FIENDISH KILLERS (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Vivian Head, Amy Williams Page B

individual. He did not kill for all the usual motives – lust, revenge, or greed – and his victims, most commonly, had no connection with him, so there was no reason for him to kill them. Moreover, each time he was brought in for questioning, the police were taken aback by his audacity and found it hard to believe that he should display such indifference as to the fate of his victims. For example, after murdering Isabella Cooke, he took authorities to the place where he had buried the girl and said: ‘This is the place. In fact, I think I’m standing on her now.’
    In the same way, when he shot the Smart family dead, he appeared to show no remorse for his crime. In fact, he went back to the house several times after the event, even helping himself to the food that was in the house after the Christmas and New Year festivities. Strangely, he fed the family cat once its owners were dead, and began to drive around in Peter Smart’s car, even giving a police officer a lift to work. On that occasion, he casually told the police officer, who was working on the Isabella Cooke case, that the police were looking in the wrong place.
     
    S HEER BRAVURA
     
    On several other occasions, Manuel managed to hoodwink police by a display of sheer bravura. For example, in the Watt case, Manuel’s calm, cool demeanour when taken in for questioning convinced police that he was not to blame and, instead, William Watt, Marion’s husband, was brought into custody and spent two months in jail on suspicion of committing the crimes. Fortunately, he was released once the true culprit, Manuel, was known.
    Writing about the case after the event, the trial judge Lord Cameron commented: ‘I saw no sign indicative to a layman of any illness or abnormality beyond callousness, selfishness and treachery in high degree, but I did form the impression that he was even then laying the foundation of a suggestion that he might in the end of the day be presented not as a criminal but as one in need of medical care.’
    So calculating was Manuel that even in his initial interviews with police, he took care to show that, should he be found guilty, he could rely on an insanity plea to get him off the hook. However, his plan failed and eventually he was hanged as a common murderer. According to witnesses, his last words before he met his death were: ‘Turn up the radio and I’ll go quietly.’

John Wayne Gacy

     
    Even by comparison with his fellow serial killers, John Wayne Gacy, ‘the killer clown’, has become something of an icon of pure evil. This is partly to do with the way he dressed up as a clown to entertain children at parties near his suburban Chicago home – what more sinister notion is there than that beneath the clown’s make-up lies a sex killer? And partly it is because of the sheer enormity of his crime – thirty-three young men raped and murdered, almost all of them buried beneath his suburban house.
    John Wayne Gacy came into this world on March 17, 1942, St Patrick’s Day, the second of three children born to Elaine Robinson Gacy and John Wayne Gacy Sr. He grew up in a middle-class district of northern Chicago and was raised as a Catholic. His childhood was for the most part uneventful. Look a little closer, though, and there were troubles. John Gacy Sr was a misanthropic man who frequently took his anger out on his son through physical beatings and verbal abuse. John Gacy Jr, in turn, became very close to his mother. Aged eleven, he sustained a nasty accident when he was struck on the head by a swing. It caused him to have regular blackouts during his teens. During his teenage years he also complained of heart problems, though this seems likely to be just a symptom of a lifelong tendency to hypochondria – thus whenever he was under pressure he would claim to be on the brink of a heart attack.
    Gacy did poorly in high school, left without graduating and headed for Las Vegas in a bid to make his fortune. Instead, he ended up