1.

Dr Crippen - Murderer
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen met Cora Turner in New York, in July 1892. He
was thirty years old, and was working in a hospital, and she was nineteen.
Crippen had been married before, but his first wife had died. He immediately
fell in love with Cora, and six months later they were married.

At first they continued to live in New York, and Crippen joined a company
which sold medicines. This was Cora’s idea. She wanted her husband to earn
more money than the hospital was paying him.

Cora wanted to be a singer, so her husband paid for her to have singing
lessons. Her voice was not really good enough, and she wasn’t very
successful. Later, when the couple moved to London, she did begin to sing
in theatres, although she was never famous.

Crippen was not allowed to work as a doctor in England because he had

trained in America, so he continued to work for the American medicine
company, and opened a London office for them.

In 1905, the Crippens moved to a house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. They were

not happy together. Cora was a cruel, violent woman, and the couple were
always arguing, often because Cora spent more money than they could
afford. She also liked to be with other men.

In 1907, Crippen fell in love with his secretary, Ethel Le Neve. Ethel wanted
him to leave his wife and marry her, but Crippen would not - or was afraid to
- do this.

Then, in December, 1909, Cora discovered that her husband and Ethel Le
Neve were lovers. She warned Crippen that she would leave him, and take
most of his money with her.
 Dr Crippen

■ Walter Dew was one of the policemen who worked on the famous Jack
the Ripper murders in London, in 1888, when five women were
murdered in Whitechapel, in the east of London. (The Ripper was never
caught.) Dew left the police a few months after he arrested Crippen, and
became a private detective. He died in 1947.
Ethel Le Neve
 Cora

On January 31, 1910, two of Cora’s theatre friends, Paul and Clara
Martinetti, came to dinner with the Crippens, and during the evening Cora
and her husband argued violently. The Martinettis left early.

The next week, Crippen told neighbours and friends that Cora had gone to
America to look after someone who was sick. This came as a surprise; Cora
had said nothing to them about a sick friend, or about travelling to America.
Then, some weeks later, Crippen sold several of Cora’s rings, and some of
her other valuables, and in March, Ethel Le Neve moved into 39 Hilldrop
Crescent to live with Crippen.

Later, when Crippen told the Martinettis and other friends of Cora’s that she
had become ill and had died in America, they could not believe it and
suspected that he was lying. Finally, one of the friends went to the police
with the story.

Inspector Walter Dew of London’s Scotland Yard, England’s most famous

police station, visited Crippen soon after this and talked with the doctor and
Ethel Le Neve. Crippen spoke calmly and confidently about his wife,
making no secret of the fact that Ethel Le Neve had been his lover for
several years. He also agreed that the story about his wife’s death had been a
lie. The truth was, he told the detective, that Cora went to America to live
with a lover, Bruce Miller, who had been one of her theatre friends in
England, a few years before.

Inspector Dew was not completely happy with this story, but neither was he
able to prove that Crippen was lying.

But Crippen was not as confident as he pretended to be. The visit from
Inspector Dew had worried him, and after the detective left, he told Ethel Le
Neve that they must go away and make a new life for themselves in another
country. They began by getting a boat to Holland, then went on to Brussels,
in Belgium, where they moved into a hotel for several days.
When Inspector Dew visited Crippen’s office on July 11, he was surprised to
find the place closed and Crippen gone. Immediately, he gave orders to
search the house at Hilldrop Crescent, and it did not take his men long to
find what remained of a woman’s body under the house. She had been
poisoned.

On July 15, Crippen read in a Belgian newspaper that part of a human body
had been found under the house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. He quickly got
tickets to sail on a ship - the Montrose - which was going to Quebec in
Canada. To make any discovery more difficult, Ethel Le Neve dressed as a
sixteen-year-old boy, and pretended to be Crippen’s son. They used the name
‘Robinson’.

The ship sailed for Canada on July 20, but the captain of the Montrose,
Henry Kendall, had read about Dr Crippen in the newspapers. He
remembered photographs of Crippen and Ethel Le Neve, and began to
suspect that Mr John Robinson and his ‘son’ were not what they seemed.
Sometimes the two ‘men’ held hands, he noticed. And ‘Mr Robinson’
seemed to have had a moustache until recently. The more the captain thought
about it, the more sure he became that these were the two people the police
were looking for.

Kendall sent a radio message back to his company office in London. The
information was passed to Inspector Dew, who left England on the
Laurentic, a faster ship than the Montrose, which was also going to Quebec.

The English newspapers quickly heard what was happening and for the next
week, helped by information coming from Captain Kendall on the Montrose,
began to report the chase across the sea for their readers. It made exciting
reading.
 The remains under the house

■ A twenty-eight-year-old woman called Ruth Ellis was the last (and

youngest) woman to be hanged in England, in July 1955, for the murder
of her lover, David Blakely.

Dr Crippen and his lover knew nothing about any of this, of course, and
were quietly confident that nobody had recognized them. So it was an
unhappy surprise for them when they discovered Inspector Dew waiting for
them in Quebec.

Together with a Canadian policeman, Dew boarded the Montrose and

arrested Crippen and Ethel Le Neve. They were the first criminals ever to be
caught through using a radio message. Dew returned to London with them;
they arrived on August 28.

Dr Crippen’s trial, which began on October 18, took just three days. The jury
first heard how he had poisoned his wife with hyoscine, then cut up her body
and buried it under his house. No one was surprised when they found him
guilty of murder.
 Inspector Dew's telegram to Scotland Yard

Ethel Le Neve was tried as an accessory - someone involved in the crime

although not there when it happened - but she was found ‘not guilty’.

Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was hanged on the morning of Wednesday,

November 23, 1910, in Pentonville Prison. Hanging was the normal
punishment for murderers in England at that time.

Ethel Le Neve went to live in America, but later came back to England using
a different name. Later, she married and had children. She died in 1967.

■ The last people to be hanged for murder in Britain were Peter Allen
and Gwynne Owen Evans, in August 1964.

■ Hanging as a punishment for murder in England was stopped in 1965.

Crippen's arrest
 2. The Mona Lisa Robbery
At seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, August 21, 1911, three
cleaners in the Louvre museum, in Paris, were walking through one of the
rooms - the Salon Carre. The three men stopped to look at one of the
world’s most famous paintings - the Mona Lisa.

‘This is the most valuable picture in the world,’ said one of the men. ‘They
say it’s worth one and a half million francs.’

After staring at the famous smile for a moment or two, the three men then
walked on to the Grand Gallery, which was the next room, to continue with
some repair work. It was 8.35 a.m. before they passed through the Salon
Carre again, and one of the men noticed that the Mona Lisa had now gone.

‘They’ve taken it away,’ he laughed. ‘They’re afraid we’ll steal it!’

The other men laughed with him, and went back to their work. It was not
unusual for someone to move a painting in the gallery. They were often
taken away to be photographed, and then put back later, so the three
cleaners did not think any more about it.

At 7.20 the next morning, Poupardin, one of the Louvre guards, passed
through the Salon Carre and noticed that the Mona Lisa was not in its place.
He, too, thought someone had taken it away to be photographed.

At 9 a.m. a man called Louis Beroud arrived at the museum. He was a

painter, and was painting a picture of the Salon Carre.

‘Where is the Mona Lisa?’ he asked Poupardin.

‘It’s being photographed,’ replied the guard.

Beroud was annoyed. He wanted to continue his work, but he decided to

wait for the return of the famous painting.
■ The Mona Lisa was painted by the Italian painter and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci, who was born in 1452 and died in 1519. He spent
the first part of his life in Florence, before working in Milan, Rome,
and then France. The woman in the picture, with her famous smile, is
the wife of Francesco di Bartolommeo del Gioconda di Zansi. The
painting is sometimes called 'La Gioconda’.
■ The Louvre museum was once a royal palace, but has been a museum
since 1793. As well as being the home of the Mona Lisa, it is also the
place where you will find the most famous statue in the world - the
Venus de Milo.

He waited all morning.

‘What are they doing with it?’ he asked himself. Then, early that afternoon,
he told Poupardin to go and ask the photographer to send back the painting.
‘I don’t have much more time,’ he said.

Poupardin went away - and came back quickly.

‘The picture isn’t there!’ he said excitedly. ‘They don’t know anything
about it!’ And he hurried away to find his boss - Georges Benedite.

At 3 p.m. that afternoon, people were asked to leave the Louvre. ‘The
museum is closing,’ they were told, but were not given any explanation. It
was not until they read the newspapers the next day that most of them
discovered the reason.

Someone had stolen the Mona Lisa!

The museum was closed for a week. Police believed that the famous
painting might still be hidden somewhere inside, and they began to search.
Everyone working at the museum had their fingerprints taken.
 The Louvre

The Salon Carre

Then the police found the empty frame from the Mona Lisa on some back
stairs. Slowly, they began to put together their own ‘picture’ of what had
happened.

The thief came to the museum on Sunday, August 20 and hid in the building
after the galleries closed. At 7.30 a.m. the next morning he took the Mona
Lisa, then went into another room and down the stairs where the police later
found the frame. He stopped to take the painting out of the frame, then went
on to a door which led into a courtyard. The door was locked so he had to
take off the doorknob and break it open. He had only managed to take off
the doorknob when he heard a noise, so he pushed the doorknob into his
pocket, and sat on the stairs. A man working for the museum walked by. He
said later that he thought the man on the stairs was one of the museum
cleaners, and he unlocked and opened the door for him.

The thief went out into the courtyard, walked across it and opened an
unlocked door that led into the street. He ran off towards the Pont du
Carrousel, throwing the doorknob away as he ran. (The police found it
later.)

When the Louvre opened again, crowds hurried to look at the empty place
on the wall of the Salon Carre. They could not believe their eyes. The Mona
Lisa really bad been stolen!

Police questioned hundreds of people, searched hundreds of houses, flats

and rooms, took fingerprints and talked to other criminals. They also found
a thumbprint on the glass in the empty picture frame.

But they did not find the Mona Lisa, and as time went on the people of
France began to believe that they would never again see the famous picture
they loved so much.

■ In 1989, a man using a knife damaged ten famous seventeenth-

century Dutch paintings in Amsterdam. He said he did it because he
was angry about losing his job.
Then, one morning in November, in 1913, Alfredo Geri, a man who bought
and sold paintings, opened a letter in his office in Florence, in Italy. The
letter was from Paris, from someone who signed his name as ‘Leonard’.

The writer said that he was an Italian living in Paris. He said that he had
stolen the Mona Lisa and wanted to return it to Italy, where it belonged, and
where it had been before it was ‘stolen’ during the war with France in the
nineteenth century.

At first Geri thought the letter was probably from a madman, but to be sure
he showed it to his friend Giovanni Poggi at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
They decided to write to Leonard and ask him to bring the painting to
Milan.

On Wednesday, December 10, a thin young man with a small dark

moustache arrived at Geri’s office. He told Geri that the Mona Lisa was in
his hotel room, and that he wanted 500,000 lire (100,000 dollars) for the
picture.

Next day, Geri and Poggi went to the young man’s room in the Hotel
Tripoli-Italia - and there was the famous painting. Poggi asked if he could
take it to the Uffizi Gallery and look at it together with photographs of the
real Mona Lisa. The young man agreed, and the three of them went to the
gallery.

Later, the young man went back to his hotel - and was arrested by Italian
detectives.

The young thief’s real name was Vincenzo Perugia, and he was a house
painter. He was actually one of the many people questioned by the French
police not long after the painting was stolen, because he had once been
employed by the museum. They had searched his room at the time, but had
found nothing. (Was someone hiding the painting for him?)
 Vincenzo Perugia

Perugia's fingerprints

Perugia had been in trouble with the law before - for a robbery. But his
fingerprints, kept by the police, only showed his right thumb, and the
thumbprint from the glass in the empty frame had been a print of the left
thumb.

Now, the police searched his Paris rooms once more, and this time they
found a 1910 diary with a list of the names of people who bought and sold
paintings in America, Germany and Italy.
They also questioned two other Italian house painters; they suspected them
of hiding the picture at the time Perugia’s rooms were first searched. Finally
they had to let them go.

The trial of Vincenzo Perugia began on June 4, 1914 in Florence. When

questioned, this is what he told the judge:

‘I entered the Louvre about seven o’clock in the morning. Without being
seen, I was able to get into the Salon Carre. I took the Mona Lisa; took it
out of its frame, then left.’

‘How did you leave?’ asked the judge.

‘The same way I came in,’ answered Perugia.

He was sent to prison for one year and fifteen days, but this was later
shortened to seven months.

Some people believe that Perugia was working with other criminals, one of
whom was a painter, and that they offered the missing Mona Lisa to rich
Americans who collected paintings. Each of the American collectors bought
their Mona Lisa secretly, not realizing that it was forged by one of the
criminals and that other forgeries were being sold, too. Could it be true? We
may never know.

■ Tom Keating, a man who repaired and repainted old and damaged
pictures, forged more than two thousand pictures, pretending that they
were by famous painters, before finally telling people in 1976 that he
had been doing this for twenty-five years. He was sent for trial, but the
trial was stopped because he was a sick man.
Tom Keating
 3. The Lindbergh Kidnapping

Charles Lindbergh

It was evening on Tuesday, March 1, 1932. Charles and Anne Lindbergh

finished dinner at their large country house near the village of Hopwell in
New Jersey, USA, and Charles Lindbergh went to work in his library. Soon
after nine p.m., he heard a noise like something breaking, but it was a
stormy night and he thought it was probably thunder. His wife heard
nothing. Upstairs their son, Charles Junior (often called ‘Little It’) was
asleep in his bed.

Just after ten p.m., Betty Gow, the child’s nurse, went to check that Charles
Junior was all right. She found the little bed empty and the child missing.
Quickly, she went to find Mrs Lindbergh, but the boy was with neither his
mother nor his father.

In the child’s bedroom, the window was open, and there was rainwater and
dirt on the floor. There was also an envelope.

Lindbergh called the police, and they hurried to the house. Detectives
quickly found a rough wooden ladder about twenty-five metres from the
window of the child’s bedroom, and two footprints in the garden. The top
step of the ladder was broken - and Charles Lindbergh remembered the
noise he had heard earlier. A detective checked the envelope for fingerprints
but found none. He opened it. Inside was a note in poor English:

dear Sir!

Have 50 000 $ redy 25 000 $ in 20 $ bills 15 000 $ in 10 $ bills and 10 000

$ in 5 $ bills.

After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony.

We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police, the child is
in gute care.

Anne and Charles Lindbergh

 Charles Junior

At the bottom of the letter were two open blue circles and a filled blue
circle where they touched.

The Lindberghs were very rich and famous people. Charles Lindbergh was
the first man to fly a plane alone across the Atlantic - from New York to
Paris, in thirty- three-and-a-half hours - in 1927. And Anne Lindbergh was
the daughter of Dwight Morrow, one of the richest bankers in the East.

And now their son had been kidnapped.

Soon all America heard the news on the radio, or read it in their newspapers
the next morning. President Hoover promised to do everything he could to
see that the kidnappers were caught.

Al Capone, the famous American criminal, who was in prison at that time,
offered to help find the child through his friends and contacts in the
criminal world. For this, he wanted his freedom. The US government
refused his offer.

Usually, the Lindberghs only went to their Hopwell home at weekends.

Normally they spent the rest of the week with Anne Lindbergh’s family in
Englewood, which was nearer to New York. But Charles Junior had caught
a cold and Mrs Lindbergh wanted him to stay at Hopwell until he was
better. So how did the kidnappers know that the Lindberghs were there that
Tuesday evening? It was one of the first questions detectives asked.

People working for the Lindberghs were immediately suspected of having a

part in the kidnapping. The child’s nurse, Betty Gow, was questioned
carefully but the police finally let her go. Another woman working at the
Lindbergh house, twenty-eight-year-old Violet Sharpe, first told the police
that she was at the cinema on the night of the kidnapping.

Later she changed her story and said that she had been with a man. In May
she changed her story again. On June 10, when she heard that the police
wanted to question her once more, she killed herself.

Lindbergh told the newspapers that he would not try to injure the
kidnappers if they returned the boy safely when they got the money. He
then hired two criminals to try and contact the kidnappers.

But before Lindbergh’s helpers could do anything, the kidnappers made

contact with Dr John Francis Condon, a seventy-two-year-old teacher who
sometimes wrote for the New York paper, Bronx Home News. He was told
to take Lindbergh’s money to the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Anne Lindbergh talks to the radio four days after the kidnapping
 The kidnapper's note

A meeting time was arranged over the telephone, and Condon went to the
cemetery.

He saw an Italian-looking man walk by with something across half his face,
and guessed that the man was checking to see if there were any police or
detectives around. Then Condon saw a second man standing in the
shadows, his hat pulled down over his face and something covering his
mouth. When the second man spoke, Condon recognized the voice. It was
the man who had spoken to him on the telephone. He was about thirty-five
years old and had brown hair. He said his name was John and that there
were six people in the gang, two of them women.
He told Condon that the child was well, but then asked ‘Would I burn if the
baby is dead? Would I burn if I did not kill it?’ By ‘would I burn’ he meant
would he die in the electric chair - the punishment used in America at that
time for kidnappers and murderers. Condon saw the danger at once. If the
police caught a kidnapper he would die - whether the kidnapped child lived
or not. So if a kidnapper thought he was going to be caught he would kill
the child.

Condon and the man made more arrangements to contact each other, then
‘Cemetery John’ (as he became known) disappeared into the night.

Several more messages were passed between the two men, and then
Condon received a package in the post. Inside were Charles Lindbergh
Junior’s sleeping suit, and a note making arrangements for the money to be
handed to the kidnappers.

At 7.45 p.m. on Saturday April 2, 1932, Condon and Lindbergh went to

Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. Lindbergh waited in the car while
Condon went into the cemetery. They both heard a voice shout: ‘Hey, Doc!’

■ The first reported kidnapping was in July, 1874, in Philadelphia,

USA. Four-year-old Charlie Ross, and his six- year-old brother Walter
were kidnapped from outside their home on Washington Lane by two
men. Walter was returned the same day, but Charlie was never seen
again. The kidnappers asked for 20,000 dollars but never collected the
money. Later, William Westervelt (who had once been a policeman)
was arrested and found guilty. Nearly fifty years went by before there
was another kidnapping.

Soon after, the man calling himself ‘John’ appeared, with his hat pulled
down over his face. ‘I have 50,000 dollars,’ said Condon. The man gave
him a note. It said that the boy was on a boat called Nelly, near the
Elizabeth Islands, off the coast of Massachusetts.
Lindbergh searched for several days, but he never found the boat.

Then, on May 12, two lorry drivers found the body of Charles Lindbergh
Junior in some woods about seven kilometres from the Lindbergh’s
Hopwell house.

He had died only a few hours after the kidnapping on March 1.

 The lorry drivers who found the body

Richard Hauptmann

The police knew the numbers on the dollar bills which Condon gave to the
kidnappers, and they began to watch for them. But it was September 16,
1934, before detectives caught a thirty-four-year-old German, Bruno
Richard Hauptmann, when he paid for petrol with a ten dollar bill - one of
the ‘Cemetery John’ bills. When Hauptmann was arrested, police found
another of the bills in his pocket. And at his home they discovered another
13,760 dollars of Lindbergh’s money.

They also learned that Hauptmann was a carpenter, whose job it was to
make things from wood - like ladders.

Hauptmann said that the money belonged to a business friend, Isidor Fisch,
who had gone back to Germany and died there in March, 1934. Hauptmann
said Fisch had left the money behind when he went to Germany. And
because Fisch had owed Hauptmann about 7,500 dollars, Hauptmann had
taken it.
‘I had no part in the kidnapping,’ Hauptmann told detectives, ‘and I did not
write the notes to Lindbergh.’

But the police refused to believe him, and they said that the writing on the
notes was the same as Hauptmann’s.

At the trial in January 1935, Charles Lindbergh said that he recognized

Hauptmann’s voice. He also changed his story. He now said that ‘Cemetery
John’ had called ‘Hey, Doctor!’ and not ‘Hey, Doc!’, and that he had
spoken with a foreign accent.

Dr Condon, who was at first not sure that Hauptmann was ‘Cemetery John’
when questioned by the police, said at the trial that he was now sure that the
German was the man to whom he had spoken in the cemetery.

The jury believed both men.

Hauptmann said that he had been working in New York at the time of the
kidnapping. His wife and employer both agreed with this (although his
employer would not speak at the trial), but the papers to prove it could not
be found.

■ In December, 1963, the son of the famous American singer and film
star, Frank Sinatra, was kidnapped. Sinatra himself delivered 250,000
dollars to the kidnappers, and Frank Junior was returned. The three
kidnappers were arrested soon after.

The jury finally decided that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty of kidnapping
and murder, and he died in the electric chair at Trenton State Prison, New
Jersey, on April 3, 1936.

But questions are still asked about the trial.

Was the writing on the kidnap notes really Bruno Hauptmann’s?

How did Hauptmann know that Charles Lindbergh and his family were at
the house near Hopwell on that stormy night in March 1932? He told the
police that he had never been to the village of Hopwell, and that he did not
know it.

We shall probably never know the whole truth.

 4. The Great Train Robbery
In the early hours of August 8, 1963, the night mail train from Glasgow to
London’s King’s Cross station was making good time. But for the driver,
fifty-eight-year-old Jack Mills, and his assistant, twenty-six-year-old David
Whitby, this would be a night they would remember for the rest of their
lives. Mills, especially, would always be a sick man and, indeed, would die
young, after what was about to happen.

Nearly all the train’s twelve coaches were used as offices for the Royal Mail,
for sorting the letters and packets into groups for different towns and cities.
One special coach - for valuable packets - was carrying 128 bags of old
money. The money was old banknotes which were on their way to the Royal
Mint - the place where banknotes are made - to be destroyed.

■ The first train to be robbed was in America. On October 6, 1866, four

brothers - John, Simeon, William and Frank Reno - stopped the train
near Seymour, Indiana, and stole 10,000 dollars.
Bridego Bridge
 The police investigate

At 3.03 a.m., almost eighty kilometres from London and near the small
village of Cheddington, Jack Mills suddenly saw a red signal. He
immediately brought his engine to a stop. It was unusual to find a red signal
here, so David Whitby got out of the engine to walk to the emergency
telephone, which was behind a signal box. But two men in black balaclava
helmets (later known to be Buster Edwards and Bob Welch) came out of the
darkness and pushed him down on the ground at the side of the railway. One
man told Whitby, ‘If you shout, I’ll kill you!’

Two men climbed into the engine and Jack Mills tried to fight them. One of
the men hit Mills over the head. Meanwhile, others in the gang quietly and
efficiently unfastened the ten sorting coaches at the back of the train, leaving
just the front two fastened to the engine. The valuable packets coach was the
second of these.

David Whitby was brought back and the robbers made Jack Mills drive the
train very slowly to Bridego Bridge, 600 metres down the railway. They left
the other ten coaches behind - the seventy sorters still working inside them
did not realize what was happening.

Other gang members wearing balaclavas and army uniforms were waiting at
the bridge with Land Rovers and a three-tonne army lorry. They had tied
something white to a stick by the railway to mark the place where they
wanted the engine to stop.

They broke the windows of the valuable packets coach and made the Post
Office sorters lie down on the floor. Next, the robbers passed 120 bags of old
banknotes out into the darkness.

Fifteen minutes later, the train robbers put handcuffs on Mills and Whitby
and warned them not to try to escape for at least half an hour. Then, leaving
eight bags behind, they disappeared into the night.
Jack Mills
The robbery had taken a total of twenty-four minutes.

The 120 mailbags contained 2.5 million pounds in old notes. Today, that
would be about 25 million pounds, and at the time it was the biggest robbery
ever. The newspapers were soon calling it the ‘crime of the century’, and the
Post Office quickly offered 10,000 pounds for information that would lead to
the arrest of the robbers.

How did the robbers change the railway signal from ‘Go’ to ‘Stop’? was one
of the first things detectives wanted to know. They soon had the answer. The
robbers had covered the green ‘Go’ signal with a glove, then used their own
red light which they had brought with them.

But where were they now?

Weeks before, the gang had bought an old farmhouse - called Leatherslade
Farm - about fifty kilometres from the bridge. They went there after the
robbery to count their money. Each man would get more than 150,000
pounds.
 Leatherslade Farm

They had planned to stay at the farmhouse for four days, but during the
afternoon of Thursday, August 8 they heard something on the radio news
that made them change their plans. Buckinghamshire Police announced that
they were sure the gang were hiding not more than fifty kilometres from
Bridego Bridge. In fact the police were only guessing this, because Mills and
Whitby had been told not to try to get help for thirty minutes. The gang
would have needed longer than this to go more than fifty kilometres to a
hiding-place.

The gang left Leatherslade Farm on Friday, August 9.

By the following Monday the police had found the farmhouse where they
were hiding. Inside were Post Office mailbags. Before long detectives had
found the fingerprints of several people in the gang, some of whom were
well-known criminals - Bruce Reynolds, Buster Edwards, Ronnie Biggs,
Bob Welch, Roy James, John Daly and Charlie Wilson.

Now began the job of finding them.

James White

Charles Wilson
 Bruce Reynolds

■ Two other famous train robbers were Robert Leroy Parker and Harry
Longbaugh, better known as 'Butch Cassidy’ and The Sundance Kid'.
These famous criminals robbed trains and banks throughout North and
South America in the late 1890s. From 1901 they lived in South
America, and it is believed that they were shot dead by soldiers in
Bolivia in 1909.

Roger Cordrey, who had fixed the railway signal to show red instead of
green, and Bill Boal, another of the robbers, tried to find a garage for their
van in Bournemouth. But they picked the wrong person to ask. The owner of
the garage was the widow of a policeman, and she immediately suspected
something when the robbers paid her from a thick packet of banknotes. She
phoned the police while the two men were putting their van into the garage.
The police caught them and found 78,892 pounds in the van.

More of the money was found in four suitcases in a wood in Surrey, on

August 16. Then another 30,000 pounds was discovered in the ceiling of a
caravan parked near the wood.
 Ronald Biggs

By the end of the year most of the gang had been caught. Charlie Wilson
was arrested without any trouble at his Clapham home. Roy James was more
difficult to catch. He was hiding in a house in St John’s Wood in north
London. But when he saw the police, James took a bag containing 12,000
pounds and climbed up on to the roof to try and escape. He jumped and ran
along neighbours’ roofs, but more than forty policemen were in the
surrounding streets and James finally jumped down into the waiting arms of
one of them.

John Daly was arrested the same day.

Buster Edwards, Bruce Reynolds and Jimmy White were still missing. And
so was two million pounds.

The trial of the others began on January 24, 1964, at Aylesbury in

Buckinghamshire. The police did not want the trial to take place at the Old
Bailey - the famous London criminal court - because they were afraid
powerful London criminals might frighten people on the jury.

All the prisoners were tried together, and all but Roger Cordrey pleaded not
guilty. The trial took two months.

Ronald Biggs today

■ Ned Kelly was probably Australia's most famous criminal. He, his
brother Dan, and two other men, were responsible for many robberies
during the years 1878 to 1880. Ned wore a strange metal suit to protect
himself, but was finally caught. He was hanged in Melbourne in 1880.

■ In January, 1950, seven men, wearing ‘funny-face’ masks, broke into

the Brinks Armoured Car Company in Boston, America and stole
nearly three million dollars. It took six years and cost twenty-nine
million dollars before the criminals were caught and brought to trial.
Neither jack Mills or David Whitby could be sure which had been the men
behind the balaclavas, and nobody had seen the robbers at the farm. But the
lawyers brought in a total of 200 witnesses, the judge took six days to talk to
the jury, and the jury took two days to decide that all the robbers except John
Daly were guilty. The guilty men were sent to prison for up to thirty years.

Jimmy White was finally caught in Dover on the south coast of England.
Police suspected that he was trying to get abroad. Buster Edwards gave
himself up in 1966. And Bruce Reynolds - the leader of the gang - was
finally caught in 1968. He was arrested in Torquay, in Devon, and was sent
to jail for twenty-five years.

Two of the gang were not in jail for long.

In August 1964, Charlie Wilson escaped from Birmingham’s Winson Green

prison when three men broke into the prison to release him, even though
prison officers were watching him carefully because they suspected that he
was a person likely to try to escape.

In July 1965, Ronnie Biggs got out of Wandsworth prison with three other
prisoners while they were walking between the prison buildings. The four
men climbed the six metre prison wall using a rope ladder, which had been
thrown down by one member of an ‘escape gang’ outside.

Charlie Wilson went to France and Mexico after his escape, but was finally
caught again in Canada in 1967.

Ronnie Biggs finally went to live in Brazil, after first escaping to Australia.
He is still there, living in Rio de Janeiro with his girlfriend, Raimunda
Castro, and their child. There is nothing that English lawyers or the English
police can do about it.

In 1993, Biggs said that four gang members were never caught. Nobody,
other than the robbers and possibly a few other criminals, knows who they
are.
 5. The Kennedy Assassination
‘Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?’

This is a question that most people who were alive at the time can answer. It
is one of those moments that they can remember clearly, and will never
forget.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the President of the United States of
America, John F. Kennedy, arrived in Dallas, Texas, with his wife,
Jacqueline, on an official visit. It was a beautiful sunny day. At 11.50 a.m.
they left the airport at Love Field, and crowds stood along the streets of
Dallas to watch the оpen-topped presidential car go past.
 Before the shooting

They waved and shouted their good wishes to the young president and his
lovely wife, while millions more watched on television. In the same car were
John Connally, Governor of Texas, his wife, Nellie, and two Secret Service
men.

‘You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,’ Mrs Connally told the Kennedys, as
they listened to the shouts and saw the smiling faces.

At 12.30 the car turned from Houston Street into Elm Street. It was moving
very slowly. One of the buildings which had a view over Elm Street was the
Texas Book Depository, a large building full of schoolbooks.
Mr Kennedy was waving at the crowds when there was the sound of a gun
shot. The president’s hand stopped moving and then, as a second shot was
heard, went to his neck. There was a third (and perhaps a fourth) shot, and
his head was suddenly covered in blood. John Connally, who had also been
shot in the back by one of the bullets, fell to the floor of the car.

After the shooting

The car immediately raced away to Parkland Memorial Hospital, with
Jacqueline Kennedy holding her husband’s wounded head in her arms.

‘Oh my God, they killed my husband!’ she cried.

The cry was echoed through the crowd. ‘They’ve killed the president!’
And at one o’clock America and the rest of the world heard the news that
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was dead.

The Book Depository (Oswald's window is shown with an arrow)

 A policeman with Oswald's rifle

Not long after the shooting, Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit saw a man
behaving strangely, and stopped to speak to him. As Tippit got out of his car,
the man pulled out a gun and shot the policeman in the head and stomach
then ran away.

At 2.50 p.m., twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in a

cinema for the murder of policeman Tippit. Detectives took him to Dallas
police station to be questioned. Oswald said that he had not killed anyone,
but a gun which had been found in the Texas Book Depository belonged to
him.

He was arrested again - this time for killing President Kennedy.

Two days later, police decided to move Oswald from the city police building
to another prison. He was handcuffed to two detectives when he came out of
the building, but nobody could guess what was going to happen next.
Suddenly, a man pushed his way to the front of the crowd of newspaper,
radio and television reporters.

There was a gun in his hand, and seconds later he had shot Oswald in the
side.

‘He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot!’ a TV newsman told the
millions of people who were watching on television.

Lee Harvey Oswald

 Jack Ruby kills Oswald

On June 5, 1968, just five years after his brother's assassination, Robert
Kennedy was shot dead at a meeting of the American Democratic Party in
the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He, too, was hoping to become
President of the USA, but twenty-four-year- old Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian
who was living in America, managed to get into the meeting hall and shot
Robert Kennedy five times before anyone could stop him.

The man with the gun was Jack Ruby, a night-club owner and a friend of
local criminals. Later he would say that he shot Oswald because he wanted
to save Jacqueline Kennedy from the problems and worry of a long and
painful trial.
After his own trial, he was sent to prison for life, and died there in 1967.

Oswald died only a few hours after Jack Ruby shot him.

On November 25, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was buried in Arlington

National Cemetery in Washington. Jacqueline Kennedy stood with her two
young children, Caroline and John, beside her, and with her husband’s
brothers, Robert and Edward Kennedy. America’s new president, Lyndon B.
Johnson, watched with the heads of other governments from all over the
world. Millions more watched on television.

At the beginning, almost all Americans accepted that Lee Harvey Oswald
was the single assassin, but very soon questions were asked about the way
things were supposed to have happened on that terrible day. The most
important one was: how many shots were there? At first it was thought that
three shots came from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, where
Oswald’s gun was found. But some people doubted this. How could Oswald
shoot three times in less than the five-and-a-half seconds it took the
president’s car to pass, they asked? It took more than two seconds to put a
bullet into that kind of gun.

Then more than fifty witnesses said that they heard a fourth shot coming
from a small grassy hill at the side of Elm Street, in front of the president’s
car.

There were more questions.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate the president, or was it somebody else?
‘I never killed anybody!’ he told the police, many times.

Was he working for someone else? The government of Cuba, perhaps, who
did not like Kennedy? Or the Russians? Oswald had once left America to
live in Russia for a short time, before coming back with his wife to Texas.

Did the Mafia - the international organisation of criminals - kill Kennedy?

They certainly wanted him dead, because he was making life difficult for
them.
And so the questions go on, even today. Will they ever be answered, or will
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remain one of this century’s
biggest mysteries?

The grassy hill: was there a fourth shot from here?

 6. Patty and the Terrorist Trap
In 1974, nineteen-year-old Patty Hearst was a student at Berkeley
University, in California, USA. She was also the daughter of Randolph
Hearst, the rich owner of several newspapers.

Patty was living in an apartment in Bienvenue Street, Berkeley, at that time,

with her boyfriend, Steven Weed. He was a teacher at the university.

On the evening of February 4, two men broke into the apartment, knocked
Steven on the head, and pulled Patty out of the apartment building to a car
which was waiting outside.
 Patty in 1972

For the next three days her parents waited by the phone for some word from
the kidnappers. Then a local radio station received the first message from a
group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) - a small,
but dangerous, group of terrorists. The message was from their leader, a
man calling himself ‘Cinque’ who was later discovered to be a criminal
who had escaped from prison. His real name was Donald DeFreeze.
DeFreeze said that Patty Hearst was now a prisoner of the SLA.
Other people in the group were twenty-seven-year-old Nancy Ling Perry,
William Wolfe, twenty-four-year-old Camilla Hall, William and Emily
Harris, Patricia Soltysik, and Angela Attwood.

A cassette with Patty’s voice on it was sent to the radio station. She told her
parents that she was all right and that the kidnappers were not hurting her.

The next message was an order from the terrorist group to Randolph Hearst.
They told him that he must give seventy dollars worth of food to everyone
in California who was ‘on welfare’ - people on welfare were those who
were unable to work, or could not find work, and were being given money
to live on by the government. There were about six million of them in
California.

Hearst refused. It would cost more than 400 million dollars, he said, and he
wasn’t rich enough to pay out that much money. But he did give two
million dollars to start an organization called ‘People in Need’, which gave
food to the poor people in California. It was not enough for the kidnappers,
and Patty remained a prisoner.

Or did she?

On April 3 another cassette with Patty’s voice on it arrived. This time she
told her parents that she had joined the SLA and was not a prisoner
anymore. She said that her name was now ‘Tania’, that she was fighting for
the freedom of all black people, and that she would never again live with
her parents, or people like them. She was now one of the gang of terrorists.

■ Patty Hearst's grandfather was William Randolph Hearst, who was

born in 1863. Hearst was the first publisher to use large headlines and
shocking pictures of crimes in his American newspapers. He became
very rich, and by the 1930s he owned newspapers, magazines, radio
stations and two film companies. The story of his life gave Orson Welles
the idea for his film Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst died in
1951.
 William Randolph Hearst

Patty's parents after the Hibernia Bank robbery

 Patty in the Hibernia Bank

But did she join them because it was the only way she could be sure they
would not kill her? This was what her parents believed. Or was she sincere
about wanting to help the gang? It was a question that would be asked many
times in the future.

The answer seemed to come on April 15, when she and others from the
gang robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Cameras inside the bank
took pictures of Patty holding a gun and telling customers to get down on
the floor or they would be shot.

Then, a few weeks later, two of the gang, William and Emily Harris, were
caught stealing from a sports shop in Los Angeles. They managed to get
away only when Patty, who had been waiting in a van across the street, used
a gun to help them. Nobody was hurt, but all three of the gang escaped in
the van.
The police and many other people were now sure that Patty Hearst was a
common criminal.

Later, police heard from someone close to the gang that the terrorists were
living at 1466 East 54th Street in Los Angeles. Immediately more than three
hundred policemen with guns were sent to surround the building, and the
gang were told to come out with their hands up. Tear gas was used to try
and get them out, but the terrorists replied by shooting at the police. There
was a forty-minute gun battle with over six thousand shots.
Patty after her arrest
■ Seventeen-year-old Jean-Paul Getty, whose grandfather was the
famous American oil millionaire, J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped in July
1973, in Rome. The kidnappers asked for seventeen million dollars for
the boy, but his family refused to pay. Then the kidnappers cut off
Jean- Paul's ear and sent it to them. Two and a half million dollars
were paid and the boy was allowed to go free. The kidnappers,
Giuseppe Lamanna and Antonio Marcuso, were caught and sent to
prison.

Then Nancy Ling Perry tried to run from the house but was shot dead by
police. Next the house caught fire, and Camilla Hall tried to get out, but was
shot.

Patricia Soltysik, Angela Attwood and William Wolfe were burned to death
in the fire, but Donald DeFreeze appeared to have shot himself in the head
before the fire could kill him. The bodies of Patty Hearst and William and
Emily Harris were not found in what was left of the building on East 54th
Street. They, it seemed, had not been in the house at the time.

It was more than a year later - in September, 1975 - in an apartment in San

Francisco, that Patty Hearst was finally caught. Emily and William Harris
were also arrested. During that year the three of them had robbed two
banks, and Emily Harris had killed a customer in one of them.

Patty Hearst was sent for trial in February, 1976, where she told the jury
that everything she had done was to avoid being killed by the SLA. She said
that she had been locked in a cupboard for several weeks until she agreed to
do what they asked. By then, she said, she was so ill she was ready to
believe and say anything that they told her to say.

But the jury - seven of whom were women - found her guilty of bank
robbery, and Patty Hearst was sent to prison for seven years.

Her parents worked hard to get her free, and slowly the public came to
believe that Patty Hearst was not completely to blame for everything she
had done. And on February 1, 1979, she walked out of prison a free woman.
 7. Shergar
People have been asking questions about Shergar - the racehorse which
became famous after winning the 1981 Derby - ever since he was
kidnapped in 1983. What happened to him? Why was he taken? Who were
the kidnappers? People have offered several possible answers to these
questions, but the kidnapping still remains very much a mystery.

For James Fitzgerald, the man whose job it was to look after Shergar, it all
began at about 8.45 p.m. on Tuesday, February 8, 1983, when two men with
guns, their faces covered by balaclavas, pushed their way into his house at
the Ballymany horse farm, near Newbridge, in Ireland. They locked Mr
Fitzgerald’s wife, son and daughter in a downstairs room, then ordered him
to take them to Shergar’s special stable, and to open the stable door. At the
same time other members of the gang were driving a car and horse-box to
the stable.

After opening the stable door, Fitzgerald was ordered to lead the ten-
million-pound racehorse into the horse-box. As usual, Shergar was quiet
and well-behaved, and did not kick or try to pull away. Then Fitzgerald was
pushed into a van with some more of the kidnappers and told to lie down
with his face on the floor.

The gang drove about forty kilometres away from the farm before they let
Fitzgerald go. They told him not to contact the police, and said that they
would telephone him the next day.

‘We want two million pounds for the horse,’ they said.

Fitzgerald telephoned his boss - the horse farm manager - as soon as he got
home, and the police were informed about the kidnapping in the early hours
of the next morning. Fitzgerald was questioned, but he could tell detectives
very little about the kidnappers. They had all worn balaclavas and he did
not know what any of them looked like.
 Shergar

Soon, newspaper, television and radio reporters had the news, and everyone
learned that one of the world’s most famous racehorses had been
kidnapped.

The police waited for the kidnappers’ next move - but nothing happened.
No telephone call. Only silence. They searched stables and farm buildings
across the whole of Ireland. The Sporting Life racing newspaper offered
10,000 pounds for Shergar’s safe return. Lord Derby, one of Shergar’s
several owners, said that he thought the horse was out of the country by
now.
 Shergar wins at Ascot racecourse

Weeks and months went by. During this time, hundreds of people
telephoned the police to say that they thought they had seen the famous
racehorse - either in fields, on roads, or in lorries - in various parts of the
world. Others phoned to say that they were holding Shergar and would cut
off his head unless money was paid to them. Two telephone calls to an Irish
radio station, saying that Shergar would be returned, now that 1.2 million
pounds had been paid to the kidnappers in France, were quickly proved to
be false.

By October that year, Shergar’s owners were offering 100,000 pounds for
his safe return, but there was no news.

There is still no news.

Some people say the IRA (the Irish Republican Army) was responsible for
the kidnapping. But why was no money ever paid or collected? It’s a
question that will probably never be answered. But surely the biggest
question of all has to be: is Shergar alive or dead?

Shergar with the Aga Khan

■ In 1968, a burglar went to rob a home in Detroit, in America, and he

took his dog with him. But he forgot to take the dog out with him
afterwards. The police arrived, and were delighted when the dog
decided to walk home to his owner. All they had to do was follow him to
catch the burglar!
Glossary
assassin a person who kills someone for political reasons assassination a
killing by an assassin

balaclava helmet a woollen hat which can be pulled over your head to
cover most of your face

caravan a small house on wheels that a car or van can pull

cemetery a place where dead people are buried

court a place where judges and lawyers listen to trials

doorknob a round thing on a door, used to open and shut it

fingerprint mark made by your finger which shows the lines on your skin

forge make a false copy of something

frame the edge of wood or metal round a picture

gang a group of criminals who work together

glove a piece of clothing which covers your hand

guilty if you are guilty, you have done something wrong

handcuffs two metal rings, joined by a chain, which can be locked round
someone’s wrists

hanged if a person is hanged, they are killed by tying a rope round their
neck and taking away whatever is under their feet
horse-box something used for carrying a horse, usually pulled behind a car
or van

jury a group of people in a court of law who listen to the facts about a
crime, and then decide if the person accused is guilty

kidnap take someone away and hide them so that his family or friends will
pay money to get him back

mail letters and packets that have been posted

mask something which you wear over your face to hide it

museum a building to keep beautiful, old and interesting things in for

people to look at

poison if you poison someone, you give them something to eat or drink that
can kill them

public if you make something public, you make it known to everyone

race a test to see which person or animal can run the fastest

rope something thick which you use to tie things

secret service a special kind of police who work secretly

signal something used on a railway (usually a red or green light) to tell a

train driver whether to stop or go

stable a building where horses are kept

tear gas a gas which makes your eyes hurt, and fill with tears

terrorist a person who uses violence for political reasons

van a kind of big car or small lorry

widow a woman whose husband is dead

witness someone who sees something happen and can tell the court about it
at a trial