Carol Anne Davis was born in Dundee, moved to Edinburgh in her twenties and now lives in south-west England. She left school at 15 and was everything from an artist's model to an editorial assistant before going to university. Her Master of Arts degree included criminology and was followed by a postgraduate diploma in Adult and Community Education.

  Since graduating from Edinburgh University in 1987, she has been a full-time writer. Her crime novels Near Death Experience, Extinction, Sob Story, Kiss It Away, Noise Abatement, Safe as Houses and Shrouded have been described as chillingly realistic for their portrayals of sex and death.

  She is also the author of the true crime books Parents Who Kill, Doctors Who Kill, Youthful Prey, Sadistic Killers, Couples Who Kill, Children Who Kill and Women Who Kill.

Introduction
1 The Deputy Sheriff: Gerard Schaefer
2 The Deacon: Sam Smithers
3 The Obstetrics Nurse: Norma Jean Armistead
4 The Bishop: Marvin Pentz Gay
5 The Public Safety Officer: Robert Fratta
6 The FBI Agent: Mark Putnam
7 The Charity Worker: Robert Spangler
8 The Foster Mother: Eunice Spry
9 The Chief Of Police: David Brame
10 The Devout Catholic: Danilo Restivo
11 The Model Pupil: Brian Blackwell
12 The Preacher's Daughter: Erin Caffey
13 The Altar Boy: Colton Pitonyak
14 The Bank Clerk: Alan Hopkinson
15 The Childminder: Judy Buenoano
16 The Christian Mother: Ellie Nesler
17 The Criminology Student: Stephen Griffiths
18 The Priest: Gerald Robinson
19 The Policewoman: Antoinette Frank
20 The Doctor: Philippe Neniere
21 The Community Police Officer: Kenneth DeKleine
22 The Youth Pastor: Rick Pulley
23 The Highway Patrolman: Craig Peyer
24 The Junior Police Officer: Steven Rios
25 The Monk: Mykhaylo Kofel
26 The Trainee Vet: Steven Harper
27 The Lay Minister: Jeffrey Lundgren
28 The Classics Student: John Tanner
29 The Religious Teachers: Colin Howell & Hazel Buchanan/Stewart
30 The Teenage Volunteer: Bernadette Protti
31 The Ivy League Lawyer: Jason Bohn
32 The Town Marshal: David Young
33 The Airline Pilot: Richard Crafts
34 The Church Organiser: Mary Jane Fonder
35 The Criminal Justice Student: Donny Tison
36 The Headmistress: Jean Harris
37 The Church Youth Camp Leader: Donald Miller
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements

What makes a mild-mannered bank clerk kidnap little girls? What drives a deacon to use and murder prostitutes? Why would a respected airline pilot bludgeon his wife to death? All of the men and women profiled in the following pages were in good professions – some were doctors, clergymen, criminologists, policemen and educationalists – but all of them fell spectacularly from grace. Most committed murder, though two stopped short of this, perpetrating repeated acts of extreme child abuse. The younger killers were model pupils, the type voted most likely to succeed.

  Criminologists used to see violence as an act of frustration often borne out by an inability to articulate strong emotion, hence the unemployed young man lashing out at his girlfriend or the drunken layabout slapping his energetic kids. These professionals also believed that men and women who had no control at work would take out their rage on weaker victims during their leisure time.

  And, at first, this seems borne out by a quick look back at recent history's most heinous crimes. Raymond Morris, profiled in one of my previous books, felt demeaned by his factory job and would go to work in a suit and lie to his relatives and neighbours about his work life. His rage spilled over and he became a murderous paedophile. Similarly, Peter Sutcliffe, the serial-killing Yorkshire Ripper, felt that he was too bright to be a lorry driver and had a sign in his cab saying that genius lurked within. Moors murderer Ian Brady saw himself as an intellectual and abhorred being an office clerk, whilst labourer Fred West told anyone who would listen that he was a skilled abortionist.

  There was nothing wrong with the work that these men did, but they viewed themselves as superior to it and carried some of their frustration into their increasingly pathological sex lives. They also found that stalking their prey brought them an excitement that the nine-to-five simply lacked.

  The culprits featured in this book broadly fall into several categories. First, the predatory personalities who knew from an early age that they wanted to molest women or children and joined the clergy in the hope that it would provide them with a lifelong moral framework. It didn't. Similarly, some of these emotionally fractured men entered the police force in the hope of becoming extra good. But other police officers, such as the sadistic Gerard Schaefer and the misogynistic Craig Peyer, deliberately entered the force to lure young women into their lethal traps.

  Some of the other professionals featured here fit into the intelligent-but-hugely-damaged-in-childhood category. Though they became everything from a church organiser to an Ivy League lawyer, they were at heart angry and neglected children with numerous unmet needs.

  Greed is one of the motives which rears its ugly head, particularly in the case of the foster mother from hell, Eunice Spry, who was willing to keep one of her foster daughters in a wheelchair, despite the fact that she could walk, in order to claim additional benefits. Her other motive was sadism. Greed also motivated policewoman Antoinette Frank, who turned a thriving family restaurant into a bloodbath in the hope of stealing the day's takings.

  Fear also plays its part, as evidenced in the case of FBI Agent Mark Putnam, a basically good man who murderously overreacted when his lover threatened to tell his wife and employer about their relationship. Fear equally influenced Steven Rios, who was terrified that his gay lover would tell Rios' wife about his true sexual desires, and terror was the main motivator for Donny Tison, a criminal justice student who helped his father, a known killer, to escape from jail as he feared his father would be killed by another prisoner if he remained behind bars.

  Extreme jealousy was behind a few of the crimes, notably those committed by John Tanner and Jean Harris, both bookish and sensitive individuals – at opposite ends of the age scale – who murdered their lovers. Meanwhile, madness motivated the doctor who became part of a cult and turned into a half-starved survivalist, and there was also increasing mental illness in Cokeville town marshal David Young, who plotted to kill an entire classroom of kids in Wyoming.

  Though some of the most sadistic adult murderers deserve to die behind bars (and several of the serial killers already have), this is not a book without hope: two of the youngest killers – and a middleaged FBI officer – have been released and gone on to lead useful lives in their new communities. Others will become eligible for parole in due course, though only time will tell if they deserve a second chance.

Gerard John Schaefer was born on 25 March 1946 to Doris and Gerard Schaefer. He was their firstborn and they went on to have a girl, then a second boy. The family initially lived in Wisconsin but relocated to Georgia when the children were small.

  The Schaefers were staunch Roman Catholics and sent their children to a religious school. It's not known if Gerard was unhappy there – but he was unhappy at home and felt strongly that his father, a salesman, favoured his sister Sara. By the time that he was 12, he had started wearing her underwear – boys who feel unloved often start to wear their mother's lingerie as a way of feeling close to her, so perhaps wearing his sister's panties was a variation on this. The young boy somehow found out about the act of autoerotic asphyxiation and would take a rope into the local woods and half hang himself whilst masturbating. This is unusually precocious for a 12-year-old, so it's highly likely that an adult told him about this masochistic act.

  When he was 16, the family moved to Fort Lauderdale in Florida and he was again enrolled in a Catholic school. But he didn't fit in and was regarded as different, especially when he dared to question religious doctrine. He had an IQ of 130, which put him in the top five per cent of the population, and had an enquiring mind. He became a reluctant loner (as opposed to a happy loner who actively prefers his own company) and retreated to the Everglades at weekends, killing animals for sport. At 18 he briefly had a girlfriend – he was handsome, with a friendly and honest-looking face – and told her that he enjoyed spying on his neighbour, Leigh Hainline, when she sunbathed in the nude. He said that Leigh Hainline was just asking to be raped. He continued to indulge in Peeping Tom activities, peering through her bedroom window whilst she undressed. He also spied on one of her female friends.

  After leaving school, Schaefer decided to train as a priest but he was turned down and rejected the church thereafter. He turned to creative writing but his teacher was alarmed that so many of his stories involved the murder of young female victims. Referred to the student counsellor, he admitted that he had fantasies about butchering animals and defiling their carcasses, and that he longed to enter the army so that he could kill men. But he hadn't committed a crime and wasn't referred for more intensive psychotherapy. In truth, his fantasies were so ingrained by this stage that it's unlikely that any talking therapy could have helped.

  He went on to graduate with an Associate's degree in business studies, after which he applied for a teacher training course, a chilling occupation for a young man who was already obsessed with thoughts of hanging teenage girls and raping their corpses. But he failed his preliminary exams so was sent a draft notice for the Vietnam war. At his evaluation he was wearing women's underwear, perhaps because he knew it would be discovered during the physical exam, and a psychiatric assessment found that he was unstable, so he was deemed unfit to serve. He would later state that he deliberately dodged the draft by telling the psychiatrist that he was contemplating suicide.

That same year, 1968, his parents divorced and that summer he starting dating a girl called Martha. They married in December (unstable men will often push for a swift marriage, knowing that they cannot maintain a normal facade for a lengthy dating period) and he returned to teacher training but behaved inappropriately with his female teenage pupils when doing his student teaching at various high schools in 1969. He was asked to leave.

   He continued to feel rage towards flighty women, and told his acquaintances that his neighbour Leigh Hainline was a slut and didn't behave like a good Catholic girl. On 8 September 1969, he paid her a visit and she was never seen alive again. There was confusion as to whether she had run away, as she had told her husband that she was leaving him for a family friend. Her locket was later found in the house that Gerard Schaefer was now living in with his mother and wife Martha. It was found with his trophies from other victims: he had kept everything from passports to diaries. (Leigh's skull was found nine years later but not identified until 2004.)

  Later in 1969, nine-year-old Peggy Rahn and eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson were seen with a young man resembling Gerard Schaefer, after which they disappeared and were never seen again. He would subsequently tell a girlfriend that he had murdered and cannibalised both children, frying parts of their flesh with peppers and onions, and he wrote short stories about how easy it was to permanently hide bodies in the woods or on construction sites. (Much later, in prison, perhaps to avoid being labelled as a paedophile, he would claim that he hadn't sexually assaulted either child, saying that he just wanted to experience what it was like to eat human flesh as he had been reading about the exploits of cannibalistic serial killer Albert Fish.)

  The following year, Martha filed for divorce and Gerard went abroad, to Europe and North Africa, for a change of scene. He would later tell investigators that he killed teenage girls throughout this extended trip. At the time, hitchhiking was common and girls often travelled extensively with a friend so weren't reported missing for some months, by which time the trail had gone cold.

On his return to the States, he began working as a security guard and soon married a woman called Teresa who was several years his junior. He was accepted into the police force at Wilton Manors but had an argument with the police chief in 1972 and tried to transfer to Broward County. They conducted psychological tests, which he failed, so he was promptly rejected. But he merely forged a letter of recommendation, took it along to Martin County and was hired as a deputy sheriff. He loved the power that this new position gave him.

  On 21 July 1972, a month after securing the post, he was driving along in his patrol car when he saw two girls, 18-year-old Nancy Trotter and her 19-year-old friend Pamela Wells, hitchhiking at the roadside. He gave them a lift to the beach and said that he would take them back there the following day. He lectured them gently about the dangers of accepting lifts from strangers and they were delighted to know that they were now in safe hands.

  The following day, a Saturday, he picked up the girls at their holiday accommodation and said that he would show them a historical monument which necessitated a drive to a remote part of Martin County. When they reached the woods, he ordered them out of the car, handcuffed both women and looped a rope around Nancy's neck before fastening it to a tree. He balanced her on a large root and pointed out that, if she lost her footing, she would be hanged to death. He tied Pamela to another tree then left the scene when his police radio alerted him to the fact that he was needed at work. He warned the girls not to move, that he would return.

  Fortunately, Nancy managed to struggle free of the noose and she ran to the roadside in a distressed state and flagged down a car. The police were called and freed an equally distressed Pamela. When Schaefer returned to the scene he found both victims gone and knew that they would have reported this attempted murder to the police. He drove back to headquarters and told his superiors that he had pretended to hang the girls in order to frighten them as they had laughed when he warned them about the dangers of hitchhiking. He admitted that he had gone too far.

  He was sacked and charged with false imprisonment and aggravated assault but after two months was released on his own recognisance, awaiting trial. It's thought that he was given preferential treatment because he had been in the police force. The former deputy sheriff must have suspected that he would be going to prison for a long time so he had nothing to lose by continuing to act out his fantasies.

On 27 September 1972, he befriended 17-year-old Susan Place and 16-year-old Georgia Jessup, telling them that his name was Jerry. Susan told her mother that she'd met him at the beach and that he was taking them back there on that same day. Mrs Place didn't like the man and wrote down his number plate, but the teenagers insisted on going off with him and were never seen alive again. (Six months later, their bodies, cut in half, were found partially buried in Blind Creek. Schaefer's fantasies included dismemberment and he was known to own extremely sharp knives.)

  On 23 October 1972, two 14-year-old girls disappeared whilst hitchhiking to the shops. Elsie Farmer's remains were found on a construction site near a school campus the following year and her jewellery was located at Gerard Schaefer's home. Her friend Mary Briscolina's body was discovered at the construction site the following month. The bodies were too decomposed to ascertain the cause of death and they were only identified through dental records. Schaefer later confessed to both homicides.

  In December, the disgraced deputy sheriff was tried for the false imprisonment of Nancy Trotter and Pamela Wells and was given a mere six-month suspended sentence, the judge believing his account that he had merely intended to persuade the girls not to hitchhike. He was told by the court that he had behaved like a fool – surely the understatement of the year. His wife and mother stood by him and the judge regarded him as a basically good family man who had made one mistake. Schaefer was free to continue his killing spree…

  On 8 January 1973, two 19-year-olds disappeared as they hitchhiked from Iowa to Florida. The driving licences of both Colette Goodenough and Barbara Wilcox were later found in Gerard Schaefer's home along with several of Colette's teeth. (Their skeletal remains were discovered in a forest in Port St Lucie, Florida in 1977.)

  Alarmed at the number of hitchhikers who were going missing, investigators turned their attention to Schaefer and a search of his mother's home found a trunk filled with photographs of his dead victims, including one photograph of a dead nude male. Many of the bodies had been mutilated and the former policeman had kept some of the bones. They also found his stories, which drew on actual murderous events, and the sketches which he had made of hanged women. He'd also cut photos of women out of newspapers and magazines and drawn nooses around their necks.

  Schaefer was arrested and tried for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. Mrs Lucille Place, Susan's mother, had identified Schaefer as the man that had driven the two teenagers away, and Georgia's handbag had been found at Schaefer's house – he was using it to store a gun and ammunition. The authorities decided to concentrate on this case as the evidence was so strong.

  The former cop was also damned by his own words as he had written an essay about how to get away with murder, suggesting how to torture the victim, tie the noose, hang her and dispose of the body. He wrote that kidnapping two women at a time was a good idea as their guard would be down if they were travelling as a pair. He wrote that he also enjoyed making one girl hurt or kill the other to stave off her own imminent torture and death.

  Following the conclusion of his trial in Florida in October 1973, the jury returned with a guilty verdict and he was sentenced to life in prison, whereupon his second wife served him with divorce papers, got a quickie divorce and soon married his attorney. Schaefer began communicating with a Filipino woman who started off as his pen pal and he married her whilst in prison but, after she got her green card, she too filed for divorce. The years passed slowly and he was very, very bored.

  In 1983, he offered to take investigators to 34 murder sites in Florida so that they could solve their missing persons cases, but his offer was not taken up. He continued to be a thorn in the authorities' side, filing frivolous lawsuits against the prison and against various true-crime writers for describing him as a serial killer. But, though he protested his innocence to the outside world, he boasted to other prisoners about his many crimes.

Whilst incarcerated in Starke, Florida, Schaefer became friends with serial killer Ted Bundy, a notorious necrophiliac. The latter had killed 33 women, whereas Schaefer was suspected to have murdered 34. Schaefer's victims were believed to have included a girl aged eight and one aged nine while Bundy had murdered a 12-year-old, so they were well matched in their depravity. Schaefer was upset when Bundy was put to death by electrocution, but, that same year, he started a new romance with a former girlfriend after she wrote to him and he replied avidly.

  Determined to remain in the public consciousness, he managed to get two books of his short stories published and got in touch with a missing persons agency, offering to point out which of the missing females on their books he was responsible for murdering. He added that he had been linked to 170 victims but that only six corpses had been found.

  Arrogant and unfriendly, he was disliked by many of his fellow prisoners: they regarded him as a snitch who would pass on information to the guards for extra favours, and he was further hated for being a former police officer and deputy sheriff. As a result of his poor reputation, the other prisoners often threw waste matter at him. But, on 3 December 1995, one of his enemies went further, entering his cell and stabbing him over 40 times with a crudely fashioned knife. The killer, Vincent Rivera, already serving a sentence for double murder, also gouged out Schaefer's eyes.

  Unfortunately, Schaefer's death means that the families of many missing women in Florida have lost the opportunity to find out if the depraved cop was responsible for the demise of their loved ones, and most are still searching for answers to this day.

Everyone said that Deacon Samuel Smithers was a really nice guy, a family man who was custodian at the First Baptist Church in Plant City, Florida. Everyone, that is, except the young women who were forced to spend time alone with him. He embarrassed and frightened several attractive female parishioners by making explicit comments about their bodies and suggesting that they have sex with him. On one occasion he lifted up a woman's blouse and, in another instance, he talked about one of his ex-lovers whilst he rubbed his penis through his clothes. Some of the women reported his conduct to the church's custodian and, by 1994, the church realised that he was an ongoing problem and asked him to have psychological counselling. He refused and they asked him to resign, which he duly did.

  It would later transpire that Smithers had had counselling in 1986 when he lived in Tennessee. Whilst acting as a volunteer fireman and as a church deacon, he'd started several fires and attempted to help put them out, hoping to be hailed as a hero. But police became suspicious about the number of accidental blazes starting in and around the church and a full enquiry showed that these were arson attacks and that Sam Smithers was responsible. He resigned from the church but they forgave him and accepted him as a parishioner, holding a prayer meeting in his honour in the hope that he would be mentally healed. The state also showed leniency, giving him a three-to-five-year sentence which was suspended on account of his good behaviour and upon his promise to have psychological counselling. Smithers turned up to a few sessions but soon quit.

  The former deacon retrained and became a welder, but his mother kept phoning him to be critical of his lifestyle. The couple moved to Florida to be nearer his wife Sharon's parents and he got a job as an electrician's apprentice and was respected as a good, steady worker. He was also an ideal husband who always came home for his evening meal and was loving and attentive. But he led a secret life in which he would sneak out to see prostitutes when his wife went to bed.

  By the late eighties, he was working as a handyman and also as a church custodian, whilst Sharon was a teacher's aide and their adopted teenage son was at college. (Smithers had a low sperm count so had not been able to father a child, a source of humiliation for him and sadness for them both as they had wanted a large family.) He had loving, dutiful sex with his supportive wife, but what he really wanted was to have rough intercourse which hurt women. He also enjoyed slapping them around.

Sam himself had endured many beatings at the hands of his devoutly religious mother, Linnie, as had his three brothers. She was still taking off her belt to him in their home town of East Ridge, Tennessee, when he was 17. He was not allowed to play baseball, despite showing real prowess at the game, because she thought that the other baseball players would use bad language. And he was not allowed to stay over with school friends as evenings were devoted to family prayer.

  Her husband, Alvin, couldn't stand the repressed atmosphere and spent his evenings drinking and smoking, occasionally picking up women. He also beat Linnie. She was so afraid of her sons seeing her naked that she would sleep in her clothing and only bathed every three or four days, when she would insist that the menfolk leave the house. She told the boys that premarital sex was sinful and that prostitutes deserved to be killed.

By 1996, the former deacon was sometimes visiting a brothel in Tampa, Florida and also picking up prostitutes on the street and going to a hotel room with them. He asked several of these working girls to come to his home instead, offering more money, but they declined.

  Streetwalker Denise Roach, however, accepted his offer in mid May 1996 and he drove her to a remote house where he was caretaker. They went into the bedroom, where the 24-year-old divorcee fellated him. Afterwards they walked out into the yard, where he grabbed an axe from the garage, beat her repeatedly about the head and put his hands around her throat, strangling her to a point of near unconsciousness. He then grabbed an awl – a sharp metal instrument which he used to punch holes in leather – and stabbed her in the face and head, several of the wounds cutting so deeply that they penetrated her brain. The man of God dragged the still-warm corpse to a nearby pond and threw her in, before going home to mow the lawn for his wife.

  Within a fortnight, he was ready to kill again. This time the unfortunate victim was 31-year-old Christy Cowan, a crackaddicted prostitute whom he had had sex with in the past. After leaving work on 28 May, he picked her up and drove her to the same house where he'd taken Denise Roach. This time the couple had full sex then walked downstairs and through the garage, where Smithers grabbed the same axe that he'd used previously and brought it down on the divorced mother-of-two's head. She was still alive, so he strangled her before dragging her body to the pond and throwing her in.

  At that very moment he heard a car drive up and went to meet the driver, the resident of the property. She complimented him on how well he had tidied and swept the yard and mowed the grass, then stopped and stared at the pool of blood on the garage floor. Smithers stammered that someone must have killed a squirrel then froze as he heard moaning sounds coming from the direction of the pond. Christy Cowan was still alive…

  Alarmed, the woman left the property and contacted the sheriff, who found the recently deceased body of Christy Cowan as well as Denise Roach's decomposing remains in the stagnant pond. Smithers had returned to the moaning woman and finished her off by battering her with a garden hoe.

  A police officer went to the former deacon's home and told him about the bodies before asking him to come down to the station. He said calmly that he would but that he wanted his wife to accompany him. At police headquarters they were separated and an officer explained to Sharon that they believed her husband had murdered someone and that the death had been particularly gruesome. She said that this wasn't possible, that he wouldn't commit such an atrocity.

  Meanwhile, Smithers was refusing to talk unless Sharon could sit with him. The police acquiesced and she told her husband to tell the truth, but he again said that he hadn't caused the pool of blood, surmising that a small animal had been killed and had bled out. When told that two corpses had been found on the property, both bludgeoned, he merely said that he was sorry to hear that but it was nothing to do with him. The police let him go home for the night but arranged to collect him and resume questioning the following day. They also persuaded Sharon to go and stay with relatives, but she remained loyal to her husband of 23 years and phoned him several times that night.

  At the mortuary, Christy Cowan was quickly identified by her fingerprints, but Denise Roach's body was so decomposed (her entire face was missing and the skin had slipped from her fingers) that she was originally registered as a Jane Doe.

  The next day, detectives resumed questioning Sam Smithers. He failed a polygraph test then admitted that he hadn't been completely truthful, that he'd picked up a woman whose car had broken down and was traumatised when she said that she'd accuse him of rape if he didn't give her $50. He added that he had driven her to the house where he was caretaker and had thrown her in the pond. As the interrogation continued he admitted to killing a second woman, though he denied having sex with either of them. Because he had moved around the country when he was younger, police forces in other areas began to consider him as a suspect in the unsolved murders of prostitutes.

  Sam Smithers' trial began on 15 December 1998. The prosecution told the jury that Smithers had confessed to both murders, whilst the defence alleged that he had been coerced into making this confession by overzealous police.

  The court heard about the blood on the garage floor and about Smithers' strange behaviour when he was confronted about it. The jury were shown the graphic autopsy photographs and the murder weapons. They also saw a security tape from a convenience store where Smithers and one of the victims, Christy Cowan, had gone to buy a soda before their sex session. And they heard from a forensic expert that semen found on a rug in the bedroom of the house where Smithers was caretaker (he was only supposed to look after the grounds of the property) belonged to Smithers and that another stain on the bedroom rug was probably from the mouth of Denise Roach.

  One of Christy Cowan's friends testified that she had given Christy a condom just hours before she was murdered – and the condom's wrapper was found in the house that Smithers was looking after. Everyone was surprised when Smithers elected to testify in his own defence.

  He took the stand and said that he'd had adulterous sex with a woman at his church who was called Mimi and that a mysterious man had seen them with their arms around each other, had taken photographs and threatened to tell Sharon about the liaison if he didn't give him access to the house which he was tending. This man, he added, had killed both women and made him dispose of their bodies in the nearby pond.

  The prosecution had a field day, asking Smithers what Mimi's surname was. He didn't know, despite being the record keeper at the church. What about the name of the mysterious man, then? He didn't know that either, he said. Why hadn't he gone to the police after being forced to drag the bloody bodies to the pond? He'd feared that the mysterious man would kill his wife and teenage son. Sam Smithers had gotten by in life by being superficially charming but, under questioning, his flimsy story soon fell apart. That same day, the jury went out and returned in less than 2 hours with a verdict – guilty of first-degree murder on both counts.

  At the penalty phase, the prosecution said that both murders had been premeditated: after all, he could have had sex in his car or at various quiet road-stops but had instead chosen to take both women to a more remote location where he could butcher them and dispose of the bodies. He'd phoned his wife to say that he was stuck in a traffic jam so would be late home. The defence argued that the killer had been so traumatised by his abusive childhood that he hadn't really known what he was doing. He had also apparently been dropped on his head as a baby, and the defence suggested this might have left him with permanent brain damage.

  His wife took the stand and said that he had been a wonderful husband and an excellent adoptive father, that the family had done everything together. He had told her that it had felt as if someone else had committed the murders, not him. The defence's psychiatrist said that this meant he might have been having dissociative episodes, breaks with reality. But the jury were unconvinced and took only 90 minutes to recommend that he be put to death.

  The former Baptist deacon appealed the death sentences, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to overturn the convictions. At the time of writing, Samuel Smithers resides on death row, awaiting his date with the electric chair.

In 1974, Norma Jean Armistead was living with her lover Charles Armistead and had taken his surname but he was losing interest and she feared he'd return to his wife. He'd said that he'd like a son as his marriage had only produced daughters, so Norma Jean, who was in her early forties, kept quiet about the fact that she'd had a hysterectomy 13 years before. She had a grown-up son and daughter from a previous relationship so he had no reason to question her fertility. It's likely that she also failed to tell him that she'd spent time in a Texas mental hospital before becoming a nurse.

  That autumn Norma Jean told him that she was pregnant and that she was sure that it was going to be a boy. As the months passed, she used more and more padding to fake an expanding stomach and wore voluminous garments to bed. The other nurses at her workplace, Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Los Angeles, believed that she was having a late baby with her new beau.

  Norma Jean needed a black or mixed-race baby as her lover was black, so when 26-year-old Mary Childs was admitted in the early stages of labour on 20 September 1974, she seized her chance. She befriended the younger woman and injected her with strong sedatives in the early hours of the morning so that she was lapsing in and out of consciousness. She also gave her labour-inducing drugs. At one stage Mary woke up to find that she was paralysed but she soon drifted back into unconsciousness, gave birth to the child and slept for many hours afterwards. Meanwhile, Norma Jean took a three-pound stillborn foetus from the mortuary, put it between Mary's legs and walked out of the hospital with her healthy baby girl.

  She took the baby, whom she called Carrie, to another hospital in the area and said she'd had a home birth and had had a medical examination at the hospital where she was employed as a nurse. She added that, in her opinion, the hospital she was in now offered better postnatal care and that's why she'd come here to register the birth. Medics were surprised at Norma Jean's decision but she was entirely plausible and they completed the necessary paperwork.

  When Mary Childs eventually regained consciousness, doctors told her that her drug use had killed the baby in her womb the week before. Distraught, Mary protested that she didn't take drugs and that she had felt the baby kicking en route to the delivery room. Doctors said that the dead foetus must have shifted inside her but she countered that it was her third child so she knew how a baby's kick felt. They added that she'd had a massive amount of sedative in her system: they had no idea that their very own obstetrics nurse had injected her with this. Mary, a hard-working grocery store assistant, protested that she'd had a blood test when she was admitted which showed that she was drug-free and that the doctor had estimated that her baby would be about eight pounds, not the three-pound foetus which they now claimed that she'd delivered. Moreover, a doctor had registered a foetal heartbeat which she had seen on the screen. Despite these numerous inconsistencies the hospital claimed that she was in denial about the stillbirth and sent her home.

Meanwhile, Norma Jean presented Charles with his new daughter but he was disappointed that it wasn't a son and again the relationship faltered. Norma Jean, by now 44 years old, began looking around for another pregnant victim and soon befriended Kathryn Viramontes, a 26-year-old who was having her boyfriend's child.

  Norma Jean attacked the younger woman on 16 May 1975 as they sat in Kathryn's apartment, injecting her with a medication which would paralyse her muscles. She taped Kathryn's mouth shut, cut her throat and also cut her from the navel to the pubic bone, effectively carrying out a home caesarean. The unfortunate mother died quickly of blood loss.

  Norma Jean took the baby boy to a nearby hospital where she again refused a medical exam, explaining she was fine and only wanted to register the birth but the baby had a slight fever and a nurse took him away for treatment. Meanwhile, the bloody body of Kathryn Viramontes was found and it was obvious that someone had cut her child from her womb. Detectives contacted the nearest hospitals and found that Norma Jean was at one of them and acting suspiciously. A doctor who insisted on examining her discovered that she didn't have a uterus or a cervix so couldn't possibly have given birth to this child or the one that she claimed to have delivered the previous year.

  Detectives went to her house and discovered that Mary Childs' daughter, now eight months old, was being cared for by one of Norma Jean's adult relatives. They belatedly united the real mother with her child and an anguished Mary Childs sued the hospital for originally preventing an investigation into what really happened. She received $275,000 and her baby daughter received $100,000.

  A film, Empty Cradle (1993), was loosely based on the case. In the movie, the killer nurse is played by an ultra slim and glamorous Kate Jackson, whilst the real Norma Jean Armistead was overweight and matronly. The mother of the stolen baby in the film is white whereas the real mother was black. Norma Jean's lover, Charles, is also portrayed as being white rather than black and still lives with his unsuspecting wife and kids. Nevertheless, Kate Jackson accurately depicts the sudden mood swings and hysterics which borderline personalities like Norma Jean Armistead display in real life.

Romantics often believe that a woman who steals a baby is overwhelmed by her maternal instincts, but Norma Jean had given birth twice and had difficult relationships with her adult children. She'd had a hysterectomy many years before so her biological clock simply wasn't ticking and, after she stole Mary Childs' baby, she did not spend a great deal of time with it. Rather, she wanted a son for the bond that she hoped this would create with her increasingly indifferent lover, Charles, and the item to hold their union together could just as well have been a puppy or a kitten if that's what he desired. With her borderline personality she saw her victims as collateral damage and has never shown full awareness of the terror that she wrought.

At the time of writing, Norma Jean Jackson (she has reverted to her real surname) is in a female correction centre in Chowchilla, California. Now in her eighties, she is suffering from heart disease, the after-effects of a stroke and arthritis, and believes that she should be released or at least moved into a halfway house. Her few supporters note that she's on ten prescription medications a day and say that she's paid for her crimes, but her detractors remember the full horror of Kathryn's murder and the fact that she robbed the young mother of potentially more than 50 years of life, as well as causing Mary Childs untold pain.

This was such an unusual case that I sought the input of Dr David Holmes, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, director of their Forensic Research Group and author of the landmark text Abnormal Clinical and Forensic Psychology. I said that Norma Jean Armistead appeared to have a borderline personality disorder, evidenced by her mood swings and volatile relationships, and asked if he agreed with this and could identify any other personality disorders which she personified.

  He replied as follows: 'Personality-disordered individuals are almost always diagnosed with two or more personality disorders – it is very rare to have a single diagnosis. Ms Armistead shows borderline personality features such as mood swings and rapid reaction to others but also in her desperate measures to avoid abandonment and gain attention. This attention-seeking and her pathologically overconfident levels of lying would tick boxes for narcissism, but, with her lack of concern for others or consequences, more clearly indicates psychopathy. There are elements of Munchausen syndrome by proxy in her acts as she fabricates her pregnancy at the ultimate expense of the suffering and death of others. Her professional manipulation of medical skills and overconfident ambition to fool other medical professionals also fits this syndrome.'

  I commented that most of us couldn't cut a foetus from the womb even if we badly wanted a baby and asked if he believed this lack of empathy is only found in psychopaths.

  'Lack of empathy can be found on the schizoid spectrum but such individuals lack the motivation to harm and do not appreciate that others may be suffering or in pain, whereas psychopaths such as Armistead know full well they are inflicting harm but feel nothing and care even less.' He added thought-provokingly that 'some individuals share the lack of revulsion at the grotesque visceral acts characteristic of psychopaths but train to put this layer of insensitivity to good use as surgeons, nurses or emergency personnel'. He also noted that 'there is an area of the frontal brain behind the eyes that prevents us acting out our darkest violent fantasies. This does not function properly in psychopaths.'

  We know virtually nothing about Norma Jean Armistead's childhood, so it's impossible to find her place on the nature-versusnurture scale, but Dr Holmes believes that 'most callous killers such as Armistead have had their dangerous traits all their lives but only display them when the opportunity arises. Some show incidences in childhood and in some cases their extreme traits can dominate the family home and destroy its emotional fabric, thus causing a broken home rather than vice versa.' He continued: 'Most individuals who suffer abandonment or loss in childhood compensate by being overdutiful and caring as adults. However, some professionals believe that dependent personalities can develop from this. Although Armistead shows dependent traits, she fits the picture of borderline psychopath better.'

  I asked him if this type of killer typically loses herself in a particularly rich fantasy life. After all, she must have known that the police would soon be looking for a baby taken via a home caesarean so it seems incredible that she believed that she could pass the baby off as her own, particularly when a medical examination would show that she'd had a hysterectomy.

  Dr Holmes explained: 'One clear trait of psychopaths is a lack of concern for the future. They live for the satisfaction of the moment and are overconfident, even arrogant, about their abilities to maintain lies. Although manipulative and cunning, they make mistakes and become careless when reality does not fall in line with their selfish and often unpleasant fantasies. Oddly, in Munchausen by proxy, perpetrators enjoy the challenge of fooling professionals into thinking they, the perpetrators, are superior. If they have any plan at all, psychopaths think they will simply use force or manipulation if found out by someone.'

  I confided that a lawyer involved in the case recently referred to Armistead as an elderly Charles Manson and asked Dr Holmes if, in his opinion, someone who committed such brutal crimes could ever become normal and present no further danger to society.

  'Dangerous personalities are lifelong propensities,' he replied, 'not temporary or curable diseases. When psychopaths agree to treatment they are most likely to manipulate the therapist into giving them a good report by faking good behaviour. Those that genuinely want to change can have their traits moderated though not removed. Personality traits often moderate as individuals pass through middle age but they do not change to anything like normal, thus they will always present a risk to others.'

Though Bishop Marvin Gay was a leader of the House of God church, he was a ruthless father who beat his little boy, Marvin junior, whenever the boy failed to accurately cite biblical chapter and verse. He went on to have another son and two daughters, whom he also beat on a regular basis, but he reserved the worst of his hatred for his oldest child.

  As the years passed, the beatings became increasingly sadistic and the father would send Marvin junior up to his bedroom then spend up to an hour jangling his belt on the stairway to increase the child's trepidation. Little Marvin began to have night terrors and wet the bed and his father beat him for this. There was little respite at school, as he was bullied because of the homosexual connotations his surname had. He often saw his father beating up his mother, Alberta, and he was confused by his father's insistence on dressing in his mother's clothes, something which his father did for sexual kicks.

Though Marvin junior was emotionally crippled by the years of abuse, he had one talent which gave him a level of self-belief: a remarkable singing voice. At first, he only used this to sing hymns in church. When the other parishioners praised him, his father became enraged, so he began to sing in the local clubs instead.