As soon as he entered the building, the officer recognized the unmistakable smell of death. As he climbed the stairs, the stench became more and more unbearable until he reached the third floor, where the owner opened the apartment door and pointed inside. His tenant refused to leave and there were numerous complaints about strong stenches. However, that was not an odor problem…
The agent inspected one of the rooms, closed with boards, looked through the keyhole and, in the background, observed the bare legs of a woman. It was a corpse. He wasn't the only one. The investigators found up to seven bodies, some of them hidden in the ceiling and others buried in the basement. They had just found the lair of an unknown serial killer nicknamed Handy Marty.
Harrison Frank Graham, better known as Marty, was born on September 9, 1959 in Philadelphia (United States) into a large family, where he was the oldest of five siblings. From a very young age, Marty had serious problems at school due to his IQ of 63. In fact, for two years he was absent from classes to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Once back home, his behavior worsened due to alcohol and drug use, which resulted in hallucinations, blackouts and paranoia. The conclusion of one of the psychologists who treated him was that he had psychotic features.
In 1979, despite his intellectual disability and mental problems, Marty left the family home to settle north of the city and work in construction. Although he also began to frequent the world of prostitution and rub shoulders with pimps. Four years later, the young man rented an apartment where he could deal drugs.
His house became a drug apartment where friends, acquaintances, prostitutes, junkies and anyone looking for methylphenidate, a stimulant drug used to treat ADHD and which requires a prescription, came. Despite his illegal business, Marty's reputation was good: everyone saw him as a good boy, calm and friendly, he regularly paid his rent and was the neighborhood handyman.
But behind the appearance of a dead fly a potential killer was hiding. Marty had everyone fooled, especially when he showed his comic side by making jokes with his Sesame Street Cookie Monster puppet, which he imitated perfectly. Who could have imagined that he was hiding dead women in his home?
The wave of crimes began at the end of 1986 and “it was something that simply began to happen,” our protagonist confessed. So much so that, over the next year, he killed up to seven women, most of them prostitutes.
His modus operandi was always the same: he lured the victims, who were usually drug addicts, to consume drugs in his apartment, then he proposed to them to have sexual relations and, at one point, he took the practice to the extreme and strangled them.
Of course, Marty never got rid of the bodies as such, but hid them in his apartment: he wrapped bodies in canvas bags and blankets, some of them he hung from the ceiling, others he placed either on top of garbage that he was piling up or on old mattresses. The rest were buried in the basement of the building.
During all that time, the criminal came to live with decomposing bodies, smells of putrefaction, worms and cadaveric fauna, and enormous amounts of filth. However, August 1987 arrived and, faced with the unbearable odors emanating from the apartment, the owner of the apartment decided to call the police.
Minutes before the first patrol arrived, Marty sealed the door to one of the rooms with boards and nails and said he would return in a few hours to pick up his things. But what he was doing was buying time to escape. When the police entered the house, they found horror and a horrifying collection of murdered women, many of them already unrecognizable due to their serious state of decomposition.
The rooms, the ceiling and the basement were full of skeletal and cadaveric remains: they found whole bodies and also parts of some, such as skull, pelvis, hands, feet and legs. For this reason, it was difficult to determine the cause of death and identify them.
One of the key pieces of the investigation was found during the property search. There, a team of scientific police combed through the knee-high garbage debris in search of objects belonging to the victims. Among the items they recovered: two heart-shaped earrings, a ring and a grid-shaped earring. The press published this information so that relatives could help and that is how they recognized the objects and identified the victims.
A young woman whose roommate had been missing for several months, Sandra Garvin, gave details that could link her friend to Marty's apartment. So it was. The murderer had ended his life and his remains were hidden in the building.
Meanwhile, investigators created a profile of the alleged serial killer, who had previously left drawings of naked women with blood around them scribbled in the kitchen and written all kinds of insults and humiliations towards them. While Marty's name was on the most wanted list and his face could be seen in any public place, the police located his mother for help. The agents believed that only she was capable of attracting her son.
On August 17, the mother persuaded Marty and convinced him to end his escape. The young man was arrested ten blocks from the so-called house of horrors and taken to the police station. Once there, the murderer confessed in detail to all the crimes, and even provided the names of all of his victims. There were ten pages full of details.
In March 1988, the trial against Harrison Graham for the murder of seven women began. From the beginning, the defendant admitted his guilt, although his lawyer asked for a lenient sentence because of his intellectual disability, his drug use, and his inability to distinguish between right and wrong. The Prosecutor's Office did not agree, hence he requested the death penalty.
On April 28, the handyman killer was sentenced to six death sentences and a life sentence for seven counts of first-degree murder. Marty remained passive and calm for most of the hearing, but after hearing the verdict he whispered to his attorney: “I'm going to kill myself; “They will never kill me.”
Immediately afterwards and before leaving the courtroom, Marty asked the judge if he could take his Cookie Monster doll with him, but he was not given that pleasure. He could no longer do imitations in prison. Since then and after several prison transfers, the prisoner has been in a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania. His demeanor is “gentle and non-violent,” says his case manager, and he has clung to his religious faith to the point of obtaining a certificate as a Protestant minister.
