The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

Oklahoma City’s OKC Serial Killer

The dismembered bodies of at least four women found in Oklahoma City between 1976 and 1995, are thought to belong to victims of the mysterious “OKC Serial Killer”. Missing body parts made identification of the victims impossible.

The pieces of the first body were found scattered over several blocks near the Capitol in 1976. The fourth body was found during the ground work in preparation for the construction of the Centennial Expressway in 1985. None of the victims matches women who have been reported missing.

On 22 April 1995, the body of a female Native American and Hispanic was found in a shallow grave on an abandoned stretch of highway 50 miles west of Oklahoma City. The head, feet and hands were missing, again making identification almost impossible. The authorities believe that the perpetrator could be reactivated the “OKC Serial Killer” as the method of dismemberment is similar.

Oradell, N.J.’s Doctor X

Publicity surrounding the suspicious deaths of patients in the Michigan Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, discussed above, reopened a ten-year-old case in New Jersey. Over a ten-month period, beginning in December 1965, some 13 patients died in similar circumstances at Riverdell Hospital, a small osteopathic facility in suburban Oradell, just eight miles from Manhattan. Most of them had had routine surgery and were well on their way to recovery when they died of unrelated causes. A doctor was suspected, but an investigation in 1966 failed to produce enough evidence to bring charges.

Then in 1976, prompted by what he said were “post-Watergate pangs of conscience”, a well-informed source, thought to be a member of the hospital’s staff, became “Deep Throat” to New York Times reporter Myron Farber. Armed with inside knowledge, Farber began questioning survivors, doctors and other interested parties. He found inconsistencies in the testimony of the surgeon originally suspected and compiled 4,000 pages of notes on the case. But because the man had never been charged and still practised medicine in New Jersey, when the New York Times ran the story he was referred to as “Doctor X”.

The Ann Arbor case also stirred the interest of Bergen County Prosecutor Joseph C. Woodcock and he was impressed by the evidence Farber had unearthed. However, he knew that to press charges against Doctor X he would need a much stronger case than had been established in 1966. Back then several staff physicians had noted that Dr X had been on duty near many of the victims around the time they died, though none of the 13 was his patient.

Nine cases attracted particular suspicion. The first involved 73-year-old Carl Rohrbeck, who was admitted for a hernia operation on 12 December 1965 and died the next day due to “coronary occlusion”—a blockage of the coronary artery. Four-year-old Nancy Savino was admitted on 19 March 1966 to have her appendix removed, and died two days later due to “undetermined physiological reaction”. Twenty-six-year-old Margaret Henderson died on 23 April, after exploratory surgery which proceeded satisfactorily. Edith Post, aged 62, was admitted for surgery on 15 May, dying two days later of undetermined causes. Sixty-four-year-old Ira Holster underwent gall bladder surgery at Riverdell on 12 July and died without apparent cause seventeen days later. Fifty-nine-year-old Frank Biggs was suffering from an ulcer when he entered Riverdell on 20 August. A week later he was dead. Mary Muentener, aged 80, underwent surgery on her gall bladder on 25 August. She died seven days later. Seventy-year-old Emma Arzt also also had gall bladder surgery on September 18, dying five days later. And 36-year-old Eileen Shaw gave birth by Caesarean section on 18 October, but died on the 23rd.

Hospital administrators had launched an investigation on 1 November 1966, after a Riverdell surgeon found 18 vials of curare—most of them empty—in Dr X’s hospital locker. Dr X told Guy W. Calissi, the County Prosecutor in 1966, that he was using the muscle relaxant for experiments on “dying dogs” in his spare time and claimed that other doctors were trying to frame him. But Calissi had been told that it was impossible to detect curare in tissue long after death, so he dropped the case.

However, forensic science had moved on by 1976. Prosecutor Woodcock got permission to exhume five of the bodies and sent tissue samples to specialists who used new detection techniques that could identify toxins in amounts weighing only a trillionth of a gram. Traces of curare had definitely been found in the body of four-year-old Nancy Savino and possibly in two others.

The Bergen County authorities then named Dr X as 48-year-old Dr Mario E. Jascalevich, who had immigrated from Argentina ten years earlier. In May 1976, he was charged with five counts of murder and was forced to surrender his medical licence pending the resolution of the case. Meanwhile, Farber secured a book contract with Doubleday for an advance of $75,000.

Dr Jascalevich hired Raymond Brown, then one of the most well-known trial lawyers in the US, to defend him. Brown went after Farber, calling him “greedy and ambitious”, and repeatedly citing Farber’s advance. He then attempted to subpoena Faber’s notes. Farber and the New York Times refused to hand them over, saying that they owed a duty of confidentiality to the journalist’s source. Farber insisted that he had no information of crucial bearing on the case, nothing that could be used to establish Jascalevich’s innocence or guilt. But the judge said he would be the judge of that and demanded that the notes be handed over to the court, so he could read them in camera before deciding whether they should be turned over to the defence. Farber refused to comply and The New York Times was fined $100,000 for refusing to obey a court order, plus another $5,000 a day until the notes were handed over. Farber still refused to part with his notes. In consequence, he was jailed for a day in July 1978, then for another 27 days in August, and once again in October. As the reporter languished behind bars, the doctor went on trial for the murder of Rohrbeck, Savino, Henderson, Biggs and Arzt.

The prosecution maintained that Jascalevich had committed the murders to discredit his colleagues whose abilities he had little time for. The animosity, it seems, was mutual. The defence maintained that medical experts had conspired with the prosecutor to bring the case. Brown maintained that the patients had, in fact, died of natural causes and general malpractice by other doctors at the hospital. The trial lasted for 34 weeks.

The trial judge directed an acquittal on two of the five murders as the prosecution had failed to prove the presence of curare in those two bodies. The jury was then asked to decide on the three victims. After just three hours’ deliberation, the jury found Jasccalevich not guilty of all charges.

The case had cost the Times more than $1 million, including $250,000 in fines. New Jersey’s legislature, appalled at the imprisonment of a reporter, toughened its shield law to protect journalists. However, Farber’s case divided journalists. The executive editor of the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, maintained: “The First Amendment guarantees the right to print the news, but without the right to gather the news, the right to print has very little meaning.” Others pointed out that the case pitted the First Amendment’s freedom of the press against a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to evidence for his defence. Carl Bernstein, one of the two journalists responsible for unearthing the Watergate scandal, pointed out that, when someone was on trial for their life, freedom of the press was not absolute.

At the end of the trial, Mario Jascalevich returned to his native Argentina, where he died of a cerebral haemorrhage in September 1984. But if he was not the killer, whoever was responsible for those 13 mysterious deaths in Riverdell Hospital in 1966 is still at large.

Philadelphia’s Frankford Slasher

The Philadelphia district of Frankford is older than the city itself. First settled by Swedes in the 1660s, the village became known for its main road, King’s Highway, which later served as the primary route between