The High Court of Australia and Constitutional Interpretation

The Australian founders were quite clear that the High Court was to be the lynchpin of the whole constitutional system. Alfred Deakin called it 'the keystone of the federal arch' which would decide 'the orbit and boundary of every power'; the 'competent tribunal' which would 'protect the Constitution' and 'oversee its agencies'.
- Galligan, B, 'The Power of Seven' Smith, M Legal Process, 6th ed. Sydney, LBC, 1994, 619.

Chapter 3, s 71-80, of the Australian Constitution establishes and governs the High Court. The fact that it is the only court specifically discussed in that most important of documents is testament to the High Court's importance. It is the only court in Australia that must exist, and its size and powers are protected. A minimum of three judges must reside over the court, and its jurisdiction may not be diminished. In fact, the Constitution provides for an increase in the stature of the court, but not the opposite.

The High Court has many powers that are unique within the Australian judicial system:
One of the High Court's principal functions is to decide disputes about the meaning of the Constitution... The power which the High Court has to interpret the Constitution means that it is a very important body. The High Court is also the final court of appeal within Australia in all other types of cases, even those dealing with purely state matters...
- Australia. Australia's Constitution. Canberra: Attorney General's Dept, 1995, xvi.

Although the High Court does not often have to exercise its Constitutional power, when it does so the impact is significant. The High Court tells the people of Australia what rights they have - or don't have. Its power to hold statutes illegal is intended to protect the people from unjust laws, but critics suggest it allows the High Court to take on a legislative role.

Ever since Griffith, Barton and O'Connor sat in 1903, the High Court has been criticised for the decisions it has made. Although people agree with its role as guardian of the Constitution, they question how well it has carried this out over the years. This criticism is inevitable because the High Court is the sole authority on Constitutional interpretation.

There have been several distinct periods in the High Court's practice of judicial review, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages that have led to criticism.

Originalism

When Australia's founding fathers sat on the High Court's bench, in the early years after Federation, the Constitution was very loosely interpreted. Having been involved with the drafting of the document, the early judges believed that they knew its intent, and ruled accordingly. In doing so, they changed the written document by reading into it rights and restrictions that were not expressly provided for. Although this was essentially de facto1 Constitutional change, originalism is validated to some degree by its proximity to Federation.

Legalism

With the passing of time and hence a decline in the number of sitting judges who helped draft the document, the High Court began to treat the Constitution as it would any other legal document. They applied ordinary methods of statutory interpretation, for, as Sir Owen Dixon explained:
It may be that the court is thought to be excessively legalistic. I should be sorry to think that it is anything else. There is no other safe guide to judicial decisions in great conflicts than a strict and complete legalism.
- Walker, T, 'Sir Harry Gibbs Reflects' (1987) 61 Law Institute Journal 417

This broad category of judicial review includes many different methods of interpretation, from strict literalism to purposive interpretation, but is essentially conservative in character. If judges do nothing out of the ordinary, it is more difficult to criticise them.

Difficulty, though, has not stopped the opponents of legalism. The decisions of the court in this period have had a significant centralist bias2, expanding the power of the Commonwealth over the States, arguably against the intention of the Constitution. Other critics, such as Sir Anthony Mason, believe that the Constitution is not an ordinary statute, and should not be treated as such:
Legalism is unachievable and so illusory; it conceals the true basis of decision-making. Values are important to legal reasoning; the values should be stated explicitly; they should be current community values. A Constitution above all cannot be interpreted legalistically.
- Galligan, B, 'The Power of Seven' Smith, M Legal Process, 6th ed Sydney, LBC, 1994, 619.

Realism

This view reflects the current trend within the High Court's bench. Realists try to consider the law in the presence of a wider social context. This departure from tradition has led to the use of the phrase 'judicial activism' to describe the proponents of this movement, usually by its opponents. Realism is intended to make the High Court's decisions more transparent and honest by rejecting purely legalistic interpretations and considering the views of the community at large.
The High Court's method, its personnel and public profile have all changed in ways that make a significant difference to the court's decision making and public profile. As well, the court is deciding high-profile cases concerning political rights, such as the implied constitutional right to free speech in the political advertising case, and social injustices, as in Mabo, which reversed terra nullius and recognised the dispossession of Aboriginal people. These are all ingredients for a heady judicial brew... But the High Court's basic role as final arbiter of the Australian Constitution and common law has not changed. Rather, the court has quietly shed its traditional mask of 'strict and complete legalism' and been exposed to political controversy in some of its recent gamer decisions.'
- Galligan, B, 'The Power of Seven' Ibid

Indeed, the political advertising and Mabo3 cases are prime examples of the way a realist approach has led to criticism of the High Court, with claims that it breaches the separation of powers by blurring the lines between judiciary and legislature.

The rejection of terra nullius4 in Mabo is clearly a realist decision: change on the basis of social necessity. The court overturned a long-standing and fundamental common-law principle by accepting the existence of a legal system prior to the arrival of white settlers. Critics say that such a decision should be left to Parliament, while proponents argue that the judges had a right and a duty to create new law based on new anthropological evidence. As J Brennan enunciated in his decision on the case:
If this were any ordinary case, the Court would not be justified in reopening the validity of fundamental propositions which have been endorsed by long-established authority and which have been accepted as a basis of the... law of the country for more than 150 years... Far from being ordinary, however, the circumstances of the present case make it unique... In these circumstances, the Court is under a clear duty to re-examine the... propositions.
- Mabo v Queensland (1992) 175 CLR 1

In essence, the High Court has accepted that such activism should not occur regularly, rather only on matters of great importance.

The implied Constitutional right to freedom of political communication is another example of the High Court's controversial nature. A series of cases led to the development of this right, and its creation was defended on the grounds of social policy. The court concluded that the Constitution necessarily requires free political speech in order to function properly, although this was not made explicit in the express provisions of the document.

Again, support for this decision is not unanimous. Although many people believe that the Constitution would be nonsense without the right to free political speech, others argue that the judiciary has altered it. They claim that because the right was not set out, it does not exist, and furthermore that this decision clears the way for other unwritten clauses to be added to the Constitution.

The biggest criticism of judicial activism is its undemocratic nature. It is, Prof Cappelletti describes it, 'judicial operations in advance of the consensus'5. The question, as the opponents of a creative judiciary see it, is whether appointed judges should make law on our behalf, when there is a democratically elected legislature for that purpose.

But the judiciary cannot be dismissed by a simple slur of democratic rights. The role of judges has always been to create or clarify the law, and principles have always been changed or even rejected. The truth is that the judiciary is appointed by those democratically elected representatives that are in the legislature - hence at least the public has some say in who is appointed, albeit indirectly. And ultimately the judiciary derives its legitimacy from other safeguards:
I think there is a basic error in applying the same criteria that legitimise legislation to the two other main forms of governmental action: administration and adjudication... As for adjudication, its legitimacy depends on the form of this type of decision making, primarily: (a) its emanation from a (relatively) independent and impartial body ('insulation'), and (b) the requirement... [that] the judge shall only act on the parties' demand ('concreteness') ... (c) adjudication must be 'enabled by law'... ie, the 'rule of law'.
- Cappelletti, M, 'The Law Making Power of the Judge and its Limits: A Comparative Analysis', (1981) 8 Monash University Law Review 15

Suggestions that judicial activists somehow go over the top of Parliament are therefore incorrect. The Constitution clearly outlines the role of the High Court in parallel to, or even as overseer of, the legislative function of government. Sir Anthony Mason thinks such suggestions are farcical:
... the court is not undertaking a legislative role. Sometimes when it formulates a new principle or qualifies an existing principle, the judicial decision may wear that appearance - because that means the decision has changed what was thought to be the law on that point... But there is no way in which the court can usurp the role of Parliament... All the courts do is respond to their obligations in the particular cases that are brought before them.
- Virtue, B, 'High Court is Planning New Rules' (1993) 28 Australian Lawyer 27

Criticism of the High Court over its judicial review is inevitable. It has been criticised in all phases of its life as Constitutional guardian. At every stage it was claimed that the court precipitated de facto change, be it the unwritten rights of originalism, the centralist bias of legalism or now the policy decisions of realism. But of the three phases, the current trend seems safest. Judges who consider the social context of their decisions will tend to make more relevant and appropriate decisions than those who lose themselves in a world of statutory interpretation do. Here, as in most instances, debate is healthy, and will help bring the High Court to the next stage of its development.
1 'In fact, whether by right or not.' - Oxford English Dictionary.
2 See, for example, the Engineers' case: Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co Ltd (1920) 28 CLR 129.
3 Mabo v Queensland (1992) 175 CLR 1.
4 Land belonging to no-one. In the Mabo decision, the assumption that nobody inhabited Australia when Europeans arrived was exposed as a fallacy, opening the way for Aboriginal native title claims.
5 Cappelletti, M, 'The Law Making Power of the Judge and its Limits: A Comparative Analysis', (1981) 8 Monash University Law Review 15.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A584741

Henry Wirz and the Andersonville Trial

What would you have done?

What would you have done, if you had spent your youth fighting for freedom as you saw it, settled in a new country with promise, built a career, and then found your adopted country embroiled in a fight for its life? Fought alongside it, no doubt. What would you have done then, if, wounded, useless in battle, you had been assigned the most thankless, impossible task of the war - overseeing 45,000 prisoners with a skeleton crew, a few cannon, and minimal supplies? The best you could, within your orders?

What if, the war lost, you had been put on trial by the victors? Would you have said, 'I made this situation, I am responsible', or would you have said, 'I did the best I could'? Who was responsible for this horror, anyway?

In our day, we are accustomed to international tribunals which try political and military leaders for war crimes, for what we call crimes against humanity. But Henry Wirz, the only man hanged for a war crime at the end of the US Civil War, was the first such 'war criminal'. Whether this was just - whether Wirz deserved to die for what he did or did not do during the last 14 months of this bitter internecine conflict - is a question that is still controversial.

For Henry Wirz was the commandant of the Confederate prison stockade called Camp Sumter - known to history as Andersonville.

The Problem with Prisoner Exchange

There is reason to fear, that many voluntarily surrender for the sake of gettng home.
- Edwin McMasters Stanton, Secretary of War (US)

Prisoner exchanges1, the main means of solving prisoner problems in most wars before the 1860s2, did not work very well during the US Civil War. The Confederacy - blockaded, strapped for resources, unable to guard or provide for the masses of prisoners they captured - urgently wanted these exchanges. The Union, with greater resources and manpower coming off the immigrant boats weekly3, did not.

As the Secretary of War, Edwin M Stanton - the primary opponent after Lincoln of prisoner exchanges - put it, there were two objections. One was that exchanging prisoners recognised the existence of the Confederacy as a nation. The other was that Union soldiers, who only served for a year, were sent home, whereas Confederates, fighting on their own turf, simply went back to the army. The Union felt it was getting the lesser bargain. This left tens of thousands of soldiers at any one time sidelined from battle, but fighting for their very existence under horrific conditions.

Prisoner exchanges broke down in 1863 over a disagreement on the disposition of black Union soldiers. When Ulysses S Grant became Union commander-in-chief, he concluded for policy reasons that prisoner exchanges were detrimental to the North, and declined to re-initiate them.

The Facts on the (Bloody) Ground

Not long after my arrival I heard a cry 'Rat call! Rat call!' I went out to see what this meant... The prisoners scrambled for the rats like school boys for apples... Of course but few were lucky enough to get a rat. The rats were cleaned, put in salt water a while and fried...
- Captain John S Swann, prisoner at Fort Delaware

Union prisons varied in quality - Elmira in New York had a 25% death rate for the year it was open. At Camp Douglas in Michigan, prisoners were deprived of clothing in a Great Lakes winter to discourage escape attempts, and 3-6,000 shivered and died in gunny sacks with holes cut for head and arms4. At Fort McHenry5 the prisoners were treated comparatively leniently, even being able to bribe the guards for a night out in nearby Baltimore, but Fort McHenry began as an internment camp for the prominent.

Conditions in Confederate prisons were bleak, though less cold in winter, a serious consideration in terms of survival. Libby Prison, a converted warehouse and chandlery in Richmond, Virginia, was overcrowded and disease-ridden, though surgeons visited there, and officers were brought food and comforts by Miss Elizabeth van Lew, the local Union spy in residence6. Prisons were often converted tobacco warehouses, or simply wooden stockades thrown up, with the prisoners living in tents, when available, or crude lean-tos constructed of materials at hand.

Estimates made about 40 years after the war indicate that in all, the South imprisoned 194,000 Union soldiers, while the North had captured 220,000 Confederates. Of these, 24,436 Southerners and 22,570 Northerners died in the camps. The total death toll of around 50,000 made the prison camps as deadly as the three days of Gettysburg, the most lethal battle of the war.

Andersonville was a stockade prison, constructed in desperation after prisoner exchanges had fallen through. In all, 45,000 prisoners were housed within the 26-acre enclosure. A creek7 ran through the camp, which quickly became clogged with effluvia. Food and water were scarce and disease was rife.

Conditions in Andersonville were horrendous, different in scale though not in quality from those in other prison camps on both sides in the conflict - of the 45,000 men imprisoned there, 13,000 died. What caused Andersonville in particular to become a byword for atrocity?

The Power of Public Opinion

We parted with our Alabama guards early in April. It was a disappointment to us, for we had found friends among them, real friends who shared with us their scant allowance. Others who had nothing 'gave all they had - a tear'.
- James Madison Page, 6th Michigan Cavalry, referring to the guards at Andersonville

The end of the war was time of heightened emotion on the part of the victorious North. Within a week of the surrender at Appomattox, President Lincoln was shot, and battle lines were drawn between those in the Administration who wished to continue Lincoln's policy of re-incorporating the rebel states 'with malice toward none, with charity for all', and those, like Edwin M Stanton, who most definitely did not. The new President, Andrew Johnson, was beleaguered from the beginning (he was later impeached, unsuccessfully). Johnson refused to allow the prosecution of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis and General Robert E Lee for war crimes, but acquiesced in the case of Andersonville Commandant Henry Wirz.

When images from Andersonville were published along with an article in Harper's Weekly8, public horror at the excesses of war was focussed on this particular camp. Someone had to pay. General Lew Wallace9, fresh from the panel that had tried the 'Lincoln conspirators'10, was named to head the court martial of the 'Andersonville jailer'.

Who was Henry Wirz, and how much did he have to do with what happened in that Georgia stockade?

From Revolution to War

Henry obviously lacked the administrative capacity that a man in his job ought to have had, but given the circumstances under which Andersonville was set up and operated, it would have taken a complete administrative genius to keep the place from becoming anything but a horror
- Bruce Catton, 'Prison Camps of the Civil War', American Heritage Magazine (online version)

Heinrich Hartmann (or Hartmann Heinrich) Wirz was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1822. A trained physician, he came to the US in 1849, with a prison record of his own. Henry, as he now called himself, was a '48er - like his contemporary, the Union General Carl Schurz11, Wirz had been involved in the upheavals that rocked Europe in 1848. Many of these young European radicals later went west. When war broke out, Wirz joined the Confederate Army, being seriously wounded at the battle of Fair Oaks. Returning from a diplomatic mission to Europe, Wirz was assigned to General Winder, who had been placed in charge of war prisoners east of the Mississippi. Thus Wirz came in charge of the nightmare that was Andersonville.

Supervision on the part of Confederate guards was non-existent - crime existed within the camp, caused by 'raiders' who stole from fellow-soldiers, even committing murder. The raiders were finally stopped by fellow prisoners, who captured and hanged them. Deaths averaged about 100 a day. Cannon were placed outside the stockade in case of prison uprising. Prisoners were required to stay inside the 'deadline' - a word that first appeared during the war, and which meant exactly what it said.

Wirz himself was far from well. His shattered arm caused him intractable pain, which was treated with morphine. There is some question that this combination caused him to be both irascible and erratic. Accounts of his alleged cruelty - including the case of a mad prisoner who was shot after crossing the deadline - vary and cannot be finally resolved.

In 1865, when Union troops liberated Andersonville, Wirz was arrested and taken to Washington, DC, for the world's first war crimes trial.

The Andersonville Trial

The vengeful thought that has root merely in the mind is but a dream of idlest sort which one clear day will dissipate; while revenge, the passion, is a disease of the heart which climbs up, up to the brain, and feeds itself on both alike.
- General Lew Wallace, Revenge

At his trial, it was alleged that Wirz behaved with wanton cruelty. Testimony was brought by former captives. Wirz offered in his defence a letter that he had written to his superiors complaining about the shortage of food for the prisoners. Some witnesses who wished to appear in Wirz's defence were excluded from the trial.

As Wirz continued to be unwell, he was brought into the courtroom on a stretcher and attended the proceedings from a chaise longue. He was convicted and condemed to death.

On 10 November, 1865, Wirz was executed in the courtyard of what is now the US Supreme Court building. The hanging was botched - it took Wirz two full minutes to die. Union soldiers stood around chanting 'Remember Andersonville'.

Vengeance or Revenge?

There are deeds, crimes that may be forgiven but this is not among them. It steeps its perpetrators in blackest, escapless, endless damnation.
- Walt Whitman on the execution of Henry Wirz
I swear positively that I never heard of Captain Wirz kicking or shooting a prisoner, nor in any way maltreating him except as I have stated.
- Testimony of Augustus Moesner for the defence, from Andersonville Trial transcripts

The 250 ticket-holding spectators in Washington who joined in the chanting as Henry Wirz, formerly of Zurich, slowly writhed his way to death on the gallows probably shared Mr Whitman's sentiments. But do we?

Much has been said, and will be said, of individual responsibility for acts of atrocity in wartime. Less is said - and this will, perhaps, continue to be the case - of the responsibility of individuals in times of high political passions to fight against the tendency to seek a scapegoat.

The war is over. You have won - therefore your enemy was wrong. Completely, utterly, and definitively wrong. About economics, about social issues. About everything.

Wars do a lot of damage. Someone must pay for this damage. Guilt must be determined, blame assigned. Thus it has ever been, thus it will be.

The wheels of military justice grind swiftly. And sometimes they crush the guilty. Sometimes questions remain - the kind that niggle in the back of the historical conscience.

The transcripts of the Andersonville Trial are public record. They can be read. Where are the transcripts for Elmira, Fort Douglas, Fort Delaware? The graves of 13,000 dead stand in orderly rows in Anderson, Georgia - where are the graves in Michigan?

Afterthoughts and Practical Considerations

June 6, 1864 - Lively skirmishing today; caught and killed 17 or 20 lice, all fat and in good condition.
- Eugene Forbes, Sgt, Co. B, 14th New Jersey Cavalry, at Andersonville

Wirz had been ordered to keep more than 30,000 men at a time confined in a filthy, dangerous place in order to prevent their escape - and to use whatever military means he had at hand to do so. This, though terrible, was in keeping with the usages of that war. His qualifications as an administrator were doubtful, but there was a great deal of amateurism in that war.

His supply problems were enormous - he complained about this to his superiors. Shortages of food and equipment were common in the Confederacy - nobody was getting enough to eat as the war wore on. In fact, of the 1,000 guards at Andersonville, 226 died, of the same diseases and privations as those on the other side of the fence12.

Supplies were short in the South because the region was subject to naval blockade. Supplies were also short because almost every able-bodied man was fighting, leaving a serious shortage of agricultural labour. In addition, the war was being fought largely on Southern territory, causing damage to crops and disruption of rail services.

Union policy in refusing prisoner exchange was deliberate and based on a war strategy intended to exploit the advantage of greater available manpower. This policy - along with the policy of rendering Confederate prisoners unfit for further duty - essentially regarded the soldiers themselves as raw materials.

One could argue that such considerations prevail in wartime, particularly when so much is invested in the outcome. But by holding a postwar tribunal, the judges are inviting comparisons - a consideration of whether the victors had not, in fact, been doing exactly what they had accused their opponents of doing - deliberately exacerbating the suffering of prisoners of war.

It is perhaps impossible for any people to look at such questions dispassionately - certainly not in the aftermath of a bloody war which levied such a personal toll on all involved. Nor for a war in which ideology was used to such devastating effect.

The political reasons for holding a show trial of one man are evident. A century and a half later, the questions are there to be raised. Was the Wirz case one of clear-cut responsibility for an atrocity? Was this man guilty of 'wanton cruelty', of carrying out an expressed policy in contravention of the codes of war? Or was he a convenient scapegoat for a nation looking back in horror at what it had become?

Civil wars leave long-lasting scars. Long after the fighting is over, even when the shell craters have been filled in and the fields grow green over the burned-out homesteads, the memory remains of the ugliness of man's inhumanity to his fellow-man. That loss of faith is the deepest wound, and heals last, if at all.

Abraham Lincoln, himself a casualty of that war, had a vision of healing that he expressed in his Second Inaugural Address:
...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

This is, of course, the legacy we want to believe in - the one in which we judge one another fairly, in which we are not drawn by our own fear, suspicion, and doubt to cast the blame on another. A review of the post-Civil War period will reveal many instances in which fear, suspicion, and doubt won out over Lincoln's vision of reconciliation.

For Further Reading

Written in 1959, Saul Levitt's play The Andersonville Trial, based on trial transcripts, ran on Broadway before being taped for a PBS special in 1970. A visit to Youtube will yield scenes from this performance, directed by George C Scott and starring Cameron Mitchell, Richard Basehart and William Shatner.

MacKinlay Kantor's novel Andersonville is rich in period detail, and earned the author the 1955 Pulitzer Prize.

Andersonville itself is open to the public and can be visited.
1 The exchange rate during the US Civil War was as follows: 1 general = 46 privates, 1 major general = 40 privates, 1 brigadier = 20 privates, 1 colonel = 15 privates, 1 lieutenant colonel = 10 privates, 1 major = 8 privates, 1 captain = 6 privates, 1 lieutenant = 4 privates, 1 noncommissioned officer = 2 privates. (Source: 'Prisons, Paroles, and POWs'.)
2 The Napoleonic Wars, which resulted in a major prisoner issue in Great Britain, were an exception. The Thames hulk fleet and the construction of Dartmoor came about as solutions to the problem of French prisoners of war in that long-running conflict.
3 For an international view of the aggressive recruitment of immigrants by the Union, see that excellent Irish source, the popular ballad.
4 The number is impossible to determine; there is a mass grave with only an approximate count on the marker.
5 Francis Scott Key wrote the US National Anthem while sitting in a cartel boat outside Fort McHenry. His grandson, a prominent Southern sympathiser from Baltimore, spent the Civil War inside Fort McHenry. To understand why President Lincoln declared martial law in that secessionist city, and interned its local government, please refer to a map of the eastern United States. Baltimore is north of Washington, DC.
6 The prison, from which several successful escapes were made, has the unusual distinction of having been moved in its entirety to Chicago after the war for use as a Civil War museum.
7 A small river.
8 On which the banner reads 'Journal of Civilization'.
9 Author of Ben Hur.
10 The 'Lincoln Conspirators' - those accused of aiding John Wilkes Booth in his assassination of President Lincoln - included Mary Surratt, a widowed tavern owner who was hanged for aiding in Booth's escape, as well as Dr Samuel Mudd, who had treated the assassin and was marooned for a time in the Dry Tortugas.
11 Founder of the US Civil Service.
12 These are buried in nearby Americus, Georgia.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A61035176

Giovanni Vigliotto

Patricia Ann Gardiner was at a swap meet1 in Arizona, 1981, when she met the man of her dreams. Giovanni was not exactly a prince — he was chubby and short, had a big nose and puffy lips, was in his early 50s, and wearing faded jeans — but he was charming. She was impressed by the honest way he gazed deep into her eyes, and her mothering instincts were turned on by his soulful, hang-dog attitude. He told her about his millions of dollars in savings and the ocean liner he owned. She married him only eight days later. Because he lived in California, she liquidated her assets, packing them into his car. Then she got into her own with her pet poodle, he got into his, and they headed to a honeymoon hotel in San Diego.

Only Patricia and her pooch arrived at the hotel. Vigliotto and her $36,000-worth of possessions had vanished on the highway.

The Victims

Patricia was not the first woman jilted by the glib-tongued flea-market denizen. In fact, she was the 105th. Under various aliases, this man had wooed and fleeced 104 other lonely women in 18 states and nine foreign countries.

Sharon Clark, of Angola, Indiana, left $49,000 of her money and possessions in his care, only to find herself barefoot and quite alone in an Ontario motel barely three weeks later, in June 1981. This was five months before Patricia Gardiner tied the knot with the same man. Sharon tracked him down, following his trail down to a Florida shopping center, where he was selling Patricia's furniture.

Only four months before Sharon's wedding, Joan Bacarella of Englishtown, NJ, found herself pacing a motel waiting for the return of the man so concerned for her welfare that he'd convinced her to divorce her separated husband and marry him instead. He had $1,600 in cash and $40,000-worth of inventory from her shop.

The Technique

This man had told women that he was a wealthy businessman, a retired Mafia don, or anything rich and impressive sounding. Born Fred Jiff, he changed his name and occupation for almost every courtship; Giovanni Vigliotto had an exotic and appealing ring to his bored, middle-aged and provincial targets. He was always touchingly concerned about their welfare, a perfect gentleman to the point of being courtly, and endearingly self-pitying. Women, particularly bored and ageing ones, found the combination irresistible.

The Trial

Jiff went on trial on 28 March, 1983, in Phoenix, Arizona. Every day, an audience showed up to hear the next installment in the daily soap opera of testimony. He became a media celebrity, with jokes about wives and polygamy flying freely at his expense. Jiff seemed to feel a bit put upon, and was more than a little convinced that things were being blown out of proportion. 'It was always the women who popped the question,' he complained.
They say I mesmerise people. That's just not true. They charge me with adopting a courtly manner to manipulate these women... I never realised there was any other way to treat a woman than the way I do. Is it wrong for a man to hold the door for a woman to pass through? Is it wrong to buy them flowers? If the rest of the men in the United States don't treat women that way, then I'm sorry for the women in this country. No wonder so many of them were anxious to marry me.

Jiff compared himself to Walter Mitty2, saying that his adventures with women took him out of his rather pathetic existence and into a loving world of happiness. And although he ditched each woman shortly after marrying her, he still managed to write all 105 names on a board during lunch break in court3. That was only one part of his impassioned performance of injured innocence that kept the audience in stitches, and the judge and attorneys pulling their hair out.

The jury (eight men and four women) was out for only 24 minutes before returning to pronounce him guilty on all 34 counts of bigamy and fraud. For this, he received a 28-year term for fraud, six for bigamy, and a $338,000 fine. Jiff's initial imprisonment was exciting: he had book publishers clamouring, TV show offerings, women demanding a retrial, and even an endorsement offer for a potency drug. Eight years into his imprisonment in Florence, Arizona, he died at the age of 61. Jiff's pre-gigolo past is still shrouded in mystery.
1 The US equivalent of a car boot sale.
2 A chronic daydreamer who uses his imagination to escape the sordid realities of his life in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber.

3 It bears mentioning that there were not 105 women who testified against him. That number comes from his own admission.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A48400463

The West Memphis Three

The story of the West Memphis Three is one of the most troubling cases to pass through the American Justice system in recent times.

The term West Memphis Three actually refers to two groups of individuals: Three eight year-old boys named Steven Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers; whose naked, mutilated and drowned bodies were found in a section of woods behind a truck stop in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993; and the three teenagers subsequently arrested and convicted of the murders - Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelly Jr, and Jason Baldwin.

Through media exposure, mainly provided by a pair of HBO documentaries, Paradise Lost I and II, various facts about the case came to light that shed a great deal of doubt on the guilt of the three convicted youths, and the circumstances under which they were tried for the crimes.

The documentarians, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky1, were granted access to almost every aspect of the case as it unfolded; including interviews with the families of both the victims and the accused, the police officers and officials involved, and the three accused young men themselves. What they uncovered brought to light evidence that, at the very least, these three young men were arrested and convicted of a crime based on almost no credible evidence of any kind whatsoever, multiple accounts of hearsay and speculation, and an unmistakable prejudice in the small, rural community in which they resided.

The Crime

What is known for certain is that, sometime during the afternoon of 5 May, 1993, Steven Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers were seen riding their bikes around the West Memphis neighbourhood of Robin Hood Hills in which they all lived. Soon afterwards, the children's parents began to worry when night began to fall and the children had not been heard from.

Melissa and John Mark Byers, mother and stepfather of Christopher Byers, claim that they went looking for their son sometime in the early evening, driving around the neighbourhood in their car. John Mark Byers continued the search for a while, enlisting the help of his other stepson, before alerting the police to Christopher's disappearance. Byers' chronology of his own actions on the night the children went missing has varied many times, depending on who he tells the story to.

Throughout the night, people searched the neighbourhood and the surrounding woods for the three boys, but it was to no avail. It was after one o'clock the next afternoon before a grisly discovery was made. The three young, lifeless bodies lay facedown in a drainage ditch a few dozen yards from a busy highway.

The Investigation

The city went into an immediate uproar. This small, predominately fundamentalist community had been plagued, and influenced, for years by hysterical reports of rampant Satanic cult activity amongst teenagers and other 'social deviants'. The so-called 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980s had largely begun to subside in the rest of the country2; but in rural, conservative Arkansas the Devil was still a perfectly viable murder suspect, and no one personified the citizens' of West Memphis' idea of the Devil perhaps more than 18 year-old Damien Echols.

Echols was, by most accounts, a bright though introverted teenager who would never even have been noticed in a larger suburban or metropolitan area. In West Memphis, however, he stood out like a sore thumb. He liked to wear black clothing; sometimes emblazoned with the logos of heavy-metal bands such as Metallica; he dyed his hair jet-black; he liked to read about Wicca and other alternative religions and belief systems. He was, in short, your typical, one-in-a-hundred, alienated goth teenager. In West Memphis, however, that was enough to make you a murder suspect.

Damien was not a troublemaker, but he was conspicuous by nature of his appearance and had found himself often harassed by police in the past when minor crimes had occurred around the neighbourhood, although nothing was ever found to connect him to any such activities. When the bodies of the three boys were found, it didn't take long for someone to interpret it as a satanic crime, and from there, it was a short step to Damien Echols becoming a suspect.

Damien, along with his friend, 17 year-old Jason Baldwin, was questioned by the police repeatedly, even though he had alibis for the time period in question, had no connection to the three boys, and showed no signs nor physical evidence of having been involved recently in any type of physical struggle. Unable to pin anything on Damien right away, the police spread their investigation net further, offering up a reward for anyone coming forth with information that may lead to the arrest of the killer(s).

Many opportunistic residents attempted to take advantage of this reward, even to the point of fabricating outlandish stories in attempts to implicate the two 'freaks', as Damien and Jason were known. One woman went so far as to claim to have attended a black mass in a nearby town with Damien, who drove the pair there in his Ford Fiesta. Damien did not own, nor have access to a Fiesta and, when pressed for details, the woman could not remember the name of the town, any of the people at the ceremony, or what day it was. She later admitted to lying in order to get the reward money, yet part of her testimony was still used against Damien. One young man, who was initially lured into talking to the police under promise of a reward, was a 17 year-old boy with an IQ of 72 named Jesse Misskelly.

Misskelly, by all accounts, knew Damien and Jason in passing at best, and had never been seen to socialise with them. Nevertheless, Jesse, under circumstances which are to this day unclear (since only a small portion of the 12-hour interview, which took place without Jesse's understanding of, or waiving of, his Miranda rights3, and without a lawyer present, was recorded), proceeded to tell police inspector Gary Gitchell a story stating that, on the morning of 5th May he came upon Damien Echols and his friend Jason Baldwin playing in the creek behind the truck stop. At that point, Misskelly claimed that three young boys rode up on their bikes and that Echols beckoned the boys over to him, at which point he began to beat and rape the boys one at a time while Misskelly and Baldwin restrained the other two4.

Misskelly claimed that, initially, he was just an observer; running away several times before the boys called him back to restrain a fleeing Michael Moore. As the police pressed for more details, however, Jesse kept adding more information; much of which was contradictory to both the facts of the case and to stories he had told just moments earlier. Jesse's so-called 'confession' was in fact so riddled with inconsistencies as to be borderline fiction.

Jesse, who has a substantial learning disability, later claimed that originally he just wanted to tell the police that he was a witness to the crime, in order to share in the reward. As the interrogation went on, however the police kept pressing him for details that he didn't know but felt obliged to give them, in order to stop them from pressuring him any longer. Before long, Jesse had, perhaps inadvertently, confessed to being present and acting as a participant in the crimes and, without knowing his rights or the benefit of counsel, signed a statement saying that he, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols had murdered the three boys during an occult ritual. Jesse said he thought that if he just signed the paper and told them what they want, then they would leave him alone and he could go home. Jesse was arrested for murder on the spot.

On the basis of Jesse's confession, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were also arrested, even though they both had alibis for the night in question (as did Jesse). Baldwin, in particular, seemed to be guilty of little more than association with Damien; his scrawny frame hardly suggesting that he could overpower even a feisty child. Nevertheless, the public had the satisfaction of knowing the 'freaks' that did this had been caught, and the trial began immediately in the media and among the public, while it waited to move into the courts.

The Trial of Jesse Misskelly

One would have been hard-pressed to find a more volatile selection of potential jurors from which to try this most sensational of cases. Media leaks and contamination of the case had begun almost from the start, and there was likely not a soul in West Memphis who had not made up their minds about the guilt of the three accused teens well before the courtroom doors opened. Nonetheless, Damien seemed confident in his eventual acquittal; 'I didn't understand at the time how they could prove you did something that you didn't do', he later said.

Due to Jesse's confession implicating Jason and Damien, it was decided that Jesse would be tried separately from the other two. Jesse's lawyer, Dan Stidham, defended his client as best he could, but, despite the (complete) lack of evidence, it was Jesse's own words that betrayed him, in the form of his confession (despite his immediate recanting of it as soon as he left the police station). This happened even though the defence countered with their own expert in false confessions, Pulitzer winner Dr Richard Ofshe, who determined that the statement Jesse had given to the police was indeed coerced. Unfortunately, since the validity of the confession had already been ruled upon, Dr Ofshe was not allowed to make comments specifically rebutting Jesse's confession, and therefore his testimony had little impact. Nor did the fact that Jesse, during the unrecorded interrogation, was threatened, asked leading questions, and his mental deficiencies overlooked.

Jesse was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He was offered a deal soon afterward that would have reduced his sentence significantly in exchange for testifying against the other two boys. Jesse refused the deal.

The Trial of Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols

After the widespread news of the Misskelly verdict, the second trial was almost a foregone conclusion. Even so, Damien and his defence team still harboured hopes that they could instil reasonable doubt by focusing on the most telling aspect of the case; the lack of evidence. Also, there were a few other cards that the defence had up their sleeves; one in particular that, sadly, was investigated more thoroughly by lawyers after the fact than by police in the beginning, when it could have potentially solved the case.

It seems that on the evening of the murders, an individual, described as a black male, shaking and covered in blood, stumbled into the women's restroom at a Bojangles fast-food restaurant a few miles from the crime scene. A police car was called to the scene to investigate, but the officer never left her car while taking the report. Blood samples were taken from the bathroom stall, but were lost by the forensic investigators before they could be tested. 'Mr Bojangles', as he came to be known, was never found, and even this act of gross police negligence was not enough to instil doubt in the jury.

Nor was the bloody knife belonging to John Mark Byers, the clearly disturbed stepfather of Christopher Byers - the victim who had suffered the most overtly sexual mutilation5.

During the trial, Byers had inexplicably presented the HBO film crew with a hunting knife as a gift. When the crew noticed what looked like blood on the knife, they turned it over to the police, who determined upon testing that the knife contained DNA that could have come from either Byers or from Christopher, yet Byers had claimed originally that the knife had never been used6.

Byers became an interesting figure in the case, given to explosive outbursts laced with 'fire and brimstone' Old Testament rhetoric one moment, and violent descriptions of the torture and pain he wished to constantly inflict on the three teens he blamed for his stepson's murder the next. He has also subsequently aroused suspicion by virtue of his constant violent run-ins with the law (many involving children), his many contradictory statements regarding his whereabouts and actions during the time of the murders, and later for the mysterious death of his wife in 1996, who supposedly died while in bed next to him and whose death remains officially unsolved to this day7.

Despite obvious viable suspects and leads that were not thoroughly investigated, and the aforementioned complete lack of physical evidence, the jury accepted the prosecutions' claims that the three teens brutally murdered the youths as part of a ghastly satanic ritual. It did not help matters that the defence lawyers decided to put Damien himself on the stand; his rebellious appearance and palpable dramatic teen angst did little to sway the jury in his favor; after the trial, even Echols himself would admit that he 'wasn't really taking the whole thing seriously'. When the jury returned its verdict, Jason Baldwin was sentenced to life in prison, while Damien Echols, the alleged ringleader and satanic 'high priest' of the cult of West Memphis, Arkansas, was sentenced to die by lethal injection. All three remain behind bars today.

The Aftermath

Since the airing of Paradise Lost on HBO in 1997 and the various media coverage it received, the case of the West Memphis Three has become something of a national rallying point for exposing the horrible miscarriages of justice that can occur within the American legal system. Various celebrities have taken up the cause and participate and organize fundraisers regularly to raise awareness of the case.

An online support resource, Free The West Memphis Three has been perhaps more instrumental than any other group in disseminating information about the case and offering a meeting place for activists. They have also raised money for independent investigation into the case and to raise college funds for Jason, Jesse, and Damien. The goal of the Free The West Memphis Three movement is not necessarily to prove that these three young men are definitively innocent, but to bring to light the fact that they almost certainly did not receive a fair trial, and were convicted without sufficient evidence against them.

Legal appeals and hearings are ongoing at the time of this writing, and as support continues to swell, perhaps there is hope that the case will some day be reopened and that the truth, whatever it may be, will come out. Until then, the case of the West Memphis Three remains a chilling reminder that sometimes, just being different is a crime punishable by death.

Related BBC Links
Keep up to date with the latest events around the world at BBC News.
1 Directors of 1992s Oscar-winning Brother's Kepper
2 The wave of hysteria that sparked such legal quagmires as the McMartin preschool trial; most of these cases that resulted in convictions have now been overturned.
3 The statement required to be read to criminals in the US at the time of their arrest; 'You have the right to remain silent... etc'.
4 Medical examiners determined that the boys' bodies showed no signs of rape.
5 Christopher Byers, aside from being beaten and drowned along with the other two boys, had a number of unique wounds inflicted upon him alone. Among other things, his genitals had been removed and the skin around them savagely flayed. His body also showed signs of healed-over scarring, indicating past abuse.
6 In yet another inconsistency, once blood was found on the knife, Byers then suddenly remembered cutting himself on the knife while skinning a deer. None of this was strange enough to warrant further testing or investigation by the police.
7 Melissa Byers, a known drug abuser, had traces of illegal drugs in her system at the time of her death, but not enough to kill her.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2832257

The Tale of the 'Batavia' - Waiting in Turn to Die

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The Scene at Sea

Behold an instrument of the most powerful organisation on Earth. She is the Batavia, a merchantman of the Dutch East Indies Company, en route for the Spice Islands with a fortune in silver bullion aboard.

Eight months ago, in the October of 1628, she put to sea from the port of Amsterdam. To understand her fate, you must first comprehend a culture in which mercantile acumen has far outstripped charity and human decency. You must perceive that morality here begins and ends with the fear of divine retribution. You might then appreciate that this world's Nemesis will take the form of a smooth-tongued and Godless madman.

Jeronimus Cornelisz is the under-merchant on board the Batavia, the second-in-command for the company after Francisco Pelsaert. Neither of these educated gentlemen has the slightest idea of how to sail this ship. That responsibility belongs to Ariaen Jacobsz, the skipper, but his authority may be countermanded at any time by the companymen.

Little more than a year ago, Cornelisz's future seemed assured. He had qualified as a Haarlem apothecary and established his own business. Then his newborn son died of syphilis, and his professional and social reputation were simultaneously ruined. His creditors uncovered an association with a heretical Epicurean sect. As the authorities closed in, Jeronimus sought the refuge of the desperate, a flight to the end of the world, to the East Indies in the service of the Company.

Jacobsz and Cornelisz are dangerous allies aboard the Batavia. The roughness and resentment of the sailor is fuelled by the conscienceless persuasiveness of the disgraced apothecary. A mutiny is gestating here, but circumstance will deliver it in grotesque form.

Not all femme fatales are willing. Her name is Lucretia Jans, but we will call her Creesje. Familiarity with a beauty such as this is a natural temptation, but it is also perilous under these circumstances.

We are perhaps 40 days from landfall in the Spice Islands. The captain and the under-merchant have recruited some would-be mutineers among the hot-headed young cadets and the disillusioned sailors. This ship is late and their salaries are dwindling to nothing, but the malcontents are running out of time in another way too. There are still very many of the crew who would stand by Pelsaert and the company in the event of a confrontation. Cornelisz needs to turn the neutrals against the upper-merchant. To his chagrin, Pelsaert's manner is monotonously passive and reasonable.

But Jeronimus has seen those admiring glances towards Creesje. If someone were to violate her, Pelsaert would surely lash out.

A couple of days slip by and Creesje is locked in her cabin, unconsolable. They stopped short of rape, but they stripped her and smeared her genitalia with tar and excrement, in a mocking parody of the novice seaman's initiation rite. Perhaps half-a-dozen took part in the cloying darkness. She has told Pelsaert that she can identify only one with certainty. His name is Jan Evertsz, the high-boatswain.

The upper-merchant does not yet suspect Cornelisz, and even confides in him. Pelsaert's disgust and anger are plain enough, and Jeronimus fans them as much as he dares. But his superior is a practical coward, and does nothing. Justice can wait for port.

Time moves on at the numbing pace of the sea. These hesitant mutineers are still prevaricating over their next move. Before they act, Fate will overturn their chessboard.

It is the 3 June, an hour or so before dawn. Some 300 souls are huddled aboard this ship. There are troops for the colonies down in the dank and vermin-ridden confines of the lower decks. There are the sailors, also before the mast and companions in squalor. There are passengers, all of them bound for a new life at the edge of the Empire. The life expectancy of Europeans out there is about three years, but these people all have something in common. They are far beyond a homeland that has no need of them. Their future prospects may be dismal, but they no longer have any past. This world is bound together by the slender and pathetic hopes of its refugees.

Many here are destitute, pinning their dreams to their skills as craftsmen, their fortitude as labourers or their feats at arms. A few are wealthy, cosseted in the relative comfort of the cabins astern. There are women, children and even newborns among this host. History will assiduously record the names and fates of around two-thirds of them. The company is nothing if not meticulous.

The Wreck

Three hundred souls, all so very different in prospect and station. In a few moments' time, they will all be equal. 

We are 60 miles off the coast of what will one day be Western Australia. But longitude is notoriously difficult to measure with the crude timepieces of this age. Jacobsz believes that he is 500 miles away from the vaguely-charted shores of Terra Australis Incognita. His charges will come to bitterly regret his error.

In better light, the surf rimming the low-lying bars and reefs of Houtman's Abrolhos would be visible to a diligent watchman. In the darkness, the Batavia ploughs instead into the coral with sails full set. The eight-inch double hull of fine Dutch oak withstands the impact, but the ship rides high out of the water and lists critically to port. The high tide now recedes, and the falling waterline condemns the weakened hull to the devastating cantilever of her masts and spars. Not long after dawn, Jacobsz and Pelsaert make the irrevocable decision to dismast their ship. It buys them days rather than hours of structural integrity, and the chance at least of an orderly salvage of provisions. In return, they accept the certainty of marooning on a square mile of salt-caked rock.

It is mid-morning, some six hours since the impact. Jacobsz and a pair of trusted steersmen come back alongside in the Batavia's yawl. The skipper's report brings a glimmer of hope, for there is a navigable gap in the reef within a few hundred yards and a small island beyond on which rainwater pools persist above the tideline. Within half a mile, a second and larger outcrop breaks the surf. On the north-western horizon, further islands can be seen.

Pelsaert now begins to direct a fraught operation. He carries the hopes of many frightened people as well as a duty to protect and deliver the Company's silver. Over the next two days, he shuttles survivors via the first island to the larger one beyond, and recovers all the casks he can from the doomed vessel. The exercise is becoming ugly, however. There are now nearly 200 people on the further island, and some 70 left on the ship. The majority of the latter are seasoned seamen, and they are by now drunk, reckless and violent. The other group are becoming desperate and disorderly through thirst and realisation of their plight.

Pelsaert's nerve fails him. With Jacobsz and 46 others on the smaller island, he gives the instruction to build up the sides of the longboat for an ocean voyage. Java lies fully 2000 miles to the north, but the upper-merchant consoles himself with the conclusion that the others can be saved only through his departure. On the morning of 7 June, the 48 set out, taking even the yawl with them. The survivors will name the scrap of coral that they leave behind 'Traitors' Island'. The larger but equally barren ground beneath their feet they now dub 'Batavia's Graveyard'. They cannot yet know how apt that title will prove to be.

Among the men ashore, some with experience of maritime discipline appreciate the need to take control. Unless rigorously directed, these people will fight and squander the precious water. The ship's provost, Pieter Jansz, and the surgeon, the unrelated Frans Jansz form a council, co-opting also a chaplain, Gijsbert Bastiaenz and a couple of others. These men are just, but they are robust and they are also armed. The powers they declare for themselves are vital for survival.

It is now nine days since the wreck. Suddenly and violently, the Batavia's hull fails under the onslaught of the waves. Many of those left on board drown in seconds, trapped below deck. Most of those who enter the sea alive will be cut to pieces against the reef. Around 20 make it ashore, but of under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz, now the most senior officer present, there is no sign. By an outrageous stroke of fortune, the bow section to which he clings drifts through the reef and is grounded two days later in the shallows off Batavia's Graveyard. Jeronimus cannot swim, but his peers come to his aid. The last man to escape the Batavia alive is carried gasping onto the shores of a hell ready-fashioned for him.

Jeronimus Takes Control

Within a week, the under-merchant has recovered and has quite naturally been co-opted to the council. He notes that soldiers already party to the shipboard mutiny are guarding the rough tent containing the weapons and provisions. He notes also that more than 200 people are trying to survive on this bare and lifeless strip of ground. Some 20 of the original escapees are dead already, most through dehydration compounded by the drinking of sea-water in the early days of their plight. As many again are seriously ill.

Jeronimus considers this predicament with the detachment of the psychopath. We can only speculate about his state of mind, his reasoning, his reasons. The under-merchant will never tell us.

But there are literally tons of lucre lying in the shallows out there. The Company will certainly come looking for it. If Pelsaert succeeds in bringing help, the planned mutiny will surely be uncovered. If help is slow to come, then a dreadful death awaits those stranded here.

Who knows what notions will become convictions in a mind like this one, under circumstances like these? Jeronimus has already committed sufficient crime to hang. It is a toss-up whether civilisation or nature kills him first. His only potential salvation, unlikely though it may be, would be to overcome his rescuers and to disappear with enough booty to buy his lifelong safety.

The mission is now straightforward: to annex these sparse resources in the coming weeks, and to command a fighting force capable of seizing a rescue vessel should one arrive. In the under-merchant's chilling mind, the sea-going mutiny is transposed to the Abrolhos. Around three-quarters of those here must die. The remainder must serve Cornelisz unquestioningly. The logic is as simple as the implications are horrible.

The under-merchant is nothing if not cunning. For as long as possible, his actions will be plausible and consistent with the welfare of the castaways. Rough skiffs are constructed from driftwood from the wreck, and a party comprising most of the uncommitted professional soldiers are ferried to the far islands, some six miles to the northwest. Under the command of one Wiebbe Hayes, they are instructed to light fires if they find fresh water. They are left without boats or weapons, but they have been promised frequent visits and have no reason to mistrust this assurance. They do not know that Jeronimus' henchmen have already reconnoitred these islands and found them arid.

Splitting up the senior councillors between the various local islands, ostensibly to lead the search for water, seems so reasonable. The provost, his family and a dozen others are returned to Traitors' Island. Another councillor is put in charge of around 30, many of them very young, on an island about two miles to the west, just beyond the deepwater channel. They call it Seal Island, because sea lions appear to frequent it, but Jeronimus knows already that it is just as barren as the others.

The under-merchant now synthesises an excuse for reconstituting the council, demanding execution for a self-confessed accessory to a minor instance of pilfering. The punishment is clearly disproportionate. The surgeon protests, and finds himself ejected from the group that runs this island. Unconsulted, the now-absent councillors share a similar fate. Their replacements are predictable: Jeronimus' henchmen.

Within a few days, the shipping of provisions from Batavia's Graveyard to these outlying parties abruptly stops. The under-merchant forgets them for the time being. Back in his own domain, it is time for a more active killing spree to begin.

Two Months of Mayhem

Jeronimus has willing lieutenants here. There are half-a-dozen merciless individuals, none as clever as the under-merchant, but all utterly persuaded by the logic of his mission. They are mostly soldiers and cadets, already deeply implicated in the original plot to seize the ship. For them too, rescue equates with death. They include the cadets Zavenck and van Huyssen, and the lance-corporal Pietersz, known as the 'Stone-cutter'. Their first victims are the recipients of summary justice. Perhaps three men really do attempt to steal provisions in the first week of July. Their executions do not cause particular alarm in this numb and weary community. At about this time, something like two dozen more are surreptitiously dispatched. There are two methods. One is the killing of those already sick, at first by strangulation or suffocation. The second is to feign the sending of assistance to the outlying parties, a particularly effective way to eliminate the fitter potential adversaries, since they make natural candidates for the ostensible task. They are sent off numbering one or two in a skiff, accompanied by a slightly greater number of well-armed mercenaries. Nobody expects their return.

It is 9 July, around midday. Jeronimus' despicable plan is working well. The dispirited and weak inmates of a death-camp are perhaps not so hard to murder after all. And then, quite suddenly, fires are burning away on Hayes' Island.

No reaction to this eventuality can maintain both the plan and the deception. Given time, Jeronimus would probably decide to rejoin with the outliers, excuse the failure to send provisions and set about a fresh scheme fortified by the newly-discovered water. Instead, something else happens almost immediately. There are makeshift boats setting out from Traitors' Island. The provost and his charges must have fashioned them from jetsam. They are making for Hayes' Island.

Jeronimus makes a snap decision. He feels confident enough to expose his designs. His men set out in their skiffs, and these craft have been built by experienced carpenters using authentic tools. They overhaul the provost easily. Hayes and his men do not see what happens now, since they are miles distant. But the castaways on Batavia's Graveyard witness the slaughter of some 15 of their defenceless companions.

From this moment on, all except the mutineers are in minute-by-minute fear for their lives. Small wonder, then, that dozens more will declare for the under-merchant in the coming days.

Jeronimus is sceptical about the new converts and demands a typically chilling proof of their commitment. Systematically, he obliges them to prove themselves by killing those who remain outside the mutiny. The methods become more violent and more overt. Usually by night, victims are picked out and killed in their tents, using the swords, axes and daggers which only the mutineers control.

The events on Houtman's Abrolhos in the six weeks from mid-July till late August 1629 belong to a fuller account of the tragedy of the Batavia. All the facts are there to be read, if fascination compels it. Versions are legion, in fact, because the inquisition will be painstaking and the interests of the witnesses are diverse. And there are very many graves to be explained.

Any decent person will be satisfied with a summary of the story. Jeronimus succeeds in his prime aim of reducing the population of the Graveyard to around 45 souls. Of these, 31 are his sworn supporters, implicated by their own hand in the form of a written oath. They can never betray the mutiny now. Most of the remainder are the surviving women, around half a dozen summarily assigned to the pleasuring of the murderers on demand. Two more have been reluctantly and grotesquely betrothed, to Cornelisz and the impetuous van Huyssen respectively. There are a further seven men who will not declare for the mutiny, but who are tolerated for their invaluable skills: carpenters, cooks and the like. They are terrorised mercilessly, and they surely realise that they will be slaughtered without compunction if a sail appears on the horizon.

Throughout the bloody orgy, some episodes stand out as even more horrible than the norm of steady killing. The unfortunate inhabitants of Seal Island are wiped out in three waves over the period of a fortnight. With nowhere to hide and no means to defend themselves, half of them are denied even the mercy of a quick end. The chaplain's wife and six of his seven children die in a single night, though Cornelisz perversely spares the pathetic churchman himself. The under-merchant poisons a newborn, for no deeper reason than its disturbance of his sleep. Even then, he fails to kill her, and a newcomer to the oath is compelled to finish the job by strangling the comatose infant the next day. A day later still, and more enthusiastic accomplices hack the child's bereft mother to death.

The Beginning of the End

You want to know more? No, really, you don't. It has all happened many times in history, and this is just one insignificant example. You ought to have realised by now that wanton cruelty lies deep in your own psyche too. Under duress as dire as this, perhaps it would come out. A lesser sense of despair and desolation might suffice, and you would yourself succumb to a monster's persuasion. So don't even ask. Don't even think of finding out.

Throughout this time of horror, Jeronimus never himself lays a violent hand on anyone. His casual experiment with the baby is as close as he gets. But nobody ever resists his orders to kill. Some are too scared. Some find their own psychoses sated by the under-merchant's detached justification. Zavenck and Hendricxz in particular are killing on their own impulse now, and Jeronimus neither approves nor disapproves. Events are progressing in the right general direction as far as he is concerned. A little blood-lust among the mechanical rituals does not greatly worry him.

In fact, Jeronimus now seems far more interested in bedecking his ridiculous 'uniform' with Pelsaert's jewels, and with proclaiming absurd titles. He increasingly espouses the heretic's belief that all that he does is ordained by God, that Sin does not exist, that he is somehow indestructible.

At some point in the recent past, Jeronimus has crossed the line between a different rationality and true madness. Nothing can save him from himself now.

The Traitors' Story

There is, of course, a parallel adventure taking place. It is no less perilous, though rather more noble. It concerns Pelsaert, Jacobsz and the longboat.

The northwest coast of future-Australia is barren and sheer. For many days, the party skirt it, finding a single miraculous haven where they can replenish their dwindling water-casks. Then the wind and tide abruptly seize them, and sweep them rapidly north. Jacobsz and his high-boatswain Evertsz excel themselves in this struggle to navigate the flimsy craft, and make landfall on Java on 3 July. All 48 of their company have survived, including even a babe-in-arms, who has lived more than half of her short life as a castaway.

This is another Batavia, the Dutch trading bastion after which the lost ship was named. It used to be Jakarta, and it will be so again. But now it is half-burned after persistent native attacks, and it is locked in a brutal and rapacious war with the English. The early 17th Century's version of global capitalism is forever one step from catastrophe. One man's brand of justice keeps disaster at bay, and that man is the fearsome Governor of the garrison, Jan Coen.

The wretch before him has lost one of the most valuable ships on Earth, plus most of the hundred men who were sent to bolster this very fort. Pelsaert is in deep trouble. The first consequence of his pleas of mitigation is Jacobsz's incarceration in a dungeon from which he will never emerge alive. Within days, Evertsz hangs for his part in the assault on Creesje Jans, the same unfortunate woman that Cornelisz himself will soon claim as his common-law wife. Such is justice in this ruthless place. It has to be so, when anarchy ever knocks.

But Coen would not be where he is without a streak of pragmatism. Pelsaert is soon aboard a yacht, the Sardam, with a crew of 40, with ringing orders to salvage the treasure. So swift was the longboat's progress that the Sardam's captain disbelieves the claimed position of the reefs, and loses many days sweeping the seas too far to the north. Except for this, the Sardam would perhaps have encountered the under-merchant's massacre at its height. As it is, she is now lost, some 50 miles north of the Abrolhos. But men are aloft, scouting the horizon, and this has an important consequence. The Sardam will make for the island that shows smoke, and the incentive for beacons belongs with Wiebbe Hayes rather than with the mutineers.

The Other Island

Of all Cornelisz's mistakes, the most costly will turn out to be his misjudgments concerning Hayes' Island. When the flares signalled the discovery of fresh water, the under-merchant should have appreciated that his adversary now held superior and long-lasting resources. The situation would continue to move in Hayes' favour, so an early attack or at least some subterfuge to neutralise him became an imperative. Instead, Jeronimus did nothing. Now he moves, but too late.

Hayes and his men have found not one, but two wells below the coral. Water is so plentiful that there is scarcely a need for rationing. Somehow missed by the mutineer's hurried survey, there is also wildlife commensurate with the water supply. Fresh meat in the form of wallabies is always on the menu. The people on this island-prison are in much better shape than their warders, and bemused, at least at first, as to why nobody has answered their triumphant flares.

But now Wiebbe Hayes knows much of what has been happening on Batavia's Graveyard. His first inkling came from escapees from Seal Island, driftwood sailors who escaped before Cornelisz's final attack. The under-merchant has carelessly failed to realise that there are corpses missing. Worse still for Cornelisz, none of his band has told him of the theft of one of the skiffs. On the night of the murder of the chaplain's family, drunken and inflamed mutineers went on to attack one Aris Jansz, the ship's barber. They wounded him, but allowed him to escape.

Hayes could scarcely believe the barber's tale, but the fresh knife-wounds lent it authenticity. Preparations for the defence of the island were begun at once. Now Hayes and his men have become the loyalists in an impending war. They have the high ground, troops in good condition and a force swelled to 40 men through the mutineers' carelessness. Their weapons are makeshift, but wreckage from the Batavia has been washed up here at last. Pikes festooned with 16-inch nails will be an unwelcome sight at the end of a half-mile struggle across the mudflats. Coral shards are lethal projectiles when launched from rope slings and catapults. In Wiebbe Hayes, the under-merchant finally has a competent adversary.

Twice in the last three weeks, a skiff has approached the island, and Cornelisz's men have alighted. On both occasions, they were only half a dozen in number. On both, they waded up to the beach, but the array of pikes persuaded them to come no closer. Insults were exchanged, and the mutineers retreated. If the under-merchant thought before that Hayes' men would be weak and on the point of surrender, then he has been well and truly disabused of that notion now.

Two days ago, there was a third visit, but this time the chaplain approached the head of the beach alone. Reticent and downcast, he brought Hayes the news that Cornelisz wished to parley, and that as a sign of good faith he would bring sailcloth, leather and wine from the Batavia's stores. It is the afternoon of 2 September, and the under-merchant has spent the whole morning ferrying around 20 of his men to an islet offshore of the defenders' position. The rivals are separated by perhaps 400 yards of shallow water and muddy silt.

So far, Jeronimus' actions have been crazed but never stupid. That is about to change. He comes forward himself with a group of just five armed men. Three are his most trusted lieutenants: Zervanck, van Huyssen and Gijsbert van Welderen. The other two, Wouter Loos and Cornelis Pietersz are more circumspect killers but capable soldiers. Nonetheless, the party is heavily outnumbered, and Hayes' mistrust can hardly have been more telegraphed.

To Hayes' disbelief, Cornelisz attempts to persuade him to join him and share his future wealth, in place of the lesser men back on Batavia's Graveyard. The soldier immediately calls upon his men to seize the mutineers, but their allies below begin to advance up the beach. These reinforcements carry swords, and Hayes realises that to meet them while attempting to restrain prisoners will put him at an impossible disadvantage. In his later confession, Jeronimus will admit amazement at the alacrity with which another gives the order to kill. Turmoil follows. Loos breaks free and is allowed to run, but his four companions are run through with pikes. Burly soldiers kneel on Jeronimus and prevent him from crying out. There is an uneasy stand-off, which is broken when the bodies of four of the most feared men in the Abrolhos are flung defiantly into the surf.

It is all over for the under-merchant. Hayes consigns his prisoner to a pit in his camp. The self-proclaimed Captain-General, still dressed in his absurd finery, is thrown seagulls to pluck. Every ninth one he is allowed to keep and eat raw.

Retribution

Back on the Graveyard, the despondent mutineers appoint a new leader. They choose Wouter Loos, passing over the Stone-cutter, who had been Cornelisz's self-appointed deputy. Time moves on to the morning of 17 September. Another, and this time final, attack on Hayes' bastion begins. Loos brings into service two long-barrelled muskets recovered from the wreck. The defenders are pinned down, and one of their number, Jan Dircxsz, incurs a fatal wound. At a best estimate, he is the 115th person to be killed by the mutineers, and he will certainly be the last.

Loos' patient sniping is proving to be a serious problem for Hayes, when he receives word from lookouts on the high ground behind that a yacht is on the horizon. The beacon is lit. Although the mutineers man their skiffs in an effort to present their case first, it is to the island with the beacon that the Sardam comes. The mutineers stand off in disarray, their doom now inevitable.

It takes Pelsaert well over three months to conduct both the salvage and the assize. Under Dutch law of this time, torture is permitted as a means of extracting a confession, provided that a further confession is later made with free will. With the evidence of carnage all around, the liberators of the Abholros have little hesitation in resorting to these methods. To Pelsaert's dismay, Cornelisz shows no sign of remorse. He anticipates a declaration of guilt and execution for no other reason than his intent to steal from the all-powerful company.

Francisco Pelsaert records these final days of Jeronimus Cornelisz's life in his journal. To the shock of any reader, the formal, convention-bound style is shot through with abject fury. It is the condemned man who dominates his accuser. Jeronimus demands to face a court in Java, not to eke out time but instead to perform his final act on a more fitting stage.

Pelsaert is too weak to make this heretic recant, and almost seems to fear the twisted logic of his prisoner. Cornelisz will not get his wish; he will die here, and very soon. But he will never believe in his guilt, and through these journal-notes the pathetic upper-merchant finally reveals his impotence.

How does a man justify crimes such as these? Here's how. Listen and be afraid.

Jeronimus has always been much better at dreaming than at planning. He is by nature a provocateur, a catalyst, a siren. Actions belong to others, and it is actions, not their suggestion, which collect guilt.

Jeronimus really believes that all of this is someone else's fault. After all, he has been sorely provoked. Who wouldn't entertain a few wild thoughts with death and treasure strewn around in equal excess? Who wouldn't play God, just a little, amid this ridiculous situation?

You can see it, can't you? Jeronimus has simply been killing time. It's the others who have been killing people.

It is on Seal Island that the sentences are carried out, using a makeshift scaffold constructed in part from the remains of the Batavia. Jeronimus is the first to hang. They cut off his hands before applying the noose. In spite of Pelsaert's vengeful intentions, this is probably a mercy. The gallows has no trap, so that death by hanging is likely to be through strangulation. Fainting through blood-loss is surely quicker.

Most of the other mutineers are put to death, too. Some minor participants are variously flogged, dropped from the mast or keelhauled. A couple of them, Loos being one, are deliberately marooned on the mainland shore. The first named men to settle in Australia are thus criminals, but on the opposite coast to the one soon to be made notorious by transportation. The final execution is that of the Stone-cutter, taken back to Java where he is broken on the wheel. It is the 1 February 1630. The death-throes of the last mutineer extended just beyond midnight.

Among the loyalists, Hayes will prosper but Pelsaert will die within two years, sent in disgrace on a disease-ridden posting by the resentful company. Creesje Jans, the young widow molested by Evertsz and later raped by the under-merchant, will come to outlive them all.

Postscript from the Future

A long time from now, in 1963 to be exact, the wreck of the Batavia will be discovered and an innocuous reef named Beacon Island will be identified as her graveyard. The deeds of the psychopath who ruled her for a few terrible weeks will briefly be remembered.

In the midst of Beacon Island, amid the coral grit where nothing grows, they will discover a pit full of a fine black deposit and the remains of long-dead plants. In a place such as this, the flora consumes whatever nourishment it can. Though the flowers fed on the bodies of the dead, those people of the future will realise that this place once bloomed, in a fleeting time long ago. They will realise too that nobody ever saw the flowers above this grave. We can only pray that they will pity the poor souls who lie here forever.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1037693

The Moors Murders

The Moors murders shocked the public like few other crimes of modern times. The case is fixed in the memory of anyone old enough to remember the terrible search on Saddleworth Moor, as police officers with spades looked for the graves of missing children.
- BBC News correspondent Peter Gould.

Ian Brady1 and his girlfriend Myra Hindley (1942 - 2002) tortured and killed five children. The slayings became known as the 'Moors Murders', because the bodies of four of the victims had been buried on Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester.

The case has been a subject of fascination for some people, it has also been the subject of art, music and many books. It continues to stir feelings four decades later2.

Joint Conviction

The simple truth seems to be that in most cases of folie à deux, neither partner would be capable of murder if it were not for the stimulus of the other. Some strange chemical reaction seems to occur, like a mixture of nitric acid and glycerine that makes (explosive) nitroglycerine.
- Criminologist Colin Wilson.

Brady and Hindley were convicted of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. Brady was also convicted of the murder of John Kilbride with Hindley found guilty of being an accessory.

After a 15-day trial at Chester Assizes, both were jailed for life3 on 6 May, 1966. They escaped the death penalty as it had been abolished as a form of punishment just four weeks before their arrest.

In 1987, the pair confessed to two more murders - those of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Both were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to try to find the remains of the victims, but only one body was recovered. The Director of Public Prosecutions decided a prosecution of those two cases would not be in the public interest.

Ian Brady

Glasgow-born Brady was a quiet, brooding, stock clerk at Millwards Merchandisers in Manchester. Brady was interested in the doctrine of the Nazis and was influenced by the writings of Nietzsche4 and the Marquis de Sade. In 1961 Brady's firm hired a new secretary, Myra Hindley, who immediately took a shine to Brady's dark good looks. Within a year they were lovers.

Brady was harbouring a sadomasochistic sexual appetite and Hindley readily submitted, the pair often took pornographic photographs of each other. Photographs were recovered later which showed Hindley in apparently innocent poses on Saddleworth Moor, but they actually marked the graves of some of their victims.

After the trial verdict, Brady accepted his guilt. He was declared insane in 1985 and has been receiving treatment in Broadmoor Hospital, the UK's first purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane. Eventually he wrote a book entitled The Gates of Janus5, which allegedly gives an insight into the mind of a serial killer, although it is not an autobiography. He is legally barred from receiving any profits from the book, which was published abroad. Brady says his only wish is to be allowed to die, and since he went on hunger strike in 1999, staff at Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool have force-fed him through a tube.

Hindley's Description of Brady

The strength of my love for Ian Brady was part of the reason I allowed myself to be pushed into murder. He had such a powerful personality, such overwhelming charisma. If he'd told me the moon was made of green cheese or that the sun rose in the west I would have believed him.
- Myra Hindley (in a letter to a BBC producer).

Myra Hindley

Hindley was born in Crumpsall, Manchester, in 1942. She had strong religious convictions and loved animals and children. As a teenager she was in demand as a babysitter. After she became involved with Brady, she was a willing participant in the kidnappings and eventual deaths of the five children, supposedly to 'please' her lover. After their arrest, Hindley stated that she played little part in the killings, having been manipulated and controlled by Brady.

Although in separate prisons, the pair continued their affair by exchanging love letters and seeking permission to marry, but this was refused. Then, in 1973, Hindley severed all contact with Brady. During her time in Highpoint Prison in Suffolk she became a devout Roman Catholic and reportedly showed remorse for her victims. She took an Open University course and obtained a degree in humanities.

The late Lord Longford befriended Hindley and started campaigning for parole on her behalf. By 1986 Hindley realised she was never going to be released unless she admitted her guilt, so she changed tack and started co-operating with the authorities. Eventually, after several false leads, a body was found on Saddleworth Moor, that of Pauline Reade, the first victim.

Successive Home Secretaries had ruled that in Hindley's case 'life should mean life'. After her initial 30-year sentence had expired in 1996, Hindley campaigned for release from prison. In 1998, Appeal Court judges upheld the decision by the former Home Secretary Jack Straw that Hindley should stay in prison until she died. She took her case to the House of Lords in 2000, but five Law Lords ruled unanimously that Mr Straw's decision had been lawful and justified, and her request for freedom was denied.

The police mugshot of Myra Hindley became an iconic image of evil. Controversial artist Marcus Harvey (born 1963) created a 13ft by 10½ft monochrome portrait of Hindley using stencilled childrens' handprints. When 'Myra' was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in September 1997, four members of the Academy resigned in disgust. The portrait was vandalised by egg-throwers and ink-splatterers. Later it was displayed behind glass at the Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, South Bank, London, alongside other controversial works of art like Damien Hurst's mutilated animal carcasses exhibited in formaldehyde, and Tracey Emin's unmade bed.

Myra Hindley, dubbed by the tabloid press 'the most hated woman in Britain', died in hospital from a combination of bronchial pneumonia and hypertension, on 15 November, 2002. Local undertakers refused to take care of Hindley's body so a funeral director from 200 miles away had to be brought in. She was cremated in a private funeral outside of normal working hours, with 12 friends in attendance.

Brady's Description of Hindley

Myra Hindley and I once loved each other. We were a unified force, not two conflicting entities. The relationship was not based on the delusional concept of folie à deux, but on a conscious/subconscious emotional and psychological affinity. She regarded periodic homicides as rituals of reciprocal innervation, marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer. As the records show, before we met my criminal activities had been primarily mercenary. Afterwards, a duality of motivation developed. Existential philosophy melded with the spirituality of death and became predominant. We experimented with the concept of total possibility. Instead of the requisite Lady Macbeth, I got Messalina. Apart our futures would have taken radically divergent courses. Before entering the witness box, I instructed both her counsel and my own to ask me specific questions designed to give the fullest opportunity of providing a cover for Myra. This managed to get her off on one murder charge. I also told her to adopt a distancing strategy when she went into the witness box, admitting to minor crimes whilst denying major. When, upon my advice, she appealed against sentence on the grounds that she should have been tried separately, Lord Chief Justice Parker denied the appeal, stating that, far from being disadvantaged by being tried with me, it had been to her great benefit as all my evidence had been in her favour.

For twenty years I continued to ratify the cover I had given her at the trial whilst, in contrast, she systematically began to fabricate upon it to my detriment. Therefore, when I learned from the Panorama programme this week that she was now claiming I had threatened to kill her if she did not participate in the Moors murders, I considered that the lowest lie of all. The fact that she continued to write several lengthy letters a week to me for seven years after we were imprisoned contradicts this cynical allegation. Perhaps her expedient demonomania now implies that I exercised an evil influence over her for seven years from my prison cell three hundred miles distant?
In character she is essentially a chameleon, adopting whatever camouflage will suit and voicing whatever she believes the individual wishes to hear. This subliminal soft-sell lured the innocent and naive. As for the parole board, I advised her to build on three pillars: educational studies, powerful contacts and religion. She did. I myself have never applied for parole and never shall, which is why I can afford the luxury of veracity and free expression.
- Ian Brady (in a letter to Home Secretary Jack Straw).

The Victims

Pauline Reade, 16, was walking to a dance at a Manchester club in July 1963. Hindley, who was known to Pauline, stopped her car and asked the girl to help her find a glove she'd lost on the Moor, in return for some gramophone records. Brady was lying in wait, having ridden ahead on his motorbike. Pauline was raped, beaten and stabbed, then buried on the Moor. Pauline's remains weren't discovered until 1987.

John Kilbride, 12, the oldest in a family of seven children, was offered a lift home from a market in Ashton-under-Lyne in November 1963. He had been to the cinema with a friend, but they separated when the other boy went to catch a bus home. After Brady was arrested he led police to where John's body was buried.

Keith Bennett, 12, was walking to his grandmother's home in Longsight when he was abducted and murdered in June 1964. In 1987, Hindley tried to assist police by drawing a map showing where she and Brady had buried Keith's body, but they couldn't find it despite repeated attempts. To date Keith's body has never been found.

Lesley Ann Downey was just 10 when she was kidnapped, tortured, then strangled in December 1964. Brady and Hindley tape-recorded Lesley's screams and the pathetic pleadings for her life. Hindley stated during the trial that she played little part in the horrific crime, but her stern voice could clearly be heard on the tape. The recording, which was retrieved from a luggage locker at Manchester Central station, was played to the jury during the trial and was compelling evidence against the pair.

Edward Evans, 17, was being attacked with a hatchet by Brady at Brady and Hindley's home when David Smith interrupted. Smith convinced Brady that he could be trusted to keep quiet, but, fearing for his own life, he told his wife Maureen (Hindley's sister) who persuaded him to tell the police. Edward's mutilated body was found by police the next day, still in the bedroom where Hindley and Brady dumped him. It was October 1965 when the murders were brought to an end, but for the grieving relatives the nightmare was just beginning.

The Other Victims

My family has never got over the killing. It's like a dagger. It digs in and it will still dig in even though she [Hindley] is dead.
- Terry Kilbride, brother of John.

Lesley Ann Downey's mother, Ann West, was required by police to identify her daughter's voice on the infamous tape, to aid Brady and Hindley's convictions. Mrs West suffered nightmares, flashbacks and severe depression ever since hearing how her daughter suffered during her last hours alive. She took anti-depressant medication and sleeping tablets for the rest of her life. Her doctors said that the years of stress had contributed to the cancer which affected her ovaries, breasts, bowel and liver, before finally passing away in 1999.

Keith Bennett's mother Winnie Johnson is the only mother of a victim still living. She actively campaigned against Hindley's applications for parole and release. Mrs Johnson's letters contributed to Hindley assisting the police in 1987. Since Hindley died, Mrs Johnson has written to Brady begging him to tell police where her son's body is buried so she can have some closure, to no avail.
He was a kid you could love, there was no harm to him. He enjoyed life and was very interested in nature. He used to pick up leaves and caterpillars and bring them home, and he collected coins. My son is still up there [Saddleworth Moor] and I just want him back. It is hard to explain, but it is like another world up there. It is so quiet, and I always feel close to Keith. It is comforting. I cry more when I am at home. It is leaving the moors that is hard. I just want to be able to pick him up and take him home. I pray to God that this is the year Keith is found.
- Winnie Johnson, speaking in 2004, the 40th anniversary of her son's disappearance
1 He was born Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January, 1938.
2 Coronation Street was criticised for shooting a dramatic scene on Saddleworth Moor in 2006.
3 At the time, a 'life' sentence was normally taken to mean 30 years.
4 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the idea that superior men are not bound by social moral codes.
5 Which no British publisher would print.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A10177355

The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping

Most kidnapping tales follow pretty much the same plot:
Someone gets kidnapped
A ransom is demanded
If the ransom is paid, the person gets recovered. If not...

However, the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping was not your average tale. Due to the high profile of the victims, the unusual circumstances surrounding the crime, the poor detective work and a bizarre hoax some weeks before, the kidnapping has passed into the realm of American myths alongside Elvis and UFO sightings.

Background and the Crime

Charles A Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA, on 4 February, 1902, the son of a Swedish emigrant and US Congressman. He trained as a pilot with the United States Army Air Service and in 1925 started flying with the US Air Mail. On 20 May, 1927 Lindbergh became a world hero as the first aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in a solo flight. He became the most recognised man the world over. Only five years later his life would become a public tragedy when his 20-month-old son Charles Jr disappeared from his crib.

Some weeks before the crime, Lindbergh staged his own kidnapping of his son, a cruel joke he played on his wife, Anne Lindbergh. This set the tone for some of the hoax theories surrounding the subsequent true kidnapping.

On a rainy Thursday night, 1 March, 1932, an unknown person placed a home-made ladder against the nursery wall of the Lindbergh's residence in Hopewell, New Jersey and took Charles Jr from his bed. The child's absence was discovered and reported to his parents at approximately 10pm by the child's nurse, Betty Gow. A ransom note was found on the windowsill and traces of mud were found on the floor. During and since the trials, much has been made of the fact that the nursemaid had not heard or seen anything that night, nor had the household's highly-excitable dog barked.

The Ransom Demand

Although the first ransom note, full of spelling errors, warned the family not to go to the police, they were duly called in to investigate and the newspapers soon splashed the sensational news over their front pages.

Another chilling, poorly-written, missive, the second of 13 ransom notes, warned the family again:
Dear Sir. We have warned you note to make anything public also notify the police now you have to take consequences - means we will have to hold the baby until everything is quite. We can note make any appointments just now. We know very well what it means to us. It is really necessary to make a world affair out of this, or to get your baby back as soon as possible to settle those affair in a quick way will be better for both - don't be afraid about the baby - keeping care of us day and night. We also will feed him according to the diet.

We are interested to send him back in gut health. And ransom was made aus for $50000 but now we have to take another person to it and probably have to keep the baby for a longer time as we expected. So the amount will be $70000 $20000 in $50 bills $25000 in $20 bill $15000 in $10 bills and $10000 in $5 bills Don't mark any bills or take them from one serial number. We will form you latter were to deliver the money. But we will note do so until the Police is out of the case and the papers are quite. The kidnapping we prepared in years so we are prepared for everything.

Ransom Paid, Body Discovered

The Lindbergh's paid a ransom of $50,000 in gold certificates. Despite this, a truck driver discovered the decomposed body of a child several months later about two miles from the family home. It was determined a blow to the head was the cause of death. The body was identified as the Lindbergh's son through a birth defect affecting one of the child's feet. Lindbergh ordered the body cremated, without a full autopsy. He later scattered the ashes of his son from his aeroplane.

The Capture and Trial

Following a two-year manhunt, illegal immigrant and convicted criminal, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 35-year-old German carpenter who had been in America for approximately 11 years, was arrested. A $20 gold ransom certificate was found on his person and over $13,000 of the Lindbergh ransom money was discovered hidden in his garage.

The ensuring trial lasted only five weeks. Commentary of the time focused on the trial as a witchhunt, with the unfortunate Hauptmann convicted on flimsy evidence amid a lot of bias surrounding his German origins. Lindbergh himself told the court he had heard Hauptmann say several words at his house, although at the time the airman was elsewhere. Though Hauptmann denied all involvement, he was convicted and executed for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

Was it a Hoax?

The high profile of the victims ensured controversy surrounding this case has never died down. Several propositions have emerged to support the conspiracy theory that the kidnapping was a hoax:

People Claiming to be the Lindbergh Baby

Ever since the trial, people have come forward to stake a claim on the Lindbergh fortune. Three of the claimants Harold Olson, Charles A Lindbergh III, and Geneva Cato Fields, have the strongest cases. Their claims are based on physical appearance backed up by 'recovered memories' and the testimony of supporters.

In particular, Charles A Lindbergh III, his legal name since 1985, refuted history's reports of his death. He asserts he wasn't carried through his nursery window and down the ladder. He thinks the Lindbergh's nursemaid, Betty Gow, was a party to the kidnapping and that she carried the 20-month-old child down the main staircase and handed him over to 'a man with a moustache and a woman'. His 'recovered memory' emerged during hypnosis, and he subsequently passed polygraph tests. He also points to surgery done on his foot, indicating a defect which led to the identification of the Lindbergh baby's body all those years ago.

Poor Evidence Gathering

People who witnessed the trials have asserted the evidence gathered against Hauptmann was sketchy at best, and that bureaucrats and police alike were under political pressure to make a conviction. Fingerprints lifted from the child's toys were misplaced and then 'found' later on. Police trampled footprints that might have provided important evidence at the house. Many say sloppy evidence gathering during the case will mean the world will never know whether an innocent man was put to death. Because the alleged body of the Lindbergh baby was cremated, DNA testing, which was not available at the time, cannot help modern-day investigations.

Celebrity-blinded Trial

At the time the baby went missing Lindbergh, through his aviation feats, was the most famous person in the world. Those who witnessed the trials have said the jury was held in his thrall as he gave evidence that he had heard Hauptmann's voice at the house, even though he was elsewhere at the time. Reportedly, cross examination was also rudimentary. Other serious allegations were made about Lindbergh following his death - that he was a Nazi sympathiser and anti-Semitic. His family have never commented on these allegations.

Lindbergh's Own Staged Kidnapping

The fact that Lindbergh had already played a trick on his wife during the weeks preceding the debacle has led some conspiracy theorists to imagine Lindbergh himself doing the same thing again. They believe the baby died, perhaps as a result of an accident or mistreatment, and the family made the second kidnapping story up so covering their actions.

We will never know.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A476796