by Ian Brady
To normal sensitivities, it may sound unbelievably callous to remind you of the fact that the actual killing itself is usually only an afterthought, an irksome necessity, the conclusion of a ritual, a logical precautionary measure not only to elude capture but also to erase the only witness who has seen and been subjected to the killer’s true nature.
However, in Sutcliffe’s case, killing was actually an integral part of the ritual or, if you like, his mission from God.
It is yet once more paradoxical that, on the one hand, the serial killer often wishes to demonstrate his contempt for society, yet still feels compelled to maintain his good name, as it were. A second, more extreme, example of how maintaining a good name can be a most corrupting preoccupation.
The inner knowledge that he is a house divided slowly corrodes the artificial boundary the killer has tried to build within to separate his two selves, his dual personality. The inevitable collapse of this edifice will almost certainly result in psychotic chaos and, probably, the total destruction of the weaker of the two polarised psyches.
In my experience, this process is most likely to begin shortly before the killer is captured, the predominant part of the psyche subconsciously betraying the weaker yet homicidal. This process, I believe, accounts for the expressed feelings of relief many killers experience immediately after being caught, the strenuous internal battle within the divided psyche being over at last. There have been instances where serial killers have actually left messages at the scene of the crime asking to be caught before they kill again. Rather an insult to the police, when they can’t catch a killer who is begging to be captured.
Sutcliffe struck me as a classic example of this adjustive mechanism, with one crucial difference. After arrest he continued to delude himself and shun personal responsibility for the crimes.
When, after some years in prison, he eventually saw the light, it was with one eye shut. Through a glass darkly. He shifted responsibility for his crimes from God to the Devil. Having used God as a balm to conscience during the murders he now used the Devil to same effect. This of course greatly diminishes the nature of his repentance and strength of moral commitment. A question of simply passing the buck from one myth to another.
Meanwhile, as already posited, the serial killer at large must continue to murder his victims not only because of the wrong he knows he has done to them, consciously or subconsciously, but also in order to preserve his perilous balance of self-esteem. The victim is, so to speak, always in double jeopardy.
In the serial killer a more extreme form of this emotionally debilitating self-knowledge makes him hate the victim even more, as though the victim were to blame for the whole predicament. He actually resents the moral imposition or discomfort they are causing him! Thus the killer progressively rationalises until he regards the victims as mortal enemies and is able to demote and depersonalise them to the level of objects which have served their purpose. Troublesome obstacles in his existential path, embarrassing reminders of his own treachery — a treachery which, in a more relativistic frame of mind, the killer might actually be proud of, as a physical extension of his intellectual superiority or concrete evidence of having advanced beyond the trivial confines of good and evil.
In Sutcliffe’s particular case, the resulting guilt complex was so severe that he pushed all the responsibility onto God and the Devil.
Sutcliffe was in the disorganized, psychotic killer bracket: of average intelligence; socially introverted; unskilled worker; frenzy during the crime; delusionary and hallucinatory psychotic episodes; victims randomly selected and easy to approach; depersonalisation of the victim; minimal conversation prior to surprise, violent attack as talking would confer human value, impeding or endangering the depersonalisation process; no restraints used; chosen crime scene haphazard and dangerous; sexual acts sometimes committed after death; body left unhidden at crime scene.
Towards the end, he killed two victims he wrongly believed were prostitutes, and expressed at least a modicum of remorse to me over them.
I tend to believe that the remorse in these particular cases was genuine, incongruous though it might seem to others. But by that stage of his murderous career Sutcliffe had descended into such an advanced delusional state of psychotic maladjustment that a woman only had to look like a prostitute in order to qualify as a victim. In his eagerness to find a sacrifice, he had subconsciously begun to transpose the qualities of prostitutes onto any female he found remotely within the province of a red-light district.
It is my opinion that Sutcliffe was in the subcategory of schizophrenia. In the grip of schizo-affective psychosis, and suffering from paranoid delusions of grandeur and persecution. His mission direct from God in actuality being symbolic revenge for some real or imaginary injury at the hands of a prostitute, or a female he retroactively deemed a prostitute or to be immoral in some way. His paranoid condition, in the early stages, was probably exacerbated by involutional psychosis or abuse of alcohol, which served as a catalyst to homicidal urges. The satisfying of those urges helped to substantiate and neutralise the threat posed by psychic schism. He needed a sense of commitment. Immediacy. Escape.
On one occasion when Sutcliffe was driving in broad daylight with a male companion, he suddenly stopped the car and got out, making a hasty apology and stating that he would not be long. He then walked briskly into a red-light district and, in the street, struck a strolling prostitute on the head with a stone, badly injuring her. He then made his way back through the streets to the car. This spontaneous, extrapunitive act indicates his incipient psychosis was as yet episodic rather than systematized. That he was not unduly depressed and could still distinguish, to a significant extent, between his inner world and the realities of the external.
This hypothesis is reinforced by the loving relationship he was still able to maintain with his wife, Sonja, his parents, relations and close friends, despite the fact that the dualism had obviously started to take root in his personality. Had he been caught and hospitalised at this violent but non-homicidal juncture, there was every likelihood that he might have responded to treatment and escaped his eventual fate.
Whether or not he has responded to treatment since his capture is now of no earthly consequence. He will never be released. Politicians serve the mob, not the individual.
The fact that Sutcliffe managed to evade capture for five years was not due to his intelligence but rather to an astounding lack of it on the part of the police. Had the killer left a photograph of himself, posing with a foot on each victim, English police chiefs of such outstanding quality might have caught him eventually. In any event, they didn’t, but two ordinary coppers on the beat accidentally did.
Sutcliffe had not only killed thirteen victims but had also attempted to kill seven others, who gave a detailed description of him to detectives. In addition, Sutcliffe most considerately shortened the odds by making no attempt whatsoever to change his appearance.
During our conversation, he described in a jocular manner one of the many occasions on which his lorry was stopped at a police roadblock.
A detective with a clipboard in his hand had approached the lorry. Sutcliffe leaned over and obligingly opened the left-hand door and, in doing so, by reflex moved his left foot forward so that one deep-tread boot dangled unwittingly over the rim of the high cab. Looking down at the clipboard the detective was holding, Sutcliffe saw on it a photocopy of a boot-print he had left in soft mud next to the body of a victim he had killed in Manchester.
He casually confided to me that the situation had presented him with a quandary: should he draw his foot back into the cab and risk the furtive movement being spotted by the detective? Or should he leave it precisely where it was with the sole of the boot right in front of the detective’s face?
He decided to leave it. The ‘detective’ didn’t even give it a second glance, Sutcliffe laughed.
Even more amazing was the fact that detectives had questioned Sutcliffe at his home several tim
es during the five-year hunt as, with his black beard, he fitted almost identically the police artist’s portrait of the killer drawn from the descriptions of victims who survived. Why the police never even thought to put him in a lineup for the surviving victims to identify defies comprehension. After each interview, the police were apparently satisfied with Sutcliffe’s explanations and suspected nothing.
However, to be fair to the lesser ranks, a bad calculation by police chiefs was really the main cause of Sutcliffe’s apparent invulnerability. During police investigations in June 1979 they had received a tape recording sent to them by a man claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper. The man had a ‘Geordie’ accent (Northeast England). Police forensic experts even managed to identify the precise local district of the particular dialect, narrowing the field further to that of Wearside.
Two prostitutes had been killed in the Northeast. This and other facts convinced the police chiefs that the tape was genuine. They had parts of the tape broadcast on television and radio, hoping someone would identify the voice.
Quarter of a million people were interviewed, forty thousand statements were taken and almost six million car registrations were checked. All to no avail, as the police chiefs had instructed their forces to look for a man with a Wearside accent. Sutcliffe, with his broad Yorkshire dialect, was therefore ruled out as a suspect.
To this day, long after Sutcliffe’s arrest and conviction, police are still hunting for the man with the Wearside accent.
As related, in speaking to me, Sutcliffe was passionately adamant that the two prostitutes in the Northeast were not his victims. That vehement denial, from a man who had committed thirteen murders and seven attempted and therefore had nothing to gain by lying, rang true. In which case it almost certainly indicates that a copycat killer, a second Ripper, sprang into being, and is still at large probably somewhere in the northeast of England.
It was therefore ironic, and poetic justice in view of the errors made by police chiefs, that it took two ordinary patrol-car policemen to finally capture Sutcliffe during a routine check-up.
The historic event occurred on 2nd January, 1981, on a drizzly, bitter-cold night in Sheffield — a city world-famous for its stainless steel cutlery and surgical instruments.
Raucous singing, stale smoke and beer fumes spilt out of the dingy back-street pubs in the red-light area. High-heeled drabs clicked their way along the wet stone slabs of the pavement, touting for customers from passing cars, unaware that the Ripper’s was amongst them.
But two policemen in their patrol car did happen to notice a vehicle almost hidden in the shadows of a dark driveway. They decided to investigate purely out of idle curiosity. Police forces in the northern cities the Ripper haunted had been instructed to note the registration of every car seen in the red-light districts. Sutcliffe’s car registration had been noted in prostitute areas, which had led to the several times he had been questioned at home by detectives.
When the two policemen walked up to the car, they saw the occupants were a man and a woman. The man had a black beard, and they recognised the coloured woman as a local prostitute. Asked for his name, the man replied, ‘Peter Williams’ — why this name was chosen by Sutcliffe is not recorded.
Meanwhile, the other policeman, who was checking the registration of the car, noticed that one set of number plates had been taped over the real ones.
Sutcliffe and the woman were told they were being taken in for further questioning. Sutcliffe immediately expressed the need to urinate and was allowed to walk to a clump of bushes in the dark driveway.
At the police station it took surprisingly little questioning before Sutcliffe stated, ‘I’m the one you’re looking for. I’m the Ripper.’ Police chiefs converged on the station from all points of the compass.
Sutcliffe’s car was searched but no weapons were found. This was perplexing. The Ripper’s modus operandi was first to batter the victim unconscious with a hammer, then stab her to death with a knife or screwdriver.
One of the arresting policemen suddenly remembered allowing Sutcliffe to urinate. Detectives raced back to the spot and discovered a hammer and a knife which Sutcliffe had hurriedly thrown into the bushes. The police chiefs, who had so ineptly misdirected the hunt for the Ripper, were now celebrating, jockeying with each other to grab the limelight in front of the assembled mass media.
The junketing became more subdued when they discovered the many times detectives had previously questioned Sutcliffe and let him go.
When the police searched Sutcliffe’s lorry, they found a card taped to the window:
‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius if unleashed would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?’
At his trial, as already evidenced, Sutcliffe’s defence was that he had received instructions from God to kill all prostitutes.
Both the defence and prosecution psychiatrists who had examined him had agreed he was insane. But the trial judge was not going to be cheated of his personal moment of glory. He decided that the medically unqualified jury should decide whether Sutcliffe was mad or not, and the trial went ahead.
Predictably, Sutcliffe was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He was sent to the psychiatric wing in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where he had long conversations with this author, the ‘Moors Murderer.’ The press got wind of this and falsely reported that the two notorious killers had played chess together. ‘Brady Checkmates the Ripper’ took up the whole front page. Sutcliffe stated that Brady had simply asked whether he, Sutcliffe, could play chess and, as he had replied ‘Not very well,’ no game had taken place and they had simply talked all the time, mostly about cities in the north of England they had both visited and left their mark upon. The chess gambit had simply been a good story for the newspapers to concoct, as previous press reports on file had accurately stated that Brady had played John Stonehouse (a former British government minister convicted of embezzlement) in the chess final at Wormwood Scrubs in 1979.
After five years in prison, where he was attacked by other inmates and suffered facial scars, Sutcliffe was transferred to Broadmoor, a hospital in the south of England for the criminally insane.
There is no prospect of him ever being released. The fact did not perturb him. The Devil was to blame. He was a martyr.
Despite the larger body count, in the public eye Sutcliffe’s case holds none of the quixotic, shrouded intrigue which still surrounds his infamous, anonymous predecessor more than a hundred years after he prowled the decaying, foggy byways of Whitechapel.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
— Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Richard Ramirez
They are no members of the common throng;
They are all noblemen who have gone wrong.
W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911)
He was to become known as ‘The Night Stalker.’ His will to power and revenge would peak in the summer heat of 1985 Los Angeles, culling victims from amid the professional, middle-class milieu for whom he harboured an unqualified, pathological hatred.
Conflicting, polarised motivations made him a disorganised psychotic killer with secondary psychopathic symptoms, perpetrating random homicides, rapes and other unnecessary acts of violence ostensibly in the furtherance of theft.
Here was yet another killer who, like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, deluded himself into believing that his main motive was financial gain, when in fact it was really the satisfaction to dominate self and others. The will to dare, the resolve to inflict whatever punishment he chose on a class of society he despised, and which drove him to commit one savage excess after another. The middle class were his ‘chosen people,’ as it were. He would teach them the meaning of loss.
Over and above the ‘Napoleonic complex,’ the bisexual rapes committed by Ramirez betoken what I hav
e dubbed the ‘Alexander complex,’ the sexual urge to conquer all he surveyed, not only half the sexual world but male and female, adding a further dimension to the degradation he felt compelled to inflict.
That Ramirez had some awareness of these internal personal struggles is evident from his third-person hallucinations, indicating a paranoid and probably schizophrenic cycle, in which he perceived himself as an emissary of Lucifer, a demonic secular instrument of occult will.
In his particular case, this probably served as a release/defence mechanism to lessen the impact of conditioned guilt and concomitant, almost certainly constant, melancholia.
Physically in the ectomorph category, restrained and introverted in episodic cooling-off phases, he was psychologically pent-up and primed, by schizo-affective-paranoid psychosis, to commit homicides and violent, extra-punitive sexual assaults with savage, hate-filled enthusiasm, which afterwards left him drained, withdrawn and melancholic.
Perhaps this partly reveals why he allowed some victims of the assaults to live. The other, less altruistic and far more aesthetically satisfying prime motive will be dealt with in due course.
Any passing moral insights Ramirez may have experienced whilst under the delusional influence of his paranoid convictions would not have been likely to influence him to any significant extent.
The nature of his crimes indicated that Ramirez had progressed very rapidly from the episodic stage to the chronic schizo-affective, prone to settle all problems by violence. This rapid progression was probably accelerated by an increased bilateral, abrasive interaction between his paranoid delusions and confirmatory or negative social events in the external world.
Citizens of the respectable residential areas of Los Angeles, districts once considered relatively safe and secure, were so shocked by ‘The Night Stalker’ that they began to arm themselves with pistols and baseball bats in a state of panic and siege. Was nothing sacred?