by Colin Wilson
The simplest and perhaps most likely explanation may be that prostitutes have always presented an easy, and even obvious target for the sexually-motivated killer. They symbolise carnality; they actively invite an approach, often touting for custom; and no potential ‘high risk’ victim ever risks injury or death more readily than by entering the nearest dark alleyway with a total stranger. Because of widespread poverty, and the influx of workless Irish and East Europeans into Britain in the late nineteenth century, the Ripper’s chosen killing ground at Whitechapel was notorious for prostitution. He could guarantee to find victims of opportunity there on every foray he made: whores were as thick on the ground in the East End at night as were the fleas in their doss-house bedding.
Hindsight apart, contemporary written evidence exists which appears to confirm that the Ripper had targeted whores as his intended victims before he committed at least three of the five murders attributed to him. In a letter, thought to be genuine, to the Central News Agency in London and post-marked 27 September 1888 (i.e. three days before the ‘double event’, and six weeks before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly), the writer – who signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’, thus coining the immortal nickname – declared: ‘I am down on whores and shan’t quit ripping them till I do get bucked’.
This trait, of first choosing a type of victim to murder and then staking out a likely locale in which to trawl for them, can be identified time and again in the behaviour of modern serial killers. Dennis Nilsen, the thirty-seven-year-old homosexual British civil servant and serial killer, prowled the ‘gay’ bars of Soho for four years between 1979 and 1983 looking for homeless, vulnerable youths. His modus operandi was to ply each ‘pick-up’ with drink, offer him a bed and then strangle him with his tie as he slept. Next morning he would either secrete the body beneath the floorboards of his home in Muswell Hill, north London, or dismember it and dispose of the pieces elsewhere. Each murder left Nilsen ephemerally replete but wholly unmoved, like a spider despatching a fly. He described his reaction after he deposited victim number ten (and third corpse to be dealt with in this way) under the floorboards. ‘That was it. Floorboards back. Carpets replaced. And back to work at Denmark Street’ (the offices of the Manpower Services Commission). Sheer carelessness in disposal of body parts led directly to Nilsen’s arrest. His practice was to boil the severed heads, or burn them with the trunk and limbs on bonfires and flush the lesser remains down the toilet. Instead he blocked the drains – and was caught.
Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, scoured the red-light districts of Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and elsewhere during a six-year search for victims prior to his arrest in 1981. Like Jack, he targeted prostitutes: and in that period he intercepted thirteen ‘victims of opportunity’ – by no means all of whom were streetwalkers – and killed them all with exceptional violence. His compulsive urge to murder whores led him to presume that every woman he encountered in those areas where he lay in wait was a prostitute: in fact, five of the thirteen were respectable passers-by. All were subjected to the same degree of violence, and most of the bodies were mutilated after death.
On one occasion Sutcliffe returned to the murder scene days after the attack, and further mutilated the still-undiscovered body by attempting to sever the head with a hacksaw. To return to the scene of the crime is a common behavioural characteristic in certain serial killers. They do so for a variety of reasons: to check on the progress (if any) made by the police, to relive the fantasy which inspired the murder, and to commit acts of further mutilation and/or necrophilia.
Prime importance is placed by FBI analysts on the role of fantasy in serial murder. Detailed, ongoing research shows that some convicted serial killers enact violent fantasies – including acts of murder – in their minds at seven and eight years of age, occasionally even earlier. These aggressive daydreams continue to develop and expand through adolescence into manhood, the age when their violent dreams are usually first translated into the physical act of killing. (Some serial killers commit murder in their teens. In the next chapter we discuss one youth who committed four murders by the age of fifteen: pp. 129–31, The Profilers.)
Serial killers are almost invariably found to have experienced environmental problems in their early years. In many cases they stem from a broken home in which the parents are divorced or separated, a home with a weak or absent father-figure and dominant female, sometimes a home-life marked by a lack of consistent discipline. As policemen and probation officers have long known, the psychological damage resulting from such a deprived or miserable childhood all too often manifests itself in a number of recognisably aggressive traits. They include defiance of authority, theft, persistent lying, acts of wilful destruction, arson, cruelty to animals and other children; with such symptoms accompanied by long periods of daydreaming (or fantasising) – that ever-available trapdoor leading into a private, make-believe world where the unhappy young can shape their revenge on society for all ill-treatment, real or imagined.
In the context of serial murder, the triad of youthful behaviour most frequently seen as indicative of violence ahead is: enuresis (bed wetting) beyond the age of twelve (although analysts also recognise that there may be several different reasons for this). Next is arson – sometimes committed by children as young as five or six. Its long-term significance lies in the type of arson offence. A ‘disorganised’ young arsonist is likely to cause smaller fires and least monetary damage. In contrast the ‘organised’ arsonist – the one who thinks things through – usually starts his fires from the outset in occupied buildings. His intention is to hurt people, as well as to inflict maximum monetary damage.
The ultimate state of the behavioural triad is cruelty, to animals and other people. ‘We’re not talking here about kicking the dog,’ said one analyst. ‘We’re talking about throwing puppies on to bonfires or tying firecrackers to the cat, that kind of behaviour. One serial killer talks about “Tying a cherry-bomb to the cat’s leg, lighting it – and blowing the cat’s leg off. Made a lot of one-legged cats.”’ This trait can be seen in children on both sides of the Atlantic who grew up to be serial killers. Moors murderer Ian Brady won a childhood reputation as an embryo psychopath who threw cats from tenement windows in the Glasgow Gorbals. When Ed Kemper, the Californian serial killer, was thirteen he cut the family cat into pieces with his Scout’s knife.
‘The next step is aggression against people. He chooses animals first because animals can scream, they show fear, they bleed, they do all those things we do – but they’re not people. This time, it’s projection. Now he’s getting even with society.’ Hostility to society is one of the hallmarks of the adult serial killer. Some express it in the murders they commit, others express it in words. We know that the man calling himself Jack the Ripper wrote ‘I am down on whores and shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled’. When actress Sharon Tate begged the Manson ‘Family’ gang to spare her for the sake of her unborn child, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel responded by stabbing her sixteen times, inflicting several wounds after her death. Finally Atkins dipped a towel in the actress’s blood and wrote ‘Pig’ on her living-room door. Dennis Nilsen – a heavy drinker – clearly felt this need to ‘get even’ with society in each murder he committed – including those he could barely remember next morning. While awaiting trial, he wrote from jail to the police who had questioned him: ‘God only knows what thoughts go through my mind when it is captive within a destructive binge. Maybe the cunning, stalking killer instinct is the only single concentration released from a mind which in that state knows no morality . . . There is no disputing the fact that I am a violent killer under certain circumstances. It amazes me that I have no tears for these victims. I have no tears for myself or those bereaved by my actions. Am I a wicked person, constantly under pressure, who just cannot cope with it, who escapes to reap revenge against society through a haze of a bottle of spirits?’
The same detailed behavioural research which first
indentified the importance of fantasy in the evolution of the serial killer also examined the part played by pornography. Between 1979 and 1983 agents from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit conducted an in-depth psychological study of thirty-six convicted, incarcerated sex murderers held in United States prisons nationwide. Of those thirty-six murderers, twenty-five were serial killers: the other eleven were either ‘spree’ killers (a detailed classification of murderers appears in the next chapter), or single or double sex murderers. Nearly half of those who co-operated with the FBI analysts (43%) were found to have been sexually abused in childhood, one third (32%) during adolescence, and a slightly larger percentage (37%) over the age of eighteen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most admitted to ‘sexual problems’ as adults. More importantly in the context of pornography, nearly seventy per cent said they felt ‘sexually incompetent’ (as adults), and relied heavily on visual stimuli – with a large majority rating pornography as the most effective stimulus.
Pornography is seen by analysts of the Behavioural Science Unit as a factor which fuels the serial killer’s violent fantasy, rather than as a cause of the murders he commits. In particular they condemn the ‘bondage’ type pornography – so frequently portrayed on the cover of American detective magazines – as the sex stimulus most likely to fuel, say, the Bundy-type murderer’s fantasies.
‘That is what appeals most to the sexual sadist. To see a woman who is bound, or restrained in some way with a gag round her mouth, looking terrified as someone threatens her with a knife or a gun. That is their fantasy: to dominate and control, to inflict pain and suffering on the victim. To see this portrayed on the cover of the magazine may fuel that fantasy – but it’s not the cause of the murder (he commits). Such killers have these desires, they have this violent tendency within them, and that’s why they’re attracted to this type of pornography. We find the sexual sadist and the really violent offender more drawn to this type of pornography than what one might call “classical” pornography, with its explicit sexual content. What the sexual sadist looks for is dominance, control over the victim, and that’s what he sees in this kind of magazine cover. Bundy may have blamed pornography for his “sick obsessions” but that kind of statement is typical of the serial killer. He always blames someone – or something – else for what he’s done; he is not to blame, it’s never his fault.’
Although the original survey of the thirty-six murderers was completed in 1983, the practice of interviewing convicted offenders by FBI analysts is a valued, ongoing process. No inducement of any kind is offered to the prisoners concerned – some of whom may be on Death Row, awaiting the outcome of their appeals – in return for their co-operation. Furthermore, no visitor may carry weapons inside prison for obvious security reasons, with the result that the lone FBI agents who carried out those pioneer interviews ran considerably personal risk in questioning convicted, violent murderers who literally had nothing to lose, no matter how they reacted. That practice ceased after one agent – who conducted a solitary interview with a serial killer weighing close on three hundred pounds (more than twenty-one stone) and standing six feet nine inches tall – rang three times in fifteen minutes without response when attempting to alert the prison staff that the interview was over. The serial killer (FBI agents do not identify violent offenders who co-operate in Behaviour Research Interviews) whose crimes included the decapitation of most of his victims, was fully aware of the interviewer’s dilemma. ‘I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard,’ he said. The agent bluffed his way through until the warder arrived, and was not harmed; but today all FBI agents work in pairs when interviewing violent offenders in jail.
Such interviews may last from four to seven hours. One agent talks with the prisoner, while his colleague monitors the conversation. Even so the authorities recognise that there must always be some element of risk involved. Some penal institutions require signed waivers ruling out negotiation in the event of hostage-taking, and/or to release the state from responsibility should death or injury result from the interview. While neither analyst nor offender may claim to enjoy the experience, it can prove beneficial to both parties – if for vastly different reasons. Some murderers who have admitted their crimes find relief in talking freely about them. Others feel flattered to be included in a work of reference. Not a few try to impress the interviewer with their innocence. For the analyst it is a unique opportunity to meet face to face with an offender whose violent, sometimes bizarre crimes are a matter of record: a rare chance to probe the psyche of the kind of serial murderer he may encounter time and again in the investigative years ahead.
With most serial killers except ‘medical serial killers’ (see here), their individual libido is mirrored in the kind of victim they mark down for murder. The heterosexual targets females, homosexuals prey on fellow ‘gays’ and the bisexual serial killer makes no distinction between male and female victims. Ted Bundy, a heterosexual and former law student at the University of Washington in Seattle, was a handsome and intelligent undergraduate who enjoyed normal sexual relationships with a number of female students before he turned Peeping Tom and, ultimately, one of the worst serial killers in United States criminal history.
At first, whenever opportunity occurred during the four years in which he was an active serial killer (he spent half the time in custody, but twice escaped), Bundy scoured university campuses, student rooming houses and youth hostels searching for ‘look-alike’, attractive female victims. His modus operandi was to use guile, plus his undoubted surface charm, to lure them to a waiting car. The car was almost always stolen; in a sudden Jekyll-and-Hyde switch of character he would club them over the head, abduct and drive them to some lonely spot, then rape and sexually abuse his victims before strangling them and dumping their bodies like so much refuse. ‘Throwaways’, he called them contemptuously.
After his second escape from custody in 1977, Bundy deteriorated into a drunken, disorganised ‘blitz’ type of serial killer. While he continued to target female students, he now attacked them in a wild ‘overkill’ fashion after breaking in to their quarters. On the night of his penultimate attack in January 1978, he broke into a student rooming house in Tallahassee, Florida, and battered four girls unconscious. One he raped and strangled. He sexually abused another, who died on her way to hospital. A third girl suffered a fractured skull, and the fourth a broken jaw. Bundy fled. Three weeks later he murdered again, and for the last time. His victim was a twelve-year-old schoolgirl whom he abducted, strangled and sexually violated. He was arrested shortly afterwards – not for her murder (the child’s body was not found for a month) – but for firing on a traffic policeman who gave chase while Bundy was driving a stolen car. Bundy, who was using an assumed name, was identified in custody (the FBI had profiled him) and later charged with the three Florida murders only. He was tried and found guilty, and – after a decade of highly-publicised and largely self-conducted appeals – Ted Bundy was executed in 1989.
Negro drug pusher, burglar, rapist and heterosexual serial killer Carlton Gary, alias ‘The Stocking Strangler’ of Columbus, Georgia, assaulted, raped and strangled five elderly white women in Columbus in the late 1970s. His victims were all complete strangers who lived alone, and whose homes Gary broke into in the exclusively white Wynnton district of the city. A sixth white woman of seventy-eight, whom Gary raped when he broke into her Wynnton home immediately preceding the fifth murder, escaped death only because she fought him off long enough to sound a burglar alarm and summon the police. Gary escaped, and the murders ceased abruptly in February 1978. Although a native of Columbus, Gary had moved east in the mid-1970s. After escaping from a New York state prison in 1977, he returned to Columbus and committed the Wynnton murders. At that time he was not a suspect; then in 1979 – a year after the Wynnton murders had ceased – he was arrested elsewhere in Georgia on unrelated charges. After interrogation he was charged with three of the Wynnton stranglings, together with associated counts of rap
e and burglary. In 1986 he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Gary, now thirty-seven, is on Death Row awaiting the outcome of appeals which may not be decided until the early 1990s.
One racial criminal behaviour characteristic links the Carlton Gary homicides in Columbus, Georgia, with nine serial murders committed in New York City in 1974 by Calvin Jackson – another heterosexual negro ex-convict – and a series of at least seven murders, committed a decade later and more than four thousand miles away in Stockwell, South London, by the bisexual British serial killer Kenneth Erskine.
By early summer in New York in 1974, five women – mostly elderly – had been found dead in their rooms over a period of two years in the run-down Park Plaza Hotel at 50 West 77th Street. Foul play was not suspected. All were thought to have died either from acute alcoholism or (in one case) asphyxia, that might have been self-induced. Then Yetta Vishnefsky, who was seventy-nine, was found dead in Room 605. This time no pathologist was needed to establish the cause of death. She had been bound with her own stockings, and knifed in the back: the post-mortem examination revealed that she had been raped. Shortly afterwards Kate Lewinsohn, who was sixty-five, was found dead in Room 221 with a fractured skull. She, too, had been raped. And on 8 June Winifred Miller was found burned to death in her bed in Room 406.
While the police investigation into those three murders was continuing, a ninth victim – sixty-nine-year-old Mrs Pauline Spanierman – was found by a maid, battered to death in her room in the adjacent twelve-storey apartment house at 40 West 77th Street. On this occasion there was a suspect; a black man, weighing about one hundred and forty pounds (ten stone) and five feet seven inches tall, who had been seen making his way down the fire escape at the Park Plaza at half-past three that morning, approximately the time that Mrs Spanierman was murdered. The precise description led the police to Calvin Jackson, an ex-convict and former drug addict, who worked at the Park Plaza as a porter – and shared a room there with a woman named Bernice Myers.