by Colin Wilson
Dr David Canter has described the techniques he used to pinpoint where the railway rapist lived:2
‘Many environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that people form particular mental maps of the places they use. Each person creates a unique representation of the place in which he lives, with its own particular distortions. In the case of John Duffy, journalists recognised his preference for committing crimes near railway lines to the extent that they dubbed him the “Railway Rapist”. What neither they nor the police appreciated was that this characteristic was likely to be part of his way of thinking about the layout of London, and so was a clue to his own particular mental map. It could therefore be used to see where the psychological focus of this map was and so specify the area in which he lived.’
By the time John Duffy was arrested in 1986, the techniques of ‘psychological profiling’ had already been in use in America for a decade, and the use of the computer had also been recognised as a vital part of the method. A retired Los Angeles detective named Pierce Brooks had pointed out that many serial killers remained unapprehended because they moved from state to state, and that before the state police realised they had a multiple killer on their hands, he had moved on. The answer obviously lay in linking up the computers of individual states, and feeding the information into a central computer. Brooks’s programme was labelled VICAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme – and the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, was chosen as the centre for the new crimefighting team. VICAP proved to be the first major step towards the solution of the problem of the random sex killer.
* * *
1 For a more detailed account of the history of crime detection, see Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection, Colin Wilson, 1989.
2 New Society, 4 March 1988
Two
Profile of a Serial Killer
UP TO THE time this book went to press, no defendant facing charges of multiple murder in any British court had ever been described in proceedings as a ‘serial killer’, or his alleged crimes as ‘serial murder’. No such classification obtains either in British legal terminology or, indeed, in everyday conversation.
Even now, despite increasing use of the term in media reports, it is doubtful if one layman in a hundred in Britain knows what distinguishes the serial killer from all other multiple murderers. That is certainly not because none are to be found in the annals of British crime; on the contrary. The reason is that their identification and acceptance as a unique species of murderer is new, so new that outside the United States – the country worst affected by these most dangerous of all killers – the civilised world is only just waking up to the threat they pose to society.
Paradoxically, the man generally regarded as the archetypal serial killer is also the world’s most notorious murderer: Jack the Ripper. ‘The Ripper’ – the only name by which we know him, for he was never caught – stalked and mutilated his victims in the gas-lit alleys of London’s East End more than one hundred years ago. How many women he killed during that brief reign of autumn terror in 1888 is uncertain. Four, perhaps five; by no means an exceptional tally in the context of the violent 1980s, yet nonetheless a series of murders which continue to excite worldwide interest – fascination, even – both because of their savagery, and persistent conjecture as to the identity of the Ripper and his fate.
While his identity may never now be satisfactorily established, modern criminal profiling techniques enable us to discern a clearly identifiable pattern in the five Ripper murders. Their significant behavioural thread lies not so much in the modus operandi which governed all five homicides – the ‘pick-up’, followed by the slitting of the victim’s throat – as in the post-mortem mutilation which accompanied four of the murders (the Ripper was disturbed during the course of the other one).
Such a ritual, sexually sadistic trait is a hallmark of a certain kind of serial killer. The modus operandi may vary over time; it is chosen basically because it is practical – and because it works. Changes may be introduced should some flaw emerge (perhaps during the early murders, which do not always proceed to plan), or even deliberately to try to confuse the investigating police. The ritual aspect of the crime, however – which is conceived of fantasy, and endlessly rehearsed in the offender’s mind before he kills for the first time – is his ‘signature’, his mark; and it is principally this ‘signature’ which enables a series of crimes to be linked through behavioural analysis.
The most advanced, systematic profiling technique in use today – the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme, devised and developed by agents of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia – is based on the tenet that behaviour reflects personality. Thus, expert crime scene interpretation (based on police and medical reports, photographic and forensic evidence, etc.), translated into identifiable behavioural characteristics, enables the FBI analyst to profile the type of offender responsible – as distinct from the individual. Such detailed behavioural analysis is not a theoretical aid to criminal investigation: it works. It is used every day by FBI analysts at Quantico, and is especially effective when dealing with apparently ‘motiveless’ murders (i.e. where there is no apparent connection between murderer and victim). The same behavioural analysis technique is used to combat a variety of offences, notably serial murder but also in cases involving abduction, rape, arson, drug trafficking and certain planned terrorist crimes, such as hijacking and hostage-taking. The scope for expansion would appear to be almost limitless, given time for research; meantime its greatest immediate value in the United States lies in aiding local law enforcement agencies in the tracking down and arrest of serial offenders.
No violent criminal instils a greater sense of fear and outrage among the community than the serial killer. The sadistic nature of his crimes, especially in the relatively rare cases involving torture and/or mutilation, inevitably attracts maximum publicity; while public alarm is further heightened by an awareness that – unlike most other murderers – many serial killers deliberately target total strangers as their victims. The net result is a vicious circle of ever-increasing fear and publicity as each new murder is discovered, all of it combining to add significantly to existing pressures on the police concerned. However, thwarted from the outset by a lack of clues to the murderer’s identity (a situation aggravated by the apparent absence of any connection between assailant and victims), the investigation may drag on for years in the face of mounting criticism and even hostility. (One recent example in Britain involved the six-year-long hunt for Peter Sutcliffe, alias the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed thirteen women before he was caught in 1981 – and then during a routine police patrol check, as mentioned in Chapter 1.)
Man’s quest for a composite profile of ‘the murderer’ is not new. Pioneering work in the eighteenth century, using physiognomy (the art of judging character by facial features), and phrenology (the study of cranial bumps and ridges, vis-à-vis the development of mental faculties), failed to reveal significant common physical similarities. A more recent, twentieth-century theory held that chromosomal imbalance (caused by the presence of an additional male, or ‘Y’, chromosome in the genes), increased the probability of violent criminal behaviour. This supposition, however, was challenged when Richard Speck – the American multiple murderer who killed eight nurses in one night in 1966, and who was thought to suffer from such an imbalance – was found on examination to have no extra chromosome. Subsequent research showed that most males with such an imbalance display no abnormally violent behaviour. The FBI profilers (or analysts, as they are officially called) use behavioural traits commonly identified in convicted, sexually-oriented murderers as their analytical mainstay; and that this technique stands the test of time is clearly borne out by scrutiny of the 1888 Ripper murders.
All the five Ripper murders were obviously sexually motivated. All five victims were the same type of person, i.e. prostitutes. All were actively soliciting in the same general ‘red-light’ area on
the nights they met their deaths. Four of the murders – those of Mary Ann Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly – were plainly ritualistic, with post-mortem mutilation. Nicholls was disembowelled. So was Chapman. But, unlike Nicholls (whose robust stays precluded mutilation above the level of the diaphragm), Chapman’s uterus was cut out and removed, her entrails severed from their mesenteric attachments and left draped symbolically over one shoulder. Eddowes was similarly mutilated, except that in her case the left kidney was removed with the uterus. Following that murder a letter from someone, claiming to be the killer, referred to anthropophagy (cannibalism), viz. ‘(the kidney) tasted very nise [sic]’.
Mary Jane Kelly, the last of the Ripper’s victims and the only one found dead in her room, suffered the most bizarre mutilation. On this one unhurried occasion when, having changed his modus operandi, he ran less risk of being disturbed, the Ripper’s mutilation of the body was more elaborate than hitherto. The room measured only twelve feet square, so that every detail loomed large. Kelly’s throat was cut so deep she was all but decapitated, drenching sheets and palliasse in blood. She was dressed only in her chemise. The rest of her clothes were found folded on a chair, while other items of female clothing – including a skirt and hat – had been burned in the grate, apparently to provide light for the ritual mutilation.
The Ripper cut off the wretched woman’s nose and both breasts, and – as if they were trophies – displayed them on the bedside table, together with strips of flesh carved from her thighs. Her forehead was flayed, the abdomen ripped open, her uterus and liver cut out. The uterus had vanished: the liver was left for the police to find, neatly positioned between Mary Jane Kelly’s feet. In a final, symbolic gesture the Ripper had taken one of the woman’s hands and thrust it deep inside her gaping belly.
Only Elizabeth (‘Long Liz’) Stride – the first of his two victims to die on 30 September 1888 (hence the night of the ‘double event’) – was spared mutilation. This was not from any sense of compassion on the Ripper’s part, but strictly to save his own skin. Bruises found on Stride’s shoulders and collarbone indicated where he grabbed hold of her before dragging her to the ground. A single sweep of his knife was enough to sever her windpipe (all five of his victims died in this way, with their throats slit right to left). On this occasion, however, as he knelt to rip open Stride’s abdomen, he was disturbed and forced to flee – possibly by the approach of a horse and cart, whose driver (a steward in a nearby working men’s club) first discovered the still warm corpse.
The Ripper wasted little time in stalking a replacement prostitute victim. Within the hour, and only half-mile away in Mitre Square, Aldgate, he accosted and murdered streetwalker Catherine Eddowes – who ironically had just been released from Commercial Street police station. In the words of Constable Watkins, the ‘peeler’ who found her body, the crime scene revealed by his bull’s-eye lantern resembled nothing so much as ‘the slaughter of a pig in market’. A curious feature of this murder was that the Ripper placed part of the intestine between her left arm and body.
Pathologist Dr F. Gordon Brown commented that the abdominal cuts had ‘probably been made by one kneeling between the middle of the body’, and said there had been little or no bleeding since they were inflicted after death. However, Kate Eddowes had also sustained multiple facial wounds (one of which severed the tip of her nose), while the gash in her throat ran almost from ear to ear. ‘All the vessels in the left side of the neck were severed,’ said Dr Brown, ‘and all the deeper structures in the throat were divided down to the backbone. Both the left carotid artery and jugular vein were opened, death being caused by haemorrhage from the cut artery.’
Such an attack would undoubtedly have left bloodstains on the Ripper’s hands, cuffs, some outer clothing and, very probably, his boots (elastic-sided boots were widely worn in 1888). He evidently paused afterwards to wash his hands in a sink in the passage north of the Square; the bloodstained water was still visible when Major Smith, the acting City Police Commissioner, arrived on the scene. The Ripper’s disciplined conduct in the wake of his earlier street murders indicates a calculated awareness of the risks he ran. Each mutilation, carried out at the murder scene, was a ‘high risk’ situation, and he made off fast afterwards with his body-part souvenirs. If that was an obvious precaution to take, his ability always to make his way apparently unnoticed through ill-lit streets and alleyways – burdened by the urgent need of a wash at very least, and most likely a change of clothing – speaks of methodical advance planning on the Ripper’s part.
Furthermore, on the night of 30 September 1888, his awareness of the hue and cry certain to follow the discovery earlier of Stride’s body half a mile away would have been doubly acute: this was a time when Ripper-mania was at its height in dockland London. And yet – on this one occasion when the ritual mutilation had been denied him – he now took an even greater risk by remaining in the same general area and committing a second murder within the hour. Not content with that, he also made time to sever and remove the coveted body parts from this second victim before attempting to flee: no easy task in any circumstances, on that darkened strip of pavement where Eddowes was murdered. As Doctor Brown revealed at the inquest, ‘The left kidney was completely cut out and taken away. The renal artery was cut through three-quarters of an inch . . . the membrane over the uterus was cut through and the womb extracted, leaving a stump of about three-quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb was absent – taken completely away from the body, together with some of the ligaments . . .’
The conclusion must be that the ritual was of supreme importance to the Ripper. More than that, it was a clamorous, overpowering need, a compulsion, which overruled all other considerations that night – personal safety included. Such criminal characteristics were so rarely encountered in the late nineteenth century as to be wholly incomprehensible to the average police officer, no matter how experienced. Outside the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes or Sergeant Cuff, most investigative thinking then was directed towards far more elementary criminal motivation.
Thanks to the FBI’s criminal investigative technique – based on the behavioural analysis of violent crime – the clues which abound in those 1888 murders point clear as a signpost to the type of person responsible. The main traits so far identified, i.e. the repetitive, sadistic nature of the crimes; the targeting on each occasion of an identical kind of ‘stranger’ victim (a prostitute), with all five murdered in the one general area; and the evident planning behind the murders, from attack to escape, stamp the Ripper unmistakably as a serial killer.
The same research has also established that the serial killer is to a large degree sexually motivated, and often decides in advance on the type of victim he intends to target (as opposed to specific individuals); so that the crime may be a true ‘stranger murder’ in all respects. (‘Stranger murder’ is a term often used by the American press to describe serial killing.) Since the selective process must turn on the psyche of the murderer concerned, it follows that the range of possible serial murder victims will encompass the whole spectrum of society; from the youngest infant to the aged and infirm, and from the wholly respectable to the brazenly disreputable.
Although his victim may be a random choice, the serial killer may nonetheless have planned the murder with considerable care. Once decided on the type of person he intends to kill, he will possibly stake out a specific locale: a shopping precinct, perhaps, or a school playground, an old folks’ home, a singles bar, a lonely bus stop – or busy main road even, if hitchhikers are his target – to await or cruise for those victims of opportunity likely to be encountered there. Moreover, before he launches his first attack he is likely to have methodically reconnoitred the locale – his way in and way out, nearby traffic lights, roundabouts, one-way streets, any factor likely to impede his getaway in an emergency – until satisfied he has a practical escape route available. Such a precaution will be doubly important if the serial killer i
ntends to abduct his victim and dispose of the body elsewhere.
Given obvious changes in traffic conditions, the same characteristics may plainly be seen in the Ripper’s behaviour one hundred years ago. Prostitutes were the type of people he elected to murder, and Whitechapel was the locale he staked out for victims of opportunity. That he knew his way well through those gas-lit alleys is self-evident; no matter how close the hue and cry, he got clean away each time without once being stopped for questioning. Over the years, a number of theories have been expounded as to why the Ripper murdered (women) prostitutes only. Sexual motivation aside, the most popular has always been that he was some kind of moral avenger: a man who dealt out rough justice to all whores, because one had infected him (or some close relative) with syphilis. On the other hand his twentieth-century counterpart Peter Sutcliffe, alias ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, who murdered thirteen women over six years on the assumption all were prostitutes, claimed that a voice from the grave told him that he had a God-given mission to do so. Sutcliffe had in fact once worked briefly as a grave-digger: however, his plea was rejected by the trial court as a ruse to try to obtain a lenient sentence.