Serial Killers Joe Ball The Butcher Of Elmendorf Documentary
Joseph D. (Joe) Ball (January 7, 1896[2] – September 24, 1938)[1] was an American serial killer, sometimes referred to as "The Alligator Man",[3] the "Butcher of Elmendorf"[4] and the "Bluebeard[3] of South Texas". He is known to have killed two and is said to have killed as many as 20 women in the 1930s. His existence was long believed to be apocryphal, but he is a familiar figure in Texas folklore.
Background[edit]
After serving on the front lines in Europe during World War I, Ball started his career as a bootlegger, providing illegal liquor to those who could pay. After the end of Prohibition, he opened a saloon called the Sociable Inn in Elmendorf, Texas. He built a pond that contained six alligators because he misunderstood the term corpus delicti, believing that a murder conviction without a body would be impossible.[citation needed] He charged people to view them, especially during feeding time; the food consisted mostly of live cats and dogs.[4]
Murders[edit]
After a while, women in the area were reported missing, including barmaids, former girlfriends and his wife. When two Bexar County sheriff's deputies went to question him in 1938, Ball pulled a handgun from his cash register and killed himself[3] with a bullet through the heart (some sources report that he shot himself in the head).
A handyman who conspired with Ball, Clifford Wheeler, admitted to helping Ball dispose of the bodies of two of the women he had killed.[3] Wheeler led them to the remains of Hazel Brown and Minnie Gotthard. Wheeler told authorities that Ball murdered at least 20 other women, but the alligators had disposed of any evidence. There has never been any concrete evidence that the alligators actually ate any of his victims.
There were few written sources from the era which could verify Ball's crimes. Newspaper editor Michael Hall investigated the story in depth in 2002, and wrote on his findings for Texas Monthly.[4]
Serial Killers Johann Unterweger The Vienna Strangler Documentary
Johann "Jack" Unterweger(16 August 1950 – 29 June 1994) was an Austrian serial killer who murdered prostitutes in several countries. First convicted of a 1974 murder, he was released in 1990 as an example of rehabilitation. He became a journalist and minor celebrity, but within months started killing again. He committed suicide following a conviction for several murders. Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Reinhard Haller diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder in 1994.[1]
Early life[edit]
Unterweger was born in 1950 to Theresia Unterweger, a Viennese barmaid and waitress, and an unknown American soldier whom she met in Trieste.[2] Some sources describe his mother as a prostitute.[3] His mother was jailed for fraud while pregnant but was released and travelled to Graz where he was born. In 1953, his mother was again arrested and he was sent to Carinthia in southern Austria to live with his grandfather, whom he described as a violent alcoholic.[citation needed]
He was in and out of prison during his youth for petty crimes, and for assaulting a local prostitute. Between 1966 and 1975 he was convicted 16 times, mostly for sexual assault and spent most of those nine years in jail.[4] In 1974, Unterweger murdered 18-year-old German Margaret Schäfer by strangling her with her own bra, and in 1976 was arrested and sentenced to life in prison with no parole option for 15 years. While in prison, Unterweger became an author of short stories, poems, plays, and an autobiography, Fegefeuer oder die Reise ins Zuchthaus (Purgatory or the trip to prison), which was adapted into a motion picture.
In 1985, a campaign to pardon and release Unterweger from prison was undertaken. President Rudolf Kirchschläger refused the petition when presented to him, stating that Unterweger must spend the court-mandated minimum of 15 years in prison.[2] The campaign gathered momentum among the Viennese cafe intellectuals,[5] Vienna’s radical-chic set, writers, artists, journalists and politicians who agitated for a pardon,[6] including the author and 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass,[5] Peter Huemer[7] and the editor of the magazine Manuskripte, Alfred Kolleritsch.[6] He was released on 23 May 1990, after the required minimum 15 years of his life term. Upon his release, Unterweger's autobiography Fegefeuer oder die Reise ins Zuchthaus was taught in schools and his stories for children were performed on the radio. Unterweger himself hosted television programs which discussed criminal rehabilitation, and he reported as a journalist for the state broadcaster ORF (Austria's equivalent of the BBC), including reporting stories concerning the very murders for which he was later found guilty.[5][6]
Murders[edit]
Law enforcement later found that Unterweger killed prostitute in Czechoslovakia[8] and six more in Austria in 1990, the first year after his release. In 1991, Unterweger was hired by an Austrian magazine to write about crime in Los Angeles, California, and the differences between U.S. and European attitudes to prostitution. Unterweger met with local police, even going so far as to participate in a ride-along of the city's red light districts. During Unterweger's time in Los Angeles, three prostitutes — Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez, and Sherri Ann Long — were beaten, sexually assaulted with tree branches, and strangled with their own brassieres.
In Austria, Unterweger was suggested as a suspect for the prostitute murders. In the absence of other suspects, the police took a serious look at Unterweger and kept him under surveillance until he went to the U.S. — ostensibly as a reporter — observing nothing to connect him with the murders.
Arrest[edit]
Law enforcement eventually had enough evidence for his arrest, but Unterweger was gone by the time they entered his home. After law enforcement chased him through Europe, Canada and the U.S., he was finally arrested by the FBI in Miami, Florida, on 27 February 1992. While a fugitive, he had called the Austrian media to try to convince them of his innocence. Back in Austria, Unterweger was charged with 11 homicides, one of which had occurred in Prague.
That night, he committed suicide at Graz-Karlau Prison by hanging himself with a rope made from shoelaces and a cord from the trousers of a track suit.[9] He is reported to have used an intricate knot identical to that used on the murdered prostitutes. Because he died before he could appeal the verdict, under a technicality of Austrian law, Unterweger is officially to be considered as innocent, despite the original guilty verdict; Unterweger's case was one of those considered in a review of this Austrian legal principle.
Dramatizations[edit]
In a 2008 performance, actor John Malkovich portrayed Unterweger's life in a performance for one actor, two sopranos, and period orchestra entitled Seduction and Despair, which premiered at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica, CA.[10] A fully staged version of the production, entitled The Infernal Comedy premiered in Vienna in July 2009. The show has since been performed throughout Europe, North America and South America.[11] In 2015 Elisabeth Scharang directed a film called Jack about Unterweger.[12]
Television[edit]
The story of the police investigation, pursuit and prosecution of Unterweger is the subject of an episode of The FBI Files entitled "Killer Abroad" (Season 2, Episode 14). He is also the subject of an episode of Biography entitled "Poet of Death."
Allan Legere (born February 13, 1948) is a Canadian serial killer and arsonist, also known as the Monster of the Miramichi, in reference to a reign of terror he inflicted upon residents of the Miramichi River valley of New Brunswick in 1989.
Legere was convicted in the murder of shopkeeper John Glendenning, of Black River Bridge, New Brunswick, which occurred on the evening of June 21, 1986.[1] After cutting the power, Legere and his accomplices Todd Matchett and Scott Curtis, broke into the elderly couple's store. After repeatedly beating John and his wife Mary, the trio fled the scene. Mary then discovered her husband (who had been beaten to death); she crawled up the stairs to the phone and dialed 911. The dispatcher spoke with Mary on the phone until the emergency forces arrived. Police tracked down the three and arrested them. Matchett pleaded guilty to murdering John Glendenning and brutally beating his wife Mary; Curtis and Legere were convicted at trial.[2]
Trial and escape[edit]
Legere was serving his murder sentence at the Atlantic Institution maximum security penitentiary in Renous-Quarryville, under the responsibility of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). On May 3, 1989, Legere was transported by CSC personnel from the penitentiary to the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre[3] in Moncton, New Brunswick, for the treatment of an ear infection. Legere managed to convince the CSC personnel to let him use a washroom at the hospital alone, and there he picked the lock on his handcuffs with a homemade key he had hidden in a cigar. He then used a piece of television antenna that he had concealed on his body as a weapon, and held the officers at bay before fleeing the building. Legere escaped the hospital property and through a combination of carjacking and motor vehicle theft, was able to evade recapture.
More murders and eventual capture[edit]
Legere was at large for a period of seven months and during this time committed four additional murders in and around the towns of Chatham, New Brunswick, and Newcastle, New Brunswick, and adjoining communities (now part of the city of Miramichi). The individuals he murdered were Annie Flam (May 29, 1989; during this incident, Flam's sister was also assaulted); sisters Linda and Donna Daughney (October 13, 1989; Legere set fire to the Daughney home before leaving), and Father James Smith (November 24, 1989).[4] Legere was recaptured on November 24, 1989 following a failed carjacking that began in Saint John, New Brunswick, and ended outside Rogersville, New Brunswick; rewards of $50,000 were collected for the information that led to his arrest.
Conviction[edit]
In August 1990, Legere was convicted on charges pertaining to his escape, and sentenced to an additional nine years.[4] His trial for the murders began with an indictment in November of that year. Legere's trial featured the first Canadian uses of DNA fingerprinting to convict rather than exonerate;[5] in November 1991, Legere was convicted of the murders committed while he had been at large.[4]
Present[edit]
As of 2011, Legere was held in Canada's only Super-Maximum security penitentiary, nicknamed the "SHU", in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec.[6]
In 1996, the city of Fredericton shut down its old jail, and in 1999 the building was repurposed into a science museum; the cell in which Legere was held during his 1991 trial is now used for an exhibit on DNA fingerprinting.[7]
John Edward Robinson (born December 27, 1943) is a convicted serial killer, con man, embezzler, kidnapper, and forger who was found guilty in 2003 of three murders and received the death sentence for two of them. He subsequently admitted responsibility for five additional homicides, and investigators fear that there might be other, undiscovered victims as well.[1]
Because he made contact with most of his post-1993 victims via on-line chat rooms, he is sometimes referred to as "the Internet's first serial killer".[2]
Early life
Robinson was born in Cicero, Illinois, the third of five children of an alcoholic father and a disciplinarian mother.[2]:4 In 1957 he became an Eagle Scout, and reportedly traveled to London with a group of Scouts who performed before Queen Elizabeth II. Later that year he enrolled at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago, a private boys' school for aspiring priests, but dropped out after one year due to disciplinary issues.[3]
In 1961 he enrolled at Morton Junior College in Cicero to become a medical X-ray technician, but dropped out after two years. In 1964 he moved to Kansas City and married Nancy Jo Lynch, who bore their first child, John Jr., in 1965, followed by a daughter, Kimberly, in 1967, and twins Christopher and Christine in 1971.
Early crimes
Robinson was arrested for the first time in Kansas City in 1969, after embezzling $33,000 from the medical practice of Dr. Wallace Graham, where he worked as an X-ray technician, a job he obtained using forged credentials. He was sentenced to three years' probation.[3]
In 1970 Robinson violated probation by moving back to Chicago without his probation officer's permission, and took a job as an insurance salesman at the R.B. Jones Company. In 1971 he was arrested once again for embezzling firm funds and ordered back to Kansas City, where his probation was extended. In 1975 it was extended again after another arrest, this time on charges of securities fraud and mail fraud in connection with a phony "medical consulting" company he had formed in Kansas City.
During this period, Robinson cultivated and maintained the outward appearance of a community-minded citizen and family man; he became a Scoutmaster, a baseball coach and a Sunday school teacher. In 1977 he talked his way onto the board of directors of a local charitable organization and forged a series of letters from its executive director to the mayor of Kansas City, and from the mayor to other civic leaders, commending his generous volunteer efforts and generally singing his praises. Eventually he had himself named the organization's Man of the Year, and threw a festive awards luncheon in his own honor.[3]
In 1979 Robinson finally completed probation; but in 1980 he was arrested again on multiple charges, including embezzlement and check forgery, for which he served 60 days in jail in 1982. After his release he formed a bogus hydroponics business and swindled $25,000 from a friend whom he promised a fast investment return to pay for his dying wife's health care.[2]:4 At this time he reportedly began sexually propositioning his neighbors’ wives, triggering a fistfight with one of the husbands. He also claimed to have joined a secret sadomasochism cult called the International Council of Masters, and to have become its “Slavemaster”, whose duties included luring victims to gatherings to be tortured and raped by cult members.[3]
Murders begin[edit]
In 1984, having started two more fraudulent shell companies (Equi-Plus and Equi-2), Robinson hired Paula Godfrey, 19, ostensibly to work as a sales representative. Godfrey told friends and family that Robinson was sending her away for training. After hearing nothing further from her, Godfrey's parents filed a missing persons report. Police questioned Robinson, who denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. Several days later her parents received a typewritten letter, with Godfrey's signature at the bottom, thanking Robinson for his help and asserting that she was "OK" and did not want to see her family. The investigation was terminated, as Godfrey was of legal age and there was no evidence of wrongdoing. No trace of Paula Godfrey has ever been found.[2]
In 1985, using the name John Osborne, he met Lisa Stasi and her four-month-old daughter, Tiffany, at a battered women’s shelter in Kansas City. He promised Lisa a job in Chicago, an apartment, and daycare for her baby, and asked her to sign several sheets of blank stationery. A few days later Robinson contacted his brother and sister-in-law, who had been unable to adopt a baby through traditional channels, and informed them that he knew of a baby whose mother had committed suicide. For $5,500 in "legal fees", Don and Helen Robinson received Tiffany Stasi (whose identity was confirmed by DNA testing in 2000[4]) and a set of authentic-appearing adoption papers with the forged signatures of two lawyers and a judge. Lisa Stasi was never heard from again.[2]:4
In 1987 Catherine Clampitt, 27, left her child with her parents in Wichita Falls, Texas and moved to Kansas City to find employment. She was hired by Robinson, who reportedly promised her extensive travel and a new wardrobe. She vanished in June of that year. Her missing persons case remains open.[4]
From 1987 to 1993 Robinson was incarcerated, first in Kansas (1987–91) on multiple fraud convictions and thereafter in Missouri for another fraud conviction and parole violations. At Western Missouri Correctional Facility he met 49-year-old Beverly Bonner, the prison librarian, who upon his release left her husband and moved to Kansas to work for him. After Robinson arranged for Bonner's alimony checks to be forwarded to a Kansas post office box, her family never heard from her again. For several years Bonner's mother continued forwarding her alimony checks, and Robinson continued cashing them.[3]
By now Robinson had discovered the Internet and roamed various social networking sites using the name "Slavemaster", looking for women who enjoyed playing the submissive partner role during sex. The first victim he met online was Sheila Faith, 45, whose 15-year-old daughter Debbie was wheelchair-bound due to spina bifida. He portrayed himself as a wealthy man who would support them, pay for Debbie's therapy, and give Sheila a job. In 1994 the mother and daughter moved from Fullerton, California to Kansas City and immediately disappeared. Robinson cashed Faith's pension checks for the next seven years.[2]:6
Gradually, Robinson became well known in the increasingly popular BDSM online chat rooms. In 1999 he offered a job and a bondage relationship to Izabela Lewicka, a 21-year-old Polish immigrant living in Indiana. When she moved to Kansas City, the still-married Robinson gave her an engagement ring and brought her to the county registrar where they paid for a marriage license that was never picked up. It is unclear whether Lewicka believed she and Robinson were married; she told her parents she had married, but never told them her husband's name. She did sign a 115-item slave contract that gave Robinson almost total control over every aspect of her life, including her bank accounts. Sometime during the summer of 1999 she disappeared. Robinson told a Web designer he employed that she had been caught smoking marijuana and deported.[2]:8
Around the time of Lewicka's disappearance Robinson convinced Suzette Trouten, a lonely licensed practical nurse, to move from Michigan to Kansas so they could travel the world together while she became his submissive sex slave. Trouten's mother received several typed letters, purportedly mailed while the couple was abroad, although the envelopes were stamped with Kansas City postmarks. The letters were, her mother said, uncharacteristically mistake-free. Later, Robinson told Trouten's mother that she had run off with an acquaintance after stealing money from him.[2]:9
Arrest
Robinson became increasingly careless over time and did a progressively poorer job of covering his tracks. By 1999 he had attracted the attention of authorities in both Kansas and Missouri as his name cropped up in more and more missing persons investigations.
Robinson was arrested in June 2000 at his farm near La Cygne, Kansas after a woman filed a sexual battery complaint against him and another charged him with stealing her sex toys.[1] The theft charge, in particular, finally gave investigators the probable cause they needed to obtain search warrants. On the farm a task force found the decaying bodies of two women, later identified as Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten, in two 85-pound chemical drums.[2]:9
Across the state line in Missouri, other members of the task force, searching a storage facility where Robinson rented two garages, found three similar chemical drums containing corpses subsequently identified as Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, and her daughter Debbie Faith. All five women were killed in the same way, by one or more blows to the head with a hammer or other blunt instrument.[2]:9
Conviction
In 2002 Robinson stood trial in Kansas for the murders of Suzette Trouten, Isabella Lewicka and Lisa Stasi, along with multiple lesser charges. After his conviction on all counts, he received the death sentence for the murders of Trouten and Lewicka, and life imprisonment for Stasi's (because she was killed before Kansas reinstated the death penalty). He also received a five-to-20-year prison sentence for "interfering with the parental custody" of Stasi's baby, 20½ years for kidnapping Trouten, and seven months for theft.[2]:9
After his Kansas convictions Robinson faced additional murder charges in Missouri, based on the evidence discovered in that state. Missouri is far more aggressive in its pursuit of capital punishment convictions, and Robinson's attorneys were anxious to avoid a trial there. (Kansas has not executed anyone since reinstating its death penalty statute in 1986.) Chris Koster, the Missouri prosecutor, insisted as a condition of any plea bargain that Robinson lead authorities to the bodies of Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey and Catherine Clampitt. Robinson, who has never cooperated in any way with investigators, refused; but Koster still faced pressure to make a deal because his case was not technically airtight. (Among other issues, there was no unequivocal evidence that any of the murders had actually been committed within his jurisdiction.) Robinson, on the other hand, faced pressure to plead guilty to avoid an almost certain death sentence in Missouri, and failing that, yet another capital murder trial back in Kansas.
When it became clear that the women's remains would never be found without Robinson's cooperation, a compromise of sorts was reached: In a carefully scripted plea in October, 2003, Robinson acknowledged only that Koster had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder for the deaths of Godfrey, Clampitt, Bonner and the Faiths. Though his statement was technically a guilty plea, and was accepted as such by the Missouri court, observers remarked that it was notably devoid of any contrition, or specific acceptance of responsibility.[2]:15 He received a life sentence without possibility of parole for each of the five murders.[5]
Robinson currently remains on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas, and could become the first convict executed by lethal injection in that state.
Aftermath
In 2005 Nancy Robinson filed for divorce after 41 years of marriage, citing incompatibility and irreconcilable differences.[5]
In 2006 Lisa Stasi's daughter—known since her "adoption" as Heather Robinson—filed a civil suit against Truman Medical Center in Kansas City and social worker Karen Gaddis. The suit accused Gaddis of putting John Robinson in contact with Stasi and her newborn daughter in 1984, after he told Gaddis that he ran a charitable organization providing assistance to "unwed mothers of white babies." In 2007 Heather Robinson and the hospital reached a settlement for an undisclosed sum, which Robinson said she would split with her biological grandmother, Patricia Sylvester.[5] Heather Robinson won a second judgment, in 2007, preventing John Robinson from profiting from any future potential book sales or film rights.[6]
In 2006 the body of a young woman was found in a barrel in an area of rural Iowa where Robinson reportedly had a business partner. The identity of the victim—whose remains, forensics experts say, could have been in the barrel for 20 years or more—and Robinson's possible involvement, remain open questions.[7] Kansas and Missouri police note that long stretches of Robinson's time remain unaccounted for, and they fear that there are additional undiscovered victims. "He's maintained the secrets about what he's done with the women, he won't ever tell, it's the last control that he's got," said one investigator. "There are [probably] other barrels waiting to be opened, other bodies waiting to be found."[1]
Victims
Robinson is known to be responsible for eight homicides, but his total victim tally remains unknown. The following is a chronological summary of the eight victims identified thus far:
1984: Paula Godfrey (age 19); remains never recovered
1985: Lisa Stasi (19); remains never recovered
1987: Catherine Clampitt (27); remains never recovered
1993: Beverly Bonner (49): remains discovered at storage facility in Raymore, Missouri
1994: Sheila Faith (45) and Debbie Faith (15): remains of both discovered at storage facility in Raymore, Missouri
1999: Izabela Lewicka (21): remains discovered at Robinson's ranch near La Cygne, Kansas
2000: Suzette Trouten (28): remains discovered at Robinson's ranch near La Cygne, Kansas
