Free 100 Most Infamous Criminals by Jo Durden Smith Page A

new headquarters. They must have decided that it was Dunlop who’d betrayed them. For a day later his naked, bullet-riddled body was found by a lake near Webster, Wisconsin. There was a blood-stained woman’s glove beside it.

    Ma Barker headed a family of criminals
    From now on Ma seems only to have trusted ex-cons and escapers from one or other of her three boys’ jails. Several of these now joined Fred, Alvin Karpis and her; when the growing gang took a bank in Fort Scott, Kansas in June 1932, they used the proceeds to stage a welcome home party for one of Fred’s ex-cellmates. Three months later, with some of the $240,000 that they heisted from the Cloud County Bank in Concordia, Kansas, they bought ‘Doc’s’ parole from the Oklahoma Pen – and even ‘two years of absence’ for his partner-in crime, Volney Davis. Leavenworth, though, proved a more difficult proposition. Hermann stayed behind bars.
    December 1932: Minneapolis, Third Northwestern Bank – two policeman and a civilian killed. April 1933: Fairbury, Nebraska, Fairbury National Bank – one gang member killed. June 1933: Minneapolis, Arthur Hamm Jr, of the Hamm Brewing Company kidnapped – yield, $100,000. The kidnappings, the bank-heists and the killings went on through 1933. In South St. Paul, one policeman was killed, another crippled for life. In Chicago, a traffic cop was gunned down while enquiring about an accident with the gang’s car, unaware that bank messengers had been recently been held up nearby. The pressure on Ma’s boys and the offers of rewards, though, began to pile up; and it was because of this, perhaps, that they decided in January 1934 to go for the big one.
    They’d first decided simply to rob the Commercial State Bank in St. Paul. Then they decided to kidnap the bank’s president. After a month’s negotiations about the ransom and conditions, they took the enormous sum of $200,000 – enough, they thought, to buy them new identities and new lives. Fred and ‘Doc’ Barker, Alvin Karpis and a few of the others had their fingerprints shaved off and their faces surgically altered. And then they all scattered to locations across the United States, from Montana to Florida, Nevada, Ohio and elsewhere.
    A year after the kidnapping, for all this, ‘Doc’ was picked up in the apartment of his Chicago girlfriend and in it was found a map of Florida, with the area around Ocala and Lake Weir circled. This coincided with a tip the Feds had had: that Ma and Fred were hiding somewhere in the south, where there was a famous alligator known to locals as ‘Old Joe’. Within days, then, they raided a cottage on the shore of Lake Weir. Ma and Fred put up a fight, but by the time the shooting was over, they were both dead, Ma with a machine gun still in her hand. There were enough weapons in the cottage, J. Edgar Hoover later said,
‘to keep a regiment at bay.’
    The rest of the gang were soon picked up, in ones and twos, in Toledo, Ohio and Allandale, Florida; and finally Alvin Karpis was run to ground in New Orleans. Years later, after being sentenced to life imprisonment, Karpis, whose real name was Francis Albin Karpavicz, taught Charlie Manson the guitar.
     

David Berkowitz
    O n April 17th 1977, a letter was found on a Bronx street in New York from a postal worker called David Berkowitz. It was addressed to a police captain and read in part:

    The ‘Son of Sam’ terrified New Yorkers
‘I am deeply hurt by your calling me a woman-hater. I am not. But I am a monster… I am a little brat… I am the Son of Sam.’
    Nearby was a parked car in which Berkowitz’s latest victims, a young courting couple, had been arbitrarily gunned down. Valentina Suriani had died immediately; Alexander Esau died later in hospital, with three bullets in his head.
    No one, of course, knew then that the ‘Son of Sam’ was the pudgy twenty-four-year-old Berkowitz. But for nine months he’d been terrorizing the late-night streets of Queens and the