O.J collapsed into an officer's arms... then asked to call his mom
OVER his 30-year police and forensic psychology career, Dr Kris Mohandie has come face-to-face with kidnappers, serial killers, stalkers, and terrorists. Drawing on his expertise, Dr Mohandie analyses the thought processes that motivate the most dangerous people who have ever walked among us.
This is the first-hand account of his work, covering shocking cases like the Columbine shooting and the O.J. Simpson case.
OJ. SIMPSON
O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson had divorced in the early 1990s after he pleaded no contest to a domestic battery charge. Nicole sought out police at the time, saying Simpson had hit her, kicked her, and threatened to kill her. She said she had suffered beatings and emotional abuse for years at the hands of the former football great. It was finally enough. But over the ensuing years, Simpson couldn’t let the relationship go.
Everything culminated on the night of June 12, 1994.
Nicole’s friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, had just arrived at her home to return glasses that had been left at the restaurant he worked at, when an unknown assailant ambushed them. Both were stabbed to death viciously outside her Brentwood, California, condominium.
At 8:30 in the morning on Friday, June 17, 1994, police called Robert Shapiro, one of O.J. Simpson’s attorneys. They said his client needed to surrender by 11:00 a.m. to face murder charges. But Simpson wasn’t ready to turn himself in.
The time came and went, and he was now labelled a fugitive. What happened next is among the most surreal moments in criminal history: the white Bronco chase, broadcast live on television stations around the world as news helicopters followed Simpson’s car on a wild ride across Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, with police cars with flashing lights close behind. I was the on-call psychologist for the LAPD tasked with responding to barricades and consulting with the negotiation team but was unaware of what was happening at the time.
At home in Pasadena when it was all going down, I was aggravated that the rock-and-roll music I was listening to on the radio kept being interrupted by news of some freeway pursuit. Then I realised the news was about O.J. Simpson.
I called the SWAT headquarters and asked if we were being called in to help. I was told to go to Simpson’s home. Simpson was despondent, armed with a handgun, and threatening suicide in the Bronco. I slipped on a bulletproof vest and was escorted through the backyard past two fullsize statues of Simpson. SWAT officer Pete Weireter was already negotiating with Simpson from the doorway of the residence. I slipped in beside him and validated the themes. Simpson was worried about his reputation being damaged, his loss of status. I could see the shiny gun held to his head... I suggested we use what we had, the crowds: “Look at all these people. They still love you.”
A short time later he surrendered, collapsing safely into an officer’s arms, deflated. He wanted to use the restroom, call his mom, and get something to drink. All of which happened.
But it took some time to get him the drink. I learned a short time later that was because one of the cops was looking through the fridge for orange juice.
“O.J., have some orange juice.” Juice for “The Juice.” Cop humour. Gotta love it.
COLUMBINE
“Isn’t it fun to get the respect we’re going to deserve? We don’t give a s**t because we’re going to die doing it.”
It was a chilling postscript left behind on videos recorded in the weeks leading up to what would become a horrendous watershed event in American history – the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999.
Seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had prepared for months. They stockpiled firearms and ammunition. They made crude bombs from gasoline, propane tanks, and metal pipes. They would be ignored as outcasts no more. They live – and die – in infamy.
“Directors will be fighting over this story. I know we’re gonna have followers because we’re so f ***** g God-like,” Klebold said in one of the videos... Thankfully, I don’t think any directors did.
Harris and Klebold shared these fantasies with each other, bonded by a phenomenon Dr. J. Reid Meloy refers to as “clandestine excitement” – the thrill of a forbidden secret, another layer of control woven into the power-driven idea of “If you only knew.” Their only hope was to achieve immortality through violence and death.
WHEN Peter Sutcliffe – aka The Yorkshire Ripper – was finally apprehended and jailed for life in 1981, 13 women lay dead.
Sent to HMP Parkhurst and then diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and moved to Broadmoor, during his time inside, Sutcliffe rubbed shoulders with some of Britain’s biggest criminals, including the Kray twins and Ian Brady, the infamous, hated Moors murderer.
Authors Robin Perrie and Alfie James had unparalleled access to Sutcliffe, interviewing him tirelessly over a 16-year period, and their book, I’m the Yorkshire Ripper: Conversations with a Killer. is the closest the British public has ever got to understanding the monster that was The Yorkshire Ripper.
In this extract, Sutcliffe talks about how he and Brady were opponents on the chess board and – more sickeningly – they used to compete for the title of Britain’s most infamous inmate.
A MEETING OF MONSTERS
It goes without saying that Sutcliffe’s victims all suffered an agonising and terrible ordeal. But, appalling and repellent though his actions were, he did not seek to prolong their suffering to afford himself further gratification in the same way Brady did. Whatever satisfaction Sutcliffe derived from murder, it was the lead up to it and the act itself which provided it, not the extended suffering of the victim once she was in his clutches.
“Ian Brady seems to actually enjoy people’s suffering, but then that’s the trademark of a psychopath,” he said.
“I played a game of chess with him. I played Brady two or three times, but he wouldn’t play me in the end because I beat him.
“Not that I was friends with him, but he was an acquaintance, you get acquainted with all sorts of people.”
A number of years later, a newspaper article revealed Brady’s claims to be the most notorious criminal in the country, dismissing Sutcliffe because “he’s had 34 mentions in the press this year.
“I’ve had 144” and adding: “Why do you think I’m still top of the ratings after 40 years?” Sutcliffe was furious.
“He’s such an idiot is the man, such a loose cannon, saying he’s a much bigger criminal than me and all that, who wants to hear that rubbish? Pathetic. You wouldn’t think somebody would be proud of what they’d done, would you? I can’t understand him, he’s just a psychopath, an idiot, full of himself, and he’s shallow, very shallow and stupid, he’s not intelligent really in the real sense of the word. Thinks he’s the bee’s knees.
“It shows how his mind works, doesn’t it? He’s sick in the head, he’s proud of what he’s done.
“He loves the publicity. Unlike myself, I hate it, but he seems to thrive on it. He even gets jealous if I seem to get more publicity than him, which is very weird.”
Yet, despite his dismissal of Brady’s league table of criminals, Sutcliffe couldn’t stop himself making a bid for top spot.
“I’m a lot more high profile than anybody else.”
KRAY CONNECTION
Sutcliffe was also keen to dispel the rumour that Britain’s most famous gangster family had put a price on his head and reveals that Ronnie Kray even tried to help him escape Broadmoor.
Gossip had it that they didn’t get on, which was not so according to Sutcliffe, who also rebuffed the idea that Ronnie hated him so much that he previously arranged for a prisoner in Parkhurst to attack him when he was there.
“I read it in a newspaper, I think it said Ronnie had put a contract out on me, but when I met him I pulled him about it and he totally denied any such thing. If it was true, he must have been scared to admit it, but I believed him and we got on okay.
“I used to cut his hair and we used to sit and chat.”
The idea that Ronnie and Sutcliffe didn’t get on is further undermined by the revelation that the Kray twin helped him acquire the hacksaw blade which he intended to use to achieve his freedom.
“It came from a friend of Ronnie Kray’s who was a patient in
Broadmoor,” explained Sutcliffe.
The blade was snapped in half and a friend of Sutcliffe’s, who intended to escape with him, took the other section to get to work on the bars in his own room.
“I nearly managed to cut through one of the bars in my cell window,” Sutcliffe said proudly.
After progressing the escape attempt each night, he hid the blade during the day behind a skirting board.
The escape bid came to an abrupt end when, without warning, he was moved to another room.
“After a while, that cell was being decorated and it was noticed that the bar on the window had been nearly cut through. Because it had been a while since I’d done it, it had turned rusty so no connection was made to me.”
Extracted from I’m the Yorkshire Ripper: Conversations with a Killer, by Robin Perrie and Alfie James, RRP £8.99, available from mirrorbooks.co.uk
THINK you know everything about the Krays? Think again. The extent of the Kray twins’ activities has always been uncertain but now, it is time for the conclusive account of their story, from their East End beginnings, to becoming the kingpins of London’s underworld.
This objective account, compiled by best-selling crime author and criminal lawyer James Morton, cuts through the conflicting versions of their stories and answers burning questions still being asked, 50 years after their infamous conviction.
MURDER OF GEORGE CORNELL
There was no love lost between the Krays and George... One story, hotly denied by Kray and his supporters, was that in the early 1960s Ronnie had called Cornell out of the Brown Bear public house in Aldgate and Cornell had promptly knocked him out. The Twins later claimed they had looked after him on one of the occasions he had been released from prison, and had even given him new clothes and a pension. Despite the fact they had stepped in, they regarded him as something of a traitor in leaving his East End origins and defecting to the Richardsons when he married a south London girl. Worse, he had also refused to cut them in on the shortterm blue film racket he was running in Bloomsbury.
At the time of his death in March 1966, in theory Cornell was a partner with Benny Saher in the Sombrero club in Ann Place off Oxford Street. In reality Cornell was minding Saher... He was also believed to have been responsible for an arson attack in the area earlier in the month on 6 March.
Other stories about him included one that he had killed a man in
South Africa. Had he lived, he certainly would have been charged in the Richardson Torture Case along with the fraudster Brian Mottram.
On the evening of Wednesday 9 March, George Cornell died from a bullet in the head while sitting in the saloon bar of the Blind Beggar public house.
It is certain that Ronnie was drinking in The Lion when he heard that Cornell was in the Blind Beggar about 90 seconds away by car. He ordered Scotch Jack Dickson to drive him and Ian Barrie to Vallance Road, where he collected a Mauser pistol, and then on to the Beggars.
Dickson was told to wait outside with the engine running.
There were about half a dozen people in the bar that evening, including two who knew both Ronnie Kray and George Cornell. At 8.30 pm the barmaid put on her favourite record, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore by the Walker Brothers, and was talking to Cornell when Ronnie Kray and Ian Barrie walked in. They went over to Cornell, who said, ‘Look who’s here. Let’s get a drink.’
Kray then shot him at point blank range. The bullet exited the rear of Cornell’s head and then hit a wall in the bar. As a distraction Barrie fired shots into the ceiling. The bar was now empty except for Cornell and an old man still sitting at his table. The barmaid loosened
Cornell’s tie and was trying to stop the blood from his head with tea towels when ambulance staff arrived.
Dickson first drove Ronnie back to The Lion and then there was a general exodus first to the Stow Club, the spieler in Walthamstow High Street. From there it was on to the nearby Chequers where Reggie bought his brother a clean suit...
When the news of Cornell’s death came through, Ronnie gave a cheer and the team, fearing they would be regarded as traitors if they did not, sycophantically joined in. At least Sammy Lederman said, ‘Ronnie, you’re a cold-blooded murderer’.
Later Ronnie Kray wrote in Our Story: “I felt f ***** g marvellous. I have never felt so good, so bloody alive, before or since. Twenty years on and I can recall every second of the killing of George Cornell. I have replayed it in my mind millions of times.”