The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  Ironically, initial facts indicate that police investigating the Green River Murders were reluctant to admit that even one serial killer was responsible!

  This dual expediency is understandable, as: (a) admission that a serial killer is at work generates public fear and hostility towards the police unable to capture him, and (b) when finally forced to admit the existence of a serial killer, it is officially convenient to attribute all the murders to one killer, rather than compound public panic by raising the spectre of two or more serial killers simultaneously prowling the city streets.

  The first ostensible victim attributed by the police to the (using their non-plural sobriquet) ‘Green River Killer’ was sixteen-year-old Wendy Coffield, a convicted prostitute who specialised in decoying her clients into isolated areas where they could be ‘rolled’ by her male confederate or pimp.

  On 7th July, 1982, her body was found in the Green River. She had been strangled with her own jeans. The investigation was conducted by the King County Police, Seattle.

  A month later, 12th August, the body of a second victim was discovered in the Green River, less than a mile away from where Wendy Coffield had been found. Again that of a convicted prostitute and part-time stripper, twenty-three-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner. The only relevant fact the King County Police apparently bothered to note was the completely irrelevant fact that both victims sported tattoos. They saw no other reason to connect the two killings.

  A few days later, on 15th August, two more female bodies were discovered in the Green River, a quarter of a mile from where the body of Debra Lynn Bonner had been dragged out. The notable differences being that this time both victims were black, entirely naked and had been weighted down below the surface of the water with large rocks.

  The King County Police managed to deduce, from forensic examination, that both of these bodies must have been there when they had searched the immediate area where Debra Lynn Bonner’s corpse had been found three days earlier. So belatedly they spread their net farther afield in search of clues, only to find, almost immediately, yet another body, the fifth, this time not in the river but on the bank. Again the female victim was black and, significantly, had been strangled with her jeans, in the same manner as Wendy Coffield.

  Please note at this juncture, for future reference, that I am of the opinion that a second killer, for his own purposes, deliberately copied the first killer’s methodology and choice of dumping ground.

  As already indicated, though the King County Police had initially been extremely tardy in coming to the conclusion that a serial killer was at work, this had been mainly due to their lack of thoroughness in not finding the other three bodies in the same locale. In view of events yet to unfold, I believe that it would not have made any difference, so far as catching the killer was concerned, had they found the three additional bodies earlier than they did. The three lost days were of little relevance as the killer had left no definitive traces to follow.

  But if the King County Police had made a faster connection between the first victim found in the Green River, sixteen-year-old Wendy Coffield, and the second victim, Debra Lynn Bonner, both being convicted prostitutes, they would then presumably have placed that area of the Green River under close, round-the-clock surveillance. If they had done so, they would have captured the killer/killers within days, as shall be proven presently.

  All five bodies having been found so close to one another conclusively signified (to the police) that they had all been murdered by a single serial killer, conforming to the classic pattern of killing and disposing of his victims in an area he was familiar with. As his easy-to-approach prostitute victims were transported to the carefully chosen isolated area in a vehicle, it seems at first glance reasonable to assume that the killer was a psychopath. But as some of the rocks (which ‘weighted down’ two of the four victims found in the water) had been rammed into their vaginas, it is questionable whether concealment of the bodies was his main motive, as in the case of a psychopath.

  So secondary psychotic symptoms become apparent. Use of the rocks as penis substitutes, and as a method of degrading the victim, reveals the killer’s sexual inadequacy and his need to compensate, consciously or subconsciously. It also suggests the killer premeditates but does not fully prepare for the crime, using whatever objects come to hand, i.e., the use of the rocks and the strangling of two of the five victims with their jeans.

  This reasonably indicated that the killer was physically powerful and confident, a deduction reinforced by his not having used restraints on the victims, street-hardened prostitutes who habitually carry some weapon for protection against possibly violent clients. Rather, the killer controlled his victims by choice of isolated killing ground — ‘microcosm management’ is the term I would coin for this particular method.

  The forensic scientists examining the latest three victims eventually came up with some startling findings.

  One of the two black victims found in the Green River had been murdered only two days before discovery. And the body of the third black victim, who was found on the bank of the river, was still in a state of rigor mortis, thus indicating that she had been killed probably less than a day previous. Which signifies beyond question that, if you accept for present convenience that only one killer was involved, the murderer had returned three times to that area of the Green River with his additional victims, even after the police had found the bodies of Wendy Coffield and Debra Lynn Bonner there.

  So, as already stated, if the King County Police had immediately connected the deaths of the first two prostitute victims and put that small section of the Green River under constant police guard, the killer would have walked straight into their waiting arms, not once but thrice! I must again add at this point that I personally believe they would have in fact captured two separate killers. I will explain why at the appropriate time.

  The King County Police tried to rectify their oversight by belatedly setting up round-the-clock surveillance teams in that area of the Green River where all five bodies were discovered. Almost immediately, the sensationalist media leaked this information to the general public — and presumably to the killer, for he did not return to the scene of the crime this time.

  Meanwhile, the latest three black victims had been identified by Seattle detectives.

  The first of the two found in the river itself was Marcia Faye Chapman, a thirty-year-old prostitute who had a family of three, and had gone missing on 1st of August, 1982.

  The second victim was Cynthia Hinds, again a hooker, who had vanished on 11th August 1982.

  The third victim, who had been found face down on the bank of the river, was sixteen-year-old Opal Mills, who had vanished a scant three days before her body was discovered. She had no criminal record for prostitution or any other offence. In brief, she was respectable and thus did not fit the pattern of the apparent prostitute killer.

  Forensic experts concluded, from the scrapes and scratches on the body of Opal Mills, that the killer had dragged her corpse along the ground to the spot where it was found on the riverbank. This suggests that she was killed elsewhere and brought there by vehicle. Another significant difference in the original pattern.

  All of which raises further mystifying, psychological questions. A psychopathic serial killer, who takes a keen interest in media accounts of his crimes and police tactics, must have known that the police had found his first two victims and would not have returned three times to the selfsame area with further victims. So what was the explanation? That the killer was not the psychopath his methods indicated, but a psychotic who was not sufficiently alert to know that his first two victims had been found and who cared even less? Or was he a psychopath who believed in double-bluff? Or, perhaps more likely, one who was in a privileged position to know definitely that the police had not set up a trap to catch him there after the first two killings? Perhaps a policeman or a reporter with inside contacts?

  Even if that were the case, the psychopath would have bee
n intelligent and cautious enough to assume that the discovery of his first two victims had brought a highly dangerous amount of morbid public attention to that particular area of the Green River, and surely would not have risked immediately returning there three times with fresh victims.

  The presence of the busy Seattle-Tacoma International Airport within a short distance from Green River prompts the outside possibility that the killer might have flown elsewhere on business for a couple of days, and missed the local news reports.

  But that possibility is pretty much negated by the fact that he killed in the danger area on three separate further occasions in a matter of days, and was therefore in a position to know his previous two victims had been discovered.

  If we accept the police theory that only one killer was involved, this apparently points to the killer being a pronounced psychotic in the grip of chronic delusions driving him to take foolhardy, monumental risks despite the odds. But such an assessment would have to ignore the strong psychological evidence to the contrary, essentially reflecting the personality print of a stealthy, intelligent psychopath with perhaps only secondary, non-affective psychotic symptoms. That profile is further reinforced by the significant determinant that he has been clever and self-controlled enough to evade capture to this very day.

  If, as I believe, there were at this early stage two separate killers involved, the second copying the methods of the first for his own advantage, the second killer had made the pattern-breaking mistake of choosing his own preferred type of victim, i.e., Opal Mills, not a prostitute.

  We must now progress to the forty-odd other murders the police have attributed to the so-called Green River Killer.

  The section of the Green River the killer had used as a dumping ground till then may have been small, but he stalked his prostitute victims in a much larger hunting radius, which stretched along the Pacific Highway from Seattle to Tacoma.

  This long, broad highway is usually referred to as ‘The Sea-Tac Strip,’ as it runs past the sprawling Seattle-Tacoma International Airport which, like all large airports, has a multitude of bars, diners, hotels and motels studding its borders, including five-star Hilton and Holiday Inn, making the crowded, busy district a lucrative beat for hookers to sell their wares.

  The city of Seattle itself, with its skyscrapers and neon pyrotechnics, is much like many others in North America. It is the largest city in the state, constituting a major port in west Washington, on an isthmus between Lake Washington and Puget Sound.

  The city is generally regarded as the foremost commercial centre in the Northwest and has two excellent universities. In the fall it has a blustery atmosphere not too dissimilar to that of Chicago. The contrast between rich and poor is not quite so striking as in New York.

  All in all, Seattle can be summed up as modest and respectable. The Town and Country Inn offers in neon: ‘A PILLOW FOR YOUR THOUGHTS.’

  Naturally the city has its districts of ill repute, where the hookers patrol the pavements in pants and bra, stand gossiping together on corners, smoking reefers and haggling prices with the johns in kerb-crawling cars.

  Hookers are mostly a happy-go-lucky breed, and far more interesting than most of their sisters who walk the straight line.

  The genteel look down their noses at hookers, never seeming to realise it takes a lot of hard courage to be one. Here the lights are not so bright, the doorways not so sweet. Here you meet stark reality, the quick and the dead. Here the killers come to prey.

  With the monotonous foreboding of a production line, the flow of victims continued to mount.

  A mere two days following the discovery of Wendy Coffield’s corpse, another young prostitute, seventeen-year-old Giselle Lavvorn, mysteriously disappeared while strolling on the Sea-Tac Strip. The Seattle police searched around but could find no trace of her.

  The next hooker to disappear was Kase Lee. She had not been seen since 28th August 1982.

  On 29th August 1982, another prostitute, Terri Mulligan, vanished after being witnessed entering a car.

  This was quickly followed by the disappearance of eighteen-year-old Mary Meehan, who had been seven months pregnant.

  The tenth prostitute victim was fifteen-year-old Debra Estes. A curious, poignant piece of information about her was found in police files.

  Three weeks before her disappearance, she had been driven to a deserted spot by a client in a pickup truck. He had drawn a gun and forced her to strip and perform oral sex, then had robbed and tied her up. She had reported all of this to the Seattle police who, in a surprisingly short space of time, managed to trace and arrest the man. At first they were sure they had captured the Green River Killer. The suspect asked for and passed a lie-detector test, but that was not sufficient proof of innocence.

  However, after the detectives made wider inquiries, it became clear that the man could not possibly be the Green River Killer. If further proof were needed, the aforementioned ninth victim, Mary Meehan, had disappeared while the man was in the police cells. But the young Debra Estes had taken no heed of the inherent warning in her lucky escape, and had chosen no new path or even another city, but had instead walked blithely on to her own annihilation.

  Even serial killers can sometimes risk the self-destructive experience of introspective pathos and pity — but not too often, if they wish to survive in the solitary world they have chosen. To will their own death, they need only unlock those rusted, inner-sealed chambers where the imprisoned alter ego waits to kill them with treacherous grief.

  No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

  — Richard the Third, Shakespeare

  As detailed in the explanatory opening chapters of this book, I will not devote a great deal of space to the names and biographies of the victims in various cases, except when I believe such details help to enhance the forensic exercise we are engaged in. I do this not out of any disrespect for the victims; the primary aim of this book, as explained, is to delve into the psychology of the serial killer.

  In the remaining five months of 1982, another six victims were chalked up, bringing the total to sixteen. The Seattle police, patently and literally, did not have the slightest clue or insight to assist them in stemming the steady crop of corpses. Understandably, the detectives were becoming increasingly discouraged, their minds and spirits drained by the Green River, as it were. But, perhaps more to the point, as the police rely greatly on the help of the public, the public was by then actually becoming bored with the murders.

  The killings were beginning to hold less interest than the synthetic drama of soap operas. The murders had no variety, no originality, no panache, no cathartic effect, just the same stale routine over and over.

  The public’s attitude to murder, whether they choose to admit it or not, is not dissimilar to that of a theatre critic. They are, as it were, always on the lookout for new, aspiring, homicidal talent to tickle the palate. But this killer seemed to have lost whatever inspiration he once possessed; he no longer shocked or surprised his audience, and they were silently booing him off the stage for lack of artistic creation and imagination.

  Apparently the Green River Killer did not have critical acclaim at the forefront of his mind. He continued to kill with the same prodigious, unoriginal regularity.

  March 1983, Alma Smith and Dolores Williams fell victim. The following month saw another five victims added to the total. Two of these actually disappeared on the same day, 17th April 1983. On 30th April 1983, eighteen-year-old Marie Malvar was driven away by a man in a pickup truck — her pimp took the trouble to follow in his car but lost them. Marie Malvar simply disappeared. However, 17th May 1983, her driving licence was found in a room at the airport. Police did not even bother to retrieve the licence and examine it for prints, so it was eventually destroyed months later.

  Another ten victims bumped up the overall total in May, June and July, 1983. By now the only visible function the Seattle police seemed to be serving was to keep score. There was no public
outcry to spur them on to better efforts. Nobody seemed to care; after all, they were only prostitutes and it was about time somebody cleaned the streets up for ‘respectable’ citizens. That was the general attitude.

  The Green River Killer, as the Seattle police still insisted on calling him, had long since stopped disposing of the victims in the Green River, and was now randomly using surrounding woods, lakes and other isolated locations. Some victims were skeletons before they were found, and defied attempts at identification. Many others simply eluded all searches by the police.

  As 1983 drew to a close, over forty victims had been attributed by the Seattle police to the Green River Killer, no matter if many of the victims were dumped miles away from the Green River.

  From a psychological viewpoint and public relations-wise, as already indicated, one can clearly discern the advantages to the police of putting all the murders down to one, diabolically clever psychopathic killer. If the public were informed that, since the original five victims were found in the Green River, another half-dozen budding serial killers had grasped the opportunity to get on the homicidal bandwagon in the sure knowledge that the police would credit all the murders to the invisible Green River Killer, the chaotic state of affairs would have inspired women to flee Seattle. It was much more acceptable and comfortable for the public to believe that there was only one perverted serial killer murdering at will.

  Faced with a possible clutch of serial killers, the public would begin to wonder how many more serial killers were getting ready to join the queue to get their kicks. People would envisage Seattle evolving into a national or international hunting ground, or homicidal Disneyland, for ‘tourist serial killers’ who could fly in for a spot of sport, in a city where the chances of being caught by the police were non-extant.