Serial Killer Investigations (10 page)

Ressler and Douglas were at the Bramshill Police Academy, where Ressler had coined the phrase ‘serial killer,’ and they were drinking at a nearby bar when one of the leading investigators in the three-year-old Ripper case, John Domaille, walked over to speak to them, with several other detectives. They sketched out for the benefit of the FBI agents the background of the case, and the scenes of the crimes. The man in charge of the case, Chief Inspector George Oldfield, had received a cassette containing a message that purported to be from the killer. Ressler and Douglas had heard the tape in the US, and Douglas now commented: ‘Based on the crime scenes you’ve described and the audiotape, that’s not the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that.’

Douglas then sketched out his own notion of the killer. He would be an almost invisible loner in his late twenties or early thirties, with a pathological hatred of women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver, since he seemed to get around quite a bit. The murders were his attempt to punish prostitutes in general.

In fact, the Ripper was caught by accident in January 1981, after 13 murders and four serious attacks. Two policemen doing a routine check on a parked Rover interrupted prostitute Olivia Reivers, and her client, who gave his name as Peter Williams. Recognising Reivers as a convicted prostitute with a suspended sentence, the policemen checked the number plate of the car and found it to be false—in fact it came from a scrapyard for used cars. When they ordered Reivers into their car, the man asked if he might relieve himself, and went behind an oil storage tank before being taken to the police station. There he gave his correct name, Peter Sutcliffe, aged 35, but continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. But when one of the policemen, acting on a sudden hunch, returned to the storage tank, he found a hammer and a knife that Sutcliffe had dropped among the leaves. After 48 hours in custody, Sutcliffe confessed to being the Ripper. The massive hunt for him had taken six years.

Psychologically speaking, Peter Sutcliffe proved to be as strange and complex as Ed Kemper. This working-class young man was the last person in the world anyone would have expected to become the sadistic disemboweller of women. As a child he had been so gentle and timid that he seemed destined for a life of self-effacement. His father, who was mad about cricket and football and was regarded as something of a ladies’ man, treated him with a kind of irritable contempt, which reflected his feeling that his eldest son would always remain a sissy.

John Sutcliffe’s large family was terrified of him. He was the kind of man who would walk into the room when everyone was watching television, and change the channel onto a sports program. Then he would sit in front of it, so close that no one could see past him. One of his daughters admitted that she daydreamed of murdering him.

Peter, born in June 1946, was undersized and shy, a scrawny, miserable little boy who spent hours staring blankly into space. He learned to walk quite literally by clinging to his mother’s skirts. And he continued to cling to them for years after.

At school he was so withdrawn and passive that after his arrest, most of his teachers could not even recall his face. His headmaster remembered him because Peter had once played truant for two weeks because he was being bullied. When his father found out, he made such a scene at the school that from then on, the headmaster took great care that Peter would never be bullied again.

The Sutcliffe home in Bingley, Yorkshire, was no background for an introspective child. With a dominant, self-assertive tyrant for a father, Peter inevitably took his mother’s side. But his younger brothers were in many ways more like their father. One of them once floored the local boxing champion by punching him in the testicles. The house was always jammed with people, and John Sutcliffe enjoyed ‘feeling up’ any girl who strayed too close. The atmosphere was heavy with sex, and even Peter’s mother, a quiet doormat of a woman, had an affair with a local police sergeant. When her husband found out, he retaliated by moving in with a deaf woman who lived a few doors down the street.

Peter was 23 when the unthinkable happened, and he discovered that his mother, the woman he regarded as his ideal, his vision of what a woman ought to be, loving, hard-working, self-sacrificing, always warm and sympathetic, had been having an extramarital affair. His father later confessed to a female reporter that he thought this had ‘turned Peter’s mind’.

John Sutcliffe had learned about the affair when his wife mistook his voice on the phone for that of her lover. (They had never before spoken on the phone, and he was not wearing his teeth.) He arranged to meet her in a hotel room, arrived three hours early, and persuaded a member of staff to let him into the room. He had taken his children with him to witness her shame.

When Kathleen Sutcliffe came into the room, carrying a bag with her nightclothes, she was confronted by her family, including Peter and his fiancee, Sonia. Her husband began to shout at her, calling her a prostitute. He then made her open her night bag, take out the expensive negligee she had packed for her tryst, and hold it up.

John later told the reporter: ‘I remember Peter were just standing there—he were shook rigid. He had a look on his face like an animal, it were. I think it may have turned his mind.’

There was another factor: Kathleen’s lover was a policeman. This made it even worse. Coppers were not held in high esteem in their house. John had been arrested for breaking and entering. The second brother was always in and out of jail, and some of Peter’s best mates were burglars. The infidelity of Peter’s mother with one of the ‘enemy’ must have convinced him that even the nicest women were whores at heart.

By this time, Peter himself was no longer the pathologically shy boy. Ashamed of being so weak, he had flung himself into bodybuilding until by his late teens he had the physique of a wrestler. As soon as he could afford it, he had bought his first car, and used to drive at 80 miles an hour through the narrow Bingley streets. For as much as he disliked his father, he also admired him, and wanted to be more like him.

Where women were concerned he could never match his father or his brothers. He liked to drive around the red-light district of Bradford and stare at the women, but he never dared to accost one, even though he boasted to his mates about his (in reality nonexistent) sexual experience. With his obsessive, semi-incestuous feelings about his mother, Peter Sutcliffe was undoubtedly a psychological mess.

Then he finally found himself a girlfriend. She was a Czech emigre named Sonia Szurma, was even shyer than he was, and so plain that even his father did not try to put his hand up her skirt.

And it was the timid Sonia, oddly enough, who started the train of events that turned him into a killer. For when she began having an affair with an Italian who owned a sports car, Sutcliffe was thrown into a frenzy of jealousy. It was like his mother all over again; this young woman who seemed so shy and withdrawn was just like the rest of them. Peter finally took the plunge and went to a prostitute. But even this turned out to be a fiasco. He was unable to raise an erection, and the girl swindled him out of five pounds. Worse still, when he saw her later in a pub, and asked for his change, she jeered at him and told the whole story at the top of her voice, so he became a laughing stock.

For the introspective boy who had been fighting all his life to feel like a man, the humiliation bit deep, and turned poisonous.

One day, eating fish and chips in a friend’s minivan, he thought he saw the prostitute, and followed her. He was carrying in his pocket a brick inside a sock that was precisely for this kind of opportunity. He hit her on the back of the head, and then ran back to the van. But she succeeded in taking its number, and police questioned him. He managed to convince them that it had been an ordinary quarrel, and they let him go.

But that act of hitting a prostitute had taken possession of his imagination. He realised that it had given gave him some deep and strange satisfaction that was intensely sexual. He became a kind of dual personality. While the Peter known to his friends and Sonia remained genial and courteous, another Peter enjoyed stopping his car by prostitutes and asking what they charged. When they told him, he would shout, ‘Is that all you’re worth?’ and drive off.

In 1975, a prostitute turned him down and released once more the wellspring of rage; he followed her and hit her with a hammer, then raised her clothes and took out a knife. Someone called out, and he ran away. But the feverish excitement that swept through him again made him realise that what he really wanted was to assert his masculinity by killing a prostitute. A month later he again crept up behind a woman and hit her with a hammer; again he was disturbed and had to flee. But now it was only a matter of time before he committed murder.

It happened two months later, when he picked up a drunken hooker who was thumbing a lift. He took her to a playing field, where he once again proved to be impotent. He then made up for it by hitting her with a hammer and stabbing her repeatedly in the breasts and stomach.

What he had failed to realise, as he daydreamed of revenge on ‘whores’, is that he was handing himself over to a demon who would give him no peace. He would have to carry on murdering and disembowelling woman after woman, even when he knew perfectly well that they were not prostitutes, because only this could make him feel fully alive. Roy Hazelwood was right: ‘sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.’ A murderer like Peter Sutcliffe is the living illustration of what he meant.

The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was the biggest police operation ever mounted in the United Kingdom. It cost £7 million, and involved 200,000 interviews—including four with Sutcliffe—and 30,000 searches of homes. But it taught the British police the same lesson that the FBI had learned through Manson, Kemper, and the rest: there had to be some more logical way of trapping serial killers. The Yorkshire police reached the conclusion Pierce Brooks had reached in 1948: the answer lay in computerisation. In the United Kingdom, this happened in the early 1980s, and would later help to trap serial killers such as Duffy and Mulcahy, the ‘Railway Rapists’.

In the US, it also began to happen in the early 1980s, when Pierce Brooks persuaded the Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was approved. It was decided to run it from Quantico, and in May 1985 Brooks was appointed its first director, and joined the team there.

By that time, Ressler had already inaugurated a new project that he called the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), which sprang from that plan to interview killers—Ressler’s original ‘Criminal Personality Research Project’ of 1978. The idea, as Ressler put it, was to ‘bring together the fragmented efforts from around the country so they could be consolidated into one national resource centre available to the entire law enforcement community’.

But at the time Ressler and Douglas were advising the British police about the Yorkshire Ripper, all this lay some years in the future. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, another series of random and apparently motiveless killings was underlining the need for some method of psychological profiling.

It had started in the stiflingly hot early hours of 29 July 1976, as two young women sat talking in the front seats of an Oldsmobile on Buhre Avenue in the Bronx; they were 18-year-old Donna Lauria, a medical technician, and 19-year-old Jody Valenti, a student nurse. Donna’s parents, on their way back from a night out, passed them at about 1 a.m., and said good night. A few moments after they reached their apartment, they heard the sound of shots and screams. A man had walked up to the car, pulled a gun out of a brown paper bag, and fired five shots. Donna was killed immediately; Jody wounded in the thigh.

Total lack of motive for the shooting convinced police that they were dealing with a man who killed for pleasure, without knowing his victims.

Three months after the Bronx murder, on 23 October 1976, 20-year-old Carl Denaro shared a few beers with friends at a Queens bar. At 2.30 a.m., he left with Rosemary Keenan and parked his car near her house. Suddenly a man appeared and fired five shots into the car; one of them struck Carl in the head. Rosemary raced the car back to the bar and his friends, who rushed him to the hospital. Surgeons replaced a part of his skull with a metal plate.

Just a month later, on 26 November, two young women were talking on the stoop in front of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens; it was half an hour past midnight when a man walked toward them, started to ask if they could direct him, then, before he finished the sentence, pulled out a gun and began shooting. Donna DeMasi, 16, and Joanne Lomino, 18, were both wounded. A bullet lodged in Joanne’s spine, paralyzing her.

On 30 January 1977, a young couple were kissing goodnight in a car in the Ridgewood section of Queens; there was a deafening explosion, the windscreen shattered, and Christine Freund, 26, slumped into the arms of her boyfriend John Diel. She died a few hours later in hospital.

On 8 March 1977, Virginia Voskerichian, an Armenian student, was on her way home, and only a few hundred yards from her mother’s house in Forest Hills, Queens, when a gunman walked up to her, and shot her in the face at a few yards range; the bullet went into her mouth, shattering her front teeth. She died immediately. Christine Freund had been shot only 300 yards away.

By now police recognised that the bullets that had killed three and wounded four had all come from the same gun, an uncommon .44 Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. And this indicated a homicidal psychopath who would probably go on until he was caught. The problem was that the police had no clues to his identity, no idea of where to begin searching. Unless he was caught during an attempted murder, the chances of arresting him seemed minimal. New York City mayor Abraham Beame called a press conference in which he announced: ‘We have a savage killer on the loose.’ He was able to say that the man was white, about five feet ten inches tall, well groomed, with hair combed straight back.’ The press dubbed the unknown shooter ‘the .44-Calibre Killer’.