Authors: Paul Britton
Mickey Banks and his colleagues had talked about the knifeman being ‘frenzied’ and ‘out of control’ but that was wrong. There was no slashing or uncontrolled stabbing as in Rachel Nickell’s murder. By comparison, this was a precise surgical or anatomical exploration. Stabbing was the least of what was done to her - she was almost filleted.
At some point a clear attempt had been made to dismember her legs, but the knife had probably by then become blunted and the killer didn’t have the anatomical knowledge of how best to fully sever a joint.
Because Samantha had died and bled in the hall, there was little blood in the lounge. However, this meant that a single, isolated stain on the sofa stood out and puzzled me. Had he sat down to survey his handiwork, I wondered, leaving the stain, or did he rest Samantha against the sofa while he prepared the room? Another possibility occurred to me and I made a note to ask Mickey Banks whether Samantha’s body had been reassembled at the mortuary.
The Home Office pathologist had found few defence injuries apart from small grazes on several fingers. He found that Samantha had died from multiple stab wounds, four of which passed through her heart, while her other injuries occurred after death. There were possibly two knives involved, both thin-bladed, very sharp, and about seven inches long.
The sequence of events eluded me at first and I began writing questions for Mickey Banks. Things like: can you confirm that the toys on the window-sill weren’t disturbed? Is Jazmine’s head at the right end of the bed? The duvet on Samantha’s mattress has been thrown back - did she make it up every morning? Apart from the kitchen is there any other evidence of the killer walking blood through the flat? How freshly used are the coffee cups on the kitchen worktop? The phone book is open - is anything marked or highlighted? There are daubs of blue paint on the kitchen wall, could Jazmine reach that high? There are paint chips on the balcony handrail, how new are they, where do they come from? Could the marks on the brick wall beneath the balcony be shoe scuff marks?
I also jotted down questions that Banks couldn’t be expected to answer, but I had to consider them. For example, why didn’t Jazmine have a cuddly toy with her?
Why was there no foot impression on the mattress below her bed? One of Jazmine’s pictures is missing from the wall, who moved it? The door to the cassette player was open and a cassette box rested on the fire screen, did he play music to himself?
These might seem like insignificant details, but you can’t take anything at face value when dealing with people who commit bizarre crimes. For example, just because there is a paint daub on a wall in the same flat as a child, it doesn’t mean the two automatically go together.
In early December I went back to see Mickey Banks. We’d talked several times on the telephone and he’d been sending me new material. In particular, I wanted to ask about the postmortem report. Through a cloud of smoke, I sat in his office explaining the psychopathology of different sorts of murderers. In this case I saw a deliberate, relaxed, almost euphoric mutilation of a young woman along with the almost incidental murder and rearrangement of a child.
‘But I need more detail. I want to know where he started cutting her and what order he did things in. He savoured this, and to understand him I have to know exactly what he’s done. For instance, did he take anything away?’
Banks asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘The photographs don’t show me if any part of her body has gone. If it has, then you’re looking at a trophy-taker.’
Banks looked horrified. ‘Surely if something were missing, the pathologist would have told us?’
‘I don’t know if they put her back together or simply assumed she was all there.’
I could see that Banks didn’t relish asking the Home Office pathology unit to reassemble the body; he was looking for more justification.
‘You remember the bloodstain on the sofa?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever wonder how it got there?’
Banks nodded.
I went on, ‘The way I see it, there are three likely scenarios. He could have rested Samantha’s body against the sofa at some point; or maybe he sat down to admire his handiwork. But I think he might have put something on the sofa - a part of her.’
I could see the detective’s disgust. He didn’t want to believe it, but said, ‘I’ll get them to check.’
A supplementary report was prepared on 14 December, nearly six weeks after the first postmortem. The pathologist wrote, ‘I reconstructed the incised wounds of the chest and abdomen and noted that a portion of the abdominal wall approx 12 cm by 10 cm was absent on the right side.’
Banks was annoyed and couldn’t understand how this had been missed the first time.
However, it didn’t surprise me because the idea of sexual mutilation and trophy-taking is uncommon and outside the experience of most murder investigators and pathologists; it doesn’t even enter their thinking. Normally the most urgent priority is establishing the cause of death and, in this case, how many knives were used and their measurements.
However, the trophy-taking had confirmed my worst fears about the killer. The final pieces were in place and I could tell Mickey Banks about the man responsible and the most likely sequence of events.
‘Is it a one-cup, or a two-cup story?’ asked Banks, ordering some tea. An intelligent and softly spoken man, he had a very pragmatic and practical approach to his work. He wanted to be shown the whole picture and to understand more about his quarry. In some ways I felt sorry for him. Unlike other investigations I had been involved in, particularly those that were high profile like the murder of Rachel Nickell, Banks was operating in a virtual backwater in southeast London without the main-stream attention of his superiors in the Metropolitan Police.
Compare this to the Nickell investigation where senior command at New Scotland Yard took a great deal of interest from the very beginning. Intense media scrutiny seemed to set the agenda, along with influential community groups, although it was also suggested it might have something to do with the Metropolitan Police commissioner’s wife being on Wimbledon Common at the time of the murder.
Banks listened as I explained to him the nature of sexual deviancy and its various manifestations. Again the seeds were likely to have been sown in this man’s infancy and childhood.
‘I would expect to find disturbance in his early life, particularly within his family,’ I said. ‘At some point he became a problem and quite likely the victim of other people’s problems.’
‘He grew up with a different set of values from most of us and these may have brought him to the attention of the police or social services. Any attempts to repair the psychological damage that may have been present at the time clearly failed.
‘Within this childhood he was probably the victim as well as the inflictor of violence,’ I said. In the process he learned how aggression could be used to solve problems and it became a substitute for talking. It’s far easier to lash out and force someone to do what you want than to learn the social skills necessary to help them see things your way.
I’ve interviewed patients who suffer from violent tempers and they talk about a pressure building up inside their heads as if someone is squeezing their skull with a steel clamp. This tension builds up and up and finally explodes into violence. Immediately, the pressure goes away and for a short time there is a tremendous sense of relief as if the steel clamp has been loosened.
Samantha and Jazmine’s killer is likely to have grown up feeling that he isn’t valued and his hostile attitudes are based on the assumption that if people aren’t well-disposed to him, it’s far better to act first before they hurt him. This also manifests itself in his attitudes towards sex and his relationships with women.
As with Rachel Nickell’s killer, an anger and sense of bitterness develops and can fuel fantasies of being able to punish, control and dominate women, making them do what he wants. If this process escalates, fantasies are taken into the real world and are acted upon. This pathway isn’t necessarily a nice, neat linear climb from indecent exposure to minor sexual assaults to rape and then to murder. Offenders are opportunists as well as planners and will do whatever is available if that means raping one day and exposing themselves the next.
Understanding this meant appreciating the delicate interaction between opportunity, sexuality and the other factors in an offender’s life because his day-to-day existence will have a layered richness just like everyone else. He’s going to enjoy the cinema occasionally, eat at restaurants, catch a cold and prefer certain types of clothes and haircuts. The patterning of all of these things determines who he is and what he does.
‘Yeah but not everyone enjoys slicing up a woman’s body,’ said Banks incredulously.
I explained that men respond to a broad range of sexual stimuli; one only has to look at the array of pornography produced to cater for them. People tend to assume that what they see in magazines on the top shelf of the local newsagent is what pornography is all about - pictures of naked women and risque stories about adultery and over-sexed housewives.
Unfortunately, there are publications that pander to far narrower and more specific tastes. These include pornography that deals with sadism, violence, and rape, as well as the most dreadful child sex films that can range from showing the child as an apparently willing consenting lover who is groomed and seduced, to the extreme of showing the child clearly in agony as he or she is grossly sexually violated. For people who are excited by this last category, the child’s agony is the important thing.
There are others who fantasize about the acquisition of women who are kept as slaves, tortured and humiliated, before ultimately being killed and then mutilated. Certain people’s deviancy locks on to different aspects of this process. For some it is the whole scenario that excites them, for others it is the victim’s death and for Samantha’s killer it was the mutilation.
‘In many ways this is the ultimate sexual offence,’ I told Banks. ‘It might not look sexual but if you consider Samantha’s injuries, most of the cruel damage is in the vulval and vaginal area and he took his trophy from the lower region. The mutilation was part of a refined sexual fantasy that had matured over years. Her killer wanted complete control of a woman and he couldn’t have achieved more intimate control than being able to do what he did to Samantha’s body, not even if he’d tortured her or turned her into his sex slave.
‘This man wasn’t sadistic, otherwise he would have kept Samantha alive for longer and taken enjoyment from her suffering and fear, and from his control over her. Instead he killed her quickly and then focused on his main source of pleasure, the interaction with her body.’
From the very beginning I’d been asked to consider whether the same man could have been responsible for the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. Both victims were blond attractive mothers who were savagely murdered. A child had been present in each case and a knife or knives had been used.
In my view the presence of a child in both attacks was the single largest differentiating factor between them, rather than a link. In the first case Alex was entirely a matter of disinterest to the killer, while Jazmine had been an important object of sexual gratification for the killer. Equally, the Plumstead murders involved a much more refined scenario where the pleasure gained from the postmortem injuries was greater than any joy taken from the actual killing. There was a sense of exploration and discovery whereas Rachel’s murder had been frenzied and over within six minutes as the killer downloaded his anger and bitterness. It was a completely different scenario.
Banks said, ‘You mentioned his fantasy having “matured”. How old is he?’
‘Twenty-five plus. This isn’t his first crime or his first sexual crime; his sexuality grew into this very narrow and particular direction but he will still have vestiges of an earlier, less discriminate range of sexual pastimes.’
‘Such as?’
‘Voyeurism, indecent exposure, indecent assault, rape. He may have used prostitutes and have hurt or attempted to hurt them with a knife rather than sexually assaulted them. He may also use contact advertisements to arrange meetings with women.’
‘I thought you favoured the balcony as his likely point of entry?’
‘I still do, but it’s not clear how he became aware of Samantha. He could have met her through the contact ads and then started to watch her or follow her. It can’t be ruled out. If he does use contact ads, it’s even more likely that he’s had dealings with prostitutes in the past.’
Moving on to the next point, I said, ‘There’s no reason to expect him to be of other than normal intelligence. This is a man who is now confident in his ability and his motivation. The way he was able to gain access to the address and spend upwards of an hour in the flat leaving relatively few identifying traces behind indicates a man who is in control of himself and the situation. He’s thinking all the time.’
My opinion of the killer’s intelligence related to his cognitive functioning rather than his mental state or any possible personality disorder. People often make the mistake of assuming that someone must be mentally ill to have done such a thing. In fact the presence of mental illness alone neither implicates nor eliminates a person from an inquiry, except when it so limits their functioning as to make it impossible for them to actually carry out the act. Similarly, people assume that if a person is mentally ill then any crime he or she commits must be a consequence of this illness. Again this is not necessarily so. It’s perfectly possible for a person to commit an offence that is not related to their mental illness. Equally we must remember that mental illness is not a constant state and a person can suffer only periodic problems. This is what often makes it so difficult to establish exactly what went on in someone’s mind when they pulled the trigger or used the knife.
‘He’s a calculated risk-assessor and self-preservation is important,’ I told Banks, referring again to how few traces were left behind in the flat. ‘But he wasn’t always this way. He’s matured into this careful sexual murderer and in the early stages of his offending he may have been more careless.