The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (73 page)

gullible pen pals. “On the contrary,” Belcher wrote, over time from the salary she earned as a part-time Wal-

“Florida Statutes have ruled it illegal to deny inmates Mart employee.

that privilege because doing so would deny inmates The correspondence was finally too much for Pardo, access to the outside world. Many inmates, both male who tripped himself up with a clumsy mistake. On and female, have accumulated considerable amounts of October 12, 1995, Betty Ihem received a letter meant money this way. They are convicts and some are experts for Barbara Ford. It read:

at ‘conning’ honest people out of their hard earned dollars. Often, when we advise a person that an inmate is My Dearest Barb,

not being honest, the person will still choose to believe the inmate.”

Hi. I hope this letter finds you in the best of health. You With that grudging seal of approval, Manny Pardo are all I want and need. I am not a dream and if my was free to pursue his career as a death-row swindler.

love interests you, well then it’s yours.

Only the final, inevitable date with “Old Sparky” will I love you,

curtail his correspondence with gullible women, and no Manny

final execution date has been set at this writing. With others who have killed repeatedly across the Sunshine Predictably furious, Ihem sent the letter on to Ford, State, Pardo takes his ease with pen in hand and plays with her own explanatory note written on the back.

the waiting game.

Eight days later, Ford wrote to Pardo, addressing him as

“Thief of Hearts” and enclosing photocopies of the money orders she had previously sent him.

PAULIN, Thierry, and MATHURIN, Jean-Thierry
Between October 1984 and November 1987, elderly You received the money under false pretenses [she Parisian women lived in terror of a savage killer whom wrote] which makes you a fake and not the “Man of they dubbed the “Monster of Montmartre,” after the Honor” which you professed to be. Needless to say, you neighborhood that was his favored hunting ground.

are a liar and a hypocrite—the very things you said you The first victim, 83-year-old Anna Barbier-Ponthus, was hated in people. If you choose not to return the money, found gagged, bound, and beaten to death in her apart-I will be your very worst nightmare and expose you for ment on October 5, 1984. Four days later, firefighters
209

PETIOT, Marcel

found 89-year-old Suzanne Foucault inside her burning MENT would spare both killers from the guillotine, but flat, bound hand and foot, with a plastic bag pulled Paulin’s days were already numbered. Diagnosed as suf-over her head. A third victim, 71-year-old lona fering from AIDS in 1985, he was still awaiting trial Seigaresco, was discovered on November 5, bound with when he fell into a coma on March 10, 1989, and died electric cord and beaten to death in her small apartment of AIDS-related complications on April 16.

on Boulevard de Clichy. If Parisian police had any doubts that a serial killer was at large in their city, those doubts were dispelled two days later with the discovery
PETIOT, Marcel

of two murdered women. Alice Benaim, age 84, and 80-A Frenchman born in 1897, Petiot first demonstrated year-old Marie Choy, next-door neighbors, were found criminal tendencies in public school by stealing from his slaughtered in their adjoining homes. (Choy had been classmates. He later moved on to looting mailboxes, bound with steel wire and forced to drink bleach before and during military service, in 1917, he stole drugs she was beaten to death.) On November 8, 75-year-old from an army dispensary for sale to street addicts. Dis-Maria Mico-Diaz was found in her flat, bound, gagged, charged with a pension and free treatment for psy-and nearly hacked in two with 60 stab wounds.

choneurosis, Petiot went on to obtain a medical degree, Detectives didn’t know it yet, but their quarry could despite spending part of his student days in an asylum.

hardly have been more flamboyant. A black transvestite In 1928 he was elected mayor of Villanueve, while prac-drug addict who dyed his hair platinum blond, Thierry ticing medicine there, but his term was cut short by Paulin was a native of Martinique, born in 1963. A Petiot’s conviction of theft in 1930. Whatever his sen-homosexual sadist, Paulin broke the usual mold of gay tence it did not hamper his continued criminal activity.

serial killers by preying on members of the opposite sex, That same year, one of Dr. Petiot’s patients—a sometimes accompanied on his raids by male lover Madame Debauve—was robbed and murdered in her

Jean-Thierry Mathurin, a 19-year-old waiter from Mar-home. Gossip blamed the doctor, but his chief accuser—

tinique. Between them, they worked out a system of fol-another patient—was soon silenced by sudden death. A lowing old ladies home from the market, moving in to woman who accused Petiot of actively encouraging her pounce as the victim unlocked her front door. The vic-daughter’s drug addiction disappeared without a trace, tims ranged in age from 60 years to 95, and the brutal but things were getting hot in Villanueve, and the good violence they suffered told authorities the “Monster of doctor struck off in search of a friendlier climate.

Montmartre” had more on his mind than simple

In Paris, he was convicted of shoplifting but was dis-snatch-and-grab robbery.

charged on the condition that he seek psychiatric ther-Feeling the heat of public outrage, Parisian authori-apy. As World War II began, Petiot was convicted of ties swept the city for junkies and sexual deviates, drug trafficking and was alleged to be an addict himself, grilling all they could find in hopes of turning up a lead.

but the court released him after payment of a small fine.

Paulin and Mathurin fled to Toulouse, killing time in By early 1941, with Nazi occupation troops controlling gay bars and drug dens until they had a lovers’ quarrel much of France, he had devised a get-rich scheme that and parted company. Back in Paris, Paulin beat up a mirrored elements of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution to drug pusher who tried to swindle him, and the dealer the Jewish question.”

surprised him by filing assault charges. Convicted at Petiot bought a house on rue Lesueur in Paris, contrial and sentenced to 16 months in jail, Paulin was tracting for special modifications that were completed paroled in 1987 and resumed his reign of terror as if the in September 1941. The revisions included raising gar-crime spree had never been interrupted. The violence den walls to block his neighbors’ view and construction peaked in November, with three victims killed on the of a triangular, windowless death chamber inside the weekend of Paulin’s 24th birthday, but the Monster’s house. As the war dragged on, Petiot made a fortune by time was running out. One of his victims had survived posing as a member of the French resistance movement, and offered a description to police. The gendarmes had offering to help Jews and other fugitives flee the coun-no trouble locating a bleached-blond black man, arrest-try. Clients arrived at his house after dark, receiving an ing Paulin on December 1, but they were embarrassed injection to guard against “foreign disease,” and Petiot to discover that his fingerprints—on file from previous then led them to the chamber, watching their death arrests—matched those found at several murder scenes.

throes through a hatch in one wall. Arrested by In custody, Paulin readily confessed to 21 murders, Gestapo agents in May 1943 on suspicion of aiding naming Mathurin as an accomplice in many cases.

escapees, Petiot was released seven months later when Jailed on nine counts of murder, Mathurin refused even the Nazis recognized a kindred spirit.

to speak Paulin’s name, habitually referring to him as On March 11, 1944, neighbors on Rue Lesueur com-

“the other one.” French abolition of CAPITAL PUNISH-plained of rancid smoke pouring from Petiot’s house,
210

PISTORIUS, Dr. Micki

PISTORIUS, Dr. Micki:
Forensic profiler A native of South Africa, born in 1971, Micki Pistorius worked as a journalist for eight years while completing her doctorate in psychology at the University of Pretoria. Even then, she told the press in 1996, “In my wildest dreams I never saw myself in the police force, but my interest in Freudian psychology led me to see a connection between the theory and serial killers. One thing led to another, and here I am.”

“Here,” for Dr. Pistorius is an unintended place in the spotlight, hailed as the leading practitioner of forensic PROFILING outside the United States. In fact, after a series of headline-grabbing cases in her native land, she is regarded by some observers as the most successful profiler in history, eclipsing such American colleagues as ROBERT RESSLER and JOHN DOUGLAS.

Critics of profiling respond that while Pistorius has indeed described several fugitive serial killers with uncanny precision, profiling per se has yet to directly produce an arrest.

Dr. Pistorius received her first serial murder assignment within hours of joining the South African police, analyz-ing the brutal crimes of Cape Town’s “Station Strangler,”

slayer of 22 boys between 1986 and 1994. That case was closed with the arrest and conviction of 28-year-old Norman Simons, an educated predator who spoke seven languages and claimed to be possessed by the spirit of his dead brother. (The claim did not protect him from a 25-year prison sentence.) Pistorius had been accurate in each Dr. Marcel Petiot at trial (Author’s collection) particular of her profile on Simons—race, age, education, level of employment—but the arrest, as usual, came from another source: several acquaintances telephoned police and police found the chimney on fire and no one at to say that Simons resembled published suspect sketches home. Firemen broke in and found 27 corpses in the of the Station Strangler.

basement, most in various stages of dismemberment.

Still, it was considered a victory for South Africa’s Held on suspicion of murder, Petiot was released after fledgling profiler, and there has been little rest for Pisto-telling police that the dead men were Nazis, executed rius in the years since 1994, with postapartheid South by the French resistance.

Africa overrun by a veritable plague of serial killers.

The doctor dropped out of sight in August 1944

Pistorius quickly found herself caught up in the midst of when Paris was liberated, but two months later he simultaneous manhunts for such prolific slayers as fired off a letter to the press, claiming the Gestapo had

“ABC Killer” MOSES SITHOLE (38 dead), “Phoenix tried to frame him for murder by dumping corpses at Strangler” Sipho Thwala (18 killed), “Bootie Boer”

his home. The renewed investigation climaxed in Stewart Wilken (charged with 10 murders, including Petiot’s arrest on November 2, 1944, and while his rap that of his own daughter), “Cleveland Strangler” David sheet had mysteriously disappeared in Villanueve, Selepe (killed in police custody), and “Donnybrook authorities had ample evidence in hand. Formally Killer” CHRISTOPHER ZIKODE. Meanwhile, even more charged with 27 murders, Petiot admitted 63 killings random killers remain still at large: Johannesburg’s at his trial in March 1946, describing various homi-

“Nasrec Strangler” (15 dead and counting), the “Cape cides as the patriotic acts of a resistance fighter. The Town Ripper” (18 prostitutes butchered), the “Pine total may well have been higher, as one of Petiot’s Town River Strangler” in KwaZulu, Natal (profiled as a statements referred to 150 “liquidations,” and 86 dis-black rape-slayer preying on white women), and others.

sected bodies were pulled from the Seine between The incessant travel required by her job soon led Pis-1941 and 1943. Finally convicted on 26 counts, Petiot torius to divorce courts, and it has limited her prospects was guillotined on May 26, 1946.

for a social life. “If I do meet a boyfriend,” she has told
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PROFILING of Unidentified Killers

the press, “he is more than likely to be in the same work that could have passed for the bomber’s photograph, as I am.” That work in South Africa, as elsewhere, has even predicting—correctly—that the subject would be traditionally been a male preserve, but Pistorius reports wearing a double-breasted suit (with the jacket but-good progress with veteran detectives. “There was a lot toned!) at the time of his arrest. More to the point, an of skepticism when I first arrived,” she says, “but once I open letter from Dr. Brussel provoked bomber George proved I could do the work, I was quite quickly Metesky to a written response, which in turn led police accepted. Now, if anything, my male colleagues are very to his doorstep. No other profiler has yet rivaled Brus-protective of me.” Frequently compared to actress Jodie sel’s performance, and even where specific profiles are Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, Pistorius finds that proved accurate in the wake of an arrest, apprehension her civilian friends “tend to ask me about the details of itself is normally effected by routine police investiga-