The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (6 page)

The Yorkshire Ripper case taught the police an important lesson.
If suspects, like car number plates, had been fed into a computer, Sutcliffe would probably have been taken in for questioning in 1978 – when he was wearing the boots whose imprint was found beside Josephine Whitaker – and three lives would have been saved.
A computer would have had no problem storing 150,000 suspects and 22,000 statements.

Yet even with the aid of a computer, the task of tracking down a random serial killer like Sutcliffe would have been enormous.
It could only display such details as the methods of known sex offenders, and the names of suspects who had been interviewed more than once.
In their next major investigation of a serial killer, the Surrey police began with a list of 4,900 sex offenders – which, as it happened, contained the name of the man they were seeking.
The ‘Railway Rapist’ began to operate in 1982; at this stage two men were involved in sexual attacks on five women on or near railway stations.
By 1984 one of the men had begun to operate alone.
He threatened his victims with a knife, tied their hands, and raped them with a great deal of violence.
Twenty-seven such attacks occurred in 1984 and 1985.
In January 1986, the body of nineteen-year-old Alison Day was found in the River Lea; she had vanished seventeen days earlier on her way to meet her boyfriend.
She had been raped and strangled.
In April 1986, fifteen-year-old Maartje Tamboezer, daughter of a Dutch oil executive, was accosted as she took a short cut through woods near Horsley, and dragged off the footpath; she was also raped and strangled.
Her attacker was evidently aware of the most recent advance in forensic detection, ‘genetic fingerprinting’, by which a suspect can be identified from the distinctive pattern in the DNA of his body cells.
The killer had stuffed a burning paper handkerchief into her vagina.
A man who had been seen running for a train soon after the murder was believed to be the rapist, and two million train tickets were examined in an attempt to find one with his fingerprints.

A month later, a twenty-nine-year-old secretary named Anne Lock disappeared on her way home from work; her body was found ten weeks later.
Again, an attempt had been made to destroy sperm traces by burning.

It was at this point that the police forces involved in the investigation decided to link computers; the result was the list of 4,900 sex offenders, soon reduced to 1,999.
At number 1,594 was a man called John Duffy, charged with raping his ex-wife and attacking her lover with a knife.
The computers showed that he had also been arrested on suspicion of loitering near a railway station.
(Since the blood group of the Anne Lock strangler had been the same as that of the ‘Railway Rapist’, police had been keeping a watch on railway stations.) Duffy was called in for questioning, and his similarity to the ‘Railway Rapist’ noted.
(Duffy was small, ginger-haired and pockmarked.) When the police tried to conduct a second interview, Duffy was in hospital suffering from amnesia, alleging that he had been beaten up by muggers.
The hospital authorities declined to allow him to be interviewed.
Since he was only one of two thousand suspects, the police did not persist.

At this point, the investigation team decided that an ‘expert’ might be able to help.
They asked Dr David Canter, a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey, to review all the evidence.
Using techniques similar to those used by the Yorkshire Ripper team – studying the locations of the attacks – he concluded that the ‘centre of gravity’ lay in the North London area, and that the rapist probably lived within three miles of Finchley Road.
He also concluded that he had been a semi-skilled worker, and that his relationship with his wife had been a stormy one.
When Canter’s analysis was matched up against the remaining suspects, the computer immediately threw up the name of John Duffy, who lived in Kilburn.
Police kept him under surveillance until they decided that they could no longer take the risk of leaving him at liberty – another schoolgirl had been raped with typical violence since Duffy was committed to hospital – and arrested him.
When a fellow martial arts enthusiast admitted that Duffy had persuaded him to beat him up so he could claim loss of memory, the police were certain that he was the man they were seeking.
Five of rape victims picked him out at an identity parade, and string found in the home of his parents proved to be identical with that which had been used to tie Maartje Tamboezer’s wrists.
When forensic scientists matched fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibres found on one of Duffy’s sweaters, the final link in the chain of evidence was established; although he continued to refuse to admit or deny his guilt, John Duffy was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Dr David Canter has described the techniques he used to pinpoint where the railway rapist lived:
²

‘Many environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that people form particular mental maps of the places they use.
Each person creates a unique representation of the place in which he lives, with its own particular distortions.
In the case of John Duffy, journalists recognised his preference for committing crimes near railway lines to the extent that they dubbed him the “Railway Rapist”.
What neither they nor the police appreciated was that this characteristic was likely to be part of his way of thinking about the layout of London, and so was a clue to his own particular mental map.
It could therefore be used to see where the psychological focus of this map was and so specify the area in which he lived.’

By the time John Duffy was arrested in 1986, the techniques of ‘psychological profiling’ had already been in use in America for a decade, and the use of the computer had also been recognised as a vital part of the method.
A retired Los Angeles detective named Pierce Brooks had pointed out that many serial killers remained unapprehended because they moved from state to state, and that before the state police realised they had a multiple killer on their hands, he had moved on.
The answer obviously lay in linking up the computers of individual states, and feeding the information into a central computer.
Brooks’s programme was labelled VICAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme – and the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, was chosen as the centre for the new crimefighting team.
VICAP proved to be the first major step towards the solution of the problem of the random sex killer.

¹
For a more detailed account of the history of crime detection, see
Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection
, Colin Wilson, 1989.

²
New Society
, 4 March 1988

Two

Profile of a Serial Killer

UP TO THE
time this book went to press, no defendant facing charges of multiple murder in any British court had ever been described in proceedings as a ‘serial killer’, or his alleged crimes as ‘serial murder’.
No such classification obtains either in British legal terminology or, indeed, in everyday conversation.

Even now, despite increasing use of the term in media reports, it is doubtful if one layman in a hundred in Britain knows what distinguishes the serial killer from all other multiple murderers.
That is certainly not because none are to be found in the annals of British crime; on the contrary.
The reason is that their identification and acceptance as a unique species of murderer is new, so new that outside the United States – the country worst affected by these most dangerous of all killers – the civilised world is only just waking up to the threat they pose to society.

Paradoxically, the man generally regarded as
the
archetypal serial killer is also the world’s most notorious murderer: Jack the Ripper.
‘The Ripper’ – the only name by which we know him, for he was never caught – stalked and mutilated his victims in the gas-lit alleys of London’s East End more than one hundred years ago.
How many women he killed during that brief reign of autumn terror in 1888 is uncertain.
Four, perhaps five; by no means an exceptional tally in the context of the violent 1980s, yet nonetheless a series of murders which continue to excite worldwide interest – fascination, even – both because of their savagery, and persistent conjecture as to the identity of the Ripper and his fate.

While his identity may never now be satisfactorily established, modern criminal profiling techniques enable us to discern a clearly identifiable pattern in the five Ripper murders.
Their significant behavioural thread lies not so much in the
modus operandi
which governed all five homicides – the ‘pick-up’, followed by the slitting of the victim’s throat – as in the post-mortem mutilation which accompanied four of the murders (the Ripper was disturbed during the course of the other one).

Such a ritual, sexually sadistic trait is a hallmark of a certain kind of serial killer.
The
modus operandi
may vary over time; it is chosen basically because it is practical – and because it works.
Changes may be introduced should some flaw emerge (perhaps during the early murders, which do not always proceed to plan), or even deliberately to try to confuse the investigating police.
The ritual aspect of the crime, however – which is conceived of fantasy, and endlessly rehearsed in the offender’s mind before he kills for the first time – is his ‘signature’, his mark; and it is principally this ‘signature’ which enables a series of crimes to be linked through behavioural analysis.

The most advanced,
systematic
profiling technique in use today – the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme, devised and developed by agents of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia – is based on the tenet that behaviour reflects personality.
Thus, expert crime scene interpretation (based on police and medical reports, photographic and forensic evidence, etc.), translated into identifiable behavioural characteristics, enables the FBI analyst to profile the
type
of offender responsible – as distinct from the individual.
Such detailed behavioural analysis is not a theoretical aid to criminal investigation: it works.
It is used every day by FBI analysts at Quantico, and is especially effective when dealing with apparently ‘motiveless’ murders (i.e.
where there is no apparent connection between murderer and victim).
The same behavioural analysis technique is used to combat a variety of offences, notably serial murder but also in cases involving abduction, rape, arson, drug trafficking and certain planned terrorist crimes, such as hijacking and hostage-taking.
The scope for expansion would appear to be almost limitless, given time for research; meantime its greatest immediate value in the United States lies in aiding local law enforcement agencies in the tracking down and arrest of serial offenders.

No violent criminal instils a greater sense of fear and outrage among the community than the serial killer.
The sadistic nature of his crimes, especially in the relatively rare cases involving torture and/or mutilation, inevitably attracts maximum publicity; while public alarm is further heightened by an awareness that – unlike most other murderers – many serial killers deliberately target total strangers as their victims.
The net result is a vicious circle of ever-increasing fear and publicity as each new murder is discovered, all of it combining to add significantly to existing pressures on the police concerned.
However, thwarted from the outset by a lack of clues to the murderer’s identity (a situation aggravated by the apparent absence of any connection between assailant and victims), the investigation may drag on for years in the face of mounting criticism and even hostility.
(One recent example in Britain involved the six-year-long hunt for Peter Sutcliffe, alias the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed thirteen women before he was caught in 1981 – and then during a routine police patrol check, as mentioned in Chapter 1.)

Man’s quest for a composite profile of ‘the murderer’ is not new.
Pioneering work in the eighteenth century, using physiognomy (the art of judging character by facial features), and phrenology (the study of cranial bumps and ridges,
vis-à-vis
the development of mental faculties), failed to reveal significant common physical similarities.
A more recent, twentieth-century theory held that chromosomal imbalance (caused by the presence of an additional male, or ‘Y’, chromosome in the genes), increased the probability of violent criminal behaviour.
This supposition, however, was challenged when Richard Speck – the American multiple murderer who killed eight nurses in one night in 1966, and who was thought to suffer from such an imbalance – was found on examination to have
no
extra chromosome.
Subsequent research showed that most males with such an imbalance display no abnormally violent behaviour.
The FBI profilers (or analysts, as they are officially called) use behavioural traits commonly identified in convicted, sexually-oriented murderers as their analytical mainstay; and that this technique stands the test of time is clearly borne out by scrutiny of the 1888 Ripper murders.

All the five Ripper murders were obviously sexually motivated.
All five victims were the same
type
of person, i.e.
prostitutes.
All were actively soliciting in the same general ‘red-
light’ area on the nights they met their deaths.
Four of the murders – those of Mary Ann Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly – were plainly ritualistic, with post-mortem mutilation.
Nicholls was disembowelled.
So was Chapman.
But, unlike Nicholls (whose robust stays precluded mutilation above the level of the diaphragm), Chapman’s uterus was cut out and removed, her entrails severed from their mesenteric attachments and left draped symbolically over one shoulder.
Eddowes was similarly mutilated, except that in her case the left kidney was removed with the uterus.
Following that murder a letter from someone, claiming to be the killer, referred to anthropophagy (cannibalism), viz.
‘(the kidney) tasted very nise [
sic
]’.