Hateland (39 page)

     The judge in his summing-up put it simply: did Copeland know the difference between right and wrong? Had he been able to exercise will-power and free choice? The judge said all the psychiatrists agreed that Copeland had an abnormality of mind. However, they disagreed fiercely on the key issue of whether that mental abnormality had substantially impaired his judgement. The judge told the jury that if they felt Copeland's judgement had been substantially impaired, then the verdict had to be manslaughter. If not, then murder.

     The jury found him guilty of murder. Many of Copeland's surviving victims roared their approval from the gallery. The judge, the Recorder of London Michael Hyam, said:

Anyone who has heard the facts of this case will be appalled and horrified at the atrocity of your crimes. The evidence shows you were motivated to do what you did by virulent hatred of, and pitiless contempt for, other people. On your own admission, you set out to kill, maim and cause terror in the community. And that is what you did.

     As a result of your wicked intentions, you have left three families bereaved and many people so severely injured by the explosions you caused that they are reminded every day, and perhaps many times every day, that you alone are accountable for ruining their lives. Nothing can excuse or justify the evil you have done, and certainly not the abhorrent views you embraced.

     It is only too apparent that you have no feeling for those whose lives you have affected. The public must be protected from you and must be assured that if you are ever released it will not be for a very long time.

He gave Copeland six life sentences. Spectators in the gallery clapped and cheered. Some cried, others hugged one another. As he was led away, survivors and victims' relatives shouted, 'You bastard', 'Rot in hell' and 'Nazi scum'.

     The facts of Copeland's anti-social life - as revealed during and after his trial - helped explain both why he'd so quickly fallen for 'Patsy Scanlon' and why he'd become a Nazi in the first place. I'd been right about his childhood disturbance, but wrong about its source. I'd assumed that, like me and many others who drift into the far-right, he'd become a people-hater after physical or mental abuse as a child. However, no evidence of that emerged. On the surface, he seemed to have had a relatively comfortable and stable upbringing (despite his parents' divorce when he was in his teens). But, in his own eyes - so he told police - he'd had 'a horrible, bad childhood'.

     To a workmate, he said, 'My family fucked me up.' His feelings originated in his undersized genitals. From birth, there'd been medical concern about the size of his testicles. At 15, his parents sent him to a special clinic for children with growth problems. Doctors there had put his equipment under the microscope. No pubic hair had remained unruffled in their quest for medical knowledge. A memory of humiliation had stuck in Copeland's mind. His small penis and testicles began to obsess him.

     Consequently, he only ever had one short-lived girlfriend. He told a psychiatrist they'd had sex, but she hadn't enjoyed it because of his small penis. With 'Patsy' - for the first time in his life - he must have thought he'd become an object of fascination for a woman. No wonder he lied about his height: he was in fact only 5 ft 6 in., not 5 ft 8 in., as he'd told Patsy.

     He told psychiatrists that his family - mother, father and two brothers - had often discussed his lack of girlfriends. He believed they thought him homosexual. He spoke of one episode when they sang the jaunty song of the television cartoon series,
The Flintstones-.
'Flintstones, we're the Flintstones, we're the modern stone age family . . . we'll have a zoo time, a yabadoo time, we'll have a gay old time.'

     Copeland felt they kept emphasising the word 'gay' to mock him. His mother would ask if there was anything he'd like to tell her. She also said that, if he were gay, there'd be no problem. Copeland didn't appreciate her warm-hearted tolerance. His older brother, perhaps less tolerant, used to call him 'gay boy'. He told a psychiatrist he still wanted revenge against his family. He said, 'It makes me want to hurt someone.'

     He told police his bombing of the mostly gay pub (in which a pregnant woman had been among the three dead) had been 'personal'. He even said he preferred blacks and Asians to gays.

     Around the age of 13, he'd become fascinated with Nazism - and had dreamed of butchering, strangling and torturing his classmates. Indeed, his first ambition had been to become a serial killer or mass murderer. He told psychiatrists he'd often fantasised about being a Waffen SS commander. He'd imagined himself as tall, blond and powerful - with a harem of female sex slaves. Sometimes, he'd dream of being an SS man who'd pick a female, rape her, then shoot her dead. When he was writing to me, I flattered myself with the thought that my skill as a sympathetic penfriend was drawing him out. I know now that he'd probably have written enthusiastically to anyone who'd wanted him as a friend.

     In the years leading up to the bombing, he'd been isolated and friendless. At the time he planted his bombs, he'd been living alone in a bedsit with only his pet rat 'Whizzer' for company. His deep personal unhappiness had provoked suicidal thoughts, but, he told a psychiatrist, he'd been too cowardly to take his own life. After his arrest, he told a police interviewer that life in prison didn't bother him: 'I don't care. I had no life anyway. I'd say this is freedom to me.'

     He wasn't stupid. He had an IQ that put him in the top 10 per cent of the population, but he knew he was a nobody going nowhere, and that angered him, because he craved fame and notoriety. He told police, 'I wanted to be famous. I believe in what I believe in, and I took that belief to the extreme.'

     Small and insignificant, he dreamt of being omnipotent, with the sort of power over life and death possessed by his dictator heroes: Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. His bombing campaign had been inspired in part by reading
The Turner Diaries
- the so-called 'fascist Bible'. This novel, written by the American Nazi William Pierce, imagines a race war against ZOG, the Jewish-controlled Zionist Occupation Government. The book has a central male character, a hero who gains immortality for himself by his violent and ruthless struggle on behalf of the white race. This book also inspired the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

     At one stage, Copeland had wanted to go to America to join the Ku Klux Klan. Copeland hoped his bombs would provoke a race war between blacks and whites, the end result of which would be a BNP government which would repatriate all foreigners - and release him from prison as a national hero. One of his former housemates said that, apart from his dislike of blacks and Asians, Copeland had also expressed a strong aversion to people from the north of England.

     Several psychiatrists diagnosed Copeland as a paranoid schizophrenic, partly because of his peculiar ideas. But Dr Joseph, the one psychiatrist who argued he could be found guilty of murder, suggested his colleagues hadn't appreciated the significance of the nail-bomber's reading material. He said Copeland had simply been repeating things he'd read in Nazi texts. He added that psychiatrists unfamiliar with such literature might think their patient delusional - but some intelligent people put forward such extreme views in all seriousness.

     Copeland's father later slagged me off publicly for having hoaxed his 'mentally-ill' son in such a 'cruel' way. He called me a low-life scumbag.

     After Copeland's trial, the government discussed changing the law to allow the preventive detention of dangerous psychopaths. Under the proposals, people with certain personality disorders could be detained - even if they'd committed no offence - if they presented a serious risk to others. The Home Office consultation paper listed ten characteristics of such people. They'd have to demonstrate at least six of the ten in order to be detained. I went through the list. Before his bombing campaign, Copeland would only have scored four out of ten.

     To my horror, I realised that my brother Paul scored nine out of ten. The only point that didn't cover him was one relating to sexual offences. Copeland had collected photos that showed people suffering. He cut them from newspapers and magazines, then plastered them over the walls of his bedsit. The police found photos of famines, bombs, riots and atrocities. Until recently, my brother Paul used to do the same.

     It's desperately painful for me to write about Paul. His story leaves me feeling sad, bleak and, worse, helpless. I can no longer reach him. His madness has swallowed him up. The violence and mayhem that's marked every step of his way through life seems about to find its end in his premature death.

     And there's nothing more I can do for him.

CHAPTER 19

DEVIL DOG

As young boys, Paul and I used to share a double bed in the front room of our house on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. We didn't have blankets. Instead, our mother used to cover us with heavy winter coats, the most comfy being a duffle coat with tartan-check lining that we used to fight over.

     We were all terrified of our father, but Paul seemed to fear him the most. At night, Paul would lie next to me, shaking. Then he'd wet the bed. His bed-wetting got so bad that my mother took him to the doctor, who referred him to a specialist. Even at that age - I was about four, Paul two years older - I knew my brother didn't need a specialist to discover why he wet the bed. But nobody dared tell anyone that my father was beating us senseless.

     I can remember Paul being admitted to a children's hospital on the Penn Road in Wolverhampton. Mum took me to see him. I think it's the only time I've ever seen him truly happy. He was driving around in a pedal car, playing with the other children. My father arrived as my mother talked to the consultant. I remember him shouting and swearing, and then we all - Paul included - headed for home on the bus.

     My father's demented cruelty turned me and Paul into violent and unruly children. Like me, Paul began venting his anger and frustration on others. Years later, he used to joke, 'At school, I wanted to be a surgeon, but the teachers had me locked up when I tried operating on the other kids.' Many a true word spoken in jest.

     At first, he remained content to assault only the other kids, but before long he started hitting teachers too. Aged 15, he approached a bearded English teacher who'd slapped me round the face. 'Oi, you,' said Paul. 'Did you slap my brother?'

     Taken aback, the teacher said, 'Oi? Oi? Who do you think you're talking to, boy? Are you chewing gum?'

     Paul confirmed he was. The teacher ordered him to remove it from his mouth. Paul did so - then rammed it into the teacher's beard, saying, 'That's for my brother, and this is for calling me "boy".' He punched him, sending him sprawling, then walked away. The headmaster expelled him later that day.

     I laughed every time I saw the teacher walking around the school with bald clumps in his beard where he'd had to cut the gum out. He never bothered me again.

     One of the saddest aspects of Paul's depressing story is that he was by no means the brainless yob that some saw. He was a very bright boy. He could bury his head for hours in books about warplanes, weapons and battles. By his mid-teens, he could have held his own with a military historian. He'd become fascinated by the police and military from an early age. He loved putting on uniforms and even joined the Air Training Corps. When I was in the army, he used to know more than I did about the equipment I used and the history of my regiment.

     Away from school, Paul's behaviour became criminal. On the outskirts of the village was a fishing lake popular with boy anglers. Its owner, a confirmed bachelor in his 50s, lived alone in a grand house. Boys had to go there to obtain their fishing permits. Stories began to spread about the man's over-familiar behaviour.

     Paul saw a money-making opportunity. He called at the man's house and gave him an ultimatum. Either the man paid him to keep his mouth shut or he'd go to the police and allege the man had been fiddling with boys. The horrified man initially paid up, but when the fee began to rise extortionately he went himself to the police, and Paul was arrested for blackmail.

     For many years, violence and a bed were all Paul and I shared. Our lives mirrored one another's, they'd been formed in the same environment, but we could never talk about our grim inheritance. Most of the time, we could only communicate with our fists.

     When I was ten, Paul smashed me in the mouth with a rifle butt because I'd been lippy with my mother. The dentist had to remove various nerves. To this day, I still have no feeling in some areas of my mouth.

     In later years, I can remember my youngest brother Michael bringing home for the first time his new girlfriend (and future wife) Carol. He wanted to introduce her to my mother. Michael and Carol walked into a bloodbath in the sitting room. I'd smashed a dinner plate over Paul's head. His blood had then spattered the walls as we'd grappled with each other in what one of his war books would have described as bitter hand-to-hand fighting. My mother was doing her best to separate us. I can't even remember what we were fighting about. It was just another violent and bloody row.

     This madness was the norm for our family, though not for Codsall, which was then a quiet, picturesque village, not some inner-city slum littered with dysfunctional families. Indeed, gangs from Wolverhampton used to visit looking for trouble, because they regarded Codsall as 'posh'.

     It was one such gang that Paul attacked when he was 16. They'd come to Codsall to fight the locals, but only Paul showed willing. With a screwdriver in each hand, he stabbed three people before being beaten senseless. He was sent to Borstal. With good behaviour, he could have got out in six months, but he refused to respect the rules, which included having to wear a coloured tie. Different colours signified the different stages towards release.