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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
What drives attractive male cousins to rape and kill ten young women? Why do an altar girl and her boyfriend lure innocent victims into their customised torture van? Couples who kill comprise only twenty per cent of killers, but they often murder serially and are responsible for particularly inhumane deaths. Sadistic friends, psychotic sisters and an increasingly pathological mother-son team are amongst those profiled in this exploration of the world's most deviant duos. There are infamous British cases, such as the Moors Murderers and the Wests, as well as many equally disturbing but less well-known ones. In the third of this series, which focuses on the psychology of murderers, Carol Anne Davis explores the formative influences of these killers and their deadly dynamics. Comprising of thirteen in-depth case studies and exclusive interviews with experts and one of the Wests' surviving victims, "Couples Who Kill" provides an unequalled study of this disturbing subject.
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Seitenzahl: 522
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Couples Who Kill
CAROL ANNE DAVIS
For Ian
Contents
Acknowledgements
I’m deeply indebted to researcher and writer Paul A Woods for his insight into serial killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. Paul spent hours interviewing Ng for a documentary on the Lake-Ng murders and has a unique understanding of their increasingly deadly synergy.
I was also fortunate to interview Caroline Roberts, one of Fred & Rose West’s few surviving victims. Her autobiography The Lost Girl is one of the most honest books I’ve ever read.
I’m very grateful to crime correspondent Andrew Nott for answering my questions about the Trevor Hardy & Sheilagh Farrow murders. Andrew co-authored the book Cause Of Death with pathologist Dr Geoffrey Garrett and their writing made me aware of this particularly unusual and surprisingly little-known case.
Once again, I’m grateful to Lisa Dumond who took time out of her busy schedule to help with my American research. Lisa is especially interested in Anti-Social Personality Disorder, knowledge she incorporates in her short fiction and true crime. She’s also a prolific book reviewer and a novelist.
Equal thanks to David Mulcahy for sending me his thirty-nine page document A Case For Innocence and various forensic statements related to his trial. Thanks also to one of Mr Mulcahy’s friends for speaking to me about this controversial case.
Preface
Ask the British public about couples who kill and they’ll invariably name The Moors Murderers or Fred & Rose West. Canadians also opt for a heterosexual couple, Paul Barnardo & Karla Homolka, as do the Americans who tend to cite Charles Starkweather & Caril Fugate or Bonnie & Clyde. Australia’s best known deadly duo are David & Catherine Birnie whilst Daniel & Manuela Ruda recently made headlines in Germany.
But many killer couples aren’t heterosexual lovers, and some have far more complex relationships - herein you’ll find serial torture-killer cousins, an increasingly unbalanced mother-son duo, psychotic sisters and a cult-based brother and sister team. This isn’t to suggest that most deadly duos are related: Couples Who Kill also profiles gay team killers and equally sadistic friends.
Most of these partnerships arose out of the individuals shared love of cruelty, others were formed through jealousy or greed. What they all have in common is their effect on the victims: duped by two opponents rather than one, they had little chance.
The serial killer who kills alone often takes time out afterwards to mentally relive the murder and regroup his defences, but deviant duos immediately discuss the homicide and move on to the next victim and then the next. As such, several of the profiled couples were responsible for a death count that was into double figures, with one duo being responsible for over thirty sexually-motivated deaths. Couples who kill only comprise twenty per cent of serial killers, but they tend to be responsible for a much larger body count than men or women who kill alone.
Even when a couple ‘only’ murder once or twice, the results are particularly gruesome, with the individuals often stopping partway through the assault to find out exactly how their co-killer wants to proceed. With physical strength on their side, they don’t have to adopt the blitzkrieg methods of the solo attacker. Their duality also complicates matters during the subsequent trial when the jury has to ascertain who did what.
Many of these killers have similar characteristics in their backgrounds and these are summarised in the final chapter, the ‘Abuse Excuse’.
1 FRIENDS REUNITED
LAWRENCE BITTAKER & ROY NORRIS
When former prison friends Bittaker and Norris were reunited in 1979, they decided to kidnap teenage girls for sexual pleasure. Within a four month period they would repeatedly rape five known victims, torture them for kicks and kill them in an especially brutal way.
Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker
Lawrence was born on 27th September 1940 to a drug-addicted single mother in Southern California. She soon put him into care, where he was moved from one home to another by families who were more interested in the foster-payment cheques than in their foster child. As such, he didn’t receive the nurturing that all babies require if they are to bond with others, and if they are to ultimately care about anyone other than themselves.
Lawrence had an IQ in the top one percent of the population and also had a photographic memory. But his foster families were often Spanish so couldn’t converse with him fluently even if they wanted to. He was invariably clothed in hand-me-downs, some of which were girl’s clothes and shoes. Alternately ignored and laughed at, he retreated into his own little world. He literally remained on the sidelines as his foster parents fed their natural children, only giving him the leftovers. He was also sexually molested and raped by some of his so-called carers during these desperately unhappy years.
At six he was adopted by a couple who gave him their surname, Bittaker. Unfortunately it was too little too late as he was already a nascent psychopath. Young psychopaths can improve if given a consistently loving and stable environment – but George Bittaker’s work as an aircraft fitter meant that the family moved around the country so the child was uprooted again and again. He attended schools in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and California where he was always the new boy. It made Lawrence Bittaker feel even more of an outsider, alienated from his peers.
At seventeen he dropped out of high school and stole a car, was involved in a hit and run and fled to Long Beach to escape prosecution. But the police caught up with him and he was sent to a California Youth Authority home, where he remained until he was nineteen.
The rootless teenager now travelled to Louisiana, where the FBI charged him with a further motor theft. He was sent to a Oklahoma reformatory where he behaved so strangely that he was transferred to a Missouri medical centre. He’d later admit to forensic psychiatrist Dr Ronald Markman that he faked psychotic symptoms in order to get hospitalised. The medical centre found him to be hostile and manipulative, but he made sure that his conduct improved so that the staff believed they had cured him. As a result, he was released after a year.
The intelligent but self-destructive Lawrence now moved to Los Angeles and was arrested again almost immediately, this time for robbery. But he was let out on parole in 1963.
Lawrence Bittaker continued to cause havoc in the outside world. He again stole cars and was imprisoned, got out and burgled and was imprisoned, stabbed a shop assistant who tried to prevent him shoplifting and was arrested again. He was consequently sent to the California Men’s Colony where he met Roy Lewis Norris, who had a history of sexual crime.
Roy Lewis Norris
Roy was born on 2nd February 1948 in Colorado. He was an unwanted baby, the product of a very unhappy marriage which would end in recriminations and divorce. His increasingly lonely childhood included abuse and he turned to marijuana and beer to blot out the terrible memories. By his teens he was fantasising constantly about violent sex and saw women as objects to satisfy his lust.
At seventeen he joined the Navy. He was stationed in Vietnam, though he never saw combat. But his deviant sexual desires continued to build and in November 1969 he dragged a young woman from her car and attempted to rape her. He was arrested and given bail. Whilst on bail he forced his way into another woman’s flat but the police arrived before he could sexually assault her. As a result of these attacks, the Navy discharged him on mental health grounds.
Roy Norris’s violence escalated and he attacked a female stranger in the street and battered her with a brick. This time he was sentenced to an indeterminate time in a mental hospital. After five years they decided that they had cured him and let him out.
Within weeks he had proved them wrong, pulling a woman into a hedge at Redondo Beach, partially strangling her and raping her. (A classic fantasist, Roy Norris would later tell an author that the woman was his girlfriend and that the sex was consensual.) He was sent to prison where he met the equally dispossessed Lawrence Bittaker.
They began to share their sexual fantasies and Lawrence suggested that when they got out they should work through the teenage years by kidnapping a girl of thirteen, one aged fourteen and so on for every year up to nineteen. They also agreed that they’d torture their victims for fun.
Freedom
In November 1978 Bittaker was given parole and found low level factory work that must have been mind-numbingly dull for a man of his intellect. Eight weeks later Norris got out and moved into his mother’s trailer and began work as an electrician. The following month he received a letter from Bittaker suggesting that they meet up in a hotel.
At the meeting they discussed kidnapping and raping young girls and the various ways that they could dominate them. But they needed a place to keep their captives so Lawrence bought a van. The vehicle had a bed so it became his new abode and he kept it parked outside Roy’s mother’s trailer. The silver cargo van had no side windows so was ideal for keeping sex slaves. Bittaker promptly named it the ‘Murder Mac’.
The next few months were the intense fantasy phase. The two men would flirt with girls on beaches and in bars and often take their photos. Some of the girls were given a lift but they weren’t harmed as the men were still searching for a safe place to park the van so that their eventual torture sessions wouldn’t be overheard.
Their sexual lives at this time were largely auto-erotic: Roy Norris would later admit that he could maintain an erection for hours by just staring at a girl and imagining what he’d do if he got her alone.
Finally the men found a locked fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains and, by smashing the lock, gained access. Bittaker replaced this with his own lock. They now had a secure location where no one could hear their victims’ screams.
The first victim
Sixteen-year-old Cindy Schaeffer was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and became the men’s first victim. The devout young Christian was coming home from church on 24th June 1979 when Lawrence Bittaker offered her a ride. The pretty young blonde refused and increased her pace but he blocked her path and Roy Norris grabbed her. Within seconds they had bundled her into the van. They gagged and bound the teenager and drove her to the mountains, where Roy Norris raped her and forced her to fellate him. Later Lawrence Bittaker took his turn. After raping her vaginally and anally numerous times, the men tired of their traumatised victim and wrapped a wire coat hanger around her neck, taking turns to pull it tightly. Afterwards they drove her body to a canyon and dumped it for the animals to devour.
Incredibly, Roy Norris now returned to his mother’s trailer and went back to work. Lawrence Bittaker also went back to his day job. A fortnight later they grew tired of their day-to-day existence and succeeded in luring another victim into their mobile lair …
The second victim
On 8th July eighteen-year-old Andrea Joy Hall was hitchhiking when Lawrence Bittaker offered her a lift. Meanwhile Roy Norris hid in the back of the van. When she voluntarily entered the vehicle, he pounced on her and tied her up, covering her mouth with tape. He raped her and, once they’d parked at the fire road, Bittaker followed suit. They continued to sexually assault and torture the teenager for the next two days, with Lawrence Bittaker even using pliers on her genitals and nipples. Roy Norris also joined in the abuse, hitting her with a hammer again and again.
Eventually Lawrence Bittaker fetched an icepick and drove it deeply into one of Andrea’s ears. She screamed but didn’t die so he pulled it out and drove it into her other ear. Afterwards he strangled her to death. Like the previous victim, she was disposed of on the mountain in the hope that animals would ravage her corpse.
August apparently passed without incident – leastways the killer couple aren’t officially linked to any murders that month. But police believe they are responsible for up to forty-five deaths in total, especially as photographs of nineteen girls who remain missing were found in the Murder Mac van.
The third and fourth victims
In September the couple found thirteen-year-old Leah Lamp and her fifteen-year-old friend Jackie Gilliam sitting on a bench beside a bus stop. The teenagers happily accepted a lift to Hermosa Beach. But they panicked when they realised that the men were driving in the wrong direction and Leah tried to get out of the van. Roy Norris hit her with a bat and both he and Bittaker trussed up the teens and gagged them. For the first time, they had a victim each.
Noting that the struggle had alerted the attention of people on a nearby tennis court, the two killers drove off in a hurry. They were convinced that someone would call the police. Unfortunately no one did – and the two girls went on to meet hideous deaths.
This time Bittaker used a tape recorder to keep a permanent record of their torture and rape. He again used pliers on his victims’ breasts and on their genitals. They were raped and sodomised numerous times by both men. The girls’ ordeal lasted for a full three days as it was Labor Day weekend and the deviant duo didn’t have to go to work.
Eventually Lawrence Bittaker rammed his icepick into one of Jackie’s ears then into the other, after which he strangled her till she stopped breathing. Both men turned on her younger friend Leah and strangled and battered her to death.
A raped victim escapes
The duo talked over their exploits and found further pleasure in replaying the tape. With four victims to their credit, they felt invincible. Later that same month they sprayed a woman with Mace on a Manhattan Beach street and dragged her into their van. Once she was inside the vehicle, they raped her, not bothering to drive to their isolated fire road. She escaped, reported the assault and would later identify them from police photographs.
The fifth victim
The following month – on Halloween 1979 – the couple struck again, abducting Shirley Lynette Ledford. They tied her up but decided to torture her in the van rather than drive to the deserted mountain road.
This behaviour is typical of serial killers who become wilder and more violent as their killing spree goes on. Their kills follow the law of diminishing returns so they have to murder more quickly or more cruelly in order to still feel sated. At this stage some killers will opt to kill two girls at a time (assuming they haven’t done so already) or will prey upon an even more taboo victim such as a child.
In this case, the two men increased the sadism involved in the attack, with Lawrence Bittaker beating Shirley Ledford again and again, whilst urging her to scream more loudly. He also tortured her by clamping pliers around her nipples. Roy Norris joined in the atrocities, hitting her twenty-five times on the elbow with a hammer and instructing her to scream. The two men recorded part of the torture session, eighteen minutes of unendurable pain.
Two hours after they’d abducted the teenager, Bittaker strangled her with a wire coat hanger which he tightened, garrotte-style, with his pliers. They dumped the bruised and mutilated body in a random garden as Bittaker wanted to see what the press reaction would be like.
Her body, which was found the following morning, bore the numerous marks of their abuse – her arms slashed, her torso a mass of bruises. In a final act of rage they had also mutilated her most female features: her face, pubis and breasts.
A third party
The men had gotten away with at least five murders and would have gotten away with many more if Roy Norris hadn’t told a fellow ex-con about the killings. He thought that the ex-con would be impressed by his daring but the man went to his lawyer who contacted the police.
Surprisingly, it’s not unusual for a deadly duo to tell a third person about their crimes – Ian Brady, who killed with Myra Hindley, told teenager David Smith about their first four murders. After witnessing one such murder for himself, Smith went to the police. Diane Zamora told friends of her part in a co-killing, as did Marlene Olive. (They are profiled later in this book.)
The police now brought Roy Norris in on a parole violation charge as they had seen him selling marijuana. After all, they couldn’t yet charge him with the murders as it was just one ex-con’s word. Equally keen to keep Lawrence Bittaker in custody, they charged him with raping the victim who had escaped. Bittaker kept quiet in jail as he had the classic psychopathic mindset and believed he was invincible – but Norris soon began to talk.
Roy Norris’s slant on the case
Norris portrayed himself as the terrified victim of his friend. He said that Lawrence Bittaker enjoyed being totally in control – and that he, Roy, was increasingly afraid of him. He allegedly feared for his life, saying that the man could strangle him at any time. Roy Norris admitted that he enjoyed the sex but said that it hadn’t been part of the original plan to kill the girls, that Bittaker had insisted on this after they’d raped Cindy Schaeffer, arguing that they must not leave any witnesses. Norris claimed that he’d argued in Cindy’s favour for an hour (which was remarkably brave, considering he was supposed to be terrified of Bittaker) and that he had vomited when ‘forced’ to help strangle the teenager. He added that he was still haunted by the victim’s face.
But audiotapes were found which told a different tale. The victims were heard begging for mercy whilst Roy Norris tortured them with a hammer, making one of them pretend to be a cousin whom he’d had sexual fantasies about. He hit one victim repeatedly with a hammer on the elbow, urging her to ‘scream…keep it up, girl…scream till I say stop.’ Bittaker was also heard taunting a victim as he used pliers on her nipples whilst she screamed and begged to die. Hardened detectives were so shocked at what they heard on these tapes that they couldn’t stop shaking and some were sent home after becoming physically ill.
Roy Norris now talked nonstop in an effort to save his own skin. He also took detectives to sites where they’d dumped the corpses. The first two victims had disappeared, probably eaten by animals, but they found the skeletons of Jackie Gilliam and Leah Lamp. (They already had Shirley Ledford’s body as it had been dumped on a suburban lawn.) Jackie Gilliam’s skull still had an icepick embedded in it which backed up Norris’s account.
Bittaker and Norris were now jointly charged with five counts of murder, rape and kidnapping – but Norris testified against Bittaker in return for immunity from the death penalty. When Bittaker heard his friend’s confession on tape he was visibly shocked but told detectives that he had nothing to say to them. All that they could do for now was take him back to his cell. Whilst observing him there, they saw proof of his photographic memory for he could read and memorise an entire book in an hour. They also gave him the test that’s given to potential prison guards and he got the highest score in the history of the tests.
Norris’s sentence
Legal proceedings against Roy Norris were straightforward as he pleaded guilty. He was given forty-five years to life which he is currently serving at the Pelican Bay Maximum Security facility in California.
Bittaker’s sentence
At his trial on 5th February 1981, Lawrence Bittaker declared that Roy Norris had been the mastermind – but the tapes were played and they proved that Bittaker had been at least equally active. Incredibly, he suggested that the taped torture sessions were merely consensual rough play, in his own words ‘pillow talk’. The prosecutor broke down in tears twice whilst listening to the tapes and a female court reporter ran sobbing from the courtroom. The jury was also in tears. The only person unaffected by the tapes was Lawrence Bittaker who smiled throughout.
One torture victim had screamed ‘kill me’ and he suggested that this was sexual role-play. There was disbelieving laughter in court at his assertion and after three days of deliberation (it took this long because there were so many charges against him) the jury recommended death. The judge agreed and Lawrence Bittaker received the death sentence on 24th March 1981. Shortly afterwards he joined several other torture-killers on California’s Death Row.
The myths
The Bittaker-Norris murders are amongst the most shocking of the twentieth century, but, as with most team killing cases, they have attracted their share of myths. Several reporters have written that the victims were tortured to death on tape, creating snuff tapes. This simply isn’t true – two of the victims were kept captive for three days, yet the longest torture tape lasts for eighteen minutes. None of the actual deaths were recorded on tape. Indeed, the couple tried to hide the torture evidence by recording it in the middle of music tapes, hoping that the casual listener wouldn’t play the tapes to the end.
It’s also been said that all of the victims were hitchhikers; in other words, perfect victims. Again, this wasn’t true. Cindy Schaeffer was on her way back to her grandmother’s and vehemently refused a lift from the two men. She was portrayed in one documentary as wearing tiny shorts and a close-fitting T-shirt whereas in truth she was dressed conservatively as she was on her way home from a Christian youth group. And the youngest two victims, Jackie Gilliam and Leah Lamp, had just sat down near a bus stop to have a chat.
However the most abiding myths are about which man did what – and why…
The deadly dynamics
Over the years many crime writers have portrayed Bittaker as the strong lead and Norris as his weak and reluctant follower. Superficially Bittaker was indeed the instigator in that he wrote to Norris suggesting they meet up again and it was he who bought the van. But Norris was the one with the history of sexual assaults who, as a solo rapist, didn’t take no for an answer. Prior to meeting Bittaker, he had tried to enter a woman’s apartment by ringing her bell and asking to use the phone but she refused him. Undaunted, he then began to batter at her lounge window, carrying out this violent act in broad daylight. By now the terrified woman had phoned the police. Meanwhile Roy Norris hurried to the rear of the house and entered through her kitchen window. Thankfully the San Diego police arrived before he could carry out a sexual assault.
He showed further brutality during the rape at Redondo Beach, pouncing on a stranger in the street and using her scarf to semi-strangle her. And he’d battered a previous female victim about the head with a stone.
In contrast, Lawrence Bittaker’s criminal career was mostly theft-based though he’d hit strangers with a speeding car and had stabbed a shop assistant who tried to prevent him stealing a packet of meat.
And Roy Norris didn’t immediately confess when an ex-con told the authorities of the five murders. Instead, he initially played word games with the police. It was only when he realised they knew the full story that he confessed to being a reluctant participant – and he did so to save his own life. The police noted that he showed little emotion during these interviews, even when describing exactly what the victims had endured.
The photo that is usually shown of Norris depicts a smiling, slightly boyish looking man with receding hair and a moustache – but his prison photo shows a cold-eyed man with a grim-set mouth and a shaved head. It’s a face devoid of humanity, the face that his victims saw before they died.
Update
FBI agents John Douglas and Mary Ellen O’Toole interviewed Lawrence Bittaker at San Quentin and noted that, throughout the lengthy interview, he refused to make eye-contact with the female Special Agent. He wept when describing the crimes – but John Douglas believes that he was weeping for himself.
He continues to cost the taxpayer money, filing risible legal suits against the prison. One of his complaints was that he was given a soggy sandwich and that this constituted cruel and unusual punishment. On another occasion he sued after being given a broken cookie. As he’s entitled to legal aid, each of these lawsuits cost the state of California thousands of dollars and untold time.
Unlikely as it may seem, both men have become pin-ups for the lost and the lonely. Lawrence Bittaker (now in his sixties) occasionally signs letters to fans with his self-chosen nickname, Pliers. A gifted artist (childhood trauma often shapes creative adults), he makes and sells intricate pop-up and personalised greeting cards. Such is the demand for serial killer memorabilia that his toenail clippings were recently offered on an internet auction site. Bittaker remains bitter and cynical, offering to sell copies of his victims’ autopsy reports to the highest bidder and adding that he’ll autograph them.
Not to be outdone, a dealer acting on behalf of Roy Norris has offered clippings of his hair, his handprints and his drawings on the same auction website. Roy Norris alleges he has yet to be paid by this man. Meanwhile, he tries to persuade his fans to send him videos of commercial films which include torture scenes.
Andy Kahan, the director of a crime victims division in Texas, has written eloquently about the horrors of such murderabilia, urging ‘say no to killers making money off the innocent victims they brutally murdered.’ But so far it remains legal for serial killers to profit from their notoriety.
It’s well over twenty years since Lawrence Bittaker was sentenced to death yet he’s still alive – and enjoying games of bridge with other serial killers – in San Quentin. He continues to extract money from the gullible by telling them that he’ll memorise messages to their dead loved ones and take them over to ‘the other side.’
Meanwhile, Roy Norris continues to perpetuate the myth that he was a good guy terrorised by a bad man, proudly telling criminologists ‘I’m the one that fessed up.’ He will be eligible for parole in 2010.
2 MOTHER KNOWS BEST
FRANCES & MARC SCHREUDER
It is rare for a middle-aged mother and her teenage son to conspire to commit a murder – especially when that murder is of the woman’s septuagenarian father. But in 1978 Frances and Marc Schreuder would do just that.
Frances Bernice Schreuder
Frances was born on 6th April 1938, the fourth child of Bernice and Franklin Bradshaw. Franklin, a self-made man, had worked both hard and smart for many years so now owned thirty-one auto-part stores plus oil and gas leases. Bernice wanted them to enjoy the money but Franklin preferred to save and bought himself thrift shop clothes. He loved the Wall Street Journal but wasn’t willing to pay for it so would drive to a friend’s house once a week and collect free back copies. She wanted to travel but he preferred to work a sixteen-hour day.
Franklin was a Mormon who had located the family in Utah’s Salt Lake City. His wife was a freethinker who resented being surrounded by what she saw as a Mormon clique. They would argue, and Franklin, who hated discord, would rush off to the warehouse and not return until his wife was in bed asleep. As they rarely saw each other, the couple were reduced to writing each other acrimonious notes. Left alone most days with her equally unhappy offspring, Bernice frequently urged them to take her side rather than their absent father’s. She would later admit that she’d never wanted children and would have had all four aborted if it had been legal in those days.
Bernice had a breakdown soon after giving birth to Frances, so Frances was initially raised by one of her older sisters. She would later tell friends that she was the child that no one wanted – but her siblings felt equally cut adrift. Her older brother was diagnosed as schizophrenic and became so violent that the couple arranged for him to have a frontal lobotomy which robbed him of his personality. They put him in a state home where he was rarely visited and would die at age thirty-nine.
Frances was a prettily-dressed and intelligent child but she missed her mother. A neighbour would say that ‘her eyes never smiled’. She demanded attention from everyone she met but was never satisfied.
With hindsight, it’s clear that she was beginning to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a syndrome which develops when a child is ignored by his or her parents. Such infants have been made to feel unimportant during the early months of life and this leaves them with a strong sense of injury. They have a desperate need to be recognised, to be someone, yet they retain the emotional age of a very young child.
When her mother recovered she gave Frances gifts, probably to ameliorate the guilt she felt for not being there for her during her infancy. She hoped that Frances would become a famous child ballet dancer but Frances didn’t make the grade.
The little girl had increasingly strong mood-swings and temper tantrums. Onlookers would later say that her whole body looked as if it was crying out to be hugged and nurtured. Her mother still suffered from depression and Frances had to go to her dad’s warehouse if she wanted to see him at all.
As a teenager, she worked briefly for him before she started college and though her co-workers were impressed at the hours she worked, they also found her very domineering and somewhat strange.
Frances went off to college where she bought endless clothes and makeup and went out to bars with friends. But an incident that has never been made public occurred at college and she was suspended. The college strongly recommended that she have psychiatric treatment but her parents hated doctors and tried to play down the situation. As an adult, she (and later her sons) would have psychiatric treatment on and off for many years.
The first marriage
On 9th January 1959 Frances married an older man named Vittorio Gentile who was a pearl magnate. The couple relocated to New York. But she was increasingly jealous about any time he spent away from the home and the marriage soon became violent on both sides. He would later admit to slapping her across the face when she went into hysterical convulsions. That summer she took an overdose, the first of many suicide attempts.
Marc Schreuder
On 6th February 1960 she gave birth to her first son, Lorenzo, who would become known as Larry. Six weeks later she was pregnant again and towards the end of December gave birth to a second son, Marco, whose name would later be shortened to Marc. He was a cute little child with blonde hair – but his increasingly disturbed and hard-hitting mother ensured that he had little to smile about.
She remained deeply unhappy and her first husband would later note that she spent money like a maniac. Both parties accused the other of domestic violence and Frances convinced some of her relatives that she was a battered wife. After two and a half years of this marriage she scrawled swastikas on the walls of the marital home and fled with the children, setting them up in a new home. She didn’t work and now had no visible means of support so asked her parents to support her until the children went to school. (In reality, her parents also had to eventually fund the children’s schooling as she failed to find a job.)
Frances remained violent. She beat Larry and Marc with a belt and a hairbrush and in December 1964 she assaulted their teenage babysitter and faced legal proceedings. Her parents, who were still writing each other acrimonious notes in Salt Lake City, knew little of this.
By age four, Larry was diagnosed as having psychiatric problems and was sent to a special school. Marc looked less obviously ill – but neighbours noted that he often smelt bad as his mother hadn’t bathed him. He often bore the marks of her slapping palms and scratching nails and he was sometimes seen roaming the streets for food because he hadn’t been fed.
One of Frances’ favourite ploys was to lock both children out of the house for hours at a time. Larry sometimes slept on the landing overnight – and Marc once had to defecate on the common stairway because he was very distressed and had no access to a toilet. He would later tell a psychiatrist that he preferred it when his mother beat him as this was better than being locked out.
Frances soon noted that Marc was easier to manipulate than Larry, so at one stage she sent the latter to her parents in Salt Lake City and he lived there for six months before asking to go home as he missed his mum. He didn’t miss Marc for there was little love between the two brothers. Marc envied Larry as he seemed more capable of fending for himself during their frequent lock-outs from home.
As Marc matured, he put on weight and his nickname became Butterball. He tried to liken himself to the Incredible Hulk, but in truth he was physically weak. He was also very scruffy as his clothes were often unlaundered and unironed. It was hard to believe that he was the grandson of a multi-millionaire.
Yet he was an intelligent child who enjoyed playing chess, collecting stamps and rare coins. (Larry also collected rare coins but Frances had been known to sell them to raise money.) He grew up and went away to college, but like his mother before him, he became increasingly strange. He stole various items from his college and talked about suicide to the extent that a college friend would note that Marc was ‘notably and demonstrably insane’.
Frances’ second marriage
In February 1969 Frances married for a second time and took her new husband Fred’s surname of Schreuder. He was nine years her senior. Both Larry and Marc liked him but before long he, too, was subject to Frances’ wild mood-swings. In time, they began to have physical fights.
The family went to Brussels as Fred’s firm relocated him there but it was soon apparent that Frances’ mental illness was worsening. One night she was found wandering the streets in her nightdress threatening to commit suicide. She also spent so much money on designer clothes and jewels that he had to write to her parents asking them to financially help their daughter. Eventually Frances became so disturbed that she was admitted to a psychiatric institution for several weeks.
End of Frances’ second marriage
In April 1973, she gave birth to her third child, Lavinia Schreuder. Ten months later Frances threw her husband Fred out of their apartment. Larry was often away at school but she now kept twelve-year-old Marc with her as her special ‘friend’. She would keep him up half the night telling him about her problems. These problems were often financial but when she did have money she spent it on overpriced jewellery.
Bernice, her mother, sometimes sent gifts and cash – but Frances would keep the cash and return the gifts unused to cause upset. At times the two women wrote each other very hurtful letters. Bernice often said that she couldn’t send her youngest daughter any more money – but she always backed down and found extra cash. Her husband would find out about her largesse and be enraged as he thought Frances should give up her New York socialite lifestyle and live in Utah with him.
Marc’s life remained incredibly strange. On the one hand he was his mother’s companion and she clearly favoured him over Larry. She even took him into her bed every night for a year for companionship. On the other hand, she often beat him, locked him out and told him that he belonged in a zoo or a mental hospital, that he was worthless. Indeed she was so obviously cruel to him that the Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children became involved.
The years passed, an ugly mixture of Frances’ suicide threats, hysterical letters and emotional manipulation. She was clearly mentally ill but it seems that there was no one close enough to offer her help.
Religion
By the summer of 1977 she’d got religion and had herself baptised. That year she sent Marc and Larry to her parents in Salt Lake City and ordered them to break into their grandfather’s warehouse, forge cheques and send them back to her. As usual, she wasted the money she received, spending fifty thousand dollars on one pair of designer earrings. The illicit earnings were soon spent.
She also told them to be as cruel to their grandmother as possible. And she gave them stimulants to put in the old man’s oatmeal in the hope that he’d have a heart attack. Her father went very red in the face and rushed around more than usual whilst on these amphetamines but he was a very fit man and did not die. Still the two boys continued to create chaos in the household and Franklin became increasingly afraid of them. An onlooker would later say ‘Frances programmed this. She created these monsters.’ And Franklin’s staff felt very sorry for the old man as he’d hoped, albeit belatedly, to spend time with his family but was now even further estranged from them.
Cut out of the will
At the end of this appalling summer, it was rumoured that Franklin had cut Frances out of his will. In truth, he made notes for a new will and left them lying around the warehouse, knowing that his wife and other family members would find them and that word would get back to Frances in New York.
Word did indeed get back – but if Franklin thought it would make his youngest daughter cut back on her spending spree, he was mistaken. Instead, she began to plot to kill him, ideally before he could cut her out of his will. But even if she was formally disinherited she knew that she could benefit from his death as her mother would immediately offer financial support.
Frances tried to hire a hitman, using a male friend that she’d met in church as a go-between. But the potential hitman simply took his fee and didn’t kill her father.
Her hysteria increasing, Frances made it clear to Marc that she wanted her father – his grandfather – killed, that this was the solution to all of their problems. She rationalised that Franklin was old, that she could personally put all his money to better use. She warned him that they’d all end up homeless if her parents disowned her – did he really want the entire family to end up living on the streets? Frances added that if Marc didn’t kill Franklin she would lock him out of her life forever, just as she’d so often locked him out of her home. But he could be her special friend again if he would only buy a gun, travel to Salt Lake City, and kill the old man…
Marc, who was now living in at college, kept saying no, but his mother phoned him several times a day and would rant at him for hours. The teenager was delighted that she wanted to talk to him, but terrified by her increasingly bizarre requests. After a year of this relentless pressure, seventeen-year-old Marc agreed to shoot his grandfather dead. He travelled to Texas and bought a .357 Magnum pistol then flew onto Salt Lake City under a false name.
The murder
On 23rd July 1978 at around 7am he arrived at his grandfather’s warehouse. When the seventy-six-year-old arrived, he talked to him for fifteen to twenty minutes, asking him to provide the family with more money. When Franklin turned away for a moment, he shot the multi-millionaire once in the back. The man looked shocked as he slumped to the ground and his grandson shot him again, blowing off the lower back of his skull. Marc then went through the hard-working entrepreneur’s pockets and threw some of their contents about to make it look like a robbery.
He took a plane back to his mother’s house and told her that her father was dead. Francis allegedly exclaimed ‘Thank God!’ and kissed him and hugged him in a way that she’d never done before. She’d told him to bring the gun back with him, perhaps as a souvenir or in case she needed a weapon again in the future. She would later give the Magnum to the friend who had tried to arrange a hitman for her.
Blood money
Less than a month after her father’s death, Frances asked her mother to give her three thousand dollars a month from his estate. Her mother did so. (Two years later Bernice would buy Frances a twelve room apartment in the most sought-after district of Manhattan that cost over five hundred thousand dollars.)
Larry becomes violent
Meanwhile, various acquaintances of the family told the police to look closely at Francis and Larry as possible murder suspects. They found that Frances had been in New York at the time of the killing so couldn’t have pulled the trigger. Suspicion then fell on Larry as he’d actually been staying with Franklin and Bernice on the day that his grandfather was shot dead. But Bernice claimed that he hadn’t woken up until long after Franklin had left for the warehouse. As such, he had an alibi and the trail went cold.
But the following year (1979) Larry, who had become increasingly strange, attacked his college room-mate in the middle of the night, battering the innocent boy numerous times with a hammer. Other students heard the screams and intercepted nineteen-year-old Larry before he could leave the campus. Meanwhile his semi-conscious victim was taken to hospital where he had to have three operations on his head and a metal plate put in his skull. He was also temporarily paralysed down one side.
Larry claimed that alpha waves had made him do it – and his student friends testified that he’d become so odd during the previous months that they feared for their safety. He was diagnosed as being schizophrenic and it was found that in the past he’d suffered from ‘burnt out child reaction’ where an abused child simply can’t take any more.
Larry was full of violent hate but, instead of recognising these feelings, he projected them on to others and believed he was the one who was in danger. As such, he refused to see his room-mate as the victim and showed no remorse for the horrendous attack. He was put into psychiatric care – though at one stage he escaped and went back to his mother. She promptly phoned the police and he was recaged within hours.
Ongoing hysteria
Frances now had her wonderful upmarket home and she became a patron of the arts, giving vast sums to the New York ballet. Her daughter Lavinia showed real dancing talent and was given several significant roles. But one day Frances and Lavinia arrived very late for a public performance. As a result, the ballet had had to substitute another child dancer for Lavinia and Frances became hysterical, threatening to kill the terrified child.
Frances now worried that the net was closing in on Marc so she insisted that he leave her house. The teenager obligingly booked himself into the YMCA under a false name and spent his days watching porn at the cinema and his nights with prostitutes. He would sometimes dress scruffily and go to burger joints but at other times he invented a wealthier persona for himself, dressed up and went to upmarket restaurants. He set up a post office box where he received regular cheques from his grandmother. It was a lonely and unstructured existence, but he would later say that these months of freedom were the happiest of his life.
And indeed, mother and son would have probably gotten away with the crime if Frances hadn’t made herself a very bad enemy. The friend who had originally introduced her to a hitman had set up a joint account with her – and she’d taken his money. It was a tiny sum for her (but a lot of money for him) which she could have paid back but for some unfathomable reason she refused. He contacted her lawyers about the missing cash but they couldn’t help so he went to one of her sisters and hinted that Frances and Marc were implicated in Franklin’s death. He continued to phone the sister and eventually admitted that he was still keeping the murder weapon for Frances. The police were informed and the YMCA-based Marc Schreuder was soon tracked down.
Awaiting trial, he was suicidal as he believed he had nothing to live for. But the authorities explained that he could enrol in various educational courses from prison and his spirits revived.
Marc Schreuder’s trial
Four years after he’d shot his grandfather dead, Marc went to trial in Utah where he potentially faced death by firing squad. But the jury soon heard about the mitigating circumstances, the defence explaining that his mother was completely self-centred and that her tirades at him had lasted for days. They asked for a manslaughter charge as he’d been so repeatedly badly treated and had the emotional maturity of a child.
In turn, the prosecution noted that he’d been at college so could safely ignore her threats to make him homeless. This was true – but she still influenced him hugely, phoning for up to three hours a night, demanding that he do whatever as necessary to bring her money. Sometimes his college friends heard him crying as she berated him on the phone. She said that if he didn’t do what she wanted he couldn’t come home that summer – or ever again.
Marc had taped her ranting at Lavinia for four hours because the child didn’t understand a complex grammar lesson – and it was clear that she ranted in a similar way at Marc. A more stable teenager could perhaps have coped with such lengthy verbal onslaughts but Marc had never known stability. He was terrified of being left completely alone. It was easy for outsiders to suggest that the seventeen-year-old simply sever the connection with his mother, but she was the only parent he had and the closest thing to love that he had ever known.
That said, he was aware that he was deliberately ending the life of a man who had done him no harm, a man who had paid for much of his accommodation and schooling. And he’d shot Franklin a second time and had been sufficiently calculating to go through the dead man’s pockets and scatter items about to make it look like a robbery. The jury took all of this into consideration and on 6th July 1982 he was sentenced to five years to life.
Frances Schreuder’s trial
Meanwhile, having heard more and more about Frances’ involvement in her father’s death, the police went to her apartment to arrest her. She refused to answer the door for hours and when they did gain access they found her in bed. She said she couldn’t leave the house until she’d finished writing her poetry but they insisted she come with them and she went into another room to get dressed. There she started to climb out of the sixth floor window but the police were alerted by her daughter Lavinia’s screams and found the child desperately clinging to her leg.
Frances’ trial opened in September 1983. The main witness against her was Marc, who’d decided to testify in order to keep her away from Lavinia. The jury heard that Frances had given money to a hitman and told him where to find her grandfather. When the hitman backed down, she’d sent Marc off to buy a gun and had ranted at him so relentlessly that she knew he’d use it. She’d told him that if he didn’t kill Franklin that she would commit suicide. As she’d taken overdoses in front of him before, he knew that she was telling the truth.
Now forty-five years old, Frances opted not to take the stand in her own defence. She wore a large crucifix throughout the trial and scribbled copious notes. One witness suggested that a patron of the ballet could never encourage a murder – but more clear thinking observers noted that an appreciation of culture doesn’t necessarily make a woman incapable of inciting violence.
She was found guilty of criminal homicide, murder in the first degree on 27th September 1983. Six days later she was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Utah State Prison. There she told the authorities that she only had one son, Larry. She had clearly disowned Marc, the fate he most feared.
Sadly, the family remained divided after the trial, with Bernice saying that Frances had been a wonderful mother but that little Marc was ‘a born thief’. She blamed his and Larry’s psychiatric problems on their father – but he hadn’t seen them since they were toddlers. She was also enraged at one of her other daughters who had told the police about the gun.
By the time of the trial, Marc’s father had come back into his life and he was very glad of his support. Meanwhile Lavinia was cared for by a nursery nurse, aided by Bernice. Larry was eventually freed from psychiatric care and set up home alone.
In 1987, film star Lee Remick played Francis Schreuder in an ABC mini series called Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder. The Chicago Sun-Times noted that it was ‘a powerful characterisation of a woman trapped within a warped and steadily deteriorating mind – incapable of love and distant from reality,’ whilst Rivadue said that it was ‘steeped in psychotic grandeur.’
Asked to comment on Francis Schreuder, Lee Remick said ‘In my view, the sickness about this woman is that she was totally narcissistic. Only her needs in this world mattered.’
Frances Schreuder’s needs simply weren’t met when she was a young child, a negligence for which others paid a very heavy price.
3 FATAL ATTRACTION
ALTON COLEMAN & DEBRA BROWN
Worldwide there are proportionately probably as many black serial killers as there are white – but white killers are the ones reported on at length by a largely white media. As Pat Brown of the Sexual Homicide Exchange has written, ‘Minority serial killers in the United States more than likely exist at the same ratios as white serial killers for the population.’ And South Africa is currently experiencing an epidemic of black serial killers. But Alton Coleman and Denise Brown are unusual in being a black male/female pairing – rather than a solo operator or male duo – who killed multiple times.
Alton (Elton) Coleman
Alton was born in 1956, the third child of an alcoholic prostitute who would go on to have another two children. She alternated between rejecting him and having sex with clients when he was in the same room. Worse, she insisted he cater to those of her clients who preferred boys. He suffered this sexual abuse throughout his formative years, repressing his fear and anger, but his disturbance showed in that he regularly wet his pants. As a result, he was teased mercilessly at school by the other children until he started to rob and assault them. By puberty he was stealing cars.
He was originally christened Elton but hated the name and changed it to Alton. As he matured and began to run with a street gang, his nickname became Big Al.
His mother died when he was thirteen, by which time he was living with his grandmother in the projects. He remained deeply disturbed and regularly sexually assaulted his girlfriends. His IQ was borderline retarded and he harboured a deep hatred for almost everyone, but as he matured he hid his rage behind a charming façade. Both men and women were initially drawn to the handsome youth with the appealing manner and winning smile. It was only when he had them alone and vulnerable that he dropped his act.
At eighteen he and a male accomplice abducted a middle-aged woman, drove her out of town, robbed her and raped her. The naked woman ran screaming from the scene and bystanders swiftly called the police. But, embarrassed and frightened, she refused to testify about the rape so Coleman was only given six years on the kidnapping and robbery charge. Two years later he was released and almost immediately raped again. He was also arrested for molesting an eight-year-old relative but it’s likely that he intimidated her mother for the charges were suddenly withdrawn.
However, he was found guilty of other violent assaults and by his mid-twenties he’d spent a total of three years in prison. There, he regularly beat and sodomised younger inmates and was widely feared. He left prison and married but his wife left him after six months of sexual brutality. She had to seek police protection before she felt safe.
Coleman now raped several girls and young women but juries often found him so plausible that they returned a not guilty verdict. Other cases didn’t even go to court because Coleman intimidated the victims or the witnesses.
In 1984 – aged twenty-eight – he jumped bail charges for raping a fourteen-year-old and fled to Waukegan in Illinois where he met twenty-one-year-old Debra Brown in a Waukegan bar. He was attracted to younger women with a poor sense of their own identities so she was tailor-made for him.
Debra Denise Brown
Debra was born in November 1962 in Waukegan, Illinois, the fifth of eleven children. Hunger and poverty ruled their lives. Children from large families tend to have lower IQs than children from small families but Debra was actually diagnosed as being simple. This mild retardation may have been exacerbated by a head injury she suffered as a child.
Bored, the pretty teenager dropped out of high school and took a range of menial jobs. At home she remained exceptionally quiet. Her employers noticed that she was a passive girl who was easily led.
Yet she wasn’t entirely without free will, breaking off her engagement to a nice young man at age twenty-one when she met the outwardly more charismatic Alton. Her family begged her to reconsider but she fell quickly in love with Coleman who offered excitement with his tales of other cities and his flashy stolen cars.
They quickly moved in together and he introduced her to his increasingly violent brand of sex. She remained devoted to him even though he was often cruel to her, and she tolerated his need to dress in women’s clothing: men who’ve survived life with an abusive mother often feel the need to crossdress.
But even having this willing sex slave wasn’t enough for Coleman – he wanted to hurt and humiliate men, women and children just as he’d been hurt and humiliated himself.
The first murder
Alton and Debra befriended a Mrs Wheat and her nine-year-old daughter Vernita from Kenosha, introducing themselves with false names. On 29th May 1984 they took Vernita on an outing to nearby Waukegan. Her mother happily waved the trio off.
When they had the nine-year-old alone, Alton beat, raped and strangled her. (Her body wouldn’t be found until 19th June, dumped in a derelict building.) When the police began to investigate the child’s disappearance, Debra and Alton went on the run. She’d spend much of the next two months helping her lover to hold up and kidnap various victims for money or for sexual thrills, though, seated in the abduction car, she often stared blankly into space.
The second murder
On 17th June twenty-five-year-old Donna Williams, a beauty therapist residing in the town of Gary, became their next victim. Coleman and Brown asked her to show them her local church and she obligingly drove them in its direction. But they kidnapped her and Alton Coleman raped her and strangled her with her own tights. They drove around with her body in the boot, later dumping it in an abandoned Detroit house. (Despite an intensive search, her body wouldn’t be found until the following month.)
The third murder
On 18th June, the day after murdering Donna Williams, they killed again. Seven-year-old Tamika Turks and nine-year-old Annie were on their way back from the sweet shop when Debra and Alton stopped and offered them a ride home. (Most journalists have described the girls as cousins, but nine-year-old Annie was actually Tamika’s aunt.) The children had been warned not to go off with strange men but were happy to accept a lift when they saw Debra in the car.
But the couple drove to the nearby woods then bound and gagged the children. Tamika kept crying so Debra held her down and tried to suffocate her with her hand whilst Alton stamped on her face and chest. He raped her then strangled her to death with a strip of bedsheet that he’d brought from the house.
Both Debra and Alton now made nine-year-old Annie perform oral sex on them. Afterwards, Coleman raped and stabbed the child so viciously that her intestines protruded from her vagina. He beat her about the head, strangled her and believed that he’d killed her – but she revived after the couple had left and was able to identify them from police photographs.
