World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds by Charlotte Greig Read Free Book Online Page A

To Justice
    By now it was becoming clear that the Soviet bloc countries were not supporting Carlos’ activities any longer. He was also being kept at arm’s length by the radical Arab countries. Eventually, Carlos found a home in Syria, but even here he was allowed to remain only on condition that he stop his terrorist activities.
    When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was rumoured that Saddam Hussein was going to approach Carlos to make terrorist strikes on the United States. Syria expelled Carlos, and he went underground, taking shelter in various Middle Eastern countries. He found his way to the Sudan, which had become a focus for terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. However, his playboy way of life did not sit at all well with the religious fundamentalism of the Islamic sheikh who offered him protection. The sheikh arranged for him to be handed over to the French authorities.
    The arrest took place in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan, in 1994. Carlos was immediately transferred to mainland France and, after three years of solitary confinement, was tried for three murders – from among the scores that he had committed.
    Carlos was sentenced to life imprisonment. In May 2007, Carlos was told he faced a new trial, appearing before anti-terrorism judge Jean-louis Bruguiere on charges concerning ‘killings and destruction of property using explosive substances’ in France in 1982 and 1983’. The trial began on 7 November 2011 and, five weeks later, Carlos was convicted and once more sentenced to life in prison.

A Case Without a Corpse
    Forensic science is not simply a matter of running trace evidence through high-tech apparatus and printing out the perpetrator’s ID after the database has produced a match. Even the most sophisticated equipment can only analyze the evidence. It takes a tenacious, imaginative and highly motivated CSI to gather all the elements, interpret the evidence and make a case. The following account is a good example of the lengths that forensic scientists must now go to and the attention to detail they need to secure a conviction.
    Just before Christmas 1986, the police received a call from Keith Mayo, a private investigator, who said he was concerned that his client, flight attendant Helle Crafts, had gone missing from her home in Connecticut. When questioned, her husband Richard claimed that she had stormed out after an argument and that he had no idea of her whereabouts. Neither had her colleagues, but without a body there was nothing much the police could do except conduct a routine missing persons enquiry. Until, that is, a snowplough driver remembered seeing a man fitting Richard Crafts’ description operating a wood chipping machine by a river at 3.30am in the midst of a blizzard. The inference was clear. Crafts had dismembered his wife’s body and shredded it into compost. If he had tipped the contents into the river the current would have distributed the remains across the state and no amount of circumstantial evidence would be enough to convict him.
    Fortunately the coroner in charge of the case, Henry C. Lee, possessed local knowledge and told the police precisely which spot on the river to search as body parts had been washed up there in earlier cases. Sure enough, they pulled a chain saw from the water and were able to match it to the chipper and the truck that Crafts had rented. But even this proved only that Craft had discarded a rented saw in a river. It did not prove conclusively that he had mulched his wife’s remains.
    A Gruesome Task
    So for nearly a month investigators scoured the location where Craft had been seen using the shredder during the snow storm and brought back a small mountain of wood chippings and human tissue to Lee’s laboratory. There the team sifted through the debris, putting plant material to one side and human hair, tooth fragments and tissue in another.
    Each hair had to be analyzed to see if it was animal or human and, if it was human, which race and