by Kerry Daynes
Why do some criminals need a souvenir? A trophy doesn’t have to be a fetish item. Even the most mundane of objects can act as a form of proof, a physical anchor to their crime, and all the psychological meaning attached to it. In the case of a sexual assault or murder, holding it allows them to relive the excitement and stimulation, to be able to access the fantasy at any time, over and over again. I have even known some offenders make gifts of their trophy items, covertly reasserting their dominance and control over a different person – the secret knowledge that they could do to them what they did to their victim, if they so choose.
*
In addition to the discovery of the watch, Steve explained that a partial shoe print had been found at the scene of the breakin at the Johns’ home, in Hogan’s size. It was however from the sole of a very common trainer, and no matching shoes had been found at Hogan’s lock-up or home. There were some black wool fibres (possibly from gloves or a balaclava) on Johns’ body, matching the fibres found at the back-door entry point of one of the ‘hands-on-head’ burglaries, but again, neither these burglaries nor the murder could be linked to Hogan.
Without hard forensic evidence to prove anything different, there seemed little more police could do to create a persuasive case for Hogan being a killer. Resources are finite in investigations like this; it wasn’t an important or high-profile case. The reality is that the murder of an old man in his home soon drops off the media radar. The sheer volume of objects in Hogan’s lock-up also presented a practical problem: it would be too expensive and time-consuming to send it all for forensic analysis. Without any new developments to inform the next stage of the process, the case had, as they say, gone cold.
The day after my initial meeting with Steve and Jo, I returned to the station and sat alone in a small room to take a look at the crime scene evidence collected at the time of Malcolm Johns’ death. Looking at photographs of someone who has been killed – especially if their end was met in a particularly humiliating or brutal way – isn’t something that feels any more normal the more you do it. It’s like catching your neighbour in her nightie or walking in on someone you don’t know when they’re on the toilet. There’s a deep, primal sense that here is something you were never supposed to see.
Death is such an intimate and private moment – arguably the most private of all. Sometimes I see not only the outside of victims’ bodies but the insides too: organs that have spilled out, brains that have been smashed in, genitals that have been exposed or mutilated. There is surely nothing more intimate than a person’s insides. The feeling of regret, that I – a stranger – have seen them like this, doesn’t ever recede.
Crime scene pictures document in painstaking detail the place where something unspeakable has happened. Over half of all homicides take place in some sort of dwelling, so I’m often taking a tour of people’s homes.
Once a crime has been discovered, forensic teams go in and carefully peel back the layers of the site, like the skin of an onion. At each layer, evidence is documented and meticulously labelled, stripping the whole thing back, taking investigators and others involved in the process further to the heart of the matter.
Sometimes a victim’s actual heart is photographed, too, if the pictures also go on to document the post-mortem examination of the body. The pathologist slices the body down the front in one long incision and the organs are removed and photographed. Another incision is made at the back of the skull so that the brain can be examined, and at every stage there are photographs.
It is a dismal fact that some of the photographs I see are of babies or very young children. The Home Office Homicide Index consistently shows that children under one year old have the highest rate of victimization or death by homicide per million population. That means that a person is more likely to meet a violent death in the first 12 months of life than at any other age. Almost always they are killed by a parent or step-parent.
When I’m looking at a picture of a body, I like to have a brief conversation in my head with the person they once were. I say something like: Hello, I’m so sorry this happened to you. Now let’s see what you can tell me, shall we? It sounds silly, but I do it to be polite, to feel that I have shown them respect, even though this person is dead and has no idea that I am silently conversing with their photograph. I do it as much for their relatives and families as for them, or maybe just for me. I don’t have any religious or romantic notions about death, but still, humans should go out with someone holding their hand, not with violence. A body is someone’s flesh and blood. So I suppose it’s an attempt of sorts to keep a respectful bedside manner about me.
It takes a couple of seconds for my mind to register what I’m seeing. My body always registers it first, and it takes an unpleasant moment for the burst of electricity across my skin – the ‘galvanic skin response’, the body’s instantaneous reaction to stress – to subside. I am looking at the end result of what has happened. I begin to attempt to reconstruct how it happened in my head, creating a timeline of likely thoughts, decisions and actions of the people involved. That said, I’m not trying to ‘get into the mind’ of anyone, like some mystical shaman – it’s more like putting myself in their shoes. I’m trying to gain some practical knowledge that will guide me to ask the right questions or direct me to the next piece of evidence, and be of use in answering the questions I’ve been issued with. I am always aware that what I am seeing isn’t all there is. And yet it is often all you have. A game of psychological join-the-dots when someone has rubbed out more than a few of the dots.
It never gets more normal, but the longer you look, the more you can habituate, and see with a detached professional interest. Like any daunting task, you get through it by breaking it down into component parts rather than a whole, focusing on small aspects, taking it one step at a time. Concentrate on the details like this and eventually – if you’re lucky – the full picture comes into view.
*
I carefully laid out all the images taken at Malcolm Johns’ house. It was a two-bedroom terrace with a narrow staircase that took you up to the landing, delivering you directly outside the ‘back bedroom’ where Mr Johns had been sleeping. He had apparently suffered with sleep apnoea for years and snored loudly, often waking his wife – and himself – up in the night. So Mrs Johns had decamped to the bedroom at the front of the house. (She still wore earplugs every night, so that on the night he was killed she didn’t hear a thing until the fire alarm went off. Then she ran in to find her husband dead on the floor.)
Pictures of his bed showed the orthopaedic pillow soaked in blood and the headboard covered in upward splatters. He’d been killed while still in bed, and his body then moved to the floor. His head was between the end right-hand corner of the bed and the foot of the mirrored wardrobes that ran the width of the room. His body was slightly rolled over, one arm out in front, shoulder hunched in an almost insouciant pose, the other underneath his torso, raising him up like a little pedestal. It was an unnatural position, as if he had been dropped quickly onto the floor and left there, the whole thing made stranger by the way it was reflected in the mirrored wardrobes. Twin corpses.
He’d taken at least four vicious blows to the back of his head with something heavy – the pictures showed how his skull had collapsed in on itself.
The length of his body was photographed in detail as is normal, but of particular interest were his hands. Two fingers on his right hand were distorted, smashed out of line, and on both hands the fingers bore deep bruising and blood where parts of the skin had burst open with what looked like the force of a blow from a heavy object. These were not the kinds of defensive wounds you expect to see if someone has raised their hands to protect themselves. The pathologists had confirmed it: his hands had been clasped behind his head when the blows had been struck.
Pictures also showed how part of the rug that he had ended up on and a patch on the leg of his pyjamas were singed. It looked like the killer had hastily tried to set fire to the
fabric, in an attempt, no doubt, to destroy any trace of himself on the victim, but without any lighter fluid or accelerant it hadn’t caught. It had caused the fire alarm to go off, though.
I could see no practical reason for moving Malcolm Johns’ body from the bed. It was a cumbersome and unnecessary act. And when behaviour serves no practical purpose, it most likely serves a psychological need. Why was he dropped there, in front of the mirror?
The Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen was responsible for the deaths of at least 12 young men. He liked to engage in a pseudo relationship with the bodies of his victims – he liked to bathe his dead victims, dress them up and follow certain rituals involving their corpses. In his extensive and articulate confessions Nilsen talked about being bullied at school by a boy who later drowned. The young Nilsen recalled feeling both jubilant and aroused as he watched the boy’s semi-naked body being carried onto shore. This boy, who had once inspired fear in Nilsen, was no longer able to assert himself, reduced to passively receiving the attentions of a nurse and a mortician. This defining moment inspired in him a lifelong fascination with a painting called The Raft of the Medusa, which became the inspiration for his increasingly deviant sexual fantasies. The 1819 painting by Théodore Géricault depicts the aftermath of the wreckage of the French naval frigate Medusa, and shows an old man on a makeshift raft holding the naked, pale body of a dead young man.
I once had a disconcertingly casual conversation with Dennis Nilsen while he was serving his life sentence at HMP Full Sutton. In his soft Scottish burr, he told me that strangling or drowning his victims was a means not an end.
The most rewarding element of his grotesque rituals was picking up his victims and standing in front of a mirror with them cradled in his arms so he could see himself holding them. He said he liked to see their bodies in a similar pose to that of the bully who he’d watched being pulled out of the water – limp, unresisting. And himself, supreme. Staring at his reflection in the mirror as he held his victims, their arms flopping down at their sides, he took a mental picture – a visual trophy of sorts – which he could call upon when he felt inadequate and wanted to return to this powerful moment in his mind.
Had the killer gone to the trouble of pulling Malcolm Johns out of bed so he could see himself holding the body in front of the mirror? Did he crave the same visual confirmation of his own power over another human being that Nilsen had?
*
My next step was to watch the interviews with Hogan that police had conducted after he’d been arrested for the storage unit robbery. I had the accompanying transcript in my hands, but so much useful behavioural information is not recorded on paper, so I put it down and just watched the video.
Steve was right. Hogan had given little away in those interviews. The grainy split-screen footage showed him sitting with his legs crossed and his hands grasping his knee, an unconscious way of making sure his body didn’t leak any incriminating information. He was a jar with the lid screwed on tight.
It was an almost textbook example of PEACE, as the interview process used by the police is known. The letters stand for Preparation/planning; Explaining the purpose of the interview; Asking for the suspect’s account of the evidence/what happened; Challenging their account/concluding; Evaluation. It’s a framework officers use to ensure that as much useful information as possible is gathered in the interview process. Every operational officer in the country gets PEACE training, and in recent years the technique has developed into several tiers of training, tailored specifically to certain areas of crime.
I watched Hogan as he answered the questions. He took two long, slow breaths before he said anything. It reminded me of what I had been trained to do as an expert witness in court – what we call the ‘courtroom swivel’. When a barrister asks me a question, I don’t react straight away. I take a few seconds as I turn to look at the jury or the judge before I give my answer. Not only is it correct protocol to address the judge and jury, not the lawyer, it slows the whole process down. I don’t turn back to the barrister until I’ve finished saying what I want to say. I can’t be drawn into a careless, quick-fire exchange if I take the vital time I need to ensure my response is on point and conveys what I want it to. Being questioned under pressure, and with such a lot riding on your answers, is a taxing situation for anyone to find themselves in, so it makes sense that you carve out those extra seconds to collect your thoughts.
Police officer: Can you explain to us how you come to be in possession of Malcolm Johns’ watch?
Hogan: [breathe one, two] I don’t recall exactly, I buy lots of things from lots of people. It was probably part of a job lot. I don’t recall having seen it. [blink]
After a couple of hours, Hogan’s non-committal and carefully constructed answers started taking their toll on the interviewing officers. I could see them getting weary and their body language becoming more confrontational – as were the questions. Studies repeatedly show that even the most highly trained police interviewers can lapse into interrupting the suspect, asking closed questions or demanding answers that confirm their assumptions about what happened.
The first officer pushed a photograph of Mr Johns’ body across the table towards Hogan and then sat back in his chair and folded his arms. The muscles in Hogan’s jaw tensed slightly.
Police officer: You killed him, didn’t you?
Hogan: [breathe one, two] …not me.
Police officer: You battered Malcolm Johns to death in his bed.
Hogan: [breathe one, two] …not me, I didn’t batter anyone.
I noticed Hogan make gentle, affirmative nods to each question before readjusting his position, hunched over and folding his arms in mirror image to his accuser. This was a brief but telling contradiction between his verbal denial and the language of his body. But neither officer saw it – one was looking at the photograph and the other was watching her colleague.
*
Six weeks later, I was at the station again for the second round of questioning. Hogan had been transferred out of his category C (resettlement) prison for a two-day trip to the custody suite at the police station. I caught a brief glimpse of him as he was booked into his new accommodation by the custody officer. He seemed smaller than the person I’d watched on the video, shrunken and more gaunt than he’d been in those first interviews.
In the meantime, Steve and I had devised a detailed interview plan. I had suggested that since Hogan had dug his heels in so visibly (what psychologists call ‘psychological reactance’) when he had been pushed by officers in his original interviews to admit guilt (and let’s not forget, he could still be innocent – the point of an interview is to elicit reliable information, not necessarily extract a confession), letting him take the reins in this interview would produce better results. The storage unit robbery had shown us that he was a man who liked to be in control, so we decided to give him just that and see if it got him talking. That meant leaving longer silences and waiting for him to speak, using only the minimum of prompts if necessary, even asking Hogan what he felt would help the police to talk about, and generally appearing to be more submissive.
All interviews, whether of victims or suspects, are governed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE). This is the legislative framework that ensures everyone coming into contact with the investigative process is treated humanely and fairly. To avoid any suggestion that admissions made during interrogation were extracted under pressure, it requires police to make audio and visual recordings of interviews for use as evidence, and it allows certain experts and professionals, like me, to watch proceedings without being in the room. It was the first time I’d been in a custody suite since acting as an appropriate adult (someone who sits in on police station interviews with vulnerable suspects) as a student, and I recognized the atmosphere, alive with pure, steely focus from everyone.
I took my seat alongside Steve and a typist in a small interview room and watched on the video screen as a detective superintendent and another
officer settled down across the table from Hogan and his solicitor. They began going through the usual formalities ‘for the tape’. Hogan took up position – as I had seen him do previously – with his hands clasped together over his knees, rigid.
It took an hour or so, but when given the opportunity to lead the way, Hogan began to relax into the process and talk spontaneously, particularly about how he had been wrongly convicted of the storage facility incident. He kept asserting that the police should be talking to some of his drinking acquaintances about that matter and a number of potentially valuable items that had been found in his lock-up. He was especially irritated about his collection of antique weapons, which, he said, had been unfairly destroyed when he was sentenced.
He seemed keen to make his indignation known. The interviewers stuck to the strategy and, with no prompting, Hogan repeatedly returned to complaining about how these possessions, including the imitation firearm believed to have been the one used in the robbery, had been seized. He kept returning to the fact that they had been destroyed. ‘I can’t believe they destroyed them. They weren’t illegal, were they? They were destroyed, weren’t they?’
He wanted confirmation that these weapons had gone. This was interesting – why was it still so important to him now, more than four years after his arrest? Without being pushed, he had willingly led us to something that clearly mattered to him.
The interview spread over two days. Hogan was allowed to ramble in detail and at length about what was important to him. When it came to more direct matters, he continued to give closed responses and brief, indirect denials. Occasionally his response seemed scripted, as if he had rehearsed the answers to these questions already. They were, after all, easily anticipated: ‘Me kill Malcolm Johns? I wouldn’t hit an old man, I’m not the sort to hurt a fly.’