Chapter 82: She Wanted to be Friends-The Murder of Suzanne Capper

0:00 Hi guys. I'm Courtney and I'm Lisa, and welcome to the next chapter in the Book of the Dead, brought to you by dark Cast Network insie podcasts with a Twist. Did you know one of the few things that Nostre Damas correctly predicted was his own death? Did you know that only one professional baseball player has been killed while playing the game? What about the fact that one of the most poignant last words ever were spoken by a parrot.

0:48 Each week on Famous last Words, we'll examine some of the final thoughts of some of the most fascinating people in history, from presidents to murderouses, from business innovators to teen pop yics. That's Famous last Words, part of the dark Cast Network, available right now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Hello, Welcome to the next chapter of the Book of the Dead. All the way back in November of twenty twenty two, when this podcast was brand new, we did chapter sixteen where we covered the horrific murder of Junko Feruda. And as I said back then, this was a case that had haunted me since I learned about it over ten years ago, and it's a case that is one of the worst I have ever heard akin to the horror of what happened to Sylvia Likens. The reason I mentioned this is because I thought Chunko and Sylvia's cases were some of the worst of the worst committed by a group of people now obviously being involved in the true crime community. It would be ignorant and to even suggest that there aren't cases just as bad, if not worse, out there, because there are. You know, there's David Parker Ray, we covered Sake Kibaro Seto, the Kobe Child's killer. There are worst cases out there, or cases just as bad, but none truly stick with me

2:20 like theirs do. Until I came across the murder of a young woman from England named Suzanne Kapper, a case that horrified me just as much and will be burned into my brain for the rest of my life. As with Junko's story, this case comes with a heavy charger warning for torture. Listener discretion is advised. With that being said, this is the murder of Suzanne Kaepper. Suzann Kaeper was born in the Greater Manchester region of England on September one, nineteen seventy six, to a woman named Elizabeth Dunbar was no biological father listed for Suzanne, so I'm assuming Suzanne really never knew her biological father. Growing up, Suzanne was described as gentle and easily influenced and overall very sweet.

3:15 She had an older sister named Michelle, who she was very close to. When Suzanne was about three years old, her mother married a man named John Capper, and they would go on to have a little boy named Steven when Suzanne was about four years old. Stephen and Suzanne were incredibly close. He told the son that she was his best friend, and Suzanne was also very close with John, and they stayed close even when Elizabeth and John divorced in nineteen eighty seven, when Suzanne was fourteen. After their divorce, things were difficult for Suzanne and her sister. It seems as if Elizabeth had a hard time supporting the girls, so they moved around a lot, staying with relatives, John or even being placed in foster care. Suzanne, as a result, really struggled. It seems as if she had a hard time making friends, probably due to being very quiet, and she started skipping school a lot as a result. In nineteen ninety two, Suzanne was enrolled at moston Brook High School, but according to medium dot com, her attendance was very spotty.

4:27 She just wasn't there very often. According to confidentials dot com, around this time, when Suzanne was sixteen, Suzanne met a boy around her age named Clifford Puke. He was sitting by himself upset. When Suzanne asked if he was all right. Clifford told her how he was having girl troubles and they got to talking and he would go on to introduce Suzanne to his sister, twenty six year old Jeene Powell. Now, depending on the source you read, Jane allegedly had babysat Suzanne when she was six years old, but I couldn't substantiate that either way. Suzanne started hanging around with Jean at her home at ninety seven Langworthy Rode in Boston.

5:15 Jeane had three children and was separated from her husband, Glynn, so Suzanne spent her time when she was supposed to be at school, watching Jean's children or working with Jeane. Now it does seem as if Suzanne's family was aware of where she was spending her time and basically living, because reportedly Michelle had stayed with Jane briefly, and Stephen had been to the home at least once. Now, whether they were okay with it, I couldn't tell you, but I would imagine they probably weren't thrilled since Jeane's home was not a good environment. Jeane regularly sold drugs out of her home and threw raging parties all the time.

5:58 She was, also, according to Medium, involved in the handling of stolen vehicles. Now it's not clear how long Suzanne was staying with Jean, but from what I could gather, it was at least a month or two, and things really weren't going well. For one, it obviously wasn't a safe environment, as I said, and secondly, Suzanne was not being treated well. According to Elizabeth Dumbart, Jeane was having Suzanne work with her cleaning, but Jean was having Suzanne do all the work and taking all of the money that Suzanne was making. Elizabeth said quote. We found out that Jeane had taken Suzanne out of school and was making her work as a cleaner at the CIS Building, which are high rise office buildings in town. She was taking her money, just letting her keep five pounds a week.

6:52 While we thought she was in school. When we confronted her about it, she actually threatened to burn down our house. So clearly, not only is the home not a safe environment and Jeane is taking advantage of Suzanne and taking her money, but Jeane obviously may not be physically violent at this point, but she's making serious threats. Now, as far as I could tell, this was never reported. Maybe they thought that Jean was just kind of blowing smoke and just trying to act tough, but this is clearly a warning sign as we get deeper into the case.

7:34 At some point during this time, another woman named Bernadette McNeely moved into Jean's house. She was twenty four and had been living in ninety one Langworthy Road when she moved in with Gene, along with her own three children. So now there's nine people in this home, which wasn't particularly big from what I could tell, the homes on Langworthy Road were similar to housing developments, so it's not like they were living in a large house. It was closer to an apartment. And this is where things really start to go badly. There was a constant rotation of men coming in and out of the house, most notably Jean's brother Clifford, sixteen year old Anthony Dudson, who was sleeping with Bernadette and Jean, and allegedly Suzanne, Glynn Powell, and Jeffrey Lee, who was a former inmate who came by frequently to purchase ant betametans. According to an article for The Independent, this group was very wild, getting into fights with neighbors, bullying Suzanne, and they had even set fire to a neighbor's trash can. In November of nineteen ninety two, Suzanne went to visit her mother at work.

8:47 Elizabeth was working at Calderwood Day Center, and she said, according to an article Confidentials, that Suzanne shut up covered in bruises. Quote, she came to where I worked and I noticed a bruise on her feet. I said something like been fighting over boys then, but she just shrugged her shoulders. She then told me she wanted to move in with me. I just moved into a new flat that very day, and I told her to give me a couple of weeks to get her room ready. She was supposed to move in on Christmas Eve. Allegedly, what had really happened was that Jean and Suzanne had been introduced to a friend of a friend named Mohamed Yusuf.

9:28 According to Jean, Suzanne had suggested that Jean's sleep with Mohammed, and she quote gave her a good hiding for trying to make me go with an Arab. This hiding included locking Suzanne in a cupboard for four days, and Suzanne apparently did tell neighbors what had happened, but no one believed her. And part of me kind of understands someone not believing her when she says that, because it's such a crazy thing for a person to do to another person, like, no one, no sane person, at least, locks a sixteen year old girl in a cupboard for four days. The next incident of abuse was when Bernadette and Anthony contracted pubic lice. They accused Suzanne of giving it to them because she regularly slept in a bed that they would use when they were having sex. So they forced her to strip and shave herself in front of them. So not only is that humiliating to make anyone go through, let alone a sixteen year old girl, but and it's one of the things about this case that blows my mind, was that they were assaulting her. They were doing things to her that was assault, and it's mind blowing and baffling to me that they were putting her through that.

10:52 You know, they were adults and she was for all intents and purposes, child who was sixteen during the time that this is going on. According to what Steven, Suzanne's brother told the son, Michelle, who had had a child by this point, had also stayed at least briefly at Jean's house. As I had mentioned before, around the last week of November, Stephen and Suzanne, who had been watching the baby, brought her to Jeans because they assumed Michelle was there, but she wasn't. He said, quote, my sister wasn't in, so we wanted to leave the baby with Dudson, Clifford and another man who I think was Glenn Powell. They said it was nothing to do with them and didn't want to take the baby until my sister came back.

11:37 Then Dudson said, let's burn the bitch, and someone replied, you can't do that to a baby, and Dudson said he was talking about Suzanne. Now, Suzanne insisted that Anthony was only joking, and I know a lot of you out there are going to wonder why Suzanne was sticking around when these adults were treating her so badly. But Suzanne so desperately wanted friends, and as terrible as they were to her, she thought of them as her closest friends. And it's really difficult for a teenage girl to give up something as important as friendship, regardless of how they were treating her now. Unfortunately, without knowing exactly what their dynamic was, maybe there were points in times where they were overly nice to her and that kept Suzanne around.

12:32 But Michelle said that Suzanne essentially bent over backwards for them. Whatever they asked for she did. However, the treatment of Suzanne would only get worse until it came to a head on December seventh of nineteen ninety two. On this day in nineteen ninety two, Suzanne was at her stepfather's home when Jeane and Bernadette came by saying they were going to be throwing a party and that a boy that's Suzanne and was interested in would be there. According to the Manchester Evening News, as soon as they got Suzanne through the door on Langworthy Road, Glenn and Anthony ambushed her. They held her down while Glynn shaved her head and her eyebrows, before putting a bag over her head and forcing her to walk around while they all beat her with wooden instruments and a belts. After this, they forced her into a cupboard and locked her in.

13:27 Suzanne screamed and cried to be let out all night. Jeanne and Bernadette's children were home and heard all of this. Not only at this point have they brutally beaten this girl, they've done it in front of a whole bunch of children, So of course they know that that's a problem. They can't do this in front of the children. So this forced them to move Suzanne the next morning into Bernadette's abandoned home, where they turned over a bed and tied her to it using whatever was available, extension cords, belts, whatever they could get their hands on. According to all That's interesting, they injected themselves with drugs and the violence escalated into full blown torture. They gagged Suzanne with socks and continued their abuse, burning her with cigarettes, forcing her to bathe an industrial strength cleaner where they scrubbed her raw, and when Jeffrey, Lee and Clifford showed up, they joined in as well, pulling out her front's heath with pliers.

14:32 The torture went on for five days, with Suzanne begging Clifford and Jeffrey to let her go, but they refused. They continued to get high and even started injecting Suzanne as well to keep her awake so they can continue torturing her. Bernadette apparently had taken so many different drugs that she started calling herself Chucky from Child's Play, and Jeanne, according to confidentials dot Com, said that even she was disturbed by Bernadette's behavior, although apparently not disturbed enough to stop what they were doing to Suzanne. On December fourteenth, after forcing headphones onto Suzanne and blaring rave music overlaid with Chucky's catchphrase, I'm Chucky want to play into her ears, the group apparently grew tired of torturing Suzanne. Bernadette, Glynn, Andrew and jean forced her into the trunk of a stolen Fiat, according to The Manchester Evening News, before driving fifteen miles away to a wooded area near a golf course in Romilly's Stockport. When they got there, they pulled Suzanne out of the trunk, who was half naked and shoved her to the ground before dousing her in gasoline.

15:50 After failing to start a fire, Glenn Powell used the lighter against her bare back to set her ablaze. They then left Suzanne there as she and drove away, singing Burn, Baby, Burn, and laughing all the way home. But Suzanne did not die that morning. She gathered up her remaining strength and dragged herself up an embankment down the road a quarter of a mile, flagging down Barry Sutcliffe as he drove down the street on his way to work at around ten after six in the morning. According to The Independent, He took her to a nearby home to call police and an ambulance while Suzanne told him who had done this to her. Quote she said she had been held for over a week in a flat somewhere, she wasn't sure where, and she had been injected with drugs, and that she had been brought here and dumped. According to medium dot Com, Barry spoke of how the fire had done so much damage to Suzanne. He tried to hold her hand, but it was almost nothing but ash, and her legs and her feet were like raw meat. The fire had burned away almost all of the features on her feet, but Barry was struck by how polite Suzanne was despite all of the horror she had endured when paramedics arrived. She was taken to Stockport Infirmary before being transferred to a specialist unit in Withington, where she gave police the names and addresses of the four people who had done this to her. Doctors determined Suzanne had sustained

17:22 severe burns to over seventy five percent of her body, and the damage was so extensive that the only way to identify her was from a partial fingerprint they were able to get from her thumb. Ultimately, as a result of her injuries, Suzanne slipped into a coma and later died on December eighteenth, three days after she was found. Now to give you an understanding of the damage severe burns can do and how fatal they can be, I'm going to give you a brief overview from Stanford Healthcare. According to Stanford Healthcare, third degree burnt destroy the epidermis and dermis, which is the first layer of skin and the layer underneath. It can also cause damage to the bone and muscle under the skin. The burn site will appear white and or charred, and there is typically no sense of feeling because of extensive nerve damage. Burns to over fifteen to twenty percent of one's body require extensive treatment by specialists in a specialized burn unit, and there is a long list of these specialists that can be involved in this treatment, including infectious disease specialists, orthopedic specialists, psychologists and psychiatrists, occupational and respiratory specialists, plastic surgeons, and dietitians.

18:45 And that's just a name a few. Burn rehabilitation can take years, depending on the extent of the damage and involve things like skin graps, complex wound care, reconstructive surgery, pain management. I mean, the list literally goes on. In recent years, the survival rate is much higher for people who have sustained full body burns, but according to integral life dot com quote, the mortality rate increases with the size of the burn. Those with ten percent of their total body surface area or TBSA burned have a mortality rate of ero point six percent, but that increases to thirty percent if the patient has a TBSA burn of over forty percent. Patients with burns with greater than seventy percent TBSA have a fifty percent fatality rate. Of course, there is also the risk of infection and illness when it comes to burns like this, including urinary tract infections, cellulitis, respiratory failure, wound infections, and pneumonia. There's so much touch and go when it comes to treating the severe of an injury, and and while there's been amazing medical advancements in recent years and help best to treat patients who have sustained these injuries, it wasn't like that in the nineties.

20:11 While the doctors did everything possible to help Suzanne, she ultimately succumbed to those injuries. Now, when Suzanne's mother and stepfather were contacted and notified as Suzanne being in the hospital after she was found, Elizabeth didn't believe it. At first. She had assumed that Suzanne was safe staying with John. She said, quote, I thought it was a prank at first. They said Suzanne was hurt and in hospital and that I should stay where I am. They said they'll come over to pick me up. They didn't say anything else, and they didn't tell me what injury she had. When I got to the hospital, all I saw was this figure in bed, covered in bandages, with just her face showing.

20:56 I couldn't recognize her. And when Stephen, who was twelve at the time, arrived at the hospital to see his sister before she passed, John was actually told not to allow his son in the room due to how traumatizing it would be for Stephen to see his sister like that quote. My dad and I went to the hospital after a detective knocked on our door, and when we got there, one of the detectives told my dad, don't let your child go in there. What he sees will not be recognizable. Something in me was like, fuck that, and I stormed straight into the intensive care room. Suzanne looked like she had gained fifty stone. She was normally a slim, cute girl, but she had swollen up so much because of the burns. She was wrapped up in bandages and was in a medically induced coma. But I could see some of the burns, and I can still remember the smell of burn flesh. I sat down by her bed and started crying. I was in bits. A nurse said I couldn't touch her because of the burns.

21:59 Regarding its investigation, police made quick work of tracking down everyone involved in Suzanne's murder. When the group was apprehended, Jeane and Bernadette reportedly were laughing and joking around, according to medium dot Com, and all of them denied any involvement until Anthony Dudson's father encouraged him to tell the truth about what he had done. At Clifford Pooke's home, they found the teeth that Clifford had removed from Suzanne's mouth, and in Bernadette's home they found the overturned bed still covered in the ties they used to bind Suzanne to the bedframe. Jeane and Glynn Powell, Bernadette Mcneelye, Clifford Puke, Anthony Dudson, and Jeffrey Lee were all arrested and charged with murder, false imprisonment, and conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm.

22:49 They went to trial in November of nineteen ninety three, where they all pled not guilty to murder and conspiracy, with Glynn, Anthony and Jeremy all denying false imprisonment charges. According to the Independent, the jury heard how the motive for Suzanne's murder was the mounting petty grievances they held against Suzanne from the accusation of giving them lives to the alleged theft of Bernadette's pink Delfel coat worth around fifty pounds. The trial lasted a total of twenty two days and Elizabeth had a really hard time dealing with it. Quote. I wasn't allowed to attend the first day of the trial because they were going over some of the worst things they had done to her. When I did go, I was with my son. He had recently been in an accident and had metal scaffolding on his leg, but as soon as he saw them in the dock, he started to unscrew it. He wanted to use them to smash through the glass they were hiding behind. In the end, I couldn't cope with the trial and stopped attending. At the end of the trial, the jury deliberated for nine hours and fifty two minutes before finding Jeanne, Bernadette, and Glynn guilty of murder and sent to life. Anthony was also found guilty of murder and detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.

24:07 The four of them were found guilty of conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, with Glenn also being found guilty of false imprisonment. Bernadette, Jean and Glynn were given an additional twenty years to run concurrently with the life sentence, with a minimum term of twenty five years, and Anthony was given fifteen years for false imprisonment with a concurrent sentence of fifteen years for the conspiracy charge. Jeffrey was acquitted of murder but given fifteen years for false imprisonment, and Clifford Pouke was cleared of murder at the start of the trial by the judge. However, he was charged with seven years for false imprisonment and fifteen years for conspiracy, again to run concurrently with each other. Elizabeth did end up watching the sentencing and she said, quote, I can still remember clearly the moment the guilty verdicts were read, when they were taken away and sent downstairs. They just started screaming, just screaming and shouting, and I thought they didn't care when Suzanne was screaming. They didn't hear Suzanne screams.

25:13 Then Glenn Powell turned around to look at us in the public gallery and just said revenge. Now, remember I didn't say they received whole life orders in England when you are found guilty of murder, you must be sentenced to life, but that doesn't necessarily mean you spend life in prison. It means that should you be released, you will spend the rest of your life un licensed to the community. If you break the terms of the license or are found committing another crime, you go back to prison. A whole life order, like what Mayra Hindley received for her part in the Moore's murders, means that you spend the rest of your life behind bars. The only way to be released is if there is an exceptional, compassionate circumstance.

26:03 The reason I mentioned this distinction is because as of today, in twenty twenty four, not a single person involved in Suzanne's murtyr is behind bars. Every single one of them was released and almost all had their sentences reduced. Barnette's sentence was reduced by one year in twenty thirteen and she was paroled in twenty fifteen after the parole board found her to be a model prisoner and exhibiting genuine remorse. She was given a makeover end a new identity. Anthony dudson sentence was reduced by two years in two thousand and two, and he was released in twenty thirteen. Jeffrey Lee was released in nineteen ninety eight, and Clifford Pooke was released in two thousand and one. Jeane was released after serving twenty three years plus one year time served during the time she spends on remand, and Glynn was released last year in twenty twenty three, all to the outrage of Suzanne's family. Her mother said quote, it was compared to the crimes committed by the Moore's murders. If Myra, Henley and Ian Brady received a whole life tariff, then so should Jean and Bernadette. They took a life, and so they should do life. I just wish we still had the death penalty. As for Stephen, he is backing a new bill, according to the Son, called the Government's Victims and Prisoner's Bill, which aims to keep society's worst

27:34 killers behind bars. He said quote, this new bill won't help me, as Suzanne's killers are all out now, but if it saves one other family from the pain of their relative's killer being released, that will be good enough for me. I support the Government's bill to veto Parole Board decisions one hundred percent. And Lord Chancellor and just Secretary Alex Chalk Casey said, quote, Awful cases such as this are exactly why life must mean life for sadistic child killers and why I will change the law to bring in a ministerial check on parole decisions for the most dangerous offenders. In response to what Suzanne did to bring her killers to justice before her death, Elizabeth said, quote, Suzanne was very forgiving, but she was also a girl who would try to sort out her problems on her own.

28:25 That's what she did. In the end, she survived her ordeal long enough to name every single one of them. As I said in the beginning, this case will be burned into my brain forever. It is right up there with Junko farudas, it is right up there with David Parker, which I will likely never cover that case. It will live in my brain forever, just the atrocities that she went through, that Junko went through it, Sylvia Lichens, it will literally just stay with me forever. And I think part of it is the fact that these girls were all murdered simply for existing. There was a perceived slight against the offender, and that is what led to the horrific things that were done to them. That was the justification that their killers used, and it's disgusting and it will literally just it will literally be in the back of my mind forever. As always, I appreciate you guys.

29:33 We actually just celebrated two years last week, which is crazy. I have some good, some interesting cases in the works for you, guys. I appreciate you all as always, especially now that it's been two years. It's really crazy to think that it's been that long. It doesn't feel that long. But there's been a lot of changes, a lot of growth for the podcast, which is great, but a lot of things that I want to get back to that I'm trying to figure out a way to do with my work schedule being the way it is. But I appreciate you guys. I thank you for sticking around. Leave a review. It really helps us out A nice review.

30:18 I appreciate you guys listening. I apologize if this case was a little bit shorter than what you may typically be used to from me. There wasn't actually an incredibly large amount media dedicated to this case because it was kind of overshadowed by the murder of Jeremy Bulger two months after, so it did overshadow her case a bit, just given the age of Jeremy and the age of his killers, so the media kind of went wild covering his case. So there wasn't a crazy amount to look at when I was doing this one. Like I said, I have plenty of other cases in the works, a couple of books that I'm reading to get research for a couple of cases, a collab that's coming up with a fellow Dark Cast Network friend, and yeah, with that, as always, we hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you in the next chapter of the Book of the Dead. Bye, guys, thank you so much for listening to this chapter of the Book of the Dead, and don't forget that you can always connect with us on Instagram, you can connect with us on Twitter, and you can absolutely connect with us on Patreon. We also

31:48 have a merchore as well that we have frequent discount codes coming out for so that you guys can get March hand drawn by myself at a better cost. We hope you have lovely rest of your week, and just remember, please be kind and don't forget to always stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant. Bye guys, Bye, by