Doctors Who Kill E-Book

Carol Anne Davis

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 393

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

From Beverley Allitt, the attention-seeking nurse who preyed on the children in her care, to the infamous Dr Harold Shipman, who was responsible for the deaths of at least 218 of his patients, history has been littered with examples of healers who have done anything but. In a comprehensive study of violent crimes perpetrated by health care professionals, Davis offers valuable insights into 34 case studies involving doctors and nurses who have crossed the line from healer to killer. These in depth analyses include interviews with experts in the fields of mental health and criminology.

Leseprobe

Doctors Who Kill

Profiles of lethal medics

CAROL ANNE DAVIS

For Ian

1957 – 2009

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part One: Doctor in the House

1 Dr Richard John Sharpe

2 Dr Robert Bierenbaum

3 Dr Geza de Kaplany

4 Dr Debora Green

5 Dr Dirk Greineder

6 Dr Jonathan Nyce

7 Dr John Cavaness

8 Sinedu Tadesse

9 Virginia McGinnis

10 Edna Chubb

11 Noreen O’Conner

Part Two: Killer on the Ward

12 Colin Norris

13 Kristen Gilbert

14 Robert Diaz

Part Three: Medics in the Media

15 Dr Harold Shipman

16 Beverly Allitt

17 Charles Cullen

18 Orville Lynn Majors

Part Four: Deadly Dentists

19 Dr Samuel Perera

20 Dr Clara Harris

21 Dr Glennon Engleman

22 Dr Kenneth Taylor

Part Five: Lethal Paramedics

23 Gavin Hall

24 Kristin Rossum

25 Bruce Moilanen

26 Chante Mallard

Part Six: Paper Masks

27 John Brown

28 Dean Faiello

29 John Christie

Part Seven: Unbridled Lust

30 Francis Fahey

31 Dr Joseph Charalambous

32 Anthony Joyner

33 Dr Samson Dubria

34 Bobby Joe Long

Part Eight: Why They Kill

35 Typologies of Medical Killers

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Filmography

Index

By Carol Anne Davis

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

When I worked for Women’s Aid in the mid-Eighties, I was told that some of the most vicious wife-beaters were doctors. The literature on abused women included a lengthy confessional from a woman who had frequently been beaten by her husband, a respected British village-based GP. She said that he was revered by his staff and patients and demanded that his home life be similarly deferential, with nothing ever out of place. If a few of the children’s toys were lying around or the Sunday roast wasn’t quite ready, he would become enraged. Though he would punch and kick her with seeming abandon, he took care to aim his blows at her body rather than her face.

The woman admitted that she’d remained in the marriage because of the lifestyle that his salary afforded them and her fear of being alone, but had finally left after twenty years of fear and anguish. Later, I read similar stories from other British GPs’ wives, and, when I began to write true crime books, found that murderous American doctors and surgeons often had a similar history of perpetrating domestic violence. Many of them had been denied a fun-filled childhood, instead growing up in families where academic achievement was everything, whilst others had been mocked and beaten throughout their formative years.

Expanding on this theme, the first part of this book, Doctor in the House, profiles medics who have killed a family member or members. Most murdered their long-suffering spouses, but one female doctor attempted to murder all three of her children in an arson attack.

The second part looks at killers on the ward and is self-explanatory. Most of these murderers were desperate for attention, creating endless dramas both at home and in the hospitals where they worked. They were belatedly diagnosed with personality disorders, ranging from borderline to full-blown psychopathy. The majority were nurses, who commit most medical murders, a total of 45%. The other 55% is made up of doctors, surgeons and an array of workers in paramedical roles.

Other sections look at medics in the media, particularly intriguing cases which captured the public imagination, and paramedics who murdered their partners in order to enjoy the single life. Those of a weak disposition may want to avoid the Paper Masks section, though dental-phobics can safely read the Deadly Dentists segment as none of the surgeons killed within their surgeries.

The penultimate part, Unbridled Lust, examines those who killed their patients – or strangers – after raping or sexually assaulting them, and includes the profile of a medical technician turned serial killer who is currently on Death Row, whilst the final section examines typologies of medical killers.

PART ONE

DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

Though the medics in this section had potentially fatal drugs at their disposal, most chose to dispatch their victims by using traditional weapons – guns and knives – or even their bare hands. Unstable and controlling in their personal relationships, when challenged or faced with excessive demands, they exploded into violence.

The first seven chapters profile doctors who murdered a close relative, usually a wife but sometimes two or more of their own children. The other four chapters in this section focus on less-qualified medics who also killed in a domestic environment. These, too, were particularly brutal crimes, with the female paramedics stabbing, strangling and bludgeoning their friends in a paroxysm of rage at real and imagined slights.

1 Dr Richard John Sharpe

With his exceptional IQ and myriad skills, this doctor could have been anything that he wanted to be. Instead, he gave in to his rage with ultimately fatal results.

A terrifying childhood

Richard John Sharpe was born on the 23rd August 1954 to housewife Laura and toolmaker Benjamin in Connecticut, USA. He was their third son and, a mere fifteen months later, they had a fourth child, a girl.

Benjamin Sharpe worked long hours but he also played hard, drinking too much and running up sizeable gambling debts. At home he was a tyrant, beating his children and telling them that they were no good. He endlessly criticised his timid wife, beat his sons and even threatened Richard with a gun. Benjamin’s own father, a religious zealot with mental health problems who lived next door, committed suicide.

Early cross-dressing

Richard noticed that his sister, Laura, was the only member of the family who wasn’t beaten. Keen to become like her, he began to wear her clothes. This soon became a daily occurrence and, when he was twelve, he used money from his paper round to buy a girlish outfit of his own. With his small, slender figure and long hair, he was able to pass as a female and often went into town dressed as one.

By his early teens, he’d started to square up to his father and sometimes got the better of the older man. He also fought his corner in the playground and was aggressive in the classroom and on the street. His violence was wide ranging and he hit his mother and sister and killed several of the family pets. However, at seventeen, he showed a different side to his nature when a new girl, Karen, arrived at his high school. He wooed the sixteen-year-old with flattery and long romantic phone calls and, within months, she was expecting his child.

Fatherhood and marriage

On the last day of May 1973, Richard became a father for the first time. The couple called the baby Shannon. Karen took the child home to her parents, whilst Richard continued living with his. Almost everyone who knew them was against the match as, by now, Richard had shown repeatedly that he could be cold and arrogant. Realising that he was too controlling, Karen began a relationship with another teenager and, when Richard found out, he slapped her, after which they made up. That September they married secretly and moved into a rented flat.

Domestic violence

A week into the marriage, Richard overslept, blamed his new wife and threw an alarm clock at her. The abuse continued and he worked hard to alienate her from her family and friends. He was studying for an engineering degree and she supported him by working double shifts as a care assistant whilst also going to college part-time to train as a nurse.

By the mid-Seventies he was taking her birth control pills in order to grow breasts – this made him look even more womanly. Richard said that he hoped the pills would relieve stress, but he remained abusive and began to beat and mock their little daughter Shannon on a regular basis so that she became terrified of him. In 1978, he received his engineering degree but immediately changed path and enrolled on a medical course. He also continued to hit Karen and, in August 1979, assaulted her in front of a police officer. He was arrested but the charges were later dropped. By now he felt invincible; he beat Karen harder, leaving her with concussion, two black eyes and a broken nose. When Shannon was ten, he treated her with equal cruelty, blackening both her eyes.

Karen’s response was to keep her daughter out of school for two days, after which Richard told the ten-year-old to explain to her teacher that she had fallen downstairs. Ironically, children from middle- and upper-class homes such as the Sharpes’ are less likely to be perceived as domestic violence victims so adults tend to believe them when they say that they’ve sustained accidental injuries.

Like most abusers, Richard was determined to terrorise his spouse into staying with him, warning that he’d kill her parents and siblings (whom Karen was very close to) if she left.

Affairs

In 1985, at the age of thirty-one, Richard graduated from medical school and did a research year at a Massachusetts hospital. He then became a resident at Harvard Medical School whilst Karen continued to work in a nursing home. He had several affairs during his residency and would later allege that Karen had one too. When chatting up a new woman, he often introduced the subject of cross-dressing and showed them photos of himself in a female wig, make-up and attire. With his fine features and slender physique, he looked more feminine than most transvestites and was upset when some of his new girlfriends were repulsed and ended the relationship.

In the summer of 1990, he completed his residency and secured a highly paid job with a biotech company as a cancer researcher. He also taught part-time at medical school and studied to become a dermatologist, soon setting up a successful dermatology practice. He was often aloof with his patients and relied on Karen, now working part-time as his receptionist, to smooth over any ill feeling. She made increasing allowances for his short temper – after all, he was working eighty hours a week.

Mental health problems

Eventually, something had to give and Richard was so overworked and stressed that he fell into a near-stupor. His GP suggested he needed therapy, and he went to see a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as having clinical depression and a personality disorder. She prescribed Xanax, and he briefly felt better, then began to have stomach pains, for which he used larger and larger doses of painkillers. He also drank to give himself false energy. One weekday in April 1991, he felt so ill that he came home during the day, only to find Karen in bed with another man. Karen’s lover left, after which the couple had a fight which continued into the next morning, when he stabbed her several times in the forehead with a fork and she kneed him in the groin and bit his hand.

She and Shannon fled the house and Karen told his psychiatrist that she feared for her life. The psychiatrist phoned Richard and his speech was so slurred that she suspected he’d taken an overdose. She phoned for an ambulance and they took the by-now-unconscious doctor to hospital, where he was revived, evaluated and committed involuntarily to a psychiatric facility. When Karen visited, he threatened her, saying that he would kill her relatives unless she revised her statement, and she did just that, stating that he had never been violent. He was soon released.

Richard continued to self-medicate, abusing alcohol and using samples of several prescription tranquillisers. His mood remained volatile and, on a bad day, he’d keep patients waiting for hours, but on good days he wrote erudite scientific papers which were published in medical journals and earned him an international reputation as a skin specialist.

He continued to cross-dress and had all of his body hair removed. He also had plastic surgery to make his features even more feminine and liposuction to remove excess fat from his body. Karen took photos of him dressed as a woman and was tolerant of his increasing links to the transgender community. Dressing in female attire was supposed to make him feel more relaxed, but he was still so stressed that he worked out obsessively for six nights each week at the gym.

Further victims

Karen helped Richard out at the office whenever she had time, but he’d repay her by calling her names in front of his patients and partners. Chillingly, the Sharpes chose to bring two further children into this violent atmosphere: a son in 1992 (by then, Shannon had left home and gone to college) and a daughter in 1995. By the time their son went to school, he was exhibiting deep concern for his mother and didn’t want to leave her alone with his father for fear of what the man would do.

In 1997, the unstable but extremely hard-working doctor became a millionaire. The following year, he moved into the business of laser hair removal, setting up over a dozen successful franchises. But, by 2000, he was being threatened with a lawsuit from a rival company. Rather than risk losing everything, he transferred his house and almost three million dollars into Karen’s name; in the same time frame, she began another affair. He continued to call her names and belittle her in front of friends and family, telling her that she was ugly, fat and dumb.

The final straw came when Richard returned from an all-night party, still in female attire and make-up. Shocked that he would show this side of himself to his seven-year-old son, Karen said that she wanted a divorce. In February, she left with her two children and moved into a family suite at a hotel. Shortly afterwards, she met up with Richard at a lawyer’s office to discuss his access rights to their younger children. Both youngsters burst into tears when told that they still had to see their dad.

Like most wife-beaters, Richard fell apart when his punchbag finally left him, crying hysterically and begging Karen to reconsider. When she refused to reconcile, he sacked her from his company but failed to get his house transferred back into his name. He continued to self-medicate, and was so dazed the following month that he fell downstairs and broke his pelvis. He was hospitalised and patched up before being sent home with strong painkillers, which he added to his already sizeable daily dose of antidepressants and alcohol.

A brief reunion

Within weeks of Richard’s accident, Karen’s affair began to break down and she phoned her husband and foolishly took him back. He was ecstatic. But after four days of his strange mood swings and angry outbursts, she ordered him to leave and continued with the divorce. Richard now began to stalk her, and, in mid-May 2000, she took a restraining order out against him. Enraged, he began to plan her death and set about procuring a gun.

The murder

On 14th July 2000, 45-year-old Richard spent the evening drinking. Meanwhile, Karen, 44, was enjoying a rare night of freedom, having hired a babysitter and gone out to dinner with friends, her brother and his girlfriend. Richard phoned her mobile repeatedly throughout the evening but she refused to answer. Shortly after 11 p.m., she made her way home with her relatives.

In the same time frame, Richard took his rifle and drove to her house. He asked the babysitter if Karen was home but, before the girl could answer, Karen herself appeared in the kitchen doorway. She told him that he shouldn’t be there, and, in response, he raised his rifle and aimed it at her chest. She turned to flee and the .22 bullet ripped through her back, tearing into her lungs and severing her spinal cord. She collapsed and Richard walked calmly back to his car and drove away.

The children had been woken by the noise and their son, now aged seven, started asking if his father had hurt his mother. Karen’s brother, who had returned home with Karen after the meal, acted quickly to stem the blood and phone the emergency services, but she was beyond help.

Meanwhile, Richard drove throughout the night, eventually stopping to buy beer and a clothes line with which, he’d later say, he planned to hang himself. He booked into a hotel that was a hundred miles from the murder scene, lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

As he slept, his photograph was broadcast on television and someone phoned the police and gave them his current location. They surrounded his room, prepared for a shoot-out, but he surrendered quietly. He was arrested and returned to Massachusetts, where, to everyone’s surprise, he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder despite the fact that there were witnesses.

Shannon now went public about the abuse that she, her siblings and her mother had endured at her father’s hands. She did so to thwart Richard Sharpe, who was demanding that he have visits from his youngest children, despite the fact that they were terrified of him.

A suicide attempt

Richard now attempted suicide by swallowing a phial of medicine whilst being treated in hospital, but the medication was merely a vaccine, which didn’t put his well-being at risk. He swallowed the liquid in full view of a nurse and a prison officer, suggesting that he was posturing rather than seriously trying to take his own life. He repeatedly made threatening phone calls to his daughter Shannon’s answering machine (calls which she never returned) until the prison put him into an isolation unit as a punishment.

Court

The trial, held in November 2001, contained few surprises. Karen’s babysitter testified that Richard had entered the house and shot his wife. The jury also got to hear the 911 call in which Karen’s understandably traumatised brother said that Richard Sharpe was the person who had fired the gun.

Richard’s siblings spoke movingly about the numerous times he’d been physically assaulted and emotionally abused by their father, about how he’d turned from a good kid into an aggressive and violent teenager. Richard’s sister Laura admitted that he had terrorised her throughout their childhood and she was so afraid that he would kill her during the night that she put a total of ten locks on her bedroom door.

The doctor took the stand in his own defence and described the stresses that he had endured in the weeks leading up to the murder. He’d been separated from his wife and children, had broken his pelvis and endured other health problems, was being threatened with a lawsuit at work and was jealous that Karen was dating another man. He admitted to taking five or six prescription drugs on the day of the shooting and to also drinking alcohol. As is typical with such killers, he used the passive voice when talking about the homicide, saying ‘The gun went off,’ rather than the more honest ‘I fired the gun.’

The defence psychiatrist took the stand and described Richard’s mental disorders, which ranged from borderline personality to clinical depression. He noted that his client lacked a sense of identity, was unable even to decide if he wanted to be male or female. He described the various plastic surgeries that Richard had submitted to as further proof that the man was deeply confused. The prosecution’s psychiatrist concurred that the doctor probably had a personality disorder but said that he was not insane. After all, he’d gone calmly to the house and asked for Karen, had driven away after he’d shot her, got rid of the weapon and bought beer and a rope before booking himself into a hotel.

Verdict

The jury agreed with the prosecution and soon returned with a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. Later that week he was sentenced to a life of hard labour at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution. He broke down, screaming ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ but many people who knew him believed that he was crying for himself.

Further mayhem

The following spring, Richard was found guilty of offering a sizeable sum to a fellow inmate to kill the assistant district attorney, who he blamed for his life sentence. Richard was put into solitary confinement as a punishment, but tried to hang himself with his shoelaces and was transferred to Bridgewater State Mental Hospital. When he revived, he contemplated having a sex change so that he could be moved to a women’s prison.

On 5th January 2009, Richard Sharpe waited until his cellmate was in another part of the prison, then he wound his bed sheet around the top bunk, looped it around his neck and hanged himself. He was found within the hour and rushed to hospital where he was formally pronounced dead. 

2 Dr Robert Bierenbaum

Though a previous incidence of domestic violence and cruelty to animals put this surgeon in the frame when his wife suddenly disappeared, there is no physical proof linking him to her most-likely violent death.

The child prodigy

Robert was born on the 22nd July 1955 to Netta and Marvin Bierenbaum. Marvin was a doctor and Netta worked as his receptionist. They were very proud of Robert’s high IQ and almost photographic memory which ensured that he got outstanding exam results. His sister was also brilliant and went on to become a successful psychiatrist.

In high school, Robert – who liked to be called Bob – excelled at judo, skiing and various other sports. At seventeen he went to college and in 1977 he graduated with a degree in medicine, taking an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. By then he had already earned his pilot’s licence so spent many evenings and weekends flying a single-engine plane. Though supremely talented he had comparatively few social skills and many people found him blunt to the point of rudeness. He also had a penetrating stare that made many of his peers uncomfortable, though some women appreciated his intensity.

Cruelty to animals

At work, Bob found himself attracted to another young physician and they dated and got engaged, but were both working 120-hour weeks and had little time to socialise. Soon the young woman had second thoughts and broke off the engagement. Bob was enraged and let himself into her apartment when she was out in order to strangle her cat.

Marriage

By his mid-twenties Bob was chief of coronary care at Mount Sinai, a remarkable achievement for one so young. During a rare night off in 1980, he met Gail Beth Katz at a mutual friend’s house. She was an attractive young woman with a history of self-harming who had taken an overdose at age 23 after a boyfriend finished with her. Bob was an academic whilst Gail had dropped out of college, but there was an undeniable sexual attraction between them and they were both Jewish, a shared religion which was important to them. At first they appeared to be in love, but Gail was soon dropping hints to friends that Bob wasn’t in touch with his emotional side, that he wasn’t her type. However, her mother had always wanted her to marry a Jewish doctor and Gail herself seemed enamoured of the lifestyle that she could eventually enjoy as a surgeon’s wife.

They planned a lavish wedding for August 1982 but, days before, she phoned her sister in distress saying that Bob had become jealous of her kitten and had tried to drown it in the toilet bowl. The animal was terrified of him so Gail’s sister took it to an animal shelter to be re-homed. Even after this incident, Gail insisted on going ahead with the wedding, saying that she could make Bob happy and that, in turn, he’d support her when she returned to university.

After marrying in a Manhattan synagogue and honeymooning in Greece (Bob would remain involved with the synagogue and would later study Hebrew), the couple settled down to married life in New Jersey. Gail enrolled on a Psychology course, telling one of her fellow students that Bob had threatened to kill her if she ever left him. Fortunately, their work and college schedules kept them apart for most of the week, but they fought loudly every Sunday when they were both at home. Gail wanted Bob to pay her attention and to socialise, but he was working so hard that he needed to be able to come home and relax. Incensed at his apparent lack of interest in her, she began to have affairs.

One night in November 1983, she was sitting on the balcony of their home and having a clandestine cigarette, having told her husband that she’d given up: she knew that he detested smoking. But he came home unexpectedly and was so angry that he strangled her into unconsciousness. The following day, she left him and, four days later, she finally reported the incident to the police.

Bob himself was so concerned about this violent incident that he went to see a therapist. The psychiatrist, in turn, was so perturbed by what she heard that she phoned Gail in Bob’s presence and warned her that he was dangerous. She referred Bob to another psychiatrist who also phoned Gail to warn her. A third psychiatrist, Dr Michael Stone, talked to Bob, and the surgeon admitted partially strangling Gail’s kitten and strangling his former fiancée’s cat to death. He showed no remorse for these acts and the psychiatrist feared that he was in the presence of a psychopath. He met Gail and quickly realised that she showed the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, and that she was a perfect victim. People with this condition fear abandonment yet also enjoy risk-taking and often indulge in self-destructive behaviour. Try as he might, Dr Stone couldn’t persuade her to leave Bob.

Determined to have his advice on the record, the psychiatrist wrote a registered letter to Gail, suggesting that it was hazardous for her to live with her husband at this time and for the foreseeable future. She showed it to Bob then put it into a bank safety deposit box. Dr Michael Stone would also allege that he warned Bob’s parents their son was dangerous.

A brief hiatus

The couple went into therapy with another doctor, which briefly improved their ability to communicate with each other. But, in what was surely the triumph of hope over experience, Gail brought home another two cats. Soon the shouting matches resumed and Bob told a friend that Gail made him so angry that he wanted to murder her. Meanwhile, Gail began yet another affair.

After one fight too many, she played her hand, telling him that she wanted a divorce and that he’d have to give her half of his salary for as long as she remained single. When Bob understandably objected to this, she threatened to show Dr Michael Stone’s letter to his boss and to any other hospital that he might apply to in the future for a job. His brilliant career would be over before it had fully begun.

The couple eventually went to bed on the Saturday night and, the following morning, on Sunday, 7th July 1985, they resumed fighting. Neighbours heard both of them shouting followed by a loud bang. That day, Gail didn’t leave the apartment as she usually did, something that the doorman would later testify to. In fact, she was never seen again.

Later that same day, Bob left the house, drove to the airport and rented a Cessna. Soon he was flying over the Wanaque Reservoir and on to the ocean. That night, he called in at a friend’s house and said that Gail had left him after a fight. When he got home he phoned his mother-in-law and said that Gail was missing but didn’t report this to the police, instead cleaning the apartment until the early hours, disturbing neighbours by dragging the furniture about.

On the Monday, Bob reported his wife’s disappearance to the authorities and they visited the apartment to find that Gail hadn’t taken any money or credit cards, unthinkable for a woman who loved to go shopping. She’d also left behind her cigarettes and her keys. Questioned by detectives about his movements on the day that his wife had disappeared, the surgeon lied and said that he’d been home alone until the evening. He refused on two occasions to take a lie detector test. Police were convinced that he’d murdered Gail, as were her friends and family.

Whilst still under suspicion, Bob changed his flight log so that it appeared that he hadn’t flown on the 7th July but on the 8th. He also altered the records to state that he’d made several short flight checks rather than one longer flight.

He almost immediately began to date two women – who didn’t know about each other’s existence – and two months after Gail disappeared, he moved one of them into the marital home. She was worried that Gail might return, but Bob seemed unconcerned. Indeed, when detectives phoned him one night to say that they’d found a body that might be Gail, he asked if he could go back to sleep and identify it the following day. Bob clarified that the body wasn’t Gail’s. His girlfriend noticed that he was kind to Gail’s two cats and that he kept her possessions, including personal items such as her diary.

No charges

Bob was upset on the occasions when one of his heart patients died, so he decided to move into plastic surgery, which had a lower mortality rate, and was soon specialising in breast reconstruction for women who had survived breast cancer. Meanwhile, police closed down the investigation into Gail’s disappearance, telling her family that they were convinced the doctor had murdered her but they didn’t believe they had enough evidence to win the case.

The wrong body

In May 1989, police at Staten Island fished a badly decomposed female torso from the water. The head, arms and legs had been cut off, ruling out a suicide, and the sternum had once been broken but had healed. Gail Katz had never broken this bone prior to her disappearance, yet the city identified the body as hers and her parents gave the torso a full Jewish funeral and Bob sat shiva at his parents’ house for a week.

A new life

Bob Bierenbaum was now in his prime. He moved to Las Vegas, established a private plastic surgery practice and dated several beautiful women. He got himself another cat and appeared to dote on it. He told some of his girlfriends that he’d never been married but told others that Gail had probably been killed by a drug dealer or had committed suicide.

He also joined the Flying Doctors of Mercy and flew down to Mexico at least four times a year at his own expense to help children with cleft palates – the uneducated community believed that this disfigurement meant that these unfortunate youngsters were possessed by the devil, so they were ostracised and suffered terribly. Bob performed corrective surgeries on them so that they enjoyed good health and were no longer pilloried. The parents loved him and referred to him as being ‘like a saviour’. Fluent in five languages, Bob could communicate well with his patients and was very good at reassuring them.

During this time, his relationships with women continued to falter and he had three broken engagements. Some felt that he was trying to rush them into marriage as, by now, he longed to be a father. He was good with other people’s children and wanted to start a family before he reached his fortieth birthday.

Sleepless in Seattle

In 1993, Dr Michael Stone arrived in Seattle to address a psychiatric convention. He spoke about Gail Katz Bierenbaum’s disappearance and about her dangerous husband. Even though he used false names, one of the women in the auditorium had known Gail and recognised her story. Afterwards, she apparently told Dr Stone that she had seen blood on a rug in the Bierenbaums’ apartment the day after Gail’s disappearance, and that the rug had disappeared shortly afterwards.

A second marriage

Oblivious that he was still being talked about, Bob continued to work and play hard. In 1993, he met a female gynaecologist, Dr Janet Chollett, and they began dating. Three months later they got engaged and, the following summer, they married in New York. The couple moved to Dakota and resumed their medical careers, Janet delivering babies whilst Bob performed breast reconstruction surgery. In November 1996 they had their first child, a girl. Bob became a stay-at-home father whilst Janet, who wanted a change from medicine, enrolled in a Law school two hundred miles away. The couple rarely saw each other for a while and Bob often slept on a fold-out bed next to his aeroplane rather than go home. When he returned to work they hired a nanny, Bob taking especial care to recruit a non-smoker. His hatred of cigarettes was well known in the community and at work, where he sometimes refused to treat patients who smoked.

The years passed and Bob remained devoted to his second wife, his daughter and his patients. But, unbeknown to him, his time as a free man was running out. The authorities were looking at his case for the third time and, in 1998, decided to exhume the body that had been buried nine years previously as Gail Katz. Using improved DNA techniques they were able to prove conclusively that the torso belonged to another young woman, a Jane Doe.

Detectives reinterviewed Dr Michael Stone, and he told them about the woman who had approached him at the seminar and said that she’d seen blood on the rug in Bob and Gail’s apartment. The police then interviewed her, but she said that she’d only heard a rumour about the blood and hadn’t seen it with her own eyes – but she had seen the red marks on Gail’s neck after Bob had strangled her unconscious in 1983. She’d been so alarmed that she’d given Gail a cheque as the deposit for a new apartment, but Gail had decided to remain with Bob.

Police also interviewed some of the women that Bob had dated after Gail’s disappearance and one of them told the detectives about finding the altered flight log. The following year – fourteen years after Gail’s disappearance – he was indicted by a grand jury in New York.

Out on bail, Bob discussed his future with Janet. Both were convinced that he would be found not guilty, after which they might relocate to Mexico where he could continue his work with disfigured children. They also wanted to have a second child.

Dr Michael Stone testified at the hearing, recounting how alarmed he was by Bob’s behaviour and saying that he’d spoken to Bob’s parents about the situation at the end of November 1983. But Marvin Bierenbaum was able to prove that he was in a medical conference in Taiwan at this time, and Netta Bierenbaum swore under oath that she was ill with influenza. The prosecution had to admit that the psychiatrist’s dates might be wrong.

However, they were adamant about many other details: Bob had choked Gail on a previous occasion after finding her smoking a cigarette. They’d argued yet again on the day of her disappearance, after which he’d lied to people that the doorman had seen her leave the building. He had also lied in telling detectives that he was home all day when he’d actually been out flying, and had later altered the flight log to suggest that he’d used the plane on a different date.

The defence countered that Gail had been seen at a restaurant an hour or two after her supposed death and they produced a stranger who had allegedly ogled her from a nearby table. But he described her as ‘statuesque’, whereas Gail was short and slim.

A doctor for the prosecution testified that Gail’s body would easily have folded at the waist and could have been stuffed into a bag in her apartment. The authorities had already ascertained that a bag with a 110 lb weight inside could be thrown from a small plane, so they alleged that Bob could easily have dumped his wife’s body into the Atlantic, where it might never be found.

In their summary, the defence said that Gail had had several lovers and that at least one of them had never been identified, and that she occasionally used recreational drugs and could have been killed by a drug dealer. Her body might have remained hidden or she might have been wrongly buried under another name or in an unmarked grave.

Without a body, the case against Bob Bierenbaum was purely circumstantial yet the jury took less than six hours to return with a guilty verdict. Bob paled and looked deeply shocked. When he returned for sentencing, he was given twenty years to life. He appealed but his conviction was upheld in 2002. He will become eligible for parole in August 2020. 

3 Dr Geza de Kaplany

Although this murder took place back in 1962, this doctor’s crime still bears retelling as one of the most shocking in recent history.

Early terror

Geza was born on 27th June 1926 in Mako, Hungary. He and his two brothers were regularly beaten by their aristocratic father and, during one particularly severe thrashing, the little boy lost an eye. The father, purportedly a wealthy baron, died when Geza was twelve years old.

Geza went to the University of Szeged to study Medicine and graduated in 1951 with honours. An arrogant young man, he went on to specialise in heart complaints, but his politics differed from that of the ruling elite and he fled to America in 1956, initially settling in Boston. He planned to practise cardiology there and was enraged to find that his qualifications weren’t recognised. Instead, he had to retrain as an anaesthesiologist.

The good-looking and wealthy doctor took a post at a Californian hospital and wasted no time in seducing American women, but was dismayed when one of his conquests, a Swedish bank clerk called Ruth Krueger, became pregnant. He persuaded her to go home to have the baby, saying that he had taken out an insurance policy to support her and their child. However, when she was safely abroad, he changed the policy to name his mother as his beneficiary. He also sought spiritual back-up for his actions and was given this by a priest who told him that he shouldn’t marry Ruth as she was a Protestant and he was a Catholic.

With Ruth safely out of the way, Dr de Kaplany seduced five other women, including several of the nurses at San Jose Hospital where he worked. One girl agreed to go skiing with him but was shocked to find that he’d booked them a double room at the Yosemite ski resort. When she refused to sleep with him he abandoned her, knowing that she had no transport of her own. He appeared to be completely self-centred, lacked empathy and expected women to obey his every whim.

In the summer of 1962, Geza met a former beauty queen and fellow Hungarian, Hajna Piller. Her social-climber mother was delighted when the couple started dating and enjoyed a whirlwind romance. Hajna already had a boyfriend, a Hungarian engineer with whom she was in love, but her widowed mother insisted that she marry the aristocrat. Hajna acquiesced to keep the peace, but kept seeing her boyfriend on the side. She had met Geza in June 1962 and married him that August. She was a young and liberal 25-year-old whilst he was old-fashioned and 11 years her senior. Though Geza intended to keep sleeping with other people, he didn’t expect his wife to do the same…

Revenge

Just three weeks into the marriage, a woman who was in love with the doctor told him that Hajna was still seeing her engineer boyfriend. Geza was apoplectic. The following day he went to see an attorney and said that he wanted a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery and that he had no intention of paying alimony, but the attorney replied that he needed proof of his wife’s behaviour, not hearsay. He added that the couple could eventually divorce quietly, that no one need know the details of why they broke up.

Geza would later tell police that he went home and played the conversation over and over in his mind. He didn’t want his adulterous wife to get off scot-free – he wanted her to suffer. Making his way to the hospital lab, he prepared a potion that would wreak the ultimate revenge.

An agonising death

Back at his flat, Geza pretended that he wanted to make love to Hajna, but, when she was naked, he tied her to the bed, spreadeagled on her back, before putting their stereo on full blast and donning a rubber apron to protect himself. Taking a scalpel, he made numerous cuts to her face, breasts and genitals until they were hideously disfigured. He then dabbed the acids that he had brought home from the hospital into the wounds. He warned the writhing and terrified woman not to make a sound on pain of death.

Soon, Hajna’s horrific shrieks could be heard above the ear-splitting music and alarmed neighbours phoned the police, who arrived to find that large sections of her flesh had been dissolved away by the mixture of nitric, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids. One of the paramedics who tried to lift her had to be treated for acid burns. Hajna, her face unrecognisable and parts of her chest and genitalia eaten away, spent an agonising month in hospital before she died.

The doctor went on trial the following year. His lawyers wanted him to plead insanity but Geza said that he’d known exactly what he was doing, that he’d deliberately defaced his wife so that no other man would ever want her. He then insisted that photos of her injuries could not be shown in court. When he was overruled on this, he raced across the courtroom and grabbed at the offending photos, shrieking ‘If I did this, I must be mad.’ He subsequently claimed that he wasn’t responsible due to having a split personality and the defence suggested that he’d been possessed by a demon with the somewhat exotic moniker Pierre La Roche. The prosecution was more rational and said that Geza was a jealous husband who wanted revenge.

A psychiatrist claimed that Geza de Kaplany had become a paranoid schizophrenic during his abusive childhood and, taking this into consideration, the jury opted for life imprisonment rather than the gas chamber. Immediately after the trial he was allowed to appear at a press conference, at which he said, ‘I realise the awful weight of that tragedy, but I do not feel any responsibility. I was crushed by forces over which I had no control.’ The remorseless doctor, a man who had always treated women with the utmost disdain, began serving his sentence in an American jail.

Then in 1975, six months before he was officially due for parole consideration, the Taiwanese government said that they urgently needed cardiac skills such as Geza possessed, and he was flown out there as a medical missionary. Shortly afterwards, he made a public statement saying that the Californian parole board no longer had jurisdiction over him, after which he disappeared. By 1980 he was working at a hospital in Munich but, when his sadistic crime became known, he was fired.

In 2002, a Californian newspaper tracked him down to Germany, where he was living quietly with his second wife.

The septuagenarian is now a naturalised German citizen and therefore he cannot be extradited for his 1975 parole violation, much to the disgust of Hajna Piller’s surviving family and friends.

4 Dr Debora Green

Did this doctor kill her children because she wanted to return to the single life or because she wanted to hurt her ex-husband? Though the evidence against her was overwhelming, she refused to admit her guilt.

A studious life

Debora was born on the 28th February 1951 to Joan and Robert Jones in Illinois. She was their second daughter. Joan kept house and Robert initially drove a van for a bakery, though he later worked his way up to management level.

Joan had been an exemplary student and was determined that her daughters would fare equally well, so she stressed the importance of scholastic accomplishment. Fortunately, the girls had high IQs. Debora excelled in everything that she attempted, from playing an instrument to learning a second language. She was also an athletic cheerleader, slender and with seemingly boundless energy.

Debora graduated valedictorian from school and did equally well at the local university, where she studied Chemistry. She wanted to be a chemical engineer but, when she heard that there were few job vacancies, switched to medical school. She was accepted at the University of Kansas but showed less talent for medicine than she had for engineering. She also had difficulty in maintaining a relationship and had a short-lived marriage to an engineer during these student years. He would later say that she put little effort into the marriage and that she could be very cold. Her first medical jobs also failed to satisfy her as she found working in A&E boring, and, when she switched to oncology, she became too upset when her patients died.

The seemingly confident schoolgirl was now metamorphosing into an increasingly anxious young woman. Whilst she’d excelled academically, she struggled to cope with the real world and her patients found her uncommunicative and aloof. She also tended to be passive-aggressive rather than saying what was really on her mind.

Second marriage

By 1977, Debora was single again, solvent and working in a Missouri hospital as a resident doctor. She dated lots of men but became increasingly fond of Mike Farrar, a medical student in his final year. He was twenty, handsome and stable whilst Debora was twenty-four but deeply insecure. He noticed that she flew into rages but put this down to the long hours she was working. Despite his doubts, they married on 26th May 1979.

The next two years were difficult as Debora suffered from frequent migraines and also needed to take sedatives in order to sleep. Later, they moved to Cincinnati as Mike got a job there. In January 1982 they had their first child, Tim. Within six weeks, Deborah hired a nanny and started a fellowship, studying haematology at the local university. Two years later they had a daughter, Lissa, and, again, she swiftly returned to work.