The Annals of Unsolved Crime Read online

  ALSO BY EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN

  Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth

  Counterplot: Garrison vs. the United States

  News from Nowhere: Television and the News

  Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism

  Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America Cartel

  Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald

  The Rise and Fall of Diamonds:

  The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion

  Who Owns the Corporation?:

  Management vs. Shareholders

  Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA

  The Assassination Chronicles:

  Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend

  Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer

  The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

  The Hollywood Economist:

  The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies

  Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK

  THE ANNALS OF UNSOLVED CRIME

  Copyright © 2012 by E.J.E. Publication, Ltd., Inc.

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-049-5

  First Melville House Printing: February 2013

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Epstein, Edward Jay, 1935-

  The annals of unsolved crime / Edward Jay Epstein. – 1st ed.

  pages cm

  1. Assassination–History. 2. Assassination–Investigation.

  3. Criminal investigation. I. Title.

  HV6281.E67 2013

  364.152’3–dc23

  2012049984

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of a wise teacher,

  James Q. Wilson (1931–2012)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  PART ONE

  “LONERS”: BUT WERE THEY ALONE?

  1. The Assassination of President Lincoln

  2. The Reichstag Fire

  3. The Lindbergh Kidnapping

  4. The Assassination of Olof Palme

  5. The Anthrax Attack on America

  6. The Pope’s Assassin

  PART TWO

  SUICIDE, ACCIDENT, OR DISGUISED MURDER?

  7. The Mayerling Incident

  8. Who Killed God’s Banker?

  9. The Death of Dag Hammarskjöld

  10. The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe

  11. The Crash of Enrico Mattei

  12. The Disappearance of Lin Biao

  13. The Elimination of General Zia

  14. The Submerged Spy

  PART THREE

  COLD CASE FILE

  15. Jack the Ripper

  16. The Harry Oakes Murder

  17. The Black Dahlia

  18. The Pursuit of Dr. Sam Sheppard

  19. The Killing of JonBenet Ramsey

  20. The Zodiac

  21. The Vanishing of Jimmy Hoffa

  PART FOUR

  CRIMES OF STATE

  22. Death in Ukraine: The Case of the Headless Journalist

  23. The Dubai Hit

  24. The Beirut Assassination

  25. Who Assassinated Anna Politkovskaya?

  26. Blowing Up Bhutto

  27. The Case of the Radioactive Corpse

  28. The Godfather Contract

  29. The Vanishings

  PART FIVE

  SOLVED OR UNSOLVED?

  30. The Oklahoma City Bombing

  31. The O. J. Simpson Nullification

  32. Bringing Down DSK

  33. The MacDonald Massacre

  34. The Knox Ordeal

  EPILOGUE

  The Enduring Mystery of the JFK Assassination

  FURTHER INVESTIGATION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE

  The idea for The Annals of Unsolved Crime grew out a trip to Moscow in 2007 to investigate the case of a radioactive corpse. The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB officer, who had become deeply involved in the political intrigues of the billionaire Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch in exile in London, and those of Yukos, the immensely powerful oil company that Vladimir Putin was then in the process of expropriating from its owners. What made the case interesting to the intelligence services of at least four countries was the way the corpse in London had become radioactive: Litvinenko had been poisoned by an extremely rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210, which had immense value to parties seeking to go nuclear because it could be used to trigger an early-stage nuclear weapon. For this reason, it was one of the most tightly controlled and most carefully monitored substances on earth. So how, and why, were Litvinenko and some of his associates exposed to it? When I read through the relevant files in Moscow, I realized that this question might never be answered. The files had come to me by a circuitous route. The Crown Prosecutor in London had supplied their counterparts in Moscow with some evidence that they had in the case to support an extradition request for a suspect, Anatoli Lugovoi, who had also been exposed to polonium-210. What the files made clear was that, even though this was supposed to be a joint British-Russian investigation, the autopsy report, the hospital records, the toxic analysis, the radiation readings in London, and other evidence concerning the polonium-210 were being retained by the British government as state secrets. For their part, the Russians would not allow Lugovoi (whom I interviewed for many hours in Moscow) or any other Russian citizen to be extradited, and they would not furnish any information about the leakage or smuggling of polonium-210. Nor, as of December 2012, would the British allow the coroner to complete his report on Litvinenko’s death or release the autopsy files.

  Even if officially the case of the radioactive corpse remains an unsolvable crime, we can still learn a great deal from the barriers that block us from solving it. I have found in my journalistic career that even with the unstinting financial and editorial support of magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, New York, and Reader’s Digest, the cases from which I learned the most—and that most intrigued me—were cases that I could not solve. Some of the most high-profile crimes in history also lack a satisfactory solution because the basic facts of the case remain suspect. Napoleon defined history “as the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon,” which raises the question of whether such agreements proceed from facts or from political expediency. The problem of establishing truth has concerned me since I began my thesis at Cornell on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1965 by posing it to seven of the most powerful men in America, the members of the Warren Commission. Some of these men, including a former director of the CIA, a former U.S. high commissioner for Germany, and the minority leader of the House of Representatives, pointed to inherent difficulties faced by a Presidential Commission, such as pressure of time, the lack of truly independent investigators, and the need to reach a consensus even if they disagreed. Other commissions from the military tribune that investigated the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln have confronted similar problems. So do prosecutors whose careers turn on their ability to appear to resolve cases of great interest to the public. For the past four decades, in seeking to cast light on this limitation, I have tended to focus on crimes that may contain elements beneath the surface that have never been fully reported. In this regard, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera was correct when he suggested that I believe “that conspiracies are more common than most jour
nalists credit.” But conspiracies do exist—indeed, over 90 percent of federal indictments for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 have contained a conspiracy charge, according to the Center on Law and Security at New York University, which tracks all federal terrorism cases. It is also true that many cases that initially appear to be conspiracies, such as the putative plot against the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, turned out, as I discovered when I reported about it for The New Yorker, to be the unconnected acts of lone individuals.

  Some obvious problems with the puzzles presented by unsolved crimes are that they may be missing critical pieces, contain pieces that have been falsified, or contain pieces of evidence that belong in other puzzles. Even so, unsolved crimes have commonalities that can help us understand why they defy resolution. Although the taxonomy of such an elusive subject may be imperfect, I have classified these cases in four categories: loners, disguised crimes, cold cases, and crimes of the state.

  The category of “loners” has long intrigued me. A lone gunman shoots someone and then is himself killed. There is no doubt that he fired the shots and was the only perpetrator at the crime scene, but was he alone? Conspiracies can hire a lone assassin, such as the killer in the book and movie The Day of the Jackal, to minimize the chances of being detected. Consider, for example, the assassination that had probably the most momentous consequences in history, the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The bullet that killed him, and that ignited World War I, was fired by Gavrilo Princip. The immediate circumstances suggested a happenstance shooting. The archduke was on his way to an unscheduled visit to Sarajevo Hospital in his open Gräf and Stift Double Phaeton limousine. The driver made a wrong turn, got lost, and then while he backed up toward a bridge, the giant car stalled. The archduke, in his easily recognizable gold-braided uniform and plumed hat, was in the back seat, waiting for the driver to crank the car. At that very moment, Princip, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist, was finishing his coffee at a café on the corner. He spied the archduke, rushed over to the stalled car, and fatally shot him in the neck. Since no one could have known in advance that the archduke would be at that place at that time, it initially appeared to be a random shooting by a lone Serb. Austrian authorities, however, intercepted Serbian communications that revealed that this was a conspiracy planned and orchestrated by Serbian intelligence and that Princip was one of a dozen assassins positioned along the archduke’s route. At least three, including Princip, had received their weapons, training, and a suicide cyanide capsule from their Serbian case officers. It was the discovery of this plot that led to a war in which nine million soldiers were killed, and to the demise of the Hapsburg empire.

  Investigations that stop at the singleton killer may, for better or worse, leave open the door to an unsolved crime. When the stakes are high, as when a head of state is assassinated, the decision of whether to stop at the singleton killer or pursue a possible conspiracy may not be entirely free of political considerations. I first came across this political dimension when I interviewed the members and most of the staff of the Warren Commission in 1965. I was given this unique access to the Commission because my investigation—later published as a book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth—was of interest to Chief Justice Earl Warren. One of the first commissioners I interviewed was John J. McCloy, who had served as the U.S. High Commissioner of Germany. As we sat in his forty-sixth floor office in the Chase Manhattan building, he described how the Commission had wrestled over how to deal with the loner issue. He said that all the commissioners agreed that the evidence was overwhelming that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy. Their difficulty lay in resolving whether or not they could say that he was the sole author of the assassination. The chief justice, supported by most of the other commissioners, wanted to close the case by stating categorically that Oswald was a “loner.” McCloy said that he objected because the Commission did not have access to information about Oswald’s liaisons with the security services of Cuba and Russia, and therefore it could not rule out the possibility that Oswald’s connections with them made him more than a lone actor. He told the chief justice the Commission could say only that it had found no credible evidence of any other conspirators. As Warren wanted an unanimous report, he went along with McCloy and inserted a paragraph saying that, as it was not possible to prove a negative, the Commission could not rule out the possibility that Oswald had help. That qualification, though buried in the verbiage of the Commission’s report, as McCloy put it, “left the door ajar.” The “loner” issue has never really been resolved.

  Political climates can also change, and when they do, what begins as a conspiracy could end up pinned on a loner. Consider, for example, the initial conclusions about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Immediately after the assassination, with the South still seen as the enemy, the Military Commission appointed by the new president, Andrew Johnson, concluded that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who was killed during his escape, was part of a conspiracy sponsored by leaders of the defeated Confederate States. Four of his associates were hanged as co-conspirators, and an arrest warrant was issued for former Confederate States President Jefferson Davis. But when the political climate in America changed, and the reunification of the North and South proceeded, the government vacated the warrants against Southern leaders and abandoned the Military Commission’s conspiracy case. Instead, John Wilkes Booth was viewed as a deranged loner.

  What makes this issue vexing is that there is no single answer. Some crimes are committed by loners operating on their own, others by a singleton working on the behalf of a group. In the realm of fiction, the public readily accepts that a lone murderer can be carrying out a contract for a conspiracy that does not expose itself. In the movie based on Mario Puzo’s book The Godfather, no fewer than six mob leaders are slain by a lone killer retained by Michael Corleone. In Frederick Forsyth’s book The Day of the Jackal, a group of French conspirators hire a lone assassin to kill President Charles de Gaulle, sure that the man cannot be traced back to them. Such arrangements also occur in the realm of reality. The 1967 CIA Inspector General’s Report on the Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro describes how the CIA hired singleton assassins, such as Rolando Cubela (code-named AMLASH), to kill Castro between 1961 and 1963. If Cubela (or any of the other assassins) had succeeded, the CIA would claim he was a disgruntled Cuban acting on his own. How common are such conspiracies in political crimes? From the perspective of U.S. prosecutors at least, conspiracies are not rare when it comes to political murder. The interesting issue is sorting out loners who act alone from loners who act for others.

  Another category of interest is disguised murder. To protect itself against pursuit, a party can disguise a murder as a suicide or accident in such a way that the issue becomes: Was there a crime? My interest here was piqued by James Jesus Angleton, the legendary counterintelligence chief of the CIA. In 1977, he described to me six connected suicides that had occurred in Germany in late 1968. First, on October 8, Major-General Horst Wendland, the deputy head of the BND, the German equivalent of the CIA, was found shot dead with his own service revolver in his own office. That same day, Admiral Hermann Ludke, the deputy head of the logistics department of NATO, was found fatally shot by a dum-dum bullet from his own Mauser rifle in a private hunting preserve in Germany’s Eifel Mountains. Then, within days, four more bodies turned up: Lt. Colonel Johannes Grimm, who worked in the German Defense Ministry, shot; Gerald Bohm, his colleague in the Ministry, drowned in the Rhine river; Edeltraud Grapentin, a liaison with the Information Ministry, poisoned with sleeping pills; and Hans-Heinrich Schenk, a researcher at the Economics Ministry, hanged. All were declared apparent suicides. After he reeled them off, Angleton made his point. These were not unrelated deaths. All six apparent suicides had access to highly classified secrets and were all under investigation as sus
pected spies or for leaks of NATO documents. The secret investigation of these men had proceeded from the discovery of a strip of film taken on a Minox camera of top-secret NATO documents. The camera had then been traced to Admiral Ludke. This discovery was of immense interest to Angleton, who in 1968 was a liaison with the BND, because Admiral Ludke had “need-to-know” access to the top secrets in NATO, including the location of the depots in which nuclear weapons were stored. Next, a Czech defector supplied a lead that pointed directly to Major-General Wendland and the German Defense Ministry. But before the investigation could go further, both Ludke and Wendland were shot to death on the same day, followed by four other suspects in the case suddenly meeting violent ends. How was such a coincidence possible? Angleton supplied one theory: the KGB had eliminated them to protect its espionage. I said, “But they were ruled suicides.” He corrected me: “Apparent suicides,” and he added, “Any thug can commit a murder, but it takes the talents of an intelligence service to make a murder appear to be a suicide.” He pointed out that coroners look for a murder signature, such as rope burns or bruises, and, if those are not present, they declare the death apparent suicide or natural death. Those signatures can be erased, as Angleton explained, in what is termed in intelligence-speak “surreptitiously-assisted deaths.”

  The death of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010 is also instructive in this regard. Since his body had no telltale signs of violence, the Dubai coroner initially concluded that he died from natural causes. But then security cameras revealed that al-Mabhouh had been under surveillance by a group of suspicious individuals shortly before his death and, at the insistence of Hamas, his body fluids were re-analyzed by a lab in Switzerland with highly sophisticated equipment. The lab discovered in the fluids minute traces of succinylcholine, a quick-acting, depolarizing, and muscle-paralyzing drug that would have rendered a person incapable of resisting. Then Dubai authorities came up with a new verdict: Mabhouh had been murdered by first giving him this drug, then smothering him to death with his own pillow. The coroner explained that it was a disguised homicide “meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep.”