The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  But would his women victims have accepted the offer of a bath in a stranger’s house? And, in the unlikely event that they did accept, would they have not taken the precaution to find, or ask for, some means to keep the bathroom door closed? If any victim, male or female, politely declined the offer of a bath, what would the killer do then? Cut their throat and flood his house with blood? Or knock them unconscious (which, in practice, can be a protracted, bloody business in itself), then carry them into the bathroom, undress them and put them into the bath to kill them?

  Such cumbersome, uncertain methodology does not fit in with the personality print of the cautious, cunning psychopath the Butcher had undoubtedly shown himself to be. Forensic examination of the bodies revealed that the heads and organs had been removed with considerable dexterity, suggesting that the person wielding the sharp instrument had the skill and anatomical knowledge of a butcher or surgeon.

  Once again, those were precisely the same speculations which had surrounded Jack the Ripper.

  In July 1936, a young hiker stumbled upon the naked, beheaded body of a man in the city park. This time there was blood where the victim lay. No head was found. His ragged, blood-soaked clothing lying nearby indicated (a) it had been a surprise attack, probably while he was sleeping, and (b) that he was another vagrant.

  Why was the killer now taking the heads away with him instead of burying them? Being a killer of some intelligence, one must assume he had quite consciously decided to change his method, which also means he had brought some bag or other receptacle with him in which to carry off the severed head.

  Next, in September 1936, a hobo in Kingsbury Run discovered a beheaded, armless torso of a man. The police found the lower, legless half some distance away. The way the remains were widely scattered suggests the victim could have been killed in a moving freight wagon, dismembered and, eventually, thrown out one section at a time. The head was missing, and the distinctive sure-handed dissection was the crime signature of the Mad Butcher. Investigations identified the victim as a tramp.

  Examining the verifiable facts up till then, it would be reasonable to conclude that the Mad Butcher had himself at some stage been a vagrant and was now perhaps posing as one, thus explaining how he was able to approach his down-and-out victims without arousing suspicion. But other evidence — including the scrupulous washing of the bodies, and the preservation of some in chloride of lime, in my estimation, pretty well disposes of this theory, as it indicates that he had moved up in life and owned a house or premises in which to conduct his slaughtering.

  Nevertheless, I shall briefly return to these aspects later on when dealing with three additional murders in Pittsburgh which, I am convinced, were definitely committed by the Mad Butcher. It is entirely possible that he was expediently disguising himself as a vagrant, both to lull his victims into a false sense of security and to enter and leave the Run without attracting attention. As a tramp amongst tramps, he would have been as good as invisible to the police, appearing to be a potential victim rather than a hunter.

  On the other hand, an offer of charity from a respectable man of wealthy appearance would appear more genuine to most vagrants, opportunists who would readily follow a well-heeled mark they hoped to dupe for all they could get. But, of course, a man of such appearance in the Run would attract beggars (and witnesses) like flies.

  Eliot Ness finally decided to act as public uproar mounted.

  The police in Kingsbury Run were instructed to prevent more hoboes from jumping off the passing freight cars. This policy — helped along by the fact that many hoboes were leaving the Run of their own volition in fear of the Butcher — appeared to produce results. Months passed without further murders.

  But, in February 1937, another headless female torso was found on the shores of Lake Erie. The victim was estimated to be in her twenties. Police efforts failed to identify her.

  The next find, by a strolling teenager in June 1937, was a skull under a bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River, a tributary of which flowed through Kingsbury Run. Police found further human remains in a sack some distance up the river. The checking of dental records led to the woman being identified as a local prostitute, Rose Wallace.

  A month later, the headless torso of a man was discovered drifting down the Cuyahoga River. His severed legs and arms were later fished out, but not the head. The victim was around thirty years of age. He had been gutted and the heart was missing; it appeared the Butcher was literally beginning to follow his trade. Was cannibalism starting to enter into the equation? If so, he did not develop a taste for it, and never took any organs or offal again. But apparent surgical skill was once more noted.

  April 1938 produced a woman’s leg from the Cuyahoga River. Other dismembered sections of the same body were later taken from the river. Only the head was missing. Within a period of twenty-four hours another two bodies were uncovered in the city rubbish dump. The first was the torso of a female in her thirties. Searches failed to recover the remainder of the body. Then the head of a man was found neatly packaged in a box.

  Eliot Ness was again forced into action. Police raided the shacks in Kingsbury Run, arresting every hobo they could lay hands upon. Fire engines were then called out to supervise the burning down of the shanty town in Kingsbury Run. As all the victims of the Mad Butcher had been itinerant vagrants and prostitutes, it was Ness’ strategy to deprive the Butcher of further prey from this class of society. The scheme worked. Having claimed a total of twelve victims, the ‘Mad Butcher’ stopped slaughtering.

  Or did he?

  The main rail tracks from Kingsbury Run led directly to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, another busy city with a dense manufacturing industry.

  In May 1940, shortly after the Kingsbury Run murders ceased, the beheaded, naked body of a man was found in a freight car in Pittsburgh. Further searches discovered the naked, decapitated and dismembered body of a woman in another freight car. Then yet another naked and decapitated man was uncovered in a third freight car. All three murders bore the personality print of the Mad Butcher. It was as though the Butcher, having been forced by police action to cap his homicidal compulsions for a comparatively lengthy period, had eventually lost control and exploded into a final, bloody spree.

  Had the train, on its way to Pittsburgh, halted for a period in Kingsbury Run, or had the Mad Butcher, starved of victims, moved his base of operations to Pittsburgh?

  Even more fascinating a speculation, to my mind, had the freight cars in question been scheduled to depart from Pittsburgh to Kingsbury Run? In which case, as previously touched upon, perhaps the killer had perpetrated many of his classic-style killings in Pittsburgh and travelled with the bodies in freight cars to dump them in Kingsbury Run, in a systematic attempt to decoy the police from his home territory. This would certainly help to clarify the mystery of how he was able to enter and depart from the Run so easily without detection.

  But such a theory leaves unexplained the puzzle of how he was able to wash some of the bodies before disposing of them. There is the possibility that he could have utilised the railyard’s large water tanks, with their attached rubber pipes for filling the steam locomotives, to sluice the blood and forensic evidence from the bodies. And, if the Butcher conducted his messy business in the nude, he could have showered by the same method — but this highly visible use of railway water facilities could only have been employed in the Pittsburgh yards, not in the hobo colony of Kingsbury Run with so many nocturnal witnesses wandering around haphazardly.

  Whatever the case, the three Pittsburgh murders also remain unsolved.

  In attempting to build a psychological profile of the Mad Butcher, the ferocious, eccentric nature of the murders first inclined me to classify him as psychotic. But study of the case as a whole persuades me he was primarily an organised psychopath of above-average intelligence, perhaps suffering secondary symptoms of incipient psychosis not sufficiently affective to distort his ‘normal’ thought processes or detach him from reali
ty.

  The abnormal physical strength, and mature, strategic planning that the crimes necessarily involved, suggest he was a large, physically fit man in his prime, aged between thirty-five to forty-five. It is more than likely that he conducted his indoor dismemberments in a small business or detached house in close proximity to Kingsbury Run, significantly the scene of his first two (known) murders and, therefore, an area he was highly familiar with and confident to operate in, thus fitting the psychological pattern of most serial killers. He most probably owned a functional vehicle, such as a small van, which he used to transport bodies and dismembered parts to the vicinity of the chosen disposal area.

  For ease in beguiling victims to accompany him, he would have deliberately cultivated genial mannerisms and persuasive verbal techniques, casually adopted to lure his victims to the killing place. His use of restraints in one of his first known murders indicates (at this particular stage of the discussion, and according to the principles of psychological profiling) excess caution or lack of personal confidence, as does also the preserving of some of his first probable victims in chloride of lime, and then waiting patiently for the hunt to die down before choosing an opportune moment to dispose of the corpses, whole or in dismembered sections.

  It is only when one comes to the castrations, and particularly his obsessive compulsion to depersonalise all his victims by beheading them and then, as already stated, logically extending the principle by distancing the heads further from the body, that a secondary psychotic symptom becomes apparent.

  This element strongly suggests he had a verifiable history of mental illness and probably a police record for violence of some description. Which would also explain his obvious familiarity, and necessary easy manner, in the company of the petty criminals which mostly comprise the down-and-outs of society he was preying upon.

  Thus the nature of the chosen victims not only partly reveals the personality of the killer, but also suggests a facet of his probable past.

  That he exhibited apparent knowledge of human anatomy does not necessarily postulate that he was of the medical profession. He could well have read books on the subject, either in prison or in a mental hospital, or simply borrowed from a public library. Even experience as a common butcher would have taught him the simple methodology of dismemberment. Castration of the male victims, as stated, indicates further psychotic symptoms and strongly suggests repressed homosexual tendencies, sexual inadequacy and a concomitant guilt complex sufficiently severe to induce manic depression and suicidal tendencies. The fact that he meticulously washed some of the naked bodies points to the strong possibility of an additional, abnormal sexual practice being involved, most likely necrophilic in nature.

  As the police never discovered a weapon, his compulsive retention of the incriminating cutting implement, despite the obvious dangers of doing so, intimates an emotional, psychotic attachment to it, perhaps subconsciously as a penis substitute, or as an instrument believed to be invested with some occult power; a lucky charm.

  He would have taken a keen, pragmatic interest in media accounts of his crimes and police tactics to outwit and capture him.

  In studying the case, I concentrated upon obtaining from outside contacts as much forensic information as possible about the first two certain victims of the Mad Butcher, the two males found decapitated and castrated near the bottom of the steep descent into Kingsbury Run.

  As already alluded to, most serial killers, consciously or subconsciously, make small mistakes, or leave significant aspects of their personality/crime-scene print, during their first killings.

  At the beginner stage, they have not yet been mentally equipped by practice to condition their conscience or subconscious mind to cope logically and coldly with the consequences of their drastic decision to break from humanity, leaving all programmed human values behind. Brought up from childhood to expect punishment for wrongdoing, a deeply rooted, albeit small, part of their socially conditioned conscience actually still desires some external sanction to be applied, almost as a mark of distinction and recognition that they have value and that somebody cares about their welfare.

  Therefore, that selfsame subconscious urge may even coerce them into leaving some little clue to their identity at the scene of the crime. Conscience has in consequence become their enemy, a psychosomatic symptom of illness, as it were, gnawing insidiously at the will to self-survival. Distorting their judgment, it causes them to become ‘accident-prone’ by implying that punishment will somehow bring them relief and end all future suffering. A subtle variation of the pain-pleasure principle.

  I now wish to clearly state my analysis of the case which, if closer investigation of the official records I am about to refer to yields what I expect, shall belatedly lead to the identity of the ‘Mad Butcher.’

  First a brief résumé of the pertinent facts re: the first two bodies discovered. Facts which, as you shall see, provide the building blocks of my theory.

  Body number one was that of an elderly man in a decomposed condition, despite the body having been preserved with chloride of lime. Body number two was that of twenty-eight-year-old Edward Andrassy, a petty criminal, who had been dead only two or three days. His wrists bore severe rope burns. Both naked victims had been decapitated and castrated, their heads buried separately a considerable distance from the bodies, and their severed sexual organs thrown casually aside. Both had been drained of blood and thoroughly washed. No blood was found around or under the bodies. Both bodies had been neatly arranged on the ground by the killer in precisely the same manner — their arms straight by their sides, their legs straight with heels together.

  Police were of the opinion that both bodies had been carefully carried, one at a time, down the seventy-foot precipitous slope of the Run, by the killer.

  The initial, puzzling questions I sought some explanation for were: why did such a savage killer not simply toss both bodies down into the Run, instead of so considerately carrying them down at great personal risk ?

  Why did he then so respectfully and charitably arrange their bodies on the ground in precisely the same manner?

  Why had he benevolently washed both bodies?

  What common factor connected all three of these curious patterns of behaviour?

  What kind of person would perform, consciously or subconsciously, all three of these acts, from common usage and force of habit?

  An undertaker? He would have washed the bodies and carried them with respect, but he would have most probably folded their arms on their chest in an attitude of eternal rest or prayer, not put them straight by their sides.

  A male nurse, hospital orderly or mortuary attendant? Yes, any of these would have automatically washed the dead bodies, treated them with respect and arranged them neatly with their arms by their sides, legs straight, ready for inspection on the mortuary slab.

  Next I looked for an uncommon factor amongst all the Butcher’s victims. One significant fact stood out prominently: none of the victims except Edward Andrassy had shown any signs of rope burns, or other physical marks that would have indicated they had been bound in some way.

  So why had this powerfully built killer decided to tie Andrassy’s wrists with rope? Andrassy had been thin, weighing under eleven stone. Puny. What had made Andrassy struggle so fiercely that the killer bound him with rope, rope that had torn deeply into his wrists as he manically fought to get free?

  What had he fought so desperately to prevent? Did he know he was going to die? How did he know?

  If this meticulous killer was in the habit of warning his victims in advance of death, surely he would have adopted the same practice of binding them as he had done with Andrassy?

  His treatment of all the other victims clearly demonstrated that the Mad Butcher was not a sadist; he killed swiftly and efficiently without preamble. The retracted neck muscles and the heart pumped dry of blood medically testified to the fact that he sliced deeply into the carotid artery of the neck. The castrations had taken
place after death. So, the question as to why Andrassy alone had been bound with rope and struggled so violently had to have a logical, convincing answer.

  Based on my own empirical experience and judgment, the severity of the rope burns spoke for themselves. It had been a struggle against death. Andrassy must have known he was going to die.

  Q: How could he have known if not told so by the killer?

  A: Andrassy not only knew the killer but also what he was capable of doing.

  Q: Where/how did he first get to know the Butcher and possibly learn of his highly dangerous or homicidal tendencies?

  A: Problematic till further evidence.

  Supposing that Andrassy had known the dangerous killer he was dealing with, what other strong motive had overridden Andrassy’s understandable apprehension, caution and instinct for survival? What had lured him into such an obviously perilous situation? Monetary gain?

  I believe it is quite likely that he did try blackmail. By all accounts, he was just cocky enough and greedy enough to make such a stupid error of judgment. No doubt his self-confidence was bolstered by the fact that he had successfully blackmailed many of the elderly homosexuals he had supplied with boys and to whom he had sold his own personal favours.

  The Butcher himself being a silent phantom, the only possible way to get answers to some of these pertinent questions was to research Andrassy’s past as thoroughly as possible, looking for some obscure clue linking him with the Butcher.

  For this I had to get information and documentation from outside contacts, who delved back over three-quarters of a century to before Andrassy’s death on 23rd September, 1935. Obtaining details of Andrassy’s criminal record was a comparatively simple matter, his file still being in existence due to the fact that he was the victim in an unsolved murder. In 1931 Andrassy had served thirty days for carrying a concealed weapon. He had lived at home with his mother and father until his death, and had a younger brother named John, who had no police record. Andrassy had been in and out of police custody for a variety of other petty offences — street brawling, drunk and disorderly, etc., and was known to have been a procurer for homosexuals, a trader in pornography, a practitioner of small-time frauds and contricks. All these criminal activities provided fertile grounds for blackmail and a natural aptitude for same.