Category: Top Story

A good man’s murder that took decades to solve

Roy McCaleb was going to be murdered in his home in Houston, Texas in September 1985 and his killer was going to get away with it for 28 years.

At 51 years old, he was a seasoned construction worker, happily married for the second time to Carolyn Sue Krizan-Wilson, and didn’t have an enemy in the world. They had a son who lived with them with his girlfriend and they were the typical American family.

His killer wasn’t his first wife as they had divorced only due to the after-effects of the tragic death of one of their daughters, an event too devastating for their 22-year marriage to survive.

His killer wasn’t anyone from the company, Brown & Root, where he had worked as the foreman for decades.

But there was one suspect.

Several days before McCaleb was going to die, his wife of 2 years was car-jacked, assaulted, and raped by an unknown barefoot assailant. Carolyn didn’t report the incident to her husband at that time because he had recently had back surgery and was recovering from a heart attack.

Not wanting to pile undue stress on him, she also didn’t report it to the police concerned that it would get back to Roy and impede his healing progress.

That cover-up, that reluctance to cause waves was going to cause the death of her husband.

On September 22, 1985, according to Carolyn, that same man entered the McCaleb residence through an unopened back door, held her at knifepoint, and raped her again while her heavily sedated husband, who was recovering from his surgery, her son, and his girlfriend, slept upstairs.

Somehow, afterward, he found the gun that Carolyn owned, went into the room where Roy was fast asleep and shot him several times.

Shocked, Carolyn ran into the shooter, managed to retrieve the dropped gun, and fired off two shots as he fled from the house.

The Houston Police were called, sealed off the crime scene, took statements, collected evidence, photographed everything, and began the manhunt.

For months they had nothing to go on. For years there were no breakthroughs, despite Roy McCaleb’s daughter, Pamela Nalley, contacting the DA on a yearly basis for updates, determined to find her father’s killer.

And then, nearly 23 years later in 2008, suspicions, background checks, and unfolding revelations over the years broke the case wide open. This occurred thanks to the persistence of Roy’s daughter, two Texas Rangers, and District Attorney Ken Magidson who decided to move forward with the case.

After poring over the old evidence meticulously, an arrest was made.

The person brought to justice for the murder of Roy McCaleb in 1985 wasn’t the mystery attacker who broke into his house, raped his wife, and shot him dead. The true killer was none other than his wife, Carolyn Sue Krizan-Wilson.

Why did she come under suspicion after all these years? Greed!

Questions were raised about the $198,000 life insurance policies taken out before Roy’s death that she had tried to collect. Questions were raised about how unbelievably calm she had first appeared after reporting her husband’s murder at the time. Questions were raised about how her son didn’t hear the intruder forcibly assault his mother without disturbing him.

Things just didn’t add up.

And further testimony from some of her previous six husbands started to cast some light on her ability to appear as sweet and lovable one minute while being a money-hungry shrew when her mask slipped the next.

Still, the evidence was circumstantial, with no witnesses, and no physical evidence actually linking her to the shooting. At the time of the shooting, she had, against police advice, showered to remove Roy’s blood that had soaked into her nightdress where she had held him.

Even now that she was accused of the murder of her husband, Carolyn continued to insist that her mystery rapist was the killer, clinging to her innocence, that she, too, was a victim. But what motive, the Texas Rangers pressed, would he have had to kill Roy McCaleb? When asked that question she simply did not have a plausible answer.

When the case was brought to court, it was dismissed by the judge, much to the disgust of Roy’s daughter when her attorneys argued that after 23 years it had been too long to bring the case to trial and that Carolyn was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

For the next 5 years, she escaped justice.

In the end, her health deteriorating, she broke down when the court ruling was reversed in 2013. Threatened with life in prison, she finally confessed to shooting her husband for a lighter sentence. The plea deal was deemed the only way for the prosecution team to settle the case once and for all as there really was no fresh incriminating evidence and the case was, after all, decades old.

On December 26, 2013, at 71 years old, Carolyn Sue Krizan-Wilson started her 6-month prison sentence, followed by 10 years of probation.

Although the sentencing at first appeared light due to Krizan-Wilson’s health issues, Roy McCaleb’s family had finally achieved the closure they wanted. They had long suspected the truth and had fought tirelessly for 28 long years for Carolyn Sue Krizan-Wilson to be convicted for the callous murder of Roy McCaleb.

An experienced crew, a luxury yacht, and a brutal storm that will test their will to survive

Sailing was in Deborah Kiley’s blood from an early age. Before taking on the job of crewing the luxury yacht, the Trashman, from Maine to Toronto, she had done it all.

Texas-born, she had completed the Whitebread Round the World Race at the age of 23 and was accustomed to crewing vessels of all shapes and sizes. She was a natural, respected the sea for its ferocity and unpredictability, but had confidence in her ability to handle whatever the elements threw at her.

Her 4 fellow crew members hired to sail the Trashman felt the same. They were all experienced sailors and were always ready for the unexpected. They were wrong. And were going to discover that the sea was a force of nature that was way too powerful for them to believe they could conquer.

The fateful trip started in October 1982, when the 58-foot yacht briefly stopped over in Annapolis, Maryland, after setting sail from Maine. The weather, which at first seemed calm and tranquil as they skimmed across the deep blue, soon turned nasty and turbulent.

The crew, captained by John Lippoth, consisting of Meg Mooney, Brad Cavanagh, and Mark Adams, were unprepared for the dramatic change in the weather conditions. They were all used to sailing in rough weather, but every one of them had to admit that on day two of their six-day journey, they were in deep trouble.

When the storm descended on them in all its ferocity, it carried with it 110kph winds and created 10m waves that loomed above the sailors briefly before slamming into the sailing ship time and time again.

Yet there was no sense of panic amongst them, just a steely determination to get through it, working in shifts as a team to conserve energy as they navigated the violent storm like the professionals they were.

When disaster struck, Kiley was fast asleep in her bunk while above the captain was drunk at the wheel.

Water rushing into her cabin startled her awake, and she instinctively knew that they were sinking.

Above, Mark Adams managed to inflate a life raft before they all leaped into the raging ocean, the Trashman floundering behind them, sinking fast. Immediately, shark fins popped up around the dinghy, the mighty predators sensing that it was feeding time.

They could smell the blood oozing from Meg Mooney’s leg that had been injured in her escape from the capsizing Trashman, and it was driving them crazy. The sharks pulled, tugged, and bumped the dinghy in an effort to capsize it; all the terrified crew could do over the next few days was hang on and pray that the next nudge wouldn’t serve them up to the sharks.

It was a desperate situation, made worse, not just by the bad weather, but because of the lack of food and water. The 5 sailors weren’t that far from the coast but they were a long way from being rescued.

Before long, dehydration clouded the judgment of Captain John Lippoth and Mark Adams, who, in desperation, opted to drink seawater to slake the thirst that was driving them crazy. It was a fateful mistake.

Drinking seawater not only compounds dehydration but induces hallucinations and quickly starts to shut down the kidneys.

The other 3 sailors resisted, Kiley covering herself in seaweed to keep warm, Cavanaugh barely hanging on mentally, and Mooney near delirious from the infection in her leg.

On day three Lippoth and Adams were too far gone, mumbling incoherently, seeing salvation that simply wasn’t there. For Lippoth, it was an imaginary island and safety that saw him suddenly stand up and hurl himself overboard.

His splashdown was quickly followed by a blood-curdling scream as the sharks swooped in, their powerful jaws clamping on and dragging him underwater in a few bloody seconds.

The stunned silence that enveloped the survivors didn’t last very long as Adam’s delirium overtook his survival instincts. Deciding in his severely dehydrated mind that he fancied going out for a beer and a cigarette, he followed his deceased Captain over the side, straight into the slavering jaws of the waiting sharks.

Meg Mooney passed away from the infection in her leg shortly after and, with no other option, Kiley and Cavanaugh, slipped her body overboard. Watching as the sharks consumed their third crewmate in a feeding frenzy, they could but wonder in the feeble state that they were both in, which one of them would be next.

The fourth day in the dinghy was soul-destroying, dehydration slowly shutting their system down, their minds playing tricks on them.

Day five was worse, both of them contemplating ways to end the torment, wondering if the next time they closed their eyes would be the last time.

At one point, while cleaning the dinghy to eliminate any infected blood and pus that had oozed from Mooney’s leg, Cavanaugh slipped and fell overboard.

Kiley tried to drag him back on board, but she was too weak. Cavanaugh tried to pull himself back to safety but his strength gave out. And the sharks closed in.

What saved him was the appearance of the Olenegorsk. Spotting the Russian vessel gave him the impetus and a desperate burst of energy that propelled him back to safety with what little help Kiley could offer.

After 5 days of hell, they were saved.

Unsurprisingly, the ordeal forever affected both of their lives.

Mentally scarred, Brad Cavanaugh faced his inner demons head-on after a period of physical and mental recovery and returned to sailing the seas. Deborah Kiley, on the other hand, endured years of nightmares filled with the screams of her dying shipmates.

She got married, twice, had two children, wrote two books about her traumatic experience, and even became a motivational speaker.

She never sailed again, however. Those 5 days stranded in shark-infested waters never knowing if she was going to live or die, would haunt her for the rest of her days and she had no wish to relive the experience.

On August 13, 2012, at the age of 54, Deborah Kiley passed away in her new home in Mexico, cause of death unknown. Her legacy will forever be one of a strong woman who had survived where others would have surrendered, who used her story to inspire others to fight on no matter how dire the situation at first appeared.

He appeared to be just another god-fearing churchgoer, father, and family man. He wasn’t.

At the age of twenty-one, Dennis Radar, after dropping out of Kansas Wesleyan University, joined the United States Air Force. On his application, he neglected to mention that while in his teens he reveled in killing small cats and dogs by hanging them until their necks stretched and their legs stopped kicking.

That was just one of his “quirks”.

To any of his friends and family, he was not overly sociable at school, yet was polite, quiet, a nice guy who fitted in.

He stayed in the Air Force from 1966 to 1970, achieving the rank of Sargeant and being well respected by his men and superiors. Upon leaving, he went back to Kansas, got a job at an Independent Grocers of Australia Superstore, and got married at the age of 26 in 1971 to Paula Dietz.

Everything was normal. But it wasn’t going to stay that way for long.

The decline started the following year when he lost his job, had too much time on his hands, and his feelings of depression began to lead him towards a dark place filled with fantasies of blood and murder.

On January 15 1974 he selected his first victims, breaking into their home through the back door, and forcing them upstairs at gunpoint. Once in the bedroom, he tied up Joseph Otero, his wife, Julie, and their two young children aged 9 and 11.

He hadn’t initially intended to kill them all, but the unexpectedness of Joseph Otero being present forced him to change his plans. Even so, he may not have gone through with it if it hadn’t suddenly dawned on him that he didn’t have a mask on.

Not being a very experienced killer, it took a couple of attempts to kill the parents as the bags he tied over their heads didn’t work perfectly the first time, and he had to resort to strangling them one at a time. 

The son he suffocated with a bag over his head, while the elder daughter he took down to the basement and hung her, indulging in his sexual fantasies after she was dead.

In April, he broke into another apartment and strangled then stabbed to death Kathryn Bright and then shot her brother twice when he turned up unexpectedly. Amazingly, the brother survived but was unable to give an accurate description to the police so Radar remained free to kill again.

And kill again he did.

Over the next three years, he killed 2 more women, and it was at this point, that he began taunting the police, seeking notoriety even after just having his daughter in 1978.

In letters he sent to a local radio station he suggested his own serial killer’s name, BTK. It stood for Bind, Torture, Kill, basically what he did to his victims.

His new moniker was flashed across the papers, whispered in fear on the news channels, and made him famous, a target for the police.

He loved it and secretly laughed at the ineptitude of law enforcement as they failed to catch him as he continued to kill and dote on his daughter at the same time.

He took her fishing, celebrated Christmas with her and his wife, laughed, and loved like any other family man. 

As a Boy Scout leader, he embarked on trips and influenced young minds and for the Christ Lutheran Church where he worshipped regularly, he became the president of the church council.

It was in April 1985 that he murdered his neighbor, 53-year-old, Marine Hedge, and took her corpse to his church where he staged her body in various stages of bondage and took pictures for his scrapbook.

Afterward, he dumped her body in a ditch, thought nothing more of it as he continued to attend the church as usual with his family, singing praises to the Lord. Dennis Radar appeared to be a pillar of the community, a respected family man, and not even those closest to him suspected that he was the BTK killer, not even when he killed again the following year.

Another quirk his congregation was unaware of, apart from the fact that they had a serial killer in their midst, was that he had a penchant for dressing up in women’s clothing, even going as far as tying himself up and taking pictures of himself, pretending to be his victims.

Perhaps because of this role-playing, incredibly bizarre as it was, his urges to kill were satisfied and it wasn’t until 1991 that he killed again, his final victim to be was Dolores E. Davis.

Not because Radar was caught, but because he took a break to attend his daughter’s graduation, and devote himself to family and church matters.

As for the police, they had no clue who the BTK serial killer was and, in the end, had to consign his case to the cold case file, unsolved but not forgotten.

And that’s where it would have ended, Dennis Radar fading into obscurity, his fame etched into history as the killer who had gotten away with 10 murders. That’s where it would have ended if…

…The Wichita Eagle hadn’t received a letter in March 2004 confessing to the murder of Vicki Wegerle in 1986

…KAKE, a television station in Wichita, hadn’t received a letter in May with fake details of the BTK killer.

Dennis Radar was taunting the police. But in doing so he was poking the sleeping bear.

No longer was his case cold. The investigation was reenergized, with further packages with false clues planted where they would be discovered after he alerted the authorities to their whereabouts.

His sheer audacity motivated the police to go into overdrive mode. They conducted DNA matches on any samples gathered from the sites where the victims were found, no matter how inconsequential they at first appeared.

Hours of surveillance camera footage taken from around the areas where the packages were left were pored over. They wanted to get him badly, wanted to wipe the smirk off his face that they knew was there.

They had loads of data, hours of footage — that led nowhere and to no one.

But they were patient. They knew that all the BTK killer had to do was make one small mistake and they would get him. The good news, if there was any, was that while he was toying with them at least he wasn’t out there killing anyone.

That was about to change.

After more than a decade, Dennis Radar was targeting his next victim, stalking her, intending to strike in October.

But then a package that he had left in a truck went missing, annoying Radar so much that he had to direct the police to the area where he had left it, and therefore delaying his kill. 

The package was eventually recovered by the police from a trash bin where it had been discarded by the truck owner, a doll bound and gagged inside. 

Inadvertently, Radar had just helped out the investigators.

He was unaware that there was a camera overlooking the parking area and that there was now a video available for the authorities to study around the date the package had been dropped off. 

They scrutinized every second, noted down every car and person on the footage, watched as an unrecognizable figure dropped the parcel off then sauntered back to his black Jeep Cherokee.

Unfortunately, the vehicle registration plate was unreadable and couldn’t be traced back to him. That was in January 2005. In February, Dennis Radar, the elusive BTK serial killer, was going to make a simple mistake that was going to get him caught.

A floppy disc that he mailed to a local TV station to show just how much smarter he was than the police, was forensically examined, the police hopeful that a clue to the sender’s identity could be found.

When they found the clue they couldn’t believe their luck.

There was some deleted information on the disc that they managed to retrieve from the embedded metadata. That bit of data mentioned the Christ Lutheran Church, and the last document edited was done by a church-goer called Dennis.

Further investigation revealed Radar’s last name, his position at the church, and that he owned a black Jeep Cherokee.

A DNA test taken from his daughter’s recent pap smear at her university confirmed that he was their man.

His arrest happened on February 25, 2005, and the FBI, Wichita Police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation swooped on his home, his workplace, his church and gathered up all the evidence they could find.

It was all ultimately enough for Dennis Radar to confess to his crimes and get handed a damning verdict of 10 consecutive life sentences when he had his day in court.

His wife divorced him within months of his arrest. His daughter found it hard to reconcile that the father who had taken her on multiple fishing trips was a heartless killer. His congregation was appalled that someone they had prayed next to, had looked up to, had been a monster in their midst all along.

The most disconcerting thing about Dennis Radar was that he looked and even behaved like your average church-going family man. 

He looked harmless, friendly even, but what lurked behind his disarming smile, behind his glasses, was the mind of a psychopath who couldn’t understand empathy, couldn’t feel remorse for the 10 victims he had bound, tortured, and killed as the BTK Strangler.

The bad was beaten into him from an early age one blow at a time

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was as heartless as it’s possible to be and as depraved as it’s possible to become.

He wasn’t a particularly menacing looking individual, wasn’t someone you would immediately find physically threatening as he sauntered by on the street during daylight hours. But a look into his eyes when the sun went down and the shadows came out would make the blood in your veins turn cold and send a chill down your spine.

He was, to put it simply, evil.

He was the first child of 7 born to Manuel Antonio Garavito and Rosa Delia Cubillos on 25 January 1957. They were not good parents.

Life in Colombia was far from easy in the late 50s, poverty and a 10-year armed conflict between the Colombian Conservative party and the Colombian Liberal party took its toll on everyone within earshot of guns going off constantly. It was mainly fought in the countryside, peasants pitted against peasants, and being peasants, his parents were constantly caught up in the melee.

Both drank heavily, were violent, the father adulterous, uncaring, the mother lacking any vestiges of affection to show any of her kids.

On one occasion while trying to defend his drunken, pregnant mother from being beaten by his even drunker father, he ended up being tied to a tree at the age of 6 and beaten raw with a ragged branch.

Life at home was hard, life at school wasn’t any easier. He hated the bullying, which happened on a daily basis, enjoyed the studying, while it lasted. His father pulled him out of school in 1968 before he could finish the fifth grade so he could work and bring some money into the household.

It was this choice made by his father that was going to set the young Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos on the gruesome road to becoming The Beast.

It started innocently enough with his father finding him a job working in a hardware store owned by a neighbor. This neighbor was a longtime friend, this neighbor was adept at hiding his true self from the outside world.

For the following 3 years, the neighbor not only sexually molested Alfredo but physically tied him up, burnt him, bit him, and cut him with a razor blade, inflicting physical wounds and mental scars that would turn a mild manner child into a heartless adult.

Bringing this abuse to the attention of his parents would have been a waste of time, their ears closed, their eyes shut, and their mouths open only to hurl abuse at their kids or to drain a bottle dry.

The abuse only stopped when the family moved away in 1971 to Trujillo — but the damage was seared into his psyche and was beyond repair, his soul scarred way too deep.

A new town should have brought a respite, but the new town only brought a new neighbor who inflicted the same old abuse on the already damaged 15-year-old who, when he expressed his disgust at seeing heterosexual porn for the first time, was thrown to the ground and raped.

It was from that point that he fell into the bottom of every bottle he could find, every swig burning away years of shame, of revulsion, and changing him from the abused into the abuser.

In 1972 he attempted to rape a 5-year-old boy, failed, tried again the following year, and perhaps would have succeeded if the child hadn’t screamed out in terror. He was arrested for attempted rape and when his father found out he scolded him for not having the wits to at least sexually assault a woman.

It wasn’t long before Garavito, his parents ashamed of him, was kicked out and had to fend for himself. He tried various types of jobs, tried heterosexual relationships, and attempted to fit into society. He failed at all of them.

In the 1980s, suicidal thoughts forced him to seek psychiatric help and attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but neither helped in the slightest, his feelings of worthlessness persisting and his need to drink a bottle dry overwhelming.

When sober he was an okay human being, blind drunk he was anything but.

One thing Garavito neglected to do was inform his therapist that he was a pedophile, neglected to tell the church where he prayed for forgiveness that he was a child molester, and hid from his coworkers that he frequented an area in the city known for child prostitution. Or that during his lunch breaks he would occasionally tie up, rape, and torture young children, just as had been inflicted upon him as a child.

With any woman, he had tried to have a relationship with he had found it impossible to get sexually aroused. The only way he could satisfy his needs was by forcibly restraining, torturing, and raping young children.

Over the following years, Garavito ruined the lives of over 100 children, their names recorded in a ledger, partly in shame that he was the same as the men who had abused him throughout his life, but also as a reminder of how much pleasure he derived from his loathsome crimes.

He was a conflicted individual, suffering from regular nightmares and hating himself, yet unable to stop at the same time.

A brief spell in 1984 in another psychiatric facility for depression, helped not at all. The following month he was out, traveled to Pereira, and continued to lure new victims into his degradation

It was only a matter of time before the escalation occurred when rape and torture weren’t enough to satisfy him fully, when murder was the next natural progression.

The year was 1992 and by this time his tally of victims was close to 200.

His first attempt at killing a young street boy ended in failure, a beating from the police and the confiscation of his watch, his ring, and 100,000 pesos, all taken by the police for their trouble and for not keeping him locked up.

Amply rewarded, they set him free, not caring what evils he inflicted onto others as long as their pockets were full.

Three days later, on 4 October 1992, he succeeded in luring a young boy, 13-year-old Juan Carlos, to a secluded area with the promise of paid work. Once there, Garavito used the butcher knife he had recently purchased to slice the boy’s throat and cut off his genitals.

The next morning he woke up repentant, splattered with dried blood, mortified at what he had done.

But he had turned a corner.

The Beast within him was now fully unleashed. Any shame that he felt after his next 50 murders was quickly squashed as he felt the unstoppable compulsion to find a new victim to torture, to kill, even before the previous one had turned cold.

The bodies piled high over the next few years, discovered frequently by the authorities in secluded areas, in hotel rooms, some minus toes that were collected as trophies, many gutted after being raped.

Because he selected his prey at random, it was hard for the authorities to catch him. Because he wore disguises and moved around a lot, he was a ghost in the night.

He was free to kill as he pleased. When he pleased. Whoever he pleased.

But it was too easy. And after a while, he fantasized about killing even more people, of committing mass murder.

The idea appealed to his warped mind enormously and he worked on his plans to carry it out. At the same time, he carried on as normal with his regular killing spree, luring unsuspecting young boys to a grisly end at the tip of a sharp knife.

Young John Ivan Sabogal, on 22 April 1999, was going to be his undoing.

At 12 years old, he fought back bravely when Garavito tied him up, tortured and raped him. He was only saved when a passerby heard his cries for help, threw rocks at the attacker, and got brutally stabbed for his efforts.

Luckily, the two near victims evaded further harm and managed to escape alive.

Garavito was promptly caught and brought in for questioning, the police not initially convinced of his guilt. But the more they questioned him, the fewer straight answers they were getting. They probed further, looking into his past, his whereabouts whenever there had been a spike in sexual assaults and murders.

Over the 7 months that he was incarcerated the evidence began to mount against him, evidence that convinced the police that maybe, just maybe they had finally captured The Beast that they had been hunting since 1992.

What tied him undeniably to many of the killings was the DNA found on some of the corpses that were matched to the DNA taken from strands of hair in his cell, and a pair of unique glasses that not many people wore. On top of that the lead detective on the case, Aldemar Duran, interviewed Garavito’s last known girlfriend — and she gave him the suitcase that contained all the evidence he would ever need.

Inside, were photos of Garavito’s victims, a journal of his rapes and kills, and trophies.

On 28 October 1999, Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, confessed to torturing, raping, and killing 172 victims across Colombia. He also confessed to crimes outside the country, and to some murders that they knew nothing about.

He was handed down the longest sentence in the history of Colombia, 1,853 years and 9 days, by a horrified judge and jury. This was further reduced to 40 years, then 22 when Garavito disclosed the whereabouts of some of his victims, those that he could remember, that is, there were so many.

In total, his spree of wanton sexual assault, mutilation, rape, and murder encompassed 221 souls. 

Imprisoned within Valledupar, the maximum-security prison where he was incarcerated, his life was, unsurprisingly, in constant danger. He had to be separated from the other prisoners or he would be killed, serial rapists, and serial killers loathed by the other inmates.

But despite his crimes, The Beast would be eligible for parole in 2023.

He could be freed to start a new life or return to his old one. Either way, surely, The Beast was too wild a predatory animal to be unleashed upon the public, the risk too great.

To protect the public, it was imperative that Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos should be kept in a cage until his dying day.

If there was ever a good bone in the body of The Beast, it had been beaten out of him a long time ago, and nothing could be gained in releasing him into an unsuspecting population to go on the hunt ever again.

Why let a good party go to waste when the population is starving and freezing in their own homes?

Brexit was an incredibly divisive vote in 2016 to separate the United Kingdom from the European Union that split the country, family, and friends right down the middle. There can be no denying the societal impact it created that reverberated around the world.

Those in support of it wanted to be free of the oppressive yoke of the European Union, wanted to eliminate the bureaucracy foisted on the country by unelected bureaucrats in the EU. They were told by Leave politicians and campaigners that they needed to take back their sovereignty, that the country needed to be in control of its money, its borders, and its laws.

Those who wanted to remain in the EU were accused of not being patriotic enough, of not believing in Britain, of fearmongering when the realities of leaving were pointed out. But they were more concerned about what the country was going to lose, how their freedom to travel was going to be curtailed, and how red tape was going to swamp businesses that were accustomed to seamless, just-in-time exportation to the European Union.

Wounds were cut deep then, that are still trying to heal now.

In 2018, the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, announced that there was going to be a national celebration to mark the newfound freedom that the Uk had achieved by holding a festival to showcase the benefits of Brexit.

There were objections from various factions, concerned about the message it was sending and the cost to the taxpayers. Those concerns were ignored and it received the final stamp of approval from the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, in 2019 when he won a majority in the House of Commons.

The Festival of Brexit was scheduled to begin in March 2022 and conclude in October of the same year.

The price tag for the seven-month-long celebration was £120m, and that equated to about £17m a month, £4m a week.

The vision for The Festival was to show the diversity, creativity, and innovation of the newly liberated United Kingdom.

First, £3m was allocated for anyone wishing to participate in The Festival. There were 300 applications vying for inclusion, whittled down to 30 candidates after a vetting process, with each team being awarded £100,000 to develop and present their ideas for The Festival of Brexit.

From the 30 shortlisted submissions, 10 were eventually commissioned in February 2021 and were awarded further funding to complete their projects. Showcasing diversity, innovation and creativity were the objectives, and the final projects were as diverse as:

• Growing cubes, a sustainable method of growing food in urban areas

*An event to discuss the future of the country, in Welsh and English

*Converting an unused North Sea offshore oil rig so it can be viewed by the public

*A Pokemon Go style story of 15 towns and cities across the country

*Art exhibitions and poetry anthologies.

Since that decision was made a few earth-shattering events have occurred. The Covid 19 pandemic descended on the world, Brexit was more or less fully implemented in January 2021, and the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out.

All of these events brought astronomical costs and lost revenue to the country, all running into the billions, with money donated, with money spent, with money wasted. Regardless, plans for The Festival of Brexit proceeded unabated.

Nothing could derail the preparations, and the rising cost of living didn’t sway the government in the slightest. It seemed irrelevant to them that food banks were being swamped by thousands of people, both in and out of work, who couldn’t afford to pay the rising energy costs and pay for food at the same time. For millions of people in the UK, it was a simple choice of eating or heating.

Pensioners on fixed incomes were even worse off. To save money on heating, many of them opted to ride around all day on the buses using their free passes in an effort to keep warm. In this way, the money they saved on heating their homes during the day could be spent on food. For a country as great as Great Britain, it was a sad state of affairs.

When interviewed about the unbelievable conditions the elderly were enduring, the Prime minister, Boris Johnson, smiled, feeling proud of himself for being the one who had introduced the free bus pass for them.

It was a lie, as under his tenure as the Mayor of London he had merely extended the usage times of the bus pass which were previously more restricted.

So, instead of using that £120m to subsidize the heating for the elderly, he was happy that they had the opportunity to ride around all day free on the buses rather than be warm in the comfort of their own homes.

Instead of using that money to make sure children didn’t go hungry, his government was adamant that everything went ahead accordingly, that the country needed a celebration to lift up their spirits.

But with one significant change.

With more bureaucratic paperwork and more barriers to trade than ever before, it was harder to paper over the cracks that were beginning to appear in Johnson’s Brexit ideology. He and his accomplices had claimed that there would be no drawbacks to leaving the European Union, no downsides, and only upsides.

And so, since no quantifiable benefits of Brexit could be seen, felt, or spent, it was decided that the title of The Festival of Brexit was not exactly appropriate. What was there to celebrate? Sovereignty was not keeping pensioners warm in their own homes nor putting food on the tables for millions of people.

The name was quickly changed to Unboxed: Creativity in the UK.

The price tag stayed the same, however, £120m of public money deemed reasonable to waste when millions were having to decide between eating and heating.

So, with no fanfare, with not one headline in any newspaper in the country, with not one mention on any news station, Unboxed: Creativity in the UK, launched its seven-month festival in March 2022, all literary traces of Brexit erased.

Initially, the idea of The Festival of Brexit was to emulate the success of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to repeat that successful celebration as there are no benefits of Brexit that one person, in government, on the streets, or in a nuthouse, can point to and claim that it is improving the lives of even one member of the public.

To spend £120m on a party to celebrate an event at a time when there is a cost-of-living crisis rampaging through Great Britain is irresponsible, a colossal waste of public funds that in no way, shape or form, was going to be value for money.

Brexit is a bust. The Festival of Brexit now known as Unboxed is a failure.

What is the point of having a party when there is nothing to celebrate?

How much longer could he keep getting away with murder?

The first body that was found belonged to Melissa Barthelemy. The date was December 11, 2010, and from the decomposition of her body, it was evident that she had been in the ground for a long time.

She had been reported missing in July the year before and was only found by accident by an officer who was searching for a different missing person. If Officer John Mallia hadn’t taken note of the FBI database about bodies being disposed of along roadways, she may never have been found, the thick vegetation covering her unmarked grave.

Along the Ocean Parkway in Oak Beach, where Officer John Mallia was conducting his search with his cadaver dog, a German Shepherd named Blue, more bodies were soon discovered.

The Suffolk County police department realized immediately that they had discovered the dumping ground of an unknown serial killer.

Three additional bodies were sniffed out by Blue, each spaced about 500 feet apart. Maureen Brainard, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello were each wrapped in the same type of burlap bag as Melissa Barthelemy, and each of them had been murdered in the same fashion — strangulation.

The initial 24-year-old missing person, Shannan Gilbert, who Officer Mallia had been searching for, was not found at this site. She would, however, be found on Oak Beach a year later, her cause of death recorded as accidental drowning by Suffolk County police, yet strangulation couldn’t be ruled out when an independent autopsy was requested by her bereaved family.

Over the following few months, more missing persons were found in similar conditions of advanced decomposition, and worse, dismemberment. Jessica Taylor’s torso was found in 2003 minus its head and hands while Valerie Mack’s partial remains, discovered in different areas in 2000, weren’t identified until 2020 even though she had been reported missing 20 years previously.

Both women were found in the Manorville area in New York, not that far from the four bodies found by Blue, the cadaver dog.

Perhaps the killer had dismembered his victims in an effort to hide their identities or to waste the authority’s time and resources in trying to match limbs to torsos.

It worked, at least 4 of the 6 bodies were classed as Jane Doe, John Doe, or Baby Doe.

The connection that tied 9 of the bodies found to date was that they were all sex workers. But perhaps the most disturbing revelation was that the remains appeared to have been buried before the original 4 bodies, known as the Gilgo Four.

A file was opened on The Long Island Serial Killer who it appeared had been operating at least since 1996, but apart from the 10 victims, there was not a single clue as to who the perpetrator might be.

Suffolk County police presumed that he was a resident of Long Island and in June 2011, in an effort to flush him out, put up a $25,000 reward if it led to the arrest of the killer hiding amongst them.

Nothing. Whoever he was, he was a ghost that left behind no clues, didn’t stand out in a crowd, and unless he made a mistake was never going to be caught.

It wasn’t until December 10, 2015, that the FBI became officially involved in the case following the announcement from Suffolk Country Police Commissioner Tim Sini. This was made possible by the resignation of Police Chief James Burke who for years had blocked their involvement but now had to step down from his job, himself indicted under conspiracy charges, assault, and civil rights violations.

It took the FBI nearly two years before they even had a suspect.

His name was John Bittrolff, a carpenter, a family man from Long Island, and they could conclusively tie him to at least two of the six new Long Island victims who were unearthed over the years.

DNA evidence convicted him of the murders of Rita Tangredi and Collen McNamee and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But to the other fourteen victims, there was not one shred of evidence connecting them to the murderous carpenter.

John Bittrolff was not the Long Island Serial Killer. The FBI had not got their man.

So who was he? Who was the killer who was getting away with the murder of at least 16 people over a 20-year period? And how were they going to catch him?

The FBI profile of the serial killer only went as far as the victims, their jobs, where they lived, and any footprints they may have left behind that could turn into breadcrumbs, clues, or hard evidence.

Anyone who had spoken to any of the victims over the previous years were looked at, interviewed, alibis checked, and phone records scrutinized. Some names stood out more than others.

One was James Bissett and the other was ex-police surgeon, Dr. Peter Hackett, both Oak Beach residents, both living in the Manorville area where previous bodies or body parts had been discovered.

For Dr. Hackett, the connection came from phone call records that showed he had made contact with Shannan Gilbert’s mother days after her disappearance. In the call, details of which he strangely recanted three days later, he told Mari Gilbert that he was looking after her daughter and had prescribed her medication to calm her down as she was severely distressed.

The following police investigations could prove nothing apart from the fact that the phone calls had taken place, not what had actually been said. A lawsuit brought by the family also failed in a court of law to prove that he had given Shannan any drugs, despite what Mari Gilbert had recalled about their phone conversation.

Even the fact that clothing, personal items, and even Shannan Gilbert’s body was found just behind his property, wasn’t enough for the police to charge him.

Not long after the investigations had concluded, Dr. Peter Hacket moved to Florida with his family.

Another firm suspect was James Bissett. He became a person of interest because he was the main supplier of burlap that was used to wrap many of the bodies. Before he could be questioned further, he committed suicide.

Were either of these two men The Long Island Serial Killer, or could it be someone from law enforcement who knew how to cover their tracks, like the disgraced ex-Police Chief James Burke?

There can be no doubt that he hindered the original investigations, denying the full involvement of the FBI for years. Did he know more than he ever revealed? Was he covering up evidence of his own wrongdoings, or protecting someone else?

The Long Island Serial Killer has never been identified. He may be in prison, he may be dead, or he may still be free somewhere and literally getting away with murder, the dismembered remains of his new victims waiting to be discovered.

Life tore them apart, death bonded them together

Mary Neilson, at 22-years old, was a psychology student at the University of Western Australia and, strangely enough, it was her car that was going to get her killed.

Not in a car crash, but from the person she met at a spare parts yard. She went there to get some cheap tires, ended up meeting an enigmatic worker, took his phone number, and went to his house on Moorhouse Street a while later on October 6, 1986.

She was surprised when she arrived there to find the man’s wife also waiting for her, expectant. The wife introduced herself as Catherine. Mary didn’t know what to do, the situation unusual, and she was unsure whether to leave or to stay.

She should have left.

Together, David John Birnie and his wife, Catherine Margaret Birnie, overpowered Mary Nielsen, gagged and chained her to the bed. Catherine watched as her husband raped their guest. Afterward, they transported her on Albany Highway to Bedfordale where David raped her again, then strangled her to death with a nylon cord.

If she had not gone to the house of David and Catherine Birnie on Moorhouse Street, Mary Nielson would have achieved her psychology degree a year later. As it was, she was buried in a shallow grave at the side of the highway waiting for justice.

The murderers forgot about Mary Nielsen as soon as the last shovel full of dirt was patted down.

Two weeks later they spotted their next victim walking along the highway in Claremont, hitchhiking, not a care in the world. The daughter of one of the best ophthalmic surgeons in the country, 16-year-old Susannah Candy’s bright future was erased the moment she accepted the lift from the harmless-looking couple.

At knife-point, she was restrained, taken back to Moorhouse Street, and suffered the same fate as Mary Nielsen. Only this time, David gave his wife the opportunity to end the young girl’s life by strangulation after drugging her to make her more compliant.

Susannah Candy, leaving behind grieving parents and her siblings, was buried alongside Mary Nielsen, her young life brutally cut short, waiting like her neighbor for justice.

For David and Catherine Birnie, rape and murder were now in their blood, another victim urgently required to satisfy their desires.

But why were they so evil?

David’s family life growing up was dysfunctional, to say the least. He and his four siblings often went without cooked meals, lived in squalid conditions and his mother was far from loving, apart from when she was giving sexual favors to taxi drivers in lieu of paying the fare, that is.

David met Catherine when she was just 12-years-old in the 60s when his family moved to another part of Perth, but they were pulled apart by her disapproving father and circumstances beyond their control.

He met his first wife after a brief spell in prison for a few misdemeanor felonies, not for the attempted rape of a pensioner that he got away with, nor for the cruelty he had inflicted on the horses where he worked as an apprentice jockey.

Catherine’s life trajectory was similar in that she met her husband, Donald McLaughlin, after her time spent in prison. They had seven children together.

In 1985, she divorced Donald, legally changed her surname to Birnie, and reunited with David after years apart. It wasn’t long before they began to fantasize, plot, and plan how they could commit their first rape and murder together.

Mary Nielsen was their first and they reveled in it.

Susannah Candy was their second, and they began to feel invincible.

Noelene Patterson and Denise Brown were victims three and four, Catherine taking a perverse pleasure in the death of Noelene, fearing that David was getting too close to their captive after repeatedly raping her, so unhinged was her mind. 

The death of Denise Brown was the most gruesome of all. Before being interred, she was stabbed in the neck instead of being strangled and then placed in her shallow grave. 

Moments later, she sat up, still very much alive.

David Birnie reacted instinctively and battered her repeatedly about the head until he knew for sure that she was dead. 

Shocked at the gruesome nature of the killing, her lover splattered with blood, breathing heavily from the exertion of bludgeoning someone to death, Catherine began to have second thoughts about carrying out any further killings.

But her need to torture, to watch another human being suffer, was just too great, so she didn’t relent for long.

Kate Moir was victim number 5, almost.

She was captured, raped, and held captive, and it was only going to be a matter of time before she was drugged, strangled, and buried in a shallow grave.

Seizing upon a small mistake by her captors, she managed to escape through a window after Catherine, alone in the house apart from Kate, answered the call of her drug dealer at the front door and forgot to handcuff her to the bed.

Disheveled, panicking, she fled to the nearest store where the police were called. Unfortunately, despite her cries of rape and abduction, the officers were skeptical about her story. If it wasn’t for the young constable taking notes, Laura Handcock, there may have been no follow-up. Luckily, even though she didn’t recognize the names, which were false, she knew the address.

The Birnie’s were brought in for questioning, their answers conflicting from the start. Catherine denied knowing her, even though a picture drawn by Kate Moir was found hidden in the house as proof that she had been there.

While David admitted that she had been in the house consensually.

Detective Sergeant Vince Katich focussed on David Birnie, believing that he would be the one to crack first. But the suspect stuck to his tall tale, and the detective just couldn’t poke enough holes in it to trip him up.

So, late into the night, with no progress being made and concerned that these two killers were about the slip through his fingers, he decided to go back to basics — and simply asked where the bodies were buried.

Imagine his surprise when David Birnie, perhaps a modicum of guilt worming its way out of his scarred soul, confessed to the murders of the four women.

The four graves were uncovered, a trial date was set, and a sentence of life in prison was handed down to the Moorhouse Murderers. For their victims, finally, justice was served.

For David John Birnie, life in prison was spent with him mainly being confined to solitary confinement, reviled as he was by the other prisoners who were eager to do him bodily harm. In October 2005, he was found hanged in his cell.

Catherine Birnie at first attempted to be a model inmate, understanding that under Australian law an inmate can become eligible for parole every three years. She tried but was refused constantly, her crimes making her one of Australia’s worst female serial killers, and just too dangerous to be let loose in society. Ever.

The Moorhouse Murders, as they came to be known in the papers nationwide, chronicled the murders of four promising women and a fifth potential victim, all carried out by two depraved individuals who were harmless apart, but heartlessly ruthless when together.

A missed opportunity allowed a criminal to become a city’s worst nightmare

If only he had been stopped in 2003 and sentenced for his crimes the public would have been protected from an unassuming serial killer. If only that had been done lives could have been spared.

If only…

Back in 1970, after graduating high school, Bruce McArthur married his high school sweetheart, probably not because he was madly in love with her, certainly not because she was his soulmate, but because he thought that was what was expected of him.

It wasn’t easy to come out as gay back then.

For the next thirty years, they were a married couple, having two children, and living happily as husband and wife. Well, happily-ish.

From the early 1990s, McArthur worked as a salesman promoting the latest underwear fashions throughout northern Ontario, trying to find himself in local bars as well as customers in department stores.

His sheltered upbringing in a small farming town, Woodville near Ontario, wasn’t conducive to coming out as gay. Traveling in his job helped to open his eyes, and finally gave him the courage to admit to his wife that he was gay.

After separating, McArthur left for Toronto feeling freer than ever before, a weight lifted from his shoulders, now able to live his true life as an openly gay man.

The gay district in Toronto was like a new world for him to explore and he frequented it as often as he could, his new lifestyle funded by his new landscaping business. Being somewhat rotund with a white beard and a big belly, he was also a dead ringer for Santa and even got a gig at a local mall for the festive season.

But he also had a not-so-jolly ho ho ho side.

The incident happened in 2001 when he was still relatively new to Toronto, an argument turning very violent one night in the gay district that resulted in McArthur using a metal pipe to beat another patron, badly.

He was barred from the gay district for three years, arrested, and barely escaped a prison sentence in 2003 on the recommendation of a psychological report that evaluated him as being unlikely to commit any further violent attacks. After all, he was a family man, a seemingly upstanding citizen of the community. He had no previous criminal record and no past bad indiscretions to paint him as a bad guy.

So, based on his unblemished history, he was released to commit brutal murders in the not-too-distant future.

This was the point where Toronto’s most prolific serial killer could have been stopped.

Instead, he was freed as a nonviolent offender, someone who was harmless on paper but who was going to embark on a violent murder spree for the next 7 years and slaughter 8 innocent men.

His hunting ground was, surprisingly, the gay district. He would lure unsuspecting lovers back to his apartment, mainly immigrants who would not be reported missing and strangle them using a bar, a rope, and the strength of his burly arms to tighten the noose around their necks until he had squeezed the last drop of life out of them.

He would then have sex with their corpses. And take pictures of each and every one of them.

Like most serial killers, he liked to have mementos so he could relive his crimes at his leisure.

Disposing of the bodies involved dismemberment, callously hacking them into smaller pieces for easier disposal throughout suburban Toronto. What made this possible and for him to do so undetected, was the success of his landscaping business. The gardens of his unsuspecting customers were a perfect cover for him to bury the body parts where they would never be found.

Emboldened, Bruce McArthur continued in this fashion for years, living more than one life, a respected businessman by day, a cheery Santa Clause at Christmas, and a serial killer by night.

And then he made a fatal mistake.

His victims were normally the homeless and recently arrived immigrants who would not be missed. In 2017, he killed Andrew Kinsman, a prominent gay rights activist, someone who was reported missing quickly, his disappearance brought to the attention of the police.

They quickly realized, after opening a missing person file, that there were more disappearances, specifically from the gay district area; a larger task force was immediately formed to investigate further. As they delved deeper, the missing person list lengthening, a person of interest became their prime suspect — Bruce McArthur.

At this time, McArthur was completed unaware of the interest growing around his nighttime activities, of the surveillance tracking his every movement, going about his usual business of stalking gay men to find his next victim.

During the next few months, a video was discovered showing Kinsman entering McArthur’s minivan just before his disappearance, the last time he was seen alive. With this crucial piece of evidence, a search warrant was issued that allowed the police to enter McArthur’s residence.

The search was conducted surreptitiously when he was absent, and it unearthed a treasure trove of incriminating grisly photos of McArthur’s victims, including photos of Andrew Kinsman among them. The officers left the premises undisturbed, keeping it under surveillance until they had an arrest warrant.

Still, McArthur was unaware.

In January 2018, the surveillance team witnessed McArthur enter his home accompanied by another man. It was obvious what was about to happen. They had to act quickly.

Bursting into the apartment, they caught McArthur in the process of taping a black bag around the head of his latest potential victim who was handcuffed to the bed, struggling feebly but still alive.

Several of the officers pounced, forcing him to the ground and handcuffing his hands behind his back; other officers freed his intended victim at the same time.

Six months after the investigation had started, the task force had successfully caught the serial killer who had brought fear to the city of Toronto.

A sigh of relief across the city was followed by one of disbelief when McArthur’s face was plastered across all the newspapers. Many of his customers who recognized him were shocked that such a jolly-looking person, known throughout the city as the Gay Killer, had been their landscaper, had been in and around their homes. They were in for even more of a shock.

The following February, Bruce McArthur faced a judge and the disbelieving stares of a jury for his crimes.

They listened intently as the names of the 8 men he had killed and confessed to killing were read out loud.

They listened along with the homeowners present with horror in their eyes as the prosecution described in detail how he had discarded the dismembered remains of his victims in over 75 properties around Toronto.

They listened with anger when it was pointed out the exact moment when Bruce McArthur could have been imprisoned for a crime years ago that would have seen him locked away from society.

If only he had been sentenced accordingly for the brutal attack he had conducted then.

If he had, lives would have been spared and The Gay Killer would not have been given the freedom to choke the life out of his victims, would not have been free to destroy the lives of brothers, sisters, relatives, and friends.

They were the ones who were left behind to mourn a loved one who had been tragically ripped from their lives in the worst-case scenario imaginable, taken from them and leaving behind a gaping wound that would take years to heal.

Bruce McArthur was sentenced to life in prison for the murders he had committed over a 10-year period.

But if only he had been stopped in 2003.

If only…

He lived a life not caring about another soul. To him, everyone was a victim waiting to be victimized

On February 28, 1976, Juan Fernando Hermosa Suarez was born on the wrong side of the tracks. But the other side of the street was just as bad. The city of his birth was Clemente Baquerizo in the Los Rios Province, Ecuador, where being streetwise meant the difference between getting robbed in one unlit alleyway, or being killed in another.

In certain areas of the capital city, Quito, safe streets were few and far between when the sun went down.

At 15 years old he was beyond the capability of his adoptive parents to hold him in check, to hold him accountable for his crimes, to demonstrate to him that his actions could affect other people negatively. At 15 years old, he just didn’t care.

He did what he did, when he wanted, and to whom.

Perhaps because of his don’t-give-a-damn attitude, other delinquents decided to follow his leadership no matter how bad it was going to turn out.

One such occasion happened after leaving a discotheque with members of his gang on November 22, 1991, his decision to steal a car a turning point in his young life. The car in question was the taxi they took from the club to Agosto Avenue.

The taxi driver?

Suarez shot him in the back of the head. 

The body was disposed of casually by his gang in Los Chillos Valley where it was found the next day by the police, hidden as it was in plain sight.

The young gang didn’t hang on to the car for long. They were callous killers, but they weren’t completely stupid.

For Suarez, the murder of the taxi driver meant less than nothing to him. His heart was like stone, the blood in his veins colder than ice, his new best friend a 9mm pistol.

Another five of its bullets were going to be discharged the very next day after a heated argument in his own home with his transvestite hairdresser, Charlie. The cause of the argument was unknown, but there can be no doubt that alcohol helped in pulling the trigger five times, and Charlie getting dead.

Or on that particular night was Juan Fernando Hermosa Suarez, despite the alcohol, just looking for someone else to kill now that he had gotten a taste for murder?

Over the next four months, he lived up to his name of El Niño del Terror.

His killing ground was generally in the northern section of the capital city, Quito. His choice of weapon was his trusty 9mm. His victims were killed on the weekends, selected on a whim, just unlucky to cross the path of one of his bullets on that particular dark night.

But he did have a type.

Taxi drivers and any homosexuals who frequented the bars and clubs in the downtown area of Quito were his types. As his notoriety grew, every Friday and Saturday night they were gripped with a feeling of impending doom as they toured the clubs and bars. They quickly learned to party in groups, yet even so their eyes nervously watched the alleyways that could be concealing the cold eyes of a killer and the barrel of his gun, both searching for their next victim.

As the death toll rose, complaints flooded into the Mayor, Fausto Teran Bustillos, pressuring him to do something. A task force was formed headed by the Grupo de Intervencion y Rescate of the National Police.

Immediately they began to round up members of the street gangs and squeezed them for information. Hard. There were rumors but nothing concrete, despite the acts of gentle persuasion used by the officers.

The breakthrough came when they caught a few of Suarez’s crew in the act of robbing a store. When questioned, they stayed silent as loyal soldiers do, giving nothing up. After all, they were all from the streets, all of them hardened by a life of crime.

That changed when the first bruises were handed out to them a sharp blow at a time. Then they squealed out their leader’s name, self-preservation easily overcoming any feelings of loyalty.

Fausto Teran Bustillos had found the notorious serial killer and wasted no time in coordinating the operation to capture him, alive, dead, or somewhere in between.

The date of the operation was January 16, 1992, set to be kicked off at 3 am when their target would be more easily captured. Just in case there was any sort of resistance, however, the National Police were armed to the teeth.

Their information placed Suarez in his mother’s room located close to a skylight, a rooftop opening that was going to be the entry point. Once inside, they were going to grab him while he was fast asleep, completely unaware of their presence until they had him in handcuffs.

Or that was the plan.

Everything was going well, several dark police shadows approaching the suspect’s room, guns up, senses alert to the slightest noise.

Unfortunately, Suarez was a light sleeper. He heard something imperceptible that brought him instantly awake and, like a caged animal sensing imminent danger, he was immediately alert. Instinctively, without hesitation, he came up firing his 9mm.

All hell broke loose.

Caught by surprise themselves, the National Police returned fire in the darkness, automatic guns spewing a hail of bullets that lit up the night in intermittent flashes. Outside on the street, the remaining policemen joined in in an effort to help their comrades, firing wildly and lobbing grenades at the besieged house.

It was sheer chaos.

A wall of the house completely collapsed in the explosion, toppling directly onto two policemen taking shelter close to it, trapping them beneath its weight. Bullets flew everywhere inside and out as taking Suarez alive wasn’t a priority anymore. They just wanted him got.

But not one of those bullets found its intended target.

Suarez escaped the barrage unscathed, not even a scratch to slow him down, but was still captured 15 minutes later trying to jump from a back window and was taken into custody.

There was one casualty, however. In the melee, of the thousands of rounds expended in the house, Suarez’s mother was hit. She was accidentally shot at least 11 times and died sometime during the explosive confrontation.

Finally captured, unfazed even by the death of his mother, Suarez tried to claim his innocence, claiming self-defense in some of the cases. But the judge was having none of it. He listed the 22 people that Suarez had murdered, had gunned down in cold blood, and condemned him for his brutality. He sentenced him to the maximum term under the law — which was 4 years!

Suarez wasn’t going to be 16 until the following month so could only be tried as a minor, and 4 years was the maximum term he could be sentenced to despite the number of people he had killed.

But for Suarez, 4 years was just too much.

How his girlfriend managed to smuggle a gun into the prison 16 months later was a mystery, but it resulted in the death of one security guard and Suarez breaking out with 10 other inmates.

He went on the run to Colombia, enjoying his brief moment of freedom before catching tonsilitis and getting recaptured. In 1996, with no additional repercussions for his murderous escape, he was released from the Virgilio Guerrero Rehabilitation Center after serving the remainder of his sentence.

El Niño del Terror was now 20 years old and a free man.

But could he leave his brutal past behind, re-invent himself and contribute to society in a positive way? Or was it a case of once a serial killer always a serial killer?

In March 1996, just after he had turned 20, his body was found on the banks of the Aguarico River, horribly hacked at by blows from a machete, riddled with bullets, and his face beaten virtually beyond recognition.

A brief police investigation revealed that he had been abducted by five hooded individuals who, it seemed, had tortured him mercilessly. For how long they couldn’t tell, but Suarez had suffered greatly before the killing shots had ended his life.

The National Police ascertained that the torturers were probably relatives of some of the victims murdered by Ecuador’s youngest serial killer. No doubt they were incensed that his incarceration of 4 years in a juvenile detention center for killing 22 people just wasn’t good enough.

For them, that wasn’t justice. That wasn’t even a slap on the wrist.

In this particular case of murder, the National Police didn’t try very hard to find the 5 vigilantes who had tortured and killed El Niño del Terror.

As far as they and the population and the victims’ families were concerned, justice had been served.

Is a childhood accident responsible for creating a prolific serial killer, or was he evil from the start?

If not for this one incident, this one accident, would Alexander Pichushkin have grown up to become a renowned chess champion? Possibly. As it was, he grew up to become a notorious serial killer.

The incident itself was no earth-shattering event that had onlookers gasping in shock and horror, unable to look away. No, it was as innocent as a child falling off a swing.

Born in Moscow on April 9 in 1974, he had a brother, a half-sister, two loving parents, and a doting grandfather, someone important in his life who was going to be responsible for the young Alexanders’ interest in chess, but not his interest in killing people.

That was to come later.

As a six-year-old child, he was quite sociable, fun to be around, and made friends easily.

The accident, when it happened, wasn’t concerning at the moment of impact. But it became so when his moods changed, when he became more distant, less sociable, more aggressive.

It was a simple fall, laughed off even as his bum hit the ground, the six-year-old eager to get back on even as the swing seat came rushing back to hit him squarely in the temple, hard. There was hardly any blood, barely a bruise, but the damage to the frontal cortex had been done.

This area, according to psychology experts, is where the brain controls impulses like aggression and the impulse to do something very bad. From that day his moods changed, darkened, and his young face that was once quick to show joy before was now even quicker to show anger.

He lost friends, was ostracized, was shunned at school. His parents lost control of him, not understanding the change in their once happy child, and even his siblings shied away from him, not recognizing their younger brother.

His grandfather took his young grandson under his wing and into his home as an adolescent when school bullying served to intensify his mounting anger issues. In an attempt to channel what he perceived to be a sharp intellect searching for an outlet, he introduced him to chess in the local park.

Bitsa Park became Alexander’s haven. He took to the game naturally, challenging the old-timers who shuffled the worn pieces with gnarled fingers, decades of experience behind every wrinkle. Their myopic eyes traveled every inch of the chessboards, scrutinizing the young upstart from under bushy eyebrows who dared to sit across from them.

Alexander was a natural. He took them all on, beating them regularly at the tables and his grandfather was delighted that he could now channel his energy in a direction that didn’t involve violence.

And then his grandfather died and he was back to square one. Only worse this time. Vodka took the place of his departed grandparent, replacing kindly encouragements with darker and darker suggestions with every emptied bottle.

He continued to play chess, but the mean streak festering inside him was now being fueled daily by his new best friend. There was now a sly whispering voice in his mind that was getting harder to ignore, to control, whose slurred murmurings kept urging him to go out and find someone to kill.

Alexander Pichushkin was either too weak to resist, or too evil to want to resist.

The date was July 27, 1992, when Alexander, now 18, recruited a friend to help him find a victim. His name was Mikhail Odichuk, a classmate. He wasn’t evil, he was just tagging along out of curiosity, unsure whether his friend was serious or not. He found out the hard way when Alexander, determined to find a victim, discovered how uncommitted his accomplice was, so killed him instead.

When questioned after Odichuk’s body was found in a well 3 days later, the back of his head caved in, Alexander remained calm under the interrogation. With insufficient evidence, he managed to get away with his first murder. There were many more to come yet this appeared to satisfy his urges for the next 9 years.

From 2001 he went into overkill mode.

On May 17, he bludgeoned Yevgeny Pronin to death after a game of chess in Bitsa Park and hurled his body down a well. He tried the same tactic with pregnant Maria Viricheva, but she had fought back despite her injuries, hanging on to the sides of the well as he hurled her into the hole.

Pichushkin, ruthlessly unemotional, beat her head against the side of the dank wall until her fingernails snapped and she plummeted into the pit.

Incredibly, she survived the fall, managing, despite her numerous injuries, to climb out of her almost watery grave. Alive, a witness, she pointed a bloody, nail-less finger at her attacker.

To no end. She was an undocumented migrant, he was Russian. Life was unfair. No charges were pressed.

So, Alexander Pichushkin carried on killing, casually tossing his victims down wells to hide their corpses and cover up any evidence. Soon, even that was too much trouble, so he just killed them in his usual killing field of Bitsa Park, and left them where he had battered them to death.

But it only takes one mistake for a killer to be caught, for the murderous killing spree to end, for him to be brought to justice.

It wasn’t Mikhail Lobov in 2002 who survived his plunge into a dank well who was going to be Pichushkin’s undoing. Nor was it going to be Konstantin Polikarpov in 2003 who was beaten so badly that, even though he survived the frenzied assault, his memory did not. Nor was it going to be the ex-policeman, Nikolai Zacharchenko, whose body was found openly in the park on November 16, 2005.

The person who brought the reign of terror of Alexander Pichushkin to an end in July 2006 was Marina Moskalyova, not because she survived to finally point an accusing figure at the elusive serial killer. But because she had died.

Before she had accompanied her co-worker, Alexander Pichushkin, on a friendly walk through Bitsa Park, she had left a note for her son and husband, explaining where she had gone, with whom, and his phone number.

When her battered corpse was discovered, Pichushkin was suspect number one. Under questioning, he denied everything, denied even being with her the night of her disappearance, despite the evidence. Once again, he was going to get away with murder, or so he thought.

Marina Moskalyova had traveled by metro the night of her disappearance with her co-worker. Reviewing the CCTV footage of them together hours earlier at a station proved Pichushkin’s denials to be false. Two days later he was charged with her murder.

When his notebook was discovered after a search of his home, the investigators realized immediately that they had caught the serial killer who they had been hunting for so long. Finally, they had got their man. Finally, they had captured Alexander Pichushkin.

A more horrifying revelation was uncovered in his notebook of a drawing of 64 squares similar to those on a chessboard — and 62 of them had been filled in. Those 62 squares denoted the men, women, and children who Pichushkin had killed over the years. 

This discovery gave Pichushkin the nickname of The Chessboard Killer.

When Pichushkin was confronted by his notebook, irrefutable proof that he was a mass murderer, he was more upset that 2 of his victims had survived than the fact that he had been caught. His only statement was that he was pleased he had at least surpassed the record of Andrei Chikatilo, The Butcher of Rostov, his idol.

With the pile of bodies stacked as high as the evidence against him, the judge found him guilty on October 27, 2007, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, with the first fifteen years to be spent in solitary confinement.

But he had very nearly gotten away with it again

There was no doubt that Alexander Pichushkin, The Chessboard Killer, would have continued killing indiscriminately if not for that one seemingly inconsequential metro ticket. His sentence of life in prison had allowed him to dodge the fate that had been served to The Butcher of Rostov, a bullet to the back of the head.

But a truly just punishment for The Chessboard Killer would have been for him to have been incarcerated in a deep, dank hole similar to where he had callously hurled his bludgeoned victims, a single chess piece his only companion.