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Infamous Murders: Murder for Profit
Tuesday 9 Dec 9.30AM
In November 1988, Sacramento police were faced with the grim task of removing a number of dead bodies from the backyard of a boarding house.
The rapidly decomposing corpses, which were all elderly men or women, appeared to have been poisoned. Dorothy Puente, who had been running the boarding house for three years, had completely disappeared. The unscrupulous landlady was discovered to have cashed up to 60 social security checks belonging to the deceased, after their deaths. On 11th December 1993, she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
In February 1972, police attended a fire at a house near the Port of Spain on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. They were astonished to discover two freshly dug graves, each containing a corpse with stab wounds.
They immediately organised a search for the missing resident, Michael Abdul Malik, or as he preferred to be called, Michael X. Malik had set himself up as a spokesman and fundraiser for black power but in fact he used this as a cover to raise funds for himself.
When people got in the way of his illegal money-making schemes, he had them killed. With the police on his trail he set fire to his house and fled for Guyana, where police found him hiding out in the jungle. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1975.
In 1940s England, John Haigh devised an unusual method for raising money. He made contact with wealthy people, killed them and dissolved their bodies in acid, so that no corpses would ever be found.
His chilling confessions included a boast that he had drunk his victims' blood before disposing of their bodies. But his last victim's gall stones and false teeth didn't dissolve as quickly as the rest of the body, giving police enough evidence to convict Haigh.
He quickly confessed to four previous murders. His trial began on 18th July 1949 and lasted just two days. The jury took less than 15 minutes to find Haigh guilty and he was duly sentenced to death.
The rapidly decomposing corpses, which were all elderly men or women, appeared to have been poisoned. Dorothy Puente, who had been running the boarding house for three years, had completely disappeared. The unscrupulous landlady was discovered to have cashed up to 60 social security checks belonging to the deceased, after their deaths. On 11th December 1993, she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
In February 1972, police attended a fire at a house near the Port of Spain on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. They were astonished to discover two freshly dug graves, each containing a corpse with stab wounds.
They immediately organised a search for the missing resident, Michael Abdul Malik, or as he preferred to be called, Michael X. Malik had set himself up as a spokesman and fundraiser for black power but in fact he used this as a cover to raise funds for himself.
When people got in the way of his illegal money-making schemes, he had them killed. With the police on his trail he set fire to his house and fled for Guyana, where police found him hiding out in the jungle. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1975.
In 1940s England, John Haigh devised an unusual method for raising money. He made contact with wealthy people, killed them and dissolved their bodies in acid, so that no corpses would ever be found.
His chilling confessions included a boast that he had drunk his victims' blood before disposing of their bodies. But his last victim's gall stones and false teeth didn't dissolve as quickly as the rest of the body, giving police enough evidence to convict Haigh.
He quickly confessed to four previous murders. His trial began on 18th July 1949 and lasted just two days. The jury took less than 15 minutes to find Haigh guilty and he was duly sentenced to death.
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