S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY TURN INTO KILLERS
KEITH Farquharson had a chequered police career, having had affairs with junior colleagues and once having been demoted for sending one a sleazy poem.
But it was after the traffic officer had retired that he would be driven to murder, smothering his own wife, Alice, who had stood by him for 33 years despite his adultery.
In August 2019 Farquharson, then working as a school bus driver, killed the 56-year-old mother of three after she asked him: ‘Do you love me?’ as she lay in bed at their Aberdeen home.
Initially
Farquharson tried to pretend her death had been an accident, but an investigation showed the teaching assistant’s neck had been compressed.
Convicted of murder at the High Court in Glasgow earlier this year, the 60-year-old was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
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THEY were meant to fight crime and keep us safe…yet turned out to be killers.
Former US cop
Joseph Deangelo, known as the Golden State Killer, admitted to committing 13 brutal murders in California during the 1970s and 80s in a deal to avoid the death penalty.
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The 74-year-old, who was working as a policeman when he carried out some of the killings, was finally caught in 2018 after a 40-year manhunt and will now spend the rest of his life in prison. Detectives finally tracked down the elusive culprit by matching his DNA with a genealogy website.
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But he is not the only officer of the law to go from saving lives – to be accused of taking them. Here JAMES
MOORE looks at six more notorious cases…
IF a policeman offered you a lift, you’d expect to be in pretty safe hands.
Yet it was a fatal mistake for the victims of Russia’s worst serial killer, who lured them into his car dressed in his genuine uniform.
Mikhail Popkov worked as a police lieutenant in the Siberian city of Angarsk. But between 1992-2010 he targeted mainly vulnerable young women and violently murdered them.
Raped, and then butchered with weapons such as a screwdriver, axe or knife, Popkov would typically dump their horrifically mutilated bodies in local forests or cemeteries.
Some victims had more than 100 wounds, earning the unknown serial killer the nickname Werewolf.
Finally caught through DNA evidence, Popkov said he’d wanted to clean streets of “immoral women”.
Convicted of 78 murders by 2018, including one of a fellow male police officer, the 56-year-old is currently serving a life sentence.
IN September 2018, off-duty Dallas Police patrol officer Amber Guyger entered the apartment of unarmed 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean and shot him dead while he was watching TV and eating vanilla ice cream. Guyger said she had mistaken his apartment for hers in the same building and thought Jean was a burglar. But in October 2019 a jury convicted the 31-year-old of his murder and she was sentenced to 10 years behind bars. Jean’s younger brother Brandt forgave and hugged Guyger during her sentencing.