Like much else in the modern world, murder has changed and, generally speaking, not for the better. The nature and circumstances of acts of murder have evolved from the quiet domesticity of murder in the parlour for discernible motives, through an era of guns and gangsters, to lust killings and, seemingly motiveless, bizarre bloodletting. Dorothy Dunbar, the American writer, put it rather well in her book, Blood in the Parlor, published in 1964 when she wrote, ‘On the rim of the twentieth-century loom the Titans – Seddon, Armstrong, Crippen, G J Smith and Landru, and then, in the era of booze and bullets, art descends literally to hack work. And so, crimes marches on’.
On the cusp of the twenty-first century, then, we are witness to murders committed less for recognisable motives such as gain or elimination and more for the sheer love of killing. Inflicting pain and exercising control over others to the point of death has become a kind of addiction that is almost commonplace in news reporting and has been transformed into the stuff of cinematic entertainment. The tentacles of this fascination with violence have spread to the internet where suicide and murder can be procured on demand.
In May 2004, a fourteen year old boy in Manchester recruited another teenager over the internet to murder him in what turned out to be a failed attempt. In the same year, Armin Meiwes, a German computer expert was convicted of manslaughter in a case involving a masochist he met through the internet who wanted to die. Meiwes obliged by killing Bernd Brandes, cutting up his body and resorting to cannibalism. Following an appeal against the verdict, Meiwes is to be retried. The case had echoes of Albert Fish in the 1930s who ate part of his victim’s flesh stewed with vegetables.
Murder has captured the public imagination with renewed fervour in the first decade of the new century. A measure of this is the way that programmes about crime, both fact and fiction, dominate the television schedules. Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), a highly successful formula from the USA, has introduced a new culture depicting the relationship between crime and science with dramatic realism. It provides entertainment, lauds the wonders of forensic science and adds a touch of morality with the notion that ‘crime does not pay’. CSI represents a world where murders are solved in the laboratory by forensic experts rather than in the library so beloved of Hercule Poirot.
Patterns of murder continue to change and where Bogota in Colombia was once considered to be the murder capital of the world, a fall of 20% in the murder rate was reported in 1997. Washington DC now tops the murder league with 50.82 deaths per 100,000 of population reported in 1979/99. By contrast, London reported 2.36 murders per 100,000 of population for the same period.
There was good news overall for the USA on the murder front in 2000. The FBI reported that the murder rate had dropped to a thirty-three year low. New York City in particular recorded a drop of 40% during the four years of Mayor Rudi Giuliani’s administration. For the first time in thirty years there were fewer than a thousand murders a year in the city. Similar trends were noted in all of the ten largest US cities. The improvements were attributed to zero tolerance policing, better enforcement strategies, more officers on the streets and more criminals behind bars.
Baltimore was the exception to the improving trend, with the highest per capita murder rate in the USA. This was attributed to the prevailing drug culture which led to shootings in the streets, literally assassinations, as drug barons defended their territories. Nearly 90% of the killers had criminal records and were aged between sixteen and twenty-eight.
Richard Rosenfield, an American criminologist, has commented that the dramatic increase in prison numbers had taken many potential offenders off the streets. Between 1980 and the mid 1990s, the rate of imprisonment increased threefold and in 2000, there were two million inmates in the US penal system. Also in 2000, there were 3,500 prisoners on Death Row and 800 executions have taken place since 1976 when the moratorium on the death penalty was lifted by the US Supreme Court. The USA executes more prisoners than any comparable industrialised nation. The death penalty is authorised in thirty-eight states with Texas accounting for nearly half of the annual total in 2002. Gary Heidnik, Aileen Wuornos and Karla Faye Tucker were executed between 1998 and 2002 after spending a combined total of thirty-seven years on Death Row.
Firearms play an increasingly dominant role in murder, particularly in gangland violence, while the proliferation of guns makes all types of killing easier and has introduced new definitions to the language such as ‘Drive-by shootings’, ‘Walk-up shootings’ and ‘Road rage killings’. The firearms toll in the USA is thirty times greater than in Britain. Every day, four American citizens die in gun incidents. There are 65 million gun owners in America and in 2005 advertisements appeared in British newspapers advising travellers to the USA, particularly Florida, to be alert for road rage attacks involving guns. A new law in the Sunshine State allows citizens to use a gun if they feel threatened.
The consequences of gun culture were all too evident in the Columbine High School Killings in 1999 when two teenagers killed themselves after shooting dead twelve students and a teacher. Rules on gun ownership in Britain are probably among the toughest in the world. Nevertheless, following the Dunblane massacre in 1997 (see Thomas Hamilton) and the subsequent banning of handguns, criminal firearms offences were up by 40% in 2001. Fatal homicides with guns account for about 1% of all homicides in the UK.
Serial killing, a shocking novelty in the 1960s and 1970s, has become almost commonplace. The modest total of victims whose lives were terminated by Ted Bundy (40 victims), Dennis Nilsen (15) and Jeffrey Dahmer (15) wilt beside the numbers killed by Harold Shipman (215), Gary Ridgway (48) and Anatoly Onoprienko (52). Apart from the rise in the number of victims, an associated feature is the geographical spread. Serial killers are no longer an American phenomenon; the killing syndrome has extended worldwide to include Europe, Australia and South Africa.
Offender profiling and criminal mapping have helped investigators edge closer to understanding the pattern woven by serial killers. What it is that motivates them in their remorseless hunt for victims remains a matter for speculation. Many reasons have been offered couched in terms of genetic disposition or the influence of environmental factors, the so-called nature versus nurture argument. Once caught, and they invariably go on until they are, serial killers readily become barrack-room lawyers and self-made psychologists voicing a hundred and one reasons why they are not guilty. Domineering mothers, parental sexual abuse, childhood rejection, low achievement and many other reasons spring easily enough from disaffected minds.
The ambition of criminologists is to find personality characteristics that will enable sociopaths in the making to be identified before they set out on a murderous trail. In 2004, Scotland Yard set up a Homicide Prevention Unit to study past crimes and imprisoned murderers with a view to preventing violent crime in the future. To this end, behavioural scientists are interviewing convicted serial killers to analyse offending patterns and personality profiles. Research carried out by the FBI has shown that most serial killers fall into categories according to such factors as the type of victim selected and the modus operandi employed. This kind of insight into the evolving patterns of serial killing acquired at an early stage can curtail the duration of the killing cycle and reduce the toll of victims.
Advances in neuroscience and genetics may make it possible to map changes in brain chemistry which enable a predisposition to criminality to be identified. A technique that might help in this process is so-called ‘brain fingerprinting’ which has been successfully used in the USA. Criminals may unwittingly signal guilt through their unconscious thoughts. The brain puts out electrical impulses when stimulated by images it matches with stored images. Unlike the lie detector, where the subject can deceive the interrogator, ‘brain fingerprinting’ depends on unalterable electrical patterns which betray guilt.
In the USA, a convicted murderer has pleaded that the presence of an abnormal gene in his body accounted for his violent behaviour. This was an ingenious attempt at exoneration, using a physical explanation rather than the voices in the head which murderers frequently claim as the springboard for their violence. Some forensic psychiatrists believe that the actions of many serial killers defy diagnosis. While they are sane, they operate in a world of totally self-centred evil in which they kill for pleasure. To that extent they are isolated from the world.
It has been said of Ian Brady, for example, that he believes himself to be ‘the centre of the universe, superior to all’. He published a book in 2001 called The Gates of Janus in which he set out his thinking on serial killing. His tone was superior and unrepentant. Remorse is an unknown emotion for most serial killers and a number of them have used their notoriety to turn themselves into celebrity murderers. Dennis Rader, the BTK murderer, wrote to the media asking how many people he needed to kill to get his name in the paper and, before he shot and killed thirty-five people, Martin Bryant said he would think of a way in which he would be remembered.
Harold Shipman did not admit responsibility for the murders he committed, refusing to cooperate with the police to establish the number of victims’ lives he took and proving to be a difficult prisoner. Clifford Olson, on the other hand, has expressed his willingness to provide details of dozens of murders on top of those for which he was convicted, provided the authorities consider him for parole.
The modern world seems to want to revile its murderers and then to celebrate them. Murderers on Death Row such as John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, received proposals of marriage and killers convicted of the most heinous crimes are frequently deluged with fan mail. Richard Ramirez was reported to receive a hundred letters a week in the early 1990s and a woman who voted for the death sentence in his case claimed to have fallen in love with him. Peter Sutcliffe is another recipient of regular fan mail and offers of romantic attachment.
A feature of murder celebrity in the modern world is the way that some murderers capitalise either on their profession of innocence or simple exploitation of their notoriety. Ian Brady’s desire to share his knowledge of serial killing has already been mentioned. There is a literary genre here going back at least a hundred years to Florence Maybrick and to Nathan Leopold, Jack Abbott and others who have found expression in print. A new phenomenon, though, is of relatives adding their accounts as in the case of the Kray brothers, Ruth Ellis and Rosemary West. And, in the exceptional case of the Black Dahlia, a son has accused his father of being the murderer.
In the first half of the twentieth century, crime investigation depended in large measure on the clever deduction, hunches and intuition of detectives. This picture changed as science began to play a greater role, offering analysis and corroboration instead of guesswork. Since it was first used in a murder case in 1988 (see Colin Pitchfork), DNA has become a major tool in crime investigation. Very often with only minute traces of material to work on, DNA has been the means of confirming guilt where previously there was doubt. Good old-fashioned determined police work still brings results in murder investigation even when there is no victim‘s body. Robert Bierenbaum, Thomas Capano and Kimes, mother and son, discovered that the absence of their victim was not proof against conviction.
Where crime evidence or body samples have been retained in laboratories or evidence stores, DNA offers the prospect of retrospective justice. This was the case in the murder of Hilda Murrell which remained unsolved for eighteen years until DNA testing in 2002 from crime scene evidence identified Andrew George as her murderer. DNA evidence also played a crucial role in convicting Dennis Rader after he had eluded investigators for thirty years. But retrospective use of DNA does not always provide the answers sought at the time. Attempts to identify Bible John by DNA comparison were not successful. Hopes of campaigners that Jeremy Bamber, Albert DeSalvo and James Hanratty would be absolved of guilt by DNA testing were dashed when there were judged to be insufficient grounds for changing the original verdict. Perhaps the most widely publicised application of DNA testing was Patricia Cornwell’s attempt to identify Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper, again with inconclusive results.
One of the consequences of the pre-eminence gained by forensic science is the ‘CSI effect’. Popular television programmes have long drawn on crime both real and fictional as source material for dramatic entertainment. Programmes such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and Silent Witness show science in the ascendancy, aided by computerised technology and full of certainty. This is what has been called the ‘CSI effect’ and some forensic specialists believe it puts pressure on expert witnesses and jurors. Max Houck, a forensic scientist at West Virginia University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005 that defence attorneys were concerned that juries think science is infallible.
Some leading professionals in Britain share this view and believe that forensic science portrayed as an exact process devoid of doubt and ambiguity is wide of the mark and distorts the criminal justice system. In reality, crime laboratories deal less with certainties and more with probabilities. Some of these concerns came into focus in 2004 when a study in Britain commissioned by the Home Office showed that 43% of jurors failed to understand much of the terminology used in the courtroom.
Time is an important factor in the investigation of murder. Time of death, in particular, is a crucial factor to be determined in examining a murder crime scene and a new technique enables skeletal remains to be more accurately dated than previously. Radioactive dating of bones can be achieved by measuring radioisotopes, such as Lead 210, which occur naturally in them. The normal metabolism of the body ensures that the amount of radioactive lead is maintained at a constant level. This process stops with death and, because lead decays at a measurable rate, it is possible to work back to the time of death. Results are possible within an accuracy of twelve months for a subject dead for seventy years. Presentation of this type of evidence will inevitably tax the powers of experts to explain and juries to understand.
Time is also an essential component of justice. Some murder cases take years to solve and are suddenly re-activated by some new development or piece of evidence. Justice finally caught up with Ira Einhorn after he had eluded the system for twenty-five years and the Green River Killings, unsolved for twenty-one years, were eventually brought home to Gary Ridgway. Time also works in favour of exonerating some who have been unjustly convicted of murder. Thus, Leo Frank and Derek Bentley were granted posthumous pardons in 1986 and 1998 and Iain Hay Gordon had his conviction quashed in 2000, three instances of justice delayed.
Murder continues to be an activity which recognises no boundaries. When human behaviour lurches into violence, victims and murderers alike may come from any background or profession. There are no barriers. Age, gender, race, profession and status do not inhibit the dark, elemental forces of the murderous impulse. Even medical practitioners and nurses, dedicated to the preservation of life, fall prey to the addiction of murder. There is no clearer example than that provided by Dr Harold Shipman. Curiously, the very profession that should be best equipped by training and practice to perform murder to perfection, frequently bungle it. Dr Shipman became careless and new recruits to the ranks of medical murderers include Dr Robert Bierenbaum, Dr Michael Swango and Dr John Baksh. They join the infamous ranks of Crippen, Cream, Palmer and many others, all of them careless to different degrees, in the pantheon of medical murderers.
Murder, both in its commission and discovery, brings together two kinds of genius. Evil intent and the guile to deceive and cover up, pitted against investigative wisdom and invention. The history of murder is the story of this conflict and Murderers’ Row offers a glimpse of that world through the lives and crimes of some of murder’s foremost exponents.
Robin Odell
Sonning Common, Oxfordshire
Wilfred Gregg
Ruislip, Middlesex