2 cases tagged “dismemberment”
Convicted: Rosemary Pauline West (née Letts; also known as Jennifer Jones since 2020)
In February 1994, police arrived at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, looking for a missing teenage girl. What they found instead would stop Britain cold: nine sets of human remains buried beneath the floorboards and garden of a nondescript terraced house — and that was only the beginning. Rosemary West, a 40-year-old mother of eight, sat at the center of it all. She had helped lure young women and girls to that house. She had participated in their torture, their sexual abuse, their deaths. She had then gone on living there — cooking meals, watching television, raising children — while the bodies of ten victims, including her own stepdaughter and her own teenage daughter, rotted in the earth beneath her feet. On 22 November 1995, a jury took less than two days to convict her on all ten counts of murder. The judge said she should never be freed. He was right. Thirty years later, Rose West — now calling herself Jennifer Jones — remains in a prison cell, in declining health, largely alone, still insisting she is innocent. This is the story of how ordinary evil hides in plain sight.
Convicted: Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)
On Easter Sunday morning, April 7, 1996, an East Rutherford police officer spotted a man dropping garbage bags into the Passaic River behind a small New Jersey electronics company. When Officer Richard Freeman approached, he found blood on the man's hands and clothing. Inside those bags were sixty-five pieces of what had once been Yakov Gluzman, a prominent cancer researcher, dismembered through the night with hacksaws and a scalpel after his wife and her cousin attacked him with axes in his own apartment. The woman who orchestrated it had once moved George H.W. Bush, UN Secretary-General U Thant, and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to action on her behalf. She had survived rape at age ten, near-starvation at eleven, and the entire machinery of Soviet bureaucracy. She had gone on an 18-day hunger strike to free her husband from the USSR. And then, more than two decades later, she waited in his darkened apartment holding an axe. Rita Gluzman became the first woman ever charged and convicted under the Violence Against Women Act, a law built to protect women from men like the one prosecutors said she had become. Tabloids called her the Jewish Lizzie Borden. She still calls herself innocent.
