Authors: Paul Britton
Describing it as a savage murder with sadistic features, Mr Justice Tucker said, ‘You are, in my opinion, a very dangerous young man. I bear in mind you are only twenty years old. I sentence you to custody for life.’
Tony Bayliss and Gino Varriale won’t leave it there. Although the investigation was brought to a successful conclusion, they saw so much pain, confusion and holding back in that small community that they want to know precisely what happened, and, knowing now who it happened to, why it happened.
There is one person, Edwin Hopkins, who can finally answer these questions. Bayliss and Varriale won’t rest until he does because then they’ll be better equipped for the next time.
Since my name first became publicly linked to police investigations, I have been conscious of the different ways in which people perceive what I do. The reality hasn’t been helped by films such as The Silence of the Lambs and TV dramas like Cracker. Even family friends will make comments about how exciting my work must be. It took a long while before I could understand this reaction.
Some have a notion of the psychologist/detective treading lightly and gently over a murder scene which people tend to imagine is very clean and tidy as in Agatha Christie stories. In fact country house murders can be just as grubby as the death of a prostitute in a crack-ridden council estate, and be motivated by more abhorrent urges. A few regard the psychologist as fitting somewhere between a clairvoyant and a witchdoctor. They mistrust what they don’t understand or alternatively embrace it without question.
One of the most chilling and disturbing things I can recall hearing is when another psychologist who had given advice on a murder described the experience as ‘the most exciting, arousing and rewarding experience of my life. It was better than sex.’
I found this repugnant. I dread getting phone calls from the police and dislike every moment of reconstruction process.
So why do I do it? Well, that’s easy.
Barely a week has gone by in the past fifteen years when I haven’t seen the trauma and sadness caused by crime. I listen to the victims of rape and families who have been destroyed by losing someone they love. I also see and hear what predatory sex offenders and predatory murderers do and I know what drives them. Can there be a more powerful motivation than wanting to bring this to the end?
There is nothing exciting or heroic about this. Usually when I become involved somebody is already dead and I am constantly aware that if I make a mistake and misdirect the inquiry, then someone else might die. It’s like standing on the front edge of oblivion and the only good time is when it’s over.
When psychological profiling began in Britain in the early 1980s, it wasn’t a question of how reliable, or how much weight police could give my findings. More to the point, they asked, ‘What do we do with it?’
I might have been able to tell them why the offence had happened; that the offender was aged in their late forties or early fifties, with a particular sort of job, educational background, lifestyle, geographical base, and how they would respond to police actions, but unless the investigators decided to do something with this information, it had little operational value. Doing something meant committing themselves and devoting time, money and personnel. But how could they be sure I was right? What happened if I was wrong?
Most SIOs took my advice, a few ignored it, and some waited until one of my predictions proved correct and then went back and looked more closely at what I had said in total.
Over the years psychological crime analysis has developed and become more widely valued, the early doubters are now supporters. Using it to design the DNA screening for Naomi Smith’s killer is a prime example of how far it has come to be relied upon in investigating serious crime since those early days.
I don’t know how much longer I will continue dealing with murder and sexual violence. Years ago I came to the realization that instead of bringing my work home with me I left a small part of myself behind at each crime scene. I wondered what would happen when there was nothing left to leave behind.
I have been on a treadmill that has so far encompassed more than 100 serious crimes - more, it has to be said, than many senior officers will investigate in their whole careers. I could carry on, perhaps, but it now seems much more important to help the police not to need me, except in particularly challenging cases, and to develop master-classes and seminars which will allow investigators to recognize the basic psychological clues and the principles involved in different classes of crime.
More importantly, I will continue to become more involved in risk assessment and crime prevention. This means increasing my work in several different areas, including, vitally, how we can best train people to be more attuned and alert, lowering their chances of becoming a victim of crime.
I will also continue to advise companies and other institutions how to respond to threat and to organize their security arrangements to best effect. I’ve never forgotten the abduction of Abbie Humphries where the surveillance cameras at the Queens Medical Centre were so badly positioned that they provided a photograph that became one of the most destructive aspects of the entire investigation. It was so poor in quality that it served no useful purpose yet became the subject of heated debate over whether it should be shown or not shown to the public. Significantly, there were no pictures of the nurse from those vulnerable parts of the hospital where the risk was highest.
I also remember the Heinz baby food case where psychological advice proved to be critical in determining the investigatory response.
On a research level, we know what motivates people to murder so ways must be found to use this knowledge and to stop them in mid-flight. The urgency of this was underlined by the dreadful shootings at Dunblane Primary School. Even in the small amount of material I have read relating to Thomas Hamilton there were sufficient early signs to have said, ‘Let’s keep firearms away from this chap.’
I’m not suggesting that the killings could necessarily have been averted. Even without his guns, Mr Hamilton might well have found another way to kill the children of Dunblane, but as it was, he had the means to hand and by removing his guns it would at least have signalled a recognition that something was not quite right.
When I completed the International Review of Offender Profiling for the Home Office in June 1992, the recommendations were accepted and were aimed at making the UK the clear European centre of excellence for offender profiling within two to three years. Unfortunately, the speed of development has been much slower than this.
The problem is that too many personal agendas and personal investments are obscuring the objectives. There are petty jealousies in all fields of endeavour, but offender profiling, because of the publicity surrounding it, seems to have more than most. I was told a story about a BBC radio producer who wanted to do a programme on offender profiling and lamented, ‘I have been in the business of making documentaries for a long time and in all my career I have never come across an area that is so bogged down in hostile politics and dreadful interpersonal difficulties as this.’
The time has come for other people to enter the area, people who haven’t invested too much of themselves in being right in a particular case, or showing someone else to be wrong. The pure researchers must say, ‘OK, let’s look at psychological profiling; let’s make it a field of work and study like memory, language and cognition; something which ceases to be associated with a half-dozen people and becomes an expertise that can be taught and improved upon and can lead to more effective investigating.’
This will bring in the detached experimental psychologists, whose interest is to prod it, shake it, challenge all aspects of it, weeding out the straw platforms and honing the body of knowledge that remains.
I have been fortunate in my career to work with some of the very finest police officers - intelligent, straightforward and pragmatic men and women, who have a wonderful grasp of complex detail and a wealth of experience. In general, they have taken the attitude that anything that can help them in their investigation should be utilized.
Sadly, the arrival of a psychologist at an incident room is often picked up by the media and highlighted. This can lead to noses being put out of joint - not necessarily within the inquiry teams but higher up among the policy-makers in the police service. They worry about being displaced or not receiving as much credit.
This will change. A few years ago it was forensic scientists who captured the headlines and the imagination of the public, inspiring crime novels, TV dramas and feature films. Now it is forensic psychology and ‘offender profiling’. This will pass and soon profilers will be seen as simply another resource that the police can call upon.
In terms of its impact upon me, I see the world differently from when I started this work. I see things in terms of risk factors. I notice women who collect the mail in their dressing-gowns and leave their curtains open at night. This can be the only trigger that a voyeur needs. It’s easy to think that if Samantha Bissett had lived on the second floor that she and Jazmine might still be alive. But it’s just as easy to consider that if she’d kept her balcony door locked and blinds drawn at night, Robert Napper might never have targeted her.
Similarly, I see young women coming out of hotels, laughing as they walk along the street arm in arm. I look at them and I can rank them in terms of their likelihood of being at risk. We all contrive to manage the image we present through the clothes we wear, how we act and what we say. This allows an estimate of other aspects of our lives, which in turn influences the extent to which we are open to predation.
Nowadays, when I walk down the street I notice things that I didn’t see fifteen years ago. I look at how people use their bodies, faces and voices; what they wear, how they drive their cars and relate to each other. It sounds terrible, but I think that one of the reasons that I tend to hold back from conversation is that now, without trying or wanting to, I learn things about people - not the detail of their lives but the shape of their personality and thinking. I find myself knowing more about them than I ever had any interest in knowing or wanted to know.
My son Ian, who is now my assistant, and Emma, my daughter, described it wonderfully one day when I picked up a slice of bread that had another slice stuck to it.
Ian said, ‘I bet if you were a materials engineer, whether you wanted to or not, you couldn’t help seeing the two slices of bread in terms of their tensile strength, friction coefficient and all the rest of it.’
Emma added, ‘All you want is a slice of bread for a sandwich, but your training and experience would give you all this additional information.’
Looking back, I don’t remember the victims’ faces because usually the pictures I see are taken after death when the light has gone out of their eyes. What I do remember are their minds because so much of what I do involves learning the intimate details and rhythm of their lives. It’s knowing them and knowing what happened to them that makes the pain and sadness of their deaths even greater. This is not enjoyable work.
The memories will never go away and they are the most potent reason why I can’t say no when the police call. Each time I see the minds, hundreds of them, a sea of people who have been raped, murdered, abused and damaged; and somewhere there is a man who will continue to hurt. He’s likely to be sitting and remembering what he did, savouring it and gaining sexual pleasure from recounting it. He’s real and he’s out there and eventually his urge will begin to build up again. I can’t always predict when this will happen but I do know that unless he’s stopped he is going to kill again and again and again.
How can I say no?
THE END