Profiling Comes to Britain
In England, psychological profiling suddenly came into its own with the arrest of the “railway rapist” John Duffy, one of the most sadistic rapists since the Hillside Stranglers. (It would later emerge that Duffy, like Bianchi, was only half of a rape-and-murder team, the other half being a childhood friend, David Mulcahy.) The profiler involved was David Canter, then a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey.
The London police did not even become aware they had a problem until July 1985, after the rapists had attacked three women in three hours. The first, a twenty-two-year-old dancer, was grabbed in the Euston Road and dragged into Warren Mews at 1:15 in the morning. She was sexually assaulted but not raped. An hour later, two men brandishing knives dragged a twenty-year-old woman into a doorway in Kentish Town, but she escaped. An hour later still they dragged a twenty-four-year-old secretary into an underground car park at Chalk Farm, and both of them raped her. The triple attack led police to look for similar offenses on their computer, and they soon recognized a pattern involving no less than twenty-seven rapes that had been going on since 1982.
The rapes had begun at half past midnight on June 10, 1982, when two men in balaclavas grabbed a twenty-three-year-old woman in North End Road, Hampstead, dragged her under the railway bridge, and raped her. One rapist was tall, the other short. There was another similar rape in July, and another in August, and then three rapes in September. On one occasion the rapists attacked two foreign au pair girls on Hampstead Heath. In the following year, 1983, there was only one attack, in March—the 10th—but by the end of the next year, the number had reached twenty-five. In one of these, on June 6, the shorter rapist operated on his own. He threatened his victim with a knife, tied her hands, and raped her with a great deal of violence.
On December 1985, a nineteen-year-old secretary, Alison Day, left her home in Hackney Wick, East London, to meet her fiancé, an out-of-work printer; she never arrived for their date. Seventeen days later her body was found in a nearby canal, weighted down with stones. Alison had been raped and beaten on the head with a brick. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her attacker had ripped a strip from her tartan shirt, tied it round her neck, and then twisted a stick in it to make a tourniquet.
More rapes followed, then, on April 17, 1986 a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Maartje Tamboezer, set out on her bicycle to the sweetshop in the village of East Horsley, near Guildford. Her father, a Dutch executive, had only just come to England to work. She took a shortcut down a narrow lane through some woodland beside East Horsley station, and ran into a nylon cord stretched across the road, which swept her off her bicycle. She was bludgeoned, and then her hands tied behind her before she was raped and strangled. This time the killer stuffed paper tissues into her vagina, then set them alight, obviously in an attempt to eliminate semen. Witnesses spoke of sightings of a small wiry man in a blue parka running for the 6:07 to London. Two million railway tickets were collected and examined for the suspect’s fingerprints without result.
The rapists would commit one more murder. On May 18, 1986, Ann Lock, twenty-nine, a secretary at London Weekend Television, took her usual late-evening train to Brookman’s Park, North London, where she usually collected her bicycle, and cycled home to join the husband she had only recently married. She vanished, and it was not until July 21 that her decomposed body was found. An attempt to burn it suggested that she was a victim of the killer of Alison Day and Maartje Tamboezer.
A year earlier, in 1985, Detective Chief Superintendent Thelma Wagstaff had given some thought to the notion of trying to set up a London equivalent of the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and asked the advice of Professor David Canter, of the University of Surrey, who was invited to lunch at Scotland Yard in November 1985. At that time he had never heard of psychological profiling. But in January 1986, he saw an article about the rapists in the London Evening Standard, and made up a table of the attacks, set out in two columns labelled “Two Attackers” and “One Attacker.” The result was that he was asked to visit Hendon Police College in North London, where an incident center had been set up. By this time, the police forces involved had decided to link their computers, and the result was a list of 4,900 sex offenders, soon reduced to 1,999. The police had noted the similarities in method between the murders of Alison Day and Maartje Tamboezer—the ligature and the gag cut from the clothing, and had tentatively linked these crimes to the North London rapes.
Canter was assigned two police officers as assistants, and began to computerize the data. One of his assistants, Detective Constable Rupert Heritage, had marked the location of all the rapes and murders on a map. As Canter looked at it, he pointed to an area in the center of the first three rapes and said: “He lives there, doesn’t he?” He was, in effect, noting what Detective Horgas would deduce about the case of Virginia’s South Side Rapist—that a rapist usually starts close to home.
Canter then went on to make a number of other observations, such as that the rapist had lived in the same area since 1983, and that his knowledge of the railway system—which had led journalists to label him the “Railway Rapist”—possibly indicated that he had worked for the rail network.
In the list of 1,999 suspects, a man named John Duffy occupied number 1,594; he was included because he had been charged with raping his ex-wife and attacking her lover with a knife. The computers showed that he had also been arrested on suspicion of loitering near a railway station. (Since the blood group of the Ann Lock strangler had been the same as that of the Railway Rapist, police had been keeping a watch on railway stations.) Duffy had been called in for questioning, and his similarity to descriptions of the Railway Rapist noted. (Duffy was small, ginger-haired, and pockmarked.) But when the police tried to conduct a second interview, Duffy was in the hospital suffering from amnesia, alleging that muggers had beaten him up. The hospital authorities declined to allow him to be interviewed. And since he was only one of two thousand suspects, the police did not persist.
Studying the map of the attacks, Canter concluded that the rapist probably lived within three miles of the Finchley Road area of North London. He also concluded that he’d been a semiskilled worker, and that his relationship with his wife had been stormy. (The violence of the rapes suggested a man burning with anger.) When Canter’s analysis was matched up against the remaining suspects, the computer immediately threw up the name of John Duffy, who lived in Kilburn. He was small, wiry, and had what some of the victims called “laser eyes.” He was also a martial arts expert, and had worked on the railways.
Police kept him under surveillance until they decided that they could no longer take the risk of leaving him at liberty—another schoolgirl had been raped with typical violence since Duffy was committed to the hospital (but had been allowed to go in and out)—and they arrested him. When a fellow martial arts enthusiast, Ross Mockeridge, admitted that Duffy had persuaded him to beat him up so he could claim loss of memory, the police were certain that he was the man they were seeking.
Five of the rape victims picked him out at a lineup, and string found in the home of his parents proved to be identical with that which had been used to tie Maartje Tamboezer’s wrists. When forensic scientists matched fibers from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibers found on one of Duffy’s sweaters, the final link in the chain of evidence was established.
Duffy’s wife, Margaret (who divorced him in 1986), added further useful information. She had married Duffy, who had been a former altar boy, in June 1980, when he was twenty. But she seemed unable to conceive, and it embittered their relationship; he seemed to feel that his failure to procreate was a kind of personal insult, and their sex life took on a sadomasochistic element. He liked to tie her hands as if he was raping her; the more she struggled the more he liked it. His obsession with bondage, and his violence led to angry quarrels. This was the period when he and Mulcahy began their series of rapes. In the autumn of 1983 Duffy and his wife had attempted a reconciliation, which accounted for the lull in the attacks. But in June 1985, there was a total breakdown in the marriage. “The nice man I had married had become a madman with scary, scary eyes,” said his wife. Although Duffy continued to refuse to admit or deny his guilt, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment on February 27, 1988—life meaning a minimum of thirty years.
David Canter has described the techniques he used to pinpoint where the railway rapist lived:
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 recognized 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.
After his conviction, Duffy remained sullen, stubborn and unrepentant. But at some point he had confessed to a prison counselor that he had had an accomplice in the attacks. It was probably resentment that his accomplice was living a happy family life outside that made him decide to betray him. In 1999, he decided to “clear his conscience” by naming his fellow rapist as his schoolfriend David Mulcahy, a married father of four.
During the earlier rapes, the “taller rapist” had been described by some of the victims as the less violent of the two. He had more than once gone back to the bound victim to see if she was all right, and even apologized. When the gag was too tight he sometimes loosened or removed it. But it seemed that since those early days he had become more brutal; after Ann Lock had crawled out of the canal into which they had thrown her, Mulcahy raped her again, and it was he who murdered her. So now, on February 2, 2001, he was given three life sentences for the rape and murder of Alison Day, Maartje Tamboezer, Anne Lock, and for seven other rapes.
Duffy’s decision to turn in his friend had also cost him dear; several more rapes were disclosed, and Duffy was given an additional sixteen years.
The next major British murder case, that of Fred West, would achieve worldwide notoriety in 1994, when the local police discovered a number of female corpses buried in the back garden and concreted under the floor of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Of all the serial killers in this book, West was probably the one who can most literally be described as a “sex maniac,” since those who knew him well noted that he seemed to eat, think, and dream sex from morning until night.
West was a swarthy, slightly simian-looking man with long sideburns, piercing blue eyes, and a gap between his front teeth. There were several children in his family, ranging in age from babies to teenagers—three of them very obviously not his; they were clearly of mixed race.
His wife, Rose, many years his junior, had once been pretty; now she was plump and bespectacled. There were rumors in the area that she worked as a prostitute—large numbers of men were seen coming and going from their house, many of them black.
One day in May 1992, Rose had gone out shopping, leaving her husband alone in the house with the five younger children. West asked his fourteen-year-old daughter to make him a cup of tea, and then to bring it up to his room on the second floor, which was also a bar. Once there, the girl was undressed and raped in front of a video camera, sodomized, and then raped again—West was obviously in a fevered state of sexual excitement. He left her crying, and went downstairs.
When Rose returned, her daughter told her that her father had raped her. Rose’s only comment was: “Oh well, you were asking for it.”
The distraught daughter told a school friend, who in turn mentioned it to a policeman. On the morning of August 6, 1992, police made a thorough search of 25 Cromwell Street, and found an extraordinary assortment of pornographic videos and sex aids, including whips, dildos, chains, and handcuffs.
The following day, the police arrived with a social worker to take the children into care. They arrested Fred West. Detective Constable Hazel Savage, the policewoman who was dealing with the case, went to call on the West’s eldest daughter, Anne Marie, who had left home when she was fifteen because her father had made her pregnant. At the police station, Anne Marie described how Fred had raped her for the first time when she was nine years old. Her stepmother, Rose, had looked on, laughing. After that, her father had regular sexual intercourse with her, and also allowed his younger brother, John, a dustman, to join in. Anne Marie also mentioned that she was worried about her younger half-sister, Heather, who had vanished from her home in May 1987. Fred sometimes joked that she was buried under the patio. But by the time the rape case came up in court, Anne Marie had changed her mind about giving evidence in court, and Fred West was acquitted.
A marriage truly made in hell. Pictured here during happy times are serial killers Rosemary and Fred West. The couple took pleasure in molesting their own daughters, raping young women, and together killing at least twelve victims, including Fred’s daughter Heather. West hanged himself in his jail cell and Rosemary was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole. (Associated Press)
Hazel Savage now tried to persuade her superiors to dig up the garden and look under the patio. Finally, with a great deal of difficulty—they were afraid of being sued—she succeeded. On February 24, 1994, four policemen with a warrant arrived at 25 Cromwell Street. They told West’s daughter Mae that they intended to dig up the garden in search of Heather’s body. Fred was arrested the following day. That evening, he admitted to murdering his sixteen-year-old daughter. The next morning, the police uncovered Heather’s remains. But the pathologist was puzzled to discover an extra femur—a thighbone—among the remains. Another body had to be buried somewhere.
Confronted with this evidence, Fred now admitted that, in fact, there were two more bodies buried in the garden. The police soon uncovered these, and identified them as Shirley Ann Robinson, a former lodger of the Wests, and Alison Chambers, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called who had vanished in 1979. Shirley Ann had been the lover of both Fred and Rose, and a fetus found nearby was later admitted by Fred to be his own child.
The police now moved their search to the basement, and found five more dismembered corpses under the floor. Another was discovered under the bathroom floor, and identified as Lynda Carol Gough, who had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ home before she vanished in April 1973. That brought the total up to nine bodies.
The search was moved to a field near West’s former home in the village of Much Marcle, and located the body of West’s first wife, Rena. They also found the body of Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, underneath the kitchen of their former home at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. Finally, another body, that of one of West’s former girlfriends, Anne McFall, was found buried in a field, bringing the body count up to twelve.
As Fred West’s story began to emerge, it became clear that he had been operating longer than any serial killer in criminal history. His first murder—that of Anne McFall—seems to have taken place eighteen years earlier, in 1967.
Fred had been born in a farm cottage in Much Marcle, a small Herefordshire village, in 1941, the son of a farm laborer. It later emerged that, in the West household, incest was common, and that his father frequently told his three daughters, “I made you—I’m entitled to touch you.” West was later to take exactly the same attitude towards his own daughters. West’s mother retaliated by seducing Fred when he was only twelve years old.
Fred was a mild, unaggressive teenager. When he was seventeen, he swerved his motorbike to avoid a girl on a bicycle, and hit his head against a wall. He was unconscious for almost a week, and one leg healed permanently shorter than the other. It was after this accident that his brothers observed a change in his disposition. He became moody, and had sudden fits of rage.
Two years later, when he was nineteen, he was standing on the platform of a fire escape outside a youth club and tried to put his hand up the skirt of a girl he had invited outside; she gave him a push and he fell over the rails, striking his head. He was unconscious for twenty-four hours.
Shortly before this accident, he had met a sixteen-year-old Glasgow delinquent named Katherine Costello, known as Rena, who, even at that age, had worked as a prostitute. Soon they were having sex in fields, and Rena was convinced that she was in love. Nevertheless, she went back to Glasgow, returned to prostitution, and was soon pregnant by her black pimp.
Unhappy at the unwanted pregnancy, she returned to Gloucestershire, and Fred tried to abort her, without success. Apparently unconcerned that she was pregnant by another man he married her in November 1962. He had always been excited at the idea of women being possessed by other men—preferably while he was watching.
They went back to Glasgow, where he ran an ice cream van, but their marriage quickly deteriorated, and he began to beat her. Rena also confided to a friend that Fred’s sexual demands were “weird.” She may have meant that he liked to tie her up.
After accidentally killing a child when backing up in his ice cream van, West returned to Much Marcle, and found work as a butcher in an abattoir. This job may also have influenced his sexuality—a friend at the time recounts that West plied a trade as an abortionist, and had a collection of “gruesome polaroid photographs of blood-stained women.” West obviously found blood exciting.
Soon, Rena rejoined her husband, bringing with her two Scots girlfriends, one of whom was the teenaged Anne McFall. All four of them—and Rena’s baby, Charmaine—went to live in a small trailer. And although Fred frequently beat Rena, Anne nevertheless fell in love with him. When Rena decided to return to Glasgow, Anne stayed behind, and soon became Fred’s mistress.
Why he murdered Anne is uncertain, since he later described her as “an angel.” It may possibly have been because she told him she was pregnant. He strangled her in July 1967, and buried her in a nearby field.
Rena now came back to live with him. And in January 1968, West committed another murder. The victim was a fifteen-year-old waitress called Mary Bastholm, who knew West through the café where she worked—he had done some decorating there. On the night of January 6, 1968, she waited at a bus stop on her way to see her boyfriend, and then simply disappeared. Mary’s body was never found, but when West was in prison, he told his son Stephen that he had killed her.
In November, West and Rena were again living apart, and Fred was occupying a trailer near the village of Bishop’s Cleeve. It was there that he met Rose Letts, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who, it became clear, was already something of a nymphomaniac, and West had little trouble seducing her. In spite of the violent opposition of her parents—it later emerged that she had had an incestuous relationship with her father—she moved into the caravan with Fred as soon as she was sixteen. Rose’s younger brother, Graham, later described how she had seduced him when he was twelve.
When she and Fred moved in together, he was soon persuading her to have sex with other men while he looked on. When they moved together into Gloucester, Fred put advertisements into sex magazines, with photographs of Rose displaying her naked breasts. Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, and Fred’s first daughter, Anne Marie, moved in with them. But Charmaine intensely disliked her stepmother, who reciprocated by beating her.
In the New Year of 1971, West was sent to prison for theft and fraud at a garage where he had worked, and it was while he was there that Charmaine disappeared. There seems to be little doubt that Rose killed her. From now on, Fred and Rose were bound together by their knowledge that the other was a killer.
At their first home, at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester, they made the acquaintance of a young married woman, Liz Agius, whose Maltese husband worked abroad. She began to make a habit of taking tea with them, and one day felt strangely drowsy; she woke up to find herself naked in bed between Fred and Rose—and Fred admitted that he had raped her. Oddly enough, it does not seem to have disturbed the friendship. It was also at about this time that Fred’s wife, Rena, came to call on them at Midland Road, and simply disappeared. Her body was eventually found buried not far from that of Anne McFall.
The Wests’ life seems to have become a nonstop sexual orgy. In September 1972, Fred and Rose, now married, moved to 25 Cromwell Street. They rented out cheap rooms to teenagers, and Rose was soon having sex with the male lodgers. Fred had no objection—when his wife returned from another man’s bed, he flung himself on her with intense excitement. Rose also enjoyed sex with other women.
A teenage au pair, Caroline Raine, was hired, but when both Fred and Rose made sexual advances, she decided to move back to her parents. Four weeks later, on December 6, 1972, the Wests saw Caroline in nearby Tewkesbury, and offered her a lift home. She accepted, but soon regretted it because Rose, sitting in the back seat with her, tried to kiss her on the mouth. When it was clear she was going to be uncooperative, Fred stopped the car, and punched her until she lost consciousness.
Back at 25 Cromwell Street, West dragged Caroline upstairs, and Rose sat beside her on the settee and began fondling her breasts. She was given a cup of tea, which made her sleepy. Then the Wests tied her hands behind her, and gagged her with cotton wool. She was stripped naked and laid on the floor, where West beat her between the legs with the buckle end of a belt. After that, Rose, who had obviously become sexually excited, lay between her legs and performed oral sex, Fred meanwhile lying on top of Rose, having sex with her.
Later, while Rose was in the bathroom, Fred raped Caroline. He raped her a second time the next morning, when someone came to the door and Rose went downstairs to answer it.
The Wests now told her that they wanted her to return as their au pair, and Caroline, realizing this was her only chance of escape, agreed. In fact, she confessed what had happened to her mother as soon as she got home, and the Wests were arrested. But in court on January 12, 1973, they were charged only with indecent assault, the magistrate obviously believing their story that nothing more serious had taken place. Caroline had felt too traumatized to attend the hearing. The Wests were fined £25 and returned home with the knowledge that if they intended to silence future victims, it would be simpler to murder them.
This is exactly what they did. Lynda Gough, nineteen, was a girlfriend of one of their male lodgers, and had also slept with his roommate. (Rose had climbed into bed with both of the men on the first night they moved in.) In April 1973, Lynda left home, leaving her parents a note saying that she had found herself a flat. They never saw her again, although when Mrs. Gough called on the Wests to ask if they knew where her daughter was, she noticed that Rose was wearing Lynda’s slippers. The Wests insisted that Lynda had simply gone to Western-Super-Mare looking for a job.
It was at about this time—mid-1973—that West began having sex with his nine-year-old daughter, Anne Marie. She was taken to the basement and hung up from the ceiling by her hands, while a dildo was inserted inside of her. After that, her father raped her regularly, sometimes even when she came home from school for lunch. Anne Marie was also made to submit to many of Rose’s lovers while her father spied through a hole in the wall. At fifteen, Anne Marie became pregnant by her father, but had a miscarriage. It was at this point that she decided to leave home, and lived by prostitution.
During the next two years, the Wests murdered five more girls, and Fred concreted their bodies under the basement floor. These were:
Carol Ann Cooper, fifteen, who vanished on November 10, 1973, after going to the cinema with friends. It seems certain that the Wests offered her a lift, then took her home and killed her after forcing her to join their usual “sex games.”
Lucy Partington, twenty-one, was a student at Exeter University and a niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis. She vanished on December 27, 1973, after spending the afternoon with a disabled friend. It seems likely that the Wests kept her prisoner for several days, raping and torturing her before killing her.
Therese Siegenthaler, twenty-one, was a Swiss student, who set out hitchhiking on April 15, 1974, to see a friend in Ireland. She disappeared, and her body was found in the Wests’ cellar twenty years later.
Shirley Ann Hubbard, fifteen, had, like so many of the Wests’ victims, been in foster care. She was working as a trainee shop assistant in Worcester, and disappeared on November 5, 1974, on her way to see her foster parents in Droitwich. When her body was found, her skull was completely covered with black adhesive tape, and plastic tubes had been inserted into her nostrils to enable her to breathe.
Juanita Mott, eighteen, was also the child of a broken home. She had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ house in Cromwell Street, and it seems likely that she returned there one day to see a friend, and was raped and murdered.
There was a three-year gap between the death of Juanita Mott in April 1975 and that of the next victim, Shirley Ann Robinson, another child of a broken home who came to the Wests’ house as a lodger. She entered into a lesbian affair with Rose and also became pregnant by Fred. She was obviously hoping to persuade Fred to abandon Rose and marry her. Shirley Ann disappeared on May 9, 1977, and was buried in the garden, since there was now no more room in the basement.
Alison Chambers, sixteen, had spent years in a children’s home after her parents split up. In September 1979, she wrote a letter to her mother saying that she was living with “a really nice homely family.” Her body was one of those found in the Wests’ garden.
The last known victim was the Wests’ own daughter Heather, sixteen, whose virginity West had taken when she was fourteen. She became deeply depressed, and it is conceivable that West thought she might start telling friends about the incest he continued to force on her. On June 19, 1987, West took the day off from his building work, and some time during that day, he and Rose murdered Heather. Her body was the last to be buried in the back garden.
Did West then stop killing? This seems doubtful. On the day the police went to 25 Cromwell Street with a search warrant, his son, Stephen, managed to contact him on his mobile phone, to tell him what had happened. West said that he would be home immediately—but in fact, took several hours. It seems likely that he went to check on bodies buried elsewhere, to make sure that they were not likely to be discovered. He also hinted to his son, when Stephen visited him in prison, that there were still many more bodies to be discovered. The evidence of the children made it quite clear that West’s life revolved around sex. They noted that he thought and talked about sex all the time. Rose was almost as bad—West encouraged her to sleep with his brother John (who also had sex with Anne Marie), to continue her affair with her father, to work as a prostitute, and to take a series of black lovers, by whom she occasionally became pregnant.
Fred’s second daughter, Mae, was raped at the age of eight, almost certainly by John, who would later commit suicide on the day before the jury was to return its verdict on the charge that he had been raping Anne Marie and “another girl.”
After Fred’s arrest in 1994, and the discovery of the twelve bodies, Rose was also charged with ten murders.
On New Year’s Day 1995, Fred West committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, with strips of blanket from his bed, which he had plaited together. Anne Marie made a suicide attempt after hearing of her father’s death. Rose, on the other hand, declared vociferously that he had got what he deserved. Her own story was that she was innocent, and knew nothing about the various murders committed by her husband when, she claimed, she was out of the house sleeping with clients.
The trial of Rose West began at Winchester Crown Court on October 3, 1995, and it was obvious that the defense pinned its hopes on the fact that there was no definite evidence to link her to any of the murders. Yet there was still ample evidence that Rose was capable of taking part in the rape of women such as Caroline Raine and a married neighbor named Liz Agius. Another young woman, known at the trial as Miss A, told how, as a teenager, she had called at 25 Cromwell Street, had been undressed by Rose, and then made to take part in an orgy in which she was tied down to a bed, while Fred raped and sodomized her.
Rose made a bad impression on the jury by a blanket denial of knowing anything whatever about the crimes—she even insisted that she had never met Caroline Raine, in spite of the evidence that she had helped to kidnap and sexually abuse her.
On November 21, 1995, Rose was found guilty of ten murders, and sentenced to life imprisonment, the judge, Sir Charles Mantell adding: “If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.”
It seems very clear that what was basically responsible for turning West into a “sex maniac” was being born into a household that became a sexual free-for-all, with the father committing incest with his daughters, the mother with her eldest son, and the brothers and sisters joining in the sex games. (In his late teens Fred impregnated his thirteen-year-old sister.) All this, combined with West’s serious head accidents in his teens, had the effect of turning normal sex into “kinky” sex, then into sadism. It became clear that West used his basement as a torture chamber, suspending the girls by their wrists, and cutting off fingers and toes. Even the body of his eldest daughter had missing fingers. It seems that what we are dealing with here is an extreme version of what Hazelwood meant when he said that sex crime is not about sex but about power. What West was seeking in hanging his victims from the ceiling was a sense of total control, of being the “master.”
A search for utter control also seems to be the explanation in one of the most puzzling cases of multiple murder in the late 1990s: that of Harold Shipman, who is also Europe’s most prolific serial killer.
Shipman, of Hyde in Cheshire, came under suspicion after the sudden death of an elderly patient, Kathleen Grundy, on June 24, 1998. Mrs. Grundy had apparently left a will in which her considerable fortune—over £300,000—was left to her doctor, Harold Shipman. But the will was carelessly typed, and two witnesses who had also signed it explained that they had done so as a favor to Dr. Shipman, who had folded the paper so that they could not see what they were signing.
Mrs. Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, reported her suspicions to the police. Detective Inspector Stan Egerton noted that this looked like a case of attempted fraud. But could it be more than that? The death rate among Shipman’s patients, especially elderly women, was remarkably high, but there seemed to be no other cases in which Shipman had actually benefited from the death of one of them.
In fact, the above-average death rate had been noted by one of Shipman’s colleagues, Dr. Linda Reynolds. In 1997, she had realized that Shipman seemed to have been present at the deaths of an unusual number of patients—three times as many as might have been expected—and reported her suspicions to the local coroner. Yet these came to nothing; there seemed to be no logical reason why a popular GP should kill his patients. If the coroner had checked Shipman’s criminal record, however, he would have learned that he had been arrested twenty years earlier, in 1976, for forging prescriptions for the drug pethidine, a morphine derivative, to which he had become addicted.
Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed, and the postmortem showed that she had died of a morphine overdose. Another fourteen exhumations of Shipman’s patients revealed the same cause of death. Moreover, it was clear that these were only a small proportion of Shipman’s victims. After his conviction for fifteen murders on January 31, 2000, further investigation made it clear that the total could be as high as 260.
Shipman ran his practice alone, and was known to medical colleagues as a rude, overbearing man. His patients, however, found him kindly and patient, always willing to talk to them about their problems. But with people over whom he had authority, he was a bully. He was brutal to a young female pharmaceutical representative, out on her first assignment, and browbeat her until she was in tears. When a receptionist forgot his coffee, he went white with rage. When his wife rang him to say that she and the kids were hungry and waiting to eat dinner, he snapped: “You’ll wait until I get there.”
When a man is as arrogant and impatient as Shipman, it seems obvious that he has an inflated opinion of himself. Shipman seems to have been the kind of man who urgently needed reasons for a high level of self-esteem, but simply lacked such reasons. The accounts of people he upset—always people who were weaker than himself—make is clear that he was a classic case of a Right Man. He had tried working in a practice with other doctors, but they found his self-opinionatedness intolerable.
But how do we make the leap from arrogance and frustrated craving for self-esteem to murdering patients with overdoses of morphine?
The first step is to recognize that Shipman was a member of the dominant 5 percent, while his wife, Primrose, was undoubtedly of medium to low dominance. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied the role of dominance in sexual partnerships, observed that such an extreme mixture of high and low dominance seldom works.
So how did this curious relationship come about? Shipman’s background offers a few clues. He was born in Nottingham in January 1946 of working-class parents. Harold, his mother’s favorite, was not obviously talented, and less than brilliant at school; but his mother’s expectations turned him into a hard worker, a “plodder.” He was distinguished in only one respect—on the rugger field, where, a friend commented, he “would do anything to win.”
When his mother died of cancer he was seventeen, and expressed his grief by running all night in the rain; but he did not even mention her loss at school. During his mother’s painful last days, Shipman watched the family doctor administering increasingly large doses of morphine.
After an initial failure, hard work got Shipman into Leeds University Medical School. There he acquired himself a girlfriend who was living in the same students’ lodging. Primrose Oxtoby was three years his junior, and has been described by writers on the case as “frumpish” and “a plain Jane”; even then she had a tendency to put on weight. Her background was even narrower than his; her parents had been so strict that she was not even allowed to go to the local youth club. But in less than a year, Shipman had—as he himself said later—“made a mistake.” Primrose was pregnant. Her parents immediately broke ties with her. But she married Shipman, and as more children followed, any hopes he had entertained for an interesting future evaporated. Primrose was not even a good housekeeper, and policemen who came later to search their house were shocked by the dirt and general untidiness.
The Shipmans moved to Pontefract, where he became a junior houseman at the General Infirmary. Three years later, in 1974, they moved to Todmorden, in the Pennines, and he began injecting himself with pethidine, obtained on forged prescriptions, to stave off depression. When he was caught two years later, he was suspended, and Primrose and the children were forced to live with her parents. Shipman fought hard to save his job, but was fired from the practice. He obviously felt that he had been treated unfairly.
After his trial in 1976 for forging prescriptions, he was fined £658, which would be about twelve times as much in today’s (2006) money. He must have felt that fate was grinding him into the ground. In the following year he became part of a practice in Hyde, Cheshire, and—the evidence seems to show—began his career as a murderer.
When he was questioned on suspicion of fifteen murders, Shipman angrily denied any wrongdoing, sure that he had covered his trail so carefully that he was safe. But the investigators soon discovered that he had made extensive changes in his patients’ notes, to make them seem more seriously ill than they were. On October 7, 1998, Shipman was full of self-confidence during the police interview. But when a detective constable began to question him about changes he had made in the patients’ records, he began to falter and flounder. That evening he broke down and sobbed. But he still refused to confess.
Why did Shipman kill? Could it have been because the Right Man needs a fantasy to justify his immense self-esteem, and dealing out death with a syringe provided that fantasy—the self-effacing GP who is actually one of the world’s most prolific serial killers?
Or could it have been something as simple as a psychological addiction, like the escalating sadism the BSU noted in so many serial killers? At least one man in Todmorden, the husband of Eva Lyons—who was dying of cancer—believed that Shipman injected his elderly wife with an overdose of morphine in a mercy killing. Soon thereafter, eight more elderly patients were found dead after Shipman had been to see them. Had he discovered that watching someone die peacefully produced in him a sense of relief that was not unlike the effect of morphine? And was this ability to deal out death a godlike sensation that compensated for the failure of his life?
With most serial killers there is an overt sexual element in the murders. But the only hint of sexual frustration can be found in the case of seventeen-year-old Lorraine Leighton, who went to see him about a lump in her breast. Shipman’s comments about the size of her breasts were so rude that she fled the surgery in tears.
One thing that seems clear is that Shipman felt no guilt about killing his patients. After his imprisonment, someone said something that implied a comparison with Myra Hindley, and Shipman snapped: “She is a criminal. I am not a criminal.”
Shipman was given fifteen life sentences in January 2000 for murdering fifteen patients. On Tuesday, January 13, 2004, he was discovered hanging in his cell. An official report later concluded that he had killed between 215 and 260 people over a twenty-three-year period.
It was the chance intervention of a British witness that led to the conviction of Australia’s worst serial killer, Ivan Milat.
In the early 1990s, it became obvious that a particularly sadistic killer was operating in southern Australia. Because his victims were usually hitchhikers, he became known as the “Backpacker Killer.” Most of the disappearances occurred in New South Wales, not far from Sydney.
On September 19, 1992, two members of a Sydney running club, Ken Seilly and Keith Caldwell, were jogging in the forty-thousand-acre Belanglo State Forest. As Ken approached a boulder he was overwhelmed by a nauseating odor—what smelled to him like decaying flesh. A closer look at a pile of branches and rotten leaves revealed a human foot poking out. The two men carefully marked the position of the remains and set off to contact the authorities. When local policeman arrived at the scene they called in regional detectives, who then sent out a call to the Missing Persons Bureau. The corpse was identified as that of Joanne Walters, a British backpacker who, along with her traveling companion, had gone missing in April 1992. The next day, police investigators uncovered the body of Joanne’s companion, Caroline Clarke. Caroline had been shot at least ten times in the head, as well as stabbed several times. Joanne had been viciously stabbed fourteen times in the chest and neck; the fact that she had not been shot, as had Caroline, suggested that there had been two murderers. There were no defensive wounds on their hands, which suggested that the young women had been tied up. And it was clear that the killers had taken their time; there were six cigarette butts, all of the same brand, lying nearby. The bodies were too decayed for forensic examination to determine if they had been raped.
A wide search of the Belanglo State Forest was immediately launched but failed to reveal additional bodies—hardly surprising given the vastness of the forest. More than a year later, however, on October 5, 1993, two lots of skeletal remains were found there; they proved to be those of two nineteen-year-olds, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, who had vanished on December 30, 1989, after setting out from Melbourne. Soon after this discovery, sniffer dogs unearthed the decomposed body of Simone Schmidl, twenty, a German tourist who had vanished on January 20, 1991. Three days later, the dogs located the bodies of two more German backpackers, Gabor Neugebauer, twenty-one, and his traveling companion, Anja Habscheid, twenty, who had vanished on December 26, 1991. Anja’s body had been decapitated, and the angle of the blow made it clear that she had been forced to kneel while the killer cut off her head.
A special team, known as “Task Force Air,” was set up to hunt the Backpacker Killers. When interviewing members of a local gun club, the task force received a strange report. A friend of one of the members claimed to have witnessed something suspicious in the forest the previous year. When contacted by the police, the man supplied them with a detailed description of two vehicles, one a Ford sedan and the other a four-wheel drive, that he saw driving down one of the trails into the forest. According to him, a man was driving the sedan while in the back seat two other men held between them a female with what appeared to be a gag in her mouth. In the second vehicle, he reported that he saw the same thing—a male driver and a bound female in the back with two males. The observer added descriptions of all the occupants—clothing, hair color, and approximate ages. He claimed to have noted the license plate number of the four-wheel drive, but had lost it. His official statement to the police was signed, “Alex Milat.”
Although the task force methodically pursued the clues they had, they made no progress during the next six months. But following their “Milat” line of inquiry, they finally got their break: a workmate of Croatian-born Richard Milat reported that Milat had been heard saying: “Killing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread.” Police checked his work schedule against the presumed dates of the murders. Richard Milat was at work on all of those days, but his brother Ivan was not. And Ivan had a long police record, which included sex offenses.
Investigators now turned their attention to the Milat brothers, who were found to own property about twenty-five miles from Belanglo.
Once again, the case marked time. Then, in April 1994, the police uncovered a report that a young Englishman named Paul Onions had placed a call to the task force’s hot line five months earlier. Here was the tip they had been hoping for. Onions, a student from Birmingham, had been attacked by a man who corresponded to Milat’s description, near the Belanglo State Forest.
Onions had been hitchhiking from Sydney on January 25, 1990, when he had encountered a short, stocky man with a drooping moustache. The man asked him where he was heading, and offered him a lift in the direction of Melbourne. Onions was impressed by the stranger’s car, an expensive-looking four-wheel drive Nissan. As they climbed into the car, the stranger introduced himself as “Bill,” and said that he was Yugoslav.
As they passed the town of Bowral, Onions noticed that “Bill” kept glancing in the rearview mirror and slowing down. When he asked him why, “Bill” explained that he was trying to find a place where he could park for a while, and retrieve an audiocassette player out of the trunk. The layby was close to the turn off to the Belanglo State Forest. Some instinct told Onions to get out of the car at the same time as “Bill,” which seemed to annoy his companion. “What are you doing out of the car?” he asked. And then, suddenly, he produced a black revolver, and the friendly manner vanished. “You know what this is—a robbery.”
Onions tried to calm “Bill” down, then became more alarmed as the man reached into the back seat, and took out a bag containing rope. “That was enough,” said Onions later. “I decided to leg it.” Behind him he heard the man shout, “Stop or I’ll shoot,” and a bullet whizzed past his head. It had the effect of flooding him with adrenalin, and he ran even faster.
The man nonetheless caught up with him, and the two began to wrestle at the side of the highway, while cars drove on past them. Onions managed to break free, and scrambled over the top of the hill. He spotted a van driving towards him, and flung himself on the ground to force it to halt.
Behind the wheel was Joanne Berry, who had her sister and four children with her. Onions pleaded: “Give me a lift—he’s got a gun.” Berry, at first frightened by the seemingly crazy man in the road, noticed the true fear in his eyes, and allowed him to clamber into the back of the van through the sliding door.
When he told her what had happened, she drove him straight to the Bowral Police Station. There Onions reported the attack, and Berry told the police that she had also glimpsed the man running away, with his hand held low—obviously to hide the revolver. Incredibly, the Bowral police succeeded in losing the report on the attempted robbery, with the result that “Bill” was free to continue raping and murdering.
Four years later, however, the police lost no time in flying Onions to Sydney. There he identified Milat as the man who had fired his revolver at him. Onions had also left his backpack in Milat’s car when he fled, and he later recognized a blue shirt found in Milat’s garage as his own.
On May 22, 1994, police arrested fifty-year-old Ivan Milat in Eaglevale, a Sydney suburb. In Ivan Milat’s garage, police found a bloodstained rope of a type that had been used to bind some of the victims, a sleeping bag that proved to belong to Deborah Everist, and a camera of the make owned by Caroline Clarke. The police also found spent cartridges similar to those found near Caroline in Milat’s garage.
Milat had a long police record. Born in December 1944 to an Australian mother and Croatian father, he had been a member of a large family that had been repeatedly in trouble with the law. In his twenties he had been incarcerated several times for car theft and burglary.
In 1971, he had picked up two female hitchhikers, and had suddenly turned off the highway, produced a knife, and announced that he intended to have sex with them, or would kill them both. One of the girls, who was eighteen, allowed him to have sex with her on the front seat. Milat had then driven on to a petrol station, and she had taken the opportunity to run inside and tell the attendant that she had been raped, and that the driver was holding her friend. When several employees ran towards the car, Milat pushed the other girl out and drove off at high speed. Later on, he was pulled over by police, but there were no knives or rope in the car. Milat agreed that he had had sex with the girl, but insisted that it was with her consent. In any case, he said, both the girls were “screwy.”
After this brush with the law, Milat had fled to New Zealand, to escape the rape charge, and also two charges of armed robbery. He was brought back and tried three years later, in 1974, but was cleared of all charges and freed. (One of his brothers went to prison for a bank robbery.)
In 1979, he again gave a lift to two women near the Belanglo State Forest, and suddenly pulled off the road. When he told them he intended to have sex with both of them, the women managed to jump out of the car, and hide in a ditch. Although Milat searched for them, cursing and swearing, for nearly two hours, he did not succeed in finding them. Unfortunately, neither of the women reported this attempted rape until years later, when the Backpacker Task Force was set up.
Milat’s trial began in the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney on March 25, 1996. By that time, the press had dubbed him “Ivan the Terrible.”
What emerged clearly during the trial was that Milat was a “control freak,” whose chief pleasure was seeing his victims terrified and helpless. It also became apparent that with every killing, he became more sadistic, and relished taking his time over it. At one murder site, half a dozen cigarette butts were found. He paralyzed some of these female victims by stabbing them in the spine, so he could sexually attack them at his leisure. The injuries found on the victims were so appalling that the presiding judge refused to give details during the trial, in order to spare the relatives.
A friend of Milat’s ex-wife, Karen, gave evidence that suggested that Milat was another Right Man, who demanded total obedience and submission. Milat was obsessive about keeping the house neat and tidy, and when Karen went shopping with a list, she had to stick to every item on it, or risk him flying into a violent rage. She had to ask him for every penny she spent, account for every minute of her time, and bring back receipts for every purchase. Milat’s younger brother George reports that Milat would become enraged with his wife on the smallest provocation. When Karen finally walked out on him, and he could not find her, he burned down her parent’s garage. And it was shortly after Karen left him in 1989 that Milat began his series of murders.
Milat’s barrister suggested in court that the murders must have been committed by Milat’s brothers Walter and Richard, and in a television interview on the day after the trial, the two brothers were accused on camera of being accomplices in the murders. Understandably, both men denied the allegations.
Milat was found guilty on July 27, 1996, and sentenced to life imprisonment on seven counts of murder. In the maximum-security wing of Goulburn Correctional Centre, only a short distance from Belanglo, where he eventually was transferred, he was placed in solitary confinement after a hacksaw blade was detected in a packet of cigarettes. He declared that he would continue to make every effort to escape.
His brother Boris, tracked down to a secret location by reporters, told them, “All my brothers are capable of extreme violence. The things I could tell you are much worse than Ivan is supposed to have done. Everywhere he’s worked, people have disappeared.”
Asked if he thought Ivan was guilty, he replied: “I reckon he’s done a hell of a lot more.” Pressed to put a figure on it, Boris Milat replied: “Twenty-eight.”
