A serial killer who kept the decomposing bodies of 11 women in his Ohio home and yard for more than two years was sentenced to the death penalty Friday.
Judge Dick Ambrose accepted a jury’s recommendation and ruled that Anthony Sowell’s troubled childhood and mental health issues did not mitigate the seriousness of his crimes.
“The court gives no weight to the defendant’s expression of remorse,” Ambrose said in handing down the verdict.
Ambrose set an execution date of October 29, 2012. Sowell has the right to appeal, which could delay his execution by years.
Sowell, 51, sat with his eyes closed as two women he raped but did not kill and the relatives of his victims shared their pain during the sentencing hearing.
“You’re going to hell for your actions,” Donnita Carmichael said to the man who killed her mother Tonia.
“May your pacemaker stop and you die tonight,” said Dorothy Pollard, aunt of victim Diane Turner.
“He took my heart,” testified Donald Smith, whose daughter Kim was among the victims.
One of Sowell’s surviving rape victims said “I had to forgive him so I can move on with my life,” adding “he didn’t kill me, he killed what I was.”
The former U.S. marine was found guilty on July 22 of 82 charges including kidnapping, rape, molesting a human corpse, robbery and attempted murder.
Tony Williams, author of Uncle Jack: A Victorian Mystery
AN AUTHOR who claims Jack the Ripper was a Welsh surgeon driven to butcher prostitutes in a crazed bid to cure infertility says he has more evidence to back the sensational allegation.
Explorer and writer Tony Williams believes his grandmother’s great-great uncle Sir John Williams was behind the notorious orgy of bloody killings in London’s Whitechapel in 1888.
In his 2006 book Uncle Jack he made a compelling case for the philanthropist – who founded the National Library of Wales by donating his large collection of books – having a dark alter ego as the notorious serial killer.
And in an updated version of the book containing new material, Uncle Jack: A Victorian Mystery, Williams says glass slides forming part of the Sir John Williams collection at the National Library in Aberystwyth have now been examined.
Mr Williams said: “The tissue on the slides has been examined by a respected pathologist and it has been confirmed it is human uterus tissue.
“Since I wrote the first book I have been inundated with messages, some from experts like gynaecology Professor Ron Jones from New Zealand who says that study of the human uterus at this time was something new.
“Many medical experts who have examined the Ripper killings also say the murderer must have had anatomical knowledge to do what he did.
“These were not the actions of a drunken sailor, it had to be a doctor or surgeon and the glass slides show Sir John was researching the human uterus.”
Carmarthenshire-born Sir John, who once practised in Craddock Street, Swansea, was a friend of Queen Victoria and obstetrician to her youngest daughter.
He had a surgery in Whitechapel at the time of the Ripper killings, which claimed the lives of at least five women.
And Mr Williams says he knew many of the victims, even performing surgery on them in the years leading up to the murders.
Sir John was said to have been devastated to learn he and his Swansea-born wife Lizzie could not have children and he travelled the world looking at methods used to increase fertility.
During the Whitechapel murder spree, the Ripper killed women and removed their sexual and internal organs with surgical precision.
Intriguingly, at the time when the killings suddenly stopped Sir John told friends he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Only in his 40s, he retired from London life and moved to Aberystwyth where he gave up surgery.
As well as books, Sir John also donated his surgical knife and the glass slides to the National Library. Mr Williams now has a replica of the surgical tool.
The author of Island of Dreams (1994) about his family’s experiences on a Pacific Island and Forgotten People (1998) about North Dakotan Indians, Mr Williams stumbled across the Ripper link when investigating his illustrious ancestor’s life story.
Sir John, former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, started doing abortion work on women from workhouses in the East End when he established his practice.
Mr Williams uncovered documents showing his ancestor had carried out an abortion in 1885 on Mary Ann Nichols, later to become the Ripper’s first victim.
Mr Williams said: “He desperately wanted children and you can imagine his frustration when prostitutes were becoming pregnant but did not want the children and then came to him for help.
“Maybe he decided to use his surgical skills to look in detail at women’s reproductive organs or maybe it was just some kind of madness, revenge even.”
Mr Williams even discovered a letter sent by Sir John in 1888 in which he apologises for canceling an evening dinner appointment on September 8 because he had to go to a clinic in Whitechapel.
That was the date of the murder of Annie Chapman, the Ripper’s second victim. She suffered surgical incisions to the abdomen, and the removal of her uterus.
Mr Williams believes by the time of the last killing Sir John might have been intimately involved with victim Mary Kelly who grew up in Carmarthenshire and who later lived in Cardiff.
He said: “Police witnesses say they heard someone speaking to Mary in a foreign language shortly before she was killed – that language might have been Welsh.”
Mr Williams’ book has not gone down well with the National Library of Wales where he is referred to as “the father of the library”.
A spokesman said when the first book was published: “We do not think there is justification for a claim like this on someone who has done so much for the National Library.
“We hope that Sir John’s legacy and reputation will be strong enough to survive this.”
The Down Town Club in Philadelphia was crowded with men from the Vidocq Society who had gathered for lunch.
Cops, sleuths and gumshoes, they are the heirs to Sherlock Holmes, and investigate cold case murders, pro bono.
It was 1993 and I was there at the invitation of Vidocq Commissioner Bill Fleisher.
Vidocq was interested in looking into the unsolved case of Carol Ann Dougherty, 9, who had been raped and strangled in the choir loft of St. Mark Church in Bristol in 1962.
I had written a six-part series, based on police files, for the 30th anniversary of the murder in 1992. But before Vidocq got its investigation under way, the Bucks County prosecutor’s office put it before a grand jury.
Fleisher and his group were still interested, and so I got the lunch invitation.
I was shown to a table. On my left was Bill Ressler, the renowned FBI investigator who coined the term “serial killer.” On my right was Frank Bender, whose talent was reconstructing for investigators the faces of dead people, based on their skulls.
A self-taught sculptor, Bender called himself the “recomposer of the decomposed.”
Four years earlier, Bender had become famous when he created a bust of fugitive John E. List for the TV show, “America’s Most Wanted.” List had killed his wife, children and mother in 1971, parked his car at JFK Airport, and vanished.
Bender had aged List perfectly, with receding hairline, wrinkles and tortoise-shell eyeglasses. List was arrested two weeks later in Virginia.
That day at the Down Town Club, Frank Bender was in black. He was wiry, with an intense gaze.
Fleisher introduced us, and mentioned the Carol Dougherty case and the series. Bender wanted to know all about it. He was silent as I spoke. When I finished, he looked at me. Then he said, “You will be haunted the rest of your life.”
Odd. The grand jury had the case. An indictment was expected. Haunted? How could he be so sure? I asked.
“It’s a child,” he said.
Bender fascinated. He told stories of dead people who, he said, seemed to speak to him as their images emerged from clay.
In the late 1970s, he was an art student who studied human anatomy by observing autopsies at a city morgue.
In 1977, when he reconstructed the face of a murder victim and it resulted in the killer’s arrest, the police sent more skulls.
He had a spooky knack for guessing precise skin color and facial expressions of his subjects.
The skulls of the unidentified dead were given titles. “The Man in the Cornfield.” “The Girl on Route 309.” “The Boy in the Bag.”
They haunted his dreams, he said.
At the Down Town Club, he asked, “Tell me what you didn’t put in your story.”
An intriguing question, I thought, and I told him about “12.”
After the series ran, a note signed “12” arrived. The sender requested a meeting with me to reveal Carol Dougherty’s killer. The sender instructed me to acknowledge the note in a classified add in the newspaper. I did.
A few days later, while I was at Mass at St. Mark’s, an envelope was left under the windshield wiper of my car. Inside the envelope was a paper with “12” on it. That’s all.
I said neither I nor the police know what it means.
Without hesitating Bender said it was the killer. Instinct.
“He’s playing with you,” he said.
The Dougherty case remains unsolved. Even today, I chase leads.
I thought of this last week, when Frank Bender’s obit appeared in the newspapers. He died of mesothelioma. He was 70. He will be buried in the National Veterans Cemetery at Washington Crossing.
His final reconstruction, completed last year, was of a child, a 10-year-old boy whose remains were found in a field in North Carolina in 1998.
Bender told the Greensboro News-Record why he took the case, even though he knew he would probably not live to see it solved.
“A child is so innocent. They have a whole life ahead, and it’s taken away,” he said. “It all bothers me, but they bother me the most.”
We now know what serial killers do all day in jail.
They plot new ways to bleed our compensation system dry.
Some of the most vile men ever to have walked the Earth are busy planning their next loony compensation sting at the taxpayer’s expense.
The “Evil 13”, a gang of serial killers including Milly Dowler’s murderer Levi Bellfield, Soham monster Ian Huntley and the Suffolk strangler Steve Wright, have spent tens of thousands of taxpayers’ money lodging trivial compensation claims.
So while severely wounded soldiers are fighting to get even £50,000 for the horrendous loss of their fertility, Levi Bellfield is bunging in a claim for £30,000 because he was “given a slap” by a fellow prisoner.
This 6ft tall 18-stone monster has gone crying to personal injury lawyers over a minor assault which left him with a few cuts and bruises.
He claims it is his “human right” to be protected from the prison’s main population because of his crimes. Remind us again of those crimes?
Only the savage murder of three young women who no longer have the luxury of any human rights.
Nor do the Dowlers, as Bellfield made sure when he subjected that heartbroken family to the most harrowing murder trial in living memory.
It is beyond belief that monsters like Bellfield are being allowed openly to milk our compensation system.
Milly’s killer is said to sit in his prison cell, surrounded by legal papers, figuring out new ways to sue the prison service “for a bit of a laugh”.
Even if his claims are eventually thrown out, they still cost the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds to defend.
That’s on top of the £4million we’ve forked already out on legal aid at his trials.
There is something inherently wrong with a system which allows a child-killer like Ian Huntley to sue the prison service for £95,000 for a knife attack while critically injured soldiers returning from serving our country in Afghanistan are forced to fight for years to get half-decent compensation payments.
Part of the problem lies with the new breed of no-win, no-fee lawyers who will do anything to make a fast buck, even if it means screwing the taxpayer for the sake of a serial killer who will never see the light of day outside prison.
While even the worst offenders have the right to sue the prison service for serious assaults, this sub-culture of petty claims through personal injury lawyers must now end.
Even outside prison these legal vultures are a menace to the taxpayer, with the cost of personal injury claims doubling to £14billion in 10 years.
It now means every motorist in the country is paying exorbitant insurance premiums to fund petty claims.
Former Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw is on a crusade to clamp down on this legal racket.
It is not only costing us dear but lining the pockets of our most heinous criminals.
He once wowed India with a TV show where he rolled out French cuisine with a flourish. Now celebrity chef Alain Andre is seeking to make a more piquant dish: a film on his fellow Frenchman Charles Sobhraj, who is currently serving life for murder in the dank and dismal Central Jail of Kathmandu.
Andre, who spends half the year in India and half in Europe, mostly Paris, has a production company in New Delhi — Pash Production.
The sexagenarian’s USP is that along with his film partner in Paris, François Enginger, he is the only one to hold a contract to make a film on Sobhraj, a right that Sobhraj has been fiercely protecting from Bollywood film makers who have also showed interest in his life and crimes.
Andre, who has never met Sobhraj, says he came to know about him though Enginger while they were shooting a film in Thailand. François asked a travel agency in Paris to get his visa and the woman who was assisting him turned out to be Sobhraj’s ex-wife Chantal.
At that time, Sobhraj was finishing his stint in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. When he was released and deported to France in 1997, Andre says Sobhraj and Enginger became friends with the latter helping him obtain an apartment and giving him money.
During that time, Sobhraj, depicted as a serial killer by the media, showed a different side to him.
“Charles met a Chinese woman and had a baby with her,” says Andre. “The baby was sick and Charles, with François, were at the doctors’ every day. They became good friends and François said to me: ‘This man cannot be a killer, he is so gentle’.”
Then Sobhraj disappeared from Paris in 2003 only to surface in Kathmandu in a blaze of media glare with Nepal police arresting him and then slapping him with the murder of an American tourist in 1975.
Despite a long battle in three courts, Nepal’s Supreme Court finally judged him guilty last year and upheld the 20-year prison sentence awarded by the lower courts.
“We think he has fallen into a trap,” Andre says.
With Enginger currently in Morocco, Andre is now scouting for a “serious” Indian co-producer who will be willing to put down 50 percent of the budget needed for shooting the film. Andre has planned the feature film, to be made in Hindi and English, to be shot in France, Greece and India.
With Sobhraj’s obsession with controlling the script, how did Andre persuade him to make the film?
“Charles knows that Isabelle Coutant Peyre (his lawyer in Paris) will protect his rights and make sure that the movie respects his point of view,” Andre says. “And I personally would not want to make any movie without respecting Charles’ life and honour.
“Nobody can say Charles is a killer; there is no proof. Only Nepal has sentenced him as a killer, but the so-called proofs are fake and the United Nations International Committee for Human Rights in Geneva itself has condemned Nepal in 2010.”
What about the rumours that Shah Rukh Khan was ready to play Sobhraj in the film?
Andre nixes that.
“I met an Indian producer who told me he was a partner of SRK and so the rumour went around that way,” he says. “But the discussions with that Indian producer are over.”
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at sudeshna.s@ians.in)
Imagine that you could earn nearly a million dollars for every year you spent in prison with the understanding that you would likely get out in the prime of your life. Would you take that deal?
More specifically, suppose you could live like royalty behind bars, in almost total control, with guests free to come and go as they pleased, cellphones, TV, gourmet food and fine wine to eat and drink. Would that make the deal worth 20 years of your life?
Charles Sobhraj in France
For serial murderer Charles Sobhraj, the idea of retiring to Paris and making $15 million for a movie deal based on his life made spending more than two decades in a notoriously corrupt Indian prison worthwhile. Sobhraj, a Vietnamese-Indian by birth and French national by adoption, turned a sentence for homicide in India into almost a life of leisure while at the same time evading prosecution for a dozen murders in jurisdictions that should have brought a death sentence.
He was a con man, jewel thief, drug dealer and murderer, but one who lived a life of adventure and intrigue that made him a media celebrity. He amassed enough money to bribe his captors who provided him with amenities to make life in an Indian prison more bearable. For most of his incarceration he had access to typewriters, a television, refrigerator and a large library. That’s in addition to the drugs and food that he used to entertain and control his fellow inmates in the prison that was supposed to be the harshest in India.
Even more vexing was the idea that, at 52 years old, Sobhraj could walk out of Delhi’s Tihar prison, sign a $15 million deal for his life story and then charge the media upwards of $5,000 an interview once he returned to Paris.
Not bad for a man who was convicted of one homicide and accused of committing at least 10 more. Some authorities believe Sobhraj killed more than 20 unsuspecting European and American tourists and pilgrims who journeyed to the Far East and the subcontinent. Some came east in search of drugs and others came in search of spiritual growth. Instead, they found Charles Sobhraj and his gang of killers.
This article is all about how a serial killer can profit. The leaches and blood suckers that help him disgust me.
I can only guess that this so called chef has lost whatever little flair he had. He needs fast cash and is willing to sell his soul for it! Guess he was never much of a chef!
Serial rapist-murderer Lloyd Clark Fletcher likely to re-offend if released from prison, court told.
NOTORIOUS serial rapist and murderer Lloyd Clark Fletcher was likely to commit violent sexual assaults if released from prison, a court has been told.
Brisbane Supreme Court judge Debra Mullins said she was required as a matter of law to review whether to extend an indefinite sentence imposed on Fletcher in 1998.
Justice Mullins is required to make a decision despite Fletcher’s own on-going requests to remain in jail for the rest of his life.
Fletcher has earned two dubious honours in Queensland legal and criminal history after he was sentenced to an indefinite sentence – life without the possibility of parole – on May 19, 1998.
Not only was he one of the first murders convicted in Australia through the use of DNA, he was also the first prisoner in Queensland sentenced to an indefinite jail term.
Over a 20-year period Fletcher violently attacked at least four women and murdered one.
In 1998, Fletcher was jailed for life for the murder of Manly schoolgirl Janet Phillips
However, some months later he was sentenced to an indefinite sentence for attacking a teenager at Wynnum railway station.
It was only after DNA samples were taken from Fletcher for the railway station attack that he was matched with samples from the Phillips murder site 10 years earlier.
Fletcher, now aged 53, was back in the Supreme Court today for the first review of his indefinite sentence, which can only be lifted by order of a judge.
The court was told under the relevant Act, Fletcher was entitled to a review because 13 years had passed since his sentence – under previous law the time needed before a convicted murderer could apply for parole.
Dressed in a dark grey shirt, dark trousers and white sneakers, a bald Fletcher, sporting a large handle-bar moustache, sat slumped and uninterested in the dock of Court 10, with his hands tucked into his pockets, during the 25-minute hearing.
Fletcher, who represented himself, told Justice Mullins he had nothing to say to the court regarding the review.
“I have nothing to say, your honour. (Nothing) at all,” he said.
Prosecutor Deborah Holliday said psychiatrist reports, ordered by Chief Justice Paul de Jersey in April, indicated Fletcher remained a serious danger to the community if released.
Ms Holliday said one report supported a continuation of Fletcher’s indefinite sentence until the next review in two years.
The court was told Fletcher remained “relatively untreated” while in custody and was a “high risk” of committing “violent sexual” offences if released.
Justice Mullins said she wanted time to review the Crown’s material before handing down her decision on Thursday.
Fletcher, during a mention of the matter in April, told Justice de Jersey: “I am not going to contest my indefinite sentence.”
Fletcher’s criminal offending began in 1978, when Fletcher, then 20, raped and attempted to murder a woman, 23, at Innisfail, in northern Queensland.
He served nine years of a 15-year sentence.
Fletcher was also jailed for five years after attempting to abduct a girl, 13, at Bright in Victoria in 1989.
She was saved by some labourers who were returning from a job and heard her screams.
In 1997, Fletcher grabbed a girl, 16, at the Wynnum railway station and forced her into his car at knife-point.
He choked and bound her but she was able to escape when a group of teenagers came to her rescue.
It was after police took DNA samples from Fletcher for that offence that he was linked to the murder of Ms Phillips in July 1987.
The 15-year-old schoolgirld was attacked, raped and killed while walking home from a party.
What is the judge reviewing? Is she seriously considering a release?
Warning! The video below contains graphic images that some might find disturbing!
I came across this article after posting about the Crime Museum in the United States. The article is also pretty unsettling but it is interesting.
Many Thai children who grew up in the 1960s received the same warning from their parents. “Don’t stay out after dark or the ghost of See Uey will eat you.”
The cannibal-turned-supernatural legend and movie villain was, in reality, a poor Chinese man who went on a killing spree around Bangkok and some of the nearby provinces. He had a taste for children. No one is certain, but it’s believed that he murdered and ate anywhere from five to eight children. Speculation also ran rife that his omnivorous ‘diet’ may have included some adults that he was never charged with. Caught in the act of burning one of the corpses by the young boy’s father, See Uey Sae Ung was finally arrested in 1958. His confessions traumatized Thailand, birthing a bogeyman who still haunts the nation’s psyche. After stabbing the children in the throat, See Uey told police, he then slit open their chests and ate their hearts and livers.
Being poor does not normally equate to killing and eating children. I am just saying.
A Hainanese immigrant who toiled as a coolie, rickshaw-puller and vegetable farmer after arriving in Thailand, the country’s most legendary serial slayer was a former soldier, fighting against the Japanese invaders on the Chinese island during World War II. Some believe that his bloodlust was stoked on the battlefields of Hainan province. Professor Somchai Pholeamke, the former head of Siriraj Hospital’s Forensics Department, said, “His military commanders told the troops to eat the livers of the enemy soldiers to take on their strength and power.” Many of the Thai movies about See Uey use the battlefield as the focal point of his motivations. A scene in one such film shows the young soldier, famished and alone, after all his comrades-in-arms had been slaughtered, with nothing to eat but human carrion.
If his military training is what ‘motivated” him to become a serial child killer / cannibal why are there not many others doing the same thing? Did he train and fight alone?
Eating livers is a ghastly rite often associated with black magic in Southeast Asia. Over the centuries it has been practiced during times of warfare to dehumanize the enemy and feed on their strength. Just as the samurais believe that a man’s courage resides in his guts, which is why the ritual suicide of seppukko consists of disembowelment with a sword, the troops of the ancient Khmer empire and the more recent Khmer Rouge ate the livers of their enemies to increase their strength and stamina.
I am still calling B.S. here for the same reason I have above.
See Uey’s cadaver, waxed with the preservative formalin, is the most popular exhibit at the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum on the grounds of Siriraj Hospital, the country’s oldest medical facility, in Bangkok. The cannibal’s cockroach-brown corpse stands slumped in an upright glass casket off to one side of the room. The empty eye sockets, as well as the bullet holes left by the executioner’s machine-gun, have been filled in with white paraffin. Beside his final resting case there are several others occupied by killer rapists and murderers also sentenced to death.
Elsewhere in this academic bone-yard are Exhibits A through Z of murder weapons (knives, pliers, ropes, a hammer and a screwdriver) as well as bullets extracted from the dead during autopsies
Of the two actual skeletons in the museum, the one in a glass case belongs to the former chairman of the hospital’s forensics department, Songkran Niyomsane, who founded the museum in 1965. “He was a true man of forensics,” said Somchai with a chuckle. “He wanted the students to be able to be able to study him after he died.”
Elsewhere in this academic bone-yard are Exhibits A through Z of murder weapons (knives, pliers, ropes, a hammer and a screwdriver) as well as bullets extracted from the dead during autopsies. More macabre still are the glass jars in which human foetuses, plucked from the womb after the mother had perished, swim in formaldehyde. One jar houses a two-month-old victim of hydrocephalus with a grotesquely swollen head that makes him look like an alien’s offspring. As a testament to Buddhist compassion, many Thai visitors leave dolls, candies and toys for the spirits of these kids.
Near the preserved cadavers of the mass murderers is a glass case full of skulls with bullet holes in their foreheads. There is no signage in either English or Thai to explain this display. Somboon Thamtakerngkit, the division chief of the hospital’s Forensic Pathology Department, said there is a modus operandi to the morbidity. “King Rama VIII, the eldest brother of our present king, was shot in the forehead back in 1946,” she said. “Not much was known about entrance and exit wounds caused by gunshots then, so they used the skulls of these unclaimed bodies for tests.” The results of these early shots at forensics proved that claims of suicide were skullduggery. Riddled with question marks, the case remains Thailand’s most contentious murder mystery.
But the real gallery of grotesques is the many autopsy photos lining the walls. They portray, in livid reds and bruising blues, exactly what an exploding grenade does to a torso, how a broken beer bottle can tear out a throat, a train sever a head, or a knife shred a woman’s genitals. As repulsive as most of these images are, the doctors who work with the dead learn invaluable lessons from them to help the living. The autopsies and photos, Somboon said, also assist the doctors, the police and judges to bring the perpetrators of these murders most foul to justice.
The museum doubles as an ad-hoc classroom for students boning up on forensics and anatomy. They refer to the skeletons and cadavers as ajaan yai (“headmasters”) and wai them—a prayer-like gesture that is local sign language for respect and gratitude.
Professor Somchai pointed to a glass box containing the cadaver of a killer rapist. “The museum also might teach the students something else. If you do a big crime you could end up like this,” he laughed.
I agree with the scared straight method. Take all budding criminals and give them an eye full.
The Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum has no age restrictions. Some visitors are but schoolchildren on the eve of adolescence. Should they be allowed to witness such horrors? That is debatable. Perhaps what both the young and the old need to see are the horrendous effects of violence: not the slow-motion cinematic ballet of gunfire and falling bodies, but the ugly anatomy of real death.
I guess that is up to the parents of the children. I would not have taken my son but by the time he was 12 my brother would have been bugging my parents to take him.
In 2007, the terror trove was renovated and linked together with five other facilities under the banner Siriraj Medical Museum 6. For a miniscule entry fee, visitors can drink in a sobering six-pack of mortality checks and loathsome diseases.
The Ellis Pathological Museum is devoted to the pioneering work of the Professor A.G Ellis, an American who stayed in Thailand with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1919 to 1921 and again from 1923 to 1928. He was the first pathologist in the country. Touring this museum of organs infected with cancer, hearts deadened by strokes and livers pickled with alcohol could very well make you never want to drink, smoke or wrap your molars around another cholesterol-heavy cheeseburger ever again.
The squeamish and the anally retentive will have an especially crap time in the Parasitology Museum. Every worst fear and phobia any traveler ever had about the intestinal horrors lurking in Asia has been graphically outlined and exhibited: roundworms, pinworms, hookworms, whipworms and tapeworms. Idolaters of Stephen King and the medical thrillers of Robin Cook may relish opening this can of parasitic worms, but most visitors give it the bum’s rush.
Older Thais who grew up with admonitions from their parents that are straight out of a monstrous fairy tale are hypnotized by the cannibal
Of the six facilities, it is the Forensic Medical Museum that draws the biggest crowds and, of all the exhibits, it is See Ouey’s upright casket that generates the greatest number of glares and gazes. Older Thais who grew up with admonitions from their parents that are straight out of a monstrous fairy tale are hypnotized by the cannibal. Younger Thais who have seen the movies and TV shows are baffled by his tiny size. Many of the travellers and expats look stupefied by this medieval exhibition of putting killers on public display. After all, the crimes of the serial lady-killer Ted Bundy and the cannibalistic necrophiliac Jeffrey Dahmer were much more heinous than See Uey’s, but no one ever put their corpses on display.
I do not get that. He killed and ate young kids so how is Dahmer’s and or Bundy’s crime so much more “heinous?
For all the movie frames and column inches he has racked up, See Uey remains an enigma. The only information about him in the museum is a newspaper clipping in Thai, taped to the side of his final resting case, reiterating the few known facts about him – his upbringing on Hainan, his days as a soldier, his alleged body count and his execution in 1958 – along with a black-and-white mug shot in which the rodent-faced man is baring his teeth. But it’s difficult to read the expression on his face. Was he mugging for the crime photographers and living up to his reputation? Is this the glower of an extraordinarily angry and embittered man? Or does he look more like a cornered rat, baring his teeth and snarling out of fear?
To answer those questions, I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, over the course of many years, writing all sorts of features and guidebook entries about the history of the area and the exodus from China that brought in tide after tide of landed immigrants during World War II and after the country fell to the communists in 1949. An elderly woman who sold vegetables in the “Old Market” (little changed in the past century), told me, “There’s a Thai expression about ‘traveling with a pot and a mat’ to describe any trip taken on the cheap. But it actually came from the fact that those were the only two things that most of us Chinese immigrants brought to Thailand. Even thinking about that journey by boat makes me seasick: stuck in a cargo hold for months that stank of shit and vomit and piss, roaches and rats everywhere.” She shuddered with disgust.
“It was bad enough coming to all these foreign lands where people hated us, but our own people preyed on us too. My brothers and sisters never made it to Thailand. They were on another boat, but the sailors knew we’d be traveling with all our valuables. Once the boats were at sea, some of these pirates would rob people and throw them overboard to drown or get eaten by sharks. That’s what happened to my brothers and sisters.” Tears glittered in her eyes.
There are many Thai slang terms for us. Because we were seen as ‘reds’ they sometimes called us ‘pussy blood Chinks’
As a ‘boat person’ See Uey would have shared some of those experiences.
Another Chinese immigrant from Hainan, a retired police officer on active duty at the time See Uey was on the loose, spoke of the xenophobia directed at the so-called “Jews of the Far East” wherever they washed up after the exodus: Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States. “There are many Thai slang terms for us. Because we were seen as ‘reds’ they sometimes called us ‘pussy blood Chinks’. Since the communists wanted to destroy religion and the temples we were also referred to as ‘the Chinks who killed the temples’. That one I still hear quite often, but some of the older expressions like ‘rickshaw Chinks’ and ‘human animals’ that were used to describe our status as the lowliest manual labourers, aren’t really used anymore, expect by a few older people,” said Wen Liang, sitting in a shophouse that was a reconverted opium den, near the Dragon Lotus Temple in Chinatown.
As a coolie and vegetable farmer, See Uey would have also been a punching bag for many of the same jabs and swipes.
This type of thought others me. Some try to excuse the criminals because they had a hard life or went through hardships. The whole time that they are making these excuses for the killers they interview others that were there, went through the same thing or worse and did not become criminals.
I will not go on a rant about that, I will save that for another post but it does get on my nerves.
Like many people interviewed for this story, the retired cop expressed skepticism that the cannibal killed and ate as many children as he was charged with. “Let me put it this way. It would not have been difficult to pin some other unsolved murders on a poor, illiterate ‘human animal’. He did confess to killing some of the children, but it’s possible he may have targeted some adults, too. We found a few other corpses that had been cannibalized in Bangkok around that time, but he was never charged with those crimes or confessed to them.” Slowly and solemnly, the ex-cop nodded. “We detectives are forever examining motives. Some of my colleagues in the police force interviewed him after he was arrested and they did not think he was insane. I have often wondered if his anger was not a more generalized rage against the world mixed with a kind of sorrow that came from knowing he would never see his homeland again. Many Chinese immigrants of the time could probably identify with those misgivings.”
I have to wonder if it really makes it better if he only killed and ate 5 kids rather than let’s say 10?
And, not ranting but those other immigrants did not become murdering cannibals did they? Even though they suffered and had heartbreak…. I’ll stop.
In the forensic museum, Professor Somchai had also addressed the quandary of whether See Uey was insane or not at the time of his homicidal binge. He pointed to a long scar on the cadaver’s forehead. “Here you can see the incision. After he was executed, they did an autopsy to see if See Uey’s brain was normal, and it was. But of course it was impossible to really assess his state of mind during the period leading up to his arrest.”
Feeding on all these different quotes and anecdotes, facts and fictions, legends and conjectures, features and guidebook entries, after a lengthy period of indigestion, I combined a bunch of them, adding a few of my own embellishments and allusions to The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, for a novella of mine that was long-listed for the Bram Stoker Award in 2008.
CLEVELAND – A Cuyahoga County jury recommended the death sentence for convicted serial killer Anthony Sowell.
On July 22, the same jury found Sowell guilty on 82 of 83 counts, including aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping and abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors said Sowell lured the women into his house with drugs and alcohol, then strangled them. The remains of 11 women were found, some wrapped in plastic bags, around his Imperial Avenue home in October 2009.
It will be up to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Dick Ambrose to make a final decision. He could still give Sowell life in prison without the possibly of parole when sentencing takes place on Friday at 9 a.m. Sowell stood emotionless in courtroom with is hands cuffed in front of him while the verdict was read.
As Sowell was escorted from the courtroom by Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s deputies, family members applauded and cried. Assistant prosecutors Rick Bombik and Pinkey Carr shared hugs with several the victims’ relatives.
The 51-year-old Cleveland man was also convicted of raping two other women and attacking another. One woman told the jury, Sowell slapped her across the face and said “Bitch, take your clothes off,” before brutally raping her.
During the mitigation phase, the defense called more than 20 witnesses, including the defendant himself, to make a case against the death penalty.
“The only thing I want to say is that I’m sorry. I know that may not seem like much. And I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart,” Sowell said, during his guided and unsworn testimony. “This is not typical of me. I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it. But I know it’s not a lot, but that’s all I can give.”
While Sowell’s sister and his former prison cellmate gave reasons why they love the man who killed 11 women, other people painted a different picture of Sowell.
“I think I was about 10 or 11 and everything change. Like me and Anthony would fight all the time,” Sowell’s niece Leona Davis said. She said she would get tired of fighting and that’s when Sowell would rape her. “His mom would beat us all the time… We got tied up to a pole and she would beat us.”
The last person to be sentenced to death in Cuyahoga County was 29-year-old Denny Obermiller. He pleaded guilty to killing his grandparents and was sentenced during a bench trial. Prosecutions said he strangled them in August 2010 and raped his grandmother, before setting their house on fire to hide the evidence. It was the first time that most could remember that a defendant in Cuyahoga County pleaded guilty and waived his right to argument against his execution.
The last jury in Cuyahoga County to recommend the death penalty was in March 2007. Charles Maxwell was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, while her young daughter watch on the even of her fourth birthday. The judge upheld the recommendation for the 2005 murder and Maxwell now sits on death row.
According to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, there are 151 people on Ohio’s death row and 25 of them are from Cuyahoga County.
Sorry really does not work when you murder people.
Which one of these "I'm sorry" apologies does NOT belong: I'm sorry I said things that hurt you. I'm sorry I ran into you and made you fall down. I'm sorry I was late for work. I'm sorry I lied to you instead of telling you the truth. I'm sorry I borrowed your shirt without asking. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to spill my red wine on your new rug. I'm sorry I don't have the answers you need. I'm sorry I can't make it, I have previously scheduled plan … Read More
The mother of the last victim of the Moors murders is refusing to back the return of the death penalty insisting ‘hanging is too quick’ and child murderers must be made to suffer.
Twelve-year-old Keith Bennett is buried on bleak Saddleworth Moor on the border of Yorkshire and Lancashire after being murdered by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1964.
Brady only admitted Keith’s murder – along with Pauline Reade, 16 – while serving a multiple life sentence for killing three other children, but has always refused to reveal the whereabouts of his grave.
Keith Bennett’s mother Winnie Johnson on Saddleworth Moor. She said hanging murderers is ‘too quick’
The pair were jailed for life in 1966 after being convicted of the murders of three other children, Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. Myra Hindley died in jail in 2002.
Last night, Keith’s 77-year-old mother Winnie Johnson said hanging was too quick and child killers must be made to suffer.
It comes as almost 50 years after the death penalty was abolished there is an ever growing online petition calling on Parliament to hang child and police killers.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were jailed for life in 1966 after being convicted of the murders of three other children, Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride
The last hanging in Britain took place the year the schoolboy was murdered.
HANGING: A HISTORY
Until 1868 hangings were performed in public
In London, the traditional site was at Tyburn, but before 1865, executions took place outside Newgate Prison, Old Bailey, now the site of the Central Criminal Court
The death penalty was abolished in 1965 and renewed in 1969
The last woman to be hanged was Ruth Ellis on July 13, 1955, by Albert Pierrepoint who was a prominent hangman at the time
The last hanging in Britain took place in 1964, when Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester were executed for the murder of John Alan West
But last night Ms Johnson insisted she would not be signing-up to the first controversial issue the man-in-the-street wants debated in Westminster under the Government’s new ‘let-the-people speak’ decree.
She said: ‘Hanging is too quick. Child killers like Brady must be made to suffer, in the way he hurt my Keith and all the other little ones.
‘The rope is too simple a solution for his sort. Serial killers like him need to be left to rot, for years, when hopefully they will reflect on their appalling crimes.
‘People could be forgiven for thinking I would be among the first demanding a return to capital punishment, but that is too soft a sentence for Brady.
‘I really hope that he has suffered over the years and now, maybe in the twilight of his life, he will display a single shred of sympathy by telling me where Keith’s remains are located.
‘The gesture would mean so much, especially as all police searches for Keith’s body have officially ended.
‘If Brady had swung for his crimes against my son and the others, there would have been no chance – however slim it is – of him relenting and putting me out of my misery by pinpointing Keith’s grave.’
The search for Keith’s body on Saddleworth Moor has been going on for decades – but Brady has refused to reveal the grave’s whereabouts.
I can understand her hope of finding her baby’s grave through Brady, I just do not ever see him giving it. Serial killers enjoy the games, the attention and the pain that they produce in the families, the living victims.
I understand her hoping that he has spent years dwelling in the death he caused, but I doubt that he did.
Most serial killers love re-living their crimes, many even return to the murder / burial sites to masturbate. Some bring lovers o these spots for sex because the memories excite them.
I wish that her ideas could be truth but there is no real reason to believe that she can / will / has gotten what she hopes for.
Keith was lured into a car by Brady’s lover Hindley while walking to his grandmother’s house four days after his 12th birthday in June 1964 – two months before Peter Allen, 53, and Wynne Owen Evans became the last murderers to be hanged in the UK.
Brady killed Keith and buried him on the Yorkshire-Lancashire moorland while Hindley kept look-out.
When the e-petition reaches the expected 100,000 signatures, MPs will be forced to debate a return to the gallows.
I can not see any reason to keep serial killers, child killers or pedophiles alive. Medical science, psychiatrists, criminologists, history and more have proven that these offenders can not and will not be “fixed”. They are and always will be threats to society in general, to the weak and to our children in particular.
For these kinds of criminals, the most brutal, repeat, killers and tormentors I support capital punishment.
They add nothing but fear, threats, pain and insecurity to our society, even in prison. Why allow that?
They will never be able to be productive members of society and will always be a threat to anyone that has to come into contact with them (including but not exclusive to guards, doctors, nurses, teaches, visitors, maintenance people, and other prisoners) so why allow this risk to all for the few?
Let me know your opinions and why.
If you want to sign the petition there is a link (a few others as well) below.
Keith Bennett’s mother Winnie Johnson on Saddleworth Moor. She said hanging murderers is ‘too quick’
The search for Keith’s body on Saddleworth Moor has been going on for decades – but Brady has refused to reveal the grave’s whereabouts.
Real Life Monsters 