Great Crimes and Trials Episode Rating Graph

One man’s obsessive adoration of the world’s greatest rock star led to a transposition of personality and the death of John Lennon.

When an unassuming US doctor living in London in 1910 fell in love with his secretary, he was tied to a wife who he hated. His solution was murder. Dr Crippen and his mistress fled abroad and when a body was discovered in the cellar they tried to escape across the Atlantic. But one of the world’s first radio transmissions enabled the police to foil them.

Seven bodies were found in the crawl space under his home. Eight more were quickly uncovered in other parts of the house, some in trenches covered in quicklime. Eventually, the remains of twenty-eight were discovered. When he had run out of burial space he started dumping bodies in the river. His victims were male and the disappearances continued until the thirty-third killing brought the police with a search warrant to the house.

Within weeks, the hillsides around Los Angeles became the scene of a terrible carnage - more than ten strangled corpses. The police soon realised they were no longer dealing with a serial murderer but hunting something frighteningly new - two killers, who were out on a ‘spree’.

In the world of gangsters, he was notorious, ruthless, a man destined to become a legend. He turned to crime out of boredom and soon found it was too addictive to give up. He blazed a trail across the States, robbing banks with a violent and authoritative ease.

When the kidnapping of a 17-year-old girl was linked to the brutal murder of three British subpostmasters the police knew they were dealing with a ruthless and callous killer. For the girl, the abduction ended in unimaginable horror. For the police it would take another eleven months and a chance encounter before the ‘Black Panther’ was eventually cornered.

In June 1946 after six years of war a girl was found whipped and murdered in a cheap London hotel. The hunt was soon on for a suave and sinister ex-RAF pilot who showed little remorse or concern when he was sentenced to hang.

Charles Manson was the ultimate hippie leader with a difference. Together with his cult followers he pioneered a new revolution - a helter-skelter of bloody, calculated and remorseless killing that brought a new, sinister meaning to the term - ‘The Family’.

In 1949 John George Haigh escorted Mrs Olivia Durand-Deacon down to his factory in Crawley, where he shot her in the head and then heaved her into a previously-prepared vat of acid. Charged with murder, he said he had also disposed of seven other victims the same way - including his parents - and often enjoyed drinking their blood….

It was a crime that defied the imagination. In November 1978, deep in the jungles of Guyana the Rev Jim Jones gathered nearly 1,000 devoted followers around him, and with a simple promise persuaded them to commit the greatest ‘revolutionary’ mass suicide of the 20th Century.

For three years Albert DeSalvo stalked the streets of Boston, leaving behind him a hideous trail of human destruction. It was a crusade of evil, of a maniac who might never have been caught had it not been for his confessions to another prison inmate.

He was a man determined to demonstrate his German purity. In 1934 he became a member of the SS. He killed not only Jews en masse, but was also responsible for the calculated deaths of twenty-seven RAF prisoners… Eventually, in 1959 he was discovered hiding in Argentina by Israeli agents, who kidnapped him and flew him to Israel for trial.

He was the double murderer who insisted on being executed. The question always remained: how badly did he want to die, and why? It was good that he believed in reincarnation as on 17th January 1977 after years of legal moralising his wish was granted and he was strapped to an old office chair and shot dead by a firing squad in Utah.

Women began to disappear in the Seattle area in the first half of 1974. Almost on a monthly basis after that other women mysteriously vanished - then on the grass hillside near Lake Sammanish the remains of some decomposed bodies were found. It was not until July 1979 that a jury found attractive graduate Bundy guilty and mercifully ended the reign of a savage multiple sex-killer who brutally murdered over twenty girls.

He had an obsession with disinfecting his flat. When he moved out, four bodies were discovered there and two more in the garden. When arrested it became horrifically clear that he had also killed a mother and child in 1949 - a crime for which another man had already been hanged.

It was the first in Britain for centuries. In a cruel and callous kidnapping a woman became the innocent victim of mistaken identity. After many efforts to catch her abductors, the police were led to a lonely farmhouse - and two brothers with a ghastly secret.

The brutal murder of Sir Jack Drummond and his family in the lonely Provencal countryside led to a sensational trial and the eventual sentencing of a peasant farmer to the guillotine.

It was a crime that shattered America. A case so improbable that nobody ever dreamed it could happen. Despite a ransom being paid, after 72 days the body of American legend Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped baby son, was found murdered. A German carpenter was tried, sentenced and sent to the electric chair, but to this day it is not known if he acted alone…

Born in Nebraska, Charlie Starkweather was a dissolute teenager and self-styled rebel. He dreamt of becoming rich and of earning a fortune through crime. In 1958 he realised his fantasies when he set off on the outlaw trail with his schoolgirl lover, 14-year-old Caril Fugate, like a latter day Bonnie and Clyde. In his wake he left 11 motiveless murders until he was finally cornered, captured, and executed in the electric chair.

In December 1971 the world was amazed when it was announced that author Clifford Irving would be collaborating with millionaire recluse Howard Hughes on his official biography. It was even more astonishing when this was swiftly followed by an announcement from Hughes that the whole thing was a hoax. Irving insisted that this was a misunderstanding, but when Hughes finally broke cover to speak to journalists the ingenious fraud was revealed.

On 10th March 1980, Jean Harris, headmistress of an exclusive East Coast girls school, drove to the house of her lover, Dr Herman Tarnower, author of the best selling ‘Scarsdale Diet’, and shot him dead. She had been aware that he wanted to end their relationship, and claimed that his shooting had been an accident while she was trying to persuade him to kill her. The jury was unconvinced and she was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

On 4th February 1974 Patricia Hearst the 19-year-old heiress to one of America’s largest media fortunes was kidnapped by an obscure terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Within three months she had apparently joined them when she was filmed wielding a gun during a bank raid. Recaptured and tried, Patty was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but released in January 1979 as an act of Executive Clemency by President Jimmy Carter.

An habitual criminal from childhood, Caryl Chessman was also one of the cleverest of criminals. Condemned to death for repeated rapes, robberies, sexual perversion and kidnapping on 18th May 1948, he used his brilliant mind to learn enough law to carry on a crusade against execution for 12 years.

The murder of a policeman in Britain is still a rarity, but on 12th August 1966 the nation was shocked when three were gunned down in West London after stopping a car. Within a few days, two petty criminals John Duddy and John Witney - had been arrested, and the description of a third, Harry Roberts, had been publicised all over the country. But it was not to be for another three months, after one of the largest manhunts known in Britain that Roberts was tracked down in Epping Forest where he had been using his military training to evade capture.

After a desperate phone call appealing for help police raced to a remote farmhouse in Essex, to stop a hysterical young woman running amok with a loaded hunting rifle. They arrived to find her and her family dead, in an apparently straightforward mass shooting followed by suicide. But not everyone was satisfied with his verdict, and several months later the dead girl’s step brother was arrested and charged with carrying out what had almost become the perfect murder.

Hitler and his Nazi party dominated Germany for only 12 years. But during that short period they not only brought about a World War in which tens of millions of troops and civilians died, but were responsible for a cold-blooded policy of mass extermination directed against the Jews and other racial groups which the Nazis considered subhuman in which many more millions were slaughtered. When the Nazis had finally been defeated, the victorious alliance against them took the unprecedented step of putting their surviving leaders on trial at Nuremberg for ‘Crimes against Humanity’.

In April 1943, Berlin announced that the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers had been found murdered by the Soviets at Katyn Wood. Stalin indignantly denied the accusation, even though all documents on the bodies stopped in 1940 when the men had been in Soviet hands. Only recently did the full truth of who was responsible come out.

Mahatma Gandhi was revered as the father of modern India, whose campaign of non-violent rebellion finally persuaded the British to pull out of the ‘Jewel’ of their empire. His murder on 20th January 1948 by right-wing fanatics was a severe blow to hopes of avoiding inter-communal violence, as were the assassinations of his successors as leaders of India, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.

The last 1950s and 1960s were a time of turmoil in America as the Civil Rights movement fought against racial segregation. Its leader was the charismatic preacher Martin Luther King Jr, and his assassination in April 1968 allegedly by a lone gunman James Earl Ray, gave rise to endless conspiracy theories as to who had funded him to do so.

Few events have shocked a generation more than the murder of President John F Kennedy on 22nd November 1963 in Dallas. Young and charismatic he seemed to promise a new beginning for America and the world, and within hours of his death theories about who had killed him abounded. These were not stilled by the Warren Commission’s assertion that there was a single gunman, and this programme looks at some of the other possibilities - such as the Cubans, big business, the Mafia, the KGB.

On 4th April 1962 James Hanratty was hanged for an apparently motiveless shooting of two lovers on the A6 main road near London. But much of the evidence had been circumstantial, and pointed equally well towards another name, Peter Alphon. When he confessed during an interview that he had carried out the murder many people were amazed that no charges were ever brought and controversy still rages as to whether Hanratty was wrongly executed.

During the five years from 1978 - 83 an unassuming civil servant who lived in the Muswell Hill area of London became Britain’s worst mass murderer. Dennis Nilsen, who had been a policeman for a short time, lured at least 15 young men back to his flat, murdered them and then disposed of their remains down the sewer. Only when this became blocked was his ghastly secret discovered, and after his lawyers had failed to establish insanity, he was imprisoned for life