The Milkman Did It: A series of brutal attacks in an English village. The suspect is the last person you’d think of. He’s the guy who delivers your milk.
A Desperate Man: Continental Flight 11 has just taken off from Chicago O’Hare. There’s a man onboard with a death wish. He’s carrying a bomb.
Evil Walks Among Us: Daniel had saved for months to buy Christmas presents for his family. On the day he went shopping, he encountered a monster.
The Contract: A deeply disturbed young man obsessed with fame and fortune. He believes that a demon will grant his wishes... but only if he pays in blood.
Self Help: The killer had a strange defense. He said that the victim had asked to die and had paid him for the job. He was only fulfilling his obligation.
A Cold Day in Hell: On a cold, drizzly day, a little girl decides to play hooky from school. That turns out to be a dreadful mistake.
Kill for Me: She was a troubled teen, finding stability with her foster family. But one of her guardians has an ulterior motive, a motive that involves murder.
Murder Most Vile Volume 51
Too Mean to Die
There was a time when Hammond, Indiana was a boomtown. That was back in the day when its steel and oil industries were in full flow, when workers flocked in from all over the country to take advantage of the plentiful jobs. By the early 80s, though, those halcyon days were long gone. The factories were shuttered, and the city was looking the worse for wear, just another struggling metropole in America’s Rust Belt. In many ways, Paul Komyatti Sr was a manifestation of his hometown’s post-boom woes.
Back in his prime, Paul had worked construction, putting in long hours to provide for his wife, Rosemary, and their two children. Now, at age 65, he was retired, in poor health, bitter with the way his life had turned out. Most of his days were spent riding a stool at his local bar. Paul liked to drink and he was a nasty drunk. His wife could attest to that. Rosemary Komyatti could often be seen sporting bruises and black eyes. The insults and put-downs hurt almost as much.
But Rosemary wasn’t the only one to suffer under her husband’s tyrannical rule. Seventeen-year-old Paul Jr often found himself on the wrong side of his father’s ire. On one occasion. Paul Sr chased his son through the neighborhood with a gun. Paul Sr’s daughter, Mariann, was spared the beatings but not the verbal abuse. Mariann fled the family home when she was 18. She later married a man named William “Billy” Vandiver, a work-shy loser with a criminal past. Needless to say, her father hated him.
In fact, there was only one person who escaped Paul Komyatti’s all-encompassing hatred of humanity. That was his grandson, Jason, Mariann, and William Vandiver’s boy. Paul was devoted to the child. When Mariann and Billy fell on hard times and asked if they could move into the family home, Paul immediately agreed, just so that he could have his grandson around. His favorite pastime (other than visiting with his boozing buddies) was to take the boy to one of his favorite fishing spots along the Lake Michigan shoreline. It was only when he was with Jason that Paul’s crusty exterior gave way to anything approaching human kindness.
None of that kindness ebbed to the other members of the household, though. Paul was as cantankerous as ever, perhaps even more so now that he had his daughter and son-in-law living under his roof. The tension was ratcheted to boiling point, the arguments frequent and brutal. Eventually, Mariann had enough and said that she was leaving. Paul responded that she was welcome to go but that Jason was staying with him. The altercation turned physical. Mariann got the worst of it.
For Paul Komyatti’s longsuffering children, this was the last straw. Paul was out of control. Something had to be done to stop him. It was Mariann who first suggested murder as a solution to the problem. It took very little persuasion to get her brother on board. However, the scheme could not proceed without their mother’s approval. How would Rosemary feel about the plan to murder her husband?
At first, Rosemary was hesitant. She suggested that they wait it out. Paul’s health wasn’t what it had once been. He was afflicted with emphysema and had recently undergone open heart surgery. Given that he was still a chain smoker and a heavy drinker, it seemed only a matter of time before he keeled over and died.
Mariann, though, wasn’t willing to wait – not another month, not another week, not another day. “He’s too mean to die,” she told her mother. It was time to act, time to reclaim their freedom. Eventually, Rosemary was persuaded. Her only stipulation was that the murder could not take place inside the house. She didn’t want to be left with a mess to clean up. With their mother’s blessing thus obtained, Mariann and Paul Jr put their heads together to come up with a plan. They had an eager accomplice in Billy Vandiver.
The initial plan was to gun Paul down as he staggered home from his favorite drinking hole one afternoon, making it look like a mugging gone wrong. Billy had a friend who he thought might agree to do the job. However, the plan was soon abandoned as too risky. A murder committed on a city street in broad daylight would attract too much heat. And bringing someone from outside the family into the plot brought other risks. He might talk out of turn or perhaps decide to blackmail them. The assassination plot was out of the equation.
The next idea was to poison the old man by spiking his medication. Paul had been prescribed nitroglycerin to aid his recovery after his recent operation. They figured that if they could increase the dosage, they’d send him into cardiac arrest. This meant that Paul would have to be killed at home, but Rosemary was talked around to that. She just wanted to be rid of her abusive husband. It was she who started pouring out the capsules into his beverages, seeking to trigger the desired reaction.
But Paul would prove to be much tougher than any of them had anticipated. He showed no reaction, even as Rosemary kept upping the dosage. Eventually, Rosemary became frustrated and started spooning rat poison into her husband’s food and drink. All that achieved was to give him an upset stomach which made him more disagreeable than ever. It was time for a new plan.
This idea, discussed at length among the conspirators, involved injecting an air bubble into a vein with a syringe, triggering a heart attack. Of course, Paul was never going to lie still while someone stuck a needle in him, but Billy had a plan for that. He suggested that they might subdue their victim by holding an ether-soaked rag over his face. He knew where to obtain a quantity of the stuff.
The date for the murder was to be March 20, 1983. At around 1:00 p.m. that afternoon, Billy and Paul Jr sprang into action. Their plan went something like this. They’d enter the room while Paul Sr was asleep. Paul Jr would hold his father’s feet while Billy lay across his chest and forced the cloth over his mouth and nose. Then, once he was unconscious, they’d stick the needle into his arm and inject an air buddle into a vein. Simple.
To give the conspirators their due, it was a clever plan. Given Paul Sr’s tenuous state of health, no one was going to delve too deeply into an apparent heart attack. But the idea would fail over one small detail. When they went to retrieve the ether bottle from under the kitchen sink, they found that a significant quantity had evaporated. Would it be enough to knock Paul Sr out? Billy decided that it would have to be. The plan was going ahead.
Unfortunately for the would-be killers, Billy’s calculation of the amount of ether they required was way off. Paul Sr woke as soon as the cloth was placed over his face and started struggling. Realizing that it was Paul Jr pinning his legs, he started begging, “Please son, can’t we just talk about this.” Then he cried out to his wife for help, then in desperation to his grandson. Waiting anxiously in the living room, Rosemary and Mariann heard the cries and prayed for it to be over.
But the old man wasn’t giving up the fight. He continued struggling and almost broke free several times. In desperation, Billy pulled a gun he was carrying and used it to pistol whip his father-in-law. That only made Paul fight harder. Incredibly, he appeared to be gaining the upper hand. That was when Paul Jr decided to end this once and for all. In his pocket was a razor-sharp fish filleting knife. He pulled it now and started stabbing his victim, plunging the knife in, time and again. In the living room, Rosemary and Mariann heard a series of piercing screams. Then silence. Moments later, Billy emerged from the room, covered in blood. “It’s done,” he told them.
The plan had been to make Paul Sr’s death look like a cardiac arrest. That wasn’t going to work now, not with the body looking like it had come off second best in an altercation with a combine harvester. A new strategy was called for. They were going to have to get rid of the corpse. That would involve dismembering it. Billy and Paul Jr convened to the garage where they selected the tools for their macabre task, a pruning saw and a crosscut saw. However, a surprise awaited them when they returned to the bedroom. Paul Sr was still alive. Billy quickly remedied that, taking one of the saws and hacking through the old man’s throat. Paul Komyatti Sr was still alive when he was decapitated.
Now began the gruesome task of dismemberment, something that the conspirators somehow managed to interject with offbeat humor. At one point, Billy walked into the living room carrying Paul Sr’s severed penis which he offered to Rosemary. “I didn’t want it when he was alive,” she quipped. “Why would I want it now?” That brought peals of laughter as Billy returned to continue cutting.
Eventually, the horrific business was done, the body sectioned off and wrapped in garbage bags. Billy and Paul Jr loaded these up and drove with them to the lakefront where the body parts were dropped into a depression in the ground and covered over with a sheet of plywood. Meanwhile, Rosemary and Mariann were hard at work, cleaning up the bloody mess that had been left behind. The deed was done. Now, could they pull off the cover-up?
Paul Komyatti was quickly missed by his drinking buddies down at the local. When his usual seat remained empty for several days, a couple of them came asking about him. Rosemary told them that he’d gone on a fishing trip to Canada. They found that strange since Paul had said nothing about it. Nonetheless, they let it fly. Paul wasn’t required to share his plans with them.
But the fishing trip story was only going to hold up for so long. As the inquiries became more frequent and more insistent, Rosemary decided that it might be prudent to report her husband missing to the police. She used the same cover story, saying that Paul had gone on a fishing trip to Canada and hadn’t returned. The police weren’t overly concerned. It would not be the first time that a man had run out on his family.
Would this ruse have held up indefinitely? Debatable. However, events were about to take an unexpected turn, courtesy of Billy Vandiver. Billy had been angling for his share of Paul’s estate and had already managed to wheedle several thousand dollars out of his mother-in-law by hinting that he might go to the police and admit to the murder, dragging all of them into it. Rosemary was sure that he was bluffing. Nonetheless, she was afraid of Billy. She’d seen firsthand what he was capable of. What if he decided to do to her what he’d done to her husband? It was for this reason that she decided to talk to the police.
However, Rosemary wasn’t about to confess to her involvement in the murder plot. Instead, she came up with a convoluted story about a conversation she’d overheard between Billy and Mariann. They’d been talking about killing her husband, she said, and she now believed that they had followed through on their plan and had disposed of the body somewhere along the lakeshore.
Rosemary’s story had plenty of inconsistencies. However, the police believed there was at least some truth to it, specifically as regards the disposal of the corpse. A couple of detectives therefore drove to the area Rosemary had mentioned and began scouting it out. They’d been walking the shoreline for nigh on two hours when they picked up a scent that was familiar to them, the putrid aroma of death. It appeared to be coming from under a sheet of plywood. The officers lifted the board, unleashing a swarm of black flies. Paul Komyatti had been found.
Now followed a roundup of the suspects. Rosemary and Paul Jr were arrested first, then Mariann. Meanwhile, a warrant was issued for Billy Vandiver who had skipped town and was on the run, considered armed and dangerous. He was eventually tracked to his parents’ farm in Missouri and arrested there. The gang was all together again and one of them was talking. Paul Jr was the first to crack, spilling the beans on the murder plot and sparing none of the gruesome details.
Rosemary and Paul Jr were the first of the conspirators to go on trial. Both admitted to their part in the crime although they claimed to have done so under duress. They’d only participated because they were terrified of Billy, they said. The jury rejected that excuse and found them guilty. The sentences were harsh – 100 years behind bars for each of them, with Paul Jr’s sentence later halved by the judge on account of his youth. “This family seems genetically free of feelings and shows a blackened character of epic proportions,” his honor said in his summation.
Next, it was the turn of Mariann Komyatti Vandiver. She entered a guilty plea to conspiracy and received a sentence of just eight years. Given that it was she who first came up with the idea of killing her father, she got off lightly. The same could not be said for her husband. William Vandiver received the ultimate penalty. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Death row inmates in the United States typically spend years, even decades, awaiting execution as they work their way through the appeals process. But William Vandiver did not want to wait decades. He wanted it to be over as soon as possible and thus barred his attorneys from filing an appeal on his behalf. He got his wish on October 16, 1985, when he was led to the death chamber at the State Penitentiary in Terre Haute. The execution was badly botched. Three jolts of electricity were passed through Billy Vandiver’s body before he was eventually declared dead. Like his victim, it seemed that he was almost too mean to die. Almost.
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