Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  But by the “hidden agenda” Brady may have meant something more straightforward. In January 2006, Brady’s mental health advocate, Jackie Powell, who had to visit him regularly in Ashworth, gave a newspaper interview in which she said that he had explained his motives to her, and that what he wanted was “to commit the perfect murder.” “That’s what it was all about. He saw it as the ultimate act of being above the law.”

  My quarrel with Brady was in the nature of a misunderstanding. During the course of our correspondence, I persuaded Brady to write a book about serial killers based on his own insights. The typescript was called The Gates of Janus, and at first glance I felt fairly convinced that no publisher would touch it, since its first part consists of seven chapters in which he explains why no criminal behind bars is as wicked as our corrupt society. The second part, on the other hand, seemed to me full of interesting comments on killers such as Bundy, Gacy, Sutcliffe, and the Hillside Stranglers. I sent it to Adam Parfrey, the California publisher who had brought out Gerard Schaefer’s stories and Danny Rollins’s autobiography, and he accepted it on condition that I wrote an introduction. The book was published in the United States in 2001.

  Before it could be distributed in the United Kingdom, however, Ashworth Hospital, where Brady is imprisoned, got wind of it, and demanded to see it. I had no objection, for I was aware that Brady does not even mention Ashworth. On the other hand, I had talked about the result of the government enquiry into Ashworth, the Fallon Report that spoke of “years of abuse, corruption, and failure,” and recommended that it should be closed down.

  The authorities at Ashworth demanded various changes to my introduction, all of them trivial, and mostly disputable. This was out of the question, since the book was already in print. I was all for ignoring their demands, but the British distributor was afraid of legal action. Finally I satisfied both Ashworth and the distributor by agreeing to insert an erratum slip listing their objections. The result was that The Gates of Janus was published in the United Kingdom in November 2001.

  As far as Brady was concerned, this erratum slip was the last straw. When his solicitor, Benedict Birnberg, went to Ashworth to see him, shortly after Janus was published, he told me that Brady had shrieked obscenities for an hour without stopping. At first I found this baffling, for the erratum slip is only a few lines long, and makes it clear that my own “apology” was tongue-in-cheek and that I retracted nothing.

  Then I understood. Brady has spent years in a battle with the Ashworth authorities, and with authority in general. He had done his best to convince himself that the Moors murders were no more criminal than acts carried out by society every day. Not long before the publication of Janus he had written to me saying that he was looking forward to seeing the book in print, and finally being allowed the satisfaction of denouncing our corrupt society as it deserves. Instead, he obviously felt that his triumph had been tainted, and that Ashworth had won.

  After that traumatic afternoon with Brady, Benedict Birnberg advised me not to write to him—that if Brady felt in a forgiving mood, he would no doubt write to me when he felt like it. But the truth was that I had no particular motivation in wanting to renew a correspondence with Brady. Ten years of exchanging letters had taught me something I should have realized sooner—that even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his own criminality, and cannot escape. The character flaws that turned Brady into a rapist and killer would prevent him from ever achieving the kind of self-discipline to see himself objectively. So my notion that his negative feelings could be diverted into creativity was wishful thinking.

  At least he had taught me something fundamental about the serial killer.

  16

  Profiling Comes to Britain

  In England, psychological profiling suddenly came into its own with the arrest of the “railway rapist” John Duffy, one of the most sadistic rapists since the Hillside Stranglers. (It would later emerge that Duffy, like Bianchi, was only half of a rape-and-murder team, the other half being a childhood friend, David Mulcahy.) The profiler involved was David Canter, then a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey.

  The London police did not even become aware they had a problem until July 1985, after the rapists had attacked three women in three hours. The first, a twenty-two-year-old dancer, was grabbed in the Euston Road and dragged into Warren Mews at 1:15 in the morning. She was sexually assaulted but not raped. An hour later, two men brandishing knives dragged a twenty-year-old woman into a doorway in Kentish Town, but she escaped. An hour later still they dragged a twenty-four-year-old secretary into an underground car park at Chalk Farm, and both of them raped her. The triple attack led police to look for similar offenses on their computer, and they soon recognized a pattern involving no less than twenty-seven rapes that had been going on since 1982.

  The rapes had begun at half past midnight on June 10, 1982, when two men in balaclavas grabbed a twenty-three-year-old woman in North End Road, Hampstead, dragged her under the railway bridge, and raped her. One rapist was tall, the other short. There was another similar rape in July, and another in August, and then three rapes in September. On one occasion the rapists attacked two foreign au pair girls on Hampstead Heath. In the following year, 1983, there was only one attack, in March—the 10th—but by the end of the next year, the number had reached twenty-five. In one of these, on June 6, the shorter rapist operated on his own. He threatened his victim with a knife, tied her hands, and raped her with a great deal of violence.

  On December 1985, a nineteen-year-old secretary, Alison Day, left her home in Hackney Wick, East London, to meet her fiancé, an out-of-work printer; she never arrived for their date. Seventeen days later her body was found in a nearby canal, weighted down with stones. Alison had been raped and beaten on the head with a brick. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her attacker had ripped a strip from her tartan shirt, tied it round her neck, and then twisted a stick in it to make a tourniquet.

  More rapes followed, then, on April 17, 1986 a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Maartje Tamboezer, set out on her bicycle to the sweetshop in the village of East Horsley, near Guildford. Her father, a Dutch executive, had only just come to England to work. She took a shortcut down a narrow lane through some woodland beside East Horsley station, and ran into a nylon cord stretched across the road, which swept her off her bicycle. She was bludgeoned, and then her hands tied behind her before she was raped and strangled. This time the killer stuffed paper tissues into her vagina, then set them alight, obviously in an attempt to eliminate semen. Witnesses spoke of sightings of a small wiry man in a blue parka running for the 6:07 to London. Two million railway tickets were collected and examined for the suspect’s fingerprints without result.

  The rapists would commit one more murder. On May 18, 1986, Ann Lock, twenty-nine, a secretary at London Weekend Television, took her usual late-evening train to Brookman’s Park, North London, where she usually collected her bicycle, and cycled home to join the husband she had only recently married. She vanished, and it was not until July 21 that her decomposed body was found. An attempt to burn it suggested that she was a victim of the killer of Alison Day and Maartje Tamboezer.

  A year earlier, in 1985, Detective Chief Superintendent Thelma Wagstaff had given some thought to the notion of trying to set up a London equivalent of the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and asked the advice of Professor David Canter, of the University of Surrey, who was invited to lunch at Scotland Yard in November 1985. At that time he had never heard of psychological profiling. But in January 1986, he saw an article about the rapists in the London Evening Standard, and made up a table of the attacks, set out in two columns labelled “Two Attackers” and “One Attacker.” The result was that he was asked to visit Hendon Police College in North London, where an incident center had been set up. By this time, the police forces involved had decided to link their computers, and the result was a list of 4,900 sex offenders, soon reduced to 1,999. The pol
ice had noted the similarities in method between the murders of Alison Day and Maartje Tamboezer—the ligature and the gag cut from the clothing, and had tentatively linked these crimes to the North London rapes.

  Canter was assigned two police officers as assistants, and began to computerize the data. One of his assistants, Detective Constable Rupert Heritage, had marked the location of all the rapes and murders on a map. As Canter looked at it, he pointed to an area in the center of the first three rapes and said: “He lives there, doesn’t he?” He was, in effect, noting what Detective Horgas would deduce about the case of Virginia’s South Side Rapist—that a rapist usually starts close to home.

  Canter then went on to make a number of other observations, such as that the rapist had lived in the same area since 1983, and that his knowledge of the railway system—which had led journalists to label him the “Railway Rapist”—possibly indicated that he had worked for the rail network.

  In the list of 1,999 suspects, a man named John Duffy occupied number 1,594; he was included because he had been 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 Ann Lock strangler had been the same as that of the Railway Rapist, police had been keeping a watch on railway stations.) Duffy had been called in for questioning, and his similarity to descriptions of the Railway Rapist noted. (Duffy was small, ginger-haired, and pockmarked.) But when the police tried to conduct a second interview, Duffy was in the hospital suffering from amnesia, alleging that muggers had beaten him up. The hospital authorities declined to allow him to be interviewed. And since he was only one of two thousand suspects, the police did not persist.

  Studying the map of the attacks, Canter concluded that the rapist probably lived within three miles of the Finchley Road area of North London. He also concluded that he’d been a semiskilled worker, and that his relationship with his wife had been stormy. (The violence of the rapes suggested a man burning with anger.) 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. He was small, wiry, and had what some of the victims called “laser eyes.” He was also a martial arts expert, and had worked on the railways.

  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 the hospital (but had been allowed to go in and out)—and they arrested him. When a fellow martial arts enthusiast, Ross Mockeridge, 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 the rape victims picked him out at a lineup, 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 fibers from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibers found on one of Duffy’s sweaters, the final link in the chain of evidence was established.

  Duffy’s wife, Margaret (who divorced him in 1986), added further useful information. She had married Duffy, who had been a former altar boy, in June 1980, when he was twenty. But she seemed unable to conceive, and it embittered their relationship; he seemed to feel that his failure to procreate was a kind of personal insult, and their sex life took on a sadomasochistic element. He liked to tie her hands as if he was raping her; the more she struggled the more he liked it. His obsession with bondage, and his violence led to angry quarrels. This was the period when he and Mulcahy began their series of rapes. In the autumn of 1983 Duffy and his wife had attempted a reconciliation, which accounted for the lull in the attacks. But in June 1985, there was a total breakdown in the marriage. “The nice man I had married had become a madman with scary, scary eyes,” said his wife. Although Duffy continued to refuse to admit or deny his guilt, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment on February 27, 1988—life meaning a minimum of thirty years.

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

  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 recognized 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.

  After his conviction, Duffy remained sullen, stubborn and unrepentant. But at some point he had confessed to a prison counselor that he had had an accomplice in the attacks. It was probably resentment that his accomplice was living a happy family life outside that made him decide to betray him. In 1999, he decided to “clear his conscience” by naming his fellow rapist as his schoolfriend David Mulcahy, a married father of four.

  During the earlier rapes, the “taller rapist” had been described by some of the victims as the less violent of the two. He had more than once gone back to the bound victim to see if she was all right, and even apologized. When the gag was too tight he sometimes loosened or removed it. But it seemed that since those early days he had become more brutal; after Ann Lock had crawled out of the canal into which they had thrown her, Mulcahy raped her again, and it was he who murdered her. So now, on February 2, 2001, he was given three life sentences for the rape and murder of Alison Day, Maartje Tamboezer, Anne Lock, and for seven other rapes.

  Duffy’s decision to turn in his friend had also cost him dear; several more rapes were disclosed, and Duffy was given an additional sixteen years.

  The next major British murder case, that of Fred West, would achieve worldwide notoriety in 1994, when the local police discovered a number of female corpses buried in the back garden and concreted under the floor of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Of all the serial killers in this book, West was probably the one who can most literally be described as a “sex maniac,” since those who knew him well noted that he seemed to eat, think, and dream sex from morning until night.

  West was a swarthy, slightly simian-looking man with long sideburns, piercing blue eyes, and a gap between his front teeth. There were several children in his family, ranging in age from babies to teenagers—three of them very obviously not his; they were clearly of mixed race.

  His wife, Rose, many years his junior, had once been pretty; now she was plump and bespectacled. There were rumors in the area that she worked as a prostitute—large numbers of men were seen coming and going from their house, many of them black.

  One day in May 1992, Rose had gone out shopping, leaving her husband alone in the house with the five younger children. West asked his fourteen-year-old daughter to make him a cup of tea, and then to bring it up to his room on the second floor, which was also a bar. Once there, the girl was undressed and raped in front of a video camera, sodomized, and then raped again—West was obviously in a fevered state of sexual excitement. He left her crying, and went downstairs.

  When Rose returned, her daughter told her that her father had raped her. Rose’s only comment was: “Oh well, you were asking for it.”

  The distraught daughter told a school friend, who in turn mentioned it to a policeman. On the morning of August 6, 1992, police made a thorough search of 25 Cromwell Street, and found an extraordinary assortment of pornographic videos and sex aids, including whips, dildos, chains, and handcuffs.

  The following day, the police arrived with a social worker to take the children into care. They arrested Fred West. Detective Constable Hazel Savage, the policewoman who was dealing with the case, went to call on th
e West’s eldest daughter, Anne Marie, who had left home when she was fifteen because her father had made her pregnant. At the police station, Anne Marie described how Fred had raped her for the first time when she was nine years old. Her stepmother, Rose, had looked on, laughing. After that, her father had regular sexual intercourse with her, and also allowed his younger brother, John, a dustman, to join in. Anne Marie also mentioned that she was worried about her younger half-sister, Heather, who had vanished from her home in May 1987. Fred sometimes joked that she was buried under the patio. But by the time the rape case came up in court, Anne Marie had changed her mind about giving evidence in court, and Fred West was acquitted.

  A marriage truly made in hell. Pictured here during happy times are serial killers Rosemary and Fred West. The couple took pleasure in molesting their own daughters, raping young women, and together killing at least twelve victims, including Fred’s daughter Heather. West hanged himself in his jail cell and Rosemary was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole. (Associated Press)

  Hazel Savage now tried to persuade her superiors to dig up the garden and look under the patio. Finally, with a great deal of difficulty—they were afraid of being sued—she succeeded. On February 24, 1994, four policemen with a warrant arrived at 25 Cromwell Street. They told West’s daughter Mae that they intended to dig up the garden in search of Heather’s body. Fred was arrested the following day. That evening, he admitted to murdering his sixteen-year-old daughter. The next morning, the police uncovered Heather’s remains. But the pathologist was puzzled to discover an extra femur—a thighbone—among the remains. Another body had to be buried somewhere.