Читать книгу The Book Of Lists - David Wallechinsky - Страница 19

1 GRIGORI RASPUTIN The Russian mystic and orgiast held enormous political power at the court of the Romanovs from 1905 until his murder in 1916. That this decadent, vulgar peasant should hold such sway over the Empress Alexandra infuriated a group of five power-hungry aristocrats, who set out to destroy him. They arranged for Rasputin to take midnight tea at the home of Prince Felix Yussupov. Some accounts say that Rasputin drank voluminous amounts of poisoned or opiated wine and remained unaffected, to Yussupov’s great consternation. The frightened Prince contrived an excuse to go upstairs, where the waiting gang furnished him with a gun, then followed him downstairs. According to Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, the men assaulted her father and ‘used him sexually’. Then Yussupov shot him. Again, according to Maria, they viciously beat Rasputin and castrated him, flinging the famed penis across the room. One of the conspirators – a doctor – pronounced the victim dead; but Yussupov, feeling uneasy, began to shake the body violently. The corpse’s eyelids twitched – and opened. Suddenly, Rasputin jumped to his feet and gripped Yussupov by the shoulders. Terrorised, Prince Felix pulled himself free; Rasputin fell to the floor, and the other men dashed upstairs. In the midst of the brouhaha, they heard noises in the hallway: Rasputin had crawled up the stairs after them. Two more shots were fired into him, and again he was beaten with harrowing violence. The men (still doubting his death) bound Rasputin’s wrists. Carrying him to a frozen river, they thrust his body through a hole in the ice. Rasputin was still alive. The icy water revived him, and he struggled against his bonds. When his body was found two days later, his scarred wrists and water-filled lungs gave this proof, as did his freed right hand, which was frozen in the sign of the cross.

2 SAMUEL DOMBEY Dombey was a black gravedigger in post-Civil War Orleans. Because he worked for such low rates, his fellow gravediggers decided to put an end to their competition. They called upon a certain Dr Beauregard, reputed to have magical powers, to use his $50 ‘supreme curse’ involving an owl’s head. The next morning, as Dombey began to dig a new grave, he heard a loud explosion. Someone, apparently injured, staggered from a nearby clump of bushes. There Dombey found a gun which, overloaded with buckshot, had blown up. Later, a much-bandaged Dr Beauregard threatened to curse anyone who questioned him. The gravediggers took matters into their own hands. They placed a keg of explosive powder under the cot in the tool shed where Dombey took his daily nap and lit it while he slept. The explosion blasted Dombey out the doorway and plopped him 20 feet away. The tool shed was completely destroyed, but Dombey was unhurt. The local police nicknamed him Indestructible Sam. But the best (or worst) was yet to come: Indestructible Sam was soon captured by masked men and taken in a boat to Lake Pontchartrain. Sam’s hands and feet were tied, and he was dumped into the depths of the lake. These particular depths, however, turned out to be only 2 feet; Sam wriggled free of his bonds and walked ashore. Next, Dombey’s foes tried arson – and as Dombey ran from his burning home, he received a full load of buckshot in his chest. Firemen saved the house and rushed Sam to the hospital, where he lived up to his nickname. Sam had the last laugh. He continued to dig graves, and died at 98, having outlived every one of his jealous competitors.

3 MICHAEL MALLOY In 1933, a down-and-out drunken Irishman became the victim of an extraordinary series of murder attempts. Malloy was a bum who frequented the speakeasy of one Anthony Marino in the Bronx. Marino and four of his friends, themselves hard up, had recently pulled off an insurance scam, murdering Marino’s girlfriend and collecting on her policy; pitiful Michael Malloy seemed a good next bet. The gang took out three policies on him. Figuring Malloy would simply drink himself to death, Marino gave him unlimited credit at the bar. This scheme failed – Malloy’s liver knew no bounds. The bartender, Joseph Murphy, was in on the plot and substituted antifreeze for Malloy’s whisky. Malloy asked for a refill and happily put away six shots before passing out on the floor; after a few hours, he perked up and requested another drink. For a week Malloy guzzled antifreeze nonstop. Straight turpentine worked no better, and neither did horse liniment laced with rat poison. A meal of rotten oysters marinated in wood alcohol brought Malloy back for seconds. In an ultimate moment of culinary inspiration, Murphy devised a sandwich for his victim: spoiled sardines mixed with carpet tacks. Malloy came back for more. The gang’s next tactic was to dump the drunk into a bank of wet snow and pour water over him on a night when the temperature had sunk to -14°F. No luck. So Marino hired a professional killer, who drove a taxi straight at Malloy at 45 mph, throwing him into the air – and then ran over him again for good measure. After a disappearance of three weeks, Malloy walked into the bar, told the boys he’d been hospitalised because of a nasty car accident, and was ‘sure ready for drink’. Finally, the desperate murderers succeeded – they stuffed a rubber hose into Malloy’s mouth and attached it to a gas jet until his face turned purple. The scheme was discovered, and four members of the five-man ‘Murder Trust’ (as the tabloids dubbed Marino & Co.) died in the electric chair. One New York reporter speculated that if Mike Malloy had sat in the electric chair, he would have shorted out every circuit in Sing Sing.

4 DR ARTHUR WARREN WAITE’S FATHER-IN-LAW AND MOTHER-IN-LAW Dr Waite was a New York dentist whose wife was the only daughter of a rich drug manufacturer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Waite decided to remove the only two obstacles in his path to riches: his parents-in-law. The doctor’s efforts are neatly chronicled in Carl Sifakis’s book A Catalogue of Crime. Setting to work on his mother-in-law, Waite took her for a drive in a heavy rain with the windshield open. He put ground glass in her marmalade. He introduced into her food all sorts of bacteria and viruses – those that cause pneumonia, influenza, anthrax and diphtheria. The lady did catch a cold, but that was all. In disgust, Waite shifted his attention to his father-in-law, trying the same disease producers – with absolutely no effect. He filled the old man’s rubber boots with water, dampened his sheets, opened a container of chlorine gas in his bedroom while he slept. Nothing. Then he tried giving the old man calomel, a purgative, to weaken him, and then a throat spray loaded with typhoid bacteria. People started commenting on how well the old man looked. Waite got off the disease kick and switched to arsenic. Amazingly, the poison failed. Finally, Waite polished off the old man by smothering him with a pillow. By now, however, other relatives were suspicious, and an autopsy on the father-in-law’s body was ordered. Heavy traces of arsenic were found; although this was not the cause of death, the arsenic was traced to Waite and he finally confessed to his crime.

5 HERBERT ‘THE CAT’ NOBLE This Dallas racketeer earned his nickname after the first nine attempts on his life. He was shot at so often that he was also called ‘The Clay Pigeon’. His third moniker was ‘The Sieve’ because he had been riddled by so many bullets. The murder attempts were made by another Dallas gangster, the crude, illiterate ‘Benny the Cowboy’ Binion. A retired police captain revealed the details of their rivalry to Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, authors of the Green Felt Jungle, an exposé of Las Vegas crime. Binion was taking a 25% cut of Noble’s crap games and wanted to up it to 40%. Noble refused, and the fireworks began. In a dramatic car chase, Binion’s thugs splattered Noble’s car with bullets, and one slug lodged in Noble’s spine. Binion moved to Las Vegas, but the feud continued long-distance – Benny wanted to save face by employing hired killers to nail Noble. Hollis ‘Lois’ Green, a depraved murderer, succeeded in wounding Noble on his third attempt. The following year, in 1949, explosives were found attached to Noble’s car, and he was soon shot again. Real tragedy struck when Noble’s beloved wife, Mildred, was literally blown to bits by an explosion of nitrogelatin planted in his car. This loss unhinged Noble’s mind – his prematurely grey hair (he was 41) turned snow-white, he lost 50 lbs, and he began to drink heavily. Another shooting put him in the hospital, where he was fired upon from across the street. Noble’s attempts at retaliation included equipping a plane with bombs to drop on Binion’s home, but Noble was shot again before he could carry out his plan. Next, Noble miraculously survived the bombing of his business and a nitroglycerin explosion in one of his planes. Binion finally killed Herbert the same gruesome way he killed Mildred – with nitrogelatin hidden near Noble’s mailbox. On August 7, 1951, the top part of Noble’s body was blown right over a tree – there was nothing left of the bottom. The retired police captain who revealed all this commented, ‘I think Noble had more downright cold-blooded nerve than anyone I’ve ever known. He was ice in water in a tight place.’

6 DAVID HARGIS The 23-year-old Marine drill instructor was murdered in San Diego on July 21, 1977 – but it wasn’t easy. His wife, 36-year-old Carol, took out an insurance policy on her husband to the tune of $20,000. Her accomplice was 26-year-old Natha Mary Depew. First, the ladies went to the woods to find a rattlesnake; instead they found a tarantula, which they made into a pie. David didn’t really like the taste of the tarantula pie, so he only ate a few pieces. The women then tried to (1) electrocute him in the shower, (2) poison him with lye, (3) run him over with a car and (4) make him hallucinate while driving by putting amphetamines in his beer. Their plan to inject a bubble into his veins with a hypodermic needle – thereby causing a heart attack – failed when the needle broke. They considered putting bullets into the carburettor of David’s truck, but Depew objected because she wanted to keep the truck after his death. Frustrated, they resorted to a more old-fashioned method – they beat him over the head with a 6½-lb metal weight while he slept. This worked. The murderesses were apprehended while trying to dump the body into a river. Depew told the jury, ‘If it had not been for Carol I would never have touched him … He looked so beautiful lying there sleeping.’

7 BERNADETTE SCOTT Between 1979 and 1981, Peter Scott, a British computer programmer, made seven attempts to kill his 23-year-old wife after taking out a $530,000 insurance policy on her. First he put mercury into a strawberry flan, but he put in so much mercury that it slithered out. Next, Peter served Bernadette a poisoned mackerel, but she survived her meal. Once in Yugoslavia and again in England, Peter tried to get her to sit on the edge of a cliff, but she refused. When Bernadette was in bed with chicken pox, her husband set the house on fire, but the blaze was discovered in time. His next arson attempt met with the same result. Bernadette had her first suspicion of foul play when Peter convinced her to stand in the middle of the street while he drove their car toward her, saying he wanted to ‘test the suspension’. He accelerated, but he swerved away moments before impact. ‘I was going to run her over but I didn’t have the courage’, he later confessed to the police. Pleading guilty to several charges, he was jailed for life. The Scotts had been married for two years.

8 ALAN URWIN According to the Daily Mirror, after his wife left him, Urwin, a 46-year-old former miner from Sunderland, England, made seven suicide attempts in a three-month period in 1995. Having survived three drug overdoses, he wound an electrical wire about his body, got into a tub of water, and plugged the wires into an outlet. The fuse blew out and he suffered a minor electric shock. He then tried to hang himself with the same piece of wire, but it snapped and he fell to the floor, very much alive. For his sixth attempt, he broke a gas pipe in his bedroom and lay next to it. When this didn’t kill him, he lit a match. The explosion blew away the gable end of his semi-detached house, along with the windows and part of the roof. He was pulled out of the wreckage suffering nothing worse than some flash burns. He was convicted of arson and placed on two years’ probation. A few months later, he was on speaking terms with his ex-wife and was considerably more cheerful.