The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  Perhaps his most interesting observations concerned dominance in women. In 1936, Maslow began a series of Kinsey-type interviews with college women – he preferred women to men as interviewees because they were capable of greater frankness; male answers tended to be distorted by self-esteem. His findings, stated in a paper of 1939 (and another three years later) was that female sexuality is related to dominance. The higher-dominance females went in for more promiscuity, lesbian relations, masturbation and sexual experimentation (fellatio, sodomy, etc.).

  What surprised him was that he discovered that his subjects tended to fall into three groups: high dominance, medium dominance and low dominance. A medium-dominance woman might have a high rating for sex drive, but her sexual experience was usually limited; she tended to be a ‘one-man woman’. A low-dominance woman (and these were difficult to get into the study group) was inclined to feel that sex was strictly for child-bearing, and one low-dominance woman who was sterile refused her husband sex even though she had a high sex drive. (It is important to note that all three groups could have a high sex drive, but that the amount of sex they indulged in depended on how dominant they were.) Medium-dominance women had a romantic attitude to sex; they liked to be wooed with lights and flowers and soft music, and they liked the kind of male who would be a ‘good provider’ – someone who was stable rather than exciting. Low-dominance women seemed to feel that sex was rather disgusting. Most of them thought that the male sexual organ was ugly, while high-dominance women thought it beautiful.

  The really significant observation that emerged from the study was that the women tended to prefer males who were slightly more dominant than themselves, but within their own dominance group. Low-dominance females preferred the kind of man who would admire them from a distance for years without pressing his suit. They found medium- and high-dominance males rather frightening. Medium-dominance women found high-dominance males frightening. High-dominance women like the kind of man who would sweep them off their feet, and in lovemaking hurl them on a bed and take them with a certain amount of force. One highly dominant woman spent years looking for a male who was even more dominant than herself, and failed to find him. When finally she discovered a man of slightly superior dominance, she married him and remained faithful; but she enjoyed picking fights that would make him violent and end in virtual rape – an experience she found immensely exciting. One high-dominance woman who could have an orgasm virtually by looking at a man admitted to not having orgasms with two lovers because they were too weak. ‘I just couldn’t give in to them.’

  When writing his biography of Abraham Maslow in the early 1970s, Colin Wilson was struck by the fact that this dominance relation seems to explain many crime partnerships – for example, the Leopold and Loeb murder case (mentioned in Chapter One), in which two Chicago students from wealthy families committed various crimes – ending in murder – for ‘kicks’. Most commentators on the case remain content with the dubious explanation that they wanted to prove that they were ‘supermen’; but the master-slave relationship between Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold makes us aware of what really happened. Loeb’s ego – his self-esteem – was nourished by his ‘slave’; but it was not enough to express this self-esteem merely by dominating Leopold (who, in any case, wanted to be ‘used). Like any juvenile delinquent, Loeb had to express it by ‘defying society’, committing petty crimes for pleasure rather than gain. It was this craving to express his dominance through ‘defiance’ that led to the scheme to kidnap and murder a child. Without his ‘slave’, Loeb would almost certainly never have become a killer.

  The most significant observation about the case is that Leopold and Loeb belonged to two different dominance groups: Loeb was ‘high-dominance’, Leopold medium. This, according to Maslow, seldom happens in ordinary human pair-bondings. To begin with, the high-dominance person is seldom sexually interested in people outside his own dominance group. He may cheerfully sleep with medium- or low-dominance women, but he is incapable of taking any personal interest in them. If, in fact, he consents to relations with a person outside his dominance group – out of loneliness and frustration – the resultant boost to his ego can amount to a kind of intoxication. In a well-adjusted person, this would usually lead to an increase in self-confidence. In a person whose dominance has been suppressed – as in Maslow’s ‘previously inferior monkeys’ – the result may be criminal behaviour, which could be interpreted as a kind of chest-beating to demonstrate triumph.

  In some cases, the relationship between a high-dominance and a medium-dominance person may amount to a kind of hypnosis. In November 1899, a New York lawyer named Albert T. Patrick knocked on the door of the Madison Avenue apartment of William Rice, a wealthy retired businessman in his eighties. The man who opened the door was Rice’s valet, Charles Jones, and Patrick lost no time in trying to persuade Jones to betray his employer, and furnish some evidence that could be used in a lawsuit against Rice. Jones, who was the old man’s only friend, refused with horror, but there was something about the beady eyes and dominant gaze of Albert T. Patrick that fascinated him, and when Patrick returned a few days later, he allowed himself to be persuaded, and agreed to forge a letter in which his employer apparently agreed to abandon the lawsuit. When Patrick learned from Jones that Rice had left his fortune of three million dollars to a college in Texas, he persuaded Jones to co-operate in a scheme to forge a new will, leaving the fortune to Patrick. The next step was to poison Rice with indigestion pills laced with mercury. When these failed to bring about the desired result, Jones was ordered to kill the old man with chloroform. By now he was so completely under Patrick’s domination that he complied. As soon as the old man was dead, Patrick hurried to the bank with a forged cheque for $25,000, but Jones had accidentally made out the cheque to ‘Abert’ T. Patrick, and when the teller noticed this, the scheme began to go wrong. The bank manager demanded to speak to Mr Rice on the telephone and Jones had to admit that the old man was dead. Soon after this, Jones and Patrick found themselves in adjoining cells. Patrick now handed Jones a sharp knife and said: ‘The jig’s up. It’s no use. You go first and I’ll follow.’ Jones was so completely under Patrick’s spell that he cut his throat without pausing to reflect that it would be impossible for Patrick to get the knife back . . . In fact, Jones recovered, and turned state’s evidence. Patrick was sentenced to death, but was finally pardoned and released.

  Almost half a century later, in 1947, Raymond Fernandez, a petty crook with a toupee and gold teeth who specialised in seducing and swindling lonely middle-aged women, met an overweight nurse named Martha Beck through a lonely-hearts club. Fernandez had become a crook after a serious head injury that caused a total personality change. (We have already noted how many serial killers have suffered head injuries.) His first sight of Martha was a shock – she weighed fourteen stone – but she seems to have possessed a certain wistful charm. Once in bed, they discovered that they were soul-mates, and their sex life became a non-stop orgy. When Martha learned how Fernandez made a living, she proposed to join him – posing as his sister – adding only one refinement: that they should murder the women after he had seduced and robbed them. (In fact, Fernandez may have poisoned a widow named Jane Thompson in the year before he met Martha, but this has never been established – her death was certified as being due to acute gastro-enteritis.) In the course of a year they murdered at least three women, the last being a forty-one-year-old mother and her twenty-month-old daughter. Suspicious neighbours called the police, who soon discovered two freshly cemented graves in the cellar. Tried in New York, they were both electrocuted on 7 March 1951, Martha having some difficulty squeezing into the electric chair. Wenzell Brown’s book on the case, The Lonely Hearts Murders, makes it clear that Martha was the dominant one of the pair, while Fernandez was weak, vain and easygoing. Both had had the unhappy childhood that seems so typical of mass murderers. Martha’s obesity made her feel a ‘freak’, and because she was pathetically eager to please, she all
owed men to fondle her intimately while still a child. Fernandez was a sickly and puny little boy whose highly dominant father despised him; he spent his childhood wrapped in daydreams. When he and three other teenagers were caught stealing chickens, the fathers of the other boys agreed to act as guarantors and they were released; the father of Raymond Fernandez refused to co-operate and he went to prison. Even after the head injury that changed his personality, he never displayed any sadism towards the women he swindled. It seems to have been the partnership with Martha that turned him into ‘America’s most hated killer’.

  Perhaps the clearest example of the influence of the dominance syndrome on criminality is England’s Moors Murder case.

  Between July 1963 and October 1965, Ian Brady and his mistress Myra Hindley collaborated on five child murders. They were finally arrested because they tried to involve Myra’s brother-in-law, David Smith, in one of the murders, and he went to the police.

  Ian Brady, who was twenty-seven at the time of his arrest, was a typical social misfit. The illegitimate son of a Glasgow waitress, he was brought up in a slum area of Clydeside. Until the age of eleven he seems to have been a good student; then he was sent to a ‘posh’ school, together with a number of other re-housed slum boys, and began to develop a resentment towards the better-off pupils. From then on he took to petty crime; his first appearance in court was at the age of thirteen, on a charge of housebreaking. He had served four years on probation for more burglaries when he moved to Manchester to live with his mother and a new stepfather in 1954. As a result of another theft he was sentenced to a year in Borstal. Back in Manchester, he went back on the dole. It was a dull life in a small house, and he seems to have been glad to get a job as a stock clerk at Millwards, a chemical firm, when he was twenty-one.

  It was at this point that he became fascinated by the Nazis and began collecting books about them. They fed his fantasies of power. So did his discovery of the ideas of the Marquis de Sade, with his philosophy of total selfishness and his daydreams of torture. It becomes clear in retrospect that Brady always had a streak of sadism. A childhood friend later described how he had dropped a cat into a deep hole in a graveyard and sealed it up with a stone. When the friend moved the stone to check on his story, the cat escaped.

  For Brady, the Nazis represented salvation from mediocrity and boredom, while de Sade justified his feeling that most people are contemptible. Brady particularly liked the idea that society is corrupt, and that God is a lie invented by priests to keep the poor in a state of subjugation. Stifled by ennui, seething with resentment, Brady was like a bomb that is ready to explode by the time he was twenty-three.

  It was at this time that a new typist came to work in the office. Eighteen-year-old Myra Hindley was a normal girl from a normal family background, a Catholic convert who loved animals and children, and favoured blonde hair-styles and bright lipstick. She had been engaged, but broken it off because she found the boy immature. Brady had the sullen look of a delinquent Elvis Presley, and within weeks, Myra was in love. Brady ignored her, probably regarding her as a typical working-class moron. Her diary records: ‘I hope he loves me and will marry me some day.’ When he burst into profanity after losing a bet she was deeply shocked. It was almost a year later, at the firm’s Christmas party in 1961, that he offered to walk her home, and asked her out that evening. When he took her home, she declined to allow him into the house – she lived with her grandmother – but a week later, after another evening out, she surrendered her virginity on her gran’s settee. After that, he spent every Saturday night with her.

  Myra found her lover marvellously exciting and sophisticated. He wore black shirts, read ‘intellectual’ books, and was learning German. He introduced her to German wine, and she travelled as a pillion passenger on his motorbike. He talked to her about the Nazis, and liked to call her Myra Hess (a combination of a famous pianist and Hitler’s deputy). He also introduced her to the ideas of the Marquis de Sade, and set out converting her to atheism, pointing out the discrepancies in the gospels – it did not take long to demolish her faith. He also talked to her a great deal about his favourite novel, Compulsion by Meyer Levin, a fictionalised account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case.

  It was in July 1963 – according to her later confession – that he first began to talk to her about committing ‘the perfect murder’, and suggesting that she should help him. In her ‘confession’ (to Chief Superintendent Peter Topping) she alleges that Brady blackmailed her by threatening to harm her grandmother, and by showing her some pornographic photographs of her that he had taken on an occasion when he had slipped a drug into her wine. The photographs certainly exist – thirty of them – some showing them engaged in sexual intercourse and wearing hoods. (These were taken with a time-lapse camera.) Emlyn Williams, who saw them, states that some show keen pleasure on their faces, which would seem to dispose of Myra’s claim that they were taken when she was unconscious. Whether or not she was telling the truth about blackmail, it seems clear that Brady could have persuaded her to do anything anyway.

  In her confession to Chief Inspector Peter Topping (published in 1989 in his book Topping), she described how, on 12 July 1963, she and Brady set out on their first ‘murder hunt’. By now Myra Hindley owned a broken-down van. She was sent ahead in the van, with Brady following behind on his motorbike. Her job was to pick up a girl and offer her a lift. The first child they saw was Myra’s next-door neighbour, so she drove past her. The second was sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, who was on her way to a dance. Myra offered her a lift, and she accepted. In the van, Myra explained that she was on her way to Saddleworth Moor to look for a glove she had lost at a picnic. If Pauline would like to come and help her search, she would give her a pile of records in the back of the van. Pauline was delighted to accept.

  Once on the moor, Brady arrived on his motorbike, and was introduced as Myra’s boyfriend. Then Brady and Pauline went off to look for the glove. (Since it was July it was still daylight.) By the time Brady returned to the car, it was dark. He led Myra to the spot where Pauline Reade’s body was lying. Her throat had been cut, and her clothes were in disarray; Myra accepted that Brady had raped her. That, after all, had been the whole point of the murder. Together they buried the body, using a spade they had brought with them. Brady told her that at one point Pauline was struggling so much that he had thought of calling for her to hold the girl’s hands – clearly, he had no doubt that she would co-operate. On the way home, they passed Pauline’s mother and brother, apparently searching for her. Back at home, Brady burned his bloodstained shoes and trousers.

  In an open letter to the press in January 1990, Brady was to contradict Myra Hindley’s account; he insisted that injuries to the nose and forehead of Pauline Reade had been inflicted by her, and that she had also committed some form of lesbian assault on Pauline Reade. According to Brady, Myra participated actively and willingly in the murders.

  Five months later, Brady was ready for another murder. On Saturday 23 November 1963 they hired a car – the van had been sold – and drove to nearby Ashton market. There, according to Myra, Brady got into conversation with a twelve-year-old boy, John Kilbride, and told him that, ‘If Jack would help them look for a missing glove, he would give him a bottle of sherry he had won in the raffle’. Because Myra was present, John Kilbride accompanied them without suspicion. They drove up to Saddleworth Moor, and the boy unsuspectingly accompanied Brady into the darkness. Myra Hindley claims that she drove around for a while, and that when she came back and flashed her lights, Brady came out of the darkness and told her that he had already buried the body. He also mentioned taking the boy’s trousers down and giving him a slap on the buttocks. In fact, Myra said, she was fairly certain that he had raped John Kilbride. He had explained that he had strangled him because the knife he had was too blunt to cut his throat.

  In June the following year – in 1964 – Brady told her he was ‘ready to do another one’. (Like all serial killers he had
a ‘cooling-off period’ – in this case about six months.) According to Myra, he told her that committing a murder gave him a feeling of power. By now they had their own car, a Mini. On 16 June 1964 she stopped her car and asked a twelve-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, if he would help her load some boxes from an off-licence; like John Kilbride, Keith Bennett climbed in unsuspectingly. The murder was almost a carbon copy of the previous one; Keith Bennett was strangled and buried on Saddleworth Moor. Brady admitted this time that he had raped him, and added: ‘What does it matter?’ Keith Bennett’s body has never been found.

  On Boxing Day 1965 Brady and Hindley picked up a ten-year-old girl, Lesley Ann Downey, at a fairground at Ancoats. Myra Hindley had taken her grandmother to visit an uncle. They took the child back to the house, and Brady switched on a tape recorder. Myra claims she was in the kitchen with the dogs when she heard the child screaming. Brady was ordering her to take off her coat and squeezing her by the back of the neck. Then Lesley’s hands were tied with a handkerchief and Brady set up the camera and a bright light. The child was ordered to undress, and Brady then made her assume various pornographic poses while he filmed her. At this point, Myra claims she was ordered to go and run a bath; she stayed in the bathroom until the water became cold. When she went back into the bedroom, Lesley had been strangled, and there was blood on her thighs – from which Myra realised that she had been raped. At eight o’clock that evening they took the body up to Saddleworth Moor and buried it.

  In his open letter to the press in January 1990, Ian Brady denied that Myra had played no active part in the murder of Lesley Ann Downey. ‘She insisted upon killing Lesley Ann Downey with her own hands, using a two-foot length of silk cord, which she later used to enjoy toying with in public, in the secret knowledge of what it had been used for.’