by Jon Ronson
“David is really the father of psychological profiling in the United Kingdom,” Britton said, “because he came and asked me the question. Do you follow me? If David hadn’t come and asked, I would have had no reason to get involved.”
He looked at me. It was obvious he wanted me to say, “Oh, but you’re the father of criminal profiling in the United Kingdom.”
I think he wanted to emphasize that there was more to him than the terrible incident.
“Oh, but you’re the father of criminal profiling in the United Kingdom,” I dutifully said.
And so David Baker watched as Britton “almost unconsciously began asking myself questions” (as he later wrote in his best-selling memoir The Jigsaw Man). “When did he tie her up? How long had she been conscious? How quickly did she die?”
Britton eventually announced to Baker that the killer would be a sexual psychopath, a young man in his mid-teens to early twenties, lonely and sexually immature, probably living at home with his parents, a manual worker comfortable with knives, and possessing a big collection of violent pornographic magazines and videos.
“It turned out to be entirely correct, and they were very quickly able to lay hands on the person responsible,” Britton said. “A man called Bostock, I think it was.”
Paul Bostock, who did indeed fit Britton’s profile, confessed to the murder, and Britton became a celebrity. There were glowing newspaper profiles. The Home Office brought him in to finesse a newly created Offender Profiling Research Unit and asked him to appear in a TV series, Murder in Mind. He said he was reluctant to become a TV celebrity and agreed only after the people at the Home Office explained to him that they wanted to be seen to be at the cutting edge of psychological profiling and reminded him that “everything I’d done was very successful.”
As the months progressed, Britton correctly profiled lots more psychopathic sex murderers, almost all of them young men in their mid-teens to early twenties, living alone or at home with their parents and owning a big collection of violent pornography.
“There is a criticism . . .” I began.
“A criticism of what?” Britton unexpectedly snapped.
He had been so modest, even meek, until that moment and so this sudden lurch in tone came as a surprise.
“. . . that, uh, your profiles were all of almost identical personality types,” I said.
“Oh, well, that’s after the event.” He shrugged.
And in fact he did—according to The Jigsaw Man—successfully profile some criminals who weren’t the archetype: a blackmailer who slipped razor blades into Heinz baby products turned out to be a former police officer, just as he had apparently predicted.
These were the golden days for him. True, the odd unsubstantiated rumor began to surface of occasions when he may have got it wrong. For instance, it was said, a teenage girl had in 1989 walked into a police station in Leeds and claimed to be a “brood mare” for some pillars of the community, including the chief constable and the attorney general, a member of the House of Lords.
“What’s a brood mare?” the baffled policeman asked the girl.
She explained that she was regularly taken to a flat in the student district of Leeds, where, in the basement, which had a pentagram painted on the floor, she was impregnated by the chief constable and his fellow satanic Freemasons. Later the fetus would be ripped from her and sacrificed on the altar to Lucifer.
The policeman didn’t know which way to turn. Was she a fantasist or an actual brood mare? Was his boss a satanic elder or a victim of slander? And so he asked Britton to assess her testimony. He declared she was telling the truth, the police launched an expensive investigation and found nothing. No altar, no coven, no evidence of brood mare activity of any kind. The case was quietly dropped.
“A brood mare?” Britton furrowed his brow when I asked him about this rumor.
“Does it ring any bells?” I asked. “She said the people in the satanic cult were high-ranking police officers and they’d impregnate her and rip out the fetus and use it as a sacrifice to Satan?”
“There are a number of cases I’ve dealt with over the years involving satanic activity,” Britton replied. “It’s not uncommon. But I don’t remember that one.”
If the brood mare investigation did happen, he could be forgiven for not remembering. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a whirlwind for him. There were media appearances, policemen queuing up to ask his advice on unsolved sex murders, and so on. He was riding high. And then it all fell apart.
On July 15, 1992, a twenty-three-year-old woman, Rachel Nickell, was found murdered on Wimbledon Common. She’d been stabbed forty-nine times in front of her toddler son, Alex. The police, as had become customary in cases like this, asked Britton to draw up an offender profile.
“I rubbed my eyes until white stars bounced across the ceiling,” he later wrote in The Jigsaw Man. “I’d been concentrating so hard it was difficult to refocus.” Then he announced that the killer would be a sexual psychopath, a single man, a manual laborer who lived at home with his parents or alone in a bedsit within walking distance of Wimbledon Common and owned a collection of violent pornography.
It is, in retrospect, sort of understandable why they wrongly believed Colin Stagg was the killer. In a terrible twist of fate, he looked an awful lot like the witness sketches of the man seen running away from the scene, which, in turn, looked a lot like the actual murderer, Robert Napper. Plus Colin fit Britton’s profile like a hand in a glove, even more snugly, in fact, than Robert Napper would turn out to. For instance, Colin lived in a bedsit a short walking distance from the common, whereas Napper lived in Plumstead, seventeen miles away across London. (Nowadays Robert Napper lived three doors down from Tony in the DSPD unit at Broadmoor. Tony told me nobody on the ward liked him much because he was tricky and weird.)
Stagg had previously been cautioned by the police for sunbathing naked on Wimbledon Common and writing an obscene letter to a woman named Julie whom he’d contacted via a lonely-hearts page in Loot magazine. A sign on his front door read: “Christians keep away. A pagan dwells here.” Inside was a collection of pornographic magazines and books on the occult.
However, there was no evidence he was in any way sexually deviant. As he writes in his memoir, Who Really Killed Rachel?: “I consider myself to be a perfectly normal person . . . a normal red-blooded male who yearned for the company of women. . . . What I really craved was a solid, dependable relationship ultimately leading to marriage and children.”
But yes, he told the police, he’d been walking his dog on Wimbledon Common the day Rachel was murdered, as he did every day.
The police—strongly suspecting they had their killer—asked Britton if he could devise a way to elicit a confession out of Stagg, or eliminate him from their inquiries. And that’s when he had his brainwave.
He suggested that a covert officer should make contact and allow Stagg to befriend her. The police instructed an undercover policewoman—“Lizzie James”—to write to Stagg, claiming to be a friend of Julie’s, the lonely heart from Loot.
Unlike the prudish Julie, Lizzie would say she couldn’t get Colin’s erotic letter out of her mind. To hammer home the hint, she added: “I have an odd taste in music, my favorite record being ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ by Lou Reed.”
Colin, clearly bowled over by this wonderfully unexpected turn of events, responded immediately.
“I’m painfully lonely,” he wrote, and asked Lizzie if she’d mind terribly if he sent her some of his sexual fantasies.
Lizzie replied that it would be a treat: “I’m sure your fantasies hold no bounds and you are as broadminded and uninhibited as me.”
And so Colin wrote back, detailing the two of them making gentle love in a park on a sunny day while whispering, “I love you. I love you so much.” The fantasy ended with Colin tenderly wiping the teardrops that rolled down Lizzie’s cheeks.
The police were thrilled. Colin had introduced the location of a p
ark.
But Paul Britton advised caution. It would clearly have been better if his fantasy had been less affectionate and more, well, vicious. So, in her next letters, Lizzie upped the ante. Colin mustn’t hold back, she wrote, “because my fantasies hold no bounds and my imagination runs riot. Sometimes this worries me and it would be nice if you have the same unusual dreams as me. . . . I want to feel you all powerful and overwhelming so that I am completely in your power, defenseless and humiliated.”
“You need a damn good fucking by a real man,” Colin gamely replied. “I am going to make sure you scream in agony.” He immediately clarified that he wasn’t really a violent person. He was just saying it because it was the kind of erotic fantasy he gathered she wanted to hear: “If you found it offensive I can’t apologize enough.” In fact, he said, it would be brilliant if she would go round to his flat so he could cook her “my specialty rice bolognaise followed by my homemade raspberry mousse.”
Nonetheless, Paul Britton noticed “distinct elements of sadism” in Colin’s letters.
And on it went. Lizzie sent Colin a series of letters that strongly inferred how incredibly fanciable she thought he was. Colin’s responses indicated that he couldn’t believe his luck. This was surely the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. The only cloud on his horizon was the incongruous fact that whenever he suggested taking things to the next level—by perhaps meeting up and actually having sex—she invariably went quiet and backed off. He was puzzled, but put it down to the mysterious ways of womanhood.
Under Britton’s direction, Lizzie began dropping hints to Colin that she had a “dark secret,” something “bad” and “brilliant” and “glorious” that she had done in her past, which aroused in her “the most exciting emotions.”
Colin replied that he’d love to hear her dark secret and that actually he had one, too: the police wrongly believed he had murdered Rachel Nickell, “because I am a loner and I have ancient native beliefs.”
Lizzie responded that she rather wished he was the murderer: “It would make things easier for me ’cos I’ve got something to tell you.” It was her “dark secret.” Maybe they should have a picnic in Hyde Park and she could reveal her dark secret then. Colin replied that he’d be thrilled to have a picnic and hear her dark secret but it was only fair to inform her that he definitely hadn’t killed Rachel Nickell. Still, he inelegantly added, perhaps they could have sex and he could yank her head back with a belt as he entered her from behind while “indulging in carnal lusts every five minutes.”
Lizzie’s “dark secret”—as she finally informed Colin in Hyde Park, a large team of undercover officers monitoring their every move—was that when she was a teenager, she’d gotten involved with some “special people”—satanic people—and when she was with them, “a baby had had its throat cut. And then the baby’s blood was put into a cup, and everybody had a drink, and it was the most electrifying atmosphere.” After they drank the baby’s blood, they killed its mother: “She was laid out naked and these knives were brought out and this man handed me one of the knives and he asked me to cut the woman’s throat, and I did, and then there was this big orgy, and I was with this man, well, this man was the best ever.”
Lizzie looked at Colin and said she could truly love only a man who had done a similar thing.
Colin replied, “I think you’re aiming a bit high.”
During the weeks that followed, Lizzie persevered: “The thought of [the killer] is SO exciting. It’s a turn-on to think about the man that did it. . . . I want someone like the man who did this thing. I want that man. . . . If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Colin sadly replied, “but I haven’t.”
Still, he dutifully sent her increasingly violent sexual fantasies, involving knives and blood, etc., and when Lizzie handed them to Paul Britton, he studied them and solemnly informed the police, “You’re looking at someone with a highly deviant sexuality that’s present in a very small number of men in the general population. The chances of there being two such men on Wimbledon Common when Rachel was murdered are incredibly small.”
Lizzie tried one last time to elicit a confession out of him. They met in Hyde Park. “I try to imagine him,” she wistfully said as they ate sandwiches by the Serpentine, “and the thought of him is so exciting. Perhaps you are that man. I want you to treat me sort of like that man treated her.”
Colin (as he later wrote) started wondering if Lizzie “might be mentally disturbed.”
“Maybe we should call it a day,” he said forlornly to her.
At that, she stood up, sighed, and stomped away, passing a nearby yellow van filled with police officers.
A few days later Colin was arrested and charged with Rachel Nickell’s murder. He spent the next fourteen months in custody, during which time the real murderer, Robert Napper, killed a mother and her four-year-old daughter, Samantha and Jazmine Bissett, near his home in Plumstead, East London.
“Samantha’s body was so horribly mutilated,” Paul Britton told me at the Premier Inn, “the police photographer assigned to the crime scene opened the duvet Napper had wrapped her in, took the photograph . . .” Britton paused. He stirred his coffee. He gave me a grave look. “. . . and never worked again.”
And this, Britton’s look said, was the world they inhabited, the full horror of which innocent civilians like me would never truly understand.
Finally the Colin Stagg case went to the Old Bailey. The judge took one look at it and threw it out. He said the honey trap was “deceptive conduct of the grossest kind”; the idea of “a psychological profile being admissible as proof of identity in any circumstances [was] redolent with considerable danger.”
And with that, Britton’s reputation, and the reputation of his profession, were ruined.
Nobody emerged from the story well. The policewoman who played Lizzie James disappeared from history in April 2001, when the BBC reported that she’d received £125,000 compensation for trauma and stress. In 2008, Colin Stagg received compensation of £706,000, but that was only after sixteen years of being turned down for every job he ever applied for amid enduring rumors that he had gotten away with murder. Paul Britton was placed under charge by the British Psychological Society, but the case against him was dropped after his lawyer argued that given the passage of time, he wouldn’t have a fair hearing. He became a pariah in the offender-profiling world.
Now, at the Premier Inn, I said, “I’d like to talk about Colin Stagg.”
At this, Britton held up his finger, silently riffled through his bag, and handed me a sheet of paper. It took me a moment to understand what I was reading. Then I got it: it was a statement, prepared by him, for anyone who might ever ask that question.
At the very beginning of the Nickell investigation—his statement claimed—he told the Metropolitan Police that the Plumstead rapist (who eventually turned out to be Robert Napper) was their man. But they wouldn’t listen.
I looked up from the page.
“Did you really tell them that?” I asked.
Britton nodded. “I said, ‘You’re looking at the same offender. I met him in Plumstead and I met him at Rachel Nickell.’ They said, ‘Our analysis is clear. They’re not linked.’ Okay. They’re the Metropolitan Police. They know these things. I’m not perfect. It would be arrogant of me to feel that my analysis was superior to theirs. And they’re right. It would be. I had to learn it. I had to accept it. Consider this a tutorial. There we are. Sorry.”
“Can you give me proof?” I asked. “Is there anybody out there who’d be willing to say, ‘Absolutely yes, this is totally true’?”
“There are a number of people who could say that. None of them will.”
“Because of their vested interests?”
“Because of their pensions and their situation and their interests. But I had a phone call from two people who said, ‘I was there. I know what
happened. You’re right. Forgive me for not saying anything. Maybe when I’ve collected my pension, I’ll say so.’”
“I don’t suppose any of them have collected their pensions yet?”
“Folks look after their own lives. You can’t blame them. It’s rough-and-tumble. . . .”
“Oh,” I said.
He looked at me. “Let me try and help you with this . . .” he said.
For the next half-hour Britton patiently broke down the events of the honey trap for me to demonstrate that at no point did he do anything wrong. His rule throughout was that “the suspect, Colin Stagg, must be the person who introduces every single element. What you may then do is reflect that back. You must never introduce it first. If you do, you’re fulfilling your hopes, you see?”
I was openmouthed. I didn’t know where to start.
“But what about Lizzie’s past ritual murders?” I said.
“How . . . sorry . . . what are you thinking there?” Britton softly replied, shooting me a hostile glance.
“She said she could only love a man who’d done something similar,” I said.
“If someone you were walking out with said that to you,” Britton said, “what would you do?” He paused and repeated, “What would you do?”
“But he was clearly desperate to lose his virginity to her,” I said.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.
It was bewildering that Britton really seemed unable to appreciate how misshapen the honey trap had been, but just as startling to me was the realization that it was in some ways an extreme version of an impulse that journalists and nonfiction TV makers—and perhaps psychologists and police and lawyers—understand well. They had created an utterly warped, insane version of Colin Stagg by stitching together the maddest aspects of his personality. Only the craziest journalist would go as far as they did, but practically everyone goes a little way there.
