Killer Couples (10 page)

At her second meeting with Darren, she reiterated her plan, going over the details of when and where the attack should take place.

‘From my point of view, the only concern I have is that whatever you do and whichever way you do it, it looks like a break-in that’s gone wrong,’ she told him, unable, as usual, to resist trying to take control of the proceedings.

She emphasised the need to make sure it didn’t appear that Judith Love had been deliberately targeted, to be sure that ‘there is no trace back to you, and therefore no trace back to me.’

To seal their bargain, she handed over an envelope. Inside was £5,000 in cash.

‘You’ll get the other £5,000 when the job is done,’ Ann told Darren, as if this was just one more business transaction.

If Ann Hunter was experiencing any stab of remorse for what
she was doing, if she was going through any inner turmoil at how quickly things seemed to be escalating beyond her control, she certainly didn’t betray any evidence of it. After all, the first rule of business, particularly for a woman at the top, is never to get emotional.

Later, she would claim to be feeling out of her depth, desperate to stop the plan she’d set in motion with the recklessness of someone taking the handbrake off a juggernaut parked at the top of a steep hill. But, as Darren studied the inscrutable, strangely line-free face of the woman in front of him, he could detect no such reservations.

‘It’s all set then,’ he said, expressionlessly.

Except that, luckily for Colin and Judith Love, it wasn’t set at all. ‘Darren’ was actually an undercover police officer. When William Niven contacted the police after his initial meeting with Anton Lee, they’d set up an elaborate sting operation to catch Ann Hunter and her boyfriend red-handed. All the meetings had been taped – there really was no way out.

In October 2005 Ann Hunter and Anton Lee were arrested on charges of incitement to solicit murder and solicitation of murder respectively.

Anton Lee immediately confessed, allowing the feelings he’d been trying to keep at bay during the preceding crazy weeks to come flooding to the surface. First, was shame; deep abiding shame. All his adult life, he’d worked to make a reputation for himself as a man of integrity, at work and in private, and he’d destroyed it overnight, all out of weakness, and all for love.

But coupled with that shame was an overwhelming relief. At last the nightmare was over. Over the past few weeks, the plan that had started out as a casual, drunken conversation had opened out into a web that caught and bound him with threads of love, of passion and loyalty so intense and so twisted, it blinded him to the norms of human behaviour. It was the greatest of ironies that in trying to prove himself to Ann, he’d lost himself in the process.

Ann Hunter, however, had no such epiphany. Whenever she’d felt herself under threat in business, she’d leapt into defensive mode, and that’s exactly what she did now. It had been Anton’s idea, she insisted – he’d set the whole thing up. All she’d done was go along with it. She was guilty of weakness, but not malice.

At her Old Bailey trial in December 2006, she pleaded guilty to soliciting grievous bodily harm with intent against Judith Love, but not guilty to incitement to solicit murder.

‘I loved Colin,’ she told the court in an impassioned speech. ‘I loved him like my own flesh and blood.’

She claimed to have been shocked when Anton Lee first brought up the idea of a hitman to kill either Colin or Judith or both, but to have gone along with the idea of having Judith beaten up. ‘Anton knew I didn’t want Judy killed in any way. But did I want her harmed? He discussed with me the various degrees of harming,’ she said.

Ann, whose fearsome business reputation had been built on standing firm and having the strength of her own convictions, claimed to have been swept away by the tide of Anton Lee’s
Machiavellian scheming: ‘I was led into an opportunity, an opportunity I couldn’t have envisaged or brought about. When that opportunity was there, I did board the plane.’

Listening to tape recordings of her meetings with Darren, she backtracked, saying she hadn’t wanted to look weak in front of him and that she’d planned to cancel the hit before it was ever put into action.

But the jury didn’t believe her. On 21 December 2006, she was found guilty of inciting Anton Lee to solicit murder. She had allowed her uncontrollable hatred and jealousy to overrule her common sense and now she would have to pay the price.

At the beginning of January 2007, Ann Hunter was sentenced to eight years in prison for plotting to kill her ex-partner and his wife. Anton Lee, who described himself as ‘an old fool’, received a four-year sentence for his part in the crime.

‘It is a tragedy to see two people of ability, achievement and maturity facing sentence for such serious offences,’ said the judge. ‘The context of your crime is breathtaking both in its audacity and its coldness. The story seems to have touched just about every human emotion and reaction.’

When love is healthy it can set off a chain of other loving relationships. Unfortunately, the same can happen when love is diseased. Anton Lee’s love for Ann Hunter was wilfully, destructively blind, while Ann Hunter’s love for Colin Love was obsessive and savagely territorial.

And the next link in the chain?

Outside the courtroom, Colin and Judith Love blinked under the unwelcome glare of the television crews’ lights.

‘I still find it almost impossible to believe that an intelligent and gifted woman would contemplate such a plan without fully realising the downside of exposure and failure,’ remarked Colin Love. ‘I am completely neutral towards her now. I have no feelings for her.’

In the end, as any spurned lover knows all too well, the antithesis of love is not hate, it is indifference.

T
he courtroom was packed. Over a hundred journalists and photographers jostled with police, court officials, grieving family members, and as many of the curious public as could squeeze their way in. A low-level hum of background chat permeated the entire proceedings. People snuck in drinks and brought out dog-eared novels to read during the recesses, rustling in bags with furtive intensity. It was more like a theatre spectacle than a judicial process.

And the undisputed stars of the show weren’t about to miss their opportunity to bask in the spotlight. In the dock, Daniel Ruda and his wife Manuela played to their audience. The two had dressed for the occasion with elaborate care and attention to detail.

Daniel, with his close cropped hair and neat goatee probably
wouldn’t have attracted a second glance had you walked past him in the street. True, the 26-year-old car parts salesman’s dark clothes gave him a slightly sinister air, but nothing more than any of the other tens of thousands of young people in Germany who follow a certain type of music and loosely term themselves Goths. It was only when he smiled that those sitting in the front rows of the packed courtroom felt a shudder of shock and revulsion. Not just because his top side teeth were sharpened into fangs, it was more to do with the glint in his green eyes as he flicked his long tongue around his lips for the benefit of the observers. If Daniel Ruda wasn’t dangerously insane, he was doing a very good impersonation.

His wife of three years, Manuela, cut a much more exotic figure. Her long jet-black hair was partially shaved at the temples to reveal tattoos of an upside-down crucifix and a target on her skull. Her eyebrows, which were completely shaved off, had been repainted with expert precision in two finely drawn black arches, perched mockingly above the dark glasses she was allowed to wear into court on account of her sensitivity to daylight. Her lips, painted deep blood-clot red, were outlined in black, like the border on a funeral invitation. Her white skin had the greyish tinge of veal kept too long and locked away in the dark. During the quieter moments in court, the hush was punctuated by the staccato of her inch-long black nails tapping impatiently on the table in front of her.

As details of their crime were revealed in court, members of the public flinched involuntarily, as if trying to shield themselves
from the descriptions of the horror this couple had inflicted. Satanic worship, murder, vampirism, sixty-six separate stab wounds, and the image of a sated Manuela and Daniel, the blood of their victim, Frank Hackert, trickling from the corners of their mouths… No wonder several members of the public felt sick, while others clutched the hand of the person next to them, as if seeking comfort in the face of such inhumanity.

The only people unaffected by the sickening descriptions were the Rudas themselves. As others gasped in uncomprehending revulsion at the things they’d done, they smiled broadly, as if receiving some kind of accolade, sending one another glances of mutual congratulation and delight. During the more gruesome accounts, they kept their eyes on the Frank Hackert’s parents, drinking in each new display of grief or pain, occasionally licking their lips appreciatively or making devil horn signs with their fingers.

If ever there was a couple who seemed somehow not quite human, it was Daniel and Manuela Ruda.

As personal ads went, this one was pretty specific and, truth be told, when Daniel Ruda placed in the classified pages of
Metal
Hammer
, a black metal music fanzine, in August 2000, he wasn’t really expecting to be overwhelmed with replies. Then a 23-
year-old
, who’d always felt detached from everyone else around him
– different and superior – he’d started to despair of ever finding someone to share his taste for the macabre and the extreme.

In marked contrast to his banal daily life selling car accessories at a parts dealer in Herten, just north of Bochum, Daniel Ruda had a deeply sinister private side. A former skinhead, he’d flirted with Nazism and Far Right politics, but always there was a voice within him urging him to go further – to be more shocking, more outrageous, to stretch the boundaries to breaking point and beyond.

Satanism gave him the extra ‘edge’ he was looking for. At that time in Germany, devil-worship certainly wasn’t unheard of. A whole movement of disaffected young people, many from former East Germany, had turned their back on mainstream religion and begun looking at the Occult and Satanism for darker ways of expressing their disillusionment and anger. Daniel became convinced he was Satan’s chosen Messenger of Death. From an early age, he shied away from human contact, flinching whenever someone tried to give him a hug or an embrace. Increasingly his thoughts turned to death and to dreams of violence and murder.

Daniel believed normal human rules and laws didn’t really apply to him, that he was above them, and when he placed his lonely hearts ad, he was looking for someone equally ‘special’. To his amazement, he found her.

His new soul mate was a scowling, Satan-obsessed misfit, three years his junior. Until adolescence, Manuela Ruda (née Bartel) had been an ordinary, well-adjusted middle-class girl
from a small German university town called Witten in North Rhine-Westphalia, who loved animals and performed well at school. But at 13, everything changed. Manuela started experimenting with radical hair cuts and clothes chosen more for their shock value than anything else.

‘Why do you have to do that to yourself?’ her despairing mother would ask, as her once fresh-faced daughter painted on thick black make-up round her eyes.

At school, Manuela was increasingly ostracised. Her friends no longer knew how to approach her, and she began to keep herself to herself, even attempting suicide at 14 by taking a drugs overdose. Angry at the world, as so many teenagers are, she went on demonstration after demonstration, not caring all that much what they were about, just to have something to rebel against.

By 14, Manuela Ruda claimed to have been visited by the Devil himself. At the age of 16, she had run away to London, attracted by the lively Goth scene there, and the city’s traditional tolerance of eccentrics and fashion extremists.

Camden Town in north London has always been a mecca for Goths. The grubby, litter-strewn streets have been home to several legendary clubs and shops, where young people dress uniformly in black, their pallid, sun-phobic complexions contrasting shockingly with their dyed black hair, gather to listen to the music they love in the company of like-minded peers.

As with any umbrella musical movement, Goth encompasses diverse subdivisions. Some people just like to dress up on a weekend and listen to bands that are the mainstream-end of
Gothic, while others are more hardcore and never seen without their heavy make-up and black nail varnish. In Eastern Europe, some elements of the Goth scene have been linked to Far-Right racism. Then there are the Satanists and the Vampires…

The strand of Goth music called black metal has long attracted a small, but significant fan-base, who are avowedly ‘anti Christian’ or who actively worship the Devil. Closely linked are the devotees who claim to be living vampires, shunning daylight, hanging out in graveyards and enjoying the taste of blood.

Manuela Ruda fitted right in.

She started working in a Gothic nightclub in trendy Islington, North London. With her uncompromising clothes and
hardline
attitude, Manuela naturally gravitated towards the more extreme fringes of the scene and was soon experimenting with vampirism at the so-called ‘bite parties’, where willing participants tried to lick blood drawn from each other’s arms.

‘You can’t drink from the arteries,’ she would later explain to an astonished courtroom. ‘No one is allowed that.’

Some no doubt saw the parties, and the regular trips to graveyards, as an extension of dressing up for Halloween – the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
brought to life - but Manuela took it all in deadly earnest.

‘Dig me a grave,’ she begged her companions one night, as they lurked aimlessly around a shadowy graveyard. ‘I want to know what it feels like to be buried alive.’

While in the UK, the young Manuela travelled up to the Scottish Highlands, where the wild, undeveloped landscape appealed to her own sense of isolation from what was considered to be normal, civilised society. Working as a chambermaid in a hotel, she even struck up a friendship with one of Scotland’s most notorious eccentrics, the so-called Leopard Man of Skye, Tom Leppard, who lives in a cave and has 99.9 per cent of his body covered with leopard-print tattoos. The Leopard Man agreed to see her after she wrote to him expressing her interest and the two maintained a sporadic correspondence after that. Clearly, whatever it was Manuela was searching for during her stay in the UK wasn’t to be found within mainstream British culture.

So this then was the Manuela Ruda who returned to Germany in the late 1990s, out of synch with the majority, obsessed with death and devilry, gravitating towards the
ever-more
extreme fringes of society, where people boasted of having souls as black as the clothes they wore. This was the Manuela who turned the pages of a music fanzine in the summer of 1999 to find an advert that seemed to jump out from the pages into her very skin, an advert she returned to again and again until the words were imprinted on her memory: ‘Black-haired Vampire seeks Princess of Darkness who hates everyone and everything and has bidden farewell to life.’

Would her story, and that of Daniel Ruda and Frank Hackert, have been different, had she not replied to the ad in the fanzine? There are moments in time when fate teeters on a pinhead,
where the course of a life, of many lives, is decided in a puff of air no stronger than a sigh. If Manuela hadn’t picked up that paper, if she’d decided, like so many times before, to skip through the Personals’ section, convinced it could hold no interest for someone like her, if she’d ringed the ad in pen only to think better of it the following day, the future of three lives might have been unrecognisably different.

There’s a certain chemistry in killing, an arrangement of elements that, mixed together, causes a particular chain of reaction. This is multiplied many times over when couples kill, where the combination of the two individuals creates the chain. If just one element, one molecule is altered, the outcome is vastly different – so many ‘ifs’.

When the couple finally met up, there was an immediate attraction. Each recognised in the other the same sense of alienation coupled with the same conviction of superiority, of being special, singled out. Separately they’d been outcasts, smouldering with resentment and casting around wildly for ways of channelling their anti-social rage and hostility. Together they were a unit, bolstering each other’s twisted view of the world and feeding off one another’s hatred. Satanism, one of several common links that first drew them together, started to become the centrepiece around which they built up the foundations of their new joint lives. What might easily have been a passing interest if they’d remained separate now solidified into the focal point of their relationship.

The couple moved in together to an apartment in Manuela’s home town of Witten. Their taste in home décor was a very long way from the IKEA style with which most of their contemporaries were furnishing their first homes. The living room was dominated by an altar made from imitation human skulls while pinned to the back of the bathroom door was a black-and-white poster of hanged women. The bedroom held the heavy oak coffin in which Manuela liked to sleep and the lighting came via specialist cemetery lights. Homebase, it was not!

As the whole world welcomed in the new millennium, Daniel and Manuela wanted no part of a shiny new future. Instead, they spiralled ever deeper into a nightmare fantasy world, where vampires stalked the night streets and the Devil called the shots.

While Daniel kept up the façade of normality, travelling to his job selling bumpers and windscreen wipers in a car parts lot, behind the closed doors of their apartment, he and his oddball new girlfriend were unravelling at a terrifying rate. Alone, they’d kept their bizarre beliefs largely to themselves, forcing them to the back of their minds, knowing others would find them incomprehensible. Together, they allowed their imaginations full rein, indulging one another in ever more extreme interpretations of the world and their own place in it. Manuela, always keen to stand out from what she regarded as the ignorant masses surrounding her, had her incisors removed and animal fangs implanted in their place to mark her out as different from the rest. Then, on 30 October 2000, in a bizarre pre-Halloween ceremony, she formally dedicated her soul to the
service of Satan, vowing to accept his every word as law. While Daniel worked, during the day she stayed inside, closing the shutters against the unwelcome light and often seeking out the dark security of her coffin.

One of the ideas the couple came back to again and again as they constructed their dark fantasy world, where just one master existed and they were his messengers, was that of human sacrifice.

‘We can’t go to be with Satan unless we give him an offering first,’ they’d tell one another, by this stage not even noticing how dangerously blurred the line between role-play and reality was becoming.

In March 2001, Daniel Ruda had what he considered to be a most exciting vision: ‘I was given four numbers,’ he told Manuela, agitatedly. ‘6,6,6,7.’

For him, there was no doubt what this vision signified. ‘We’ll get married on 6 June, or 6/6, and then on 6 July we’ll find someone to sacrifice to Satan and then kill ourselves so that we can go to be with him always,’ he said.