Serial Killer Investigations

by Colin Wilson

  In April 1880, 20-year-old Louis Menesclou admitted to murdering four-year-old Louise Dreux and sleeping with the body before he attempted to burn it; he was executed.

  But it was the five Jack the Ripper murders, which happened between 31 August and 9 November 1888, that achieved worldwide notoriety, and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new kind of problem: a killer who struck at random.

  The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disembowelled. The next victim, another prostitute, Annie Chapman, was found spread-eagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disembowelled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner—a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many serial killers. The two murders engendered nationwide shock and outrage—nothing of the sort had been known before—and this was increased when, on the morning of 30 September 1888, the killer murdered two pickups in one night. A letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, boasting of the ‘double event’, was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders. When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the killer, there was unprecedented public hysteria. As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far. A 24-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disembowelled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours. Then the murders ceased—the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home.

  From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.

  Robert Ressler wrote in I Have Lived in the Monster: ‘Sexual satisfaction for Jack the Ripper, and others of his ilk, derives from seeing the victim’s blood spilt’ and pointed out that cutting out uteruses and opening the vagina with his knife leaves no doubt that the crimes were sexual (by which, presumably, he means that they were accompanied by orgasm).

  In 1988, a century after the Ripper murders, a television company in the US decided to do a two-hour live special on the case, and asked John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood to participate. Their provocative conclusions are described in Dark Dreams by Hazelwood and Michaud.

  To begin with, Douglas and Hazelwood were interested to learn of the vast amount of evidence that would be available to them, from coroner’s reports, witnesses’ statements, and police files; there were even photographs. In addition, they were presented with a list of five favourite suspects, which included Queen Victoria’s physician Sir William Gull; the heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor; Roslyn Donston, a Satanist and occultist who lived in Whitechapel; Montague Druitt, a melancholic schoolmaster who drowned himself soon after the last murder; and a psychotic Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. The latter two were listed as leading suspects in a private memorandum by Sir Melville Macnaghten, who had been assistant chief constable at Scotland Yard soon after the murders. Most of these suspects were dismissed on various grounds—for example, Sir William Gull had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side a year before the murders and would have been in no condition to prowl the streets, while Prince Albert Victor had solid alibis.

  But the most interesting part of the program was the analysis presented by the profilers:

  [John] explained that Jack was like a predatory animal who would be out nightly looking for weak and susceptible victims for his grotesque sexual fantasies. Douglas told the TV audience that with such a killer, you do not expect to see a definite time pattern because he kills as opportunity presents itself. He added that such killers return to the scenes of their successful crimes.

  He surmised that Jack was a white male in his mid-to-late-twenties and of average intelligence. John and I agreed that Jack the Ripper wasn’t nearly as clever as he was lucky. I then said that we thought Jack was single, never married, and probably did not socialise with women at all. He would have had a great deal of difficulty interacting appropriately with anyone, but particularly women.

  I said Jack lived very close to the crime scenes because we know that such offenders generally start killing within very close proximity to their homes. If Jack was employed, it would have been at menial work requiring little or no contact with others.

  I went on to say that, as a child, Jack probably set fires and abused animals and that as an adult his erratic behaviour would have brought him to the attention of the police at some point.

  John added that Jack seemed to have come from a broken home and was raised by a dominant female who physically abused him, possibly even sexually abused him. Jack would have internalised this abuse rather than act it out toward those closest to him.

  John described Jack as socially withdrawn, a loner, having poor personal hygiene, and a dishevelled appearance. Such characteristics are hallmarks of this type of offender. He said that people who know this type of person often report he is nocturnal, preferring the hours of darkness to daytime. When he is out at night, he typically covers great distances on foot.

  I said that Jack simultaneously hated and feared women. They intimidated him, and his feeling of inadequacy was evident in the way he killed. I noted that the Ripper had subdued and murdered his victims quickly. There was no evidence that he savoured this part of his crime; he didn’t torture the women or prolong their deaths. He attacked suddenly and without warning, quickly cutting their throats.

  The psychosexually pleasurable part came for him in the acts following death. By displacing or removing his victims’ sexual parts and organs, Jack was neutering or de-sexing them so that they were no longer women to be feared.

  I find this profile convincing and impressive. It sounds, of course, oddly like Ramirez, the Night Stalker. The skill of Douglas and Hazelwood in profiling killers has been so fully demonstrated in this book, it seems to me probable that this is as accurate a profile of the Ripper as we shall ever get.

  It should be noted that the profilers do not feel that it is likely that Jack the Ripper was a ‘gentleman’, as so many theorists have suggested since the time of the murders. They see him as working class.

  That also rules out the suspect suggested by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell—that the Ripper was the artist Walter Sickert. I would also rule out Sickert on other grounds. This kind of murder is an explosion of frustration—this is why we so often say that a killer is a ‘walking time bomb’. No artist or creative person is likely to experience this degree of mental stress and frustration. In fact, I have pointed out in A Criminal History of Mankind that no creative artist has ever committed a murder. A few have killed in the course of quarrels or duels, such as Ben Jonson and Caravaggio, or to revenge honour, like the composer Gesualdo, but never a premeditated crime of violence.

  The only Ripper remaining suspect of the five named above is Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish hairdresser who came to England in 1882 in his late teens, and who spent a number of periods in an insane asylum. He died in 1919.

  This is not to suggest that Kosminski has to be Jack the Ripper. There are a number of other candidates, including a homicidal Russian doctor named Michael Ostrog, also on Sir Melvile Macnaghten’s list. And there may be some so-far unknown who fits the FBI profile even better. But it probably does mean that we should not be looking for suspects who do not qualify as ‘gentlemen’.

  From the end of the Victorian age until the beginning of World War Two there were no British serial killers. In London in early 1942, a member of the Royal Air Force named Gordon Cummins became known as the Blackout Ripper when he took advantage of the London blackout to murder four women. Although the motive seems to have been primarily robbery, there was also a sadistic sexual element in that he mutilated one woman with a can opener and two with razor blades. He was arrested on 15 February after a passer-by
interrupted an attack, and he fled, leaving his gas mask with his service number on it. He was later hanged.

  Another airman, Neville Heath, would undoubtedly have gone on to become a serial killer if he had not been caught after his second murder in July 1946. On 21 June 1946, he had taken a model named Margery Gardner to a London hotel; she had masochistic tendencies and Heath had a taste for flogging women. He seems to have become over-excited and left her dead and mutilated. Two weeks later, staying in a hotel in Bournemouth, he insisted on escorting 21-year-old Doreen Marshall back to her hotel, and murdered and mutilated her in a wooded gorge. He was arrested, and a jeweller identified him as the man who had sold him Doreen Marshall’s watch; he was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 16 October 1946.

  Britain’s first true serial killer since Jack the Ripper was the middle-aged John Reginald Halliday Christie, who committed eight sex murders in London’s Notting Hill between 1943 and 1953. To his neighbours, the most irritating thing about Christie was his authoritarian personality. As a special reserve constable during World War Two, he became notorious for his officiousness—he enjoyed reporting people for minor blackout offences.

  A sexually frustrated loner who suffered from bouts of impotence, his solution was to persuade women to inhale a nasal decongestant called Friar’s Balsam, which is added to boiling water, then breathed in with a towel covering the head. Christie would then introduce a rubber pipe attached to the gas supply, which quickly induced unconsciousness, after which the women were strangled as he raped them. This is the method he employed with his first two victims, an Austrian part-time prostitute named Ruth Fuerst, 21, strangled in September 1943, and a fellow-employee at a radio factory, Muriel Eady, 31, killed three months later. In his confession, Christie would declare that after killing her, ‘I felt that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.’

  On both occasions his wife, Ethel, was away in Sheffield visiting her family.

  Christie’s next murder, in 1949, was that of Beryl Evans, 22, the wife of a Welsh labourer, Timothy Evans, 27, who lived in the upper floor of the slum terrace house at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. They had a year-old baby, Geraldine. Lack of money caused frequent quarrels, and when Beryl found she was pregnant again, she decided to have an abortion. Christie claimed to be a skilled abortionist. On the morning of 8 November 1949, Christie went up to her flat, and told her to lie on a quilt in front on the fire, and take a few sniffs of gas to anaesthetise her. Then he strangled her and almost certainly raped her.

  When her husband came home from work, Christie told him that his wife had died during the attempted abortion, and said they would both face criminal charges when her death was discovered. Evans was of subnormal intelligence, and the likeliest scenario is that Christie somehow persuaded him to kill baby Geraldine. Then both bodies were concealed in the outside wash-house. Somehow, Evans was convinced that he had to sell his furniture and flee to Wales. There he went to the police station and confessed to ‘disposing of’ his wife, and to strangling her and his daughter. By the time he was tried for their murder, he had changed his mind and accused Christie of strangling his wife and child, but the jury did not believe him, and he was hanged. Christie was a witness against him and was commended by the judge.

  Ethel Christie had a strong suspicion, amounting to a certainty, that her husband was somehow involved in the murders—she had noticed his extreme nervousness at the time. She confided her belief to a neighbour, and when Christie came in and caught them discussing the case, he flew into a rage. This could explain why, on 14 December 1952, he strangled her in bed. It could also have been that he experienced a compulsion to commit more sex crimes, and that Ethel stood in his way. Christie told her family in Sheffield that she was unable to write because she had rheumatism in her fingers.

  In mid-January 1953, Christie picked up a prostitute called Kathleen Maloney in a pub in Paddington, and invited her back to his flat. As she sat in a deckchair in the kitchen, he placed the gas pipe under the chair; she was too drunk to notice. When she was unconscious, he raped and strangled her and put her in the closet.

  The next victim, Rita Nelson, was six months pregnant; Christie may have lured her back with the offer of an abortion. She also ended in the cupboard—the second body.

  About a month later, Christie met a girl called Hectorina Maclennan, who told him she was looking for a flat. She and her boyfriend actually spent three nights in Christie’s flat, now devoid of furniture (Christie had sold it). On 5 March Hectorina made the mistake of going back to the flat alone. She grew nervous when she saw Christie toying with a gas-pipe and tried to leave; Christie killed her and raped her. When her boyfriend came to inquire about her, she was in the cupboard, and Christie claimed not to have seen her. As Christie gave him tea, the boyfriend noticed ‘a very nasty smell’, but had no suspicion he was sitting within feet of her corpse.

  During the next few months, the squalid little flat was allowed to become filthy and untidy. Christie had no job and made no attempt to get one. A week later, he sublet the flat to another couple, collected £7-l3s for rent in advance, and wandered off, leaving the bodies in the closet that was now disguised by a layer of wallpaper. The owner of the house, finding the flat sublet, told the new tenants to leave, and looked into the closet. In spite of the hue and cry that followed, Christie made no attempt to escape from London—he even registered at a cheap doss house under his own name. He walked around, becoming increasingly dirty and unshaven, until he was recognised by a policeman on Putney Bridge. What happened to him in those last weeks of freedom? It is tempting to suppose that he ceased to be responsible for his actions. Yet he continued to plan and calculate: even when on the run, he met a pregnant young woman in a cafe, and told her he was a medical man who could perform an operation...

  He was tried for only one murder, that of his wife, and pleaded insanity. Found guilty, he was hanged on 15 July 1953.

  Christie seems to have been a highly neurotic since his early days in Halifax, in the north of England, when a sexual failure in adolescence caused him to be labelled ‘Reggie-no-dick’ and ‘Can’t-do-it Christie’. But the determining factor that finally turned him into a sex killer may well have been an accident he suffered when he first came to London in 1922; he was struck by a car and was unconscious when taken to hospital—one more to add to the list of serial killers with suspected head injuries.

  The series of unsolved murders known as the Thames Nude Murders deserve a place in any history of manhunting because the detective who led the investigation believes that it was his game of psychological cat and mouse that drove the killer to suicide.

  Between February 1964 and January 1965, the bodies of six women, mostly prostitutes, were found in areas not far from the Thames. The first of the bodies, that of a 30-year-old prostitute named Hanna Tailford, was found in the water near Hammersmith Bridge. She was naked except for her stockings, and her panties had been stuffed into her mouth. On 18 April the naked body of Irene Lockwood, a 26-year-old prostitute, was found at Duke’s Meadows, near Barnes Bridge. She had been strangled and, like Hanna Tailford, she had been pregnant. A 54-year-old Kensington caretaker, Kenneth Archibald, confessed to her murder, and he seemed to know a great deal about the victim, but at his trial it was established that his confession was false. Archibald was acquitted.

  There was another reason for believing in his innocence: while he was still in custody, another naked woman was found in an alleyway at Osterley Park, Brentford. This was only three weeks after the discovery of Irene Lockwood’s body. The dead woman—the only one among the victims who could be described as pretty—was identified as 22-year-old prostitute and striptease artist Helen Barthelemy. There were a number of curious features in the case. A line around her waist showed that her panties had been removed some time after death, and there was no evidence of normal sexual assault. But four of her front teeth were missing. Oddly enough, the teeth had not been knocked out by a blow, but deliberately forced out—
a piece of one of them was found lodged in her throat. Medical investigation also revealed the presence of male semen in her throat. Here, then, was the cause of death: she had been choked by a penis, probably in the course of performing an act of fellatio. The missing teeth suggested that the killer had repeated the assault after death. It was established that she had disappeared some days before her body was found. Where, then, had her body been kept?

  Flakes of paint found on her skin suggested the answer, for it was the type of paint used in spraying cars. Clearly, the body had been kept somewhere near a car-spraying plant, but in some place where it was not likely to be discovered by the workers.

  Enormous numbers of police were deployed in the search for the spray shop and in an attempt to keep a closer watch on the areas in which the three victims had been picked up, around Notting Hill and Shepherds Bush. Perhaps for this reason, the killer decided to take no risks for several months.

  The body of the fourth victim—Mary Fleming, 30, was found on 14 July 1964. Her false teeth were missing, there was semen in her throat, and her skin showed traces of the same spray paint found on Helen Barthelemy. She had vanished three days earlier.

  Her body was found in a half-crouching position near a garage in Acton, and the van that took her there was actually seen leaving the scene of the crime. A motorist driving past Berrymede Road, a cul-de-sac, at 5.30 in the morning, had to brake violently to avoid a van that shot out in front of him. He was so angry that he contacted the police to report the incident, but had failed to take note of the license plate number. A squad car that arrived a few minutes later found Mary’s body in the forecourt of a garage in the cul-de-sac.

  The near-miss probably alarmed the killer, for no further murders occurred that summer. Then, on 25 November 1964, another naked corpse was found under some debris in a car park in Hornton Street, Kensington. It was identified as Margaret McGowan, 21, who had disappeared more than a month before her body was found, and there were signs of decomposition. Again, there were traces of paint on the body, and a missing front tooth indicated that she had died in the same way as the previous two victims.