Our Daily Dead

from AZCentral.com (and Canadia Press)

KINGSTON, Canada - A serial killer who terrorized Canada with a string of slayings of young women in Montreal and Calgary more than 30 years ago has died in prison.

Wayne Boden, whose penchant for biting the breasts of his victims earned him the nickname the “Vampire Killer,” died in hospital earlier this week at Kingston Penitentiary.

Corrections Canada attributed Boden’s death to “natural causes” and said funeral arrangements were still being made.

Boden was locked up in 1972 after four women in Montreal were found raped and strangled, all with bite marks on their breasts, between 1968 and 1970.

He confessed to three of the killings after a teacher in Calgary was found dead in 1971.

Boden, who was in his late 50s, had been ill and was transferred to Kingston from his home institution of Bath about six weeks ago.

On July 23, 1968, Norma Villancourt, a 21-year-old teacher, was found dead in her Montreal apartment, having been raped and strangled, and with bite marks on her breasts.

Victims Shirley Audette, 20, Marielle Archambault, 20, and Jean Wray, 24, followed. All were raped and murdered and found with bite marks.

Then, in 1971, teacher Elizabeth Pourteous, 33, vanished in Calgary and she was also found raped and strangled. A cufflink was found near her body.

Boden, a travelling salesman, was arrested shortly afterward. He told police that he had moved from Montreal a year earlier, admitted seeing Pourteous on the night she died, and said the cufflink was his.

A forensic orthodontist also matched Boden’s teeth with bite marks on the victim, the first time such evidence had been allowed in a Canadian trial to identify an accused.

Boden later made headlines in 1984 while on a “humanitarian” day pass from the maximum-security Laval Correctional Centre. He escaped from a guard after asking to use the washroom while eating in a Montreal hotel.

Technorati Tags: serial killer, Wayne Boden, Vampire Killer

from the LA Times
Richard Kuklinski, 70, a notorious Mafia hit man known as “The Iceman,” who claimed to have killed more than 100 people and was the subject of several books and two cable television documentaries, died Sunday at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton, N.J.

A spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Corrections did not disclose the cause of death but said it was not suspicious.

Kuklinski, who was serving consecutive life sentences at New Jersey State Prison for two murders, typically used cyanide administered from a nasal spray on his victims and earned the nickname “The Iceman” because he kept some bodies in a freezer.

Kuklinski’s admissions of guilt in TV interviews and in court were shocking to his wife, Barbara, who said in an HBO interview: “We were perfect. We were the all-American family.”

The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer

Married to the Iceman: A True Account of Life With a Mafia Hitman and the Inside Story of His Crimes

Technorati Tags: Richard Kuklinski, Mafia, hit man, The Iceman

LA Times
Friedrich Engel, 97, a former Nazi SS officer involved in the massacre of Italian prisoners in World War II, died overnight Feb. 4 or 5 in Hamburg, Germany, his wife, Else, said. She did not give a cause of death.

In 2002, a German court convicted Engel of 59 counts of murder and handed him a suspended seven-year jail term for the 1944 shootings in a mountain pass near the Italian city of Genoa.

An appeals court ruled in 2004 that it believed Engel was responsible for the massacre. But it quashed the conviction, saying the lower court had failed to legally prove murder and ruled out a retrial because of Engel’s age.

Engel, known in Italy as the “Butcher of Genoa,” acknowledged helping organize the May 19, 1944, shootings in reprisal for an attack on a movie theater in the city four days earlier in which five German sailors died.

However, he denied the murder charge, insisting that the shootings were ordered by German naval officers and that his unit was responsible only for selecting the victims from Genoa’s Marassi jail.

Technorati Tags: Friedrich Engel, Nazi, Butcher of Genoa