Murderers Caught

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 4

Murderers Caught

They Caught These Killers. By Bruce Sanders. Herbert Jenkins. 199 pp. Here are the accounts of investigations leading to the arrests and convictions of some twelve murderers, and a nasty lot they are. The crimes were committed in seven countries, and it is possible to observe the different methods of detection. Of necessity the accounts given of crimes, motives, and man-, hunts have to be curtailed and the figures of the criminals; and of the policemen seem: to be depicted as steel engrav- ■ Ings rather than portraits, but j Mr Sanders has done his job well and this collection is up to the standard of its many useful predecessors. That fingerprint genius, the late Chief Detective Inspector Fred Cherrill, was responsible for catching George Brain and George Russell. Inspector Herbert Hannam’s meticulous routine work in tracking down Whiteway. who murdered two young girls on the eve of the Coronation in 1953, is particularly well told, and the nationwide search for the notorious Toplis, who was also eventually caught in the fine meshes of the dragnet, completes the English setting. Commissioner Belin’s running down of Landru, and the capturing of Charrier and the killing of his two accomplices, who robbed the Riviera Express and murdered Lieutenant Carabelli, by Chief Brigadier Mettefeu of the Paris Prefecture, made that splendid policeman a veritable Maigret. One of the most interesting stories is the tracking down of August Frassen by Pinkerton’s George Bangs. All Bangs had was the corpse of a young man found in a small town in New Jersey. There were no marks of identification, and Bangs traced the victim back to Strasbourg and ferretted out a murderer not even suspected of being in the United States. Murders in Canada. Trinidad, and Egypt are faithfully dealt with.