Authors: Paul Britton
‘It’s also clear that his sexual interests aren’t restricted to adult women. They’re quite broad.’
This is one of the things that the investigators had struggled to understand. If this man set out to murder and mutilate Samantha, why bother touching Jazmine? One reason, of course, is that Jazmine was in the way. But if this was his only concern he would simply have smothered her with a pillow. Instead he penetrated her which indicated a broader range to his sexual deviancy. It meant that the police search for possible links with other crimes had to consider offences involving children as well as adult women.
Continuing with the profile, I said, ‘He’s always going to be looking for new victims and will respond at short notice to high risk victims or when an opportunity presents itself. This might mean indecent exposure or a minor indecent assault or going out and raping while the dinner is cooking. However, periodically, he will have much stronger urges that relate to the fantasies that have driven Samantha’s death. He will need to seek out new women victims and he will be driven in those times by strong levels of anger and lust, together with feelings of personal inadequacy. He’s going to want a particular woman because she stands out in his mind but he knows that she’s never going to say, “I like you, let’s go to bed.” He knows that he can’t have her and it makes him angry. He will have an escalating sense of being insulted by her and by women in general.’
Banks asked, ‘Is he likely to be married or to have a girlfriend?’
‘I doubt it. I don’t think this man will have the empathic ability to make a marriage work or to sustain a relationship. His sexual deviation has matured but not his personality and he clearly has some form of psychological dysfunction, although I don’t know the shape of it. These things would prevent him sustaining a relationship.
‘Having said that, there’s no reason to expect that he has poor social skills and couldn’t get by in the community without standing out. I think he’s personally confident in what he does and what he wants but I doubt if he could cope with a woman who had her own sexual needs and who presented herself as an equal partner rather than in a submissive role.’
Banks asked, ‘What about employment?’
‘Given his intelligence and social skills I see no reason why he can’t be holding down a job but it’s going to be unexceptional work, most likely unskilled manual labour.’
I mentioned that pornography would feature in this man’s life, particularly anything that focused on the mutilation of women if he could get access to it. In the course of the investigation, if detectives came across intelligence regarding underground publications of this nature, they should look closely at the mailing lists.
‘This man isn’t seeking attention or notoriety. He doesn’t care about making News at Ten. By this stage, his focus is on the pleasure he receives from postmortem contact with a body rather than any sense of notoriety on a grand scale. He does, however, have a sense of display evident in how he left the bodies. But this was designed to impact on the people who found the scene and not for a wider audience.
‘Because this man knows that he doesn’t like the world and that the world doesn’t appreciate him, he could be provoked into further killings by perceiving himself as being regarded as a monster or being despised by those referring to him.’
This was an important point for Mickey Banks to remember when making statements to the media. Because the killer was being driven to some extent by anger and a sense of personal inadequacy, if he saw himself being referred to in a way that confirmed all of the bad things he believed people felt about him, it would fuel the inadequacy and lack of self-esteem, making him angry again.
At the same time I knew he probably had a strong psychological defence against seeing himself in a negative light and would project blame outwards. I told Banks, ‘This is not a man who goes home and beats his chest and tears his hair out, saying “Oh my God, what have I done? How can I stop?” He doesn’t want to explain or negotiate or to make excuses. He can do what he likes to a victim because, “She’s mine and she’s mine on my terms.” There’s no remorse.
‘He will have a previous history of aggressive offending against women and may have a history of animal mutilation.’ The latter potentiality is supported by a growing amount of literature that has established a link between mutilation murderers and a childhood or teenage fascination with injuring animals. This goes back to a desire for power and control.
Having explained the psychological profile, I began plotting the most likely sequence of events. This man is a watcher, I thought. He’s likely to stalk a victim if he becomes preoccupied with her, particularly a woman who becomes important to him, someone he wants to savour. Samantha is such a woman. It doesn’t mean he won’t respond to short notice or high risk victims like prostitutes or women who let him inside their houses, but the conditions would have to be right in terms of self-preservation and privacy.
This man has lots of psychologically familiar places from where he can watch women undress or make love. One of them is the grassy bank overlooking the rear of the houses and flats in Heathfield Terrace. The bank has an unfortunate combination of features; while it isn’t used very often for pedestrian traffic, certainly at night, someone sitting there wouldn’t necessarily attract attention. This made it perfect for watching a young attractive mother and daughter living in an accessible flat. Samantha never bothered closing the curtains or blinds. He could see right into her lounge and bedroom, absorbing the rhythms of her life into his fantasies.
Perhaps he’d seen her have sex with her boyfriend in front of the gas fire in the lounge with a cushion under her hips. Real life episodes such as this would be incorporated into his fantasies, increasing the clarity of the experience and also the pleasure.
He probably watched Samantha get ready for bed and turn off the light on Wednesday 3 November. Then he came over the balcony, using the handrail to pull himself up and scuffing his trainers on the moss and mud-splattered bricks nearest the ground. He knew about the balcony and the layout of the flat because he’d been watching. Otherwise he would have left more traces of himself as he fumbled in a strange place.
The sequence of what happened next has never been entirely clear and each of the possible scenarios has weaknesses. On one level, you might think what does it matter who he killed first? It matters because what he did, how he did it and when he did it determines why he did it - and everything comes back to the motivation.
I don’t think any intruder could have assaulted Jazmine unless Samantha had been already dead or dying. Everything I had learned about Samantha cried out that she would have fought and died to save her daughter. Most likely, she heard a sound, pushed back the duvet, put on her bathrobe and went to investigate. He attacked her in the hall, stabbing her eight times in the neck and then leaving her for long enough for her blood to have drained away.
The fact that no blood traces were found in the bedroom suggested that the killer had cleaned his hands before he entered, perhaps using kitchen towels. The only blood on Jazmine was her own. Similarly, Jazmine is unlikely to have been woken by the attack on her mother and to have confronted the killer because he wouldn’t have had time to wipe his hands. I think she was probably still asleep when he entered the room. After sexually assaulting and smothering her, the killer went back to the hall and dragged Samantha into the lounge, feet first, until she came to rest in front of the gas fire, lying face up. He pushed a large cushion beneath her hips, this raised her vulva towards him, emphasizing what he was working towards.
By now his excitement had built up and reached a controlled plateau. He began the mutilation, getting to know Samantha in a way that was so intimate and pleasurable for him that it transcended ordinary sex. Women had rejected him and he couldn’t understand why, but now he was getting to know them in an intimate exploration as well as in punishment and revenge.
Imagine a person whose great mission in life is collecting paintings. There are two levels of need - one is the urge to locate and acquire the art, and then, afterwards at leisure there is the tremendous contentment at being able to look at it and say, ‘It’s mine.’ This man was creating his own ‘work of art’ in a place that offered quiet pleasure and deep fulfilment.
Afterwards he rifled through cupboards and drawers in the kitchen, pulling out tablecloths, tea towels and un-ironed clothing. He wanted material to cover Samantha’s body and, in so doing, to create a little tableau that someone else would find, like gift-wrapping a present. In this way, whoever came across the body would be unprepared and would never be able to rid themselves of the memory of his creation.
This depraved tableau continued in the bedroom. The lividity marks on Jazmine’s body indicate that she had been moved some time after her death which means the killer must have returned to the room and rearranged the scene. It was almost as if he wanted someone to open the door, look into the room and think, how lovely, a child sleeping under a duvet and then have them discover the awful truth.
When it was all over the vivid images would remain in this man’s mind. He would replay them over and over in his masturbatory fantasies in the same way as other men or women remember a particular love-making experience.
I said to Banks, ‘When these recollections begin to dim - and they will - he’s going to think to himself, “I could have done better.” He’ll look at his trophy and say, “Next time, I’ll do this and that…”. You have to remember, this is the most unique, pleasurable and exciting experience of this man’s life and when the urge is strong enough, he’s going to want to do it again.’
Christmas couldn’t come quickly enough. For a few weeks I wanted to forget about work and slip into the comforting embrace of my family with nothing more serious to worry about than whether I had any spare bulbs for the tree lights. Marilyn could see I was tired. It had been a hectic year and she had begun to question whether I had trained so long and hard to go through the rest of my life surrounded by horror and depravity. I had started asking myself the same question.
This had never been an issue before. Having seen what predatory murderers and rapists do; and having treated the victims of violent crime, I couldn’t ignore requests for my help. Similarly, in my clinical work, I felt that if I could prevent just one person from going on to commit such crimes and save people from ever becoming victims, then it had to be worthwhile. Yet none of these things could overcome the reality that the very nature of the work erodes you.
Because forensic psychology involves building up a rapport with offenders so that you can actually help them to change, one of the fundamental principles is an unconditional acceptance of them as potentially valuable people. You cannot look upon a person as some evil creature who, nevertheless, you have decided to help. Instead, you have to engage with them at a human level in order to help them to change.
One way to build such a rapport is by diverting your mind from the horror of what was done to the victim and to focus only on the clinical need of the patient in front of you. Unfortunately, my psychological profiling work meant that I had seen the terrible deeds firsthand and spent hours looking at the remains of dreadfully defiled young women and children. It’s not easy to put aside these flesh and blood memories when you sit across a desk and look into the eyes of someone who has committed a similar crime or is excited by the prospect.
For this reason, it’s not a case of one side of my work being any more or less disturbing than the other. The impact of looking at crime-scene photographs and walking through the crime scene is enormous, but it’s equally disturbing when you sit and listen to someone recalling their darkest deeds or fantasies and you see how much joy and pleasure this gives them.
Some of these patients are able to conjure up and create events in their minds that are so extreme and sadistic that, mercifully, you hardly see anything like it in real life. Worryingly, not all of these people are securely detained. Unless they have actually committed an offence, they can be free to walk the streets and perhaps the only thing stopping them enacting their fantasies may be the clinical hold that I or a colleague have on them. I can’t force them to come and see me, only encourage them, and then use all of my experience to hold them in check.
Other cases can involve making decisions that determine the future of people’s lives. It might be a risk assessment on behalf of the Social Services Department, or a psychological report for the defence or for the Crown. Depending on my judgement, a court may well decide that someone is a danger to themselves or the community and should be detained. I think of cases such as a stalker who had threatened to kill two women. I had to decide if his threats were serious and whether he should be viewed as a criminal or a person who was psychologically disturbed and, if so, what was the actual degree of risk he posed to his victims.
Such decisions have enormous implications. If I get it wrong then someone may die, or a man may be sent to prison or a secure hospital and lose everything that he holds precious - his house, his job, his wife and his family.
Or perhaps I have to assess whether a father is safe to be left with his daughter. If I think he poses a danger and that the mother is unable to protect her, then the girl will probably be taken away into care or freed for adoption. Not only will the father never see her again but forever-after he will be labelled as an intractable sex offender. On the other hand, if his daughter stays and he doesn’t respond to treatment then I know that she will be badly sexually abused and her life will be destroyed. I can’t afford to be wrong.
All of this creates a burden and Marilyn had seen the subtle changes in me. It had been more than three years since we had taken a holiday; and every weekend and Bank Holiday seemed to be taken over with work. At the same time, a question had arisen about my eyesight.