by Ian Brady
His parents had last seen him four days before he was found dead. The police investigations discovered no previous link between Andrassy and the elderly second victim he was eventually found lying dead with in the Run.
Andrassy had frequented criminal haunts in the slum districts of the city, smoking ‘reefers’ and mixing freely with gamblers, hoods and prostitutes. Further confirmatory evidence of homosexuality surfaced. It was now certain that he had sometimes made money as a prostitute himself.
Detectives investigating his murder found a book in his room containing the names and addresses of homosexuals known to the police. All the leads were checked but produced nothing.
It was only when I checked back further, to the mid-1920s, when Andrassy had been honestly employed, for a change, that some astonishing facts came to light.
For four years Andrassy had worked as an orderly — in a mental hospital, Cleveland City Hospital. As I conjectured previously, the nature of the Butcher’s savage crimes, combined with his secondary psychotic symptoms, strongly indicated that he probably had a history of mental illness and a record for violent behaviour.
The obvious question was: Had the Butcher been a patient at the hospital during the period Andrassy had worked there? This would explain how Andrassy had come to know him and, perhaps from reading his medical record, learned of his savage capabilities.
The hospital records of those four years appear not to have been checked by police and searched specifically for any or all of the following:
(a)Any record of a physically large patient who had evinced signs of abnormal or maniacal strength?
(b)Any record of such a patient with psychopathic tendencies, incipient symptoms of psychosis, fixation, manic-depressive illness, a fantasy or delusional/hallucinatory pattern which, upon retrospective analysis, bore some relationship to the bizarre methodology and rituals employed by the Butcher?
(c)Any patient with a particularly violent reaction to active/latent homosexuality?
(d)Any patient with a past history as a convict or vagrant?
(e)Any patient with a past history of having been employed, in any capacity, in a hospital or mortuary?
(f)Any patient or member of hospital staff shown by the medical records to have had a close association with the medical orderly Edward Andrassy?
The killer would be a man who, so horrified by his inner visions, was probably much more afraid of himself than he was of other people — unless he projected his own faults or savage capabilities onto others, which would cause him to be morbidly suspicious of everybody. Paranoid. Self-defensively homicidal. Which would reinforce his lack of remorse and guilt — even the law concedes that to injure or kill someone in defence of one’s safety is both legally and morally justifiable.
Next, detectives should have thoroughly checked every member of the hospital staff, looking for anyone with a police record.
They also should have closely examined hospital staff records — those of doctors, nurses and menials — searching for any suspicion of criminal behaviour or brutality towards patients. The Butcher could just as well have been a member of hospital staff. Naturally, particular attention should have been paid to staff who had not only worked in the hospital during the four years Andrassy was there, but also had still been working there in the years the Butcher had murdered his victims. The hospital mortuary would have provided the ideal facilities required by the Butcher — marble slabs with drainage channels for the deluge of blood, and water taps to wash the slabs and bodies.
Another interesting fact emerged.
Andrassy, in 1928, married a nurse who worked at the same mental hospital, then obtained a divorce just over a month later. It was said that Andrassy was the father of the child she eventually had.
Astonishingly, there is no record of the police having bothered to question her when Andrassy was murdered seven years later. In view of the presumably abrasive circumstances in which Andrassy and his wife had so hastily parted company, surely she would have been a readily compilable source of indiscreet information about Andrassy, perhaps yielding confidential, incriminating facts nobody else knew about. Facts that might have provided the police with some clue or lead to the identity of the ‘Mad Butcher.’ There is an outside possibility that she could still be alive today, though in her nineties.
Given that public interest in, or even knowledge of, the murders committed by ‘The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ is now practically non-extant, one could reasonably argue against the likelihood of the killer ever being identified.
Unfortunately, absorbing though the case is, even in these modern days of recreational mass murder, the gruesome deeds of the Mad Butcher apparently do not afford the public that salacious frisson which still enthuses an army of amateur sleuths to pursue the identity of Jack the Ripper.
But it is still not too late to reach back into the gloom of Kingsbury Run and catch the devil by his tail, when all other methods have obviously failed.
The detailed medical and other records of the mental hospital where Andrassy worked, Cleveland City Hospital, should certainly still be in existence, possibly tucked away in some dusty storeroom, or perhaps transferred onto microfilm. Access to such files is not made readily available to private individuals, of course, unless they have managed to obtain official, written permission of some sort beforehand.
The police could access the files at will, given that the Mad Butcher’s murders are unsolved and still remain open to further investigation. But perhaps the Cleveland Police Department would be reluctant to prove my theory correct, possibly on the grounds that it would make them appear incompetent.
I do not agree that it would necessarily give rise to such criticism, considering that, seventy years ago, forensic science was still in its infancy, and the art of sophisticated psychological profiling had not yet been developed. However, if the Cleveland Police Department is reluctant to resume the investigation, perhaps the FBI Behavioral Science Unit of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), at Quantico, Virginia, could be persuaded to gain access to the said medical files and test my theory, just for the fun of it. After all, the Mad Butcher is, beyond doubt, long dead by now, so no expensive manhunt would ensue as a result of the findings — an important factor in these modern days when cost efficiency seems to be the paramount concern in law enforcement. It would at least be a fascinating academic experiment in retrospective investigation by modern profiling techniques. Perhaps even an historical event, if proof positive were found.
Even if my theory should prove wrong, possibly the FBI, in course of the exercise, might stumble upon the correct solution, or discover evidence for an alternative theory. At any rate, I have thrown down the gauntlet.
This has been a purely clinical, psychological assessment of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run murders, based upon the known, albeit comparatively limited, forensic facts placed at my disposal in the close confinement of a prison cell.
The anonymity of the Mad Butcher still leaves him an elusive, fantastical figure to comprehensively catalogue and analyse. Was he some demoniacal, taunting psychotic playing hide-and-seek in the fog of a lost era? Or a melancholic solitary, perplexed by his demanding compulsions, obscurely stalking amid the acrid outpourings of furnaces and chimney-stacks gravitating into Kingsbury Run? Or perhaps a religious maniac, walking through the gulley of death, devoutly delivering the despised and rejected of society to salvation in heaven? Or a cold, vampiric psychopath, gliding through the murk, goaded by bloodlust?
The Mad Butcher could have been any one of these, or a composite persona of them all. But I have already categorised him as a psychopath with probably non-affective psychotic symptoms.
I have briefly resurrected him to the best of my ability for others to ponder, and his spectral figure may yet be invoked to stride posthumously into the light.
We stand on earth, among our rages and our boredoms. We raise our heads; see passing in the stormy skies the banners of ec
stasy. Is it God or Satan who paints such skies, so fabulous — and false?
— Rimbaud
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ted Bundy
Ever let the fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.
John Keats (1795–1821)
The irrevocable reversal of one’s fate, one’s being, can hinge upon such inconsequential considerations as a single betrayal, an unanswered prayer or an unthoughtful slight, subconsciously resulting in the sardonic, paradoxical conversion not only to a diametrically opposite theology/philosophy but also to facets of the very one loathed in the first instance.
Milton’s ‘Evil be thou my Good’ can just as easily be transmuted to ‘Virtue be thou my Evil’ — the longer virtue slumbers, the more fanatic when it awakes.
The avenging Virtue of Robespierre, the ‘Incorruptible,’ unconditional and unswerving, logically extending the enemy’s own espousals of morality and ethics to destroy them; self-righteous in the certainty that there is no one worthy to cast the first stone and, therefore, no one is exempt from punishment.
The least infraction of this new order of virtue being a capital offence, a world of potential victims is created, and the creator of this paradoxical counterculture becomes a Rastignac, coldly examining the alien city from the heights, viewing the despised inhabitants as antagonists to whom one owes no mercy. By this tortuous route we can perhaps comprehend the intellectual/atavistic conversion and, at the risk of understatement, the overreaction of Ted Bundy and many other highly intelligent serial killers.
Essentially this category of resentful, vengeful beings, creative architects of reaction and ruin, feel neither the desire nor the need to justify their ‘crimes,’ but rather regard them as meritorious in themselves. Such absolute self-certainty is, as already evidenced, beyond the intellectual scope, imagination and experience of most ordinary people, who remain transfixed in a cultural stasis of conditioned social sensibility and moral decorum.
It is so much easier to be nice. The majority fear the unconditional, the embracing of comparatively demoniacal, tumultuous fields of mental and physical energy. Their dread is, as previously inferred, a fortunate state of affairs for the remaining predatory minority, who eagerly inhabit the kaleidoscopic realms of moral and legal relativism without the least ethical turpitude or aesthetic discomfort.
The first wavering steps in Ted Bundy’s decline and fall began with the childhood discovery that he was illegitimate — a born reject sired by Bible Belt bigotry and prejudice, not a born killer.
Natural resentment at the aberrant social stigma inexorably bred in Bundy an inferiority complex, which he fought to overcome and, in the end, overcompensated for. His futile struggle to defy the intolerant self-fulfilling prophecy of his birthright naturally served only to confirm it, tightening the warp of the net. The law of reversed effort then compounded this innate damage to the psyche, permanently curtailing and retarding emotional development in his early teens.
This self-fulfilling prophecy also nurtured in Bundy an immature hypersensitivity to any form of criticism or mark of low achievement. The classic secondary pattern of attention-seeking criminal behaviour soon began to manifest itself in acts of petty theft, vain mendacity and other forms of aggressive peer-group rivalry.
In setting himself too high a standard in studies he consistently fell below his own expectations, which inevitably exacerbated an increasing lack of self-esteem and dearth of future prospects.
But high ambition was pragmatically schooling Bundy how to bend the rules, shape the world to his own advantage and get what he wanted despite his conscious failings. Why stick to the rules made by others, especially religious precepts which branded you an outcast from the day of conception, when you can make more favourable ones of your own? There is no monopoly in the making of rules.
Bundy shrewdly plotted his course. He would defeat them all; style a crown from his bastardy, bear it silently as a badge of merit, fashion derogation into a rod for their self-righteous backs. Before he was through, they would regret the concept of illegitimacy to the roots of their soul and the anguish of their misbegotten hearts. Bastard? They had not yet met one as rancorous as he.
Whether Bundy knew it or not, he was drifting towards moral relativism.
Life was too short to be restricted and deformed by the selfish designs of the already privileged. He would thoroughly enjoy giving them a lesson in idiosyncratic ‘justice,’ and lead them in a dance worthy of Zarathustra, ‘lover of leaps and tangents,’ monster of divine laughter! A Dionysiac demon was rising from the abyss of his subconscious, eager to take flight, sink talons and teeth into living flesh, savour the blood, rip out the soul.
How much more fascinating and vital the world had suddenly become in this new shade of vision. There’s nothing like resolve to lighten the step.
He would study their law, use his dark good looks and glib tongue to personal advantage as ruthlessly as any conniving politician. Become a player in this hustling, bustling world or die in the attempt. Let all those of servile stamp slide to perdition on a prayer mat and rot there!
But some things did not work out as planned.
His engagement to a fellow student, Stephanie Brooks, who had the attributes he most envied — a wealthy family and high social connections — was broken off by her when she discovered he was emotionally shallow.
This crushing public setback and humiliation struck deep, and was probably another significant factor in the eventual launching of his murderous career. No more Mr Nice Guy. The rich bitch could afford the luxury of emotional pretensions. Patronise him, would she? She would pay the price at a future date. Her and her kind. He would see to that. Meanwhile, he had more important matters to tend to. Places to go. People to meet. Powers to exercise. Revenge to exact.
He left university and failure behind to gain practical experience in the ways of the world, particularly the criminal subculture. He mixed with easy dexterity in both high and low circles, in the company of drug addicts, thieves and aspiring politicians.
He proved a quick learner. Ambition continued to spur him on. He went back to university to study psychology, obtained a degree and attended law school, then, eventually, with an exquisitely ironic sense of the absurd, went to work with the Crime Commission and the Office of Justice Planning. Here he would get to know the enemy and how to circumvent the law like its creators. Prominent legal circles aptly generated in him an ardent taste for pornography and drugs and a high-flying lifestyle, completing his social education and skills.
At this point, some might say that Bundy, having acquired the fruits of honest effort, could have consolidated his base and become a reasonably successful, dishonest member of the bourgeoisie.
Too late for that. He had much higher things in mind. There were still far too many people above him. Dull and smug people he still had to bow and scrape to. They were blind to his potential. He would soar despite and smite and spite them.
Psychosis and incipient schizophrenia, in his case doubtless aggravated by the tedious company he was forced to bear to get ahead, were implacably delving and quarrying into his psyche. The ‘hunchback’ (the name he gave his criminal persona) was inexorably taking up permanent residence.
In Bundy’s rationale, society had branded him a failure in advance. He was committed to mastering the stacked game and balancing accounts. Higher education does not postulate higher humanism; he was clever enough to note that. Intelligent people start wars. And so would he, in his own hedonistic and comparatively simple fashion. You have to break eggs to make omelettes, and all that. At any rate, humanism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
For good deeds to be effective, they must be highly selective. Humanists make the basic error of spreading their benevolent butter so widely and thinly that it leaves no taste and has no nutritious effect. Serial killers avoid that mistake by using selectivity to spread anguish to maximum effect.
Bundy should have joined politics. He would have been th
at common variety of politician who, out to screw the voters for every cent they’ve got, when asked why they had been attracted to politics in the first instance, solemnly declare, ‘I believe I have a contribution to make to society’ — presumably referring to their cynical sense of humour.
Bundy was about ready to make his ‘contributions.’ The start of the body count was fast approaching.
Voyeuristically, he began to prowl the streets at night in search of erotic serendipity. Through a window he saw a girl undressing, and this seems to have fuelled his sexual fantasies to the point of psychotic obsession.
On a trial-and-error basis, first reinforcing his fantasies with alcohol, Bundy practised methods of attack.
On a summer night in 1973, he stalked a young woman through the streets and, caveman-style, hit her on the head with a wooden club. She screamed and he ran off.
Undeterred, he used the same tactic on several more female victims with similar lack of success. Failure would have served to exacerbate his violent tendencies and increase their ferocity.
As previously stated, it is invariably the case that actions bright and exciting in the imagination are, unfortunately, often disappointing or farcical in practice, more so when they have not been thought through thoroughly. Deep thinking gives people a headache.
They think they are thinking when in fact they are merely daydreaming. For instance, if you were to ask them what they thought of ‘adventure,’ they would express a vague, undefined pro-adventure attitude, as practically everyone does, albeit from the comfort of an easy chair. They equate, or confuse, their liking for the idea of adventure with an ability to possibly participate in the real thing. Whereas, in practice, they might immediately discover that real adventure — of the neck-on-the-line variety — is unsettling, like entering a fourth dimension where the comfortable laws and rules they take for granted in normal life no longer apply; adrenaline speeds the pumping blood and distorts the faculties; immersion in the immediacy of action obviates wider appreciation. Riding the whirlwind is an acquired taste. The psyche aspires to accommodate the new perspective of both inner and external vision. The more times you act as supreme architect, the more you become one.