How to wing it!

Fred Tokars. Have you ever heard of him? If you live in the Atlanta area, there’s a big chance that you have. Tokars used to be a lawyer who was involved in criminal activities such as money laundering and racketeering but what makes him interesting to me is the fact that when his wife discovered his criminal life, he paid for a hitman to kill her in front of his own two sons. That kind of mind is very interesting to me because the act is so cold-blooded that it just defies my understanding.

The crime.

Sara Tokars was arriving home from Florida with her two sons in the backseat of the car. When she got there, she found a stranger waiting. He forced her into the back of the car and drove off with all three. Then he stopped the vehicle, shot Sara in the head and ran away leaving the two little boys covered in blood. They were able to walk to a nearby house and get help.

Right away Fred Tokars was a suspect in his wife’s murder. The police learned of marital problems – Sara had told family members that Fred was often angry and temperamental and she suspected that he was involved with a very bad crowd of people . Her sister stated that Sara had called her and said that she had found proof of Fred’s activities but she would not tell her more over the phone . She also said she had found a way to divorce Fred and keep custody of the boys .

Tokars himself made police and Sara’s family even more suspicious .  After her death he was uncooperative and he bemoaned the loss of his lifestyle , not the loss of his partner or the tragedy that his kids had suffered . He attempted suicide because he said he was depressed . Then police discovered that there was a life insurance for Sara in the amount of $1.7 million . Fred was the sole beneficiary .

Police began looking at Fred’s business associates and soon discovered a shady character by the name of Eddie Lawrence who was arrested on bad check charges .  At first he denied any involvement in the murder but later – several months later – confessed that he had offered his secretary’s brother Curtis Rower $5000 to get rid of  “a white lady”.

He had dropped Curtis off at Tokar’s house where Curtis waited for her until she got home with the boys .

Tokars had insisted that the boys remain unharmed but that Sara be shot in the head to make sure she was dead .

He was arrested and convicted of money laundering , racketeering , kidnapping and murder for hire . He received four life sentences without the possibility of parole .

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Image via Wikipedia

Hi everyone, we’ve had a comment which unfortunately doesn’t show because we had to change our comment system but here it is:

thanks im doing an esa for school on him you gave me so new info if you post anything about ted bundy or charels manson that whould be great!!!

I certainly will ! Actually I have written a lot about Ted Bundy and I wanna direct you to a couple of the articles I wrote:

What is a psychopath?  Read here.

Where to find serial killer info online. Read here.

Burn, Bundy, Burn – On the twentieth anniversary of Ted Bundy’s execution. Read here.

I have never written about Charles Manson because he wasn’t really a serial killer and I never found him that interesting – but I hope you can use these links to study more for your essay.

Thanks for your nice comment!

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My mind is full of murderous women these days. Betty Broderick who shot and killed her ex husband Dan Broderick and his new wife. Doctor Debora Green who set fire to her house, killing two of her children. Diane Downs who shot her kids, killing one and injuring two. Susan Smith who strapped her two young sons in her car and then pushed it into a lake. Amy Fisher who shot her ex lover’s wife.

I usually read about male psychopaths but right now my eyes are very much opened to the fact that dangerous people are not always men. Know of any female psychopaths? Women who murdered their husbands, ex’s, children? Please leave a comment.

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Christopher Wilder, Most Wanted picture, Image via Wikipedia

Hello peeps! Today I’m going to write about a killer named Christopher Wilder. He is rather typical of the kind of person I usually write about in that he was a sexual sadist but he is also atypical in that he was a serial killer who turned spree killer in the end of his rampage.

Let’s start going through his background. He was born in Australia and almost died at birth. His father was American and his mother was Australian. At age 2 he almost drowned in a swimming pool. In the 60s he was found guilty of taking part in a gang rape and he was put on probation and received electroshock therapy; it is believed that this therapy only increased his sexual aggressive appetite.

In 68 he married but his wife left – having been with him in married “bliss” for a week! He moved to Florida in 69 and actually made …

quite a lot of money in real estate and developed an interest in photography. However, his sexual problems were quite clear during the seventies where he went in and out of jail for different sexual offences. Already at this early stage, he had sort of an MO in place: He’d pretend to be a professional photographer and lure young women into his truck where he’d assault them. Oddly enough, he would never be jailed for these crimes.

Then in 1982, he was charged with forcing two teenage girls to pose nude. His parents posted bail and Wilder would never get sentenced for this offense. The hearing would be in 1984; Wilder was dead by then. Actually his murder spree was quite short – from February to April 84 – but the hunt for him was very intense because he’d kill at a high rate during this short time span.

Rosario Gonzalez was the first known victim. Wilder was racing a Porsche 911 in the IMSA GTU class and Gonzalez was a model. She has never been found – neither has Wilder’s former girlfriend Elizabeth Kenyon who disappeared shortly after Gonzalez. Because Wilder knew both victims, he thought it better to run.

21-year old Terry Ferguson would be the next victim. He kidnapped her from a mall in Satellite Beach and dumped her body. The next unfortunate young woman had declined to be photographed by him and he’d wrapped her up in a blanket and held her in a motel room where he glued her eyes shut and assaulted her numerous times. He applied copper wires to her feet and passed electric currents through them. This young lady was a fighter, however, and she managed to lock herself in the bathroom where she started screaming. Wilder quickly fled . The girl had to search for help herself as her screams incredibly went unnoticed.

Already the next day Wilder approached 24 year old Terry Walden and told her he was a pro photographer. She declined to be photographed but two days later she disappeared. After dumping her body, he transferred his stolen license plates to her Mercury Cougar and then he murdered 21 year old Suzanne Logan.

Next two victims were 18-year old Sheryl Bonaventura and 17-year old Michelle Korfman who were both tortured before death. Like all of Wilder’s victims, they were young and beautiful.

The next victim 16-year old Tina Marie Risico was special in that she was kept alive to help Wilder lure other victims into his truck. Her mind has been so damaged by Wilder’s assaults that she not only helped him catch a new victim but she didn’t even try to escape although she had to chance.

The next victim – lured to Wilder by Tina Marie – was 16-year old Dawnette Wilt. At this point Wilder was on the FBI’S Most Wanted List. Dawnette was raped numerous times and then taken into the woods where she was stabbed and shot. She miraculously survived and by the time Wilder returned to the scene to make sure she was really dead, she had disappeared.
Healing in the hospital where she could give police more clues. She said Wilder was heading for Canada.

33-year old Beth Dodge  was the last victim and she was murdered only because Wilder needed her vehicle. He then drove Tina Marie to Logan Airport in Boston and bought her a ticket to LA. Wilder’s vehicle description was now broadcast out to law enforcement officials and on April 13th – after a failed attempt to kidnap another woman – his luck ran out. He stopped at a gas station and were approached by two police officers who had recognized him. Wilder reached into the car for his .357 Magnum and one of the troopers grabbed Wilder from behind. Wilder shot himself in the stomach, also injuring the trooper.

That’s where Wilder’s insane spree ended. He died instantly from his wounds. He left a personal estate of $2 million and is thought to have murdered many more women than the eight ones described.

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Quite frankly it’s gotta be the best serial killer movie ever made. It depicts the search for missing teenager Robert Piest who disappeared from outside the Nisson’s pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois in the late seventies. After a very intense investigation police would find a total of 28 bodies in local business man John Wayne Gacy‘s crawlspace and he claimed to have disposed of others in the nearby Des Plaines river, including the body of Robert Piest.

This movie is a must for true crime fans but also for regular film watchers. It’s exciting, thrilling, frightening and the actors (especially Brian Dennehy as John Wayne Gacy) do a fantastic job.

Thumbs up!

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There’s nothing like kicking back in the sun and reading about serial killers and stalkers. Well, for people like me, anyway. Former FBI profiler John Douglas is of course an expert in this field and he has written several excellent books. I can’t remember how many times I’ve read “Anatomy of Motive” but it’s more times than I can count on one hand. Douglas describes different kinds of dangerous offenders, analyzes their motives and tracks the escalation of the psychopathic behavior in the cases described.

If you’ve got a few hours to spare, check out this captivating book.

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Cleveland’s West Side was terrorized between 1983 to 1988 by a particularly cruel serial rapist who attacked women at night, creeping through an open window and masked in a stocking or scarf.

He’d order the woman to keep quiet, look away and hold a knife to her throat. As a final humiliation, he’d ejaculate either on the victims’ stomach or make her swallow.

Detective Bob Matuszny made it his personal goal to bring this brutal rapist to trial and he turned to the FBI for help.
They drew up a profile of a likely suspect: He picked victims who were easy to control (with children in a nearby room) or women he would be alone with. As the rapes occurred in the morning, it was thought that the rapist had no day job and if he had a job at all, it would be a menial job where he would have little contact with other people. He’d enjoy the fear he was instilling in people, having been named “The Westside Rapist” in the press, so he’d probably be collecting newspaper clippings about the case.

There’d be a woman in his life causing him stress but he’d be unable to stand up to her, taking his rage out on strangers instead. He’d most likely have a record of related crimes such as voyerism and he could be collecting pornography.

Over the next year Detective Mutaszny kept working at it and the rapist kept raping but in the end Mutaszny had to pack it in and he applied for a transfer which was approved.

The rapist on the other hand grew ever more cocky and he finally made the kind of mistake police had been waiting for.

After a rape he stole a victim’s credit card and demanded the password. He was then photographed by a surveillance camera using the card. Unfortunately only his lower face was showing but now the police had something to work with.
The press released the photo and security was upped.

After another rape, he once again used a stolen credit card and this time police got a shot of his vehicle, a dark Chevrolet Monte Carlo. After cruising around looking for the car for a long time, Detective Vic Kovacic got lucky: He spotted the car and wrote down the plate number.

The car was owned by a Ronnie Shelton, 27 and matching the description of the rapist. He had a record for voyerism and when police checked his fingerprints from a previous crime, it was a clean match.

At Shelton’s trial John Douglas, former FBI profiler, testified and after 4 days of jury deliberations, Shelton was found guilty of 49 rapes and 200 criminal counts in total.

He got 3,198 years in prison, maximum sentence for each offense.

Have you ever heard someone say “Why would he need to rape someone, he is so handsome he could get anyone he wants”? That’s because some people are under the misconception that rape is about sex. Rape is about control. A guy like Ronnie Shelton, for example, was in a steady relationship with his girlfriend at the same time that he raped so many women. You’ve got your Ted Bundy who could have had sex with many willing women, probably, but he still had to dominate the unwilling in the cruelest way possible.

So there was no lack of sex in Ronnie Shelton’s life. He was, however, highly insecure and angry, feeling like a nobody and wanting to feel powerful and in control . That’s what rape is all about: Domination and control of a helpless victim.

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Criminology is the part of social science that deals with the study of crime both in society and in the individual.

It’s a big hobby of mine and I know that the readers who frequence this blog a lot might think I am just a normal (or abnormal) serial killer freak who likes the gory stuff and the pics and the VW Bug replicas you can collect online. That’s not the case though.

I am really interested in what makes a criminal. Environment, genetics ? Or an evil beyond our control? It’s fascinating to study about sadism, murder, people who do indespicable things.

Much much more on criminology later..

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Drugs. A feeling of not belonging, not having a future like his friends. A girlfriend who was angry because of the interest that Jennifer Levin paid him that night. The knowledge that he would probably amount to nothing. Those were the feelings and thoughts inside Robert Chambers‘ mind on that night when he walked with Jennifer Levin into Central Park and strangled her.

They had originally gone to the park to have a sexual encounter. Chambers’ girlfriend had actually broken up with him on the same night because Levin kept pursuing him (maybe for other reasons also) and Robert Chambers was angry, probably on drugs and content to have sex with someone rather than just go home. So they went together into the park and something happened there.

Jennifer Levin’s body was found behind the Museum of Metropolitan Art in the early morning of August 26 1986, half naked and strangulated. Her underwear was found 50 yards away, making the police believe that a sexual encounter has been started on the spot where the underwear was found, then Jennifer had tried to run away from Chambers and he had caught up with her.

The press called it “The Preppie Murder“. Actually Robert Chambers was far from the upper class, well educated handsome young man the press made him out to be. He was raised by his mother who had emigrated from Ireland to New York and he attended the preppie schools on scholarship because his mother could not afford to pay for it. His friends were in fact much better off economically than him and he soon took to stealing and doing drugs.

On that fatal night, Robert was with his friends at the bar Dorrian’s Red Hand and they were all excited about their futures and the prospects that lay ahead. Jennifer Levin was attracted to Robert but he paid her little interest. He picked Jennifer to go to Central Park with because he thought it would be an easy way to get sex and she probably was excited to go with him, thinking she finally stood a chance with him.

Jennifer Levin was a beautiful young girl, full of life and living with her dad and his new wife. Her home life was, however, not idyllic. She often fought with her father, not getting along with her step mom she would phone friends and ask to spend the night.

Plenty of witnesses had seen Robert and Jennifer leave together that night so he became the main suspect very quickly. When the police came knocking on his door, he appeared with a scratched face and his explanation was that his cat had scratched him.

At the police station, he kept altering his story, first claiming that Jennifer had gone into a store to buy cigarettes and they had parted shortly after but one of the officers had discovered that Jennifer didn’t smoke so they knew Chambers was lying.

He then claimed they had parted on another street. They had maybe walked a little further, maybe they had actually gone into the park together..and then came the story that he stuck to throughout the trial: Jennifer had wanted to engage in wild sex in Central Park and she had tied him with her panties. When he tried to get her off him, he accidentally knocked her over and she died.

An attorney said something to the effect of “You’re the first man ever to have been raped in Central Park”. When Chambers was asked to lift his shirt, the police saw that his torso was also full of scratches.

The press ran with the story that Chambers had been an altar boy, had attended the finest schools in the country and it was hard to believe that such a promising young man could be such a monster. The story sounded a lot similar to that of Ted Bundy who went to law school, was involved in politics and murdered over 30 young women across The United States.

But Robert Chambers was not what the press made him out to be. Unambitious, going nowhere, addicted to drugs, a liar and a thief – that was the picture of the real Chambers.

When the case got to trial, the jury deadlocked for nine days and then returned a verdict of manslaughter in the first degree. Chambers was sentenced to 5-15 years for the murder of Jennifer Levin.

In jail Robert Chambers didn’t fair too well. He kept getting into trouble and was cited for weapon and drugs infractions. He wasn’t released until 2003, having served all of his sentence. His freedom didn’t last long, though. In 2004 he was stopped in his car with a suspended license and in possession of heroin and cocaine. He pleaded guilty and got 10 days.

Then once more, a short bout of freedom ensued. In 2007 Chambers was once more arrested, this time for selling drugs and resisting arrest when he struggled with an officer and broke the man’s thumb.

In August 2008 Robert Chambers was sentenced to 19 years.

All true crime stories make an impact on me but this one in particular because there is such a big lesson to be learned here. We must be extremely careful of who we put our trust in. Young beautiful Jennifer Levin put her trust in Robert Chambers on that night, maybe knowing he was drugged but thinking that if he only loved her, she could help him. His troubles ran so much deeper than she knew. Another case comes to mind: That of Alex Kelly who offered to drive a young girl home from a party and then savagely raped her in the back of his car and ran from justice for years until police caught up with him in Sweden.
The girl probably thought “He’s a friend of my friend so he must be okay”.

The victim is never to blame and that’s not what I am trying to do here. I am merely saying, don’t let the death of Jennifer Levin be in vain. Let us listen to the lesson and let us remember to be careful with our trust.

More about this case can be found following these links:

Wikipedia
East Side Story
Crime Library

Here is part 1 of the 48 Hour Mystery documentary “The Preppy Killer”.

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In March 1996 former FBI profiler John Douglas was visiting Glasgow and was interviewed by Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley from ITV. During the show a mass murderer went into a gym at the Dunblane Primary School and shot dead sixteen kids between the ages of 4 and 6 and their teacher who had heroically fought to protect them. John Douglas was asked to remain in the studio and answer the burning questions “Why?” and “Who?”.

He was able to say with a lot of certainty the type of individual who would be responsible for such a gruesome act. A white male, loner with a feeling of having been wrong by the community in which he lived. I am highly impressed by that – even though Douglas writes in his book “The anatomy of motive” that his quick thinking is a result of his many years of profiling criminals. It’s still also the result of a fairly genius mind, if you ask me.

The shooter turned out to be exactly the type John Douglas had predicted: Thomas Watt Hamilton, white loner, aged 43, with a grudge against the school and the entire community. After the massacre, Hamilton killed himself, thus escaping the consequences of his actions.

Unfortunately school shootings have become something we see quite often, we’ve even had a couple of episodes here in Denmark. This was of course a different kind of shooting where a crazy gunman (not a student) shot at innocent children. I don’t think I can think of anything more tragic. Children represent all the things that are important: Hope, prosperity, the future. When children are taken from us, we lose so much.

Too many tragic events come to mind. Columbine shootings in Littleton. The University of Texas massacre. Virginia Tech.

Profiling is about asking “Why?” – why did he/she do it? From there the “who” comes. That’s what I am learning from reading Douglas’ fine book “The anatomy of motive”.

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