Innehållsförteckning för Real Crime Death Row från Real Crime Death Row

South Central, later known as South Los Angeles, is a 132-square-kilometre region of Los Angeles County, divided up into 28 rough, rundown neighbourhoods. It’s a dark place, filled with disillusioned individuals struggling to survive. Poverty and the ever-present easy escape of drugs are major issues. Children and teenagers are constantly lured away from their families into the ‘protection’ of the territorial gangs. Add a hefty dose of racial unrest and you are left with a hotbed of crime. The discovery of dead, drug-addled prostitutes rarely made the news back in the 1980s – after all, crack cocaine was sweeping the county and such events were an inevitable by-product. However, unbeknown to the local homicide detectives, the discovery of Debra Jackson would be the starting point of a 30-year manhunt for…

1 MCVEIGH PARKS UP In the cargo bay of the rented Ford F-700 truck are 13 barrels of explosives weighing about 225 kilograms each, 160 kilograms of high-grade Tovek sausage explosives and two fuses – one two-minute and one five-minute – that lead from the explosives into the cab. McVeigh had lit the fuses at different intervals, which will ignite the explosives and, in turn, set off the main component of the bomb: the 13 barrels of fertiliser explosive. The weight of the bomb itself is over three tons, and had to be distributed carefully around the cargo bay to avoid breaking an axle while McVeigh was driving. 2 THE BOMB EXPLODES The blast is incredible; it obliterates one third of the Murrah building, taking out most of its north…

Accounts of Michael Gargiulo varied depending on who he was around. Those who had known him in college described Gargiulo as the fastest and strongest of the football team. The Pacaccio family of Illinois, Chicago regarded him as the long-term friend to middle child Doug. Gargiulo’s friends outside of college said he considered himself a master of forensic science. To his female neighbours in California – LA fashion student Ashley Lauren Ellerin, El Monte mother-of-four Maria Bruno, and Santa Monica resident Michelle Murphy – he was a ‘creepy’ and ‘strange’ loner. According to the prosecution, he was a lust killer who slaughtered three women and attacked a fourth, as a means of control. His method, the prosecution laid bare in court as Gargiulo faced the death penalty, was to “identify…

The history of the death penalty does not begin with its invention. It’s not an idea that someone just thought up one day – the death penalty has been the norm throughout most of human history. In the animal kingdom, violent (although not necessarily deadly) retribution is by far the most common form of punishment, and this was the same for human beings until relatively recently. What sets us apart from animals is that we’re able to devise complex systems of social order, and can be just as creative when it comes to thinking up ways to punish those who don’t keep in line. One of the earliest known sets of laws is the Code of Hammurabi, by which the people of 18th century BCE Babylon had to live. The…

His muscles stretch as he reaches upwards and loops the rope into place. He knows what’s coming. Sinews tense as, with a little difficulty, he ties the knot. His toes are only just touching the ground. They jiggle a little. A fumble or two later and his breathing has quickened. His heart beat speeds up by the minute. The world blurs, and he can feel his hairline tingle. His nerve endings are lining themselves with moisture as the door opens and his mother’s eyes lock on the jumping erection blooming within his pants, as his hands claw to a halt. It was just a temporary pause – he was barely a teenager but unashamed at being found in this deviant act of selfpleasuring by his own mother. Years later Harvey…

How can a dreamer be dead at 14? You could ask Aileen Wuornos, although she actually died many years later. Aileen’s life was effectively over when she was a smiling slip of a kid sucking on men’s private parts for cigarettes in the woods near her home. The real question is what actually went on inside her head and why it led to her being sentenced to death for killing seven men that she picked up while working as a hooker. Aileen dreamed a dream in which she saw her life through the movies, put up a front and played the roles she thought were expected of her. The roles her life cast her in were, sadly, extraordinary. The narratives included other characters too, such as one of her victim’s…

The way into work is the splintered blue-grey of your average, rush-hour Monday morning. The clothes feel too tight and you’re trapped in an underground carriage with other people who look similarly like the world is going to end. Hitching slightly, it seems a cold is coming as your nose runs a little and a tiny, sharp needle drags from your throat to pricking at your watery eyes. Looking up to steady yourself, your vision is obscured. Are you really that tired? It’s too warm, too tight and breathing has become a conscious effort. Straighten up. The other well-mannered shapes appear to be holding napkins to their mouths. Thump. Thwud. Shoosd. The thrum of the train is being gradually tuned out by gargling sounds as bodies around you retch yellow…

Although 15 minutes doesn’t sound like much time, in a situation that involves a national manhunt, suddenly every second of waiting is a virtual lifetime expended. For truck driver Ron Lantz, those moments of time most certainly felt like an eternity. On 24 October 2002, Lantz, who was only a few delivery runs shy of retirement, spotted a vehicle matching the descriptions he had heard from police bulletins. He quickly realised that the 1990 blue Chevy parked at a rest stop off Interstate 70, near Myersville Maryland, could very well be that of the pair wanted in connection with more than a dozen shootings. It was a subject he and other truckers discussed; some, including Lantz, even held prayer sessions in hopes of the perpetrators being stopped. And there, right…

“BUT POLICE HAD NO CLUE WHERE HE WAS, AND FRUSTRATINGLY, THE DNA MATCH ALONE WAS NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO ARREST GARGIULO”…

“The interesting thing was when I had a conversation with him in Aspen after his first escape,” said John Henry Browne, one of Ted Bundy’s many defence attorneys. “He turned to me and said, ‘Where would a person go in the United States to get the death penalty for certain?’ I told him without hesitating, ‘Florida or Texas,’ because the statutes are upheld as constitutional. So he escapes the second time, makes it to Michigan before they realise that he’s escaped… He could have got lost in Chicago. If you want to get lost in the United States, Chicago is the place to do it. But what does he do? He goes to a small college town in Florida, the place I told him that he would get the death…

On 16 December 2004, Lisa Marie Montgomery drove 175 miles from her house in Kansas, over the state line into Skidmore, Missouri – approximate population 342, according to the census four years previously. This town straddles one main street flanked by old red brick buildings: grocery and hardware stores, a bar and the town hall – the lifeblood of such tiny settlements. Generations of farmers have been brought up and died here in Skidmore, people know each other by name, there’s that sense of community you just don’t get in the big city. Montgomery turned down West Elm Street where the red brick was replaced by small wooden houses, and parked near number 410. Clutching a bag containing a length of rope, a sharp kitchen knife, a syringe and a…

It isn’t that the official version of the worst act of domestic terrorism in the United States is an outright lie, but this story has been squeezed into a narrative. The case of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, as the man who pulled the proverbial trigger that killed 168 and injured hundreds has been sewn up like a bad Hollywood movie script, with an evil arch-villain, multiple victims and a court case that ends with a full, unrepentant confession. Job done. But the whole murky truth is far less convenient – and that’s no over-egged conspiracy theory. There are many questions that the FBI and the courts cannot or will not explain to any satisfaction, or at all: like the precise origin of the plot or who else was…

“GOD HAS FORGIVEN HER FOR WHAT SHE’S DONE AND OUR STATE HAS THE DEATH PENALTY SO WHY NOT GO FOR IT, I MEAN, WOW! SHE COULD BE HOME WITH JESUS IN ANOTHER FEW YEARS”ARLENE PRALLE AILEEN WUORNOS (THE MONSTER) Loathed lesbian, good-time girl, multiple murderess and Christian-adopted daughter. Aileen is convinced that the cops have used her to “clean up the streets” by killing curb crawlers. She willingly plays the role others have cast her in, but the ‘real Aileen’ is increasingly elusive. RICHARD, DAVID, CHARLES C, PETER, TROY, CHARLES H AND WALTER (THE VICTIMS) Aileen meets them on the freeway over the course of a year. They are normal men. They meet the lady on the highway and wind up sometimes naked and robbed, and always dead. Innocent victims…