by Colin Wilson
He was tried for only one murder, that of his wife, and pleaded insanity. Found guilty, John Reginal Christie was hanged on July 15, 1953.
Christie seems to have been a highly neurotic since his early days in Halifax, in the north of England, when a sexual failure in adolescence caused him to be labeled “Reggie-no-dick,” and “Can’t-do-it Christie” But the determining factor that finally turned him into a sex killer may well have been an accident he suffered when he first came to London in 1922; he was struck by a car and was unconscious when taken to hospital—one more to add to the list of serial killers with suspected head injuries.
The series of unsolved murders known as the “Thames Nude Murders” deserves a place in any history of manhunting because the detective who led the investigation believes that it was his game of psychological cat and mouse that drove the killer to suicide.
Between February 1964 and January 1965, the bodies of six women, mostly prostitutes, were found in areas not far from the Thames. The first of the bodies, that of a thirty-year-old prostitute by the name of Hanna Tailford, was found in the water near Hammersmith Bridge. She was naked except for her stockings, and her panties had been stuffed into her mouth. On April 18, the naked body of Irene Lockwood, a twenty-six-year-old prostitute, was found at Duke’s Meadows, near Barnes Bridge. She had been strangled and, like Hanna Tailford, had been pregnant. A fifty-four-year-old Kensington caretaker, Kenneth Archibald, confessed to her murder, and he seemed to know a great deal about the victim, but at his trial it was established that his confession was false. Archibald was acquitted.
There was another reason for believing in his innocence: while he was still in custody, another naked woman was found in an alleyway at Osterley Park, Brentford. This was only three weeks after the discovery of Irene Lockwood’s body. The dead woman—the only one among the victims who could be described as pretty—was identified as twenty-two-year-old prostitute and striptease artist Helen Barthelemy. There were a number of curious features in the case. A line around her waist showed that her panties had been removed some time after death, and there was no evidence of normal sexual assault. But four of her front teeth were missing. Oddly enough, the teeth had not been knocked out by a blow, but deliberately forced out—a piece of one of them was found lodged in her throat. Medical investigation also revealed the presence of male semen in her throat. Here, then, was the cause of death: she had been choked by a penis, probably in the course of performing an act of fellatio. The missing teeth suggested that the killer had repeated the assault after death. It was established that she had disappeared some days before her body was found. Where, then, had her body been kept?
Flakes of paint found on her skin suggested the answer, for it was the type of paint used in spraying cars. Clearly, the body had been kept somewhere near a car-spraying plant, but in some place where it was not likely to be discovered by the workers.
Enormous numbers of police were deployed in the search for the spray shop and in an attempt to keep a closer watch on the areas in which the three victims had been picked up, around Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush. Perhaps for this reason, the killer decided to take no risks for several months.
The body of the fourth victim—Mary Fleming, thirty, was found on July 14, 1964. Her false teeth were missing, there was semen in her throat, and her skin showed traces of the same spray paint found on Helen Barthelemy. She had vanished three days earlier.
Her body was found in a half-crouching position near a garage in Acton, and the van that took her there was actually seen leaving the scene of the crime. A motorist driving past Berrymede Road, a cul-de-sac, at 5:30 in the morning, had to brake violently to avoid a van that shot out in front of him. He was so angry that he contacted the police to report the incident, but had failed to take note of the license plate number. A squad car that arrived a few minutes later found Mary’s body in the forecourt of a garage in the cul-de-sac.
The near miss probably alarmed the killer, for no further murders occurred that summer. Then, on November 25, 1964, another naked corpse was found under some debris in a car park in Hornton Street, Kensington. It was identified as Margaret McGowan, twenty-one, who had disappeared more than a month before her body was found, and there were signs of decomposition. Again, there were traces of paint on the body, and a missing front tooth indicated that she had died in the same way as the previous two victims.
The last of the “Jack the Stripper” victims was a prostitute named Bridie O’Hara, twenty-eight, who was found on February 16, 1965, in some undergrowth on the Heron Trading Estate, in Acton. She had last been seen on January 11. The body was partly mummified, which indicated that it had been kept in a cool place. As usual, teeth were missing and sperm was found in the throat. Fingermarks on the back of her neck revealed that, like the other victims, she had died in a kneeling position.
Detective Chief Superintendent John du Rose was recalled from his holiday to take charge of the investigation in the Shepherd’s Bush area. The Heron Trading Estate provided the lead they had been waiting for. Investigation of a paint spray shop revealed that this was the source of the paint found on the bodies—chemical analysis proved it. The proximity of a disused warehouse solved the question of where the bodies had been kept before they were dumped. The powerful spray guns caused the paint to carry, with diminishing intensity, for several hundred yards. Analysis of paint on the bodies enabled experts to establish the spot where the women must have been concealed: it was underneath a transformer in the warehouse.
Yet even with this discovery, the case was far from solved. Thousands of men worked on the Heron Trading Estate. (Oddly enough, John Christie had been employed there). Mass questioning seemed to bring the police no closer to their suspect. Du Rose decided to throw a twenty-mile cordon around the area, to keep a careful check on all cars passing through at night. Drivers who were observed more than once were noted; if they were seen more than twice, they were interviewed. Du Rose conducted what he called “a war of nerves” against the killer, dropping hints in the press or on television that indicated the police were getting closer. They knew he drove a van and they knew he must have right of access to the trading estate by night. The size of the victims, who were all small women, suggested that the killer was under middle height. As the months passed, and no further murders took place, du Rose assumed that he was winning the war of nerves. The killer had ceased to operate. He checked on all men who had been jailed since mid-February, all men with prison records who had been hospitalized, all men who had died or committed suicide. In his book Murder Was My Business, du Rose claims that a list of twenty suspects had been reduced to three when one of the three committed suicide. He left a note saying that he could not bear the strain any longer. The man was a security guard who drove a van, and had access to the estate. At the time when the women were murdered, his rounds included the spray shop. He worked by night, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. He was unmarried.
The Moors Murder case was one of the most notorious British murder cases of the twentieth century.
Ian Brady, the illegitimate son of a waitress, was born in a tough Glasgow slum in 1938, and was farmed out to foster parents. He was intelligent and a good student, and at the age of eleven he won a scholarship to an expensive school. Many of his new fellow students came from well-to-do families, and—like so many serial killers—he developed a fierce resentment of his own underprivileged position. He began committing burglaries, and at thirteen was sentenced to two years’ probation for housebreaking; as soon as this ended he was sentenced to another two years for ten burglaries. He also practiced sadistic cruelty to animals. When his mother moved to Manchester with a new husband, he took a job in the market there, but was picked up by the police for helping to load stolen goods on to a truck. Since this was in violation of his probation, he was sentenced to a Borstal institution, a punishment he regarded as so unfair that he decided that from then on he would “teach society a lesson.”
At twenty-one, he be
came a clerk in Millwards, a chemical firm in Gorton, and began collecting books on the Nazis, and reading the Marquis de Sade—virtually the patron saint of serial killers. His books give expression to their basic belief that the individual owes nothing to society, and has the right to live in it in a kind of subjective dream world, treating morality as an illusion. Brady experienced a kind of religious conversion to these ideas. So far he had seen himself merely as a criminal; now—like Leonard Lake—he began to see himself as the heroic outcast, the scourge of a hypocritical society.
It was at about this point in his life that Myra Hindley entered the story. She was a completely normal working-class girl, not bad-looking, inclined to go in for blonde hairdos and bright lipstick, interested mainly in boys and dancing. She was a typical medium-dominance female, who would have been perfectly content with a reasonably hard-working boy-next-door. When she came to work at Millwards, she was fascinated by Brady’s sullen good looks and moody expression. But Brady was undoubtedly one of the dominant 5 percent (see chapter 4); he recognized her as a medium-dominance type and ignored her; at the end of six months he had not even spoken to her. Without encouragement Myra filled her diary with declarations of love: “I hope he loves me and will marry me some day.” Finally, Brady decided it would be a pity not to take advantage of the maidenhead that was being offered, and invited her out. Soon after this Myra surrendered her virginity on the divan bed in her gran’s front room.
For criminal couples, the combination of high- and medium-dominance egos usually produces an explosive mixture—as in the case of the Hillside Stranglers or Lake and Ng. The high-dominance partner finds himself regarded with admiration that acts as a kind of superfertilizer on his ego; in no time at all he develops a full-blown case of the Right Man syndrome. Brady found it intoxicating to have an audience; he talked to Myra enthusiastically about Hitler, and nicknamed her “Hessie”—from pianist Dame Myra Hess and the führer’s deputy Rudolf Hess.
But her sexual submission was not enough; it only intensified his craving to be a “somebody.” He announced that he was planning a series of payroll robberies, and induced her to join a local pistol club to gain access to guns. He also took photographs of her posing with crotchless panties and, using a timing device, of the two of them having sex. In some of the photographs—which Brady tried to sell—she has whip marks across her buttocks.
Sometime in 1963—when he was twenty-five and she twenty-one—he induced her to join with him in the murder of children. It is hard to understand how a typical medium-dominance woman allowed herself to be persuaded. But the answer undoubtedly lies in the curious chemistry of religious conversion. The love-struck Myra became the archetypal convert. Her sister Maureen would later describe in court how Myra had changed from being a normal young woman who loved children and animals to someone who was hostile and suspicious and said she hated human beings.
Brady’s motivation lay in his obsessive need to taste the delights of dominating another person, and the sadism that had developed in him since childhood. Myra became his “slave.” And when, in July 1963, he told her he wanted to rape Pauline Reade, a sixteen-year-old neighbor, Myra agreed to lure Pauline up on to the moor. Brady then arrived on his motorbike, and raped and strangled Pauline. Myra then helped Brady bury her on Saddleworth Moor.
In the next two years, he and Myra would commit four more murders. On October 23, 1963, they drove to the market at Ashton-under-Lyne, where twelve-year-old John Kilbride had been earning pocket money by doing odd jobs for stallholders. On that dark and foggy night a “kind lady” asked him if he wanted a lift. It was the last time John was seen alive. When his body was found two years later, his trousers had been pulled down to his knees. The police found the grave because Brady had taken a photograph of Myra Hindley kneeling on it.
On June 16, 1964, another twelve-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, vanished on his way to visit his grandmother in Manchester. His body has never been found.
On December 26, 1964, Myra arranged for her grandmother to stay with relatives for the night. At six o’clock that evening, she approached ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey at a fair and offered her a lift home. Lesley was taken back to the grandmother’s house, and forced to undress, after which Brady tape-recorded her pleas to be allowed to go home, and took photographs of her with a gag in her mouth. Brady raped her, but would later claim that it was Myra who strangled Lesley with a piece of cord. They kept the body in the house overnight before burying it on the moor.
Brady would later admit that committing so many murders had given him an odd sense of meaninglessness, of futility, which may be why he allowed almost a year to elapse before he killed again. This crime was not for “pleasure,” but to entrap Myra’s brother-in-law, David Smith, a young man who regarded Brady with hero worship, into becoming an accomplice. On October 6, 1965, the couple picked up a seventeen-year-old homosexual, Edward Evans, and took him back to the house. Then Myra called at her sister’s flat, and asked Smith to walk her home. As Smith stood in the kitchen, he heard a scream, and Myra pushed him into the sitting room, yelling. “Help him, Dave.” Brady was hacking at Evans with a hatchet. When Evans was dead, Brady handed the bloodstained hatchet to Smith, saying: “Feel the weight”—he wanted Smith’s fingerprints on it. But Smith was sickened and horrified by what he had seen (the FBI profiling team could have told Brady that a teenager would panic), and after drinking tea and agreeing to return the next day with a pram and help dispose of the body, he went home to his wife and vomited. Smith and his wife then went to the police. The next morning, a policeman dressed as a baker’s roundsman called at the house, and the body was found in a locked bedroom. Brady was arrested, and Myra was arrested the next day. Photographs of the graves led the police to uncover the bodies of two of the victims on Saddleworth Moor. In May 1966, both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Myra Hindley died in prison in November 2002.
By that time I had been in correspondence with Ian Brady for ten years. This came about because soon after Easter 1990, an attractive girl named Christine arrived at my house, explaining that she was a friend of Brady; she wanted to ask my advice about an autobiography she was writing, and whether she could quote his letters to her. I explained that Brady’s letters were his copyright, and that she could not quote them without his permission. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Brady, who was now in the Ashworth High Security Hospital near Liverpool, asking if it was true that I was helping Christine to write a book about him. I replied explaining the true situation, and Brady and I continued to correspond. In fact, I had always been curious about him, because it was obvious from the trial evidence that he was highly intelligent, and I was baffled by the way that he had converted ordinary Myra to becoming his accomplice in killing children.
My correspondence with Brady was my first contact with the mind of a serial killer. He was, in fact, as intelligent as I had supposed. But I quickly became aware that there were certain important factors that I had left out of account. William James wrote an essay called “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” And I soon came to recognize that a highly intelligent person can suffer from it just as much as a stupid person.
Brady was obsessed by the notion that the criminal has the right to be a criminal because society—particularly people in authority—commits far worse crimes. (He would cite the atom bomb and napalm.) It was no good pointing out to him that, even if that were true, two wrongs do not make a right. Brady’s hatred of authority was so absolute that he would not even consider the argument. Myra Hindley would describe how, after burying one of the victims, Brady shook his fist at the sky and shouted: “Take that, you bastard.”
Most of us can recognize how anger and humiliation makes us irrational, but even when cursing with fury, a part of us recognizes that we are being illogical, and surrendering to negative emotion. Brady seemed to possess a psychological mechanism that completely blocked any such notion. I once asked him if he ever thought about his victims; he rep
lied: “That would be the quickest way to mental suicide.”
He obviously meant the same thing when he admitted to a journalist: “I felt old at twenty-six. Everything was ashes. I felt there was nothing of interest—nothing to hook myself on to. I had experienced everything.”
I suspect that this odd sense of moral bankruptcy affects most serial killers, and sometimes explains why they make mistakes that lead to their arrest.
Brady often told me that there had been a “hidden agenda” behind the murders, and that if I read certain of his letters carefully enough, I would grasp what it was. He would never explain himself further, and I came to suspect that it was merely some form of self-justification. I was inclined to believe that he was hinting at a factor that is the essence of sex crime: that sense of power that Hazelwood talks about. Christie experienced it after he had strangled and raped Muriel Eady: “. . . once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.”
Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has labeled this feeling “the flow experience.” He recognizes that human beings need the flow experience to change and evolve. Our energies could be compared to a river flowing over a plain. If the flow is too slow, the river begins to meander as it accumulates silt and mud. But a violent storm in the mountains can send down a roaring torrent that sweeps away the silt and straightens out the bends, so that once again, the river flows straight and deep. This is why all human beings crave the flow experience.
The flow experience also brings the recognition that human beings possess powers and capabilities of which they are not normally aware. Again, it is James who catches this insight when he says that the problem with most of us is “a habit of inferiority to our full selves.”
