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

gender it belonged to. Hair that had been pulled had to be separated from hair that had been shed naturally and then those that had been torn out had to be matched to a specific part of the body. Hair that had been cut had to be subjected to further examination to see if it had been cut cleanly by scissors or ragged by a shredder. After separating body fragments from the wood chippings, Lee and his team were left with just a few ounces of body parts, a fingernail, a dental crown, a bone fragment and pieces of plastic bag in which the body parts had been transported to the site.
    Tooth fragments proved sufficient to positively identify the rest of the remains as belonging to the missing woman and when Dr Lee identified a bone fragment as part of the skull it proved conclusively that Mrs Crafts was dead. Moreover, the tissue on the chainsaw matched tissue found at the site; hair taken from Mrs Crafts’ hairbrush was matched with hair recovered from the chippings and, if that wasn’t enough, a sliver of nail polish was analyzed with a sample obtained from a bottle at the Crafts’ house and found to be identical. But the final flourish in Henry Lee’s exemplary investigation was his decision to consult R. Bruce Hoadley, a forensic tree expert. By examining the chippings found at the river and those taken from the hire truck, Hoadley was able to state that they were from the same tree and that both chippings showed the distinctive cut marks made by the chipper that Crafts had hired.
    If Richard Crafts had entertained hopes of evading arrest and prosecution for murder, he had seriously underestimated the dedication and dogged persistence of the forensic investigators on his case, who had spent almost three years putting their evidence together.
    When his case came to trial in 1989, Richard Crafts’ defence was systematically demolished by Dr Lee and his team of expert witnesses. Crafts was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

The Chicago Cult Killings
    That one lone killer might abduct, rape, torture and kill a string of young women is horrifying enough. That four men should get together to carry out such crimes as a team almost beggars belief. That, however, is exactly what Robin Gecht, Edward Spreitzer and the Kokoraleis brothers, Andrew and Thomas, did. Known as the ‘Chicago Rippers’, they were responsible for at least seven and conceivably as many as eighteen murders of women, all of them carried out with dreadful savagery and without any apparent motive, beyond the basest of sadistic urges.
    The first murder to be carried out by the gang was that of twenty-eight-year-old Linda Sutton. On 23 May 1981, she was abducted. Ten days later her body was found in a field, in the Villa Park area of the city, not far from an establishment called the Rip Van Winkle motel. Sutton’s body had been mutilated and her left breast amputated. This was evidently the work of a sexual sadist but, as yet, the police had no clues to go on.
    It was almost a year before the Rippers struck again. On 15 May 1982 they abducted another young woman, Lorraine Borowski, as she was about to open up the realtor’s office in which she worked. This time, however, it was five months before the body was discovered in a cemetery in Villa Park.
    By this time, the Rippers had struck several more times. On 29 May, they abducted Shui Mak from Hanover Park, a little way to the north of Villa Park. Her body was not found for four months. Two weeks after the abduction of Shui Mak, a prostitute known as Angel York was picked up by a man in a van, who handcuffed her and slashed her breast before throwing her out, still alive.
    More Breast Amputations
    York’s description of her attacker failed to produce any leads, and two months passed before the Rippers struck again. On 28 August 1982 the body of Sandra Delaware, a prostitute, was discovered by the Chicago River. She had been stabbed and strangled and her left breast amputated. On 8 September