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Thursday 1 January 2015

50 American Serial Killers You've Probably Never Heard Of Volume 5

At any given time there are between 30 and 50 serial killers roaming the streets of America. These are their stories.

A catalogue of evil, including;

Alfred Cline: A prolific "Bluebeard Killer" who murdered at least eight of his wives on their honeymoons.

Kimberly Saenz: Psychotic nurse who killed her elderly patients by injecting them with bleach.

Robert S. James: An inventive serial killer who used auto accidents and rattlesnake bites as his methods of mayhem.

Robert Browne: Claimed 49 victims who he killed by “every method known to man.”

Rudy Bladel: Bitter at being fired from his job, Bladel spent the next 20 years blowing away railroad employees.

Thomas Whisenhart: A dedicated family man who enjoyed carrying out postmortem mutilations on his victims.

Lorenzo Fayne: Horrendous child murderer who killed in order to have sex with his victims' corpses.

Jeremy Bryan Jones: Charming ladies’ man who killed at least 4 and possibly as many as 21 women.

Larme Price: Targeted "Middle Eastern" shopkeepers and claimed his killings were committed in revenge for 9/11.

Ricky Lee Green: Sexual deviant who enjoyed mutilating and gutting his victims.

Plus 40 more riveting cases... Click here to grab a copy

Click the "Read More" link below to read the first few chapter of

50 American Serial Killers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of Volume Five


Lowell Amos

In December 1994, a group of executives were gathered at the Atheneum Hotel in Detroit for a company Christmas party. Among their number was Lowell Amos, a 52-year-old GM plant manager from Anderson, Indiana. Accompanying Amos was his wife, Roberta. The couple partied late into the night, eventually retiring at 4:30 a.m.

At around 8:30, GM executive, Norbert Crabtree, received a frantic phone call from Lowell Amos. Crabtree and another guest, Daniel Porcasi, went to Amos’s room, where he told them that his wife had died in a tragic accident. He begged for their help in cleaning up the scene and eventually convinced Crabtree to hold onto his sport coat and a small leather case. When Crabtree later checked inside the case, he found it to contain a syringe without a needle.

With the scene cleaned up, Amos called the police. When they arrived he told them that Roberta had overdosed during a cocaine-fueled sex game. She couldn’t snort the drug due to a sinus problem, he said, so she diluted it in water and injected it into her vagina. She’d still been taking cocaine when he fell asleep. When he awoke, she was dead.

The story sounded highly suspicious, especially as it was obvious that Amos had cleaned up the room and washed his wife’s body before calling the cops. Other parts of the story didn’t add up either. A person overdosing on cocaine would thrash violently in their death throes. How was it possible that Amos had slept through it? How had he fallen asleep at all, given the amount of cocaine he claimed to have taken? Then there was the makeup smeared on a pillowcase. Evidence perhaps that Roberta had been suffocated?

Despite these, and other suspicious details, there wasn’t enough to charge Amos with murder. Nonetheless, investigators decided to keep him under surveillance while they firmed up their case. He hardly acted like the grieving widow. Two days after Roberta’s death he spent $1,000 on dinner and drinks with two women and had sex with both of them.

Meanwhile, the death of Roberta Amos had been widely reported in the media. In the wake of the coverage, the police began receiving calls from former lovers of Lowell Amos. Several of them complained that he’d drugged them during sex. These accusations convinced investigators to look into Lowell Amos’s past. What they found, shocked them.

His first wife, Saundra had been found dead in the bathroom of their home in 1979. According to Amos, she had mixed wine and sedatives and had fallen and hit her head against the side of the tub. The cause of death was ruled indeterminate, and Amos received a $350,000 insurance pay out.

Within months of Saundra’s death, Amos married his long time mistress, Caroline. However, when the new Mrs. Amos learned that he had taken out a large policy on her life, she threw him out.

Amos moved in next with his 76-year-old mother. A few weeks later, the old woman was dead. Although she’d previously been in good health, no autopsy was called for. Amos inherited more than $1 million.

Shortly after, Amos and Caroline were reconciled and he moved back in. Perhaps she believed that his newfound fortune would insulate her from any plans he may have been brewing beforehand. She was wrong.

Within nine months, she too was dead. According to Amos, she’d been blow-drying her hair in the bathroom. Later he found her in the tub and thought she might have been electrocuted. Caroline’s death netted Amos another $800,000 insurance payment.

The pattern was too much of a coincidence and on November 8, 1998, Lowell Amos was arrested for the murder of his third wife, Roberta.

Although he was never charged with the murders of Saundra, Caroline, and his mother, Michigan law allowed details of these crimes to be entered into the record, in order to establish a pattern.

This testimony, together with the crime scene evidence and a clear motive (it turned out that Roberta was preparing to leave him), made a strong case.

Lowell Amos was found guilty of murder on October 24, 1996. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

***

Ralph Andrews

Illinois investigators called him a killing machine, who was worse than John Wayne Gacy. They also referred to him as a real-life Hannibal Lechter. And if Ralph Andrews is to be believed then those descriptors are apt. He claimed to have killed as many as 40 women, making him one of America’s most prolific serial killers.

Andrews was already serving life at Statesville Correctional Center in Illinois when his boasts first reached the ears of the authorities. According to Andrews’ cellmate, he claimed to have assaulted, murdered and eviscerated women across Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Such boasts are of course commonplace among convicts hoping to make a name for themselves. But as Andrews was in prison for two murders bearing exactly those characteristics, the authorities took this information very seriously. They obtained a court order authorizing them to bug Andrews’ cell. The information they gleaned was extremely interesting.

Investigators had long suspected Andrews in the 1977 rape and murder of 16-year-old Susan Clarke. Now here he was on tape, providing a detailed confession, describing how he’d abducted Susan as she walked home from a babysitting job, how he’d sexually assaulted her, then shot her in the head, how he’d sliced open her abdomen and then dumped her in a vegetable field near Eden’s Expressway.

Armed with this information, Illinois authorities called in the help of famed FBI investigator, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on serial killers, Robert Ressler.

Ressler’s findings firmed up what many already suspected. He called Andrews a model serial killer. “No one I've seen of late fits the pattern of a serial killer as strongly as he does,” he concluded.

But did Andrews really kill as many as 40 women?

Ressler wasn’t asked to speculate on the number, but he did state that of the cases he looked at, Andrews was likely responsible for at least five. These included;

Elizabeth West, a 14-year-old freshman at Belleville Township High. Elizabeth disappeared a block from her home as she was returning from a school play. Her strangled body was found in a creek between Belleville and Millstadt on May 5, 1978.

Ruth Ann Jany, 21, discovered in July 1979, five miles south of where Elizabeth West had been found. She had disappeared a year earlier after stopping at an ATM in downtown Belleville.

An unidentified woman, estimated to be between 18 and 23 years old, strangled near Summerfield in St. Clair County in September 1986. Her body was discovered in a cornfield.

Kristina Povolish, 19 years old. Her strangled corpse was found hidden in a ditch southwest of Belleville in July 1987.

Audrey Cardenas, a 24-year-old newspaper intern, whose badly decomposed body turned up in a creek on the campus of Belleville Township High School in June 1988.

Ralph Andrews was delighted to have such an esteemed investigator as Robert Ressler looking into his case. He agreed with Ressler that the five women had been killed by the same man, and even claimed that he knew who the killer was.

“Except it wasn’t me,” he said. “Because I haven’t murdered anyone.”

Such games are of course commonplace with serial killers, and in the absence of solid evidence Andrews would never stand trial for the crimes. He died in prison of natural causes on January 31, 2006, taking his secrets to the grave.

***

Patrick Baxter

The murders had lain unsolved for over 12 years and there seemed to be very little hope of solving them. Sure there was DNA evidence, but the quantities lifted from the crime scenes were insufficient for a match. Then came yet another breakthrough in the application of this exemplary technology and suddenly the crimes were solvable.

But even as investigators rejoiced at the prospect of bringing the perpetrators to justice, they were in for a shock. The three murders – committed in disparate locations, by different methods, and against women of different races – were the work of the same man.

The first murder occurred on June 6, 1987. On that day, Michelle Walker, a ninth-grade student, was on her way to buy a pizza when she disappeared near her family's home on Warburton Avenue in Yonkers, New York. Her body was found the following day, concealed among some trees. She’d been sexually assaulted and then suffocated by someone who had covered her nose and mouth with his hand. Her jewelry was gone and she’d also been robbed of the cash she’d been carrying.

Seven months later, on New Year's Day, 1987, another Yonkers resident, Patricia England, was celebrating her 19th birthday. Sometime during the day, Patricia told her family that she was going to visit a friend. She never made it.

It would be two months before police found Patricia’s body near the Greenburgh-Yonkers border on February 6. An autopsy determined that she’d been sexually assaulted and had died of possible asphyxia. Date of death was set at around January 1, the day on which she’d disappeared. Investigators also believed that she’d been killed elsewhere, her body dumped where it had been found.

Initially, the investigation focused on a former boyfriend but he was quickly eliminated once it was determined that his blood type did not match the semen found at the scene.

On the morning of July 17, 1990, Lisa Gibbens left her apartment bound for a medical office in Hartsdale, where she’d recently started work as a receptionist. Lisa did not show up for work that day. Her body was found shortly after 9 a.m., hidden along the path she would have taken to the train station. Her purse and jewelry were missing, and there was evidence at the scene (later confirmed by an autopsy) that she’d been sexually assaulted. Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the back of the head, delivered by a sawn-off shotgun.

As in the England case, suspicion fell initially on the boyfriend, but he proved to have a cast iron alibi. Then a new suspect emerged. Douglas Steadman was the cousin of Westchester police commissioner, Anthony Mosca, and had been involved in a secret relationship with Lisa Gibbens. DNA testing cleared him of any involvement in the crime. The police were back to square one.

Unbeknownst to investigators, there was a man with links to at least one of the victims, and two of the crime scenes. Patrick Baxter lived along the stretch of road that Michelle Walker had disappeared from; he was known to hang out with friends at the Crestwood station where Lisa Gibbens was murdered; he had worked with Patricia England’s former boyfriend and had met her. None of this came to light during the initial investigations.

Then in 2000, advances in DNA technology allowed the semen samples to be re-tested. They produced a match to a single perpetrator, Patrick Baxter.

Baxter, serving a term for car theft at the time, was charged with three counts of murder. He was found guilty and given a sentence of 75 years to life.



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