“This person has a psychopathic nature which, from time to time, compels him to kill. He kills without reason and without provocation. His victims are not people who have done him harm, not persons he has reason to dislike. They are unfortunates who are selected simply because of certain fantasies going on in the killer’s mind. These fantasies have nothing to do with the real world and serial killers do not have a motive, as you and I understand the word.”
He smiled and touched the interviewer’s shoulder again. He was assuring the girl that, whatever happened, he would be at her side protecting her. Then his face became serious and he shook his head several times as he warned, “Members of the public are requested to avoid parks and such places after dark unless they are in large groups.”
What he said next was a surprise to me and would have had the inspector, had he been watching, jumping out of his seat.
“This kind of killing,” he looked piously upward, “praise the Lord, has not, till now, occurred in our city. A good thing,” another pious upward glance, “but it has its drawbacks. The East Coast Division, who are investigating these murders, do not have the necessary expertise to deal with crimes of this nature.” He smiled beatifically all round as though by doing this he removed the insult contained in his words. Then went on, unsmiling, to add to it. “The officers dealing with these killings are OK when it comes to dealing with your routine robberies, rapes and murders. But in situations like the one now facing us they are completely out of their depth. The man…” he smiled, threw up his hands disarmingly and started again. “The person responsible for these deaths is not so much a criminal as someone with a terribly sick mind.
“I have been interested in crimes of this nature and am lucky to have obtained the services of an expert in this field. His name is Dr Quincy Sio. Dr Sio is a highly qualified psychopathologist who has worked for several years in the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI. He is a man of singular talents as you will shortly see.”
The interviewer explained that an interview with Dr Sio had been arranged, to follow immediately after the newscast.
“My God,” Ma whispered. “I hope Oscar is not trying to catch this madman by himself.”
Oscar was a drunk, out on a wild-goose chase, but to Ma he was a knight risking himself to do noble deeds. I tightened the arm round her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Ma. Uncle Oscar won’t try anything on his own. He’ll get help and he knows where to get it if he needs it.”
The interview with Quincy Sio was quite the most amazing I had seen. Our television interviews are usually dreary affairs. Men in jackets and ties answer questions with which they have been familiarised so that things move to conclusions foregone long before the end of the interview. It was clear that Quincy wasn’t going to allow this to happen.
“Before you waste air-time asking me a lot of damn fool questions about myself, let me tell you who and what I am, and what qualifies me to talk about the kind of problem that your city is experiencing.” He extended a hand to prevent the interviewer from interrupting. “For starters, I am, give or take a few decimal points, the world’s foremost authority on serial killers.”
Quincy was a small man with a boyish face and a bow-tie which he touched now and again as though it was a good-luck charm.
He spoke in a manner that many Americans adopt when they are in countries they consider less developed than their own. Quincy detailed the numerous serial killings whose investigation he had been involved in. No details were too gruesome to be mentioned. The drinking of blood, cannibalisation of sexual organs, the garnishing used when testicles were microwaved.
Quincy maintained that all serial killers were motivated by perverted sexual drives and had no control over their actions. As such they should be regarded not as criminals but as psychiatrically ill. They should be treated rather than punished. I felt it was all a load of rubbish and was incensed at the thought of Vanita’s murderer being shown any kindness. Ma, on the other hand, had her eyes glued to the set and seemed to believe every word that Quincy uttered. I am sure that many Singaporeans felt the way she did. Then, the last person I expected to be taken in by the likes of Quincy phoned. It was Jafri.
“Did you catch that, How Kum?” His voice was higher than I have ever heard it. “If you didn’t I have it on tape.”
“I saw it, Jafri…”
“Really marvellous chap this Quincy. Really up there with state-of-the-art criminology. Has all the upfront details of technology you don’t even find in sci-fi magazines.” He paused, drew a breath, and went on. “Met him today with the DCP, who is himself a very forward thinking person.”
I was stunned by the change in Jafri’s voice, the change in his idiom. I asked, “Was D’Cruz at this meeting?”
“Sure thing. The DCP had to have the investigating officer present. And I’ll say this. The old-fashioned inspector sure didn’t like the way things were going and kept a low profile for most of the time. No doubt about it. Our Ozzie sure doesn’t go with modern criminology.”
“What about you, Jafri?”
“I’m with Quincy one hundred per cent. And you should be too, How Kum, if you are really keen on getting Vanita’s killer to treatment.”
“Well, I’m not sure. I’ll think about things and…”
“But not for too long, How Kum. Quincy is visiting with us for dinner tomorrow and we’d like you here as well. I’ve asked the inspector too, so he and Quincy can battle it out before an impartial jury, though I have no doubt at all that Quincy is right.”
I agreed to have dinner with them the following evening but more than one thing worried me. Jafri seemed to have changed more than in his voice and the way he spoke. The man, on whom I had always depended for rationality and objectivity, mentioned providing Quincy and the inspector with an impartial jury, forgetting that he himself could not, under any circumstances, be part of such a body.
Zainah is a marvellous cook. Generally, the Malays tend to tone down strong tastes with the liberal use of coconut milk. Jafri’s wife, however, managed to combine Malay softness with the more virile flavours of the Middle East and the sharp sauces of India, and I always looked forward to a meal at the al-Misris’ home.
I gazed at the food before us with an anticipation I had difficulty hiding. Central to the meal was the beriyani made of several varieties of rice, each differently stained. Accompanying this was a leg of lamb roasted in its own juices and heavy with spices. Then there was a rich kurma, all but hiding the chicken drumsticks inside it, and an assortment of vegetables and pickles. Jafri, in the way of his ancestors, did not drink and usually did not offer his guests alcohol. Today, however, beer was provided to wash down the meal, perhaps because D’Cruz was present. Quincy was there when I arrived. In the flesh he appeared even smaller than he seemed on television. Both growth and ageing appeared to have been halted just before puberty, and there was a Peter Pan quality about the man. The effect of this was increased by his high-pitched voice and his overly energetic movements. Unlike most Americans he was undeterred by the calorie or cholesterol content of the food. He ate voraciously and talked almost continuously.
D’Cruz on the other hand was subdued. He ate little, talked less and smoked a chain of cigarettes which he did not seem to be enjoying. He seemed somewhere else and, at the start of the evening, did not question even the most outrageous claims that Quincy made.
“It has clearly been established that serial killers, like the one we are dealing with, have abnormal limbic systems.” He looked at the inspector who was frowning at his cigarette. “I don’t think you got much anatomy in police school except to know where the kidneys are so you can throw punches at them.” He permitted himself two short bursts of laughter. “The limbic system comprises the nuclei of the hypothalamus, the hippocampal gyri and the olfactory apparatus.”
He paused and muttered, “I wish I had brought my set of neuroanatomy slides…” then carried on in his normal didactic voice. “At this point in time, this organ system is looked upon
as the nucleus of all criminal psychopathology.”
Believing he had given us enough to work on for a while, Quincy leapt from his chair, cut himself a large slice of lamb, stuffed it into his mouth and began chewing it. The movements of his jaw were short and exactly timed. As soon as he had reduced the piece of lamb to manageable proportions he began talking again. “As I said, I can’t go into real details without my slides but I’ll do the best I can.” He swallowed the lamb to prepare himself for his extempore exposition.
“The limbic system is triggered off by smell. Even he,” he jerked his head in D’Cruz’s direction, “will realise how important smell was for the water-living animals from which we all stem and from whom our nervous systems are derived. Smells, carried to us on water, brought messages of good and bad. Told us if an available mate or a dangerous enemy was close.” He stopped to stare at D’Cruz, whom he had targeted as the stupidest boy in the class. “It doesn’t take a high-grader like our policeman here, to tell us that smells, whether we are aware of them or not, influence our emotional reactions greatly. And smell,” he gripped Zainah’s shoulder, “is a sensation that is primarily involved in the sexual function. It initiates and sustains it. It is the most primitive of our sensations, the sensation we are least aware of and the most powerful.”
He paused, more because he was out of breath than for dramatic effect. “And serial killers, I cannot repeat often enough, are essentially sick people, sexually sick folk.”
Quincy, who had not released Zainah’s shoulder, began pumping it as though in congratulation. She reached for a glass of water to disentangle herself from his attentions, attempting to catch her husband’s eye in the process.
Jafri was unaware of any presence other than Quincy’s. When he had spoken to me on the phone, I felt there was a change in Jafri. There was a whining quality about a voice that had, over the years, been so full of self confidence and assurance. His manner too was fawning as he said, “You have explained, very adequately to me, the intimate connection between the olfactory sense and sexual function. I think my friends here would appreciate it if you could explain to them something of the nature of the affliction these unfortunates suffer from, and why you and your group see them as sick rather than criminal.”
Quincy, having been forced to relinquish Zainah’s shoulder, picked up a glass and began rolling it about in his hands. “Let me begin by telling you folks something about the well-known serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas. Now, our boy Henry was way ahead of the class. At ten he was having sexual relations with animals and his younger brother. Even without scientific know-how, does this not sound like his sexual physiology was disturbed? And would it really come as a surprise to hear that he committed his first murder-rape when he was fifteen?” He helped himself to more lamb and, his mouth full, asked, “And would you not say that a man who killed his victims, cut them to pieces and had sex with bits of their bodies, had an abnormal brain?” He beamed around the room.
Zainah pushed her lamb into one corner of her plate.
Quincy continued. “Then consider the case of Bobby. I mean Bobby Joe Long, of course. We have documented proof that Bobby had sex at least three times a day with his wife as well as masturbating at least five times.”
“The boy sure didn’t leave himself much time for saying his prayers,” D’Cruz muttered.
Quincy didn’t spare him a look. “We’re looking at eight orgasms a day and that definitely spells brain damage. You don’t need CT scans, magnetic resonance imaging, PET scans or even EEGs to confirm that.”
“None of the victims of our so-called serial murderer was sexually assaulted,” said D’Cruz in a flat voice.
“Ah, my dear Watson,” he laughed to himself, “a good name for you, my old-fashioned policeman friend.” He leapt from his chair, seized D’Cruz’s hand and began shaking it as though they had just been introduced. “We modern criminologists see the murder itself as a sexual act. The victims were stabbed, weren’t they?” He nodded to himself several times. “Even you, dear Watson, can see how closely the act of stabbing resembles coitus.”
“Most women I know,” the inspector mumbled into his beer, “would rather be fucked to death than stabbed to death.”
Quincy did not appear to have heard him. “The knife, you see, represents the erect penis, the gaping wound the vulva, the track into the body the vagina. And rest assured, our killer had an orgasm, with or without ejaculation, at the moment of the slaying.”
“Can you have an orgasm without ejaculation?” asked Zainah, her eyes wide.
“You do all the time, don’t you?” Quincy retorted, but without the slightest trace of humour.
“I mean men, lah,” she countered, only her use of the vernacular betraying her embarrassment.
“Certainly,” said Quincy. “Psychologists today view the orgasm more as an electrical discharge from the temporal lobe than a seminal discharge from the penis.”
“One of the girls had her neck broken,” said D’Cruz.
“But her breasts were slashed. The equivalent of Henry rubbing himself off on bits of his victims’ bodies.”
“What about there being more than one victim on two occas…” D’Cruz began.
“Like Bobby, our killer has a great sexual appetite.”
Speaking in his new voice, Jafri said, “Tell them how you propose to find the killer, doctor.”
“Primarily from their biosocial make-up. It is clear that this kind of man will have a history of severe childhood repression and trauma. Gary, for instance, was forced by an older sister to perform cunnilingus on her when he was a little boy.”
I was irritated by Quincy’s habit of referring to killers by their first names and asked, “Gary who?”
“Gary Schaefer, of Springfield, of course,” the doctor replied.
“But you have other ways of detecting these sick men, haven’t you, doctor?” Jafri prompted.
Zainah butted in before Quincy could answer. “I don’t think there are many people who have oral sex with their sisters, uh?”
The doctor rewarded her perceptiveness with a smile, nodded, allowing her to go on with the rest of her question. “And those who do go down on their sisters are not likely to tell the world about it, yah?” A nod of approval from Quincy. “So, if we don’t know how many men were forced to have oral sex with their sisters, we have no way of saying what percentage of them would become serial killers.” She paused and looked around her before continuing. “What I mean is that many men who have oral sex with their sisters may not become loony murderers later in their lives.”
I was surprised by how sharp Zainah was. D’Cruz shot her a look of gratitude. Jafri, however, didn’t seem to take her point and said, “But there are other signs of this disease, aren’t there, doctor?”
“There sure are,” the little man replied. “C. Robert Cloninger of the University of Washington School of Medicine has shown that the disorder is a genetic one. His work on adoptees has demonstrated that children whose biological parents are criminals are four times more likely to become criminals than those children whose parents are law-abiding.”
“So all we have to do,” said the inspector, barely concealing a snigger, “is to go through the records of our Social Welfare Department on adoptees and find out which of these had criminal parents. Then we find out which of the adoptees were forced to go down on their sisters and, hey presto, we have our murderer.”
Jafri glowered at D’Cruz. “Listen, Ozzie. Doctor Quincy here is a scientific criminologist, whose efforts take us to the limits of our understanding of the criminal mind.” He altered his tone. “But there are ways, aren’t there, doctor, of physically identifying these unfortunate creatures?”
“Sure thing,” the doctor replied. “The work of Dr Sarnoff Mednick of the University of Southern California has confirmed Cloninger’s theory of the genetic basis of criminality. Apart from the typical neuropsychiatric disturbance, these criminals are likely to have attached earlobes, we
bbed fingers and very long limbs.”
“Not tongues?” asked D’Cruz with a look of exaggerated innocence.
Quincy looked puzzled. He thought, and shook his head several times. “I don’t believe anyone has looked into glossal abnormalities in pathological killers. Perhaps a long tongue could be correlated with maldevelopment of the brain, some abiotrophy of Broca’s area. I must get one of our research teams to look into it.” He leaned across and thumped the inspector’s back. “You know, Watson, you’re not so dumb as your beetle brow makes you look.”
D’Cruz exploded. “Listen Quincy, doctor, or whatever you call yourself I don’t know how you persuaded the DCP…”
“DCP?” Quincy raised his eyebrows.
“The Deputy Commissioner of Police,” Jafri dutifully explained.
“…the DCP,” D’Cruz continued, “to let you in on my case. But one question burns my arse more than too much hot curry. And it is this. How the hell are we going to find this killer with his webbed fingers and spiked balls or whatever?”
Quincy was unperturbed by the outburst. “Elementary, my dear Watson. I have already set the wheels in motion. Even now, teams of social workers are tabulating data and feeding them into computers which I have specially programmed. Programmed to elicit the information we require. We are looking at the records of known sex offenders, of juvenile malcontents, psychiatric patients and abandoned children.” He bounced in his seat and farted loudly. “Within forty-eight hours, seventy-two at the outside, we will have unearthed suspects who warrant further investigation. And this, dear Watson, is more than what you have come up with in a week.”
“Tell How Kum what you may need him for,” said Jafri.
“We in the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI have, from time to time, come up with two suspects with identical psychopathological profiles and similar conditioning. In such circumstances, a person who has been close to the criminal at the time of a killing can usually indicate to us which of the two is guilty. You, How Kum, are the closest anyone has come to the killer.”
Moonrise, Sunset Page 16
