Then – in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
From ‘Alone’ (1829) – Edgar Allan Poe
CONTENTS
Title Page
1 SANTOS GODINO: ARGENTINA’S JUG-EARED MONSTER
2 ISSEI SAGAWA: HOW TO EAT PEOPLE AND INFLUENCE THEM
3 MARCELO COSTA DE ANDRADE: THE VAMPIRE OF RIO
4 RANDY KRAFT: THE SCORECARD KILLER
5 DANNY ROLLING: THE GAINESVILLE RIPPER
6 THE WASP WOMAN MURDER
7 JEROME BRUDOS: THE SHOE FETISH SLAYER
8 BAR-JONAH: SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
9 NAZIS AND MURDER IN SITCOM LAND: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF BOB CRANE
10 ‘BAD BOB’ HANSEN AND THE HUNTERS OF HUMAN PREY
11 ‘BUTCHER BROWN’ AND THE DEADLY DOCTORS
12 CONSTANTINO MACHUCA AND THE KILLER COOKS: MEAT IS MURDER
13 MURDEROUS REAL-LIFE WITCHES
14 TEENAGE KILLERS
15 DIG TWO GRAVES: TERRIBLE REVENGE
16 BIZARRE BODY DISPOSAL
17 BLOODY PACKAGES
18 WEIRD SCIENCE
19 SERIAL-KILLER GROUPIES: MEET THE WOMEN WHO LOVE KILLERS
20 SEVEN
21 HOW TO SPOT A NATURAL BORN KILLER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
About the Author
Copyright
SANTOS GODINO: ARGENTINA’S JUG-EARED MONSTER
Did child-killer Santos Godino’s ‘odd’ features offer a clue about why he liked to torture toddlers and slaughter infants?
While there have been many cases of children who kill, perhaps none has been as instinctively savage and ferocious as that of Santos Godino. The sixth of seven children, Godino was born on 31 October 1896 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Deformed at birth, with saucer-sized ears, a short body and overly long arms and legs, he soon became known as the local neighbourhood freak, dubbed ‘el Petisu Orejudo’, or ‘the short big-eared one’.
Godino grew up in the neighbourhood of Parque Patricios. Today, this is a pleasant enough locale of Buenos Aires; trees line the streets among the fairly modest high-rise tenements. A hundred years ago, however, it was a poverty-stricken slum and home to an enormous slaughterhouse; four whole blocks of it were cut off each day as the cattle were driven in and killed on the streets, in plain view of the local residents.
As if the sight of blood and the sound of screaming cattle weren’t bad enough in the morning, at night the whole of the city’s waste was brought to Parque Patricios, and then burned. Since most of the houses there were made out of salvaged junk, it went by the name of ‘the city of tin’ or ‘the bonfire’; the neighbourhood stank of stale blood and burning rubbish. The majority of people who lived there were Spanish or Italian immigrants who had come to Argentina looking for a new life and found themselves working at starvation wages in the local slaughterhouse. In short, it was the kind of place that would swallow you whole in around five seconds flat if you didn’t know your way around. Perhaps nobody would come to know the streets of Parque Patricios better than Argentina’s first and most notorious serial killer.
As his home life was utterly dismal, Godino spent most of his time trying to avoid it. School didn’t provide much escape: expelled almost instantly from every institution he ever attended, from the age of ten he took to wandering the streets, returning home only when hunger drove him to it. His father had been drunk for as long as Godino could remember and frequently beat his wife and kids senseless. But Godino, uncontrollable from the start, came in for special attention and his father frequently thrashed him around the head with a belt buckle. By the time he was 16, he had 27 scars on his head to prove it.
Most people regarded him as a slightly demented but harmless local pest; in fact, behind his somewhat vacant gaze, Godino was a fairly resourceful killer. At the age of seven, he was busy torturing to death every animal he could get his little hands on, and then keeping them under his bed in a box. What’s more, on his daily jaunts about town, he was single-mindedly luring children to abandoned houses and wastelands and murdering them.
It took him a while to get it right.
When he was seven, he beat up 17-month-old Miguel de Paoli and then threw him into a razor-sharp thorn bush, but was spotted by a policeman who had seen the small boy crying and rushed over to see what was happening. The resourceful Santos began caressing the boy, told the policeman he had found him in the bush and insisted that he take him back to his mother. When he got back with the child, he was rewarded with some sweets.
Godino wasn’t the brightest boy in the world, but he had a cunning streak. Of the 11 times he tried to kill, he was interrupted five times by nearby adults or police but managed to talk his way out of it every time. Even when he was taken to the police station (which happened three times), his age worked in his favour and he was released soon afterwards. Moreover, in most cases his victims were too young to even talk.
A year after trying to kill De Paoli, he hospitalised toddler Ana Neri for six months after trying to cave her head in with a rock. Believing the girl dead, he found the girl’s father and told him that he had found her lying on the ground and that she had fallen over. Shortly after that, he claimed his first fatality. He was never able to remember her name properly and her body was never discovered but he did remember later that she was too young to walk so he had carried her to an abandoned patch of land – where he buried her alive in a ditch.
It was March 1906 and Santos Godino was nine years old.
In the same year, his father gave up on him and took him in to the local police station, complaining that his son was utterly indifferent to any kind of authority whatsoever. As well as hurling rocks at the neighbours and seriously injuring them, by now Godino was also attacking his brothers and sisters. His father told the police that, if they didn’t take him into some kind of custody, he would ‘kill the little bugger’ himself. (He had, so legend has it, on that very morning found a dead bird in his boot – a present from Santos, no doubt.)
According to a statement signed by Francisco Laguarda, the head of the local police station, Godino’s father Fiore walked into the station and filed official charges against his own son. The statement reads as follows: ‘In the city of Buenos Aires on April 5 1906, a person appeared before me and identified himself as Fiore Godino, a 42-year-old Italian immigrant who has been living in Argentina for 18 years. During his testimony,