by Ian Brady
Only the final performance was left. The trial. A Bergman scenario, playing chess with Death.
Bundy gave a performance worthy of Cyrano de Bergerac — all was panache! He lied brilliantly, rationalised expertly when faced with concrete evidence, and conveyed by his clean-cut, all-American-boy air and delivery of speech that he was the soul of reason. Again, even the judge was impressed by Bundy’s bravura, acting accomplishments and keen grasp of law.
But everyone in the court knew they were simply watching a gripping piece of theatre, a play the ending of which they already knew, as did Bundy. He was found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair.
Bundy left the stage. Reporters rushed to telephones. The audience shuffled homeward. And jaded, seen-it-all-before cleaners entered the silent courtroom, to sweep away the litter and dust of stale law in readiness for the next juggling act.
As death drew nearer, Bundy made some futile appeals against the sentence, doubtless motivated by just a few last-minute jitters coaxing him to avoid the death scene a little bit longer and eke out a few extra ad lib performances.
All the appeals against sentence predictably failed and his date of execution was set for January, 1989.
Bundy played his last delaying gambit, proposing to trade confessions to almost twenty additional murders in exchange for life imprisonment. But the legal sell-by date for plea bargaining was long gone; he should have plea bargained at the trial, as his lawyers had advised.
On a cold January evening in Starke State Prison, Florida, the prison guards shaved Bundy’s head and lower legs ready for the electrodes to be attached. They then smeared the shaved areas with a gelatine compound conductive to electricity. A wad of absorbent material was inserted into his rectum and a catheter was attached to his penis — the forty-odd selected witnesses, assembled beyond the glass inspection panel of the execution chamber, must not have their sensibilities outraged by the unseemly bodily functions occasioned by a mega-jolt of electricity on the human body.
Prison Chaplain and doctor stood by in attendance with the solaces of hypocrisy.
Bundy was escorted barefooted to the execution chamber. Guards strapped his four limbs into the chair. Another strap was pulled tight across his chest. They attached a metal cap to his shaved head and electrodes to his legs. Before a black leather flap was placed over his face, Bundy gave the tiers of witnesses a cheerful grin; his troubles were about to end, and theirs would continue to multiply, not least from the sight they were about to witness.
Two trip-switches had already been thrown to build up the required electrical charge. When the second hand of the wall clock hit the hour, the executioner pulled the third and final switch.
Bundy’s body suddenly arched up rigidly against the restraints as the massive electric fist hit; a wisp of acrid blue smoke curled up from beneath the metal cap as his skin sizzled and the blood in his brains boiled. The current was switched off, then on again, until the heart monitor registered zero response.
Bundy’s dead body relaxed into the hard contours of the chair as though he were settling to take a short nap.
He had successfully escaped it all at last.
Beyond the prison walls, grouped around charcoal braziers and waving ‘Fry Bundy’ placards, America’s modern equivalent of a public-execution crowd was drinking, laughing and singing. Media crews and deep-toned anchormen bobbed about in a forest of parabolic microphones and cameras in a sea of steaming rednecks.
Bundy was to make a final public appearance. An enterprising prison guard with a concealed camera managed to snap a photo of Bundy’s charred features as the prone body awaited burial. The ghoulish portrait was sold and syndicated throughout America and the world.
My final psychological assessment of Bundy is that he was a psychopath, but not a highly organised one, suffering from incipient psychosis, including an essentially non-affective form of paranoid/persecutory schizophrenia.
In short, his crimes were not committed as a result of any chronic mental illness. His schizophrenic, homicidal persona, the ‘hunchback,’ although steadily gaining in influence with each murder, was never beyond Bundy’s psychic control. He was able to choose when to let it loose, or, put another way, periodically Bundy was able to make a conscious decision to go ‘mad’ and become homicidal.
He laid emphasis upon the influence of the ‘hunchback’ only at the end, obviously as a legal tactic to stave off the death sentence a little bit longer, despite his chronic death wish.
The fact that Bundy, whilst in lengthy captivity and subject to no psychiatric treatment or medication, displayed no aggressive violence and was never prey to delusional or hallucinatory influences, is additional confirmatory proof that the ‘hunchback’ was always under his control, a servant.
Again, perhaps controversially, I perceive Bundy as a tragic figure. A highly intelligent man sliced in half by two opposing tensions — the inferiority complex bred by his illegitimate birth, and overcompensatory ambition designed to thwart perceived disadvantage. Not quite the same problem of indecision that tortured Hamlet, but in the early stages it had similar effect, leading Bundy to resolve the anguished dichotomy by embarking on the same course of action, multiple murder.
Had Bundy possessed Hamlet’s talent for self-analysis, he might have solved his lesser problem more pragmatically by recognition of his own limitations. Instead, his inferiority complex goaded him to goals too high, drove him too hard to achieve them, and futilely challenged the law of reversed effort in his particular case. Then, not wishing to duplicate the dogging, depressing disappointment of failure, he tried too little or, perhaps more aptly, tried too hard not to try hard, and met failure once again. Double jeopardy. ‘Catch-22.’
When I say Bundy ‘failed,’ I mean by his own perceived personal standards. By any normal measure, his academic achievements were well above average and highly commendable. But he was stuck on a psychic seesaw, forever thinking too highly or too lowly of himself, and ended up balancing in limbo between the two worlds. Had he achieved, even modestly, a more dexterous equilibrium, he would probably be practising as a reasonably successful lawyer today. Given his undoubted social and manipulative skills, innate ambition, amorality and ruthlessness, he might even have reached Congress or the Senate.
Is that all that life, fate, destiny, or whatever else you wish to call it, boils down to? That we are all born with certain talents and intellectual capacities and that our success or failure simply depends on what use we make of them, how well we can understand, control and channel them?
Your intellect, instinct and life experience may tell you that it takes only one short hop to get from philosophy to zoology. That’s if you make any real distinction between them in the first place, of course, or deny that it is part of the human condition that the two shall ever walk hand in hand till humankind annihilates itself. Does anyone still believe that it will not?
Strip your leaders of sanctimonious verbiage and false sentiment. Construct a psychological profile of each. Examine their bank accounts and deeds. And you may then agree that they are much the same species tried and hanged in Nuremberg fifty years ago. Sociably acceptable psychopaths, above national laws they legislate for others.
Can you distinguish amongst their number any saints or heroes, or even a genuinely honest individual? By merely directing attention to such glaring incongruities, it is not my intention to justify ‘criminals,’ more to define criminal action and analyse the behaviour of those who reach high office by criminal criteria.
In conclusion, it is only fair that I should point out — particularly to those readers exhibiting synthetic horror and disbelief — a significant fact that I have deliberately withheld up to this point.
Namely, that some leading psychiatrists did recently undertake a study of prominent politicians, militarists, financiers and other men of power, wealth and privilege (libel laws forbidding revelation of their names), and came to the firm conclusion that (a) most were suffering from
affective forms of mental illness, and (b) many were found to be certifiably insane.
Observant readers among you can probably accurately surmise many of the prominent people who were on that list, and many more who should be.
A similar study, conducted by another team of psychiatrists fifteen years ago, reached almost precisely the same conclusions as the most recent. It’s reassuring to know whose fingers are on the nuclear buttons.
Let those who speak of ‘evil’ first learn to recognise the genuine article and the most nefarious forms of disguise it assumes. In real terms you will learn to your cost eventually. Therefore, in that confident conviction, I am quite genuinely glad that my life is as good as over already, thank you, as the outside world suffocates slowly in pollution and corruption. Death is the balm of the hopeless.
However, semantics will be the death of you. Not Bundy and his like. We are mere passing amateurs.
When a rich man is fallen, he hath many helpers; he speaketh things not to be spoken, and yet men justify him…
— Ecclesiasticus
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Green River Killer
A Christian is a man who feels Repentance on a Sunday For what he did on Saturday And is going to do on Monday.
Thomas Russell Ybarra (1880)
In general we all begin life pretty well pristine and optimistic, believing that life is endlessly fascinating and exciting, and that it will only become more so as we grow older.
This, in fact, may actually turn out to be the case for some people; in the first instance, those fortunate few who are born with a superfluity of wealth or talent, and the leisure opportunities to enjoy and indulge same to a satisfactory extent. And even the less fortunate class of people, who are forced to work daily for a living, may be lucky enough to land a form of employment they actually enjoy performing, and which leaves them with at least sufficient time and energy to appreciate and relish their leisure pursuits to a more or less reasonable degree.
But what of the far greater majority of people who are reluctantly constrained, by lack of private means, to waste most of their lives toiling for the welfare and financial betterment of others far richer than themselves, performing repetitious daily employment that would madden a lower primate?
It is, to me, an amazing fact that most of that latter class, either from lack of intellect or will or spirit, in the course of time grow to accept their unenviable lot in life as the natural order of things, and settle down quite contentedly to entirely waste the next several decades of their brief existence in serf-like subservience.
The limit of their ambitions being apparently to marry, breed, further burden themselves by mortgage (significantly, the dictionary definition of ‘mort’ is ‘a call blown on a hunting horn to signify the death of the animal hunted’), own a family car, and live in excruciating moderation and boredom till death do they depart.
This gives rise to apostrophe: ‘Is there a life before death?’ Some people, in my opinion, are to all intents and purposes born spiritually and intellectually dead in the first place.
Your average serial killer — if such a conflicting classification is valid — will have none of this social conditioning, consigning him to a lifetime performance of stultifying banality.
The very prospect and contemplation of such a bleak future are so contrary to the serial killer’s psychic constitution that they have emetic effect. His beliefs, his philosophy and life ambition are firmly rooted in comprehensive hedonism. Whether it be considered immoral/illegal is not of the slightest ethical interest or concern to him.
His mind is governed and guided entirely by the precepts: whoever or whatever contributes pleasantly to my life is right and good; whoever or whatever opposes is wrong and evil. Those who obstruct court destruction.
Born alone, the serial killer is prepared to die alone.
They are predisposed to the universal concept of mutual indifference. Whatsoever they do is regarded as their concern and no one else’s. Let those who attempt to oppose beware, for they shall receive no warning shot, be given no quarter for the presumption and impertinence of interference.
Those primal traits and characteristics form the remorseless remittance of the serial killer. He has, as it were, taken the American Constitution, in particular its sentiments on ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ very seriously indeed, much more so than the majority of the disaffected population, perhaps regarding it as literally custom-built to suit his own highly individualized and idiosyncratic view of life.
But — and this is important — when the lower-class criminal points to the far vaster and socially more damaging crimes of the upper class, he is accused of simply trying to justify himself. Whilst the upper class justify themselves by virtue of the power they hold.
Those members of the middle class who, either from mutual benefit or by omission, contribute to this socially acceptable calibre of elitism, are, in my opinion, morally inferior to the working-class criminals who attempt to emulate the values of the upper class and invariably bear the brunt of penalty and guilt.
During President Richard Nixon’s term of office, the Special Advisor to the President, Charles Colson, had a framed statement of personal belief mounted behind his desk in the White House:
‘When you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’
The serial killer largely perceives society as a jungle of corrupt power in which he has suffered a general defeat, or even as a personal affront to his originally optimistic expectations. Cumulative disillusionment and rancour in his case exacerbates the degree of post-traumatic stress, generating a fatalistic, unforgiving methodology of general revenge. The revenge of the conquered and disaffected. That of Milton’s Satan in hell, fashioning his will and resentment to a personal quest of retaliation:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
And, what is else, never to be overcome …
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.
If a person is told enough times that he is honest and decent, or regards himself as such, he naturally feels obliged to live up to the image, be it real or fictitious.
It therefore follows that the same obligatory mechanism works if he is told or believes he has qualities opposite to those, again be they actual or imaginary. Perceived by others as a problem to be managed, he will react accordingly.
‘A problem? Managed? I’ll show you what a problem is! I’ll show you managed!’
In addition, as indicated, even when people believe at a conscious level they are honest and fit to condemn the crimes of others, the taunting subconscious reminds them of their own dark fantasies, and guilt makes them more vociferous. Innocence is at best a myth or a form of self-delusion, at worst a paradigm of internal and external corruptive influence which inexorably incites or invites crime.
My point? People should be less dogmatic and pious when philosophically attributing responsibility, as they are usually quite purblind to their own share. Responsibility is multi-motivational and multi-attributable, not some rudimentary political or legal calculation. An individual does not of course have to be a member of a committee in order to own committee mentality, unctuously washing their hands like Pilate.
The category of serial killer who concentrates his thirst for vengeance upon prostitutes, like the Green River Killer did, is almost invariably suffering from a personal moral crisis or dilemma. In one sphere he perhaps self-righteously believes he has some form of mandate from God to punish transgressors in any manner he sees fit. In the second sphere, that of schizophrenic fugue, he may be unaware of the personal pleasure he derives from inflicting divine retribution, perhaps having rationalised the pleasure into an inescapable cross he must bea
r in devotion to a divine mission.
Most intelligent people have a strong sense of self-actualization but choose less harmful ways to achieve it.
In this psychically amorphous field of attributive endeavour, psychology has its obvious limitations. It strives to deal with the ‘soul’ by calling it the ‘psyche,’ predominantly because the psyche yields itself to principles of scientific analysis and interpretation. It therefore sanctifies the scientifically objective at the expense of the subjective.
The art of psychiatry is much more flexible in encompassing the mercurial spirit of mankind and its multi-polar affective disorders.
For instance, the person I once was, whilst in the pursuit of multifarious criminal activities in many cities, also enjoyed visiting their art galleries and historical/natural museums. The architectural qualities of cities also excited my interest and I would often relax in the ancient gestalt of old churches — existentially juxtaposing the sacred with the profane; the texture and tactile pleasure of polished wooden pews contrasting with the smooth gunmetal of the revolver under my arm; the contentment of sitting in mote-filled sunlight slanting through stained-glass windows while waiting for darkness to fall; the savouring of silence and tranquility before the storm; the pantheistic appreciation and communion with all forms of the animate and inanimate. Contrast is life. In this case what one could categorize as abnormal moral duality in tandem with dyslogistic spirituality.
The sum total of murders the Green River Killer is said to have been responsible for — over forty in number by the last body count — in my opinion reflects officialdom’s hasty expedience.
After examining all the forensic evidence, it seems plain as day to me that at least two or more separate serial killers were responsible for the Green River Murders. Therefore, if the police ever irresponsibly claim to have solved all the murders by arresting only one killer, that would amount to their criminally allowing the other killer/killers involved to remain free to kill again — as evidenced in the Henry Lee Lucas case.