Forensics

by Val McDermid

  ‘Jack the Ripper’ was a media sensation: here, a contemporary magazine cover depicts Constable Neil’s discovery of Mary Anne Nichols’s body

  Over the next two and a half months, three more prostitutes were found murdered in the dark streets of Whitechapel. When a fifth, Mary Jane Kelly, was found slaughtered in a rented bed on 9 November, Scotland Yard were still no closer to identifying the killer, who had by now been nicknamed Jack the Ripper. In despair the police called in Doctor Thomas Bond, the police surgeon for the Westminster division, to assess the surgical skill of the murderer. The scene of Mary Kelly’s death caused Bond’s stomach to churn in horror. He couldn’t find a heart inside her chest. The Ripper had taken it with him.

  Later, in the calm of his office, Bond took a deep breath and tried to think carefully about what he had seen. First of all he answered the central question the police had posed. In fact, contrary to what the original pathologist had concluded, he decided that the murderer ‘does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or a horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals’. But Bond wanted do more than state what the Ripper wasn’t. He wanted to give the police positive guidance on who the Ripper was. He examined the police reports and post-mortem notes of the dozen or so prostitutes murdered in the previous seven months in Whitechapel, and decided that five were definitely carried out by the same man. The Ripper attacked between midnight and 6 a.m., with a long knife, in a one square mile area around Whitechapel.

  The overkill actions – so-called ‘signatures’ – interested Bond as much as the basic details. The Ripper left his victims degradingly positioned on their backs with their legs apart, their guts out or missing and their throats cut. His degree of mutilation increased murder on murder: a classic example of confidence leading to an escalation in the level of violence. Four of his victims he had left out on the street. But his last one, Mary Kelly, had been killed indoors to give him more time and privacy to mutilate her. Bond described the Ripper as ‘subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania’, and went on give his now-famous profile:

  A man of physical strength and great coolness and daring … The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible … he would probably be solitary and eccentric in his habits … possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times.

  Some elements of the Bond profile were tenuous – why ‘probably middle-aged’? – and it ignored other factors, such as the lack of semen at the crime scenes. Nevertheless, the report greatly influenced senior police officers and government figures involved in the investigation. Of course, because the police never caught Jack the Ripper, we can’t know how accurate Bond’s profile was. But it was a careful appraisal, peppered with important qualifying words still used in profiling today, such as ‘likely’, ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’, and it did address important issues such as how the Ripper escaped the scene of his crimes unnoticed.

  The modern history of what came to be known as ‘offender profiling’ began in the 1940s when the US Office of Strategic Services asked Walter Langer, a psychiatrist, to draw up a profile of Adolf Hitler. After the Second World War, Lionel Haward, a psychologist working for the Royal Air Force (and later Surrey University) drew up a list of characteristics which high-ranking Nazi war criminals might display, and the technique was also used by Dr James Brussel, Assistant Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the state of New York, in the 1950s. Brussel lived in the city’s West Village, where he smoked a pipe and buried his head in Freud. He was no shrinking violet. One of his many books was called Instant Shrink: How to Become an Expert Psychiatrist in Ten Easy Lessons. His best-known forensic work involved profiling the ‘Mad Bomber of New York’, whose campaign lasted for sixteen years.

  On 16 November 1940, a worker discovered a small pipe bomb filled with gunpowder on a windowsill at the energy company Consolidated Edison’s offices in New York. Wrapped around it was a handwritten note: ‘CON EDISON CROOKS – THIS IS FOR YOU.’ The bomb was a dud. Ten months later a similar device was found in a street about five blocks away from Con Ed headquarters, also with a note. It, too, was a dud.

  After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the New York police received a letter which read: ‘I WILL MAKE NO MORE BOMB UNITS FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR – MY PATRIOTIC FEELINGS HAVE MADE ME DECIDE THIS – LATER I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE – THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS.’

  Sure enough, New York was free of pipe bombs until 1951. But at that point the Mad Bomber began a renewed offensive. Over the next five years he planted at least thirty-one bombs, mainly in public buildings, including theatres, cinemas, libraries, railway stations and public toilets. Each bomb was a length of pipe filled with gunpowder and wrapped in a woollen sock, with a timer made from torch batteries and a pocket watch. Sometimes the police received warning calls; other times the bombs didn’t explode; and sometimes notes reiterated that the campaign would continue until Con Ed had been brought to justice.

  The first pipe bomb exploded in March 1951, near the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. At Loews Theater in Lexington Avenue in December 1952 one of the Mad Bomber’s ‘units’ injured someone for the first time. In November 1954 a bomb stuffed into a seat at the Radio City Music Hall blasted through an audience watching White Christmas, injuring four. Six more people were hurt in December 1956 by a bomb at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, where 1,500 people were watching War and Peace. The city was in uproar. The New York Police Department (NYPD) launched the greatest manhunt in its history. They believed they were after a former employee of Con Ed with a grudge. But fingerprint examiners, handwriting experts and the bomb investigation unit had not been able to narrow it down further than that.

  The NYPD called in Brussel. He studied the records of all the cases, examined the crime scenes and the bomber’s methods, and developed what he called a ‘portrait’: ‘By studying a man’s deeds, I have deduced what kind of man he might be.’ Brussel thought the Mad Bomber must be a skilled mechanic, of Slavic descent, a practising Catholic, living in Connecticut, over forty years old, neat, tidy and clean shaven, unmarried, and possibly a virgin. Warming to his task, Brussel noticed that in his handwritten letters the bomber had produced ‘w’s that resembled two ‘u’s, rounded like a pair of breasts – he therefore must not have developed beyond the Oedipal stage of psychological development, and was probably living with a mother figure, such as an older female relative. Brussel thought the bomber was suffering from paranoia, and concluded with a precise prediction: he would be wearing a buttoned-up double-breasted suit when the police arrested him.

  At Brussel’s request, the profile was published in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1956. This was probably his greatest contribution to the capture of the bomber. On Boxing Day the New York Journal-American published an open letter promising the bomber a fair trial if he gave himself up. He replied that he wouldn’t, and listing his grievances against Con Ed: ‘I was injured on a job. My medical bills and care have cost thousands … I did not get a single penny for a lifetime of misery and suffering.’

  This response led Alice Kelly, a company clerk, to look at Con Ed’s pre-1940 employment records – which the company had previously told police were destroyed. There, Kelly found a file on George Metesky, who had worked for Con Ed between 1929 and 1931 as a generator wiper, and who had been injured in an accident at the ‘Hell Gate’ plant. Metesky had inhaled a gust of gas which he claimed had damaged his lungs, leading to pneumonia and tuberculosis. He was fired from his job without compensation, which led him to write 900 letters to the Mayor, the Police Commissioner and the n
ewspapers. ‘I never even got a penny postcard back,’ he later said. Looking through Metesky’s letters of complaint, Kelly noticed that several of them included ‘dastardly deeds’, the same dated phrase that the Mad Bomber had peppered his notes with.

  Police lead away George Metesky, the ‘Mad Bomber of New York’. Here he is wearing the double-breasted suit Dr James Brussel, who provided a psychological profile of the bomber before his arrest, specified that he would be wearing when found

  On 21 January 1957, the police arrived at Metesky’s address in Westchester, Connecticut. He opened the door wearing his pyjamas, having just settled down to spend the evening with his two older sisters. His sisters told the police that he was an impeccably neat man who went to Mass regularly. When he came back downstairs from getting dressed, Metesky was wearing a buttoned-up double-breasted suit. He told the police that he never wanted to hurt anyone, and had designed the bombs accordingly. A doctor declared Metesky insane and unfit to stand trial, and he was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He was released in 1973 and died twenty years later, at the age of ninety.

  Despite the legend of Brussel’s profile, it was Alice Kelly’s meticulous searching of the records armed with the clues from his letters of complaint that nailed Metesky. But the Brussel profile was hailed as a piece of interpretative genius because it correctly depicted the bomber as a paranoid Catholic Slav living in Connecticut and wearing a particular type of suit. His deductions were logical, not magical: bombing is a crime associated with paranoia; in the post-war years protest bombings were common in eastern Europe; most Slavs were Catholic; lots of Slavs lived in Connecticut; and the fashion in the 1950s was for men to wear double-breasted suit jackets with the buttons done up.

  The most shocking aspect of the case is that it took the NYPD sixteen years to track down the Mad Bomber, even though he had given them so many clues in his notes: ‘I AM NOT WELL, AND FOR THIS I WILL MAKE THE CON EDISON SORRY.’ Malcolm Gladwell concluded in a 2007 New Yorker article that ‘Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.’ But there were no such detractors at the time. There was only relief. Brussel’s profile played a large role in subsequently encouraging the police to call on psychologists and psychiatrists to deliver profiles for their investigations into serious crime.

  In 1977 the FBI inaugurated profiling training courses at their academy in Quantico, Virginia. They were the brainchild of Howard Teton, who acknowledged James Brussel as ‘a true pioneer of the field’ and was very influenced by what he saw as Brussel’s successes. A small group of FBI agents drove off on weekend trips to jails, where they interviewed thirty-six serial killers and serial rapists. They wanted to base their future profiles on empirical evidence rather than hunch and anecdote. Their research produced two models of serial killer: the disorganised man, who attacks victims at random, not caring who they are, murdering them sloppily, and leaving forensic traces; and the organised man, whose victims fulfil a specific personal fantasy. He takes his time with them, and rarely leaves forensic traces.

  Placing serial killers within such binary categories is alluring – and enduring – but it’s more accurate to put them on a spectrum. Whilst some are always disorganised, others become more organised with time. Jack the Ripper, for example, dealt with Mary Kelly, his fifth and probably final victim, in the privacy of a rented room, the better to mutilate her. And escalation doesn’t always make killers more organised. As their need for violence and blood increases, their attacks may become more disordered and careless. Because of Hollywood we are quite accustomed to thinking of serial killers as enigmatic, very clever, white and middle-class. This is partly supported by the data: according to statistics, they tend to be slightly above average intelligence, single, white and (with some notable exceptions) working- or middle-class.

  And as forensic scientist Brent Turvey has pointed out, ‘You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms – all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behaviour in isolation.’

  For many of us, our first encounter with the very concept of a criminal profiler would have happened in the dark. The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris’s compelling novel, introduced us to FBI agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster. Trainee agent Clarice is chosen for a serial killer task force because her bosses believe she’ll be able to elicit help from Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant forensic psychiatrist who is incarcerated for a series of cannibalistic murders. Both the film and the book weave an intricate web of riddles and red herrings, encapsulating the difficulties of profiling a serial killer.

  Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels were among the first to latch on to the idea of offender profiling, and it has since proved to be fertile ground for crime writers, myself included. For the writer of fiction, understanding the motivation of our characters is at the heart of what we do; the forensic psychologist offers us the perfect fantasy figure – someone who looks at people with an analytical and empathetic eye, but who also gets to be the hero.

  But it wasn’t just us writers who were intrigued by the possibilities of offender profiling. In the mid 1980s, police forces around the world were already fascinated by the ‘offender profilers’ the FBI were training up. They offered fresh hope in cases that seemed to have dead-ended.

  For four years, the Metropolitan Police had been trying to track down a rapist who had been violently attacking women in London. The attacks began in 1982, when a man in a balaclava raped a woman near Hampstead Heath Tube station. More rapes in north London followed in similar circumstances. On 29 December 1985 the ‘Railway Rapist’ became the ‘Railway Killer’ when he dragged 19-year-old Alison Day off a train, gagged her, bound her, raped her and strangled her with a piece of string.

  By this point the police had linked the same man – who sometimes struck with an accomplice – to forty rapes. Then a 15-year-old Dutch girl, Maartje Tamboezer, was attacked as she cycled through woodland near a railway station in Surrey. Two men dragged her for half a mile before raping her, strangling her with her own belt and setting her body on fire. Only a month later, local TV presenter Anne Locke was abducted and murdered as she got off a train at Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire. The suspect list had reached unmanageable proportions. A fresh approach was needed.

  In 1986 the Met contacted David Canter, an environmental psychologist at the University of Surrey. They had a single question: ‘Can you help us catch this man before he kills again?’

  All the attacks had taken place at night on or near railway stations, the victims were usually teenaged girls, who were raped and then, in three cases, garrotted to death. Canter looked at the dates and details of the attacks, and plotted their locations on a map. He suggested that the rapes had begun opportunistically but had become increasingly planned. He thought the culprit had committed the early crimes in the area that he was familiar with, close to home, and then ventured further afield where he wouldn’t be recognised. Based on witness statements and police reports Canter built up a profile of the personality and lifestyle of the masked attacker. He suggested that he was married but without children (because he talked to some of his victims normally before he attacked them); that he had a semi-skilled job (based on his ability to plan the later crimes); was in his twenties (from witness reports); and ‘probably had a history of being violent against women and was quite a nasty character and would be known to be so’.

  On the basis of Canter’s profile the police started following John Duffy, a carpent
er who had spent some time working for British Rail, and who lived very close to the first three attacks, in Kilburn. Duffy was on the police’s suspect list because he had raped his estranged wife at knifepoint. But he was low down because some officers had thought that ‘just a domestic’. When Canter contended that the Railway Rapist would have a history of this kind of violence, Duffy was pushed up the list. The police arrested him while he was following a woman in a park, and strong forensic evidence linked him to two of the murders and four of the rapes. He was convicted in February 1988.

  Thirteen of the seventeen points in Canter’s profile turned out to match Duffy. He’d said that Duffy would be small (he was five feet four inches); feel unattractive (pockmarked by acne); interested in martial arts (spent a lot of time at a martial arts club and collected kung fu weapons); have souvenirs of his crimes (thirty-three of his victims’ door keys). After Duffy’s conviction, it became commonplace for UK police forces to ask psychologists to provide offender profiles for major crime investigations.

  The only downside to the successful prosecution of Duffy was that his accomplice was still at large. For nearly ten years Duffy refused to talk about him. But forensic psychologist Jenny Cutler eventually drew the information out of him. A source said, ‘He grew to like her. He was a social inadequate in a hostile male environment. He was struck by her in a way.’ He finally revealed the name of his accomplice – childhood friend David Mulcahy. Both from working-class Irish backgrounds, the boys had been bullied at school, and had turned to each other. At thirteen Mulcahy had been suspended from school for bludgeoning a hedgehog to death in the playground. Teachers found Mulcahy covered in blood with Duffy next to him, laughing. They committed their first rape together when they were twenty-two. In court at Mulcahy’s trial, Duffy explained, ‘We normally travelled by car. We called it “hunting”. Part of it was looking for a victim, finding her and tracking her. David had a tape of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. We used to put that on and sing along to it as part of the build-up … We did it as a bit of a joke, a bit of a game. It added to the excitement … You get into the pattern of offending – it is very difficult to stop.’ Combined with LCN DNA evidence which hadn’t been possible at the time of the crimes, the evidence was incontrovertible. In 1999 Mulcahy was convicted of three murders and seven rapes, and Duffy of a further seventeen rapes.