at the time, Sithole was working at the same company washing the vehicles. After he was arrested, the calls stopped. Elsie Masango’s sister testified that a man calling himself “Piet Tsotsetsi” had offered Elsie a job shortly before she disappeared.

Other witnesses testified, many of them parents who had to identify their raped and tormented daughters. No matter how harrowing the testimony, Sithole sat and smiled.

The only time he cried was when his wife Martha entered the court to testify against him with their one-year-old daughter Bridget asleep in her arms, but afterwards refused to let him see the child. This sudden upsurge of tears allowed those whose testimony he had sat through with a look of mild amusement on his face to laugh at him.

There was a brief respite when, on 12 November, the trial was suspended after Sithole had fallen down and re-opened his leg wound. When he returned from hospital, the grandmother of Monica Vilakazi testified that a man identifying himself as Moses Sithole had phoned her home on 11 September 1995, the day before her granddaughter went missing. He said they had met the previous month and had now found Monica a job in Germiston. The following day she left her grandmother’s house to become one of the women found at the Van Dyk Mine. Three days after Monica went missing, there was another phone call. This time the caller said his name was Jabulane, but Monica’s grandmother recognized his voice as Sithole’s. Before Monica’s funeral, the man phoned again this time identifying himself as “Mandla”. Sithole was in custody at the time and Mandla insisted that he would be acquitted. And he taunted the old woman, saying that Monica got what she deserved.

The curious thing here was that “Mandla” was the name of one of the men David Selepe had claimed as an accomplice. This name had not been mentioned in the newspapers at that time. Perhaps the police had not interrogated the right “Mandla” after David Selepe’s death.

Peter Magubane, the photographer from The Star who had accompanied Sithole and the two street kids to Kids’ Haven, said that he had introduced himself as “Patrick”—his brother’s name. It was there Sithole met Tryphina Mogotsi.

Voice identification specialist Dr Leendert Jansen was called as an expert witness to identify the voice on the recordings the police had made of the telephone conversations between Star reporter Tamsen de Beer and “Joseph Magwena”.

“I have no doubt that the unknown voice is in reality the voice of Moses Sithole,” he said. American voice analysis expert Loni Smrkovski was flown to South Africa to confirm Dr Jansen’s findings.

Then Inspector Mulovhedzi testified about Sithole’s arrest. According to Mulovhedzi, he identified himself as a police officer and told Sithole to stop. He then fired two warning shots. Then, Mulovhedzi said, Sithole came at him with an axe.

“He turned back and had an object in his hand and came towards me,” he said. “My life was in danger and I fired a shot at his legs… He kept on fighting. He hit me on my right hand and I fired some more shots. He fell to the ground.”

During cross-examination Eben Jordaan suggested that there was no axe. Sithole had merely bumped into the officer and, when he turned to say sorry, Mulovhedzi drew his gun and started shooting.

As the trial went on, the police continued to solicit the public’s help to identify eight more of the victims. Then on 3 December, in the sixth week of the trial, the prosecution introduced surprise new evidence. It was a video made in Boksburg Prison not long after Sithole’s arrest, showing him speaking about the women he had murdered.

It had been made fellow inmates Jacques Rogge and Mark Halligan and masterminded by Charles Schoeman. They were ex-police officers who had been jailed for a three million Rand (£210,000) diamond heist in Amanzimtoti, KwaZulu-Natal in 1995, during which they had killed an accomplice. Rogge suffered from diabetes and slept in the prison infirmary where he met Sithole, who wanted Rogge to steal some pills so that he could commit suicide. But first Rogge, Halligan and Schoeman persuaded him to tell his story on camera, on video equipment that the ex-cops got smuggled in. They even drew a contract giving each one a share in the profits—Sithole’s would to go to his daughter when he was dead.

The use of such evidence was contentious. It was illegal to make unauthorized recordings or videos in prison. It was also illegal to publish a prisoner’s story without the written permission of the Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, so it was unlikely that they could have made any financial gain. Indeed Charles Schoeman and his cohorts faced possible criminal charges. Then there was the vexed question of how the ex-cops got hold of the video equipment in the first place. When the video had first come to light, the Department of Correctional Services wanted to conduct an internal investigation, but the deputy attorney-general asked them to hold off so that she could keep the existence of the video secret until the trial.

This brought up all sorts of legal issues and the trial had to be suspended once again. When the proceedings resumed on 29 January 1997, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former-wife of President Mandela, was present. Sithole smiled at her; she did not smile back.

The video showed Sithole sitting back, smoking or casually eating an apple. He began with the first murder. In July 1995, he said, a woman he killed had shouted at him when he asked for directions. But he had turned on his not inconsiderable charm and arranged to meet her for a date. Then he had strangled her.

“I cannot remember her name,” he said. “I killed her and left her there. I went straight home and had a shower.”

He then relayed in detail how he had killed 29 women.

“I don’t know where the other nine come from,” he said. “If there was blood or injuries, they weren’t my women.”

He did not like blood and he did not want to see the faces of his victims as he took their lives. Consequently, he strangled his victims from behind, he said. However, he was obviously not so fastidious when he led his fresh victims into a field of rotting corpses.

He said that all his victims had reminded him of Buyiswa Swakamisa, the woman he claimed had “falsely” accused him of rape in 1989. He also said that he had not raped any of his victims, but that some had offered to have sex with him to save their lives. He had the opportunity to attack other women but did not do so because they were “sincere and without pretensions”.

On the video, Schoeman asked Sithole if there was one victim that stuck out in his mind. Sithole said he particularly remembered Amelia Rapodile, one of the ten women found at the Van Dyk Mine. Training in karate, she put up fierce resistance.

“She started to fight,” he said. “I gave her a chance to fight and I tell her, if you lose, you die… She was using her feet and kicked me. Then she tried to grab my clothes, but she could not grab me. I just tell her bye-bye.”

Charles Schoeman said he did not want to testify, claiming that his life had been threatened. But after being promised indemnity for the making of the video and any charges surrounding it, he took the stand. He said that they had originally made audio recordings of Sithole’s story, but he was so disturbed by what he had heard he had contacted the police. Then Captain Leon Nel of the East Rand Murder and Robbery Unit provided video equipment which was smuggled into prison by Schoeman’s wife. But as there had been police involvement and Sithole had not been cautioned or told that the tapes might be used at his trial, his attorney objected to their use.

DNA evidence took days as it was new to South African courts and the techniques used had to be explained in detail. However, as many of the corpses were in an advanced state of decay when they were found, DNA evidence only linked Sithole to some of the victims.

There was another trial-within-a-trial over the confession Sit-hole made in the Military Hospital after his arrest. Sithole claimed he had been coached, coerced and denied legal representation. He also claimed that the crime scenes had been shown to him by the police, rather than the other way round. On 29 July, the judge admitted confessions made in the Military Hospital and the video tape into evidence. Finally, on 15 August, the prosecution rested.

Sithole took the stand in his own defence. He claimed that he was totally innocent of all charges. Everything he had said in his confession had been fed to him by the police. He admitted knowing one of the rape victims, Lindiwe Nkosi, as she was the sister of his girlfriend, but he denied raping her. He also protested his innocence of the rape he had been sent to prison for in 1989. But Sithole did not stand up well under cross-examination and The Star said his testimony was “rambling, often incoherent”.

Finally, on 4 December 1997, Moses Sithole was found guilty on all 38 counts of murder, 40 counts of rape and six counts of robbery. One of the two assessors felt that Sithole should not be held accountable, but he was overruled by the judge and the other assessor. It took three hours to read the judgment. The following day, Judge David Curlewis sentenced Sithole to 2,410 years in prison. He was given 50 years for each of the murders, 12 years for each rape and five years for each count of robbery. These sentences would run consecutively, so that there would be no possibility of parole for at least 930 years. The judge said that he would have no qualms about imposing a sentence of death if it had been available and he refused to give life sentences as that would have meant Sithole could have been eligible for parole in 25 years and he had no faith in the parole boards or prison authorities to keep him in jail after that.

“Nothing can be said in favour of Sithole,” said Justice Curlewis. “In this case I do not take leniency into account. What Sithole did was horrible… I want to make it clear I mean that Moses Sithole should stay in jail for the rest of his life.”

Sithole listened to the sentence without emotion. He was taken to C-Max, the maximum security section of Pretoria Central Prison and the highest security cellblock in South Africa which each prisoner is allowed one hour a day outside his cell and three visits a month. One of the other 93 prisoners there is Eugene de Kock of the apartheid government’s Counterinsurgency Unit, who was sentenced to 212 years for crimes against humanity.

Sithole has AIDS but, in prison, he has access to excellent medical care and his life expectancy is now longer than if he had remained outside.

The problem here is that there were more murders than Moses Sithole and David Selepe can account for. Sithole, in his video account, which there is no reason to doubt, denied nine of the murders he was charged with, and Selepe, presumably, was innocent of the four murders that Sithole was jailed for. And the police have never been able to link Sithole to Selepe, even though there is a strange overlap between the two cases.

There is the odd coincidence around Amanda Thethe. If the police are to be believed, David Selepe had taken them to her murder site and was revealing fresh details about the crime when he was shot. But it is undoubtedly true that Sithole knew Amanda. One or other of them used her cash card and Sithole was linked to her by DNA evidence.

A man phoned murder victim Dorah Mokoena’s employer three days after she went missing, giving his name as “Martin”. Although Sithole regularly used the alias Martin, he was not charged with Dorah Mokoena’s murder.

Five days after Joyce Mashabela disappeared on 9 August 1994, a man phoned her employer, giving his name as “Moses Sima” and saying that he had found her identity papers. DNA linked Sithole to her body and he was charged with her murder. But Peggy Bodile’s body was found in the same patch of veldt two months later. Sithole was not charged with her murder. It was attributed to Selepe. Then there is the name “Mandla”, fingered by Selepe an accomplice but also used by Sithole the third time he called Monica Vilakazi’s grandmother.

The police have never revealed whether any of the four murders initially attributed to Selepe which Sithole was charged with were among the six “positively” linked to David Selepe. FBI profiler Robert Ressler and Micki Pistorius concluded that the evidence indicated that Selepe had been involved in the Cleveland murders in some way; that it was likely that the Atteridgeville killer was working with an accomplice; and that it was possible that Selepe and the Atteridgeville killer may have known each other and may even have worked together. But if Selepe was telling the truth about “Mandla”, why would he have lied about “Tito”? He may well be responsible for the murders not attributed to either Selepe and Sithole. And he is still at large.

While the trial of Moses Sithole was still underway, another serial killer was on the loose three hundred miles to the south in Transkei. Local people blame a Mamlambo—a legendary creature that is “half horse, half fish” from Xhosa tribal myth that inhabits the Mzintlava River near Mount Ayliff in the Eastern Cape. The creature is said to be 67 feet long, with short stumpy legs, a crocodilian body and the head and neck of a snake with a hypnotic gaze that shines at night with a green light. It drags human and animal victims in the water, drowning them, and sucking their blood and brains out. According to Xhosa tribal legend, Mamlambo brings great wealth to anyone brave enough to capture it.

Official sources say that seven human victims, along with several goats, were attributed to the creature in 1997 alone. But freelance journalist Andite Nomabhunga, says that nine human deaths have been blamed on the Mamlambo, including a schoolgirl. Mount Ayliff police claim that most of the alleged victims which have been found had simply drowned. Sometimes, crabs have eaten away at the soft tissues of the face and throat. Despite police explanations for the deaths, villagers claim that they are not just superstitious tribe people. There is a genuine fear that a real killer is at work under the guise of the Mamlambo.