Pretty Awful: They say beauty is skin deep. Nowhere did that ring truer than with Susan Grund – liar, adulterer, abuser of children, cold-hearted killer.
Dead Man’s Hand: A psycho is on the loose, marking his kills with playing cards. Will the police catch him before he takes another life?
A Message in Blood: It looked like an easy case to solve. The victim had even written her killer’s name in blood. But what if the clues point elsewhere?
Scene of the Crime: A young mother is found bludgeoned to death in her home. The obvious suspect is her husband but he claims he’s innocent. Brilliant detective work will prove him a liar.
The Good, the Bad, and the Deadly: A good wife, a cheating husband, and a spurned mistress collide in this dark tale of deceit, sexual obsession and murder.
Sad but True: Ronald was upper-crust, a wartime pilot living off a family allowance. He was also dangerously insane, with a predilection for throttling prostitutes.
Empty Words: A respected scientist dies in what looks like a case of accidental poisoning. But what if this wasn’t an accident? What if it was murder?
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume 25
Appointment with a Killer
Lynne Rogers was a determined young woman. Recently laid off
from an administrative job, the 17-year-old had launched a concerted effort to
find new employment. And her goal was not just any old job but the kind that
she yearned for, one that offered the chance of international travel. And so,
Lynne had spent weeks scouring business directories, eventually coming up with
a list of over 300 companies in and around London. She’d then written to all of
them, enclosing her résumé and details of the kind of position she was
interested in. To her surprise and delight, she’d received a personal reply
within days. The man who called said that he was the owner of a company that
jetted high-level executives to and from Europe. He was looking for qualified
young women who could perform secretarial duties on these trips. The pay on
offer was £14,000 per annum, more than double what Lynne had earned at her
previous job. Was she interested? Of course she was.
Despite the misgivings of her father and sister, Lynne was
over the moon about the potential job offer. In the days leading up to her
scheduled interview, she had her hair styled and sent her most practical outfit
to the dry cleaners. She also borrowed a typewriter from a friend and spent an
entire weekend honing up on her less-than-adequate typing skills. On the
morning of September 4, 1991, she was a bag of nerves. Her potential employer
had called again the previous day and told her to meet him at Charing Cross
station in central London. He’d told her that they would be driving to
Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex and taking a helicopter from there to Gatwick
Airport. He also told her to bring her passport along. It sounded almost too
good to be true – and it was.
On September 4, Lynne Rogers bade her father, Derek, and her
older sister, Suzanne, goodbye. She told them that she would call as soon as
she knew the outcome of the interview. Then she boarded the train at Catford,
London bound for Charing Cross. Her family would never see her alive again.
By 10:00 that night, Derek Rogers was becoming concerned. He
knew that Lynne had taken her passport with her and that her new employer might
well have taken her on a day-trip to the continent. But he also knew his
daughter. Lynne was a diligent, reliable girl. She’d promised to call and she
would definitely have done so had she been able. After waiting a half-hour
more, Derek went to the Catford police station and reported her missing.
The missing persons case was assigned to Detective
Superintendent Douglas Auld. But as the days passed with no clue as to Lynne’s
whereabouts, it became increasingly clear that something bad had happened to
her. Soon the story was attracting massive attention in the British media.
Teenaged girls do not simply vanish from the busy streets of London in broad
daylight, at least not unseen.
The first clue to Lynne’s disappearance emerged when a man
came forward to report a strange conversation he’d overheard. According to the
witness, he’d been making a call from a public telephone in Crawley, Sussex, in
the days before Lynne went missing. In the call box next to him was a man who
was talking quite loudly. The witness could hear everything that was said, and
he found the conversation to be odd. The was talking about a job offer
involving international travel. He also mentioned a helicopter ride during the
interview process. What the witness found strange was that such a lucrative
offer would be made via public telephone. He also noticed that the man had a
small tape recorder which he held up to receiver throughout the conversation.
After reading about Lynne’s disappearance in the newspaper, the witness had
decided to come forward with what he’d heard. Unfortunately, he could not give
a description of the man he’d seen, and the call box itself yielded no clues.
Hundreds of callers had since handled the phone, obliterating any fingerprints.
On September 9, five days after the disappearance, the
investigation took a dramatic turn when the body of a young girl was found
hidden in dense undergrowth in Rotherfield, Sussex, some 40 miles south of
London. It was Lynne Rogers and she had been brutally strangled.
The location at which the body had been found meant that the
murder inquiry was conducted by the Sussex Police, with Detective
Superintendent Michael Bennison taking charge. Initially, the belief was that
this was a sex crime, but the subsequent autopsy threw up a surprise when it
revealed that Lynne had not been sexually assaulted. There were, however,
curious bruises on her chin which would turn out, on closer inspection, to be
tooth impressions. Since bite marks are as unique as fingerprints, this was a
valuable clue.
But it would only be of value if the police could find
someone to match the bite against, and at this point they had no idea who might
have done this or why. Speaking to Lynne’s sister Suzanne, they learned that
the mysterious caller had phoned four times and that Suzanne had spoken to him
once, when Lynne was out. She said that she had heard airplanes and flight
announcements in the background. Did this mean that some of the killer’s cover
story was true, that he was an airline employee?
Further support for this theory came which police got a call
from another witness, London cab driver Thomas Reynolds. According to Reynolds,
he had been parked outside Charing Cross station on the morning of September 4
and had seen Lynne Rogers, noticing her because she was an attractive redhead.
Then a blue car had pulled up, driven by a man in a pilot’s uniform. Lynne had
exchanged a greeting with the man and had then walked around to the passenger
door and gotten in. Moments later, the car had pulled away from the curb and
blended into the traffic, most likely taking Lynne to her death. The cabbie did
not take note of the vehicle’s license plate number, but he did know that it
was a Vauxhall Carlton.
In the meantime, the police had been working another angle.
The killer had quite obviously obtained Lynne’s contact details from one of the
letters she’d sent to potential employers. A list of those 319 companies had
been found in Lynne’s bedroom and, initially, the police thought they’d have to
undertake the considerable task of contacting all of them. But then Suzanne
remembered something that the caller had told her during their brief conversation.
He’d mentioned that he’d gotten Lynne’s CV from a company based in Greenwich,
south London. Only one of the companies on the list was in that locale, an
organization called Africa Hinterland.
That company, detectives soon discovered, had gone out of
business even before Lynne had written to them. But it turned out that they
still received mail at the business park where they’d once had premises. That
mail was placed in a general mailbox at the park, along with items addressed to
other former tenants. This is where Lynne’s résumé would have ended up.
But who would have been able to access it there? Anyone
who’d formerly rented premises at the park, according to the facilities
manager. He was then asked whether any of those former tenants drove a blue
Vauxhall Carlton; and said that there was someone, a man named Wayne Scott
Singleton who had owned a now defunct operation called Casualty Car Doctor. The
park manager also added that Singleton was from Crawley. The call summoning
Lynne to her fateful interview had, of course, been made from that area.
Wayne Scott Singleton was now the main suspect in the murder
of Lynne Rogers. Looking into his background, investigators learned that he was
a married father of two who was separated from his wife and currently involved
with a long-term girlfriend. But that told only a part of the story. It turned
out that the suspect had a long police record for petty crime and that
Singleton was not even his real name. He had been born Andre Reich. Another
interesting detail was that Singleton was obsessed with flying, claimed to be a
trained pilot, and often wore a pilot’s uniform. He’d even convinced his wife
and girlfriend that he was qualified to fly light passenger aircraft.
On September 28, the police launched a coordinated
operation, simultaneously raiding several addresses where they thought
Singleton might be. Taken into custody, an outraged Singleton vociferously
protested his innocence. He even expressed sympathy for Lynne’s family and
expressed his hope that the killer would soon be caught. However, when the
police asked him to let them take a dental impression in order to eliminate him
as a suspect, Singleton flatly refused. With nothing but circumstantial
evidence against him, the police were only able to hold him for 36 hours and
were then forced to let him go.
A few days after Singleton’s release, the police received a
tip from a Rotherfield farmer named Richard Ellis, who reported that had seen a
blue Vauxhall parked beside the road close to where Lynne’s body was found.
This had occurred on September 4, the very day that the young woman
disappeared. More importantly, Ellis had written down the license plate number.
He’d recently suffered acts of vandalism on his farm, he said, and had jotted
down the number for future reference. Now he handed over that number to the
police. They ran it through the system. It belonged to Scott Singleton who had
recently told the police that he’d never been to Rotherfield and didn’t even
know where it was.
This was once again a valuable lead. But the police did not
want to make the mistake again of jumping the gun. What they really needed was
that impression of Singleton’s teeth and since he was refusing to cooperate on
that score, they were going to have to do it the hard way. Teams of detectives
began working the areas surrounding Singleton’s home, his wife’s home, his
girlfriend’s home. Eventually, their persistence and hard work paid off when
they tracked down a dentist who had done dental work on Singleton. As chance
would have it, he still had a plaster impression of Singleton’s teeth. That was
handed to a forensic odontologist who compared it to the bite marks on the
victim and was emphatic in his opinion that only Scott Singleton could have
inflicted those injuries.
On October 10, 1991, Wayne Scott Singleton was re-arrested
and charged with the murder of Lynne Rogers. The case against him appeared
overwhelming, but still the prosecution was worried about two issues. The first
was that Singleton’s girlfriend was still providing him with an alibi; the
second was that this was a crime without an apparent motive. Juries have been
known to acquit when the prosecutor fails to explain why the victim was killed.
So why had Lynne Rogers been murdered. If it wasn’t rape or
robbery and if her killer had never even met her before the day she was killed,
then why? The clue may be hidden hidden deep in the warped psyche of Scott
Singleton. Forensic psychiatrists who have examined the case believe that
Singleton had staged the whole episode in order to seduce Lynne. He had
attempted to impress her with his alter-ego as a handsome pilot but had been
rebuffed. An ego as fragile as Singleton’s does not take rejection well. It had
sent him into a murderous rage during which he had snuffed out the life of a
beautiful young woman who had only wanted to create a better life for
herself.
Singleton’s alibi also would not stand the test of time. At
trial, his girlfriend, Kim, decided to change sides and testify for the
prosecution. Called to give evidence, she admitted that she had lied about
Singleton being with her at the time of the murder. She also handed over a
cassette tape to the police. On it was a recording of airplane engines and a
voice giving take-off instructions to various aircraft. This was the tape that
Singleton had played in the background while talking to Lynne and to her
sister.
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