Now Write! Mysteries

PETER JAMES is the author of the internationally bestselling Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, published in thirty-four languages with world sales of more than six million copies, and a further fifteen thrillers, which have also been highly successful. Three of his books have been filmed and his current series is in development for television. His novel Dead Like You was published by Minotaur in November 2010, and his latest, Dead Man’s Grip, was published by Minotaur in November 2011.

For me, research is as important an element in writing my novels as character and plot. I view each of these elements as an inseparable trinity. Each of my Roy Grace novels has its genesis in a true story or in research facts—as indeed do all of my previous novels. My first Roy Grace novel, Dead Simple, came out of my fascination as a child with Poe and the terrifying notion of premature burial—and the research I did into whether such a thing as unintentional premature burial can happen today.

As a crime novelist, I am intrigued by seemingly normal people who do terrible things. Many of our worst monsters don’t walk around with the words “Rapist” or “Serial Killer” tattooed on their foreheads; they wear suits and spectacles. They are often successful professionals or businessmen, most of them with adoring wives and children, and they are viewed by friends and neighbors as pillars of their community.

Dr. Harold Shipman, sentenced to fifteen life sentences in 2000, killed more than 250 people. Yet all of his patients and his wife revered this quiet family doctor, and one Greater Manchester detective described him as “the dullest killer I have ever met.” Dennis Nilsen, convicted in 1983 for the murder and cannibalism of fifteen boys and men and known as “The Kindly Killer,” had been a police officer and then a civil servant. Ted Bundy, a handsome university graduate and former law student who had worked for the Republican Party, was executed in 1989 for raping and murdering an estimated thirty-five young women. In 2005, Wichita’s Dennis Rader, self-styled “BTK”—Bind, Torture, Kill—was convicted on ten counts of murder. A local government compliance officer, married, with two teenage daughters who worshipped him, he was a pleasant-looking man of fifty and, as a scout leader and a church warden, a much-respected man in his community.

I’m curious about what makes these people do the things they do. From the perspective of writing an intriguing novel, their intelligence, cunning, and ability to remain calm and methodical make them all the harder for the police to detect and catch.

Three years ago I attended a police forensics lecture on the latest advances in DNA and learned of a case, that of the Rotherham Shoe Rapist, which was to become the inspiration for my sixth Roy Grace novel, Dead Like You.

Between 1983 and 1986, a number of women, ranging from eighteen to fifty-three years old, walking home at night from clubs or pubs in Rotherham and Barnsley in South Yorkshire, were dragged off the streets and brutally raped by a man with a stocking over his head. He would truss them up and take their shoes as trophies, occasionally items of jewelry as well.

In 1986 he stopped, suddenly, and the police trail went cold. Detectives on the case believed that the attacker must have been a known sex offender who had either died or been jailed for other offenses, or as sometimes happens with serial offenders, who was simply having an extended cooling-off period. But in fact, James Lloyd, a divorcé with one child, stopped for a much less obvious reason: he had remarried, and was soon to father two more children.

Police files on rape and murder are never closed. By the early 1990s, DNA typing was being used on cold cases such as this one, but no matches to the “Shoe Man” were found. Then, in the early 2000s, there was a major breakthrough in forensic DNA analysis: familial DNA typing came into existence. Now a partial—or familial—match could be obtained from a relative of the perpetrator. U.S. law enforcement came up with the slogan “If you have a brother doing time, don’t commit a crime!”

South Yorkshire Police reopened the case and had their first piece of good fortune. A DNA sample from a woman, who had been arrested earlier on a drunk-driving charge, produced a familial match with the rapist. When the police went round to her home to ask if she had a brother, she replied that she did, but he was a respectable businessman, the manager of a large printing works, who had never been in trouble, so it could not possibly be him. However, when she phoned to tell her brother of the police’s interest, his immediate reaction was to phone his father and tell him to look after his family; he then attempted, unsuccessfully, to hang himself in his garage. His life was saved by his son, who cut him down.

Searching Lloyd’s office, the police lifted a concealed trapdoor and found a cache of 126 stiletto-heeled shoes, individually wrapped in cellophane; numerous stockings and tights; and some of his victims’ jewelry.

Lloyd, an attractive man of forty-nine and a Freemason, lived with his family in a $575,000 four-bedroom detached house in Thurnscoe, near Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The Senior Investigating Officer, Detective Inspector Angie Wright, said, “This man was to all intents and purposes a perfectly respectable businessman with a family, and a pillar of society.” None of his family or anyone around James Lloyd suspected for one moment that he could be the notorious shoe rapist. His wife said, “He has always been a good husband, good father, and hardworking. I had never had any indication he had the capacity for anything like that.”

The Lloyd story appealed to me for a number of reasons. I had wanted to write a crime story centered on rape for a long while. As with all my books, I desired to explore the subject from all perspectives : from the perpetrator, the victim, and the police—and this case, with the intriguing fetish of the shoes, ticked all the boxes. It also ticked another box—my central character, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, is in charge of Sussex Criminal Investigative Unit cold cases as well as being a homicide detective busy investigating present-day crimes. I thought this story would give me a unique opportunity to show how attitudes had changed within the police toward rape and, in particular, victims of rape, in little over a decade.

Fifteen years ago, a victim would probably be questioned by a cynical male officer, who would as likely as not say: “You went out in that miniskirt? Well, you were asking for it, weren’t you?” Today a victim would be interviewed by same-sex officers, in a dedicated, secure interview suite attached to a hospital, where she (or he) would be made to feel safe and would be cared for and treated sympathetically. Every police force in the United Kingdom now has such a suite.

A fact little realized by victims is that they themselves become “crime scenes”—it is on or in their bodies that much of the key forensic evidence lies, from semen or saliva to something as microscopic as a single skin cell or a clothing fiber. In the forensic examination of rape victims, Edmond Locard’s pioneering principle “Every contact leaves a trace” applies more than for almost any other kind of crime.

Until recently, the impact of rape has been underrated by everyone except for the victims. Maggie Wright, who runs a charity rape crisis center in Winchester, told me, “For a person to be raped is like being in a bad car smash. One moment you are happily walking along, living your life, the next you are lying in the wreckage of it. You receive mental injuries that will never heal.” Maggie went on to tell me of the distress suffered by many victims in the aftermath and how some will even maim themselves. “I’ve seen young women who have scrubbed their vaginas with wire wool and bleach to get rid of all traces of the perpetrator,” she told me.

Although the rapes perpetrated by James Lloyd and those in my novel are “stranger rapes,” this kind of rape is relatively rare. More than eighty percent of all rapes are inflicted by a person the victim knows—whether a relative or someone met in a bar or at a party or on a social networking site such as Facebook. But the damage can be bad or even worse when the victim is raped by someone the victim knows—many victims find themselves never able to trust any other human being again.

I was fortunate to receive a great deal of help during my research from DI Tracy Edwards and her colleagues at the Sussex Police Rape Prevention Team. Her answer to one of my questions, “What does a rapist get out of it?” surprised me, because it is not the obvious one. “For many rapists it is power over their victim, rather than sexual gratification itself,” said DI Edwards. “Some rapists find themselves unable to climax at all during the attack.”

The explanation of what turns someone into a rapist is even wider-ranging. And there is no one simple explanation for a fetishist. According to psychiatrist and author Dr. Dennis Friedman: “It could be as simple as a young man whose mother is always leaving him to meet a lover, and the sound of her clicking heels fading terrifies him, because they are taking her to get love from someone else, and not from him. So he first associates the sound of heels with love, then the idea of shoes is connected to the sex act.”

EXERCISE