Sunday, March 27, 2011

Partners in Crime

While most criminals work alone, there have been a number of very high profile criminal couples through history. This is a list of ten of the most infamous criminal duos. The list excludes killers who are children and high school killers. In no particular order, the top 10 partners in crime.
 
10
Menendez Brothers
Menendez

The Menendez brothers grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended Princeton Day School. Lyle attended Princeton University but eventually dropped out because of the expensive cost. Erik attended Beverly Hills High School in Los Angeles.
Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents at their Beverly Hills home in 1989. After shooting their parents, the brothers drove off and dumped their shotguns on Mulholland Drive and bought tickets at a local movie theater to use as an alibi. When the brothers returned home, Lyle called 911 and cried, “Somebody killed my parents!” In the following months, the brothers led a life of luxury and lavish spending, adding to investigators’ suspicions that they were involved in their parents’ deaths. Prosecutors later alleged that the brothers spent about $1 million in their first six months as orphans. Both brothers were subsequently sentenced to life in prison. [Wikipedia]
 
9
Caril Fugate and Charles Starkweather
Gat 0000 0002 0 Img0109

Caril Fugate lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in 1956, she started dating Charles Starkweather (five years her senior). Caril is the youngest female in United States history to be tried for first-degree murder. The extent of Caril’s involvement in this couple’s crimes is uncertain; Starkweather was executed still accusing her, and Fugate refuses to talk about it to this day.

Charles Starkweather was born with a mild birth defect, Genu varum, that caused his legs to be misshapen, and he also suffered from a mild speech impediment, which caused him to be teased, picked upon, and beaten up from an early age. Starkweather developed a severe inferiority complex and became self-loathing and nihilistic, believing that he was unable to do anything correctly, and that his own inherent failures would doom him to a life of poverty and misery.
On January 21, 1958, Starkweather went to visit Caril at her dilapidated house. Finding her not home, he argued with and shot to death Caril Ann’s mother and stepfather, as well as fatally clubbing Caril Ann’s two-year-old sister, Betty Jean. Charles and Caril drove to the Bennet, Nebr., farm home of August Meyer, 70, a Starkweather family friend, whom Charles shot in the head. Shortly thereafter, they got stuck in the mud and abandoned their car. When Robert Jensen and Carol King, two local teenagers, stopped to give them a ride, Charles forced them to drive back to an abandoned storm cellar, where both were shot and killed. The couple eventually took a road trip across the states killing a total of 11 people. Their story is the basis for the film Natural Born Killers. [Wikipedia]
 
8
Kray Brothers
Krays

Ronald “Ronnie” Kray (24 October 1933 – 17 March 1995) and Reginald “Reggie” Kray (24 October 1933 – 1 October 2000) were identical twin brothers, and the foremost organized crime leaders dominating London’s East End during the 1950s and 1960s.
The twins first attended Wood Close School and then Daneford Street School. There they said to have shown none of their future criminal tendencies. A teacher said of them: “Salt of the earth, the twins; never the slightest trouble to anyone who knew how to handle them.” They bought a local run-down snooker club in Bethnal Green, this was where they starting several protection rackets. By the end of the 1950s, the Krays were involved in hijacking, armed robbery and arson, through which means they acquired a small empire of clubs and other properties. In the 1960s, they were widely seen as prosperous and charming celebrity nightclub owners and were part of the ‘swinging’ London scene. The criminal activities of the twins came to the attention of the police several times, but the Kray name had such a fearsome reputation for violence that witnesses were too scared to come forward to testify. When Inspector Leonard “Nipper” Read of Scotland Yard was promoted to the Murder Squad, his first assignment was to bring down the Kray twins. By the end of 1967 Read had built up a substantial body of evidence against the Krays. Early on 9 May 1968, the Krays and a number of the senior members of their “firm” were arrested. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, with a non-parole period of thirty years. [Wikipedia]

Myra Hindley and Ian Brady
136050916 89F2275A2C

Myra Hindley was believed to have been beaten by her alcoholic father, Bob Hindley, a paratrooper in the RAF during World War II, who was also alleged to have been violent towards her mother Nellie. She could write creatively, was quite athletic, and was considered a responsible girl, ironically in demand as a babysitter.

Ian Brady was adopted into a local family at a young age. His father has never been identified; his mother claimed that he was a journalist who died a few months before their son was born. He developed a fascination with Nazi Germany, Nazi pageantry and Nazi symbolism. By the time he was a teenager, he had been brought before the juvenile courts for incidents of burglary and housebreaking.
Brady was responsible for the murders of five children during the 1960s. In August 1987 he claimed to police that he had carried out another five killings and even said where he had buried the bodies, but the police were never able to prove whether these claims were true. The five murders that Brady admitted carrying out were committed with Hindley as his accomplice. These were the infamous Moors Murders, which are still some of the most reviled crimes in Britain decades after they happened, the judge at Brady and Hindley’s trials even saying they were the worst murders in the past century. As a result, Brady and Hindley became two of the most hated individuals in British criminal history. In evidence against them was a tape recording the couple made of the murder of one of their victims.

No comments: