by Colin Wilson
When a man is as arrogant and impatient as Shipman, it seems obvious that he has an inflated opinion of himself. Shipman seems to have been the kind of man who urgently needed reasons for a high level of self-esteem, but simply lacked such reasons. The accounts of people he upset—always people who were weaker than himself—make is clear that he was a classic case of a Right Man. He had tried working in a practice with other doctors, but they found his self-opinionatedness intolerable.
But how do we make the leap from arrogance and frustrated craving for self-esteem to murdering patients with overdoses of morphine?
The first step is to recognize that Shipman was a member of the dominant 5 percent, while his wife, Primrose, was undoubtedly of medium to low dominance. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied the role of dominance in sexual partnerships, observed that such an extreme mixture of high and low dominance seldom works.
So how did this curious relationship come about? Shipman’s background offers a few clues. He was born in Nottingham in January 1946 of working-class parents. Harold, his mother’s favorite, was not obviously talented, and less than brilliant at school; but his mother’s expectations turned him into a hard worker, a “plodder.” He was distinguished in only one respect—on the rugger field, where, a friend commented, he “would do anything to win.”
When his mother died of cancer he was seventeen, and expressed his grief by running all night in the rain; but he did not even mention her loss at school. During his mother’s painful last days, Shipman watched the family doctor administering increasingly large doses of morphine.
After an initial failure, hard work got Shipman into Leeds University Medical School. There he acquired himself a girlfriend who was living in the same students’ lodging. Primrose Oxtoby was three years his junior, and has been described by writers on the case as “frumpish” and “a plain Jane”; even then she had a tendency to put on weight. Her background was even narrower than his; her parents had been so strict that she was not even allowed to go to the local youth club. But in less than a year, Shipman had—as he himself said later—“made a mistake.” Primrose was pregnant. Her parents immediately broke ties with her. But she married Shipman, and as more children followed, any hopes he had entertained for an interesting future evaporated. Primrose was not even a good housekeeper, and policemen who came later to search their house were shocked by the dirt and general untidiness.
The Shipmans moved to Pontefract, where he became a junior houseman at the General Infirmary. Three years later, in 1974, they moved to Todmorden, in the Pennines, and he began injecting himself with pethidine, obtained on forged prescriptions, to stave off depression. When he was caught two years later, he was suspended, and Primrose and the children were forced to live with her parents. Shipman fought hard to save his job, but was fired from the practice. He obviously felt that he had been treated unfairly.
After his trial in 1976 for forging prescriptions, he was fined £658, which would be about twelve times as much in today’s (2006) money. He must have felt that fate was grinding him into the ground. In the following year he became part of a practice in Hyde, Cheshire, and—the evidence seems to show—began his career as a murderer.
When he was questioned on suspicion of fifteen murders, Shipman angrily denied any wrongdoing, sure that he had covered his trail so carefully that he was safe. But the investigators soon discovered that he had made extensive changes in his patients’ notes, to make them seem more seriously ill than they were. On October 7, 1998, Shipman was full of self-confidence during the police interview. But when a detective constable began to question him about changes he had made in the patients’ records, he began to falter and flounder. That evening he broke down and sobbed. But he still refused to confess.
Why did Shipman kill? Could it have been because the Right Man needs a fantasy to justify his immense self-esteem, and dealing out death with a syringe provided that fantasy—the self-effacing GP who is actually one of the world’s most prolific serial killers?
Or could it have been something as simple as a psychological addiction, like the escalating sadism the BSU noted in so many serial killers? At least one man in Todmorden, the husband of Eva Lyons—who was dying of cancer—believed that Shipman injected his elderly wife with an overdose of morphine in a mercy killing. Soon thereafter, eight more elderly patients were found dead after Shipman had been to see them. Had he discovered that watching someone die peacefully produced in him a sense of relief that was not unlike the effect of morphine? And was this ability to deal out death a godlike sensation that compensated for the failure of his life?
With most serial killers there is an overt sexual element in the murders. But the only hint of sexual frustration can be found in the case of seventeen-year-old Lorraine Leighton, who went to see him about a lump in her breast. Shipman’s comments about the size of her breasts were so rude that she fled the surgery in tears.
One thing that seems clear is that Shipman felt no guilt about killing his patients. After his imprisonment, someone said something that implied a comparison with Myra Hindley, and Shipman snapped: “She is a criminal. I am not a criminal.”
Shipman was given fifteen life sentences in January 2000 for murdering fifteen patients. On Tuesday, January 13, 2004, he was discovered hanging in his cell. An official report later concluded that he had killed between 215 and 260 people over a twenty-three-year period.
It was the chance intervention of a British witness that led to the conviction of Australia’s worst serial killer, Ivan Milat.
In the early 1990s, it became obvious that a particularly sadistic killer was operating in southern Australia. Because his victims were usually hitchhikers, he became known as the “Backpacker Killer.” Most of the disappearances occurred in New South Wales, not far from Sydney.
On September 19, 1992, two members of a Sydney running club, Ken Seilly and Keith Caldwell, were jogging in the forty-thousand-acre Belanglo State Forest. As Ken approached a boulder he was overwhelmed by a nauseating odor—what smelled to him like decaying flesh. A closer look at a pile of branches and rotten leaves revealed a human foot poking out. The two men carefully marked the position of the remains and set off to contact the authorities. When local policeman arrived at the scene they called in regional detectives, who then sent out a call to the Missing Persons Bureau. The corpse was identified as that of Joanne Walters, a British backpacker who, along with her traveling companion, had gone missing in April 1992. The next day, police investigators uncovered the body of Joanne’s companion, Caroline Clarke. Caroline had been shot at least ten times in the head, as well as stabbed several times. Joanne had been viciously stabbed fourteen times in the chest and neck; the fact that she had not been shot, as had Caroline, suggested that there had been two murderers. There were no defensive wounds on their hands, which suggested that the young women had been tied up. And it was clear that the killers had taken their time; there were six cigarette butts, all of the same brand, lying nearby. The bodies were too decayed for forensic examination to determine if they had been raped.
A wide search of the Belanglo State Forest was immediately launched but failed to reveal additional bodies—hardly surprising given the vastness of the forest. More than a year later, however, on October 5, 1993, two lots of skeletal remains were found there; they proved to be those of two nineteen-year-olds, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, who had vanished on December 30, 1989, after setting out from Melbourne. Soon after this discovery, sniffer dogs unearthed the decomposed body of Simone Schmidl, twenty, a German tourist who had vanished on January 20, 1991. Three days later, the dogs located the bodies of two more German backpackers, Gabor Neugebauer, twenty-one, and his traveling companion, Anja Habscheid, twenty, who had vanished on December 26, 1991. Anja’s body had been decapitated, and the angle of the blow made it clear that she had been forced to kneel while the killer cut off her head.
A special team, known as “Task Force Air,” was set up to hunt the Backpacker K
illers. When interviewing members of a local gun club, the task force received a strange report. A friend of one of the members claimed to have witnessed something suspicious in the forest the previous year. When contacted by the police, the man supplied them with a detailed description of two vehicles, one a Ford sedan and the other a four-wheel drive, that he saw driving down one of the trails into the forest. According to him, a man was driving the sedan while in the back seat two other men held between them a female with what appeared to be a gag in her mouth. In the second vehicle, he reported that he saw the same thing—a male driver and a bound female in the back with two males. The observer added descriptions of all the occupants—clothing, hair color, and approximate ages. He claimed to have noted the license plate number of the four-wheel drive, but had lost it. His official statement to the police was signed, “Alex Milat.”
Although the task force methodically pursued the clues they had, they made no progress during the next six months. But following their “Milat” line of inquiry, they finally got their break: a workmate of Croatian-born Richard Milat reported that Milat had been heard saying: “Killing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread.” Police checked his work schedule against the presumed dates of the murders. Richard Milat was at work on all of those days, but his brother Ivan was not. And Ivan had a long police record, which included sex offenses.
Investigators now turned their attention to the Milat brothers, who were found to own property about twenty-five miles from Belanglo.
Once again, the case marked time. Then, in April 1994, the police uncovered a report that a young Englishman named Paul Onions had placed a call to the task force’s hot line five months earlier. Here was the tip they had been hoping for. Onions, a student from Birmingham, had been attacked by a man who corresponded to Milat’s description, near the Belanglo State Forest.
Onions had been hitchhiking from Sydney on January 25, 1990, when he had encountered a short, stocky man with a drooping moustache. The man asked him where he was heading, and offered him a lift in the direction of Melbourne. Onions was impressed by the stranger’s car, an expensive-looking four-wheel drive Nissan. As they climbed into the car, the stranger introduced himself as “Bill,” and said that he was Yugoslav.
As they passed the town of Bowral, Onions noticed that “Bill” kept glancing in the rearview mirror and slowing down. When he asked him why, “Bill” explained that he was trying to find a place where he could park for a while, and retrieve an audiocassette player out of the trunk. The layby was close to the turn off to the Belanglo State Forest. Some instinct told Onions to get out of the car at the same time as “Bill,” which seemed to annoy his companion. “What are you doing out of the car?” he asked. And then, suddenly, he produced a black revolver, and the friendly manner vanished. “You know what this is—a robbery.”
Onions tried to calm “Bill” down, then became more alarmed as the man reached into the back seat, and took out a bag containing rope. “That was enough,” said Onions later. “I decided to leg it.” Behind him he heard the man shout, “Stop or I’ll shoot,” and a bullet whizzed past his head. It had the effect of flooding him with adrenalin, and he ran even faster.
The man nonetheless caught up with him, and the two began to wrestle at the side of the highway, while cars drove on past them. Onions managed to break free, and scrambled over the top of the hill. He spotted a van driving towards him, and flung himself on the ground to force it to halt.
Behind the wheel was Joanne Berry, who had her sister and four children with her. Onions pleaded: “Give me a lift—he’s got a gun.” Berry, at first frightened by the seemingly crazy man in the road, noticed the true fear in his eyes, and allowed him to clamber into the back of the van through the sliding door.
When he told her what had happened, she drove him straight to the Bowral Police Station. There Onions reported the attack, and Berry told the police that she had also glimpsed the man running away, with his hand held low—obviously to hide the revolver. Incredibly, the Bowral police succeeded in losing the report on the attempted robbery, with the result that “Bill” was free to continue raping and murdering.
Four years later, however, the police lost no time in flying Onions to Sydney. There he identified Milat as the man who had fired his revolver at him. Onions had also left his backpack in Milat’s car when he fled, and he later recognized a blue shirt found in Milat’s garage as his own.
On May 22, 1994, police arrested fifty-year-old Ivan Milat in Eaglevale, a Sydney suburb. In Ivan Milat’s garage, police found a bloodstained rope of a type that had been used to bind some of the victims, a sleeping bag that proved to belong to Deborah Everist, and a camera of the make owned by Caroline Clarke. The police also found spent cartridges similar to those found near Caroline in Milat’s garage.
Milat had a long police record. Born in December 1944 to an Australian mother and Croatian father, he had been a member of a large family that had been repeatedly in trouble with the law. In his twenties he had been incarcerated several times for car theft and burglary.
In 1971, he had picked up two female hitchhikers, and had suddenly turned off the highway, produced a knife, and announced that he intended to have sex with them, or would kill them both. One of the girls, who was eighteen, allowed him to have sex with her on the front seat. Milat had then driven on to a petrol station, and she had taken the opportunity to run inside and tell the attendant that she had been raped, and that the driver was holding her friend. When several employees ran towards the car, Milat pushed the other girl out and drove off at high speed. Later on, he was pulled over by police, but there were no knives or rope in the car. Milat agreed that he had had sex with the girl, but insisted that it was with her consent. In any case, he said, both the girls were “screwy.”
After this brush with the law, Milat had fled to New Zealand, to escape the rape charge, and also two charges of armed robbery. He was brought back and tried three years later, in 1974, but was cleared of all charges and freed. (One of his brothers went to prison for a bank robbery.)
In 1979, he again gave a lift to two women near the Belanglo State Forest, and suddenly pulled off the road. When he told them he intended to have sex with both of them, the women managed to jump out of the car, and hide in a ditch. Although Milat searched for them, cursing and swearing, for nearly two hours, he did not succeed in finding them. Unfortunately, neither of the women reported this attempted rape until years later, when the Backpacker Task Force was set up.
Milat’s trial began in the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney on March 25, 1996. By that time, the press had dubbed him “Ivan the Terrible.”
What emerged clearly during the trial was that Milat was a “control freak,” whose chief pleasure was seeing his victims terrified and helpless. It also became apparent that with every killing, he became more sadistic, and relished taking his time over it. At one murder site, half a dozen cigarette butts were found. He paralyzed some of these female victims by stabbing them in the spine, so he could sexually attack them at his leisure. The injuries found on the victims were so appalling that the presiding judge refused to give details during the trial, in order to spare the relatives.
A friend of Milat’s ex-wife, Karen, gave evidence that suggested that Milat was another Right Man, who demanded total obedience and submission. Milat was obsessive about keeping the house neat and tidy, and when Karen went shopping with a list, she had to stick to every item on it, or risk him flying into a violent rage. She had to ask him for every penny she spent, account for every minute of her time, and bring back receipts for every purchase. Milat’s younger brother George reports that Milat would become enraged with his wife on the smallest provocation. When Karen finally walked out on him, and he could not find her, he burned down her parent’s garage. And it was shortly after Karen left him in 1989 that Milat began his series of murders.
Milat’s barrister suggested in court that the murders must have been committed by Milat’s brothers W
alter and Richard, and in a television interview on the day after the trial, the two brothers were accused on camera of being accomplices in the murders. Understandably, both men denied the allegations.
Milat was found guilty on July 27, 1996, and sentenced to life imprisonment on seven counts of murder. In the maximum-security wing of Goulburn Correctional Centre, only a short distance from Belanglo, where he eventually was transferred, he was placed in solitary confinement after a hacksaw blade was detected in a packet of cigarettes. He declared that he would continue to make every effort to escape.
His brother Boris, tracked down to a secret location by reporters, told them, “All my brothers are capable of extreme violence. The things I could tell you are much worse than Ivan is supposed to have done. Everywhere he’s worked, people have disappeared.”
Asked if he thought Ivan was guilty, he replied: “I reckon he’s done a hell of a lot more.” Pressed to put a figure on it, Boris Milat replied: “Twenty-eight.”
17
Murder in Lonely Places
In July 1960, I was in Leningrad—formerly Saint Petersburg—at an official reception at the Astoria Hotel, together with Patricia Pitman, my collaborator on An Encyclopedia of Murder. The guests were Russian writers and literary bureaucrats, and at one point I overheard Pat asking a stern-faced lady who spoke excellent English whether there were any important Soviet murder cases we ought to include. The lady snorted contemptuously that such crimes were symptomatic of Western decadence and were virtually unknown under communism.
It was precisely this attitude that would cost dozens of lives in southern Russia in the 1980s, when Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s worst serial killer, was operating.