Sex Crime—The Beginnings
The Jack the Ripper murders, which took place in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888, are generally acknowledged to be the first sex murders in our modern sense of the term. But a century before that date, London was also the scene of the first crimes that we would regard as sexually abnormal—the series of knife attacks on women by a man who became known as the “London Monster.”
In the words of the chronicler J. W. von Archenholtz, he committed “nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamt of.” These nameless crimes amounted to creeping up behind fashionably dressed women and slashing at their clothing with a sharp knife, which occasionally caused painful wounds; it was also alleged that he would hold out a nosegay to young ladies, and as they bent to sniff it, would jab them in the face with a “sharp pointed instrument” hidden among the flowers. He was also known to jab bosoms.
During the months he was attacking women, the London Monster created a reign of terror: rewards were offered for his capture and walls covered in posters describing his activities.
It seems that he became obsessed with the pretty daughter of a tavern keeper, Anne Porter, and followed her in Saint James’s Park, making obscene suggestions. On the night of January 18, 1790, when she was returning from a ball with her two sisters, he came up behind her, and she felt a slashing blow on her right buttock. Indoors, she discovered that she had a nine-inch-wide knife wound that was four inches deep in the center. Six months later, out walking with a gentleman named Coleman, Anne recognized the Monster in the park. Coleman followed the man to a nearby house, accused him of being the attacker, and made a kind of “citizen’s arrest.” The man adamantly denied being the Monster, but Anne fainted when she saw him.
The Monster proved to be a slightly built man young man named Renwick Williams, twenty-three, a maker of artificial flowers. It seemed that Williams was from Wales, had received some education, and come to London under the auspices of a gentleman who was a patron of the theater. Williams was hoping to become an actor or dancer, but proved to lack the talent and application. Instead he dressed “above his station” and aspired to become a ladies’ man, drinking rather too much. So the picture we form of him is of an introspective “wannabe,” dreaming of fame, and sexually stimulated by fashionable young ladies, whose bare arms and half-covered bosoms must have struck a country-bred youth as wickedly exciting. Slashing these provocative garments—and penetrating the body underneath—probably induced a sexual climax.
At his trial, Williams insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity; and even offered an alibi. The jury chose to disbelieve him, however, and he was sentenced to six years in prison for “damaging clothes.” The prosecuting counsel talked of “a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible.” All of which demonstrates that the eighteenth century was very far from any comprehension of sex crime.
That is understandable because, for all practical purposes, the nineteenth century saw the real beginning of the “age of sex crime.” Before that, a majority of crime was motivated by profit. But already, by 1790, Renwick Williams was becoming so excited by the provocatively clad ladies of London that he became the first “sadistic piqueur.”
In 1807 and 1808, Andrew Bichel a peasant in Regensdorf, Bavaria, murdered two young women, apparently for their clothes, then dismembered their bodies and buried them in his woodshed. He later tried unsuccessfully to lure other women to his cottage. It is not clear whether, as did the London Monster, he had a fetish for female dress, but when dogs sniffed out the women’s remains, Bichel was tried for murder and beheaded.
In 1867, as noted earlier, the clerk Frederick Baker, murdered eight-year-old Fanny Adams in Alton, Hampshire, and wrote in his diary: “Killed a young girl yesterday—it was fine and hot.”
In 1871, a French youth, Eusebius Pieydagnelle, begged the jury to sentence him to death for four murders of girls, and explained to them that he had become fascinated by the smell of blood from the butcher’s shop opposite his home in Vinuville, and persuaded his middle-class father to allow him to become an apprentice there. In the slaughterhouse, he drank blood and secretly wounded the animals. When his father removed him and apprenticed him to a lawyer, he went into deep depression, and began killing people, including a fifteen-year-old girl and his former employer.
In April 1880, twenty-year-old Louis Menesclou admitted to murdering four-year-old Louise Dreux and sleeping with the body before he attempted to burn it; he was executed.
But it was the five Jack the Ripper murders, which happened between August and November 1888, that achieved worldwide notoriety, and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new kind of problem: a killer who struck at random.
The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning of August 31, with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disemboweled. The next victim, another prostitute, Annie Chapman, was found spread-eagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disemboweled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner—a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many serial killers.
The two murders engendered nationwide shock and outrage—nothing of the sort had been known before—and this was increased when, on the morning of September 30, 1888, the killer murdered two pickups in one night. A letter signed “Jack the Ripper,” boasting of the “double event,” was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders. When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the killer, there was unprecedented public hysteria. As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far. A twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disemboweled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours. Then the murders ceased—the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home.
From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.
Robert Ressler wrote in I Have Lived in the Monster: “Sexual satisfaction for Jack the Ripper, and others of his ilk, derives from seeing the victim’s blood spilt” and pointed out that cutting out uteruses and opening the vagina with his knife leaves no doubt that the crimes were sexual (by which, presumably, he means that they were accompanied by orgasm).
In 1988, a century after the Ripper murders, a television company in the United States decided to do a two-hour live special on the case, and asked John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood to participate. Their provocative conclusions are described in Dark Dreams by Hazelwood and Michaud.
To begin with, Douglas and Hazelwood were interested to learn of the vast amount of evidence that would be available to them, from coroner’s reports, witnesses’ statements, and police files; there were even photographs. In addition, they were presented with a list of five favorite suspects, which included Queen Victoria’s physician Sir William Gull; the heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor; Roslyn Donston, a Satanist and occultist who lived in Whitechapel; Montague Druitt, a melancholic schoolmaster who drowned himself soon after the last murder; and a psychotic Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. The latter two were listed as leading suspects in a private memorandum by Sir Melville Macnaghten, who had been assistant chief constable at Scotland Yard soon after the murders. Most of these suspects were dismissed on various grounds—for example, Sir William Gull had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side a year before the murders and would have been in no condition to prowl the streets, while Prince Albert Victor had solid alibis.
But the most interesting part of the program was the analysis presented by the profilers:
[John] explained that Jack was like a predatory animal who would be out nightly looking for weak and susceptible victims for his grotesque sexual fantasies. Douglas told the TV audience that with such a killer, you do not expect to see a definite time pattern because he kills as opportunity presents itself. He added that such killers return to the scenes of their successful crimes.
He surmised that Jack was a white male in his mid-to-late-twenties and of average intelligence. John and I agreed that Jack the Ripper wasn’t nearly as clever as he was lucky. I then said that we thought Jack was single, never married, and probably did not socialize with women at all. He would have had a great deal of difficulty interacting appropriately with anyone, but particularly women.
I said Jack lived very close to the crime scenes because we know that such offenders generally start killing within very close proximity to their homes. If Jack was employed, it would have been at menial work requiring little or no contact with others.
I went on to say that, as a child, Jack probably set fires and abused animals and that as an adult his erratic behavior would have brought him to the attention of the police at some point.
John added that Jack seemed to have come from a broken home and was raised by a dominant female who physically abused him, possibly even sexually abused him. Jack would have internalized this abuse rather than act it out toward those closest to him.
John described Jack as socially withdrawn, a loner, having poor personal hygiene, and a disheveled appearance. Such characteristics are hallmarks of this type of offender. He said that people who know this type of person often report he is nocturnal, preferring the hours of darkness to daytime. When he is out at night, he typically covers great distances on foot.
I said that Jack simultaneously hated and feared women. They intimidated him, and his feeling of inadequacy was evident in the way he killed. I noted that the Ripper had subdued and murdered his victims quickly. There was no evidence that he savored this part of his crime; he didn’t torture the women or prolong their deaths. He attacked suddenly and without warning, quickly cutting their throats.
The psychosexually pleasurable part came for him in the acts following death. By displacing or removing his victims’ sexual parts and organs, Jack was neutering or de-sexing them so that they were no longer women to be feared.
I find this profile convincing and impressive. It sounds, of course, oddly like Ramirez, the Night Stalker. The skill of Douglas and Hazelwood in profiling killers has been so fully demonstrated in this book, it seems to me probable that this is as accurate a profile of the Ripper as we shall ever get.
It should be noted that the profilers do not feel that it is likely that Jack the Ripper was a “gentleman,” as so many theorists have suggested since the time of the murders. They see him as working class.
That also rules out the suspect suggested by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell—that the Ripper was the artist Walter Sickert. I would also rule out Sickert on other grounds. This kind of murder is an explosion of frustration—this is why we so often say that a killer is a “walking time bomb.” No artist or creative person is likely to experience this degree of mental stress and frustration. In fact, I have pointed out in A Criminal History of Mankind that no creative artist has ever committed a murder. A few have killed in the course of quarrels or duels, such as Ben Jonson and Caravaggio, or to revenge honor, like the composer Gesualdo, but never a premeditated crime of violence.
The only remaining Ripper suspect of the five named above is Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish hairdresser who came to England in 1882 in his late teens, and who spent a number of periods in an insane asylum. He died in 1919.
This is not to suggest that Kosminski has to be Jack the Ripper. There are a number of other candidates, including a homicidal Russian doctor named Michael Ostrog, also on Sir Melvile Macnaghten’s list. And there may be some so-far unknown who fits the FBI profile even better. But it probably does mean that we should not be looking for suspects who do not qualify as “gentlemen.”
From the end of the Victorian age until the beginning of World War II there were no British serial killers. In London in early 1942, a member of the Royal Air Force named Gordon Cummins became known as the Blackout Ripper when he took advantage of the London blackout to murder four women. Although the motive seems to have been primarily robbery, there was also a sadistic sexual element in that he mutilated one woman with a can opener and two with razor blades. He was arrested on February 15 after a passer-by interrupted an attack, and he fled, leaving his gas mask with his service number on it. He was later hanged.
Another airman, Neville Heath, would undoubtedly have gone on to become a serial killer if he hadn’t been caught after his second murder in July 1946. On June 21, 1946, he had escorted a model named Margery Gardner to a London hotel; Gardner had masochistic tendencies and Heath had a taste for flogging women. But he seems to have become over-excited and left her dead and mutilated. Two weeks later, staying in a hotel in Bournemouth, he insisted on accompanying twenty-one-year-old Doreen Marshall back to her hotel. He then murdered and mutilated her in a wooded gorge. He was arrested, and a jeweler identified him as the man who had sold him Doreen Marshall’s watch; Heath was hanged at Pentonville Prison on October 16, 1946.
Despite royal conspiracy theorists claims, and a number of books that name him as a plausible suspect, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was not Jack the Ripper. Reputable historians and most “Ripperologists” discount these theories as highly unlikely, if not downright preposterous.
Britain’s first true serial killer since Jack the Ripper was the middle-aged John Reginald Halliday Christie, who committed eight sex murders in London’s Notting Hill between 1943 and 1953. To his neighbors, the most irritating thing about Christie was his authoritarian personality. As a special reserve constable during World War II, he became notorious for his officiousness—he enjoyed reporting people for minor blackout offences.
A sexually frustrated loner who suffered from bouts of impotence, his solution was to persuade women to inhale a nasal decongestant called Friar’s Balsam, which is added to boiling water, and then breathed in with a towel covering the head. Christie would then introduce a rubber pipe attached to the gas supply, which quickly induced unconsciousness, after which the women were strangled as he raped them. This is the method he employed with his first two victims, an Austrian part-time prostitute named Ruth Fuerst, twenty-one, strangled in September 1943, and a fellow-employee at a radio factory, Muriel Eady, thirty-one, killed three months later. In his confession, Christie would declare that after killing her, “I felt that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.”
On both occasions his wife, Ethel, was away in Sheffield visiting her family.
Christie’s next murder, in 1949, was that of Beryl Evans, twenty-two, the wife of a Welsh laborer, Timothy Evans, twenty-seven, who lived in the upper floor of the slum terrace house at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. The Evanses had a year-old baby, Geraldine. Lack of money caused frequent quarrels, and when Beryl found she was pregnant again, she decided to have an abortion. Christie claimed to be a skilled abortionist. On the morning of November 8, 1949, Christie went up to her flat, and told her to lie on a quilt in front on the fire, and take a few sniffs of gas to anaesthetize her. Then he strangled her and almost certainly raped her.
When her husband came home from work, Christie told him that this wife had died during the attempted abortion, and said they would both face criminal charges when her death was discovered. Evans was of subnormal intelligence, and the likeliest scenario is that Christie somehow persuaded him to kill baby Geraldine. Then both bodies were concealed in the outside washhouse. Somehow, Evans was convinced that he had to sell his furniture and flee to Wales. There he went to the police station and confessed to “disposing of” his wife, and to strangling her and his daughter. By the time he was tried for their murder, he had changed his mind and accused Christie of strangling his wife and child, but the jury did not believe him, and he was hanged. Christie was a witness against him and was commended by the judge.
Ethel Christie had a strong suspicion, amounting to a certainty, that her husband was somehow involved in the murders—she had noticed his extreme nervousness at the time. She confided her belief to a neighbor, and when Christie came in and caught them discussing the case, he flew into a rage. This could explain why, on December 14, 1952, he strangled Ethel in bed. It could also have been that he experienced a compulsion to commit more sex crimes, and that Ethel stood in his way. Christie told her family in Sheffield that she was unable to write because she had rheumatism in her fingers.
In mid-January 1953 Christie picked up a prostitute called Kathleen Maloney in a pub in Paddington, and invited her back to his flat. As she sat in a deckchair in the kitchen, he placed the gas pipe under the chair; she was too drunk to notice. When she was unconscious, he raped and strangled her and put her in the closet
The next victim, Rita Nelson, was six months pregnant; Christie may have lured her back with the offer of an abortion. She also ended in the cupboard—the second body.
About a month later, Christie met a girl called Hectorina Maclennan, who told him she was looking for a flat. She and her boyfriend actually spent three nights in Christie’s flat, now devoid of furniture (Christie had sold it). On March 5, Hectorina made the mistake of going back to the flat alone. She grew nervous when she saw Christie toying with a gas-pipe and tried to leave; Christie killed her and raped her. When her boyfriend came to inquire about her, she was in the cupboard, and Christie claimed not to have seen her. As Christie gave him tea, the boyfriend noticed “a very nasty smell,” but had no suspicion he was sitting within feet of her corpse.
During the next few months, the squalid little flat was allowed to become filthy and untidy. Christie had no job and made no attempt to find one. A week later, he sublet the flat to another couple, collected £7 13s. for rent in advance, and wandered off, leaving the decomposing bodies in the closet that was now disguised by a layer of wallpaper. The owner of the house, finding the flat sublet, ordered the new tenants to leave, and looked into the closet. In spite of the hue and cry that followed, Christie made no attempt to escape from London, even registering at a cheap doss house under his own name. He walked around, becoming increasingly dirty and unshaven, until a policeman recognized him on Putney Bridge. What happened to him in those last weeks of freedom? It is tempting to suppose that he ceased to be responsible for his actions. Yet he continued to plan and calculate: even when on the run, he met a pregnant young woman in a café, and told her he was a medical man who could perform an operation . . .
He was tried for only one murder, that of his wife, and pleaded insanity. Found guilty, John Reginal Christie was hanged on July 15, 1953.
Christie seems to have been a highly neurotic since his early days in Halifax, in the north of England, when a sexual failure in adolescence caused him to be labeled “Reggie-no-dick,” and “Can’t-do-it Christie” But the determining factor that finally turned him into a sex killer may well have been an accident he suffered when he first came to London in 1922; he was struck by a car and was unconscious when taken to hospital—one more to add to the list of serial killers with suspected head injuries.
The series of unsolved murders known as the “Thames Nude Murders” deserves a place in any history of manhunting because the detective who led the investigation believes that it was his game of psychological cat and mouse that drove the killer to suicide.
Between February 1964 and January 1965, the bodies of six women, mostly prostitutes, were found in areas not far from the Thames. The first of the bodies, that of a thirty-year-old prostitute by the name of Hanna Tailford, was found in the water near Hammersmith Bridge. She was naked except for her stockings, and her panties had been stuffed into her mouth. On April 18, the naked body of Irene Lockwood, a twenty-six-year-old prostitute, was found at Duke’s Meadows, near Barnes Bridge. She had been strangled and, like Hanna Tailford, had been pregnant. A fifty-four-year-old Kensington caretaker, Kenneth Archibald, confessed to her murder, and he seemed to know a great deal about the victim, but at his trial it was established that his confession was false. Archibald was acquitted.
There was another reason for believing in his innocence: while he was still in custody, another naked woman was found in an alleyway at Osterley Park, Brentford. This was only three weeks after the discovery of Irene Lockwood’s body. The dead woman—the only one among the victims who could be described as pretty—was identified as twenty-two-year-old prostitute and striptease artist Helen Barthelemy. There were a number of curious features in the case. A line around her waist showed that her panties had been removed some time after death, and there was no evidence of normal sexual assault. But four of her front teeth were missing. Oddly enough, the teeth had not been knocked out by a blow, but deliberately forced out—a piece of one of them was found lodged in her throat. Medical investigation also revealed the presence of male semen in her throat. Here, then, was the cause of death: she had been choked by a penis, probably in the course of performing an act of fellatio. The missing teeth suggested that the killer had repeated the assault after death. It was established that she had disappeared some days before her body was found. Where, then, had her body been kept?
Flakes of paint found on her skin suggested the answer, for it was the type of paint used in spraying cars. Clearly, the body had been kept somewhere near a car-spraying plant, but in some place where it was not likely to be discovered by the workers.
Enormous numbers of police were deployed in the search for the spray shop and in an attempt to keep a closer watch on the areas in which the three victims had been picked up, around Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush. Perhaps for this reason, the killer decided to take no risks for several months.
The body of the fourth victim—Mary Fleming, thirty, was found on July 14, 1964. Her false teeth were missing, there was semen in her throat, and her skin showed traces of the same spray paint found on Helen Barthelemy. She had vanished three days earlier.
Her body was found in a half-crouching position near a garage in Acton, and the van that took her there was actually seen leaving the scene of the crime. A motorist driving past Berrymede Road, a cul-de-sac, at 5:30 in the morning, had to brake violently to avoid a van that shot out in front of him. He was so angry that he contacted the police to report the incident, but had failed to take note of the license plate number. A squad car that arrived a few minutes later found Mary’s body in the forecourt of a garage in the cul-de-sac.
The near miss probably alarmed the killer, for no further murders occurred that summer. Then, on November 25, 1964, another naked corpse was found under some debris in a car park in Hornton Street, Kensington. It was identified as Margaret McGowan, twenty-one, who had disappeared more than a month before her body was found, and there were signs of decomposition. Again, there were traces of paint on the body, and a missing front tooth indicated that she had died in the same way as the previous two victims.
The last of the “Jack the Stripper” victims was a prostitute named Bridie O’Hara, twenty-eight, who was found on February 16, 1965, in some undergrowth on the Heron Trading Estate, in Acton. She had last been seen on January 11. The body was partly mummified, which indicated that it had been kept in a cool place. As usual, teeth were missing and sperm was found in the throat. Fingermarks on the back of her neck revealed that, like the other victims, she had died in a kneeling position.
Detective Chief Superintendent John du Rose was recalled from his holiday to take charge of the investigation in the Shepherd’s Bush area. The Heron Trading Estate provided the lead they had been waiting for. Investigation of a paint spray shop revealed that this was the source of the paint found on the bodies—chemical analysis proved it. The proximity of a disused warehouse solved the question of where the bodies had been kept before they were dumped. The powerful spray guns caused the paint to carry, with diminishing intensity, for several hundred yards. Analysis of paint on the bodies enabled experts to establish the spot where the women must have been concealed: it was underneath a transformer in the warehouse.
Yet even with this discovery, the case was far from solved. Thousands of men worked on the Heron Trading Estate. (Oddly enough, John Christie had been employed there). Mass questioning seemed to bring the police no closer to their suspect. Du Rose decided to throw a twenty-mile cordon around the area, to keep a careful check on all cars passing through at night. Drivers who were observed more than once were noted; if they were seen more than twice, they were interviewed. Du Rose conducted what he called “a war of nerves” against the killer, dropping hints in the press or on television that indicated the police were getting closer. They knew he drove a van and they knew he must have right of access to the trading estate by night. The size of the victims, who were all small women, suggested that the killer was under middle height. As the months passed, and no further murders took place, du Rose assumed that he was winning the war of nerves. The killer had ceased to operate. He checked on all men who had been jailed since mid-February, all men with prison records who had been hospitalized, all men who had died or committed suicide. In his book Murder Was My Business, du Rose claims that a list of twenty suspects had been reduced to three when one of the three committed suicide. He left a note saying that he could not bear the strain any longer. The man was a security guard who drove a van, and had access to the estate. At the time when the women were murdered, his rounds included the spray shop. He worked by night, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. He was unmarried.
The Moors Murder case was one of the most notorious British murder cases of the twentieth century.
Ian Brady, the illegitimate son of a waitress, was born in a tough Glasgow slum in 1938, and was farmed out to foster parents. He was intelligent and a good student, and at the age of eleven he won a scholarship to an expensive school. Many of his new fellow students came from well-to-do families, and—like so many serial killers—he developed a fierce resentment of his own underprivileged position. He began committing burglaries, and at thirteen was sentenced to two years’ probation for housebreaking; as soon as this ended he was sentenced to another two years for ten burglaries. He also practiced sadistic cruelty to animals. When his mother moved to Manchester with a new husband, he took a job in the market there, but was picked up by the police for helping to load stolen goods on to a truck. Since this was in violation of his probation, he was sentenced to a Borstal institution, a punishment he regarded as so unfair that he decided that from then on he would “teach society a lesson.”
At twenty-one, he became a clerk in Millwards, a chemical firm in Gorton, and began collecting books on the Nazis, and reading the Marquis de Sade—virtually the patron saint of serial killers. His books give expression to their basic belief that the individual owes nothing to society, and has the right to live in it in a kind of subjective dream world, treating morality as an illusion. Brady experienced a kind of religious conversion to these ideas. So far he had seen himself merely as a criminal; now—like Leonard Lake—he began to see himself as the heroic outcast, the scourge of a hypocritical society.
It was at about this point in his life that Myra Hindley entered the story. She was a completely normal working-class girl, not bad-looking, inclined to go in for blonde hairdos and bright lipstick, interested mainly in boys and dancing. She was a typical medium-dominance female, who would have been perfectly content with a reasonably hard-working boy-next-door. When she came to work at Millwards, she was fascinated by Brady’s sullen good looks and moody expression. But Brady was undoubtedly one of the dominant 5 percent (see chapter 4); he recognized her as a medium-dominance type and ignored her; at the end of six months he had not even spoken to her. Without encouragement Myra filled her diary with declarations of love: “I hope he loves me and will marry me some day.” Finally, Brady decided it would be a pity not to take advantage of the maidenhead that was being offered, and invited her out. Soon after this Myra surrendered her virginity on the divan bed in her gran’s front room.
For criminal couples, the combination of high- and medium-dominance egos usually produces an explosive mixture—as in the case of the Hillside Stranglers or Lake and Ng. The high-dominance partner finds himself regarded with admiration that acts as a kind of superfertilizer on his ego; in no time at all he develops a full-blown case of the Right Man syndrome. Brady found it intoxicating to have an audience; he talked to Myra enthusiastically about Hitler, and nicknamed her “Hessie”—from pianist Dame Myra Hess and the führer’s deputy Rudolf Hess.
But her sexual submission was not enough; it only intensified his craving to be a “somebody.” He announced that he was planning a series of payroll robberies, and induced her to join a local pistol club to gain access to guns. He also took photographs of her posing with crotchless panties and, using a timing device, of the two of them having sex. In some of the photographs—which Brady tried to sell—she has whip marks across her buttocks.
Sometime in 1963—when he was twenty-five and she twenty-one—he induced her to join with him in the murder of children. It is hard to understand how a typical medium-dominance woman allowed herself to be persuaded. But the answer undoubtedly lies in the curious chemistry of religious conversion. The love-struck Myra became the archetypal convert. Her sister Maureen would later describe in court how Myra had changed from being a normal young woman who loved children and animals to someone who was hostile and suspicious and said she hated human beings.
Brady’s motivation lay in his obsessive need to taste the delights of dominating another person, and the sadism that had developed in him since childhood. Myra became his “slave.” And when, in July 1963, he told her he wanted to rape Pauline Reade, a sixteen-year-old neighbor, Myra agreed to lure Pauline up on to the moor. Brady then arrived on his motorbike, and raped and strangled Pauline. Myra then helped Brady bury her on Saddleworth Moor.
In the next two years, he and Myra would commit four more murders. On October 23, 1963, they drove to the market at Ashton-under-Lyne, where twelve-year-old John Kilbride had been earning pocket money by doing odd jobs for stallholders. On that dark and foggy night a “kind lady” asked him if he wanted a lift. It was the last time John was seen alive. When his body was found two years later, his trousers had been pulled down to his knees. The police found the grave because Brady had taken a photograph of Myra Hindley kneeling on it.
On June 16, 1964, another twelve-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, vanished on his way to visit his grandmother in Manchester. His body has never been found.
On December 26, 1964, Myra arranged for her grandmother to stay with relatives for the night. At six o’clock that evening, she approached ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey at a fair and offered her a lift home. Lesley was taken back to the grandmother’s house, and forced to undress, after which Brady tape-recorded her pleas to be allowed to go home, and took photographs of her with a gag in her mouth. Brady raped her, but would later claim that it was Myra who strangled Lesley with a piece of cord. They kept the body in the house overnight before burying it on the moor.
Brady would later admit that committing so many murders had given him an odd sense of meaninglessness, of futility, which may be why he allowed almost a year to elapse before he killed again. This crime was not for “pleasure,” but to entrap Myra’s brother-in-law, David Smith, a young man who regarded Brady with hero worship, into becoming an accomplice. On October 6, 1965, the couple picked up a seventeen-year-old homosexual, Edward Evans, and took him back to the house. Then Myra called at her sister’s flat, and asked Smith to walk her home. As Smith stood in the kitchen, he heard a scream, and Myra pushed him into the sitting room, yelling. “Help him, Dave.” Brady was hacking at Evans with a hatchet. When Evans was dead, Brady handed the bloodstained hatchet to Smith, saying: “Feel the weight”—he wanted Smith’s fingerprints on it. But Smith was sickened and horrified by what he had seen (the FBI profiling team could have told Brady that a teenager would panic), and after drinking tea and agreeing to return the next day with a pram and help dispose of the body, he went home to his wife and vomited. Smith and his wife then went to the police. The next morning, a policeman dressed as a baker’s roundsman called at the house, and the body was found in a locked bedroom. Brady was arrested, and Myra was arrested the next day. Photographs of the graves led the police to uncover the bodies of two of the victims on Saddleworth Moor. In May 1966, both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Myra Hindley died in prison in November 2002.
By that time I had been in correspondence with Ian Brady for ten years. This came about because soon after Easter 1990, an attractive girl named Christine arrived at my house, explaining that she was a friend of Brady; she wanted to ask my advice about an autobiography she was writing, and whether she could quote his letters to her. I explained that Brady’s letters were his copyright, and that she could not quote them without his permission. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Brady, who was now in the Ashworth High Security Hospital near Liverpool, asking if it was true that I was helping Christine to write a book about him. I replied explaining the true situation, and Brady and I continued to correspond. In fact, I had always been curious about him, because it was obvious from the trial evidence that he was highly intelligent, and I was baffled by the way that he had converted ordinary Myra to becoming his accomplice in killing children.
My correspondence with Brady was my first contact with the mind of a serial killer. He was, in fact, as intelligent as I had supposed. But I quickly became aware that there were certain important factors that I had left out of account. William James wrote an essay called “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” And I soon came to recognize that a highly intelligent person can suffer from it just as much as a stupid person.
Brady was obsessed by the notion that the criminal has the right to be a criminal because society—particularly people in authority—commits far worse crimes. (He would cite the atom bomb and napalm.) It was no good pointing out to him that, even if that were true, two wrongs do not make a right. Brady’s hatred of authority was so absolute that he would not even consider the argument. Myra Hindley would describe how, after burying one of the victims, Brady shook his fist at the sky and shouted: “Take that, you bastard.”
Most of us can recognize how anger and humiliation makes us irrational, but even when cursing with fury, a part of us recognizes that we are being illogical, and surrendering to negative emotion. Brady seemed to possess a psychological mechanism that completely blocked any such notion. I once asked him if he ever thought about his victims; he replied: “That would be the quickest way to mental suicide.”
He obviously meant the same thing when he admitted to a journalist: “I felt old at twenty-six. Everything was ashes. I felt there was nothing of interest—nothing to hook myself on to. I had experienced everything.”
I suspect that this odd sense of moral bankruptcy affects most serial killers, and sometimes explains why they make mistakes that lead to their arrest.
Brady often told me that there had been a “hidden agenda” behind the murders, and that if I read certain of his letters carefully enough, I would grasp what it was. He would never explain himself further, and I came to suspect that it was merely some form of self-justification. I was inclined to believe that he was hinting at a factor that is the essence of sex crime: that sense of power that Hazelwood talks about. Christie experienced it after he had strangled and raped Muriel Eady: “. . . once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.”
Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has labeled this feeling “the flow experience.” He recognizes that human beings need the flow experience to change and evolve. Our energies could be compared to a river flowing over a plain. If the flow is too slow, the river begins to meander as it accumulates silt and mud. But a violent storm in the mountains can send down a roaring torrent that sweeps away the silt and straightens out the bends, so that once again, the river flows straight and deep. This is why all human beings crave the flow experience.
The flow experience also brings the recognition that human beings possess powers and capabilities of which they are not normally aware. Again, it is James who catches this insight when he says that the problem with most of us is “a habit of inferiority to our full selves.”
But by the “hidden agenda” Brady may have meant something more straightforward. In January 2006, Brady’s mental health advocate, Jackie Powell, who had to visit him regularly in Ashworth, gave a newspaper interview in which she said that he had explained his motives to her, and that what he wanted was “to commit the perfect murder.” “That’s what it was all about. He saw it as the ultimate act of being above the law.”
My quarrel with Brady was in the nature of a misunderstanding. During the course of our correspondence, I persuaded Brady to write a book about serial killers based on his own insights. The typescript was called The Gates of Janus, and at first glance I felt fairly convinced that no publisher would touch it, since its first part consists of seven chapters in which he explains why no criminal behind bars is as wicked as our corrupt society. The second part, on the other hand, seemed to me full of interesting comments on killers such as Bundy, Gacy, Sutcliffe, and the Hillside Stranglers. I sent it to Adam Parfrey, the California publisher who had brought out Gerard Schaefer’s stories and Danny Rollins’s autobiography, and he accepted it on condition that I wrote an introduction. The book was published in the United States in 2001.
Before it could be distributed in the United Kingdom, however, Ashworth Hospital, where Brady is imprisoned, got wind of it, and demanded to see it. I had no objection, for I was aware that Brady does not even mention Ashworth. On the other hand, I had talked about the result of the government enquiry into Ashworth, the Fallon Report that spoke of “years of abuse, corruption, and failure,” and recommended that it should be closed down.
The authorities at Ashworth demanded various changes to my introduction, all of them trivial, and mostly disputable. This was out of the question, since the book was already in print. I was all for ignoring their demands, but the British distributor was afraid of legal action. Finally I satisfied both Ashworth and the distributor by agreeing to insert an erratum slip listing their objections. The result was that The Gates of Janus was published in the United Kingdom in November 2001.
As far as Brady was concerned, this erratum slip was the last straw. When his solicitor, Benedict Birnberg, went to Ashworth to see him, shortly after Janus was published, he told me that Brady had shrieked obscenities for an hour without stopping. At first I found this baffling, for the erratum slip is only a few lines long, and makes it clear that my own “apology” was tongue-in-cheek and that I retracted nothing.
Then I understood. Brady has spent years in a battle with the Ashworth authorities, and with authority in general. He had done his best to convince himself that the Moors murders were no more criminal than acts carried out by society every day. Not long before the publication of Janus he had written to me saying that he was looking forward to seeing the book in print, and finally being allowed the satisfaction of denouncing our corrupt society as it deserves. Instead, he obviously felt that his triumph had been tainted, and that Ashworth had won.
After that traumatic afternoon with Brady, Benedict Birnberg advised me not to write to him—that if Brady felt in a forgiving mood, he would no doubt write to me when he felt like it. But the truth was that I had no particular motivation in wanting to renew a correspondence with Brady. Ten years of exchanging letters had taught me something I should have realized sooner—that even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his own criminality, and cannot escape. The character flaws that turned Brady into a rapist and killer would prevent him from ever achieving the kind of self-discipline to see himself objectively. So my notion that his negative feelings could be diverted into creativity was wishful thinking.
At least he had taught me something fundamental about the serial killer.
