Serial Killer Investigations (45 page)

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 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, Bill Letts, 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 his brother 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 12 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 3 October 1995, and it was obvious that the defence 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, their ex-au pair) and a married neighbour 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 sodomised her.

Rose made a bad impression on the jury by a blanket denial of knowing anything whatsoever 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 21 November 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 13-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 Dr 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 24 June 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 favour 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 realised 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 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 he would have learned that he had been arrested 20 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 post-mortem showed that she had died of a morphine overdose. Another 14 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 15 murders on 31 January 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 person who urgently needed reasons for a high level of selfesteem, but simply lacked such reasons. The accounts of people he upset—always people who were weaker than himself—make it 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 recognise that Shipman was a member of the dominant 5 per cent, 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 favourite, 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 rugby field, where, a friend commented, he ‘would do anything to win’.

When his mother died of cancer he was 17, 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 with her. But she married him, and as more children followed, any hopes Shipman 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. 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 15 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 7 October 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 17-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.’

He was given 15 life sentences in January 2000, for murdering 15 patients. On Tuesday, 13 January 2004, Shipman was discovered hanging in his cell. An official report later concluded that he had killed between 215 and 260 people over a 23-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 19 September 1992, two members of a Sydney running club, Ken Seilly and Keith Caldwell were jogging in the 40,000-acre Belangalo State Forest. As Ken approached a boulder he was overwhelmed by a nauseating odour—what smelled to him like decaying flesh. A closer look at a pile of branches and rotten leaves revealed a foot poking out. They 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 the Missing Persons Bureau. The corpse was identified as that of Joanne Walters, a British backpacker who, along with her travelling 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 14 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 Belangalo State Forest was immediately launched but failed to reveal more bodies—hardly surprising given the vastness of the forest. More than a year later, however, on 5 October 1993, two lots of skeletal remains were found there; they proved to be those of two 19-year-olds, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, who had vanished on 30 December 1989, after setting out from Melbourne. Soon after this discovery, sniffer dogs unearthed the decomposed body of Simone Schmidl, 20, a German tourist who had vanished on 20 January 1991. Three days later, the dogs located the bodies of two more German backpackers, Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and his travelling companion, Anja Habscheid, 20, who had vanished on 26 December 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.