Crime Case Files

Gordon Cummins

In 1942, the streets of London were blacked out at night to stop lights giving the German bombers an easy target. It was against his backdrop that 28-year-old RAF aircraftman Gordon Frederick Cummins took to the streets and began a killing campaign.

The first victim was 40-year-old chemist’s assistant Evelyn Hamilton whose body was found on February 9, 1942, in an air raid shelter in Montagu Place, Marylebone.

She had been strangled and marks on her throat showed that her killer was left handed.

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Leonarda Cianciulli

Born on 14 November 1893 at Montella di Avellino, Italy, Leonarda Cianciulli had an unhappy childhood. In 1914 she married Raffaele Pansardi, a clerk in the local register office.

They made their marital home at Lariano in Alta Irpinia but in 1930 an earthquake destroyed it. They moved to Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia.

Cianciulli fell pregnant 17 times, suffered three miscarriages and ten of her children died at an early age. The other four Cianciulli protected with the ferocity of a lioness.

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Eugene Weidmann

The last person publicly guillotined in France, Eugene Weidmann was born at Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany on February 5, 1908.

A career criminal, he led a gang of teenage thieves before moving to Paris and progressing to more serious crimes including six murders. He stole cars and while on test drive, would shoot the owners in the back of the neck. He also strangled one victim.

He was arrested on December 8, 1937 after a shoot-out at his home in St Cloud. When asked if he had any remorse for his victims, he replied:

Remorse, what for? I didn’t even know them.

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Born profoundly deaf in 1924, Seisaku Nakamura was intelligent but his deafness meant that he had difficult in communicating with people. His family were also shamed of him because of the disability.

Unable to talk to people, he buried himself in violent culture, spending much of his time watching films, especially enjoying those in which people died after being stabbed by Samurai swords

He began to fantasize about re-enacting the scenes he watched.

On August 22, 1938 when he was 14-years-old, he attempted to rape two women but they fought back so he murdered them. Three years later, on August 18, 1941 he committed his third murder and two days later he killed three more people.

On September 27, 1941 he murdered his brother, and severely injured his father, sister, sister-in-law, and nephew. He kept urges in check for a year but on August 30, 1942 he murdered a couple, their son and daughter and failed to rape a second daughter before fleeing the scene.

As with many other war-time criminals, the chaos caused by the conflict prevented the authorities from stopping Nakamura and the news blackout halted dissemination of information about his crimes.

The was finally arrested on October 12, 1942 and charged with nine murders, and confessed to two more. On November 11, 1942 his father, Fumisada Nakamura, took his own life in shame at what his son had done.

Despite a plea his his defence that he was insane, Nakamura was tried, found guilty and executed

Joe Ball

In the days of Prohibition, Joe Ball was a bootlegger but afterwards he became the landlord of The Sociable Inn on Highway 181 in Elmendorf, Texas.

The bar had two selling main points – it had the sexiest waitresses in the area and a pool in the backyard in which five alligators lived. Ball would throw them meat or occasionally, a live cat or dog for the entertainment of his patrons.

Ball was born on January 7 1896 and by the mid 1930s seemed to have a great life – booze, broads and bonhomie. He slept with most of his staff, which accounted for the fact that he had been married three times.

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Marie Becker

Marie Alexandrine Becker was born in 1877 and lived in Liege, Belgium. She married and fell into the stereotypical life of a bored, middle-aged woman in the town.

Then one day in 1932, while she was visiting the local market, Lambert Beyer, the local Lothario, chatted her up as she bought vegetables.

She was flattered by the attentions of the younger man and they began a passionate affair. Becker decided that, in order to be able to fulfill her dreams and desires, she would need to kill her husband.

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Peter Kurten

Born on May 26, 1883, the third of 13 children in Cologne-Mulheim in Germany, Peter Kurten had an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters.

Kurten’s taste for sadism was awakened by the local dog catcher who taught the boy to masturbate the dogs and allowed him to watch while the dog catcher tortured them.

In 1892, two friends of Kurten’s drowned in the Rhine and it is likely that he was responsible for at least one, if not both, of the deaths.

When he was 13, Kurten began practising bestiality and discovered he got pleasure from stabbing a sheep at the same time he was having sex with it.

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Bruno Ludke

Bruno Ludke was born at Kopenick, Germany on 3 April 1908, the fourth of the six children of Otto and Emma. Ludke was a teenage rapist, necrophiliac and murderer. His father, who suffered from throat cancer, died at 1937.

The upheaval of the Second World War gave Ludke the cover to carry out his fiendish work.

In January 1939 the Third Chamber of the Erbgesundheitsgericht in Berlin ordered that Ludke be sterilled because he was a suspected rapist but mainly he was insane. After his sterilization, on May 22, 1940, he relocated to a small village outside Berlin where he carried on raping.

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Albert Fish

Albert Fist was born as Hamilton Fish in Washington DC on May 19, 1870. The Fish family was beset by insanity and bad luck. HIs father died when Fish was just five and he was taken to an orphanage from where he regularly ran away.

When he was 12 years old, he began a relationship with a telegraph boy who introduced him to coprophagia. Fish also started visiting pools to watch boys undress.

In 1885, he began work as an appreantice painter and 13 years later married, fathering six children. Throughout  his marriage he abused young boys usually under the age of six. In 1917 his wife left him.

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Firtz Haarmann

Fritz Haarmann was born in Hanover, Germany, on 25 October 1879, the sixth child of an odd couple. His father was nicknamed Sulky Ollie and his mother was an invalid.

A mummy’s boy, he was sent to military school in 1895 but was discharged because of his epilepsy. Back in Hanover, he was sent to an asylum after being caught molesting small children but escaped after six months.

In 1900 he rejoined the army to escape his pregnant girlfriend and was discharged in 1903. His father at first tried to have Haarmann declared insane and then financed him to open a fish and chip shop.

He stole the takings and then in 1914 was caught burgling a ware house and sentenced to five years in prison. He was paroled in 1918 and became simultaneously a smuggler and police informant.

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