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CONTENTS
Title Page
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
1 THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST Stephen Marsh and Rebecca Harris
2 THE KEN & BARBIE KILLERS Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo
3 ACCIDENTS DO HAPPEN Carol Ann Hunter and Anton Lee
4 ‘THE DEVIL MADE US DO IT’ Daniel and Manuela Ruda
5 THE LIES THAT BIND Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr
6 THE PRINCESS AND THE BIT OF ROUGH Charlene and Gerald Gallego
7 SMOTHER LOVE Sante and Kenny Kimes
8 DUNGEONS OF THE MIND Marc Dutroux and Michelle Martin
9 BULLY FOR LOVE Amanda Baggus and David Lehane Sarah Bullock and Darren Stewart 238
10 MR AND MRS MURDER Fred and Rose West
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Copyright
Before you read any further, be warned. The stories in this book will leave you appalled and traumatised; worse still, they will shake your faith in human nature. Certainly that’s how it was for me as I researched each gruesome case with growing horror. When writing about lone killers, at least there’s the consolation of telling oneself that this was one isolated, deluded individual. Writing about couples who kill removes even that crumb of comfort.
These are disturbing cases that will make you question everything you know, or think you know, about who we are and what we are capable of. Our immediate instinct is to classify the perpetrators as monsters, alien creatures that exist outside our comprehension and yet if that’s the case, how is it that such exotic creatures manage to find one another? How many of them must there be to be able to pair off with such sickening regularity? Of course, the truth is that there are no monsters, only monstrous crimes that grow out of a particular dynamic between two people. That dynamic is what I have tried to focus on in telling these terrible stories. As far as can be ascertained, all the facts are accurate, but, inevitably, some small liberties have been taken in bringing people and events to life to understand them better.
In 1997, in a letter to the then home secretary, Ian Brady referred to the child murders he committed with Myra Hindley as ‘marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer’. While the Moors Murders have been analysed so many times as to make their retelling in this book unnecessary, Brady’s words offer a chilling insight into this most warped and most dangerous dynamic. The couple that kills together stays together – bound by their secrets, their knowledge of one another, and by the blood rituals they’ve shared.
Writing these stories wasn’t easy, but it was grimly fascinating in terms of what it revealed about the secret underbelly of human relationships. I hope reading them provides the same experience. Just make sure you leave the light on!
Tammy Cohen
A14-year-old girl is kept for days as a sex slave, filmed begging for her life and then strangled. Two 8-year-olds are snatched off the street and left to starve in an underground dungeon. A man’s head is staved in with a hammer before he’s stabbed 66 times, his blood collected in a bowl to be drunk. A vulnerable man is held prisoner in a garden shed, then tortured to death… Sadly, there is nothing unique about violent death. Since records began there have been no shortage of accounts bearing witness to man’s tremendous capacity for inhumanity. But what makes the above crimes so shocking is that they are not the work of one depraved individual but a couple acting together. In a world where brutality has become so commonplace that we are almost immune to it, the juxtaposition of love and savagery, of romance and sadism, can still make us sit up and take notice.
We Westerners hold very little sacred, but one of our last, most fiercely protected ideals is that of the redemptive power of love. With the right person by our side, we insist, individuals who were once broken can be healed, lives that were going off track can be set straight again… The love that inspires sonnets, poetry and even Whitney Houston ballads is what we’re all searching for because it represents the key to another kingdom, where past wrongs are put right and shattered hearts become whole. Love lifts us up where we belong, we’re told. And where we belong is this better place – beyond loneliness, isolation and acts of desperation borne of bitterness and despair. Put simply, love – at least the kind of love we choose to believe in – is a power for good.
So pervasive is this view, so seductive the premise, that when something happens to cast doubt over it, we cannot, simply will not, believe it. Lovers should be heroes, not psychopaths; they should be kissing rather than killing. Their prize should be mutual salvation, not contamination.
The romantic comedies we flock to see, the love songs we sing along to, all share one clear message: love makes you a better person. Which is why crimes such as the ones described above send such shockwaves through us all. Here are couples lucky enough to find love, which is after all, our modern-day holy grail. But instead of redemption, they institute rape; instead of salvation, sadism; and instead of devotion, death.
Individually, they may have been broken from the start, but rather than fixing them, love shatters them still further into millions of irreparable pieces. This is not the noble, true love we know from a thousand big-screen love stories, but love that exalts in power, that feeds on misery, that wallows in violence. This is a love that’s twisted and warped out of all recognition – and yet it is still love.
The couples featured in this book are not inspired to be better people because they found each other. Instead they’re encouraged to be worse. Rather than boosting one another’s strengths, they exploit each other’s weaknesses. You would think you might be able to spot them, wouldn’t you, these freaks of nature who turn romance into a blood sport? And that’s another reason why they so disturb us: their very normality. They kidnap, they rape, they murder, torture and abuse… And in between they make each other cups of tea, run baths, buy birthday gifts, have sex and tour their local DIY store together on rainy bank holidays. Love may have created a monster, but it’s a monster that wears a scarily ordinary face.
Pretty, petite blonde-haired Karla Homolka and her handsome young fiancé cooked her parents a Father’s Day meal, while the dead body of the young girl they’d just assaulted lay festering among the bags of potatoes in their cellar. Rose West broke off from the most violent sexual abuse to make her husband and their victim a cup of tea. Kenny Kimes stopped off at a florist’s on his way home from disposing of the body of the man he’d just murdered to buy the woman he loved a bunch of flowers…
It’s not the differences between these couples and any other couple in love that makes them so terrifying; it’s the similarities.
