The Serial Killers Page 30
In October 1965, Brady decided it was time for another murder. He had also decided that he needed another partner in crime, and that Myra’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, was the obvious choice. Smith had already been in trouble with the law. He seemed unable to hold down a job. His wife was pregnant for the second time, and they had just been given an eviction notice. So Smith listened with interest when Brady suggested a hold-up at an Electricity Board showroom. On 6 October Smith came to the house hoping to borrow some money, but they were all broke. Brady suggested: ‘We’ll have to roll a queer.’ An hour later, Brady picked up a seventeen-year-old homosexual, Edward Evans, and invited him back to the house in Hattersley. Back at the flat, Myra went off to fetch David Smith. They had only just returned when there was a crash from the living room. Brady was rolling on the floor, grappling with Evans. Then he seized an axe and struck him repeatedly: ‘Everywhere was one complete pool of blood.’ When Evans lay still, Brady strangled him. Then he handed the bloodstained hatchet to Smith, saying ‘Feel the weight of that’. His motive was obviously to get Smith’s fingerprints on the haft. Together, they mopped up the blood and wrapped up the body in polythene. Then Smith went home, promising to return the next day to help dispose of the body. But Brady had miscalculated. Smith might feel in theory that ‘people are like maggots, small, blind and worthless’, but the fact of murder was too much for him. When he arrived home he was violently sick, and told his wife what had happened. Together they decided to phone the police, creeping downstairs armed with a screwdriver and carving-knife in case Brady was waiting for them. The following morning, a man dressed as a baker’s roundsman knocked at Brady’s door, and when Myra opened it, identified himself as a police officer. Evans’s body was found in the spare bedroom. Forensic examination revealed dog hair on his underclothes – the hair of Myra Hindley’s dog – indicating that he and Brady had engaged in sex, probably while Myra was fetching David Smith.
Hidden in the spine of a prayer book police found a cloakroom ticket, which led them to Manchester Central Station. In two suitcases they discovered pornographic photos, tapes and books on sex and torture; the photographs included those of Lesley Ann Downey, with a tape recording of her voice pleading for mercy. A twelve-year-old girl, Patricia Hodges, who had occasionally accompanied Brady and Hindley to the moors, took the police to Hollin Brown Knoll, and there the body of Lesley Ann Downey was dug up. John Kilbride’s grave was located through a photograph that showed Hindley crouching on it with a dog. (When later told that her dog had died while in the hands of the police, she made the classic remark: ‘They’re nothing but bloody murderers.’) Pauline Reade’s body was not found until 1987, as a result of Myra Hindley’s confession to Topping. Brady helped in the search on the moor and as we know, the body of Keith Bennett has never been recovered.
Brady’s defence was that Evans had been killed unintentionally, in the course of a struggle, when he and Smith tried to rob him. Lesley Ann Downey, he claimed, had been brought to the house by Smith to pose for pornographic pictures, for which she had been paid ten shillings. (His original story was that she had been brought to the house by two men.) After the session, she left the house with Smith. He flatly denied knowing anything about any of the other murders, but the tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey’s screams and pleas for mercy made it clear that Brady and Hindley were responsible for her death. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Perhaps the most interesting point to emerge from Myra Hindley’s confession was that Brady ‘didn’t show a lot of interest in her sexually’, but for the first few times they had normal sexual intercourse. There were times when he just wanted her to relieve him, and on a couple of occasions he had forced her to have anal sex with him, which she described as being ‘dreadfully painful’. On other occasions he liked her to insert a candle in his anus while he relieved himself. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the lack of enthusiasm of the high-dominance male for the medium-dominance female. Sexual excitement must involve a sense of conquest, and this girl had been a pushover. To enjoy sex he has to ‘use’ her. The first time was satisfactory because she found it painful. Sodomy was no doubt enjoyable for the same reason. He has no desire to give her pleasure; she, as the ‘slave’, must give him pleasure – by masturbating him or inserting a candle in his anus while he masturbated himself (the ultimate indignity) – while receiving none herself. All this made no difference. She said she could not stress strongly enough how totally obsessed and besotted she was with Brady. After he finally invited her out and she became in her own words ‘a Saturday night stand’, she would spend the week in a fever of anxiety waiting for Saturday night to come round again. She said she could not explain the infatuation, but it stemmed partly from the fact that Brady was so different from anybody else she had met. ‘Within months he had convinced me there was no God at all: he could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion, his softly convincing means of speech which fascinated me, because I could never fully comprehend, only browse at the odd sentence here and there, believing it to be gospel truth.’
She goes to the heart of Brady’s psychological motivation when she says: ‘He wanted to get rich and become “a somebody” – not just do a nine-to-five job working for somebody else.’ This was the source of that curious and irrational resentment that seems so typical of the criminal – anger at feeling that life had cast him for the role of a nobody. In his 1990 ‘confession’, Brady explained obscurely that he saw the murders ‘as products of an existentialist philosophy, in tandem with the spiritualism of Death itself’. What is clear is that, like Panzram, Brady felt that somebody deserved to suffer for his own miseries. Topping remarks: ‘On one occasion when I was with him he told me that he did not believe in God, that it was a nonsense to believe in a deity. But he said that after the killing of John Kilbride, he looked up into the sky, shook his fist and said “Take that, you bastard!”’ We may recall that Gallego had told a prison counsellor: ‘The only thing I really care about is killing God.’ The phrasing here is interesting. It is obviously impossible to ‘kill’ God. All that is possible is to ‘defy’ God, to try to get revenge on God, as William Hickman tried to get revenge on Perry Parker by kidnapping and killing his daughter Marian. Gallego’s resentment was so fierce that the word ‘defy’ seemed inadequate; he had to speak of ‘killing’ God, because killing was his ultimate way of expressing resentment. This is the vital key to the self-esteem killer: the desire to ‘get back’ at somebody. The artist Paul Gauguin said: ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’
One of the first recorded cases of a wife acting as a procurer for her husband’s rape victims occurred in 1963 in Lansing, Michigan. On 4 July twenty-year-old Lloyd Higdon and his wife picked up the fourteen-year-old daughter of a neighbour and offered to take her for a drive. Instead she was tied up and taken to Higdon’s house; there she was ordered to undress and, when she protested, told that if she refused she would be sold into white slavery and never see her parents again. The girl removed her own clothes and made no resistance to rape. She was then driven home and told never to mention it. Unable to conceal her state of shock, she finally told her parents. Higdon was arrested, but since intercourse had taken place with her consent, a court decided to regard it as statutory rape, and he was sentenced to a term of between four to fifteen years. He was out two years later. On the afternoon of 17 July 1967 he and his live-in girlfriend, Lucille Brumit, aged twenty-nine, picked up thirteen-year-old Roxanne Sandbrook in Lansing; the girl already knew Higdon, who lived only three streets away. She was driven to a rubbish dump near Jackson, Michigan, where Higdon tried to rape her; when she resisted, he strangled her. Her body was found on the dump a month later, in an advanced state of decomposition. Interviews with the dead girl’s friends revealed that she often babysat for the next-door neighbour of a known sex offender, Lloyd H
igdon – who happened to be serving a term in the local jail for violating his parole and leaving the area. Questioned separately, Higdon and Lucille Brumit finally admitted to the abduction of Roxanne Sandbrook. Higdon pleaded guilty to murder, and received life imprisonment.
Since that time there have been many similar cases, in some of which it becomes clear that the woman played an active part in the rape and murder. In 1968 Mrs Joyce Ballard of Chatham, Kent, admitted to enticing a twelve-year-old girl into her flat so that her husband, Robert Ballard, could assault her. Ballard, who was obsessed by books on torture and witchcraft, tied up the girl, cut open her veins, and stabbed her; then – probably appalled by what he had done – he committed suicide. Joyce Ballard was sentenced to three years in prison.
A case that took place in Western Australia in 1986 may be cited as another typical example. On Monday 6 November a half-naked teenage girl ran into a shopping centre in Fremantle begging for help; she later told police that she had been dragged into a car the previous evening by a man and a woman and taken to a house where she was chained to the bed and raped repeatedly. On Monday afternoon the couple left her unchained in the bedroom, and she succeeded in escaping through a window. The police went immediately to the house in Moorhouse Street, Willagee, where the girl had been held, and arrested David and Catherine Birnie, both thirty-five years old. Questioned by detectives from Perth’s Major Crimes Squad, they quickly admitted murdering and burying four other girls in four weeks, and led the police to the graves. In the Glen Eagle Forest, thirty-four miles south of Perth, police discovered three naked bodies in shallow graves, and another on the edge of a pine forest near Wanneroo, fifty miles north of Perth. They were identified as twenty-two-year-old Mary Neilson, a psychology student at the University of Western Australia, Noelene Patterson, thirty-one, an airline hostess, Denise Keren Brown, twenty-one, a computer operator, and a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Susannah Candy. The women had vanished between 6 October and 5 November 1986 – the last victim, Denise Brown, was murdered earlier on the same day that the teenage girl was abducted and raped.
It soon became clear that Catherine Birnie had played an active part in the murders. She had taken photographs of the corpses, one of which showed her husband in an act of intercourse, and had helped him to kill the women. The victims were abducted – two of them while hitchhiking – and taken to the Birnies’ house, where they were chained up in a bedroom and repeatedly raped. Mary Neilson had gone to the Birnies’ house to buy car tyres. (Birnie worked in a car-wrecking yard.) She had been held at knifepoint and chained to the bed; Catherine Birnie watched while her husband raped her. Then she was taken to the Glen Eagle National Park, where she was raped again. She was begging for her life as Birnie garrotted her with a nylon cord. After this, both Birnies mutilated the body to prevent it from swelling in its shallow grave.
On 20 October fifteen-year-old Susannah Candy was picked up while hitchhiking. She was held prisoner and raped for several days. During this time she was made to write two letters to her parents, explaining that she was safe and well. She was finally strangled by Catherine Birnie.
Noelline Patterson had been abducted after her car had run out of petrol; the Birnies had helped to push it to a service station, after which she was forced into their car at knifepoint. According to a workmate of Birnie’s, the couple already knew Noelline Patterson, and had helped to wallpaper her home. During the three days she was kept prisoner, Birnie showed so much interest in her that Catherine Birnie became violently jealous. It was she who finally insisted that Noelline should be killed. Birnie gave her a heavy dose of sleeping tablets, and strangled her while she was unconscious. (When she showed the police Noelline’s grave in the Glen Eagle Forest, Catherine Birnie spat on it.)
Denise Brown was also hitchhiking when the Birnies abducted her at knifepoint on 4 November. She was taken to the house at Willagee, chained to the bed and raped over a two-day period. Then she was taken to a pine plantation near Wanneroo; Birnie raped her again, and stabbed her twice while doing so. He failed to kill her, and Catherine Birnie handed her husband a bigger knife, with which he stabbed her in the neck; but even in her grave, the victim tried to sit up. Birnie had to fracture her skull with blows from the back of the axe before she could be buried. Three days later, they abducted the seventeen-year-old girl whose escape led to their arrest.
The Birnies were also suspected of being involved in three earlier disappearances of women; but it has been pointed out that this seems unlikely, since they confessed so readily to the four later murders. The pattern of the murders suggests that the abduction of Mary Neilson was unplanned – that Birnie decided to rape her when she came to the house to buy tyres, and that having experienced the pleasure of possessing a ‘sex slave’, he went on to abduct the other four girls. Case after case of this kind indicates how quickly sex crime becomes an addictive obsession.
Because the Birnies pleaded guilty, little evidence about the crimes, or about the psychology of the killers, emerged in court. Newspaper reporters tried to make up for this by interviewing their relations and acquaintances. Birnie’s twenty-one-year-old brother James – who had himself been in prison for sex offences – stated that his brother was a violent and romantic man, a complex and contradictory character who often gave his women flowers and chocolates, but who owned a huge pornographic video collection and needed sex six times a day. During a temporary break-up with his wife, Bernie had forced his brother to permit sodomy. As a twenty-first birthday present, James was allowed to make love to his brother’s wife.
David Birnie was the oldest of five children; the family had broken up when he was ten, and the children had been placed in institutions. Birnie’s mother told reporters she had not seen him in years. The father, a laundry worker, had died the previous year.
Catherine Birnie had also had a lonely and miserable childhood; after her mother’s death she had been sent to live with her grandparents in Perth. ‘People who knew her well said she rarely laughed and had few pleasures. She never had a playmate and other children were not allowed in her grandparents’ house.’ Her grandmother died in front of the child in the throes of an epileptic fit.
She had known David Birnie since childhood. When she became pregnant at sixteen, she and Birnie teamed up and went on a crime rampage, breaking into shops and factories. They were caught and convicted, but Birnie escaped and they committed another string of burglaries. Again, both were convicted. When she was released, Catherine Birnie became a domestic help, and married the son of the house; they had six children. Birnie, in the meantime, had an unsuccessful marriage, and became a jockey; his employment terminated when he tried to attack a woman sexually wearing nothing but a stocking mask. After sixteen years of marriage, Catherine met Birnie again and began an affair with him. Two years later, she left her husband, walking out without warning, and went to live with Birnie. A psychologist who examined her after her arrest said that he had never seen anyone so emotionally dependent on another person.
Birnie’s counsel read a statement in which Birnie said he was extremely sorry for what he had done, and was pleading guilty to spare the victim’s families the ordeal of a trial. ‘He does not wish to present any defence of insanity. “I knew and understood what I was doing and I knew it was wrong.”’
Their trial, on 3 March 1987, lasted only thirty minutes, and both Birnies were sentenced to life imprisonment.
There is an obvious difference between the Birnie case and the Moors Murders. Although Myra Hindley was brought up in the home of her grandmother, she had an emotionally secure childhood, and was a well-adjusted teenager. Yet both women became criminals as a result of becoming emotionally dependent on a man with criminal tendencies. Both participated willingly in abductions which they knew would lead to rape and murder. Myra Hindley claimed to have taken no active part in the rapes and murders (although Brady was later to deny this and insist she had participated in both); Catherine Birnie watched with pleasure and even s
trangled one of the victims. Yet it seems clear that neither woman would have become involved in crime except under the influence of a high-dominance male. If we consider again the case of Patty Hearst and the ‘Symbionese Liberation Army’, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘brainwashing’ may be a far more frequent phenomenon than is generally realised.
On 20 June 1955 a fourteen-year-old girl, Patty Ann Cook, was sunbathing on an inflated mattress in her backyard in Rome, Georgia, when a green pick-up truck stopped, and the driver asked directions. Then he asked her if she would like a lift to the swimming pool, and she accepted eagerly. A neighbour saw them drive off. Instead of taking her to the pool, Willie Cochran, an ex-convict in his middle thirties, drove on to a remote logging road, dragged her from the vehicle, and raped her. After that he shot her through the head, and dropped her in the river, weighted down with a big monkey wrench. After the girl’s disappearance, Cochran came under suspicion because he was a known sex offender, and drove a green pick-up truck. Under police questioning, he involved himself in contradictions, and finally confessed to the murder. Cochran was electrocuted in August 1955. The case is made memorable by a remark made by the judge, J.H. Paschall: ‘The male sexual urge has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves.’ The comment could stand as an epigraph to the history of sex crime.
While it would be a mistake to assume that all serial killers are riven by the kind of resentment that motivated Brady and Gallego, there can be no doubt that all are driven by a sexual urge that ‘has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves’. We have seen that the combination of a high-dominance, highly sexed male with a medium-dominance and emotionally dependent female can lead to strange examples of partnership in sex crime. Another widely publicised case of the seventies demonstrates how a combination of a high- and a medium-dominance male can produce the same effect.