The evil killers who thought they got away with murder
THEY’RE the serial killers, child murderers and wife killers who thought they had done everything to cover their tracks, but they were very wrong. Here’s how the heinous acts of these evil murderers were exposed.
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THEY’RE the serial killers and child murderers who thought they had done everything to cover their tracks, but they were very wrong.
Here’s how the heinous acts of these evil murderers were exposed.
JOHN SHARPE
THE evil John Sharpe shot a speargun into the head of his pregnant wife Anna Kemp as she slept in their Mornington home.
Sharpe killed her because he believed she was moody and controlling, and that their marriage was loveless.
He then buried her body in a shallow grave in their backyard.
Shockingly four days later he turned the speargun on his 20-month old daughter Gracie, killing her to help perpetuate his story that his wife had left him for another man.
Sharpe exhumed Anna’s body, dismembered it with a chainsaw and then dumped her and Gracie at a local tip.
Sharpe had several week’s head start as he tried to cover his tracks and get away with the murder.
But a combination of his bungling attempts to hide the crime and an exhaustive homicide investigation would bring him undone.
Sharpe used Anna’s ATM card at a bank in Chelsea and emailed her mother in New Zealand purporting to be her daughter.
In the month after the murders, Sharpe wrote — under the letterhead of Fast Trak Conveyancing, the business he bought into about the time Gracie was born — to one of Anna’s friends, telling her not to “hold her breath waiting for contact” from Anna.
“She has Gracie with her and is living in Chelsea,” he wrote.
Sharpe also repeatedly protested his innocence in the media.
After more than a month’s scrutiny, Sharpe cracked and confessed — but only after he was charged with murder.
FRED BOYLE
FRED Boyle loved his wife so much that he stuffed her body in a metal barrel and kept it there for 23 years after she died.
Boyle kept the green coffin nearby until his beloved wife Edwina’s skeleton was finally found inside.
He carted her with him every time he moved house and refused to allow it to be taken to the tip.
He would say in court that Edwina, the mother of his two daughters, was, after all, deserving of better than that.
The metal barrel remained close by at family functions and birthday parties and even appeared in the background of family photos.
After migrating from the UK the couple settled in the Dandenong area — spending a lot of time at the local ice-skating rink where their two daughters practised and skated in a competition.
The trouble began when Boyle started an affair with a committee member.
A year later Edwina disappeared.
Boyle murdered Edwina, aged 30 at the time, on the night of October 6, 1983 — using a .22 calibre gun to shoot her in the head as his daughters slept in the next room.
The following morning, Boyle showed his visiting brother-in-law a fabricated note from Edwina which said she had left for another man.
Boyle told his daughters their mum had gone away “with some truck driver named Ray”.
The following month Boyle told local detectives the same story.
He later sent a letter to Edwina’s overseas relatives telling them not to be surprised if they did not hear from her for Christmas.
Edwina’s relatives became suspicious and filed a missing-person report.
Not even they could have imagined the shocking revelation that was to come: that Boyle had killed Edwina and stuffed her in a metal drum.
Boyle’s story came unstuck when a man named Michael Hegarty moved in with them.
He noticed how the drum changed homes with them and wondered what was inside it.
Hegarty began a running joke that Boyle had Edwina stuffed nicely inside.
One day Hegarty’s curiosity got the better of him and with the help of others he cut open the barrel with an angle grinder.
Inside they found women’s clothes and a hessian bag — but no body.
During a clean-up of the garage in October 2006, 23 years after Edwina Boyle’s murder, Mr Hegarty found the hessian bag stuffed under boxes of power tools and garbage bags in a wheelie bin.
For some inexplicable reason, Fred Boyle had kept the bag — with what it contained — and hidden it on the property.
Mr Hegarty tentatively reached inside.
“I pulled out what appeared to be a pelvis and human leg bone,” he said in court.
“I just had to confirm to myself that it was human so I continued to look through the bag and found the skull.”
Boyle contested a murder charge, unsuccessfully claiming at trial that he came home to find his wife dead in bed.
He claimed he first put her body in the bag and placed it in his van, but bought the barrel and cemented the bag inside it when the body began to smell.
A jury didn’t believe him.
Boyle was sentenced to 21 years’ jail with a 17-year minimum term.
MALCOLM CLARKE
MALCOLM Clarke thought for decades he had got away with the murder and rape of a six-year-old girl.
Clarke had been a boarder at the home of Bonny Clarke, no relation, when he murdered her in 1982.
He might have gotten away with it had it not been for an article in the Herald Sun in 1999 that mentioned the murder.
Bonny’s friend Kylie Ward read the article and told her boyfriend she had always suspected the man who was a lodger in the Clarke home as he often walked she and Bonny to school and acted in a weird sexual way.
The boyfriend rang the Herald Sun journalist who wrote the article and he arranged for Ms Ward to contact Sen-Sgt Iddles.
It turned out the lodger named by Ms Ward, Malcolm Clarke was the murderer and he was charged and convicted in 2004 after an elaborate undercover sting organised by Sen-Sgt Iddles and homicide squad detective Tim Day.
Clarke was befriended by an undercover officer, who used Clarke’s passion for steam trains as a means to establish the friendship.
That officer later introduced Clarke to others who, unbeknown to Clarke, were also undercover cops.
Clarke and one of his new-found friends met in room 2810 at Crown Towers hotel on June 6, 2002, where Clarke was secretly caught on tape admitting to murder.
“Clarke told me that he had killed a child named Bonny Clarke approximately 20 years ago,” the undercover officer who recorded Clarke’s confession said in a sworn statement used against Clarke in court.
“He initially stated that he had gone in to play with her while he was drunk and then she screamed and so he covered her head.
The officer’s statement also said Clarke had sexually assaulted Bonny before covering her head with a pillow and stabbing her with a knife.
In 2004, Clarke was found guilty of murdering Bonny — 22 years after he did it — and jailed for life, with a minimum non-parole period of 25 years.
FERNANDO PAULINO
Fernando Paulino’s brutal murder of his estranged wife in 2013 shocked Melbourne.
Teresa Paulino, 49, was found in the garage of her mother’s Reservoir home on July 15, 2013.
She died from 16 stab wounds to her chest, stomach and back and had been bashed so ferociously she had a broken jaw and bleeding to the brain.
But when detectives arrested him outside an aged care facility in Melbourne’s west two years later, he still believed he had gotten away with murder.
He spent 20-minutes on the phone talking to his lawyer who gave him some sage advice about how he thought he should handle his predicament.
Paulino didn’t listen.
The videoed two-plus hour record of interview would ultimately undo the cocky killer.
Locked in a room with two seasoned detectives, Paulino would sink himself like so many killers before him.
For two hours the jury watched Paulino spin a now obvious web of lies to police before they turned-up the heat.
Left alone after the grilling, Paulino nervously chewed his fingernails and spat them on the floor.
He covered his eyes and rocked back in his chair.
Detective Sen-Constable Tony Harwood returned to the room. It had been two years, but he knew he had his man.
“Surely you would have known this day was coming,” he said.
“For what? I haven’t done anything,” Paulino replied.
The jurors who saw the footage disagreed and found him guilty of murder.
Paulino was jailed for at least 25 years.
GERARD BADEN CLAY
COCKY killer Gerard Baden-Clay thought his string of lies would help him get away with murder.
He played the distraught husband as he pretended his wife Allison had disappeared from their home in Brisbane’s western suburbs during an April night in 2012.
Baden-Clay said he had gone to bed at 10pm and slept soundly until 6am.
The killer shamelessly pretended to search for his wife and grew a beard to disguise marks on his face that were from Allison’s fingernails.
When he was forced to shave by detectives Baden-Clay claimed the cuts came from his razor.
Baden-Clay even suggested during his trial that his wife might have committed suicide.
When Allison’s body was found 11 days after she disappeared Baden-Clay’s lies begun to be unravelled.
Plants species found on Allison’s clothing matches ones found near their house.
Allison’s blood was also found in the back of the couple’s Holden Captiva.
It took detectives two months, but they arrested Baden-Clay.
In 2014 a jury found him guilty of Allison’s murder after a six-week trial.
But Baden-Clay again thought he got away with murder the following year when his conviction was downgraded to manslaughter.
His hopes were quashed in 2016 when the High Court restored the original verdict.
TED BUNDY
ONE of America’s most notorious serial killers Ted Bundy began killing women in Seattle and Oregon in 1974 — killing at least eight victims before moving to Utah to attend law school where he killed another nine women.
In 1975 he was arrested for kidnapping Carol DaRonch, who was one of the only women to escape from him.
He escaped from custody twice — once during a trip to a courthouse library (he was recaptured eight days later) and a second time when he climbed out of a hole in the ceiling of his prison cell.
It was not realised that he was missing for 15 hours giving Bundy time to make his way to Florida.
His killing spree continued in Florida in 1978 where he killed another six women.
In one case he broke into a sorority house at Florida State University and attacked four female residents.
Bundy decapitated at least 12 of his victims, keeping some of their heads as sick mementos.
Bundy’s former lawyer claimed the evil murderer took the lives of more than 100 people including some men.
“Most sociopaths never admit they’re evil at all,” lawyer John Henry Browne told a TV station in Seattle.
“Ted really knew he was evil. Evil, evil, evil. And, believe me, really evil.”
Bundy may well have gotten away with murder had it not been for bite marks on the victims from the Florida State attack.
They helped convict the psycho who was executed in the electric chair in January 1989.
DENNIS RADER
A SCOUT leader and churchgoer serial killer Dennis Rader hid his demons behind a common man’s facade.
He struck fear into the Wichita in Kansas as he murdered 10 people between 1974 and 1991.
Rader sent anonymous notes to police and local media.
In those notes and letters he called himself the “BTK Killer”.
The acronym stood for: “Bind them. Torture them. Kill them.”
Rader’s first victim was in 1974 when he pulled a gun and bound and a strangled married mum Julie Otero.
Rader tied a plastic bag around her husband Joseph’s head and killed their son, aged nine, in a similar way.
Rader hanged the family’s 11-year-old daughter in the basement.
He then committed a sexual act next to the body.
His killing spree continued in 1977 when he murdered Shirley Vian, before killing Nancy Fox later that year.
By 1979 the BTK Killer appeared to have gone underground.
The letters stopped and it appeared the BTK Killer had gotten away with murder.
That was until 25 years later when he penned a note and sent it to local media outlet after a 30th anniversary story of the BTK Killer’s crimes was published.
With the note came a driver’s licence and three polaroid photographs of dead woman Vicki Wegerle, who he’d strangled in her own home back in 1986.
The killer’s letters became frequent again.
They contained dolls with bags over their heads and hands tied behind their backs, cryptic word and number puzzles, copied pages from serial-killer novels and victims’ personal documents.
The notes and letters provided police investigators with valuable clues about the serial killer’s background.
The letters, and improvements in DNA investigative techniques, proved Rader’s downfall.
After a 31-year manhunt, authorities arrested the 59-year-old in February 2005.
GENENE JONES
NURSE Genene Jones is suspected of killing up to 60 infants and children in the 1980s while she worked as a licensed vocational nurse (LVN) in the ICU of a hospital in San Antonio, Texas.
But when the hospital noticed an abnormally high rate of deaths during Jones’s 3pm-11pm shifts they feared they would be sued. Instead of properly investigating the deaths the hospital simply got all of its LVN’s to resign and claimed they were upgrading standards by employing only registered nurses.
The Angel of Death, as she would later be known, moved to another hospital in Texas with a letter of recommendation from her old workplace and continued her killing spree.
As the deaths continued ,Jones might have thought she’d get away with it.
Justice finally caught up with her when 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan came to the hospital to get an immunisation in September 1982 and Jones injected her with the muscle relaxant succinylcholine.
The child died and when her body was later exhumed it showed a presence of the muscle relaxant.
Jones was convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Prosecutors suspect she has killed up to 60 infants and children.
“She has been suspected in dozens of infant deaths, she has only been held accountable for one,” Bexar County District Attorney Nicholas LaHood said last year.
Authorities are now investigating 47 deaths at the first hospital Jones worked at.
In recent years Jones has been served with five new murder indictments relating to children who died from overdoses in 1981 and 1982
DENNIS NILSEN
SCOTTISH serial killer Dennis Nilsen might have gotten away with murder had it not been for a blocked toilet.
He is thought to have killed as many as 15 young men who he lured back to his London home.
Nilsen stored his victims under the floorboard of his home and spent weeks, and in some cases months, playing with the corpses of his victims, dressing and underdressing them and even sitting them on the couch.
He committed sexual acts with the corpses of some of his victims.
One victim, Stephen Holmes, was just 14-years-old. The pair met in a London pub where Holmes had tried to buy alcohol.
He took Holmes back to his home before killing him the next day.
During the next five years, it’s thought he killed another 14 men who he would meet in gay bars, on public transport or, in one instance, a man who simply walked past his house and he struck up a conversation with.
Nilsen later admitted to police that as the killings intensified, the stench of the bodies became overpowering.
In recordings of his police confessions, he said: “In the end there were two or three bodies under the floorboards. They began to accumulate,” Britain’s Mirror newspaper reported.
“Come the summer it got hot and I knew there would be a smell problem. So I knew I was going to have to deal with the smell problem and I thought what would cause the smell. And I came to the conclusion it was the innards, the soft parts of the body, the organs, things like that.”
Nilsen would finally cut the bodies up and bury most of the remains in the garden while flushing some body parts down the toilet.
In the end, he helped in his own capture. In 1983, Nilsen was one of several tenants at his flats to complain of blocked drains.
When a plumber was called, he found the drains were blocked by flesh and small human bones.
Police went to question Nilsen at his home and were struck by the putrid smell of rotting flesh. In his flat they found carrier bags full of human parts including two torsos, organs and even a severed head.
He was jailed for life with a minimum of 25 years in 1983, on six counts of murder and two of attempted murder but his grim tally of death may have included up to 15 victims.
Nilsen died in jail in May.
TILLIE KLIMEK
TILLIE Klimek husbands kept dying, but no-one seemed to join the dots.
In the rough and tumble of early 1900s Chicago, there was too much else going on for someone to notice it.
The Polish immigrant moved to Chicago as an infant and married her first husband John Mitkiewicz in 1895.
In 1914 Klimek, who had already successfully predicted the death dates of neighbourhood dogs, tipped that her husband would soon die. Weeks later he did.
After receiving his life insurance money Klimek soon married her next husband Joseph Ruskowski who died just months later also after a prediction from Klimek.
Over the next few years, husband three and a boyfriend also died. Klimek is also said to have predicted the death of a neighbour who was suspicious about her and three children from a family she was having trouble with.
When Klimek told her cousin that she was sick of her fourth husband Joseph Klimek, the cousin suggested divorce.
But Tillie said: “I will get rid of him some other way.”
When Joseph took ill his stomach was pumped and it was found he had ingested arsenic.
The bodies of Klimek’s previous husbands were then exhumed and they too were found to have suffered arsenic poisoning.
Klimek was convicted of the murder of Frank Kupczyk and sentenced to life in prison.
Klimek died in prison in 1936.
Originally published as The evil killers who thought they got away with murder