The Perfect Crime: 5 Criminals who Disappeared Without a Trace

2 – Lord Lucan

If D.B. Cooper’s actions in the sky made his name synonymous with mysterious disappearances throughout the United States and Canada, then his British equivalent is Lord Lucan. In fact, many Brits will cite Lord Lucan’s name while referring to someone that they haven’t seen in a while, or someone notable by their absence while knowing themselves very little about the disappearing Peer himself. Such is the fame – and the infamy – of Richard John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan.

In many ways, John Bingham was the archetypical British aristocrat and gentleman. He was dashingly handsome, flashy and confident and a darling of London high society. Once considered as a potential to play James Bond in the original movies (he even drove an Aston Martin), Bingham seemed to have everything: a huge inheritance and fortune, a job that afforded him both ample pay and plenty of recreational time, a beautiful wife and two young children. He had been educated at Eton, the most prestigious school in England and served as an officer in the Army before going on to work at a merchant bank in the City of London. He married and, when his father died in 1963, inherited his titles and his place in the House of Lords. Lord Lucan was set for life, or so it seemed.

What the good Lord had, however, to go with his success, was a voracious appetite for gambling. He had long been interested in betting – he would bunk off school to go to horse races – his habits grew alongside his bank balance. In the rarified air of London high society, it was possible for gentlemen of his stature to run up huge lines of credit. His wage at his regular job became increasingly irrelevant in comparison to his gambling and he quit. Spending his days in the gentleman’s’ clubs of London, he would play backgammon and cards until the small hours. His winnings dwindled and his losses began to rack up, while at home, his wife Veronica was suffering severely from post-natal depression and began a programme of psychiatric care. Lucan began to maneuver against his wife, aiming to gain custody of their children. He became obsessed with the idea, attempting to cast Veronica as a lunatic, far more seriously mentally ill than she actually was. Lucan stopped paying bills for food and childcare, all the while gambling and drinking more. By 1974, he had discussed the idea of killing his wife on several occasions while drunk. On the 6th of November, he would put that plan into action.

On the evening of the 6th, Lady Lucan was at home with the children and the nanny, Sandra Rivett. Ms. Rivett went down to the basement kitchen to make a cup of tea for herself and Veronica, whereupon she was struck with a lead pipe and her lifeless body wrapped in a canvas sack. When the nanny failed to return, Lady Lucan went to the basement to check and was met by the assailant. She recognized her husband’s voice in the struggle that ensued and he soon admitted to the murder of Sandra Rivett. She persuaded him that she could aid his escape, if only he would lie low at the house for a few days, before making an escape while Lord Lucan was in the bathroom and running to a pub close to their Belgravia home.

Lucan’s whereabouts from that point onwards become increasingly vague. He certainly telephoned his mother, telling her that something terrible had happened and that she was to come to the house to collect the children. He then drove out of London, stopping at the East Sussex home of the Maxwell-Scott family, long-standing friends of the Lucans. Susan Maxwell-Scott would be the last person to see the Lord. The police immediately raided the flat in which Lord Lucan had been living, and found nothing untoward. His wallet, car keys, passport and glasses were all in place. They sent out a search warning across the south of England.

While at the Maxwell-Scott’s, Lucan wrote two letters to his brother-in-law, Bill Shand-Kydd. One explained that “the most ghastly circumstances” had occurred, that an unknown assailant had attacked his wife and that Lucan was being framed, and that he wanted him to care for the children. The other was a note indicating how his debts might be paid off. The car that he had driven to East Sussex was discovered several days later, a lead pipe in the trunk along with a bottle of vodka. The Lord himself would be far trickier to locate. The newspapers were full of lurid stories – Lucan was a famous man, a Lord of the Realm no less, while the story had the perfect mix of salacious and gruesome so beloved of the British tabloids – but none of them produced a concrete sighting of the missing peer. A hearing was convened in absentia that declared that Sandra Rivett had been murdered by Lord Lucan.

The immediate thought was that he had killed himself. Veronica Lucan claimed that her husband had committed suicide, while his mother, the Countess Lucan, speculated that his mysterious disappearance had been a ruse by which the children’s expenses could be paid for, as his estate would have passed onto his infant son had death been confirmed. The chief policeman in charge of the investigation, Roy Ranson, initially thought that the Earl had drowned himself in the English Channel, but later stated that he thought Lucan to be alive and living in Africa. The disappearance captivated the nation and newspapers regularly printed articles about the case, with sightings reported everywhere from India to Gabon to Switzerland. The heinous crime of the late Lord Lucan declared dead only in 1999, remains a source of fascination to the British public.

3 – Escape From Alcatraz

If committing the crime and disappearing from view is darkly impressive, then making an escape while already incarcerated is extraordinary, to say the least. On top of that, throw in escaping from the most secure prison on Earth – not to mention one of the most notorious – and you have something particularly outstanding on your hands. While one should not get carried away with lionizing the perpetrators of such a daring breakout – they were convicted criminals after all – the act itself is more than a little bit impressive. As prison breaks go, few can match that enacted by brothers Clarence and John Anglin and Frank Morris when they did the unthinkable and got out of Alcatraz prison in June 1962.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was considered near impregnable and certainly the most secure facility in the United States. It was situated on an island in San Francisco Bay, a mile and a half from the shoreline and surrounded by waters that were cold, choppy and often rumored to be infested by sharks. (The truth was that the majority of sharks in the bay are harmless, though few inmates knew this.) From its inception in 1934, the prison on Alcatraz Island was a point of no return for the most unruly and infamous inmates, those whom the Federal Government considered having little to no chance of rehabilitation. In fact, the guards that watched over the prison received little by way of rehabilitation training: they were picked because they were tough and could stand up to the level of inmate that would be in their care. While many of the myths surrounding the harshness of conditions that have been perpetuated by Hollywood are just that, life on the island prison was undeniably harsh and escape near impossible. 36 prisoners are thought to have got out of the prison proper in the three decades that it was in use, of whom the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris are among the only 5 still unaccounted for.

Check this out: Life for the Prisoners of Alcatraz in Photos.

The brothers themselves undoubtedly deserved to be in the prison. Though their crimes were usually without violence – they claim never to have used a weapon more threatening than a toy gun – they were arrested on a string of bank-robbing charges in 1956 and were doing twenty years for it when they were transferred to Alcatraz in 1961. They bought their ticket to the island via a long history of attempted escapes at the Atlanta, Georgia penitentiary at which they had previously been held. Frank Morris was an armed robber with a penchant for breakouts and had already been successful with one, earning a place at Alcatraz after he was recaptured following an escape from jail in Louisiana.

The ruse by which the June 1962 escapees made their move was ingenious. Over six months’ worth of nights, the four conspirators – another man, Allen West, was due to escape too – painstakingly crafted a ventilation shaft into a tunnel using discarded cutlery and a drill made from an old vacuum cleaner. Once they had widened it to the point where they could get out, they then built a boat in a cubby hole on the top of their cell block, stitched together from raincoats and made watertight using steam pipes as a heat source. All the while, Frank Morris played the accordion to disguise the noise of the work they were doing.

When the time came for the breakout, their method of avoiding detection was similarly inventive. They used dummy heads made of papier-mache like mixture of soap and toilet paper to give the impression that they were asleep in their cells and buy a little time. Their disguise in place they exited their cells – Allen West was unable to open his tunnel – and make their way up to the roof, down a ventilation pipe to the ground, over two 12 foot barbed wire fences on down to the waters of San Francisco Bay. All the while, the guards were never alerted and thought the three to be safely asleep in their beds. They managed to inflate their makeshift raft with a bellows fashioned from an accordion and set sail to freedom.

The disappearance of the Anglins and Frank Morris, however, had only just begun. Their escape was far from over but the facts hereafter are very sparse. They were aiming for Angel Island, some 2 miles away, according to fellow conspirator Allen West, but a thick fog and the freezing water conditions would have made life difficult. That said, the Anglins were both renowned as strong swimmers – they had spent summers as children playing the icy waters of Lake Michigan – and were more than capable of making it out. No physical evidence of the brothers or of Frank Morris has ever been found, though remnants of the boat washed up on Angel Island a few days later. While the FBI said that it was theoretically plausible but not likely that the escapees made it to freedom, they kept searching for 17 years until closing the case at the end of 1979. The US Marshals Service, tasked with locating those who escape from federal prisons, has never given up the search.

Anglin family members were regularly quoted in the press as believing that the brothers were still alive. In 2015, a TV documentary showed them with Christmas cards that were written by the brothers and a family friend, who had known them since childhood, claimed to have seen the Anglins in Brazil from the time of the escape until the late 80s, going so far as to produce a photograph of himself purportedly with the pair. The case remains open and with the participants now – if alive – well into their eighties, it seems likely that it will never be resolved.

You May Also Interested: Most Notorious Alcatraz Inmates.

4 – Radovan Karadzic

Of the figures on our list, none can match our final criminal in terms of his crimes. Thankfully then, he is the one who was brought to justice in the end, though not until long after his disappearance. He makes this count not only because he managed to evade capture for so long, but also because he managed to hide all the while in near enough plain sight. That Radovan Karadzic is one of the worst criminals of the late twentieth century is beyond doubt: he is a convicted war criminal with the blood of thousands on his hands and one of the most notorious figures of the Balkan Wars, a conflict hardly light on notoriety. That such a prominent figure was able to go to the ground and then to live in relatively normality for so long – with the might of the CIA, the UN and more trying to find him – is barely believable. The method by which he did it is stranger yet.

Radovan Karadzic came to prominence in the early 1990s in Bosnia. He had moved to Sarajevo, the capital of the then-Yugoslav republic, to study and later work as a psychiatrist. He spent some time in jail in the late 1980s for embezzlement and fraud before co-founding the Serbian Democratic Party (SDP) in 1989 as a bulwark against the perceived aggression that Serbs would face in Bosnia should Yugoslavia break apart. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, Karadzic was the head of the self-declared Republika Srpska, the breakaway entity within the new Bosnian state that represented the Serbian community of the country. The UN quickly recognized Bosnia and accepted them as members, while Karadzic traveled on three occasions to New York to discuss the situation in the country regarding the Serbs who wished to remain united with the rump of Yugoslavia, which was now overwhelmingly Serbian.

Surrounded by perceived hostility in Sarajevo and Croatian troops massing at the northern edge of his jurisdiction, Karadzic tried to take control of the armed forces of the Republika Srpska from Ratko Mladic – himself also later charged with war crimes – and entering into a struggle with his own general. It was under the jurisdiction of Karadzic and Mladic that the Siege of Sarajevo was begun and the Srebrenica Massacre carried out, among many other smaller atrocities.

The facts of the two major incidents are worth repeating to gain a modicum of perspective on the crimes committed. In the attempt to take the Bosnian capital – at just under four years, the most protracted besiegement of a capital city in modern military history – an estimated 5,500 civilians were killed along with over 7,000 military personnel from both sides. Houses were shelled near continuously by Bosnian Serb forces that encircled the city from the hills. Entire streets were turned into deathtraps by permanently placed snipers. Almost the entire city was destroyed. The actions of Karadzic’s military were not successful and after 1,425 days, the siege was lifted by the 1995 Dayton Agreement that brought an end to the war.

The other major incident that took place at the time was the Srebrenica Massacre, one of the darkest periods in post-World War Two European history. It was at Srebrenica, a small town close to the Bosnian border with Serbia that 8,373 people were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in an attack that is considered genocidal by both the United States Parliament and the European Union. The UN, too, were culpable, as they had Dutch peacekeepers in the area who failed to stop the separation of men from women and subsequent execution of thousands of men and the rampant sexual crimes against the Bosniak women. The massacre would continue in stages for 11 days.

Karadzic was indicted by a war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1995, but he had long since gone to ground. Despite being the President of the Republika Srpska and its most recognized figure, he was able to live easily just a short distance from Sarajevo in a mountain village, seemingly unhindered by the $5m USD bounty on his head or the legions of special forces that had been sent out to capture him. It was widely regarded that Bill Clinton had staked much of his foreign policy reputation on bringing the perpetrators of genocide in the Balkans to justice, but nobody could lay a finger on Karadzic. One story tells that a group of Delta Force soldiers had a gorilla suit shipped from the United States to Bosnia, with the intention of causing Karadzic’s bodyguards to slow a car down to a speed at which a grenade could be thrown at it. Of course, Karadzic was nowhere to be found. Despite theoretically being on the run, the Serb warlord released a book of poetry and a bestselling novel. It was assumed that he had left the Republika Srpska in late 1999 and then moved on to somewhere else in the Balkans, but the authorities had lost the scent almost completely.

It was not until 2005 that he would resurface, and in the most unusual of circumstances. He had been posing as a faith healer and New Age spiritualist called Dragan Dabic – not a massive leap for a man who had once been a psychiatrist – and knocked on the door of a fellow mystic in Belgrade, asking to be tutored in the ways of Balkan healers. His hair, always somewhat uncontrolled, was long and held together in a short ponytail, while his beard had grown into a white bushy mess. He had been living in a Belgrade suburb, across the road from one of those tasked to catch him who had been totally unaware that her neighbor was a wanted war criminal. Karadzic hardly kept a low profile: he had a website promoting his psychic services, a column in a local magazine and even drank in a local bar that boasted a picture of himself in his uniform on the wall. His nephew claimed that the two used to travel to Italy to watch Inter Milan soccer matches.

His capture would not be the result of intelligence work, but rather the lack of it. Karadzic’s brother called him from an old mobile with a SIM known to US authorities and the Serb intelligence agency was alerted. They had been known sympathizers of many nationalist figureheads – it was no surprise in Serbia that Karadzic had remained at large – and only after an election had allowed reforming President Boris Tadic to get his own men into office was the tipoff taken seriously. Karadzic was confronted on a bus in a Belgrade suburb and asked his name. When he was told by the policeman that he was Radovan Karadzic, the warlord asked if the cop’s superiors knew what he was getting himself into. The trial began at The Hague in 2008, and the former President found himself facing charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and of taking UN staff members hostage. He was found guilty in 2016 and sentenced to 40 years. The so-called “Butcher of Bosnia”, brought to justice at last.

5 – Heinrich Müller

Karadzic was not alone in escaping on charges of war crimes. Some of the most infamous of disappeared criminals of the 20th century was those fleeing justice after atrocities in wartime and among those, few have provoked such intrigue and speculation as Heinrich Müller. He would last be sighted in the Führerbunker in 1945 and never seen again, with no body confirmed and no traces ever found. That such a prominent figure could have escaped without a trace is unthinkable, and has provoked a whole raft of conspiracy theories that continue to be debated to this day.

Some would allege that he has never been found because there was nothing to find, that he died along with so many others in the ruins of Berlin as the Soviet troops arrived, while others would claim that he got out and followed the famed rat lines that lead to South America, where he lived in relative comfort under an assumed name and a false identity. A third, altogether more intriguing theory holds that he was captured by the Allies at the end of the war, but possessed so much information that he was repurposed and reused by them to help fight the nascent Cold War. From the 1st of May 1945 until the present day, the arguments rage and the subject is notable by his absence.

Let us first backtrack and discuss Heinrich Müller, the man. That he was one of the most senior members of the Nazi regime is unquestionable – he was in the Führerbunker after all, where only the closest to Hitler were allowed – and his friendships with the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich went back to the very origins of National Socialism. He was noted even among the virulently anti-communist Nazi Party for his hatred of leftists: he had witnessed executions committed by the short-lived Bavarian Soviet in 1919 and subsequently dedicated his life to fighting what he saw as Red Terror.

That led him into the Munich police, and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was quick to come to prominence. He was not necessarily the biggest Nazi – many questioned his commitment to the cause and Müller did not become a party member until 1939 – but few could quibble with his discipline, adherence to rules and in-depth knowledge of the left-wing opposition that the new regime under Hitler wanted to viciously crush. Indeed, he only ever joined the party for career reasons, after Himmler personally told him that he could not be promoted without party membership. Müller was a copper to the core, a stickler for rules and a lover of the administration and paperwork that went into enforcing the rules. When the Nazi rules became increasingly strict and arbitrary, he was only too happy to go along.

Not that a lack of Nazi Party membership had stopped Müller from committing atrocities. Even before the war began, he had been part of the state-sponsored Kristallnacht pogrom that led to the arrest of over 20,000 Jews, while he also worked in Eichmann’s office for Jewish Emigration, overseeing the deportation of thousands from Germany. In 1939 he took over the newly reconstituted Gestapo, taking on the name Gestapo Müller to avoid confusion with another high-ranking SS-man of the same name. As the war took hold, Müller was increasingly tasked with intelligence and counterintelligence across all of the lands that Germany conquered, as well as taking a leading role in the organization of the Holocaust. While Eichmann – another who long evaded capture after the war – would become associated with the “banality of evil” in relation to the murder of Jews, he often reported directly to Heinrich Müller. Among his other jobs of note during the war were the investigation of the murder of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague (Heydrich having been his political patron and friend of many years) as well as finding those who attempted to assassinate Hitler in the latter stages of the conflict.

As the Soviet tentacles began to encircle Berlin, Müller and his ilk retreated deeper and deeper into the center of the city and relations became more fraught. Müller in particular was terrified: he had sadistically executed many Soviet spies and prisoners of war and was well aware of what was in store for him, were he captured. A fellow high-ranking Nazi, Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur, later recounted a conversation in which Müller stated: “We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven’t the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the Russians.”. As that situation became more and more likely, the Gestapo head went to the ground. He was last seen alive on May 1, the day of Hitler’s suicide. With Berlin in ruins and the Nazi regime in tatters, it was every man for himself. Whether Müller ever made it out is unknown, but it has never stopped speculation and sightings.

The various theories that support the idea that he survived have some credence. Firstly, his name was very much in his favor. Heinrich Müller is one of the most common names in Germany – as mentioned, there was another leading SS general also called Heinrich Müller – and a body with that name would have been wholly unremarkable. A middle-aged man with an ID card in that name would have been hardly remarkable either, and a nightmare to chase back to the Gestapo head. Were he identified, it certainly would have been possible for his capturers to keep him for their own gain rather than declare who he was. Müller was a treasure trove of information about other high-ranking Nazis, an overseer of countless foreign spies and a man with intimate knowledge of how the regime operated, while also being widely regarded as partially disloyal to the regime. Anyone who held him would have had plenty of reasons to use him for their own ends.

The search for Müller has been continuous since the end of the war. Around the time that Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina and put on trial in Israel, many suspected that his former boss had made the same trip. Eichmann himself stated that he thought Müller to still be alive. The Americans had a file on him well into the 2000s, and a Freedom of Information request lead to several snippets being released to the public that told of attempts made by the CIA among others to find him, clearly a sign that they thought he had survived the Battle of Berlin. The British also organized their own searches, motivated by the so-called Stalag III murders, committed under Müller’s command and later immortalized in the film The Great Escape. None, however, were ever able to find out anything about him. With Müller now surely dead, the mystery remains and will likely remain forever.

Also Read: These Nazi War Criminals Escaped Justice Because They Were Useful to the US.