Tag Archives: 1985

1985: The Dujail Massacre

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On this date in 1985, 96 Iraqis were executed for an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein. Though not the only or the largest atrocity of that dictator, it was the crime that would do to hang him under the U.S. occupation.

Two years deep into the horrific Iran-Iraq War, Hussein paid a ceremonial visit to theShi’ite town of Dujail north of Baghdad and was greeted by an armed ambuscade — up to a dozen gunmen springing from the cover of date palms to fire at the president’s motorcade. They missed.*

The ensuing vengeance was visited so widely as to earn the sobriquet Dujail Massacre: something like 1% of the 75,000-strong town wound up in the hands of the torturers, with 148 death sentences handed down and approved by the president — and they were none too exacting about direct complicity in the assassination, freely sweeping up regime opponents and sympathizers with the outlawed Dawa Party.

A document of March 23, 1985, certifies their mass execution although the Iraqi Special Tribunal‘s investigation found this to be a a bit of an overstatement; some had already been executed previously or died of maltreatment in custody, while a few of those still alive were not present in Abu Ghraib on that day. All told, it appears that 96 of the 148 people condemned to death for the attempt on Saddam Hussein’s life were put to death on March 23, 1985. To multiply the injury, the families of the alleged perpetrators also suffered confiscation of their homes and destruction of their orchards.

The detailed documentary trail, and specifically Hussein’s personal approval of the death sentences, recommended this case to the U.S. occupation of the early 2000s as the rope by which to hang the now-deposed dictator and his closest associates. Accordingly, the Dujail Massacre executions formed one of the central charges in the 2005-2006 trial that resulted in Saddam Hussein’s own execution.

* There were a couple of presidential bodyguards killed.

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1985: Joachim Knychala, the Vampire of Bytom

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Polish serial killer Joachim Knychala, colorfully known as “The Vampire of Bytom” or “Frankenstein”, was hanged in Krakow just in time for Halloween on this date in 1985.

Knychala (English Wikipedia entry | the far more informative Polish) was a married miner of mixed German-Polish heritage — a fact which reportedly drew him considerable childhood abuse — who committed five sex-murders in Upper Silesia from 1975 to 1982.

He inherited his appellation from a different Silesian mass murderer, Zdzislaw Marchwicki, the “Vampire of Zaglebie,” with whom he eerily shared a victim: Miroslawa Sarnowska, who survived an attack by the earlier Vampire and gave crucial evidence against him, was Knychala’s third homicide.

Our guy’s m.o. was to surprise his prey with a bludgeon about the head, sometimes killing outright and other times incapacitating; despite his savagery, several women and girls survived his assaults. He did most of his evil work over the late 1970s; arrested as a suspect in such an attack in September 1979, he had a strong alibi* for the occasion at hand and then had the half-discipline to lay low for a few years after his fortuitous release.

But he could not conceal his fangs forever. In May 1982, he reported the death of his 17-year-old sister-in-law in a “fall in the woods.” Examination of the body told a more sinister tale: she’d been done in by a blunt force near the top of the skull (improbable for a mere accidental fall), and she’d had recent intercourse. Knychala was dramatically arrested at the girl’s very funeral, eventually copping to his spree and comforting himself with the hopes of a better afterlife … of pop culture notoriety. He has thus far somewhat maintained his recognizable infamy in a Poland that no longer produces death sentences.

* Seemingly strong: his work card proved his attendance at the mine at the time of the attack. Only later, during the decisive trial, was it realized that his foreman routinely registered leave time earned by Knychala’s overtime work with the state’s official youth organization by simply punching the vampire’s card as if he’d been present on such a leave day.

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1985: Hezekiah Ochuka, ruler of Kenya for six hours

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On this date in 1985, Kenya air force private Hezekiah Ochuka was hanged for his August 1, 1982 coup d’etat.

By ethnicity a politically marginalized Luo, Ochuka led a putsch of junior airmen whose announcement of leadership over the radio startled Kenyans rising for their breakfast on August 1, 1982.

That leadership lasted only six hours before forces loyal to the ethnically Kikuyu president Daniel arap Moi suppressed it. Some 300 souls were killed in the course of events.

The subsequent security sweep took up not only the putschists themselves but exploited the opportunity to crack down on prominent opposition figures — men like Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and George Anyona, who were tossed into the brutal Nyayo House torture center essentially for being anti-Moi politicians — and beyond them thousands of ordinary Kenyans thought vaguely proximate to sedition by virtue of their politics, lineage, or station in life.

Ochuka himself fled to neighboring Tanzania hoping to find asylum; instead, he was extradited back to Kenya for capital trial and hanged along with two of his collaborators, Corporals Bramwel Injeni Njereman and Walter Odira Ojode, in a badly botched execution.

These men retain to this day the distinction of being the last judicially executed in Kenyan history, even though Kenya still has the death penalty on its books.

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1985: Doyle Skillern, under the law of parties

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A philosophical Doyle Skillern was executed in Texas on this date in 1985, one of the more galling victims of Texas’s controversial “Law of Parties” — in which all parties involved in a lesser felony (such as armed robbery) may be held liable for a greater felony (such as murder) committed by any of their number.

Skillern and a buddy named Charles Sanne were drug dealers being set up for arrest by a narcotics agent.

In the course of a buy, the suspicious Sanne got the officer, Patrick Randel, into his vehicle on the pretext of doing business elsewhere — intending in fact to rob Randel. While Skillern trailed in a different vehicle, Sanne shot Randel to death (and robbed him). By the accounts of both men the shooting wasn’t premeditated; Sanne said that Randel tried to pull a gun on him and a spontaneous fight ensued.

Textbook law of parties case, made more perverse by the fact that the actual shooter, Sanne, received a prison term and was approaching parole eligibility by the time his non-triggerman accomplice, Skillern, went to the gurney.

(In fairness to the great state of Texas we must observe that Skillern’s jury when considering factors to aggravate the crime found out that he had a previous murder on his record, that of his brother. Sanne’s previous record consisted only of petty crimes.)

Prison officials said that an emotionless Skillern mused upon learning of the rejection of his last appeals, “A lot of people will still have their troubles tomorrow and mine will be over.”

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1985: Kent Bowers, the last hanged in Belize

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 1985, murderer Kent Bowers met his death by hanging at Belize Central Prison in Hattieville. Only seventeen on the date of his crime, he had reached legal age by the time of his death.

On July 4 of the previous year, Bowers had gone to the Sueno Beliceño restaurant in Belize City, where Francis and Dora Codd were having a private party to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Bowers hadn’t been invited to the party, and he was asked to leave. The Codds’ son Robert escorted him to the door, but outside, a struggle ensued and Bowers stabbed Robert in the chest and abdomen. The victim died within minutes and Bowers was arrested.

He pleaded self-defense at trial, but this argument went nowhere. An appeals court noted,

On the evidence of the prosecution witnesses it can hardly be said that the accused in producing a knife and stabbing indiscriminately was acting in self defence. None of the persons around him were armed, two were women and their efforts were directed to separating the appellant and the deceased rather than to attacking the appellant. Indeed it was never suggested to any of the witnesses in cross examination that anyone had struck the appellant or threatened him.

Kent Bowers was convicted on October 23; the death sentence was mandatory. 2,500 people signed a petition for clemency, but it was denied.

Bowers’s crime and execution were fairly forgettable, but for one detail: as of this writing, he remains the last man to have been hanged in Belize.

The death penalty is still on the books, however. Glenford Baptist was the most recent death row prisoner; he was convicted in 2001, and in 2015, his death sentence was commuted to 25 years.

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1983: 26 in Tehran

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London Times, Aug. 21, 1983:

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1985: Major Zin Mo, failed assassin

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On this date in 1985, North Korean Major Zin Mo was hanged in Buma’s Insein prison.

Eighteen months earlier nearly to the day, a huge bomb ripped apart Rangoon’s monumental mausoleum tribute to martyred founding hero Aung San.

The bomb was meant for visiting South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan,* who planned to lay a wreath at the site. But the infernal machine detonated too early, sparing its target — though 21 others lost their lives, 17 of them Korean, including Foreign Minister Lee Beom-seok.

The ensuing manhunt turned up three North Korean commandos, each of whom had been detailed short-fused grenades to commit spectacular suicide to evade capture.

Zin Kee-Chu started pulling stuff out of his bag. First a pile of money came out and while the policemen were temporarily distracted by the cash he then pulled out a hand grenade and detonated right there.

Their hand grenades had short 1 second fuses unlike our M-36 hand grenades with the longer 4 seconds fuses. So the explosion was immediate and some policemen and Captain Zin Kee-Chu himself were killed there. (Source)

But Major Zin Mo survived his explosives, albeit with devastating injuries, and fellow-captain Kang Min Chul lacked the fortitude to make the suicide attempt at all. Under none-too-gentle interrogation, Zin Mo kept his mouth shut and accepted his secret execution for the People’s Republic. Zin Kee-Chu didn’t have any better stomach to hang for his country than to blow himself up for it; he didn’t hang and lived out his life in Burmese captivity, having apparently cut a deal to tell all in exchange for his life.

There’s a phenomenal firsthand retrospective on these events, liberally illustrated, here, written by a present-day Burmese exile who was in Rangoon on the day the mausoleum was bombed.

* Chun was the guy who emerged in charge after Korea’s intelligence chief bizarrely assassinated President Park Chung-hee in 1979.

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1985: Carroll Edward Cole

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On this date in 1985, serial killer Carroll Edward “Eddie” Cole was executed in Nevada.

A smart and troubled Iowa boy, Cole‘s earliest memories were of his mother’s thrashings to scare him into keeping quiet about the affairs she had while dad was away fighting World War II.

One never knows how trauma will work its way with this or that child. In Cole’s case, it twisted him early on: he nursed a deepening hatred for women and a callousness to his fellows that would one day be diagnosed as psychopathy. Cole’s final body count is not known for sure, but while in prison he would claim that the first of them was a bullying schoolmate named Duane whom he drowned. Duane’s death had been ruled by examiners as an accident.

Carroll tested with a genius-level I.Q., but his criminal career was not one of devious brilliance. Alcoholism and petty crime — soon not so petty at all — consumed him in his adolescence and put him on his way to a rootless, lonely life alternating dead end jobs, catastrophic relationships, jail terms, and mental institutions.

The latter two did not acquit themselves well for their frequent contact with the budding butcher. Over and over, Cole was discharged without the benefit of either treatment or restraint even though Cole himself sought help on several occasions. In 1963, a psychiatrist at Stockton State Hospital in California observed that Cole “seems to be afraid of the female figure and cannot have intercourse with her first but must kill her before he can do it.” Then, that doctor approved Cole’s release. It happened again in 1970 when he checked into a Reno facility begging doctors to help him control his fantasies of misogynist violence. The doctors didn’t buy his act and sent him on his way.

Self-medicating from the bottle, Cole drifted to Texas; he married an alcoholic stripper* there, then ended it by torching in a jealous rage the hotel where she resided. Then on to Missouri and a five-year sentence for trying to strangle a little girl there — then Nevada — then back to California. In San Diego in 1971 he finally embarked on his career in homicide, Duane notwithstanding. He picked up a woman in a bar and strangled her to death. Later he would explain that Essie Buck had proven herself faithless to her real partner: vicarious revenge against his adulterous mother.

Again, an institutional failure: Cole was questioned in this murder, but released uncharged.

And thanks to that police misstep, Eddie Cole drifted through the 1970s in a drunken fog, detained several times for the minor crimes he had been committing since his teens, but murdering often without repercussion. Soon enough he experimented with necrophilia and cannibalism, too. “In the case of a woman he murdered in Oklahoma City,” according to Charlotte Greig, “he claims he came out of an alcoholic blackout to find slices of his victim’s buttocks cooking on a skillet.”

Crime Library has a detailed biography of Cole and his murders. “Spree”, with its undertones of passion and energy, doesn’t feel like quite the right word to use for this man’s self-loathing crimes. Few serial killers better exemplify the ease with which one preys on people on the fringe, the police lethargy in investigating a suspicious death that nobody cares about.

In San Diego in 1979, he strangled one woman at his own workplace, then murdered his latest alcoholic wife Diana a few weeks later. Cole was arrested digging his wife’s grave: they still ruled the death accidental. How much simpler just to close the file on the “drunken tramp”?

Cole left California after that and returned to Dallas (pausing long enough in Las Vegas for one of the two murders that would supply him his death sentence). There he slaughtered three women in the span of 11 days and was once again on the verge of being cleared as a suspect when he simply confessed to the police. His existential scream was lost in America’s trackless underbelly; in the end, he had to beg for someone, anyone, to catch and kill him. He would claim to have killed about 35 women but even then investigators, ever skeptical, would chalk more than half that tally up to bravado.

Despite what one might think about Texas’s suitability for culminating a career in self-destruction, Cole caught only a life sentence there. Fortunately for him, his wandering ways made possible a bit of venue-shopping for the death sentence he sought.

In 1984, after his own mother died, he waived extradition and voluntarily went to face two murder charges in Nevada. There he simply pleaded guilty to capital murder.

The careworn killer rocketed from conviction in October 1984 to execution in a today-unthinkable 14 months, steadfastly repelling the attempts of outside advocates to intervene on his behalf or convince him to pick up his appeals. “I just messed up my life so bad that I just don’t care to go on,” he said.

At 1:43 a.m. this date, Cole entered Nevada’s brand-new lethal injection theater. He was not the first executed in Nevada’s (post-Gary Gilmore) “modern” era: Jesse Bishop had earned that distinction in 1979. But he was the first to die in Nevada by that modernized killing technology, lethal injection. Nevada had cribbed the idea from Texas after the Silver State’s last cutting-edge killing apparatus, the gas chamber, started leaking.

It took Cole about five minutes to finally achieve his death wish … 47 years, six months, 27 days, and those five minutes.

Emerging from the spectacle, Cole’s Nevada prosecutor enthused, “It is enjoyable to see the system work.”

* Billy Whitworth worked at a club owned by Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

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1985: Vladimir Vetrov, Farewell

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This date in 1985 spelled farewell for the KGB agent Vladimir Vetrov … code-named Farewell by the western handlers to whom he passed Soviet secrets.

Vladimir Vetrov was a career officer in Soviet intelligence who grew disgruntled* and in 1980 went to work for the West.

And he was no ordinary spy. Think Aldrich Ames, to the power of ten.

Vladimir Vetrov oversaw the entire KGB directorate charged with a critical program: Line X, which surveilled western R&D and passed its fruits back to Mother Russia. In the 1960s and 1970s, Line X stole jaw-dropping volumes of military, computer, and industrial advances.

And by 1980, all that information passed through Vetrov’s hands for distribution within the USSR. His betrayal blew the entire thing to smithereens.

When he turned, Vetrov gave 3,000 pages of top-secret documents to his French handlers, information which also made its way to the CIA. “The Soviet military and civil sectors were in large measure running their research on that of the West, particularly the United States,” recalls the gobsmacked American defense advisor who reviewed the file. “Our science was supporting their national defense.”

Book CoverSergei Kostin calls his book about the man Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century, and Vetrov has surely got a claim on that title. (It’s either Vetrov or Sorge when it comes to the annals of Soviet espionage.)

The Farewell dossier exposed the entirety of the Soviet technology-stealing infrastructure, with a couple of enormous consequences.

One, it influenced Cold War strategy in the West, supporting the Reagan administration’s view that the Soviet economy (absent its stolen technological advances) could be pushed into collapse.

And two, it facilitated Langley’s most spectacular counterespionage coup, brainchild of Gus Weiss. Rather than smashing up the Line X network, the CIA turned the enormous (and in Moscow, trusted) apparatus against its creators.

By feeding Soviet agents promising but subtly flawed technology, the Americans infiltrated sabotage points into the USSR — a Trojan Horse for the information age. In 1982, software running the Soviet Trans-Siberian Pipeline allegedly escalated gas pressure fatally on the Urengoy-Surgut-Chelyabinsk pipeline, triggering an explosion so large (three kilotons) that some foreign monitoring stations initially suspected a nuclear detonation. Weiss just told them not to worry.

Meanwhile, goes the story (and one must discount appropriately here for triumphalist spin), other crapware started failing elsewhere in the Soviet Union. “Pseudo-software disrupted factory output. Flawed but convincing ideas on stealth, attack aircraft and space defense made their way into Soviet ministries.” Suddenly, the Russians couldn’t know which Line X acquisitions were dependable and which were time bombs.


From Farewell, a 2009 film.

Vetrov’s candle burned bright, but brief: he stabbed his mistress (non-fatally) during a drunken argument in 1982, then stabbed to death the man who knocked on his window to intervene. Vetrov got a trip to Siberia, but while serving his time, he casually revealed that he’d authored maybe the most spectacular inside betrayal of Russian intelligence in the 20th century. He was duly recalled for a new trial and, eventually, a bullet in the head in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison. Even in the post-communist state, he’s still considered a villain in his homeland.

More about Vladimir Vetrov and the Farewell dossier in this BBC Witness podcast.

[audio:http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/witness/witness_20120726-0900a.mp3]

* Vetrov didn’t betray the Kremlin for money. Sergei Kostin believes it was professional frustration — the revenge of the underappreciated nebbish whose merits couldn’t break through the nepotism ceiling at the clubby KGB. However — though the explanations are not necessarily inconsistent — Vetrov also wrote a pre-execution “Confession of a Traitor” savaging the Soviet system: “My only regret is that I was not able to cause more damage to the Soviet Union and render more service to France.”

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1985: Marvin Francois, back to Africa

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On this date in 1985, Florida electrocuted Marvin Francois (to the disappointment of this unknown anti-death penalty protester).

Francois’s last statement, via Last Words of the Executed:

“I am as a grain of sand on the beach of the black race. The black race has lost its pride and dignity and is slowly dying from within and without. My death ends my tears, and the fortune of watching my race slowly die. If there is such a thing as an Antichrist, it ain’t one man, but the whole white race.”

Francois had donned a mask and, with a couple of confederates, stuck up a drug house in 1977.

The mask slipped, exposing Francois’s face — and the home invaders decided to murder the eight prisoners to keep them from making the ID. All were shot in the head execution-style.

Somehow, two survived to identify Marvin Francois. It was an easy conviction. (A confederate, Beauford White, was executed for the same crime in 1987.)

Once the death sentence was on the books, appellate attorneys developed a genuinely sympathetic profile of Francois’s background, if not his crime. A federal appeals court on the day before Marvin Francois died could not help but agree that

[t]he proffered evidence shows that Francois was the product of a sordid and impoverished childhood environment. His parents were not married. His father was a habitual heroin addict who never worked, who brought other addicts into the home for the ingestion of heroin in front of Francois when a child, and who beat Francois because he would not fight with other children when he was a boy. Francois’ mother often worked as a prostitute and was of little benefit to Francois during his childhood. She married but Francois’ step-father abused him. Francois grew up as a child of the street. At the same time he was smart, and although not finishing school, he obtained his G.E.D.

The behavioral scientists in their affidavits posit that “… some offenders, like Marvin Francois, are themselves victims of circumstances that shape their lives in ways beyond their deliberate control.” They suggest that given Francois’ chaotic antisocial upbringing, “clear mitigation of punishment compellingly surfaces.”

Nevertheless, the panel concluded that, given the extent of the crime (and his existing history of violence), all this sob-story stuff “would not have affected the sentencing outcome in this case had it been submitted to the jury.”

That was that.

It was a touching parting for at least one good friend on death row with him. “We wanted to send him out on a high,” a fellow-prisoner later remembered of sharing a last cigarette with Francois while imagining it a joint. “It took a little out of me when they killed him. I’d grown real attached to him.”

According to David von Drehle’s Among the Lowest of the Dead, that disattachment was rather unusually distant: Marvin Francois’s final resting place is … the sea off Dakar, Senegal.

Francois had asked that his ashes be scattered in Africa. Susan Cary, the longtime activist … was determined that this last wish would be honored. But it was one thing to find bus fare for a condemned man’s family, and quite another to raise the money for a trip to Africa. Cary collected the cremated remains of Marvin Francois and put them in a shoebox in her closet, where they sat for two years while she tried to figure out how to get them across the ocean.

In 1987, Michael Radelet, Cary’s frend and fellow activist, announced that he was going to Senegal to visit a relative. Take Marvin, Cary suggested. Radelet was game, but there were rules — human remains can’t just be toted from country to country. Uncertain as to the relevant legalities, Radelet contacted John Conyers, a prominent black congressman from Detroit; Conyers strongly opposed the death penalty, he was well known in Africa, and he had offered more than once to help Florida’s anti-death penalty crusaders any way he could. The congressman pulled the right strings, and shortly before his trip Radelete received an official letter announcing that the Senegalese government would be happy to welcome “Brother Marvin” home.

… Radelet had a darkly comic view of the world. Traipsing around Senegal, shoebox in hand, he would place the box on the opposite chair at restauants and say things like “Marvin, would you like some water?” On sightseeing jaunts, he would take snapshots of the shoebox in front of important buildings and picturesque vistas. Finally, Radelet carried the box to a bluff outside Dakar, a lovely spot with the city in the distance and the Atlantic spread out below. He took one more snapshot – “Marvin at the seashore” — then opened the box and sprinkled the ashes on the sun glittered waves. As he gazed into the oceanic expanse, it occurred to him that this very water might have rocked and sloshed all the way from Florida; now, the waves lapped the shores of Africa, bearing the remains of Marvin Francois to his dreamland.

The aforementioned Michael Radelet — now at Colorado University, not Florida — holding forth on more up-to-date death penalty trends:

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