A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

up. So, later, were Stan Walker’s father and Cortney Naisbitt’s mother Carol, who came looking for
them. The bandits then forced everyone to drink a caustic cleaning fluid, which burned their
mouths and throats. Then they were shot. The girl was raped before being shot. One of the bandits
pushed a ballpoint pen into the ear of Mr Walker and kicked it into his head. Carol Naisbitt died
after being admitted to hospital, but Cortney survived; after many operations, he was able to
resume normal life, although badly impaired. The two killers were careless, and were quickly
arrested. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
In a book about the case, Victim, The Other Side of Murder by Gary Kinder (1982), one interesting
point emerges. The killers got the idea of making the victims drink cleaning fluid from a Clint
Eastwood film called Magnum Force, in which a prostitute dies within seconds of being forced to
drink cleaning fluid by her pimp; Pierre obviously expected the victims to die immediately.
Magnum Force is one of Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ films about a San Francisco cop who, sick of
the way that a modern criminal can get away with murder, shoots to kill. Like the Bologna and
Oktoberfest bombings, the Ogden case seems to show that a violent reaction against violence can
be counter-productive.
In the summer of 1974, three teenage delinquents known as the ‘nice boys’ gang committed a series
of robberies, rapes and murders in Vienna. The leader, Manfred Truber, was seventeen. In late June
they kicked to death an elderly man and kicked a seventy-year-old woman unconscious, ripping off
her underwear. In July, a twenty-year-old girl was dragged into bushes and raped by all three, being
made to sit astride them and move up and down. A Yugoslav construction worker was stabbed
twenty-seven times and his nose almost severed from his face. In August, another girl was raped in
the park, and then tortured and humiliated for over an hour. On 30 August a sixty-eight-year-old
woman was infuriated when one of the boys punched her on the side of the head, and fought back
with her handbag. Police arrived and arrested all three. Their score had totalled two murders, two
rapes and twenty-two robberies with violence. Under Austrian law, it was possible to pass only
short sentences on the gang.
On 2 July 1976, four-year-old Marion Ketter was playing with friends when a mild-looking elderly
man persuaded her to go away with him. A few hours later, police searching a nearby block of flats
found that a lavatory was blocked up with a child’s intestines. In a bubbling saucepan on the stove
of a lavatory attendant, Joachim Kroll, the police found the child’s hand boiling with carrots and
potatoes; the rest of her, wrapped in plastic bags, was in the deep freeze. Kroll admitted that he had
been committing rape murders since 1955, and that in most cases he had taken slices of flesh from
the victims’ buttocks or thighs and later eaten them. The total number of victims is unknown, but
Kroll could recollect fourteen. He seemed to have no appreciation of the seriousness of his crimes,
and confidently expected to be allowed home after medical treatment.
A case with overtones of a James Bond thriller occurred in California in August 1976. The school
bus of Chowchilla, Madera County, was held up by three men, who forced twenty-six children and
the bus driver into two vans. They were then driven a hundred miles or so and, in the early hours of
the morning, ordered to climb down a shaft in the ground. It led to a large underground room – in
fact, a buried truck-trailer. They were given water and potato chips, and left.
When the sun rose, the van became overpoweringly hot. By standing on a pile of mattresses, the
driver succeeded in reaching the steel plate overhead, but it refused to budge. Hours later, they
succeeded in levering it aside, only to discover that the top of the shaft had been sealed with boards
that were apparently immovable. Eventually, in the late afternoon, they succeeded in digging past