by Ian Brady
A syllogism presents two parts of an argument in which the premises may be stated before the conclusion. Therefore the serial killer’s successive murders can logically be developed as the premises from which one must synthesize conclusions that may lead to his capture.
Even though most serial killers are not guided by logic, his pursuers are constrained to be. Logic plus inspired insight is a much greater threat to the quarry, no matter how ultra-modern technological research is likely to become.
As stated, much valuable information can be amassed from extended interviews with serial killers, though obviously a great deal depends on how proficient the psychiatrist or interviewer is, or how forthcoming the killer.
One must understand that there is little intellectual or spiritual inducement for the captured serial killer to cooperate in any way. To all intents and purposes his real life is over and done with, as he knows he shall never be free again, so why should he volunteer information or reveal aspects of his personality to the authorities?
Most killers will be intelligent enough to realise that the penal authorities will mainly use such information as control points against him. Therefore he is most likely to reveal only that information which may persuade the authorities to understand his better side and treat him more humanely.
Naturally, prior to interviewing, all aspects of the serial killer’s case must be exhaustively studied — family and educational background, pathology reports on victims, police interviews, trial transcript, how he spends his time in prison, what he reads, other hobbies, brand of cigarette if a smoker, favourite chocolate bar, relationship with guards and prisoners, observed general attitude to his crimes, etc.
Essentially you will read him by his actions. Avoid use of questionnaires and an overtly structural approach. Much more will be revealed obliquely in relaxed, free-flowing conversation, touching upon politics, general philosophy, topical social questions, authors, films, controversial personalities, universal moral dilemmas.
The aim is to generate, as far as possible in the artificial circumstances of captivity, the sort of spontaneous atmosphere and genial conversation of a bar, avoiding the self-consciousness of formality.
Do not make instant notes. Create interest and it will snowball. That’s the time to be a good, observant listener. One careless display of fish-eye or impatient disinterest by the interviewer can destroy the whole relaxed ambience. Therefore eyes must be constantly candid and receptive, ready for the unexpected dart of eye contact. All these and additional techniques should be second nature to a seasoned interviewer.
Many of these very same techniques are also used by serial killers to lull and snare victims. The interviewer will in effect be faced with the difficult task of deceiving a skillful deceiver.
The serial killer shares to a significant degree a common characteristic of the schizoid, namely, a marked lack of tension in reconciling polarised opinions or beliefs. This relativistic dexterity is an advantageous aid both to deception and self-deception, the latter enhancing the persuasion of the former. The higher the vocabulary and ability to articulate with apparent validity, the more convincing the argument, independent of truth, as every lawyer and expert logician knows.
In short, expressed even more cynically, it is the impression that counts, both in the eliciting and delivery of information. Personal interaction and observation will indicate the best psychological method to mine information from an adversary, and the information will instinctively form the basis of the most effective structure of persuasion to be adopted. Negative or positive responses, semantical nuances, body language, etc., all reflect or infer significant covert data for hypothesis, reapplication and ever discrete testing, never underestimating the opponent’s own powers of observation and interpretation.
As previously betokened, one careless word or gesture, a solitary false note, can damage or neutralise a painstakingly nurtured ambience beyond recall. It is therefore largely safer to maintain a cautiously interested, confidential tone of underemphasis, unless otherwise is specifically or tactically indicated. The inner gyroscope of counter-transference is usually accurate and reliable.
You will note that I have kept this in general terms, as opposed to that of interrogating a serial killer exclusively. By and large the serial killer, like the socially sanctioned killer, regards himself as normal, except to the extent that he has transformed thought/fantasy into action.
Naturally an attitude indicating you regard him as an alien species will achieve naught except his regarding you similarly. In fact, even without given cause, the serial killer will at inception regard the interviewer as hostile anyway, by force of adversarial circumstance, and this dualistic defence mechanism is something the interviewer has to overcome.
Personally I could/can evaluate the integrity and calibre of a psychiatrist usually within the first ten minutes of a discussion, and decide whether to persevere or dismiss him/her as mechanistic.
Ironically, in some instances the psychiatrist himself evinces a serious personality disorder. So it should not be surprising that, according to official statistics, psychiatrists as a group have the highest suicide rate. Obviously a schizoid hazard of the profession, perhaps mainly due to patients injecting persuasive, relativistic philosophy into the field of inevitably limited psychodiagnostics and upsetting professional mental equilibrium.
A structurally impaired professional ego can quite easily be forced from its complacent tracks by psychodynamic intuition expressed in forcefully emotive and impulsive terms. The spoken word can possess a psychic penetration far beyond the reason of the written — as exemplified by the hypnotic oratory of Adolf Hitler and other great manipulators of primal emotion whose vocal delivery takes on the mystical power and sway of music. A psycho-semantic symphony.
Then the thing of courage as roused with rage with rage doth sympathise, and with an accent tuned in selfsame key retorts to chiding fortune.
— Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare
In the following pages I shall not tax the reader’s patience with abstruse medical terminology without defining clearly, in plain language, what is meant.
As the prime purpose of this book is a study of the forensic evidence relevant to compiling a psychological profile of the killer, I shall not unduly clutter these pages with the name and biography of every victim of each killer (unless the killer is targeting a certain category of victim). Other authors most often do use such victim biographical material, but in many instances simply as humanistic or artistic padding. In this particular case it would only serve to distract from the prime object.
This volume is not intended to be a psychological/psychiatric textbook. If further constrained to classify the book’s contents and intent, I am forced to resort to sporting terms. It is a modest manual for helping to track and capture the greatest and most dangerous animal in existence: the human predator.
I am understandably aware that tabulated techniques of the hunt may unavoidably assist the hunted as well as the hunter. Therefore both would do well to remember:
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
— Nietzsche
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
Henry Lee Lucas
Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight.
Othello, Shakespeare
Only of brief personal interest, Henry Lee Lucas’ significance comes from a sociological vantage point: the capability of mass media to create the desire in so many people to be famous at any cost, even their lives or those of others. The yearning to flicker for a few moments on television, or appear on the front page of a newspaper that wraps tomorrow’s fish. ‘The medium is the message.’
Psychologically, Henry Lee Lucas primarily fits the classification of the disorganised psychotic killer: of average or below-average intelligence; an unskilled worker; outcast, rootless transient with no social awareness; so
metimes disoriented and confused during the crime; murders committed spontaneously regardless of risk. A resentful Charlie Chaplin. Lucas’ alcoholic father abused him sadistically for years, unwittingly fashioning him into his mother’s nemesis.
An abused child usually does not focus hatred upon the parent who abuses but upon the parent who stood by and did nothing to stop the abuser. The hatred towards the abuser is effectively regarded as nothing compared to the betrayal of love and trust by the second parent. We guard against an enemy, not a loved one or friend, therefore betrayal by the latter has more psychic impact.
Lucas was twenty-three, his mother seventy, when he stabbed, strangled and raped her. Obviously the viciousness of this act projected that the hatred for his mother would burgeon into a deep-seated distrust/hatred of the female species as a whole. It would also make Lucas sexually inadequate with women throughout his life.
For the murder of his mother, he was sent to a top-security mental hospital, which eventually discharged him to spend eight years in prison. When released, he became a vagrant and petty thief, forging a lasting companionship with another illiterate, homosexual hobo, Ottis Elwood Toole, with whom he aimlessly wandered and panhandled across America.
When Lucas was again eventually arrested in 1982 for the squalid murder of his fifteen-year-old common-law wife, Frieda Powell, the niece of Toole, he was asked why he had dismembered the body. Lucas revealingly replied, ‘It was the only thing I could think of.’ In other words, it was a murder committed in panic and without forethought. Hardly the pattern of the psychopathic, calculating, seasoned killer Lucas later claimed himself to be, with several hundred prior victims to his credit. Such a killer would surely by then have been an expert innovator in such basic matters as disposal.
Nevertheless, when police routinely questioned him about other possible murders, Lucas began confessing to every homicide put to him. Contagiously, eager detectives from police forces from almost every American state began converging upon this prodigious confessor and were not disappointed.
As the body count Lucas claimed he had killed mounted, it must have seemed to the gleeful detectives that Lucas would next be revealing that he was the second shooter on the grassy knoll in Dallas.
The final, grotesque total of homicides Lucas confessed to reached over three hundred. Nominally, this made him the most prolific serial killer in American history. Which is why I am dealing with his case first.
In addition, other unusual events led me to take a personal interest in the case.
An eminent author passed a message to me from a friend of his at the FBI Psychological Profiling Center at Quantico, requesting my considered opinion of Lucas. I replied that it would help considerably and enhance accuracy if I could see or hear Lucas confessing. A videotape of Lucas being interrogated was promptly forwarded to me.
I studied the video in conjunction with forensic evidence and other documents on the case.
One of the most important factors I immediately took note of was that Lucas, when explaining away the fact that, in almost each of the three-hundred-odd homicides a different modus operandi had been adopted by the killer, made the astonishing assertion, no doubt prompted by his helpful inquisitors, that he had consciously contrived this system in order to mislead the police. From tramp to criminal genius and strategist in one unlikely stride. One had only to consider the prolific degree of applied intelligence and sustained concentration that would have been required to accomplish such feats of memory and diversionary complexity to see that it did not fit in with Lucas’s chaotic history of psychosis.
In psychological terms, it would almost amount to Lucas possessing the ability to create literally hundreds of fake criminal personae or methods, each convincing enough to fool an army of investigating detectives actually searching for a telltale M.O. in each case.
In Jungian psychology, persona is construed as the psychic mechanism which masks a person’s true thoughts and feelings in relation to the world as they perceive it. Therefore Lucas’ absurd claims went far beyond the bounds of credibility, or of Jung’s multi-personae theory that each persona is unaware of the existence of its fellows. In light of this, Lucas’ real scenario should have become transparent to expert detectives.
Namely, that Lucas, with his record of matricide and being charged with another murder, was at least intelligent and experienced enough to realise that in such a chronic situation he faced two alternatives: death by execution, or imprisonment till death. Catch-22.
Having been previously certified insane regarding the murder of his mother, what if he could again convince the authorities that he was crazy? Second. His whole life being a dismal catalogue of failure from the day he was born, there was now a final opportunity for him to be remembered as a success in some field of human endeavour. It would not have taken him long to see that claims of prolific murder filled the bill nicely in both respects.
It is reasonable to conjecture from the known facts that Lucas did not possess any significant degree of self-understanding.
Logical extension therefore suggests that Lucas, in common with the vast majority of ordinary people, was unable to differentiate between the genuine parts of himself and those that had been imposed by reaction to circumstance.
When one adds to this his psychiatric history, his chronology of lifelong failure and that fact that his free life was at an end, it becomes obvious that the transmutation from being a nobody to a world-famous serial killer would also have been a logical and psychically satisfying escape route from reality, presenting a role to which he could easily adapt.
The mass media had made serial killers as fashionable and popular as movie stars. He too would become famous and, with luck, be certified insane into the bargain.
When his bandwagon of confessions began to roll, he probably noted how willingly the police from various states not only accepted his every word, but also generously put them into his mouth to conveniently clear unsolved murders from their files. A normal police practice and tendency.
A further incentive in this particular set of sensational circumstances is the patent fact that mutual cooperation between Lucas and the detectives would not only make both Lucas and the detectives famous, but also the latter rich from books, newspaper exclusives, television appearances, films and other media spinoffs, including lucrative fees from the university lecturing circuit.
It is common knowledge that, after involvement in particularly notorious cases, police chiefs invariably retire early in order to benefit from commercial exploitation in this manner.
Again, crime is seen to pay very well indeed for some. Many otherwise respectable people exhibit not the least compunction in greatly profiting from the crimes and miseries of others. Even the relatives of victims eagerly cash in on criminal notoriety, employing agents to handle their media deals.
After I gave this (abbreviated) analysis and summation in response to the initial request by the aforementioned author, independent investigators and journalists belatedly began to test Lucas’ claims, and the whole farcical charade began to fall apart immediately.
They discovered with hilarious ease that Lucas was actually in prison when many of the murders he confessed to were committed, and, in the case of many other murders, found irrefutable documentary proof that he was thousands of miles from the scenes of the crimes when they occurred.
The special Task Force, comprised of the legendary Texas Rangers, which had been set up specially to deal with Lucas’ myriad murders, when confronted with this and other equally embarrassing evidence of monumental duplicity and inefficiency, either flatly refused to answer questions from journalists, or shifted the blame onto visiting police forces.
A lawyer who was helping to uncover these stupendous errors was suddenly arrested by the Texas Rangers and charged with a long list of unlikely criminal offences — an obvious attempt to discredit him. He eventually sued and was awarded a record $58 million in damages and, ironically, then became Lucas’ lawyer!
Lucas at last made one true confession: he had invented the whole fiasco.
With unusual candour, he admitted that, once he saw how much world attention his prodigious homicidal claims were commanding, he became a publicity junkie and just kept confessing to murder after murder.
In his own words, he ‘felt more famous than Elvis Presley.’
Though his false claims qualified him for inclusion here, the same exaggeration diminishes his homicidal stature, my interest and his significance in the annals of crime. When on Death Row awaiting execution, Lucas belatedly realised the price of his murderous ambitions.
The forces of law and order, from the low ranks to the political heights, having been made to appear ludicrously self-serving, are resolved to save face by making it a point of honour that Lucas does not cheat the death penalty. In the event, Lucas will in effect have been his own executioner.
Fame is a food that dead men eat,
I have no stomach for such meat.
— Austin Dobson (1840–1921)
CHAPTER NINE
John Wayne Gacy
They have swallowed us up quick: when they were so wrathfully displeased with us.
The Prayer Book
I had personal contact with John Wayne Gacy and we shared mutual friends. With an easy manner and a ready smile he could don at will, and harnessed to a recondite ferocity mostly only his victims saw in their final hours, Gacy evolved into the perfect psychopath.
He was in the psychological category known as the organised killer: of above-average intelligence; social skills highly cultivated; thought processes and emotions strictly controlled even under stress; functional in all aspects; victims usually strangers; use of restraints; bodies buried; high professional interest in media accounts of his crimes.