Danny Collins - Crimes That Shocked The World. The Most Chilling True-Life Stories From the Last 40 Years

W hen writing of my investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal in 2006 (Vanished The Truth About the Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, John Blake, 2007) I remarked that the genre of true crime writing must, by its very nature, take as its research material the heartbreak and misery inflicted on the victims and family of those involved in the crime whether as those left with a bitter memory at the loss of a loved one or the shame of a relationship to the perpetrator. That is an unassailable truth.

Each crime brings its own particular horror to the victim and his or her family. A mugging, a burglary or a violent beating are all crimes that leave their mark, physically and mentally, on the victims psyche. Yet there are crimes that go far beyond the limit of human tolerance and understanding and in so doing scar the psyche of all those who hear of them. Such a crime was that committed by Charles Mansons deranged hippie Family when, in 1969, on his instructions, they broke into a house in Benedict Canyon in the Los Angeles hills and slaughtered five people in a hideous blood bath, even cutting an eight-and-a-half month foetus from the body of victim Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, as she was dangled from a beam across the ceiling. Tate was stabbed many times.

Other victims of that horrific murder spree either shot or stabbed that night were Abigail Folger, heiress to a coffee fortune, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, Polish film director Voitek Frykowski, and 18-year-old Steve Parent, a friend of the house caretaker. Polanski was away in Europe at the time.

On the front door of the house, written in the victims blood, were the words: Death to Pigs. The next night, wealthy grocer Leno La Bianca and his wife Rosemary, both in their forties, were found stabbed to death in their home across town. A killer had carved the word War on Leno La Biancas body. The words Helter Skelter were written in blood on the refrigerator.

The Manson crimes are probably among the first that come to mind when one is asked to name the most shocking crime in memory but mankind is so evil that no one act can hold such a title for long. The Manson murders were committed 40 years ago and the horrors are all but lost in the fog of time. Today the crimes are weirder, the execution more horrific, the motives more incomprehensible.

* A two-year-old toddler, beaten with bricks and an iron bar, savaged and left lifeless on a railway track;

* The brutalisation and multiple dual rape of a young couple caught up in a vicious carjacking;

* A depraved killer who sets light to the naked bodies of his schoolgirl victims in a woodland ditch and then joins his victims parents in the search for the missing girls;

* An Austrian father, obsessed with Nazism, who locks his daughter in a hidden cellar for 24 years, raping his prisoner and disposing of the corpse of one unhealthy issue of his incest by thrusting the body of the one-month-old baby into a furnace in horrific parody of his admired Nazi forbears;

* A serial rapist who suffocates a 15-year-old schoolgirl before the eyes of her schoolfriends who cower away in the darkness as he submits the victim to his lust;

* A murderer who rapes the cold corpses of his victims.

These are all crimes that the human mind reels to accept. They are crimes that defy imagination, that speak of a depravity beyond reason, of such depravity that the world must take note. These are the crimes that almost daily shock our world.