Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  All of this shows Shawcross’s personality and behaviour in an interesting light. Dr Kraus argues that the symptoms manifested by Arthur Shawcross correlated in every way with one suffering from the abnormally elevated levels of this toxic chemical invasion. Parental disorientation, abnormal ECGs, general nervousness, progressive loss of ambition, poor school performance, and decreased sexual potency, all of which are embedded in his personal history.

  The abnormality also correlated with marked irritability, rages, inability to control anger once provoked, mood swings, terrible problems with stress control, violence and antisocial behaviour, all aligned with the high risk of becoming violent, which is evident in this man’s behaviour.

  * * *

  There seems little doubt that Shawcross was born handicapped, certainly in the genetic and biochemical sense. The 47 XYY chromosome disorder, linked to the abnormally high levels of kryptopyrrole, had formed a human time bomb from conception, and this would certainly account for him being the only rotten seed in the family of four children, and the undeniable fact that he demonstrated antisocial behaviour at a tender age. Of course, Shawcross always knew that he was somehow different from everyone else, especially the rest of his family, but never, in his worst nightmares, could he have known why, or just how different he might be. For the first 25 years of his life, his sexual history highlights an inclination towards children far younger than himself. He certainly enjoyed sexual fantasies about making love to his sister, Jean, and with his inbred predisposition towards violence, perhaps it was inevitable that paedophiliac behaviour leading to rape and homicide was pre-programmed into him like a faulty computer chip. Murdering Jack Blake and Karen Ann Hill serve as grim testimony to that.

  A sexual inadequate throughout his life, Shawcross blamed his wives for letting him down in that department. Millions of men use prostitutes for one reason or the other, so perhaps on his release from prison, Shawcross graduated to the seedier side of prostitution to fulfil this need, too.

  There is also evidence suggesting that people with the genetic and chemical disorders ascribed to Shawcross can metamorphose into extremely dangerous individuals who thrive during the hours of darkness. ‘The Monster of the Rivers’ came out at night and, when the beast surfaced, it was the prostitute population that suffered its homicidal wrath.

  Looking back, with all the gifts of hindsight, couldn’t it be argued that Shawcross’s rationale and modus operandi were predictable? Clothing – not only his, but that of his victims – was important to him. Garments subconsciously obsessed him, and he always mentioned clothing in his police statements and in letters and during interviews. Maybe we will never know why clothing was so important to this man, but the folding up of the garments was an indelible hallmark of his crimes, perhaps for the reason he gave during one of his interviews: ‘Fold the clothes up and they’d think they were going to get dressed again’ was his calculated remark. As a young child, Arthur’s mother demanded that he be neat and tidy, more especially with regard to his clothes, so this was possibly a learnt legacy from childhood, and a trait that he carried through to form part of his modus operandi.

  What is the explanation for his disgusting – yet quite unique – practice of forcing vegetation debris into the ears, nose, mouth, vagina and anuses of many of his victims? Again, this may be an echo from his early days when he indulged in torturing and killing small animals, fish and birds. Back then, as a child, he learned that by forcing material into his victims, he could not only prevent them from screaming out in pain, but also stop their urine and excrement from leaking out and spoiling his clothes. Shawcross murdered all of his victims near water, and this part of his MO is far easier to explain for he had been a keen angler since childhood, and during these isolated periods down by the rivers, he had ample time to fantasise about sex. Hence, Shawcross had an affinity with water. The riverbank was his territory, where he felt safe and secure.

  Shawcross also returned more than once to the bodies of his victims. Often, he would sit with the rotting corpses and discuss his life with the remains. He told them how his wives disgusted him. He explained that he did love children, and that it wasn’t his fault that he killed little Jack Blake or, for that matter, Karen Hill.

  On at least two occasions, Shawcross cut open his victims and ate their most intimate body parts. With June Cicero, his penultimate victim, he returned three times, the second time to cut into the frozen corpse, as it lay in a creek, to take his gruesome trophy.

  ‘It took some getting out,’ he explained. ‘I hacked it some, then I thawed it under the car heater as I drove along. I ate it raw. I wanted to show the police where the bone was, but they didn’t want to know.’

  One rather feels that even Stephen King could not better that scene in one of his horror novels. And then, on his third visit to the body of June Cicero, Shawcross masturbated over the bridge parapet, an act observed by a police officer and which sealed his own fate.

  Shawcross feels no remorse for his crimes; indeed, he always, without exception, lays the blame for his antisocial acts at the feet of others – his wives, God, the Army and, more recently, what he feels is his genetic and biochemical abnormality. In shifting blame in this manner, he is able to justify his behaviour to the extreme point of grand appraisement, which finds him standing on a plinth in the serial killers’ hall of fame, arguing that he is a very special human being and, as such, he is worthy of scientific study. He may be right about that, if only for the possibility of examining more closely his genetic and biochemical make-up in the hope of furthering our understanding of what he is.

  The following extract is taken from a letter written by Shawcross to the author. It is published here with his permission:

  I have been asked, Did I kill? Yes, too many times for any one person to do so! It is said I have partaken of human flesh. Think back in history: You will see that man hunted man (still do in some remote parts of the world.) Think about the animal we call pig or boar. Why does it say in some books we can’t eat this animal? Because it tastes just like human flesh. I have eaten flesh of man or woman … So the next time any of you sit down to eat bacon, ham or a nice juicy pot roast or pork chop, think about the taste, the flavour of eating human flesh. But this only effected me when I got very angry – the hunger of the predator.

  I have been a god unto myself. I’ve been the judge, the jury and the executioner. I dear people, have murdered, butchered and totally destroyed 53 human beings in my life time. Why?

  Picture in your mind: I was taught to sit for hours at a time and not move; I was taught to seek out and destroy the enemy as I received them to be.

  The prostitutes I am accused of killing were the enemy to me in their own fashion, because they can kill with social diseases and AIDS and get away with it! Do I regret it, I have been asked? My answer is, I very much regret it, to the point of wondering why I was chosen to carry out this assignment.

  The United States government taught me how to kill; what it did not teach me was the desire not to so! I still get those feelings – but the pills I am now on dampen them to the point of calming me down. Why not before?

  Why am I like I am? Study it – seek the answer before too many people get killed! I am like a predator, able to hunt and to wantonly destroy at any given time or moment … I have been pushed and threatened, but somehow the pills stop or slow down the desire to fight. I know that when I do fight there will be no control – I’ll be the predator again.

  Most people tell me I will die in prison! (So what.) Do, you have a choice of when and where you will die? … Many people believe that when they die they will go to heaven. Not so! Your soul waits to be called: Read your Bible if that is what you believe in. As for me, I will live again and go on to the next transition. I am a spiritualist … Death is but a transition of life. The people I have killed are in their next transition. They will live again, but in a much better way than the one they left behind! … I have lived in many parts of the world,
even in England, Kent to be exact. The fens were home to me 700 years ago.

  What went on in the home I grew up in is better left unsaid, but I cannot do it! I, as a child, had no control on who my sex partner was! I cannot say I did not enjoy it, be it a cousin, sister or the old girl herself.

  Every man, woman or child from 10 years of age and up is able to kill knowingly. How did I kill without the use of drugs or a struggle! Let me explain this further. The body has many pressure points: some to relax you, some to excite you and some to give pain or remove it. A few of them to stun you and, be that as it may, to kill you! Many of you humans portray me as mad-crazy. This is your free will. What you think may not be so.

  Look to the heavens, I came from there! So did you but you wont admit it! My time is near in this transition. I will move on shortly, I feel what I feel. If every man, woman and child had the same as everyone else, then crime and war would be nonexistent.

  Remember: watch the heavens, we are coming to rescue you from you.

  I am, or am I?’

  SIGNED BY ARTHUR SHAWCROSS

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1994

  This chapter is based on exclusive television and audiotape interviews between Christopher Berry-Dee and Arthur John Shawcross within the Sullivan Correctional Facility, Fallsburg, New York State, on Monday 19 and Friday 30 September 1994, and correspondence covering three years.

  Shawcross welcomes correspondence, and his address is: Inmate # 91-B-083, Sullivan Correctional Facility, PO Box AG, Fallsburg, NY 12733–0016.

  JOHN

  MARTIN

  SCRIPPS

  UK

  ‘They won’t hang me. I’m British.’

  JOHN SCRIPPS FOUR DAYS BEFORE HE WAS EXECUTED AT CHANGI PRISON, SINGAPORE, 19 APRIL 1996

  Described by the media as ‘The Tourist from Hell’, Scripps became the first Westerner to be hanged in Singapore for murder, and only the second for any offence. Dutch citizen Johannes van Damme was executed by the Singapore authorities, for drug-trafficking, in 1994. He was arrested on 27 September 1989, when he was found to be carrying 4kg of heroin. He was sentenced to death on 26 April 1993.

  Scripps is the last British murderer to be hanged since the abolishment of capital punishment in 1964. The last executions in Britain took place on 13 August of that year. Peter Anthony Allen, aged 21, was hanged at Walton Prison, Liverpool, and John Robson Walby, alias Gwynne Owen Evans, aged 24, was hanged at Strangeways Prison, Manchester. They had been jointly convicted of the murder of John West, a van driver from Workington, Cumberland, in the course of robbery.

  John Martin Scripps was born in Hertford, on 9 December 1959. The family moved to London when he was a small boy and he remembered a happy childhood, in which he was close to his sister Janet. When he was nine years old, he experienced the loss of his father, who committed suicide after he learned that his wife was leaving him for another man. John found his father at home with his head in the gas oven. At about the same time, his mother was diagnosed as having throat cancer and, although she recovered, John’s world fell apart.

  According to the FBI, 70 per cent of multiple murderers have undergone trauma at some point in their childhood.

  ‘The trauma festers away and becomes a fantasy of getting revenge,’ says Ian Stephen, a forensic psychologist who works for the police and the prison service in Strathclyde. ‘In Scripps’s case, the anger might have been directed against the fact that he has been deprived of a father, deserted.’

  John became increasingly introverted. He cut himself off from his friends and found it impossible to concentrate on learning to read and write. He acquired these skills later on, in prison, although his handwriting always remained very childish.

  At the age 14, he disappeared while at a training camp in France organised by the Finchley unit of the army cadet force. A year later, he was in juvenile court for burglary and theft.

  His first adult conviction was for indecent assault in 1978, when he was fined £40 at Hendon Magistrates Court. Thereafter, it was a grim catalogue of offences including burglaries in London, followed by jail in Israel, for stealing from a fellow kibbutz worker. In 1982, he was jailed again for burglary and assault in Surrey.

  He managed to abscond from the prison system and embarked on a crime journey throughout South-East Asia and America. In Mexico, he met and married 16-year-old Maria Arellanos, but, by 1985, he was back in Britain once again, facing a prison sentence for committing burglary. Prison could not hold him and he absconded, yet again, to return to his drug-smuggling activities in South-East Asia and America.

  Justice caught up again with Scripps in 1987, when was jailed for seven years in London for heroin offences. The following year, his young Mexican wife divorced him. While on home leave from prison in June 1990, he disappeared for the third time and flew to Bangkok.

  When later interviewed by Customs and Excise officers, Scripps said that he had flown out to Bangkok to meet a girl he had been writing to. On arrival in the Thai capital, he booked into the Liberty Hotel for three days, taking a cheap room, costing about £10 a night. Accompanied by his girlfriend, he frequented a few bars and visited the local tourist attractions. Romance seemed to be in the air and they made a trip to Ayuthaya, the historic former capital, where they stayed for two days. The couple then moved on to Pattaya, known as ‘Sin City’, and from there, to Phuket, where they lived at Nilly’s Marina Inn, at Patong Beach. Scripps spent ten days in Thailand before deciding to fly back to London. He had spent £1,000 during his sojourn in the East, including £270 on clothes and just over £100 buying 48 phoney watches. He also bought a quantity of heroin.

  * * *

  At 1.20 local time, Scripps boarded Gulf Air Flight GF 153, destination Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman. On arrival he proceeded to the transit area of Seeb International Airport to await his connecting flight to Heathrow, London. He was travelling on a UK passport issued in the name of Jesse Robert Bolah. This travel document, #348572V had been stolen.

  While killing time, in an airport bar, he met Christopher Davis, and the two men conversed as they waited for their flight. As Scripps prepared to board Flight GF 011 to London, he was subjected to a routine security check, which included a body frisk. Police Corporal Saeed Mubarak of the Royal Oman Police, found two packages wrapped in red tape in his pockets. Thinking that the packages might contain explosives, he summoned assistance from Inspector Saeed Sobait. The two police officers went through Scripps’s hand baggage where they discovered a larger packet containing white powder. The dilemma for the authorities was that, the white powder could not be tested without detaining the passenger. It was therefore decided to give one of the packets, which, as it later turned out, contained 50g of diamorphine, and the passport to the captain. Scripps was then allowed to proceed to London, effectively under detention and the responsibility of the Gulf Air flight crew.

  Scripps nervously boarded the Tri-Star aircraft and settled into seat 39H. Mid-way through the flight, schoolteacher Gareth Russell, sitting in 39K, noticed his fellow passenger drop something on the floor and kick it under the seat.

  As soon as the aircraft entered British airspace, the pilot contacted HM Customs & Excise and, moments after the plane had taxied to a stop, a rummage team headed by David Clark boarded the aircraft. The packet, which Scripps had kicked under seat, was found. After a field test for opiates had proved positive, he was charged under Section 3(1) of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, contrary to Section 170(2) of the Customs & Excise Management Act 1979.

  John Scripps was held in custody that night to allow Customs and police officers to search 6 Gordon Road, Farnborough, where he stayed, with his uncle, Ronald White. A folder of documents was found, containing a West German passport, in the name of Robert Alfred Wagner and a Belgian identity card, in the name of Benjamin George Edmond Stanislas Balthier, with Scripps’s photograph attached to it. The men named in these documents had been reported missing, many years previously, and there has been no trace of them since.<
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  Later that day, Scripps was interviewed again, and he was asked how he earned his money, how he could afford to travel all over the world, and how he could afford a very expensive Samsonite suitcase. He cockily replied, ‘It may be very expensive to you, but it isn’t to me. If you can’t afford a suitcase like this, it’s because you’re working as minor subservients of the State for a standard wage, and you’re not willing to go out and work all hours.’

  At 10.00pm on 31 August, Scripps was released in the name of John Martin, and instructed to answer bail on 29 October 1990. He failed to report and, on 28 November, he was arrested by Detective Constable Malone at his mother’s home at 11 Grove Road, Sandown, on the Isle of Wight. Police found more drugs and he was charged with possession of 50g of diamorphine at 80 per cent purity. The street value of this amount was estimated at around £9,473, while the remaining 191.5 grams of heroin he had tried to smuggle through the airport was valued at £38,551. Given the knowledge that Scripps possessed drugs valued at over £48,000, the police now understood how he could afford his jet-set lifestyle.

  Because Scripps had previously absconded from a seven-year custodial sentence for drugs offences, he was held on remand in Winchester Prison until his trial. He instructed his solicitors that he would plead ‘not guilty’. His defence was simple enough. His case would stand or fall by his claim that he had found the red-taped package containing heroin on the ground at Muscat Airport and had handed it in to the police. He categorically denied that any drugs were found on his person at Muscat. Further, he argued that the traces of heroin found in the pockets of his jeans he was wearing at the time resulted directly in him being asked to open the package he had found containing drugs. He denied any knowledge whatsoever of the traces alleged to have been found in the pocket of a shirt. If he managed to wriggle out of that, he was still not completely out of the woods, for the police had found heroin on him during his arrest in Sandown and his wallet had been stuffed with £2,000 in cash. The implication was that he intended peddling drugs on the Isle of Wight, yet another allegation that Scripps denied.