by Ian Brady
Corll, when exercising his criminal side, allowed morality and legality to enter the equation — not only as obstacles to be circumvented and guarded against, but also as appetizers to the criminal main course. Censorship and prohibition delight the senses, as apparently all but would-be protectors of public morality are aware. Such people exercise public probity chiefly to advance their own spurious claims to moral superiority.
I believe there is ample evidence that Corll was capable of love.
He was devoted to his mother, and formed an emotional and sexual relationship with fourteen-year-old David Brooks — who more than returned his love and affection, treating Corll almost as an idol. The affair continued for more than three years.
When David Brooks eventually discovered that Corll was a killer, it did not diminish his affection one bit, and the idea of betraying Corll never entered his head. In fact, as evidenced, David Brooks not only began to adopt the same beliefs and views as Corll, but also shared and enjoyed the stimulation and sensuality of the new world Corll had to offer him: a heady mixture of unconditional eroticism and the will to power which, once tasted, is probably far more addictive than any drug.
There is no doubt in my mind that Corll was a psychotic killer, not a psychopath.
Obvious traumatic changes took place as he gradually lost contact with the real world and a dual personality evolved. Normal adjustive mechanisms failed and his behaviour became progressively more extreme and polarised — the insane sadist on one side, the ‘kind and generous man’ on the other.
To compensate for this schizophrenic lack of equilibrium, he sought out younger, less discerning company in which his dangerous personality defects would not be so noticeable, and his criminal tendencies would more readily be acceptable to the chosen few he risked revealing himself to. Chosen ones he could control and would not hesitate to destroy if they proved disloyal, or were of no further use to him.
Instinct and caution would have warned him not to reveal, even to those he transiently trusted, the darkest compulsions of frenzied sadism which drove him to savagely mutilate and castrate some of his victims. Controlled application of fear has its uses, but to inspire blind terror in a confederate or enemy is dangerous, leading to unpredictable reaction. All minds have their limits. It was therefore politic that his accomplices should not know his full capabilities, — the horrors he was capable of only in total privacy. Certain powers should be held in reserve. Better to play the weakling, his other self, ‘the kind and generous man,’ and be underestimated.
The ridiculously dangerous method of paying others to lure and bring him victims is further evidence of Corll’s dual personality, the psychotic schism. This is also reinforced by the spontaneous and reckless way he killed victims whom he knew and who could easily be traced back to him. Ruthless intent was openly compromised by brash recklessness.
The minimal signs of stress Corll evinced during the crimes, his obvious depersonalisation of the victims, and the innovative but absurdly ingenuous chaos of the final scenario leading to his almost suicidal death, also bear the maladjusted personality print of the florid psychotic.
The method of transfixing his victims by all four limbs to the torture board suggests further inadequacy, lack of self-confidence in general and a pathological obsession to achieve no less than absolute control.
Cutting off the sexual organs of his living victims — in effect turning them into sexless oddities — obviously served to compensate for his own feelings of homosexual guilt and his incompetence in normal sexual relationships. The more degradation he heaped upon his victims, the more superior he felt . . . an additional compensatory mechanism.
In murdering the victims, Corll, as with many serial killers, was, in a psychological context, symbolically killing his own guilty lust, at least for a short period. As stated, in some killers, consciously or subconsciously, the act of murder serves to slow down the cycle of homicidal compulsion.
This aspect of self-deterrence is a partial factor in most serial killings. The killer yearns for a period of rest, wishing to enjoy the ordinary things of life like other people. However, in some cases the opposite effect is achieved and the homicides accelerate in resentful reaction.
The pattern of dualism surfaces again in Corll’s compulsion to sodomise the victims for days, deliberately and methodically conditioning sexual ambivalence in them, loss of sexual identity, and inevitably provoking their reluctant, pleasurable arousal.
Thus, in attempting to destroy and simultaneously re-create a new psyche in the victim, it could reasonably be contended that Corll was, probably subconsciously, transcending the boundaries of mere sadism and vainly reaching for delusive omnipotence. Arguably the ultimate, impossible ambition of all serial killers.
At their trial, both Henley and Brooks were found guilty of murder and sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment. Ironically, after both were repeatedly sexually abused by other prisoners, they asked to be segregated from the main prison population.
Detectives found documents and pornographic material in Corll’s house that led them to investigate a Dallas organisation called the Odyssey Foundation, which had a membership of 50,000. Its function was to supply its members with young boys for sexual purposes. The files contained nude photographs of the boys along with personal details.
Some good did emerge indirectly from the Houston murders. It spurred United States law enforcement bodies into a less casual attitude towards cases of young people being reported as missing.
Statistics released by the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse showed that, in America, around 70,000 children were being killed annually by sexual/violent abuse, mostly perpetrated by members of their family, relatives or friends.
In 1975, this led to the FBI National Crime Information Center setting up a computerised national index of missing persons to assist and supply information to state and local police forces. At a later date, the FBI national data bank was expanded to include the fingerprints of missing persons. Dualism sometimes works to good purpose.
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness . . .
Henry James (1843–1916)
CHAPTER TWELVE
Peter Sutcliffe
He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead.
Oscar Wilde
It is a curious fact that, in England, a murderer, or series of murders, tends to be quickly forgotten by the public unless a title is bestowed by the media — ‘The Black Panther’ (Donald Neilson), ‘The Acid Bath Murders’ (John George Haigh), ‘The Moors Murders’ (Ian Brady and Myra Hindley), ‘The Ten Rillington Place Murders’ (John Reginald Halliday Christie), ‘The Cannock Chase Murders’ (Raymond Leslie Morris), etc.
Most serial killers are quickly forgotten, and relegated to a cursory mention or perhaps only a small footnote in anthologies of murder. Others, exploited regularly by the media for profit, attain the status of folk devils in the public mind, become icons of their era, their names written large in the milestones of homicidal history.
‘Jack the Ripper,’ attributed only with five murders, remains fresh in the public’s memory after over a century. An independent survey commissioned by an English national newspaper, The Guardian, revealed that, even after thirty years, the English newspapers continue to print articles about the ‘Moors Murders’ an average of 154 times a year, simply because it guarantees immediate increased circulation. ‘The Yorkshire Ripper,’ after fifteen years, came second in the poll with only thirty-four mentions a year.
So what is the common factor in these cases that so enthrall the English public?
The answer is ‘gestalt.’ Atmosphere. The mystical and sometimes almost romantic evocation of a memorable era or ethos. Plus a theatrical, dramatic setting in keeping with murder or
, better still, enhancing its spine-chilling qualities.
The mention of ‘Jack the Ripper’ immediately conjures up streets congested with horse-drawn carriages; men sporting top hats, capes and canes; women wearing decorative bonnets, ankle-length dresses and twirling fringed parasols. Whitechapel, the sordid slum district in London frequented by prostitutes, where all the Ripper’s murders were committed, its cobbled narrow alleys swirling with fog and lit only by bleary gas lamps, offered a perfect dramatic setting for the horrendous, savage murders. The public loves being ‘horrified.’
The ‘Moors Murders,’ committed during ‘the swinging Sixties’ to background music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, was the permissive era of miniskirts for girls and long hair for men, and had a memorable enough setting, one would think. But it was insufficient in itself to pleasurably thrill and chill the English public. For that task, it took the brooding, desolate Yorkshire moors, treacherous with bogs and shrouded in deathly mist, to provide the amorphous, cathartic ingredient necessary to penetrate the public psyche and generate enduring, even endearing, morbid fascination.
In the case of Peter Sutcliffe, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper,’ as soon as the media bestowed him with the appellation ‘Ripper,’ with its connotations of the legendary ‘Jack,’ his lasting infamy was assured. The fact that Sutcliffe did not rip his prostitute victims or carry off parts of their bodies in the manner of his illustrious namesake did not deter the newspapers from cashing in on a good eye-catching title.
I had the opportunity to interview Sutcliffe at length when I was passing through the south of England. He had a mild and pleasant mien, his tone of voice quiet and deferential throughout. The overall impression was one of ordinariness, a lack of personal charisma.
He spoke of the murders he committed in a matter-of-fact, humdrum manner, sometimes quite humorously, perfectly convinced that he had done the right thing in carrying out a mission given to him by God (a phrase which comically reminded me of the Blues Brothers!) and that there was no need for him to justify his actions further than that.
This mundane attitude reduced the conception and enactment of his crimes to the mere commonplace, as though discussing adverse variations in the weather. A paradox, considering he was simultaneously claiming his eminent accomplice to be no less than God himself (then, many years later, changed it to that perfect gentleman, the Devil).
Sutcliffe said that he first received his mission from God while working as a gravedigger in a Catholic cemetery in Bingley, Yorkshire. Although he was speaking of a supernatural experience, his voice maintained the same flat-vowel drone you hear a northern English radio commentator employ when describing play in probably the most boring game in the world, cricket.
Perhaps this routine quality of tedious recital was due to the fact that he had probably described the experience already so many times to psychiatrists that he, in course of time, practically knew it by heart.
According to him, he had been casually digging a grave in pretty hard ground and had suddenly begun to feel hot and tired, so he stopped and sat down in the grave to have a rest. Could anything be more natural?
Without warning, and apparently issuing from nowhere in particular, he thought he heard a voice, which at first he took to be human but with a sort of weird echoing quality to it; he attributed it to some defect in his own hearing. He stood up to have a look around. The graveyard was totally deserted, not a person even distantly in sight. As he was standing almost up to his neck in the grave, he didn’t have a very good view, and began to suspect that possibly some of his workmates were concealing themselves nearby and playing a joke on him, perhaps trying to frighten him by speaking deeply into a funeral vase or something to create the ghostly echoing effect. He shouted out sarcastically a few times but no one answered.
After a brief period he again heard the indistinct echoing voice. Becoming annoyed by what he was firmly convinced was a morbid practical joke, he climbed angrily out of the grave to see what was what. He searched around furiously, expecting someone to pop up and run for it, but the immediate vicinity of the grave offered no surprise appearance or solution. Deciding that whoever it was that had been fooling around had probably pre-empted him and nipped out of sight over the other side of a slope, Sutcliffe trudged uphill. Still not a soul in sight.
Again he heard the voice. Sutcliffe stated that he still couldn’t make out the meaning, as the sound-distorted words seemed to be jumbled up, like echoes on top of other echoes or a multi-track reproduction. However, by now he had sensed the direction from which the sounds seemed to be coming and, still curious and suspicious, he went walking towards the source, a certain gravestone.
As he slowly realised that there was no reasonable place for a joker to hide in that particular area, he began to feel wary and genuinely frightened as the sounds continued to emanate. It could not have soothed his jangled nerves much then to realise that the voice was coming out of the gravestone!
As he described this, I, unfortunately in the clinical circumstances, had visions of the hilarious scene in a Mel Brooks film where some biblical character played by a comedian is having a heated argument with the Burning Bush, so I had trouble maintaining a suitably serious demeanour.
Sutcliffe, having ascertained that a tombstone was talking to him, said he had a good look at it and found it to be Polish! Whether or not it had been speaking to him in Polish — or, indeed, in any other foreign or arcane language — Sutcliffe did not elucidate. I found this omission curious, as Sutcliffe kept insisting that he had received a divine message by personal delivery from God or Jesus in person. I asked him if the voice had spoken to him in Hebrew. But Sutcliffe seemed not to hear the question and was gazing into space as though psychically back in the cemetery reliving the experience.
Finally he broke the reverie. ‘The name on the grave was Zipolski,’ he said. I nodded solemnly, eyes downcast, waiting for something I could insightfully interpret or put some additional psychological flesh to, over and above the hallucinatory and delusional explanations I had already reached. But again he lapsed into self-absorbed cogitation.
Eventually he resurfaced, describing how he just stood there in the by-then pouring rain looking out over the valley, like some modern-day John the Baptist, with a feeling of religious exaltation. He had been chosen, given a divine mission. At last he was someone, a person of unique importance, his dull life had ended and he was galvanised with a sense of steadfastness and portentous purpose, an instrument of divine will.
‘The mission I’d been given was to kill all prostitutes. I was under God’s protection,’ he resolutely concluded.
As many people equate religious belief with moral right, it is not uncommon for captured criminals to plead religious conviction in mitigation of their offence. Similarly, many prisoners are wont to adopt religious beliefs as an ostensible signal to the authorities of moral improvement and, more pragmatically, early parole.
Religion is the deus ex machina of the misfortunate and oppressed.
I was not quite sure whether or not some past misfortune Sutcliffe had experienced with a prostitute was at the root of the psychosis . . . his subconscious had obviously projected into that tombstone the message of revenge he craved to hear.
I then tried a wide variety of approaches to elicit or invoke a hint of the injurious catalyst buried and, in all probability blocked off, deep in his psyche, but with no success. This eventually led me to conclude that probably nothing short of drug-induced hypnosis would be able to extract the fatal secret, if indeed there was one.
In captivity Sutcliffe spent most of his leisure periods in his cell obsessively reading the King James version of the bible.
His physical appearance had changed from being slim to positively podgy — a mesomorphic side effect of the daily medication he was forced to take to maintain mental equilibrium.
There was no intellectual capacity in his conversation, no philosophical or even theological structure in discourse. Most s
urprising of all was his lack of urge to proselytize, a turgid characteristic of most religious maniacs. Instead, there was simply that calm, almost prim self-righteousness. Yet in stark contrast to this air of sanctity, medical evidence showed that Sutcliffe had performed sexual assaults upon the victims.
According to police evidence, the instrument of divine will used had sometimes been a screwdriver, serving as a penis substitute to violate the victims. There was further evidence that he indulged in oral sex before murdering some of the prostitutes for their mortal sins.
Religious fanaticism — with its fascist assumption of moral superiority and concomitant intolerance — invariably postulates a systematised rationale of inherent sadism and victimisation of one degree or another.
It salves the conscience to perpetrate evil perceived as good.
The use to which he put the screwdriver clearly indicated sexual inadequacy, leading to self-contempt which, perhaps, comprised at least part of the root cause of his psychosis, and the eventual schizophrenic descent into homicidal religious mania.
But although Sutcliffe denied the hypothesis that he had in some way, at some period of his life, suffered a real or imaginary injury at the hands of a prostitute, I remain unconvinced. He was rather too glib and defensive when the possibility was raised. Whatever the truth of the matter, by periodically destroying the object of his mania, he was simultaneously attempting to eradicate his guilt, the homicidal urge and unclean desires.
In most serial killers it is the psychic ritual itself that gradually becomes paramount. The search for power, controlled power. But, instead, what they actually are laden with, paradoxically by their total freedom of action, is an energy beyond their control. Homicidal addiction.
Normal life becomes insipid by comparison, once the adrenaline-charged high has been experienced, driving them insatiably, in a futile effort to capture and retain the god-like charge of omnipotence, the ambience of divinity, the lofty gestalt of Olympus — but some forget to take their oxygen masks before attempting such heights.