by Colin Wilson
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 22-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 20-year-old woman into a doorway in Kentish Town, but she escaped. An hour later still they dragged a 24-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 offences on their computer, and they soon recognised a pattern involving no less than 27 rapes that had been going on since 1982.
The rapes had begun at half past midnight on 10 June 1982, when two men in balaclavas grabbed a 23-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 tenth—but by the end of the following year, the number had reached 25. In one of these, on 6 June, 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 19-year-old secretary, Alison Day, left her home in Hackney Wick, East London, to meet her fiance, an out-ofwork printer; she never arrived. 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 17 April 1986 a 15-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 18 May 1986, Anne Lock, 29, 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 21 July 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’. When this was reported to the police, the result was that he was asked to visit Hendon Police College in North London, where an incident centre had been set up. The result was that he was asked to visit Hendon Police College in North London, where an incident centre 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 police had noted the similarities in method between the murders of Alison Day and the 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 computerise 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 centre 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 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 he had been beaten up by muggers. 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 had concluded that the rapist probably lived within three miles of the Finchley Road area of North London. He also concluded that he had been a semi-skilled worker, and that his relationship with his wife had been a stormy one. (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 line-up, 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 fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibres 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 20. 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 27 February 1988—life meaning a minimum of 30 ye
ars.
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 counsellor 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 apologised. When the gag was too tight he had sometimes loosened or removed it. But it seemed that since those early days he had become more brutal; it was he who had murdered Ann Lock, and after she had crawled out of the canal into which they had thrown her, had raped her again. So now, on 2 February 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 16 years.
The next major British murder case, that of Fred West, would achieve worldwide notoriety in 1994, when the 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 till 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 West’s, since they were of mixed race.
His wife, Rose, many years his junior, had once been pretty; now she was plump and bespectacled. There were rumours 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, whose ages ranged from nine to 16. West asked the 14-year-old to make him a cup of tea, and then to bring it up to his room on the first floor, which was also a bar. Once there, the girl was undressed and raped in front of a video camera, sodomised, 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 she had been raped by her father. Rose’s only comment was: ‘Oh well, you were asking for it.’
The daughter told a school friend, who in turn mentioned it to a policeman. On the morning of 6 August 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 the West’s eldest daughter, Anne Marie, who had left home when she was 15 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.
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 24 February 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 16-year-old daughter, Heather. 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.
Confronted with this, Fred now admitted that, in fact, there were two more bodies buried in the garden. The police soon uncovered these, and identified them as Shirley Ann Robinson, a former lodger of the Wests, and Alison Chambers, a 16-year-old schoolgirl who had vanished in 1979. Shirley Ann had been the lover of both Fred and Rose, and a foetus found nearby was later admitted by Fred to be his own child.
The police now moved into the basement, and found five more dismembered corpses under the floor. Another was discovered under the bathroom floor, and identified as Lynda Carol Gough, who had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ home before she vanished in April 1973. That brought the total up to nine bodies.
The search was moved to a field near West’s former home in the village of Much Marcle, and located the body of West’s first wife, Rena. They also found the body of Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, underneath the kitchen of their former home at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. Finally, another body, that of one of West’s former girlfriends, Anne McFall, was found buried in a field, bringing the body count up to 12.
As Fred West’s story began to emerge, it became clear that he had been operating longer than any serial killer in criminal history. His first murder—that of Anne McFall—seems to have taken place 18 years earlier, in 1967.
Fred had been born in a farm cottage in Much Marcle, a small Herefordshire village, in 1941, the son of a farm labourer. It later emerged that, in the West household, incest was common, and that his father frequently told his three daughters, ‘I made you—I’m entitled to touch you.’ West was later to take exactly the same attitude towards his own daughters. West’s mother retaliated by seducing Fred when he was only 12 years old.
Fred was a mild and unaggressive teenager. When he was 17, he swerved his motorbike to avoid a girl on a bicycle, and hit his head against a wall. He was unconscious for almost a week, and one leg healed permanently shorter than the other. It was after this accident that his brothers observed a change in his disposition. He became moody, and had sudden fits of rage.
Two years later, when he was 19, he was standing on the platform of a fire escape outside a youth club and tried to put his hand up the skirt of a girl he had invited outside; she gave him a push and he fell over the rails, striking his head. He was unconscious for 24 hours.
Shortly before this accident, he had met a 16-year-old Glasgow delinquent named Katherine Costello, known as Rena, who, even at that age, had worked as a prostitute. Soon they were having sex in fields, and Rena was convinced that she was in love. Nevertheless, she went back to Glasgow, returned to prostitution, and was soon pregnant by her black pimp.
Unhappy at the unwanted pregnancy, she returned to Gloucestershire, and Fred tried to abort her, without
success. Apparently unconcerned that she was pregnant by another man he married her in November 1962. He had always been excited at the idea of women being possessed by other men—preferably while he was watching.
They went back to Glasgow, where he ran an ice cream van, but their marriage quickly deteriorated, and he began to beat her. Rena also confided to a friend that Fred’s sexual demands were ‘weird’. She may have meant that he liked to tie her up.
After accidentally killing a child when backing his ice cream van, West returned to Much Marcle, and found work as a butcher in an abattoir. This job may also have influenced his sexuality—a friend at the time says that West plied a trade as an abortionist, and had a collection of ‘gruesome Polaroid photographs of blood-stained women’. West obviously found blood exciting.
Soon, Rena came to rejoin her husband, bringing with her two Scots girlfriends, one of whom was the teenaged Anne McFall. All four of them—and Rena’s baby, Charmaine—went to live in a small trailer. And although Fred frequently beat Rena, Anne nevertheless fell in love with him. When Rena decided to return to Glasgow, Anne stayed behind, and soon became Fred’s mistress.
Why he murdered Anne is uncertain, since he later described her as ‘an angel’. It may possibly have been because she told him she was pregnant. He strangled her in July 1967, and buried her in a field nearby.
Rena now came back to live with him. And in January 1968, West committed another murder. The victim was a 15-year-old waitress called Mary Bastholm, who knew West through the cafe where she worked—he had done some decorating there. On the night of 6 January 1968, she waited at a bus stop on her way to see her boyfriend, and then simply disappeared. Mary’s body was never found, but when West was in prison, he told his son Stephen that he had killed her.