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.
13 Mothers of Infamous Men
1 AGRIPPINA, THE YOUNGER (mother of NERO, monstrous Roman emperor) Raised by her grandmother, Agrippina was accused of having had incestuous relations with her brother Caligula. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (later called Nero) was the product of her first marriage. She was believed to have poisoned her second husband before embarking upon a third marriage, which was to her uncle, Emperor Claudius I. She held such sway over Claudius that she convinced him to set aside his own son and make her son Nero heir to the throne. When Nero was 16, she poisoned Claudius, thus setting the stage for Nero to be proclaimed emperor. Resentful of his mother’s continuing interference, Nero later arranged to have her assassinated.
2 HANNAH WATERMAN ARNOLD (mother of BENEDICT ARNOLD, American traitor in the Revolutionary War) Hannah belonged to a prominent family and when, as a young widow, she married Benedict Arnold III, she brought with her considerable wealth inherited from her first husband. Unfortunately, her new husband squandered this fortune, and as his ineptitude increased, Hannah assumed a dominant position in the household. She achieved a reputation as a long-suffering, pious woman, and she was pitied by her neighbours. When her young son, Benedict Arnold IV, was sent away to school, she wrote him long letters advising him as to proper Christian behaviour. Hannah lost five of her seven children in a yellow-fever epidemic, and thereafter she was obsessed by fears of death. She continually exhorted young Benedict and his sister to submit to God’s will and urged them to be prepared do die at any moment. Hannah herself died when her son Benedict was 18.
3 MARY ANN HOLMES BOOTH (mother of JOHN WILKES BOOTH, assassin of Abraham Lincoln) Eighteen-year-old Mary Ann was a London flower girl when she first met Junius Brutus Booth, a talented but dissolute tragedian. Already legally married, Junius fell madly in love with the gentle, warmhearted Mary Ann. In 1821, he accompanied her to the US. Eventually she bore Junius 10 children, and John Wilkes was her ninth and favourite child. Although she was acknowledged as his wife in America, Mary Ann’s existence was kept secret from Junius’s legal wife in England. However, in 1846, his double life was exposed, and in 1851 he obtained a divorce and at last wed Mary Ann. John Wilkes was devoted to his mother, and it is reputed that his dying words after he had assassinated Abraham Lincoln were ‘Tell Mother … tell Mother … I died for my country.’
4 BARBARA BUSH (mother of GEORGE BUSH, JR., president of the United States) Born on June 8, 1925, Barbara Pierce grew up in Rye, New York, a wealthy suburb of New York City. Her father was an executive in the publishing industry. When Barbara was 16 years old, she met George Bush at a country club dance. Three years later she dropped out of Smith College so that the two could marry. While her husband pursued a career in the oil industry and eventually entered politics, Barbara gave birth to six children, of whom George Jr was the oldest. (A daughter, Robin, died of leukaemia at the age of four.) George Jr was not a perfect son. Saddled with a serious alcohol problem until the age of 40, he was arrested at least three times, once for stealing a wreath, once for public rowdiness at a Yale–Princeton football