by Colin Wilson
Suicide is indeed a possibility, although perhaps less likely than may be supposed. Modern research shows us that serial killers rarely take their own lives; one possible reason being that the majority tend to ‘externalise’ (i.e. to blame others – not excluding the victim – for their crimes) rather than admit responsibility themselves. We have evidence of that from statements made by convicted offenders. Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen told the investigating police he would never have harmed his victims had they not been prostitutes. ‘I’m not saying I hate all women, I don’t. I’d do everything in my power, any way, shape or form for [a good woman] and to see no harm ever came to her, but I guess prostitutes are women I’m putting down as lower than myself . . . It’s like it was a game, they had to pitch the bail before I could bat.’ Ed Kemper, the giant Californian who decapitated his mother (whom he abhorred), blamed her for the murders of his several female student victims. ‘Those girls are dead because of the way that mother raised her son,’ he would say, as if he himself were another person. After beheading his mother, he cut out her larynx (a symbolic gesture, to signify that she could never nag him again), and threw it in the garbage disposal machine. When he switched on, the machine malfunctioned and the larynx flew up out again. ‘Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me,’ Kemper complained. ‘I couldn’t get her to shut up!’
The lone exception to the ‘externalisation’ thought process is sometimes found – in the ranks of the lust killer, a category of serial killer which certainly includes Jack the Ripper. However, in their 1980 survey (see here) FBI agents Hazelwood and Douglas say ‘Seldom does the lust killer come from an environment of love and understanding. It is more likely that he was an abused or neglected child who experienced a great deal of conflict in his early life and was unable to develop and use adequate coping devices. Had he been able to do so, he would have withstood the stresses placed upon him and developed normally in early childhood . . . These stresses, frustrations and subsequent anxieties, along with the inability to cope with them, may lead the individual to withdraw from the society which he perceives as hostile and threatening.
‘Through this internalisation process, he becomes secluded and isolated from others and may eventually select suicide as an alternative to a life of loneliness and frustration. The authors have designated this reaction to life as disorganised asocial.’ Whether the Ripper belonged to this category is unclear. Perversely, he exhibited certain behavioural characteristics which could fit both types of lust killer. For example the location of the bodies (all left where they were murdered), clear evidence of post-mortem mutilation, and the indication of anthropophagy which followed the murder of Kate Eddowes, all point to the disorganised asocial type. Similarly, the absence of clues at the scene of the crime (notably the Ripper’s removal of the murder weapon), and subsequent letters to the Central News Agency (as if to involve himself in the investigation), suggest the more calculating organised non-social type.
In itself, this is not unusual: FBI analysts at Quantico frequently encounter serial killers who display ‘mixed’ organised and disorganised characteristics. By carefully weighing all the available evidence – police report, results of forensic tests, pathologist’s report, crime scene photographs, etc. – they still produce an accurate profile of the type of offender responsible. Pathologists’ reports aside, little else of analytical value is available today on the Jack the Ripper murders, for nineteenth-century police investigators had no specialised technique for analysing such apparently ‘motiveless’ murders.
Ongoing, modern research suggests there could well be a third, entirely feasible explanation for the abrupt cessation of the Victorian serial murders; that the Ripper may have been arrested and jailed for some unrelated offence after murdering Mary Jane Kelly in November 1988, and thus removed from society involuntarily. This is frequently found to be the case in the United States whenever a series of violent crimes (rape as well as murder) ceases abruptly, without the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible. For example, the ‘Boston Strangler’ committed the first of his thirteen murders on 14 June 1962. His victim was Anna Slesers, a fifty-five-year-old seamstress. Victim number thirteen died on 4 January 1964. She was Mary Sullivan, a student of nineteen who was working her way through night school. Her murder reduced the city of Boston to near panic, as the police searched in vain for the unknown killer and the manhunt entered its third calendar year. Then in February 1965 a man named Albert DeSalvo – detained at the time in a Boston mental institution, awaiting trial on charges not immediately connected with the murder inquiries – began boasting incessantly to other inmates about his sexual exploits. Among his captive audience was George Nassar, a schizophrenic who himself faced charges of first-degree murder.
It suddenly dawned on Nassar that DeSalvo was Boston’s most wanted man. He told his lawyer, the remarkable F. Lee Bailey, who also represented DeSalvo after he confessed to being the Strangler. Ironically, when DeSalvo was jailed for life in 1967, he was removed from society permanently: within six years he was stabbed to death by an unknown fellow prisoner. (See Albert DeSalvo, alias the Boston Strangler pp. 206–18).
Similarly the Manson gang was arrested in the autumn of 1969 only after ‘Family’ member Susan Atkins – by then in custody on an unrelated charge – told a cellmate about her involvement in the Sharon Tate murders. The Hollywood murders were front-page news, the information immensely valuable to any remand prisoner hoping to bargain for her release; and as soon as it filtered back to the Los Angeles police department, Susan Atkins’ accomplices were quickly rounded up and the whole gang brought to trial.
Many serial killers habitually commit offences other than homicide – Carlton Gary was also a burglar, Ted Bundy a car thief, Robert Hansen an obsessional shoplifter. As a result, when a run of violent serial crimes ends suddenly without the arrest of a suspect, the investigating law enforcement officers in the United States do not automatically regard suicide as a likely reason. Statistics show that such offenders are usually: one, in custody for some unrelated offence, or two, have left the area because the publicity generated by their murders has made them increasingly nervous of arrest. When this happens, the move will probably have been planned to avoid arousing suspicion – by changing jobs, perhaps, or joining the armed forces. Should a cycle of similar violent crimes suddenly start up elsewhere, they will – once reported to the FBI at Quantico – be automatically linked to the previous offences by VICAP (see here) the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme databank. If no such new outbreak is reported, the analysts may then examine a third possibility; that the suspect has died, either from accident, natural causes – or suicide.
Although the 1980s was the decade in which murder and the serial murderer came very much to the fore, violent crime of every kind had been on the increase in the United States for years beforehand. A general rise in crimes of violence in the United States started circa 1963, and with it a sea change in traditional American habits also manifested itself. Increasingly over the next two decades, and especially in the big cities, it became the accepted practice for many people never to open their doors to callers without first vetting them – either by voice identification, or via a closed-circuit television screen. In some areas – in Hollywood for example, following the Manson gang murders – the more affluent took to hiring private guards and/or dog handlers to provide additional security; but no matter what precautions were adopted, the national violent crime graph continued inexorably to rise.
By 1980, the country faced the worst crisis in its criminal history. A floodtide of violence – rape, arson, aggravated assault, armed robbery, abduction and street mugging – reached record levels, and there was no sign of abatement. Above all 1980 was a year of murder galore. Special agent Roger L. Depue, then head of the FBI Behavioural Science Unit’s training and research wing at Quantico (and later Administrator of the newly-formed National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime), painted a g
rim word picture of America’s entry into the 1980s. ‘More than 20,000 people were being murdered per year as we entered the new decade. The year 1980 itself became a record year, with more than 23,000 people becoming victims of homicide. It was unprecedented mayhem. The rates for other serious violent crimes such as aggravated assault, forcible rape, and robbery were equally disturbing. Predatory stranger-to-stranger violent crime was increasing steadily, while the number of cases cleared by arrest were decreasing. It was a downward spiral. Something had to be done.’
The record total of 23,000-plus murders in 1980 meant that the homicide rate in the United States had more than doubled since the graph began its upward climb in 1963. It represented an average rate of 63 murders a day, 440 each week, 1,900 per month – an orgy of homicide which tarnished the national image abroad, as well as arousing fear and anger at home. In contrast the sum total of murders committed in 1980 in Britain – with a population numbering roughly one quarter that of the United States – was 549.
There was no mistaking America’s reaction. Public outrage and alarm, which had risen hand-in-hand with each successive upward surge in lawlessness, came to a head. Now the Administration was compelled to find some way of applying the brakes; nothing less would suffice. Lois Haight Herrington, who chaired the President’s Task Force on Victims of Crime, minced no words when delivering her report to the White House. ‘Something insidious has happened in America: crime has made victims of us all. Awareness of its danger affects the way we think, where we live, where we go, what we buy, how we raise our children, and the quality of our lives as we age. The spectre of violent crime and the knowledge that, without warning, any person can be attacked or crippled, robbed, or killed, lurks at the fringes of consciousness. Every citizen of this country is more impoverished, less free, more fearful, and less safe because of the ever present threat of the criminal. Rather than alter a system that has proven itself incapable of dealing with crime, society has altered itself.’
Clearly it had; America was in danger of becoming a fortress society. Fortunately, new techniques to help combat violent crime – particularly the apparently ‘motiveless’ murders which were consistently making the headlines – had already been devised and successfully employed by agents from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia. In essence, these men were ‘reading’ the crime scene for behavioural clues which would enable them to profile the type of offender responsible (as distinct from the individual). Another way in which the new method differed from traditional ‘psychological profiling’ was that this technique of criminal analysis – which combined behavioural clues deduced from crime scene evidence, statistical probability, and the intuitive judgement which comes to the investigator from years of experience – offered a systematic approach to crime investigation, as opposed to guidance based on the professional assessment of a psychologist or psychiatrist.
The idea sprang from hours of two-way discussion between Behavioural Science Unit instructors and ‘students’ (many of whom were experienced police officers) attending specialist training courses at the FBI Academy at Quantico. Then as now, informal exchanges about bizarre or unusual homicides confronting ‘students’ in their home areas were constantly encouraged. In time the instructors – who alone provided the continuity – were able to say to new classes: ‘We traded ideas recently on a similar case with another class – and they’ve since made an arrest.’ The lessons learned would then be passed on, and contact maintained. As other arrests followed, and more and more common behavioural traits began to emerge, so the FBI instructors reversed the process – and began to translate crime scene evidence, backed by police reports, autopsy findings and so on – into positive behavioural characteristics, which enabled them to build a profile of the type of offender responsible for apparently ‘motiveless’ crimes.
One important early accomplishment was their ability to identify murderers as either ‘organised’ or ‘disorganised’ offenders. In itself it provided an immediate, easy to picture, lead to the type of criminal involved: basically, the organised serial killer plans his crimes, whereas the disorganised type is more of an opportunist. The opportunist is more likely, for instance, to murder his victim with the nearest weapon to hand – a stone, say – while the organised killer usually carries the murder weapon with him (knife, gun, length of rope), plus the restraints he intends to use (gag, handcuffs, etc.). Early investigations produced failure as well as success. The problem was that the fledgling law enforcement-designed technique of profiling sex killers by organised and disorganised classification depended over-heavily on investigative experience (and often, intuition): further guidelines from within the same behavioural concept were urgently needed.
To this end a second important, related step was taken in the late 1970s to extend the scope of this new profiling technique. FBI agents from the Behavioural Science Unit, together with other agents specially trained for the task, began carrying out a survey of thirty-six convicted sex murderers held in jails throughout the United States. Of these, twenty-five were serial killers. The rest were either single, double or ‘spree’ (see next chapter for homicide classification) killers. Twenty-four were organised murderers, twelve disorganised. It was the first time in any country that such a survey – and on this scale – had been conducted. Given the co-operation of the convicted men (some of whom were on Death Row, see here) the potential value of the information available, in terms of criminal behaviour analysis, was immeasurable.
Each FBI interviewer possessed detailed knowledge of the offender’s serial murders and criminal record overall, from courtroom transcripts, police records, prison, probationary and psychiatric reports. Every scrap of information on the victims’ background and lifestyle was also collated. What the prison interviews afforded was a unique opportunity to match established facts with the offender’s eye-witness account of all that transpired before, during and after each murder he had committed. The quest for common behavioural characteristics in both the organised and disorganised types of serial killer included questions about childhood and adolescence – the all-important ‘rearing environment’ which had shaped them, first into children who tortured pets or set fire to houses, and finally into adults who committed fantasy-inspired serial murder. Only such men – some awaiting almost certain execution – could reveal the thinking behind their selection of the ‘stranger’ victims (or types of stranger victim) they targeted, often abducted, almost invariably physically and sexually assaulted, and sometimes tortured before murdering. Only they possessed first-hand experience of the compulsive frenzy (or ‘voices’) which drove them to perform each ‘signed’ mutilation of their victims’ bodies; or could describe the various phases they passed through in the course of each bizarre murder, and describe the various stratagems they adopted to evade detection and arrest for so long.
By any investigative standards, here was priceless material for analysis. The FBI does not disclose the names of the murderers who took part. However, the information they volunteered was sufficient to form an encyclopaedic databank guide to future behavioural analysis; a guide which is continually being reviewed and extended as new material flows in. (So successful was the original survey that prison interviews of convicted serial killers is now an ongoing process.) Even before it was fully completed – in 1983 – enough had been learned to ensure that no time was wasted when US Attorney General William French Smith called on all the agencies of the Justice Department for urgent recommendations on how best to contain and reduce the record 1980 violent crime figures.
In November 1982, following a meeting between members of the Criminal Personality Research Project advisory board (who had instituted the thirty-six killer survey) and other specialists, the bold concept of a single National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, was put forward. That proposal was unanimously adopted seven months later by a conference of all the interested parties, held at the Sam Houston University’s Centre for Criminal Justice i
n Huntsville, Texas. The delegates further agreed that the NCAVC should be founded at the FBI Academy in Quantico, and run by the agents of the elite Behavioural Science Unit. President Reagan then formally announced its establishment on 21 June 1984 when he gave it the primary mission of ‘identifying and tracking repeat killers’.
The NCAVC was never envisaged as a replacement for traditional crime investigation by local law enforcement agencies: there is no substitute for prompt, on-the-spot investigation by trained police officers. The need for a national centre arose because of the continuing rise in violent crime throughout the United States, a situation worsened by the ease with which transient serial offenders – killers, kidnappers, rapists and arsonists alike – could remain at large, simply by crossing the state lines in a country served by numerous independent jurisdictions. The NCAVC sees its proper role as a clearing house-cum-resource centre in the combined national fight against all violent criminals.